I feel seen by the Gothic

And if you've experienced any darkness in your life, you might too

Over the years, I’ve given several public lectures on Frankenstein, and every time at least one person comes up to me afterward and says something like, “I just don’t like books about monsters.” When I ask why, they tell me that books about monsters are silly – usually they say some version of, “it isn’t even real.” And that tends to be that. Even though they’ve just listened to me talk about the complexity of Frankenstein, they’re not willing to take a book about monsters seriously. 

This view of Gothic novels is nothing new. For as long as people have been writing Gothic novels, other people have been writing them off as frivolous. The poet William Wordsworth believed that Gothic novels were the product of a feeble-minded society, in which people only wanted “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth condemned the Gothic as part of the public’s “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” In other words, Gothic novels aren’t just silly, they’re for stupid people.

We could see Wordsworth’s opinion as a byproduct of Enlightenment rationalism. In the 18th century, philosophers like David Hume encouraged people to embrace an empirical worldview, in which all knowledge begins with our senses: “we should reject every system,” Hume says, “which is not founded on fact and observation.” This has become the dominant perspective in the 21st-century Western world: anything that can’t be verified empirically isn’t real, and anything that isn’t real doesn’t have value. But many of us experience things that we can’t prove or document or make visible to someone else. And the Gothic is particularly good at capturing those experiences. (If you want to read more about the Gothic’s relationship to Enlightenment rationalism, check out my article on Medium.)

I can’t tell you why everyone likes Gothic novels, but I can tell you why I like them. The feelings of dread, unease, and uncertainty that characterize the Gothic are feelings I know very well. I’ve had many experiences – in my family, in my relationships, in academia – that feel…Gothic. Where something was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Where I’ve doubted my judgment and wondered if I could trust my own perception. Where what I was being told didn’t match my experience.

Although it can represent all kinds of distressing situations, the Gothic excels at depicting family trauma. Imagine you’re a kid in your family home. You overhear tense conversations, phone calls in hushed tones, voices that drop as soon as you walk in the room. You know that certain topics cause your parents to avert their eyes and give vague responses. When you ask what’s wrong, the answer is “nothing.” But you know it’s not nothing, even if you can’t say what it is. This feeling – sensing something amiss but not being able to identify it – is commonplace for a child struggling to understand adult problems, and it very closely mirrors the feeling of Gothic terror.  

Perhaps you, the kid, are sensing family secrets – information that adults want to keep quiet for your sake (or for theirs). But family secrets are like ghosts: they have a way of making their presence known until someone finally acknowledges them. You feel them in the silence around your father’s first marriage, the absence of your uncle at family gatherings, or the way the mood shifts every time your mom and her sister are in the same room. There’s a reason why the haunted house is such a powerful and persistent trope: it captures the way that families, even across multiple generations, can be haunted by their past. 

The haunted house is also a trap – a place from which you might never escape – and generational trauma can feel that way, too. You’ve witnessed the suffering of your mother and grandmother, and you don’t want to repeat the pattern, you don’t want to endure the same fate, but you’re afraid you won’t be able to avoid it. What if your family trauma is like a malicious ghost who locks all the doors and cuts all the phone lines and won’t let you go?

Beyond psychological terror, the Gothic can also capture the feeling of watching someone you love turn into a monster. In In the Dream House (2020), Machado’s partner erupts into an abusive rage without warning, becoming another person entirely — a person Machado hardly recognizes. The idea that someone close to you may have monster lurking inside them is a common theme in Gothic novels. In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a well-respected doctor – spoiler alert – transforms into the monstrous Mr Hyde. But rather than a single transformation, he shifts back and forth between these two personas: during the day he is an upstanding citizen, but at night he causes terror in the streets of London. Last week I talked about how fear of outsiders is an important component of vampire stories, but Jekyll and Hyde suggests that the threat might live much closer to home: instead of a strange Count in faraway Transylvania, the monster could be the neighbor you see every day, or, perhaps, the person who lives in your house. When Jack the Ripper began killing women in 1888, the newspapers initially referred to him as “Mr Hyde” because of his ability to blend in with his fellow Londoners, stoking public fear that you can’t tell a monster just by looking at them.

The question of who gets to feel seen by the Gothic, and who is represented as a monster, is a complicated one. Traditional Gothic fiction, especially written in the 19th century, can be pretty racist, and I hope to explore that topic in more detail in a future Tuesday explainer. But for now I will say: I find the Gothic incredibly validating because, whether the explanation turns out to be supernatural or not, the heroine is always right that something is amiss.

Mitski gets it.