I’ve always loved gothic romances and horror. Darkness, melancholy, and intense emotion have long been my siren calls, and I gravitated to these genres like a werewolf to a full moon much before I became a functional reader.
As a kid, my first exposure to what I would call gothic tropes and aesthetics, outside of the folklore shared by my family, came from cartoons. I spent many Saturday mornings eating corn flakes in front of the TV while watching Scooby-Doo. And though I loved the antics of the Mystery Inc. gang, it was the foreboding atmosphere of the settings in each episode that crept quietly into my imagination. The episodes featuring creepy mansions loom large in my memory even now.
I desperately wanted to live in a drafty castle or on an ancient family estate and walk its misty grounds on dreary mornings wearing a thick, heavy cloak. That kind of life was in complete contrast to my everyday reality as the child of Caribbean immigrants living in a government subsidized apartment. Nonetheless, the lavish excess and drama of it captivated me.
As I grew older, I learned more about the history and conventions of gothic romances in particular. As a note, I am not an expert or academic on the subject and this piece is based solely on my personal reading, learning, and feelings in response to my experience of the genre through the materials accessible to me. By my awkward teens, I’d surmised that gothic romances were often (but not always) about a pale, beautiful, helpless white woman who marries a rich, brooding lord. The woman is isolated on his estate and through the course of the story haunted physically and emotionally by the sins of her husband’s past, which are usually linked to his fortune. These hauntings force our heroine to grapple with and acknowledge her own inner darkness and desires. By the end of the story, our heroine uncovers the terrible secret within the house and escapes or succumbs to the horror and corruption it contains. The house swallows her or is destroyed metaphorically or literally.
The shape of this narrative appealed to my sense of justice and my inner struggles with my own self-hate and queerness. I liked the idea that corruption and horror refused to remain buried and that a young woman was often the driving force behind bringing evil to light and liberation. During my teenage years, I sought out every gothic romance and gothic horror title I could read and took a gothic literature class as part of my English degree at University. But like our gothic heroine, I began to have misgivings about the genre—or, to keep with our metaphor, the “house” where my heart lived.
In the gothic books and media I had access to growing up in Toronto in the ’80s and ’90s, BIPOC were nonexistent or if they did appear in the work, they were often othered and represented as the manifestation of the corruption or evil that haunted white characters. Queer characters were given the same treatment. One of the most jarring moments in my reading came during my beloved Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. For a large part of the book, leading up to the revelation that Mr. Rochester is already married, I identified deeply with Jane. Jane was a hardworking and honest English girl. She wasn’t described as beautiful but rather plain and ordinary. She was good and kind and on the verge of marrying someone she loved after a life of deprivation and abuse. My heart broke for her when Mr. Rochester dragged her back to the house to reveal his wife living in the attic.
My heart shattered for myself when we learn that his wife Bertha Mason was a “mad” woman born in the Caribbean and described as the negative opposite of innocent Jane. I was born in the Caribbean, so in the moment of that reading it was impossible for me not to align myself with Bertha. I could not be Jane.
In the years since the publication of Jane Eyre there has been much analysis and intersectional criticism written about Bertha Mason and what she symbolized in relation to Jane and what Jane herself represents. Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea provided Bertha with a voice, history and name of her own: Antoinette Cosway. I did not have access to those texts when I encountered Jane Eyre for the first time and Rhys’s novel was not presented alongside Jane Eyre in my university classes. I sought out her book on my own years later.
I walked away from that experience full of admiration for Charlotte Bronte as a writer and cheering for Jane. I also left with the uneasy feeling that people like me could not be gothic heroines. I don’t belong on an English estate or manor. I am the monster, the manifestation of corruption and the other that threatens to destroy the house and Empire with its white supremacist foundations, not the pale damsel in distress that needs softness, love, or to be saved.
But the gothic had sunk its teeth into my soul and I could not shake my affinity to it, though it seemed the genre did not want my voice as one of its heroines. When I first began writing, I struggled to situate myself. I did not feel comfortable writing from the point of view of an innocent woman encountering deprivation and isolation on an estate. I grew up in poverty and had no experience with any of the “finer” things in life. Instead, I found myself drawn to the genre’s monsters who no one would willingly invite into their homes. I had more in common with Frankenstein’s creation, werewolves, Carmilla the Vampire, the duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the figures of Trinidadian folklore such as Soucouyants and Douens. I knew their isolation, anguish and loneliness. I understood being viewed as undesirable and burying your feelings, orientation, gender and heritage to appear acceptable to society. I’d seen how horror, dread, guilt and shame could be hidden in one’s heart when one did not have a wine cellar or attic in which to conceal it.
As a result, physical bodies took on the role of the manor or estate in a lot of my work. The terrible secret the protagonist confronts is their internalized self-hate which is often cultivated within them by a society or family that tries to convince them they are a monster for not conforming to a rigid status quo. The facade they must uphold while struggling with who they are are the walls that imprison them. And the romance has become the monster falling in love with herself, just as she is. Everyone deserves the time and space to process their own hidden hurts, traumas, and guilt, not just attractive young women that rich men want to marry.
Further, because a gothic catharsis can happen to anyone, it can occur anywhere: a strip mall, an amusement park, a factory, a trailer park, a shelter, a cave or a government subsidized apartment building and in any country or tradition. The gothic need not be confined to the affluent or landowning classes.
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These days when I think back on my original reading of Jane Eyre, I find myself cheering for Bertha Mason. I am no longer ashamed of my Caribbean connection to her. Yes, I, Suzan, am the mad woman in the attic. Bertha did the right thing when she burned Thornfield Hall down to the ground. She knew she deserved to be the center of her story, as all of us do—especially we “monsters” who have been shunned for not falling within the confines of the status quo.
Set the house on fire and gothic romance yourself. No manor or estate required.
