Harry Potter's Bookshelf (9 page)

Wuthering Heights
(1847) by Charlotte Brontë ’s sister Emily is the story of Heathcliff, a Liverpool gypsy waif adopted by Mr. Earnshaw, the master of the Wuthering Heights estate on the Yorkshire moors. Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine, becomes Heathcliff ’s companion and friend, but the master’s son, Hindley, despises Heathcliff and treats him like a slave when his father dies.

Catherine accepts the proposal of a relatively gentle neighbor, Edgar Linton, despite her belief that Heathcliff is her soul mate (“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same . . . I
am
Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being” [chapter nine]), and Heathcliff escapes the Heights on hearing only that Catherine believes marriage to him would be “degrading.” He returns a few years later a wealthy man, determined to have his revenge on Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. Hindley has become a drunk at the death of his wife and dies after Heathcliff wins possession of Wuthering Heights. For a more lasting revenge, Heathcliff treats Hindley’s orphan son, Hareton, as miserably as the boy’s father had treated Heathcliff.

Confused? It gets more complicated and distressing. Heathcliff marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella, in order to torture Catherine and Edgar. He treats Isabella cruelly and eventually she escapes, gives birth to Heathcliff’s child, and dies some years later. Catherine dies soon after birthing Cathy, Jr. In due time, Heathcliff forces marriage between Cathy, Jr., and Linton, his son by Isabella, and the marriage is, predictably, a disaster. Edgar and Linton die, and widow Cathy is left at Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff and Hareton.

Catherine’s ghost haunts Heathcliff literally and figuratively, and, seeing Cathy and Hareton fall in love pushes him to the edge. Heathcliff dies and is buried beside Catherine; their phantoms are seen together on the moors.

From melodrama to horror . . .

Everyone knows the gist of
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
(1818), or at least thinks they do. The popular version goes something like this: A mad scientist-doctor in a castle on the hill with a hunchbacked assistant and mega-gigawatts of voltage, reanimates a giant sewn together from the parts of corpses. The giant goes on a killing spree before the doctor and villagers hunt him down.

Fortunately, this story isn’t the one written by Mary Shelley. Her story is about a young scientist who discovers a way to create life. No castle, no hunchback, no lightning, just an unnamed monstrous giant. The ugliness of his creation causes the doctor to have a breakdown that lasts several months. Sadly, when he recovers, he learns that his younger brother has been murdered. He returns home, and, on a mountaintop, has a heart-to-heart with the monster who wants a bride. So Dr. Frankenstein heads back to the graveyard for monster-fiancée parts. Just before reanimating the stitched-together giantess, though, the scientist has a change of heart and reneges on his promised monster-bride. The monster, not pleased, has his revenge by killing Dr. Frankenstein’s bride on their wedding day, as well as the doctor’s friend. Dr. Frankenstein chases the monster toward the North Pole and expires on an arctic exploration ship trapped in the ice after telling the tale to the ship’s captain. The monster says his pathetic good-bye, incredibly, in the ship’s cabin, and escapes after a soliloquy promising his self-destruction.

Gothic takes something of a holiday (with the exception of Dickens and Collins, whose latter books are gothic melodramas) until its dramatic reemergence in the late Victorian fin de siècle horror stories made popular by Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886). Here the gentleman scientist Dr. Henry Jekyll, “committed to a profound duplicity of life,” discovers a drug that “so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity” that it freed him from “certain of the powers that made up my spirit.” Dr. Jekyll, with one draught, in other words, could become an ensouled body sans conscience and spirit, by name “Edward Hyde,” and with another, revert to the man of body, soul,
and
spirit, Dr. Jekyll.

Mr. Hyde, though, as you’d expect, is more demon than human being. His crimes touch Dr. Jekyll’s conscience but do not turn him to a path of abstinence or regret; Hyde’s crimes to Jekyll are only Hyde’s and he only makes those amends he thinks prudent.

To Jekyll’s distress, however, the transformations to Hyde begin to happen spontaneously and are more difficult to reverse. Jekyll the gentleman realizes that Hyde is now the master of his person. Hyde murders a member of Parliament, Jekyll locks himself in his laboratory, the key ingredient in the draughts is lost, and Jekyll-Hyde commits suicide.

In Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is called in to combat the Dark Lord. He leads a group of men across London and eventually Europe to destroy Count Dracula. Dracula seduces Mina Harker and gains control of her mind by forcing her to drink his blood. But this mind-link between Mina and Dracula enables Van Helsing to track the count all the way to Transylvania. In a move to protect Mina from Dracula’s summoning and influence, Van Helsing places a Communion wafer on her forehead, but it burns her flesh. Mina cries, “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day!” (chapter twenty-two). When Dracula is destroyed, her scar disappears.

Had enough? How about Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart?” In one of the most tightly crafted pieces of horror put to page, Poe’s narrator relates his murder of an old man because he couldn’t stand the man’s “vulture” eye, his “pale blue eye,” that made his blood run cold. Madness? No, he insists it’s just an “over-acuteness of the senses.”

He dismembers the body and conceals the remains under the floorboards of the apartment. The police, having been summoned when the old man’s single scream woke the neighbors, see nothing. During their investigation, sitting in the old man’s room over the dismembered body asking questions, the narrator hears the dead man’s heart, beating louder and louder. Driven to madness, the killer confesses to the nefarious deed.

What do these stories have in common? On the surface, not that much.

