Is the Gothic racist? Part II
It doesn't have to be
Hi everyone! Welcome back to your favorite English class aka Tuesday explainers. Last week I talked about a version of the Gothic that uses fear of difference to drive the plot. In other words: that person who is unlike me is terrible and we must get rid of them before they corrupt us all! The examples we looked at positioned a white, middle-class British person as “us” and everyone else as “them” — dangerous Others who pose a threat to British society.
But today, we look at two Gothic novels and a film that say, hey it doesn’t have to be that way!
The Creature, he’s just like us
The worst version of the Gothic reinforces the distinction between “us” and “them,” suggesting that the only way forward is to eliminate the dangerous Other. But the best version challenges that distinction, showing us that the self/Other divide might be blurrier than we think or — gasp! — might not even exist at all.
This is one of the things I love so much about Frankenstein (1818). With Victor and the Creature, Mary Shelley takes a standard self/Other binary and proceeds to shatter it over the course of the novel.
When Victor first encounters his creation, he is horrified: he sees a monster so grotesque, so appalling, that all he can do is flee in fear for his life. How could something that ugly be anything but evil? Rather than letting Victor’s perspective dominate, however, Shelley does something pretty unusual for a Gothic novel from that time — she lets the monster speak. In Part II, she shifts the narration away from Victor and toward the Creature, allowing him to tell his side of the story. And guess what we find out? The Creature wasn’t evil at all, at least not to begin with — he was just someone who, like everyone else, wanted love, kindness, and friendship from the people around him. But that’s not what he got — what he got was rejection, violence, and hatred.
Does the Creature eventually become a serial killer? Well, sure. But in the great nature vs. nurture debate of the 18th century, Shelley takes a firm stand: if the Creature is evil, it is only because he was so severely mistreated, not just by Victor but also by every other person he encounters, all of whom respond with horror to his appearance. In giving the reader access to the Creature’s interiority, Shelley allows us to see how badly people misjudge him, incorrectly assuming that because he is ugly he is monstrous. Frankenstein, then, raises a question that we might ask of other Gothic novels (and of ourselves): what if we’re just assuming that people are monsters based on how they look?
This question is particularly significant in Shelley’s era, as it directly contradicts the (ludicrous) idea that physical traits — e.g. facial features, skull size — correspond to things like morality or intellect. These pseudosciences (physiognomy, phrenology, etc.) formed the basis of scientific racism, as we discussed last week. And by challenging the idea that inferiority is rooted in the body, Shelley challenges the common justification for slavery, colonialism, gender-based discrimination, and other forms of mistreatment.
What’s more, Shelley suggests that Victor and society at large bear some responsibility for the Creature’s crimes. In Shelley’s view, evil is not the product of a single malicious individual; instead, it’s a communal failing. There is no saving “civilized” society by conveniently killing the monster. Frankenstein is not a perfect text — there is, for example, an interlude with some pretty egregious Islamophobia — but by humanizing the Other and redirecting blame to the wider community, Shelley offers a more compassionate version of the Gothic than any of the texts we discussed last week.
It’s you, white reader: you’re the problem, it’s you
Another version of the Gothic uses the same fear of difference we saw in Jane Eyre and Dracula, but flips the script: in this version, the white Europeans become the menacing Others (the “them”) instead of the virtuous insiders (the presumed “us”).
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) is a particularly good example of this phenomenon. When the heroine, Noemí, receives a strange letter from her cousin, she travels from Mexico City to a remote mountain town where her cousin lives with her new husband’s family, the Doyles. The Doyles are white, originally English, and they came to Mexico as colonizers in the 1800s, making a fortune from their now-defunct silver mine. But their fortune is long gone, and everything is crumbling around them, from the town, to the house, to the Doyles themselves. It’s not hard to follow the metaphors here: British colonialism is rotten and it threatens to spoil anything and anyone it touches.
Moreno-Garcia also masterfully subverts conventional Gothic representations of whiteness, making the Doyles’ skin color grotesque and frightening. When Noemí meets the patriarch of the Doyle family, Howard, she describes him as “very pale, like an underground creature. A slug perhaps,” and that’s barely scraping the surface of the many disgusting descriptions of Howard. This book becomes truly wild — one of the craziest things I’ve read — but if you fancy a wild ride, I highly recommend.
Jordan Peele does something similar in his 2017 film Get Out, in which a young Black photographer, Chris, goes with his white girlfriend, Rose, to her parents’ house for the weekend. Like Mexican Gothic, Get Out flips the script of standard Gothic plots, depicting the whiteness of Rose’s family as eerie, strange, and menacing. Classic signifiers of upper-middle-class whiteness, like lawn parties and lacrosse sticks, become terrifying as Chris realizes that something is deeply wrong at the Armitage estate. (In case you haven’t seen it, I won’t say what, but trust me it’s messed up.) In this way, Peele joins a tradition of writers who use the Gothic to explore racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States, much as Moreno-Garcia uses it to expose the horrors of colonialism in Mexico. (I put Peele second in this discussion, but I don’t mean to suggest that he is actually influenced by Moreno-Garcia since his film predates Mexican Gothic by several years.)
As always, I could go on, but I will spare you 10,000 more words on Frankenstein. Thank you for reading and see you Friday!