Michael May's Blog, page 109

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Phantom of the Opera

With Gaston Leroux's novel, we're back into full-blown gothic romance. The Palais Garnier opera house was only about 35 years old when The Phantom of the Opera was published, but Leroux had his Phantom, Erik, inhabit the mysterious catacombs beneath and decorate his chambers with relics from his past. The building was new, but Erik used its secret parts the way a gothic count uses his family castle. And for much the same purpose: attempting to dominate a young woman.

The way he does this is different depending on which version we're looking at. In the 1925 film version, for instance, Erik uses Christine's own dreams about becoming a successful opera singer against her. He becomes an analogy for the seductive, yet destructive nature of the Arts. In the novel, Christine is already getting tired of Erik's possessiveness when he kidnaps her and takes her into his home, but in the movie he woos her. He makes her choose between her career and her boyfriend, Raoul, and she chooses her career. It's not until she unmasks Erik and sees his repulsiveness that she really questions her decision. So there's this great metaphor for how demanding and potentially ugly our creative passions can be. We're often encouraged to follow our passions and dreams, but we're rarely warned that there's a price for that.

In Leroux's book, Christine doesn't really want to be a famous opera singer at all. She started that career to please her father. After her dad's death, Erik took over as her primary cheerleader. So instead of her dreams and passions, he represents cultural pressure to succeed in a particular way. All Christine really wants to do is marry her boyfriend and live a quiet life filled with love.

Whether Erik represents external pressure or internal drive, Raoul is an important part of Christine's escape. At the very least, he's the competing passion that motivates her to resist whatever Erik represents. Like in many gothic romances, he's the handsome hero who's trying to rescue the woman from her oppressor. And in the '25 movie, that's exactly what he does. She turns away from her obsessive dreams to embrace love and relationship. She's almost too late in that, but love overcomes.

The novel's different though in that it's not really Raoul who saves Christine. Following the lead of Beauty and the Beast, literary Christine overcomes Erik by being kind to him. She doesn't fall in love with him, but she's able to see through his hideousness and his anger to the hurt soul beneath. And when she reaches out and kisses him, she frees both herself and him from the curse of his hate. Love still wins, but this time it's Christine's ability to love the ugly, not just the allure of the handsome, that saves the day.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Hound of the Baskervilles

We've talked about the big overlap between gothic romance and horror, but a few years after Dracula was published, Arthur Conan Doyle married gothic romance with a whole new genre: the detective novel. It was the author's big return to Sherlock Holmes stories after killing off the character eight years earlier. The Hound of the Baskervilles was meant to be sort of a lost story from before Holmes' death, but that wasn't a satisfying tactic for fans. They continued to put pressure on Doyle until he officially resurrected Holmes two years after Hound.

Set in the wilds of Dartmoor, the action of Hound is instigated by an extremely gothic event in which the noble, but evil lord of Baskerville Hall chases a young woman into the moor with the intention of raping her. As legend has it, he's killed by a giant, spectral hound and his family is forever cursed. That becomes important in Holmes' day when the current master of the Hall is found dead near the enormous footprint of a dog. Holmes is brought in to investigate and to protect the final heir of the Baskervilles.

It's against this backdrop of gothic characters and supernatural legends that Doyle sets his mystery novel. But the gothic elements don't end with Holmes' introduction. Holmes is too logical and competent for us to be afraid as long as he's around, so Doyle wisely writes Holmes out of large chunks of the story. The detective pretends to be busy on other cases, while he's actually lurking behind the scenes the whole time. And this lets us experience the decaying Baskerville Hall through Watson's impressionable eyes. The moor becomes a haunted place of sinister figures and eerie lights, with Watson trying to figure out if the ghosts are real or just part of someone's cruel, but mundane plan.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Dracula

Gothic romance and true horror had been close partners at least since The Monk, but Frankenstein and then Dracula solidified the union. To the point where many think of gothic romance as a sub-genre under horror. I actually can't argue against that very well, except to point out that gothic romance in general and horror are setting out to do two, different things.

The intent of horror is to scare you. It's visceral. Gothic romance, on the other hand, wants to make you think. It wants to make you think about some pretty grim stuff, clearly, but the best of it is more about asking questions than just getting a physical reaction out of you. It uses some of the same tools as horror, but for a different purpose. So I think of gothic romance and horror as separate, but overlapping genres.

