by John Granger
At the beginning of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is the suffering orphan all but enslaved by his adoptive father’s son. This sets him up to play the “heroine” in the gothic story. However, the son’s family then endures Heathcliff ’s payback for generations. Dr. Jekyll, too, though also a man and despite being responsible for being Hyde’s victim, takes the “defiant victim” female stock rule.
If the gothic “heroine” (who is sometimes male) is a victim who must resist or escape to protect her virtue or self-respect, the hero is the jerk of the piece, more commonly labeled a “Byronic antihero.” Bold, passionate, selfish, demanding to the point of being sadistic, the gothic antihero is notable for overreaching his grasp, especially with respect to his understanding of what it means to be human. Jane Eyre? The antihero is Rochester, whose overbearing pride and passion for Jane makes him wish to bring her dishonor. Unable to marry her because of his marriage to the woman in his attic (!), he proposes that she consent to be his mistress. In overstepping traditional morality, he loses Jane, who escapes defiantly and returns triumphantly after Rochester has been humbled and his manor destroyed.
Heathcliff, the adopted and abused son, strives to own all the property and control the lives of those persons and families that kept him from happiness with Catherine. His passion for her and his bottomless hunger for sadistic, manipulative revenge means misery on the moors for three generations.
Dracula, Jekyll, and Frankenstein overreach in a different fashion. They are all scientists who attempt to live as men of reason and passion—mind and body without spirit—and to create the undead man of power without the spiritual faculty of soul.
Dracula, a Transylvanian nobleman and war hero, learned black arts and alchemy centuries ago and cuts a deal “with the Evil One” (chapter eighteen). Living without the interior light of spirit, he has the powers of dark magic but cannot absorb light, hence his inability to cause reflection in a mirror or cast a shadow. He dies at last because of his hubristic attempt at a one-man invasion of Great Britain.
Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein are more recognizable antiheroes in that their ambitions and overreaching are scientific rather than magical. Unfortunately, their relatively mechanical or formulaic science does not foster or require any kind of wisdom and produces human caricatures that are conscience-deprived monsters.
So, Who Exactly Are You?
Another gothic signature is the “doppelgänger” or “character going both ways.” This means that one or more characters is a mirror’s reflection and inversion of the other. Catherine and Heathcliff, she thinks, are one person, remember?
Dr. Jekyll tops this, of course, in being the exact same person biologically as his monstrous doppelgänger. Frankenstein projects his horrifically mistaken and oversized conception of what it means to be human onto his creature, an idea of himself he is obliged to destroy when he recognizes the creature is made in his own fallen image. Count Dracula, the superpowered, supernatural undead man incapable of faith, has his opposite in Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who is the embodiment of Christian faith and of sacramental vision. In these three pairings, we see the doppelgänger possibilities: internal, projection, and protagonist/antagonist pairing.
With this dual-nature storytelling, however, as you’d guess, we almost always get some confusion or conflation of who the hero and villain are. In Jane Eyre, you’ve got to be pretty cold not to wonder if Rochester isn’t as much the victim as Jane when she flees Thornfield. Heathcliff, as mentioned, becomes the monster he does because he is treated as badly as he is by his brother-by-adoption.
Who the heroes and villains are becomes even more confused in Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The hero creates the villain, who is the interior, monstrous man hiding inside the hero. In both cases, bizarre science liberates a soulless man-without-conscience to walk the streets unbridled. Which brings us to the morality of gothic fiction. It’s all about the life without thought of God. The gothic hero-villain is a story snapshot of fallen man as Calvinists see him. Man is born as an image of God and can grow in God’s likeness insofar as he identifies with his spiritual aspect and conscience. Man is depraved, however, and worse than a beast as he forgets God and lives a life consumed by the pursuit of his individual advantage.
“The Gothic world is quintessentially the Fallen world,” as one gothic literature authority summarizes it.4 Let’s review our Adam and Eve story. Man once walked with God in the Garden. There was no death; conversation with God was not only a possibility but all that human beings lived for. Adam was expelled from Paradise, though, because of his disobedience. Human beings can only regain Eden by restoring the ability to perceive and speak with God via his darkened and much-diminished spiritual capacity.
The gothic story, in a nutshell, is the Haunted House thrill-show experience written out to highlight for us the facts of our spiritual condition as fallen people living in a world apart from God.
The Gothic Fallen world is characterized by the concentration and magnification of fears and problems inherent in the “normal” world. Hence the two worlds are both effectively dissimilar and latently identical. . . . The Gothic world and the Fallen world are both blighted ones, places of danger, sorrow, and exile, in which the inhabitants’ only hope is a rediscovery of and reunion with the Father and the Beloved.5
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the concentrated version of Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Dracula. The deranged narrator is rational, clever, and calculating. However superficially sane, he is devoid of conscience or inner light. “Reason, in this world, is a frail and unreliable faculty, perhaps on an average less to be relied upon than the premonitions of excitable heroines.”6 Not only is it “frail and unreliable,” it resents the existence and authority of conscience, here symbolized by the old man’s “pale blue eye.” Reason without the rule of spirit is the servant of passion and works to destroy the single eye and extinguish its light (cf. Matthew 6:22, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”). We’ll come back to this in chapter ten, of course, when we talk about Dumbledore’s “pale blue eye” in Harry’s mirror fragment.