Jane Eyre has a hard time both growing up and with romance, but she marries her true love in the end. Heathcliff and Catherine are star-crossed lovers on the Scottish moors with an unhappy beginning, middle, and ending. Frankenstein creates life, the sewn-together creature turns on its creator, and everybody dies. Dr. Jekyll releases his inner Edward Hyde but cannot put the genie back in the bottle. And
Dracula
? The undead are vanquished by sacrament-wielding heroes able simultaneously to embrace science, faith, and the really far-out supernatural weirdness of Eastern European legends. Poe’s narrator-murderer seems equally unique and bizarre.

That’s quite the spread. Believe it or not, though, all these characters conform to two types and each of the stories is about producing an unsettling atmosphere, “unnerving” all the way to “horrifying.”

Ann Tracy, author of
Patterns of Fear in the Gothic Novel,
wrote that gothic literature, ultimately, was about fostering “nameless fears,” “familiar anxieties,” and an “atmosphere of irrational menace.”
²
There are obviously many different ways to produce this atmosphere and its unsettling effects, but “classic gothic” tends to use very similar specific story elements. Few stories have all these elements, however, and many contain only some.

Let’s start with the setting.

Gothic stories are usually set—obviously enough—in a Gothic manor or castle. There should be something supernatural or inexplicable at the very least in this manor house and probably a ghost or two will show up eventually. Think of Rochester’s mad wife walking the halls of his manor at night.

You can also expect isolated scenes, for example, on alpine glaciers, windswept moors, or arctic expanses. And there is also a sense of confinement. The setting almost certainly will include tight spaces as well to highlight feelings of isolation in a strange place. Dr. Frankenstein tells his whole story in the captain’s cabin on a ship trapped in the ice on a voyage to the North Pole. Jekyll/Hyde has the run of misty London but eventually he locks himself in his laboratory to separate himself from all others.

Subterranean passages for escape or adventure, dungeons for holding prisoners unjustly, an attic or especially frightening hole or room are commonplace, too. Jane Eyre is locked by her aunt in the “red room” where her uncle had died, which sends the little girl around the bend. Poe’s corpse under the floorboards and the terrifying labyrinth of Dracula’s castle are set pieces of fear and dread.

If you venture outside in a gothic novel, you’ll find the weather is going to be tempestuous. You’ll need a light because most of the action is going to take place at night or in the dark, and the landscape is usually shrouded in mist. Vampires and the undead only walk at night, so
Dracula
’s drama is largely between sundown and sunrise every day. In
Jane Eyre,
the only light you’re likely to experience is a fire like the one that destroys Rochester’s manor. Hyde’s London obscures his double identity in persistent mist and fog.
Wuthering Heights
weather forecasts are something like Seattle’s.

Setting and weather are best understood as reflections of the interior life and feelings experienced by the narrator or protagonist. The tight space and violent storm mirror the angst of the confused and disoriented character.

The only joyful item in these madness-inducing landscapes is the possible reunion of principals with their loved ones and families. Inevitably, the gothic heroine is separated from friends and family by choice or circumstances and is reunited with those she loves.
Jane Eyre
models the prototypical gothic romance ending in Jane’s reunion with Rochester. Emily Brontë ends
Wuthering Heights
with Catherine and Heathcliff ’s ghoulish reunion both in their shared grave and the generational echo of Hareton and Cathy, Jr.

And the clichéd gothic trappings . . . an ancestral curse or prophecy; a fascination with tainted or polluted blood; a corpse where it shouldn’t be; graveyards; sacrificial bravery and hopeless defiance; memories and dreams galore; a found book with amazing information, even magical properties (a favorite stylistic device is for the story to be told as if it’s the diary or record found in an antiquarian’s collection); a signature deformity or scar; the stranger, preferably a foreigner from Southern or Eastern Europe—but being Catholic alone will suffice for the exotic; and confusion about the hero or heroine’s birth status and origin (you’d think from the number of orphans in these stories that parents in the distant past never lived beyond a child’s birth).

Distant past? None of these stories reviewed here were set in medieval times, though that is a gothic favorite. Almost all, though, reflect the gothic social/political tension of an aristocracy or hereditary gentry in decline being displaced by a rising, aggressive merchant class. Here Count Dracula is the archetype, but there are definitely class issues in the Eyre/ Rochester relationship and in Heathcliff ’s agony in overhearing Catherine say it would be “demeaning” to marry him (and also in Heathcliff ’s determination to avenge himself by owning the Heights and the Linton . . . ).

Here is the formula for your standard “pure” gothic romance from the late eighteenth century onward:

Jane Eyre
conforms to type here but few of the other tales do. They all have the victimized heroine (sometimes male), though, whose circumstances conspire to put her or him into a trying, seemingly impossible situation from which to escape with virtue and dignity intact. The heroine’s job is to resist defiantly and to find the honorable way out, almost always a harrowing flight from a dungeon or a manor, to escape a supernatural evil or just a wicked male in the flesh. Mina Harker—with her histrionic prayers to God about her being “unclean” after drinking Dracula’s blood—also conforms to type. Her heroism is in her resistance to the bond of blood and the curse of the vampire within her. She feels God is treating her unfairly despite her trying “to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days. God pity me!” (
Dracula,
chapter twenty-one). These stories, as you can see, are uniformly “theatrical” and “melodramatic.”

At the beginning of
Wuthering Heights,
Heathcliff is the suffering orphan all but enslaved by his adoptive father’s son. This sets him up to play the “heroine” in the gothic story. However, the son’s family then endures Heathcliff ’s payback for generations. Dr. Jekyll, too, though also a man and despite being
responsible
for being Hyde’s victim, takes the “defiant victim” female stock rule.