They're of course heavily overlapping in Bram Stoker's Dracula. With all the blood-sucking and shape-changing into horrible creatures, Dracula is very much trying to scare you. But it's also completely gothic romance with its sinister count who menaces young women - Mina, in particular - against a backdrop of ancient castles and collapsing abbeys.

Mina’s one of my favorite heroes in all of literature, by the way. She’s the only character in Dracula – including Van Helsing – who really knows what’s going on, but the men all try to sideline and ignore her in the name of trying to protect her. And they pay for it.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Great Expectations

Charles Dickens isn't a name folks immediately associate with gothic romance, but he wrote one. Sort of. Great Expectations certainly incorporates many gothic romance elements, especially around the character of Miss Havisham. Her once great home is in ruins, now full of cobwebs and dead flowers and rotten cake. She's dying too, but trying to preserve the splendor, caught in a moment in time.

Dickens also includes the sinister noble who's persecuting a young innocent, but they're gender-swapped as Havisham brings suffering into the life of our main character, Pip. Of course, her instrument in this is Estella, who's life is also ruined by the old woman. so there's even some of the traditional model at work.

There's also some gothic going on in the character of Magwitch, the escaped convict whom Pip helps at the beginning of the novel. As John Bowen points out in an excellent article for British Library, Pip compares his relationship with Magwitch to that of Frankenstein's Monster and his creator. So while Magwitch isn't noble, he is another sinister figure with power over Pip. And Pip has to wrestle with whether he wants Magwitch to continue having that influence or whether Pip needs to escape it.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Wuthering Heights

Two months after Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, her sister Emily came out with a second example of gothic romance that people could take seriously. Wuthering Heights is a darker, meaner book than Jane Eyre, but it's cruelty has a purpose. Like a lot of the Brontës' work, it was designed to challenge the social structure and morality of its day. And it doesn't pull punches in doing that.

Like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights does this using gothic romance tropes and imagery as its framework. Readers are introduced to the titular house long after it's ceased to be a vibrant home. As the book opens, the desolate building has become dark and haunted. Brontë explains how it got that way in a series of flashbacks that focus on Catherine, the daughter of the house who has now become its ghostly visitor, and her adopted brother/love interest, Heathcliff.

In addition to the theme of decay and the supernatural elements, Wuthering Heights also has the young woman menaced by a sinister master. Emily Brontë puts a huge twist on this though. Heathcliff eventually becomes master of the house, but that's not what gives him power over Catherine. It's her own feelings for him. He's socially her inferior, but his crudeness influences her in extremely negative ways.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Jane Eyre

1847 was a big year for gothic romance. Ann Radcliffe popularized the genre 50 years earlier and even legitimized it for many people, but it took Brontës to make it Literature. In October 1847, Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell, even pretending to have edited an autobiography of an actual Jane Eyre.

The story follows its eponymous character as she grows from child to adult and was revolutionary for the way it handled character development. But as important as it is to the evolution of novels, it hangs its achievements on a gothic romance plot. Jane comes of age in a creepy, old house with secret rooms protected by a dark, brooding master. In many ways, the story is a mature version of Beauty and the Beast. Rochester is handsome, but he's off-putting in other ways and Jane sees through that to the good soul beneath. There's even an element of the supernatural in Jane's dreams, her vision of a ghost, and the disembodied voice of Rochester calling her away from a suitor and back to Thornfield Hall.

There have been a ton of film adaptations, but the one that's freshest in my mind is Cary Fukunaga's excellent 2011 version starring Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, and Judi Dench.

Today is Fall Comicon!

Today is Fall ComiConfrom 10am to 6pm at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in the Education Building. I'll be there all day with the Kill All Monsters and David (from Dragonfly Ripple and Mystery Movie Night ) and Diane, the insanely talented superhero face-painter.

If you've already got a copy of Kill All Monsters, please drop by and say hello anyway. We can talk comics and movies. I know it's not MovieCon, but we can talk movies anyway. Or comics. Whatever. Just stop by. David and I would love to see you.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Fall of the House of Usher

Arthur RackhamEdgar Allan Poe's work in general was heavily influenced by gothic romance in terms of mood and just the general theme of decay. We can see this really clearly in "The Oval Portrait," in which he mentions Ann Radcliffe by name and sets the story in the same mountains as her Castle Udolpho. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is another case where Poe's gone beyond influence and has written an actual entry in the canon.