Poe’s madman succeeds in killing the man, but conscience cannot be extinguished. “The eye of the heart,” another name for the faculty of conscience, lives on, and its loud beating drives the murderer to reveal his crimes finally in hysterical obedience.
Likewise Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein ultimately realize they are primarily that quality or faculty that is absent in their bestial projections and doppelgängers. This revelation (and their inability to regain mastery over their rebellious reason and passions on their own) is a large piece of the didactic moral experience in their books. Gothic stories highlight this retelling of man’s fall in the garden by pouring in plot elements that echo the Adam and Eve metanarrative; gardens, snakes, and an expulsion from Paradise after an inability to resist the temptation of power, immortality, or glory, and spiritual falls without hope of recovering self-mastery and redemption are commonplaces.
If you struggle to see the gothic world as the horror comics version of Genesis and the Fallen world we live in, the central place of death in these stories, death as an imminent danger or the ever-present backdrop fear, makes the point. All the gothic writers in the Fabulous Five were Christians; it is important to recall, consequently, that a believing Christian imagines him- or herself as living in a place of transition between the Paradise of Eden, where there is no death, and the New Jerusalem of the world to come, in which there can be no corruption, darkness, or death. The life between Eden and Eternity—our world—differs, then, from these worlds most importantly in the presence of death. To drive our human condition home, gothic stories must highlight the fact of our lives we work very hard to ignore, disguise, or otherwise hide from public view: the inevitability of our deaths.7 The Calvinistic morality of horror and gothic fiction, a genre born at the dawn of modernity, is a wake-up cal
l to the industrial age that has forgotten God and death.
Harry Potter’s Cast of Gothic Role-Players
So, are the Harry Potter novels gothic? Oh, boy, are they ever. Let’s start with the principal players and work our way to the setting and, finally, the gothic narratives permeating every book and the series as a whole.
Severus Snape has his gothic equivalent in the English history classroom of Jane Eyre’s school. Miss Scatcherd beats the angelic, long-suffering Helen Burns. Switch out “Scatcherd” and “Burns” in these tormenting scenes of mental and physical cruelty with “Snape” and “Potter” and you have a typical, sadistic Hogwarts Potions class, just shy of the physical violence.
But why is Severus the Potions teacher? Recall his words in Harry’s first session in the dungeon: “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death—if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach” (Sorcerer’s Stone, chapter eight). He’s not kidding or boasting like Lockhart; he can and does “stopper death.” This is a wickedly powerful Potions maker, a cross between alchemist and chemist like Frankenstein and Jekyll, and at least as self-important and ambitious. But Severus doesn’t create a magical doppelgänger through Potions. His real gothic twin is not Scatcherd, Jekyll, or Frankenstein but Heathcliff, the lover whose passion is unrequited, who is separated from his beloved by death. Both Heathcliff and Snape act out their unending misery sadistically on those who remind them of past injuries. Heathcliff by force and stealth manipulates for generations every player in Wuthering Heights whom he blames for his childhood suffering and his ruined relationship with Catherine. Snape, having vowed to keep Harry alive in memory of Lily Potter, the woman he loved and failed, keeps his word; he never fails, nonetheless, to treat Harry as the stand-in for James Potter, Harry’s look-alike, whom Snape despises.
We will discuss the details and meaning of Snape’s death in the Shrieking Shack in chapter eight. Here, though, we need only note that with his last request—“Look . . . at . . . me!”—he gazes into Harry’s eyes, eyes just like Harry’s mother’s, and is at last reunited with her in death.
Harry the Gothic “Heroine”
Harry is not like other male gothic figures. He is no Heathcliff, Victor Frankenstein, or Dr. Jekyll. Those madmen each have a plan, however twisted, and the will and drive to bring the plan through to the end. Harry just goes to school and wild stuff happens to him. He resists heroically the terrible things and people that cross his path, but, as a rule, Harry is a victim of circumstances not of his choosing or liking. In this, of course, he is much less the Byronic antihero of gothic romance and more the defiant heroine doing her best to escape the supernatural or masculine shadow tormenting her. If Harry needed a new name, it would be “Jane Eyre.”
She is an orphan, beaten up regularly by her male cousin, treated horribly by her aunt, even locked in the “red room” to isolate and punish her. Harry is an orphan, he is Dudley’s punching bag as a child, and he lives in a cabinet under his aunt and uncle’s stairs. They both are delivered from their families to an extraordinary school where they make their first friends.
