by John Granger
This is not just another Tom Brown or even Tom Brown “reseen . . . in the magical mirror of Tolkien,”26 as Harold Bloom would have it. The literal level of meaning we’ve been exploring in these first three chapters, with their pointers to the moral dimension the surface story inevitably brings with it is just the visible vehicle or stage setting through which and on which Ms. Rowling has worked her multivalent artistry.
Doubt me? Turn the page to discover the Frankenstein monster, vampire, and gothic romance moral meaning tucked into this schoolboy novel. We’re about to leave Tom Brown and Malory Towers for a different dimension in setting and stock response training. On to Transylvania!
PART TWO
The Moral Meaning
CHAPTER FOUR
Gothic Romance: The Spooky Atmosphere Formula from Transylvania
Harry Potter as an Echo of the Brontë Sisters, Frankenstein,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula
Gothic as a literary genre was born in the mid-eighteenth century with the stunning Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which almost singlehandedly introduced the devices, themes, and morality of this kind of novel. “Pure gothic” or gothic romance accounts for close to a third of all books written in the late 1700s and early 1800s, believe it or not, and then fades dramatically into near nonexistence. The “machinery” of the pure gothic romance, however, bled into all other genres and became a staple of Dickens, Collins, the Victorian horror writers, the “late gothic” authors, and eventually, we shall see, found a home in the world of Harry Potter.
Gothic Literature
“Gothic” can be used meaningfully to describe everything from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to bodice-ripping yarns from Victoria Holt, not to mention the macabre horror stories of Poe, Lovecraft, and Stephen King. There are “classic gothic” stories from the nineteenth century that everyone still reads, though; a look at them reveals the common elements of gothic novels that are found everywhere in Harry Potter, as well as their admonitory morality. If you could do a word-response test with literature geeks, a test in which for every category named the person has to name a novel, I’m confident that for the word “gothic” most would answer either Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Dracula.
None of them are “pure gothic”—because they don’t contain all the elements that would make them so—but all get their feel or atmosphere from Walpole and his eighteenth-century imitators.1 Let’s look at their individual stories quickly to spot the dominant, recurrent threads before seeing the gothic wool of the Potter tapestry and its moral message.
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë is an orphan novel featuring the original “plain Jane” in her rise from abused, adopted child through life’s vicissitudes to marriage with her beloved. Taken in by an aunt and uncle at her parents’ deaths, she is tormented by her cousins and shrewish aunt when her uncle dies. They send her away to school, but this is hardly an improvement, despite her making a dear friend and finding a sympathetic mentor. The teachers and the school head are sadists and sophists who dislike her, and the boarding students are treated so badly that disease eventually kills many of them, including the dear friend. The school is reformed, and Jane eventually becomes a teacher herself. She leaves the school to become a governess at a Gothic manor to a French child.
The child is the ward of a man twenty years Jane’s senior. Edward Rochester is a passionate gentleman who, after a rough start with the manor’s new governess, falls in love with her and proposes. Jane is swept off her feet but learns at her wedding that Rochester is already married and his mad wife has been kept in the manor attic out of sight. She refuses to become his mistress and flees the manor in the dark of night.
She escapes north to desolate moors and is taken in, near death, by St. John Rivers and his sisters. St. John plans to become a missionary to India and after Jane’s physical recovery and miraculous inheritance, he proposes they marry and she join him in India. Jane, though, hears a voice and realizes just in time she still loves Rochester and returns to him.
But he is a humbled man. His confined wife had burned down the manor and died after leaping from the roof; Rochester was crippled and blinded in the fire. In a melodramatic reunion, Jane and Rochester reconcile, and, in their union, he eventually regains sight in one eye.
Wuthering Heights
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 . . .
Frankenstein
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.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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 f
in 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.
Dracula
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.
And More
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.
An Atmosphere of Fear
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 . . . ).
Victims/Heroines and Conscience-Deprived Antiheroes
Here is the formula for your standard “pure” gothic romance from the late eighteenth century onward:• A young female is stripped of her familial support, her mother usually dead before the novel begins, her father or other guardian dying in the early chapters.
• The lover (if any)
who might protect her is sent away or prevented from seeing her.
• Depending upon the period of the novel, she may be kidnapped, fall into the hands of an unscrupulous guardian, go out as a governess, or marry hastily.
• Out in the world her troubles multiply. People want to kill her, rape her, lock her up in a convent for life, and make off with her small fortune.
• Her task is to defend her virtue and liberty and resist evil. She must penetrate disguises by unmasking villains, learning to trust in less-than-obvious heroes, and thereby rebuilding a support system that will restore her to a quiet life.
• With pluck and luck, she manages these near impossibilities and is rewarded with the discovery of lost relatives and/or the promise of reliable domestic love in a household of her own.3
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.”