It begins of course with the crumbling castle of a once-great family, with both edifice and inhabitants being the eponymous, falling "house." The last members are a brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline, both of whom are in poor health, physically and psychologically. Because of their specific illnesses, Roderick lives in fear of harming Madeline and unwillingly becoming the gothic nobleman who oppresses a young woman.

"Usher" isn't one of my favorite Poe stories, mostly because of how fantastical it is. I'm all for supernatural elements like ghosts and witches, but those are at least grounded in reality and I understand the rules about them. Poe goes too far when he mystically ties the siblings' well-being to their home, with no real attempt to explain why the house might be alive and sharing the fate of the family. It's great symbolism; I just have trouble accepting it as a plot point.

I've never seen Roger Corman's 1960 movie adaptation, but I understand that it fixes some of my problems. It disconnects the family's supernatural relationship with the castle while having their dysfunction bring about the destruction of the building in other ways. It also grounds their relationship with each other by giving Madeline a fiancé and having Roderick (Vincent Price) disapprove enough that he's willing to do horrible things to his sister in order to prevent her marriage.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published just a year after Northanger Abbey, in the midst of gothic romance fever. It immediately distanced itself from the rest of the genre though in almost every way. It's themes are deeper, it's narrative structure is more compelling, it's characters are more complicated, and it avoids (or at least seriously tweaks) the standard gothic romance conventions.

In fact, at first look it's hard to spot any similarities at all between Frankenstein and books like The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho. The most obvious connections are simply kindred tones and settings. There's an undeniable sense of gloom and dread over Frankenstein. And of course a strong supernatural angle and a crumbling building or two. But there's no dashing young hero out to rescue an innocent beauty from a sinister count. Shelley's not that interested in the typical plot.



Those elements are present in Frankenstein, but Shelley subverts them. Elizabeth is the heroine, but she's murdered instead of rescued. Not the first time that's happened in a gothic romance, but Shelley twists further by making Victor Frankenstein play a dual role as both would-be protector to Elizabeth and the architect of her doom. The Monster is also a paradox in that he's a willful murderer, but also extremely sympathetic. The lines between hero and villain - if there even are such things in the novel - are very blurry.

As much as Shelley plays with and rearranges the tropes, she still includes the traditional theme of decay as a major element. Victor belongs to a once-great family that begins to fall apart and die thanks to his actions in the book. Of course, one of the major themes is the reversal of death and decay, but the whole point is that this is a fool's game. Everything must eventually pass away.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Northanger Abbey

By Jane Austen's day, gothic romance was all the rage and ripe for parody. Which is exactly what she did with Northanger Abbey. She started her career working on multiple books at once, but Northanger Abby was the first one she finished (though it went by other titles in its various drafts). She failed to sell it though and it wasn't published until after her death.

The only Austen I've ever read was Pride and Prejudice and I thought that was plenty for me until I learned Northanger Abbey's relation to gothic romance. These days, it's on my reading list, too. It's the story of a young woman named Catherine who's ridiculously fond of gothic romances. When she's invited to visit friends at their estate (from which the novel gets its title), she expects a spooky place full of dark secrets. And, as it turns out, there are some mysterious parts of the house that no one ever visits. But her imagination gets the better of her and there's some embarrassment before she learns that she's confusing fiction with reality. After that, the novel is in more familiar Austen territory as various relationships are resolved.

One very cool thing about the novel is that it creates a reading list of other, lesser-known gothic romances that are recommended to Catherine by a friend. Catherine's reading The Mysteries of Udolpho at the time, which turns the conversation to The Italian (The Monk also comes up in a later discussion with someone else), but then friend Isabella comes out with The Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, The Mysterious Warning, Necromancer, The Midnight Bell, The Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Collectively this list is known as the Northanger Horrids and it's also on my To Read list.

I've read Castle of Wolfenbach already and it's a good one. It certainly has its problems: everyone is one-dimensional and there are so many counts and countesses that I literally lost track of them all. But I also enjoy the absolute goodness of Wolfenbach's heroes and seeing the villains get their comeuppance. And in addition to haunted rooms and secret passages, this one's got pirates.

I said earlier that I don't plan to read a lot more of Jane Austen, but I do seem to love all movies based on her work. That includes the 2007 TV movie of Northanger Abbey starring Felicity Jones as Catherine. It's been a while since I've seen it, so I can't write a proper review, but it was that version that clued me in on Northanger's gothic influence and made me decide I really needed to read the book, too.