But Harry as “defiant victim” resembles Mina Harker from Dracula more than Jane Eyre. They both have forehead scars. His unwilling exchange of blood with the Dark Lord at the rebirthing party, which echoes Mina’s sharing Dracula’s blood, also creates a mind-link conflating their hero-villain identities that is critical in both Mina’s and Harry’s eventual victory over their nemeses.
Like Mina, too, Harry isn’t a supercharged superhero. They are both victims of a bizarre game in which they are, in large part, unwilling players. They depend on their friends for support and in combat. And, like formulaic gothic heroines and overreaching antiheroes, the degree to which they are responsible for their vulnerability and falls to temptation lies in their inability to protect their minds from intrusive tempters and seduction. “When confronted with a tempter, natural or supernatural, of any psychological subtlety, the frail defense of the darkened understanding is exceedingly likely to give way.”8
Rowling tells this “expelled from Eden” morality tale in Phoenix. Harry does not practice Occlumency as instructed by Dumbledore. This disobedience results in, first, Harry’s out-of-body experience with a serpent via mind-link in the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Mysteries. He refuses even after this to guard his mind from the Dark Lord, who is able finally to deceive him into flying to London on what Harry imagines is a rescue mission. It is instead a trap, and Sirius, whom Harry came to save, dies instead and passes through the veil. Harry’s failure to focus on the watchful or neptic faculty of soul (traditionally linked to the “eye of the heart” or conscience) results in the death of his godfather.
Harry, though, is just a fallen man coming to understand the world as it is and his need to choose to believe and pursue redemption. Lord Voldemort, like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jekyll, is a true gothic villain because he acts boldly to pursue an ego immortality divorced from the Spirit.
Of Horcruxes and Hallows
If the Harry Potter books were written by Bram Stoker, Harry would be Mina Harker, Dumbledore could easily play Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, and Lord Voldemort would be Dracula. Voldemort is the classic gothic villain. The parallels with Jekyll and Frankenstein are clear. Tom Riddle, Jr., is an overreaching Dark Wizard on a quest to live forever. As he tells his Death Eaters at the rebirthing party in Goblet of Fire: . . . How could they have believed I would not rise again? They who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? . . . [In Godric’s Hollow] I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still I was alive. What I was, even I do not know . . . I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal—to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one of my experiments had worked . . . for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it. (Goblet of Fire, chapter thirty-three)
Note his proud scientific language: He is a pioneer in the “experiments” to “conquer death.” Like Dr. Frankenstein, though, the creature Voldemort fashions from infamous acts of murder and idolatry is something subhuman.
Frankenstein’s creature, an embodiment of the passions and reason of science, lacked conscience, as did Jekyll’s Hyde. The spiritual faculty of the human person is uncreated; call it conscience, the active intellect, the eye of the heart, or what you will, it is the divine aspect of the human person. J. K. Rowling calls it love, and Voldemort knows nothing of love.
Love burns the unworthy or polluted in gothic horror. Remember the scar left on Mina Harker when the Eucharist, representing the God who died in loving sacrifice for his sheep, was placed on her forehead? Voldemort/Quirrell burns in agony when he touches Harry at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore explains, because:Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign . . . to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed, and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good. (Sorcerer’s Stone, chapter seventeen)
Voldemort leaps this magical barrier by using Harry’s blood to reconstitute himself in Goblet of Fire. The admixture creates the “bond of blood” that joins them. When he possesses Harry at the Ministry in Order of the Phoenix, however, he is driven away and guards himself against Harry by Occlumency thereafter because of the pain he experiences when Harry remembers Sirius. The love and remorse Harry feels almost destroys the Dark Lord.
Voldemort has become undead and all but immortal, like Stoker’s Dracula, through the dark magic of Horcruxes. By committing “the supreme act of evil”—a murder—the soul is torn.
Killing rips th
e soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage. He would encase the torn portion . . . [into an object with the necessary spell work] . . . then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged . . . (Slughorn, Half-Blood Prince, chapter twenty-three).
Incredibly, Riddle, Jr., creates one unintentional and six intentional Horcruxes. The Dark Lord’s exterior transformation into a person “whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose flat as a snake’s with slits for nostrils” (Goblet of Fire, chapter thirty-two) seemed to Dumbledore “only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call ‘usual evil . . .’ ” (Half-Blood Prince, chapter twenty-three).
Dracula survives by drinking the life’s blood of others and making them undead creatures of darkness like himself. Voldemort, too, must murder to achieve immortality, but, while perhaps not as gruesome as vampirism, Horcrux creation is at least as horrible. The Dark Lord is the satanic cartoon of a materialist who infuses objects with pieces of his own soul, pieces he has acquired via destruction of his neighbor. His “life,” such as it is, is entirely exterior and material, rather than interior and spiritual. As an allegorical figure, he is the embodiment of our fragmentation, self-estrangement, and alienation—the postmodern, fallen condition gothic literature presents in imaginative form. Voldemort is Rowling’s gothic masterpiece.
