Literature Editor Jessie Hodges reflects upon her experience of reading Gothic fiction
I would like to write that there was the promise of a storm in the air when I was first introduced to Gothic fiction. A grey morning with the sort of wind which rattles through the bones and instils a quiet, biting coldness under the skin. It wasn’t, though those days would certainly come later, and it connected the Gothic and myself only insofar as I would use a beaten copy of Rebecca to protect my phone from the downpour. Taking notes from Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland, it’s good to note now the dangers of being swept up in a dramatic spiral which confounds all reason and logic except that of artistic license. In the way that reality often spits on our attempts to forge symbols out of the mundane, it was a September day so sunny I was regretting wearing my ‘Blame it on the nargles’ jumper to the first English lesson of Year 12. (Its unsuitability for the weather is now the least of my regrets.)
And yet, despite its somewhat anticlimactic introduction, Gothic fiction became itself a kind of revenant, a recurring feature on my winter reading list. With an uncanny Frankenstein-ian obsession – or it seems now – by the time the Christmas tree was up, I had devoured Radcliffe, Wilde, E. T. A Hoffman and returned to dissect old favourites like the Brontës and Du Maurier with a new Gothic eye. In Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, I found the eerie contortion of self-characterising Rebecca explicated in the book’s central dopplëganger trope; in Lockwood’s occupation of Cathy’s room, a subversion of the unwitting transgression typically afforded to young women in the first wave Gothic.
It seems incongruous that a person so incapable of sitting through horror films could take such an interest in what is essentially the literary movement behind their conception. Georgie’s severed arm clenched between Pennywise’s jaws lingered in my nightmares for years after a misjudged trip to the cinema. But the stagnant air around Miss Havisham’s rotting wedding feast conjured an unshakeable sensation of what it feels like to grapple with time: its relationship with gender, the impossibility to possess it. Here, Ann Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror is wonderfully suggestive:
“terror and horror are so far opposite […] that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them”.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-ann-radcliffe
The nature of terror is a slow-building crescendo which lingers after the scream from the depths of the labyrinth has sounded. Terror waits. It is Antoinette’s colonial entrapment in the ‘cardboard house’ of Rochester’s mansion, it is the spite in 124 Bluestone Road (Jean Rhy’s anti-colonial rewriting of Bertha’s story, Wide Sargasso Sea, p.144). When responding to the Gothic’s fraught relationship with race and colonialism, the educational, ‘soul expanding’ component of Radcliffe’s definition takes on further significance. Last year’s Gothic read was a return to Jane Eyre, where Bertha’s terrifying, disembodied ‘demoniac laugh’ eventually culminates in Jane’s account that ‘it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal’. Locating the terror in colonial anxiety – Bertha being a white Creole – enables an analysis of the racism and imperialism at play in the conception of the other. In the terror of a madwoman in the attic’s midnight wanderings, it is not just Jane’s ‘faculties’ being awakened, but the reader’s – to the underlying concerns of an empire bleeding back into its coloniser. Gayatri Spivak characterises Jane’s confrontation with her as ‘the register not of mere marriage or sexual reproduction but of Europe and its not yet human Other.’ (Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism p.247). Certainly, in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, the labyrinth turns back on Antoinette (Bertha) in a kind of colonial prison. So last year, when Rochester’s house once again came crumbling down, it was hard not to feel a conflicted sting as the colonial site burned but took its victim with it. Was Bertha’s arson deranged violence or was it another iteration of the revolution which has time and time again galvanised the gothic waves into being?
In discussing the excavation of repressed pain and marginalised voices, it would be impossible not to mention Beloved. Revenants, intergenerational trauma, scars and family secrets, the novel is quintessentially Gothic. I am unsure then whether to call Morrison’s work subversion – I am unqualified to make that call – but I’d say the text goes beyond subverting the racist coding frequent in Gothic fiction. Inspired by a real-life event of an escaped enslaved woman Margaret Garner, Beloved vindicates the experiences and consequences of slavery as Gothic concerns in itself. Much of the genre, particularly the first wave, was fuelled by white anxiety. Morrison’s text utilises the Gothic as a mode to explicate a Black reality.
For any Gothic readers seeking recommendations outside of a predominantly white canon, see Isabelle Allende’s House of Spirits, an intergenerational tale of supernatural abilities and romance and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling, a vampire story dealing with isolation, symbiosis and punishment. Because of reading Beloved, I realised I’d fallen into the trap perhaps many people of colour following a white conception of classics do: we patiently grimace at the contortion of our own identities into monsters, to brush aside the erasure of our own narratives. But there is more in the Gothic than being the madwoman in the attic.
Illustration by Evie Dowden