Kuroshitsuji is a love story
Part I - Ciel as the gothic heroine
Disclaimer: this analysis contains mentions of outdated views on gender. It is not my intention to spread hateful ideologies and the equation of certain behaviors, bodily functions, and aesthetics to femininity are to be intended solely as narrative tools to the likes of symbolism and are to be contextualized within the historical period that is being taken as reference.
‘Ciel’ in this analysis is used interchangeably for both twins, as it operates for the most part on the premise that they are the same person.
The main thesis of what is going to be discussed is heavily sebaciel-leaning. While this is a breakdown of Kuroshitsuji on a metaphorical and thematic level, and it lacks the pretense of making claims on the textual layer, it still suggests a romantic reading of Sebastian and Ciel's relationship.
the lovely @ceoandslutler is currently working on a sister analysis, consider it the cielseba twin to this sebaciel one. please make sure to check out their work too! it will be linked here as well once it's available <3 having said that...
Kuroshitsuji is a love story, which uses subtext and tropes pertaining to the literary genre(s) it draws inspiration from – clearly, but not limited to, gothic novels – to convey a romantic narrative.
Despite being described by Yana Toboso herself as "manly", Ciel is meant to represent a heroine – or more broadly, a feminine counterpart in his relationship with Sebastian and, by extension, in his role within the story. This connection has already been drawn by @/postpastiche.
The gothic heroine's main struggle comes from her condition as a woman in the profoundly patriarchal Victorian society.
In order to escape the dire situations she finds herself in, the gothic heroine must shed her femininity and engage in activities that were traditionally viewed as masculine – such as solving mysteries, like Emily St. Aubert who investigates the apparent paranormal occurrences around her in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
As Lizzy was told, the ideal Victorian woman was not analytical. She was not supposed to ask questions and, worse, find answers.
That was a man's job, as shown by Victorian literary characters such as Sherlock Holmes. Through his creation, Conan Doyle set the golden standard for detective stories, which mainly featured aloof and logical men who could withstand the intrinsic dangers of their investigations.
While male detectives solved cases pertaining to public interest, focusing their efforts on the outside world, the gothic heroine was frequently absorbed in unlocking the truth within her own private reality – a family secret, mysteries in her home, or the machinations of villains who plotted to get in the way of her happiness.
Ciel is involved in investigating the underworld, but much like a gothic heroine's tale, the main enigma of his story is deeply personal – who murdered his family and why.
To survive the hostile environment he's plummeted in, Ciel must carry a gun, wear heels and silk top hats to appear more imposing and threatening. He needs to maintain an emotional distance from the people around him, suppressing his empathetic feelings despite being at his core a kind person. Refer to @ceoandslutler's post on kindness in Kuroshitsuji.
What Ciel is doing is essentially hiding the stereotypically feminine parts of himself, mirroring the aforementioned necessity of the gothic heroine for taking on a ‘masculine’, active role in her story.
This posturing of masculinity extends to his fabricated identity as the heir. By taking his older brother's name, Ciel is no longer in a socially disadvantageous situation.
If the Phantomhive murders never happened, Ciel wouldn’t have inherited anything from his father – a Victorian practice that applied to younger sons, but also to daughters.
Even if they happened to be older than their brothers, Victorian women had no rights to their family's fortune. At times this situation took place when a daughter had no siblings at all, too, in which case another male relative would access the assets in her stead.
As it reflects the economic dependence women experienced at the time, the heroine's anxiety surrounding inheritance is a common theme in Gothic novels, and it can be found in many popular works such as Roche's The Children of the Abbey, whose protagonist is robbed of her status and estate.
The inner drama of Ciel, which inevitably encompasses his material circumstances as well, is in essence the condition of being [in the position of] a girl.
Ciel is a girl – she's rescued, protected, dressed, desired. Vulnerable to the appetites of the people around him, who want him to the point of repeatedly stepping over his boundaries due to the magnitude of the infatuation he provokes.
The lines that are most often crossed with Ciel are his bodily ones – he suffers sexual assault at the hands of the cult, Doll forces him to undress and ends up exposihg his scar, Lizzy wants to control how he dresses and shatters his family ring in the process, and Sieglinde fondles his genitals without consent.
Women in Gothic literature experience a similar loss of control over their own body, a blatant example being Lucy Westenra in Dracula. She's slowly drained of her blood by the titular villain, and later experiences a brutal death by impalement after being subjected to invasive medical treatments decided by the men around her.
The gothic heroine's body doesn't get violated only by the unrestricted, unwanted access others have to it, but also in its loss of physical freedom. She's often trapped by men in dark, claustrophobic spaces she cannot leave, else she'd no longer be under their control. Such is the fate of The Phantom of the Opera's protagonist, Christine, who's abducted by the besotted Erik and hidden in his secret underground lair.
Ciel has been kept in a cage during his days as a cult victim, and was subsequently about to repeat the experience due to Baron Kelvin’s schemes. A similar incident takes place when he’s kidnapped by Viscount Druitt, who plans on selling Ciel at an illegal auction while he's tied up and, again, trapped inside a cage.
What endangers Ciel is the visceral fixation he awakens in older men – a foundational theme in these works, as it made its appearance in the first recorded Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. The story features prince Manfred's consuming obsession with marrying the much younger and unwilling Isabella.
Ciel's vulnerability to predatory attention is often the result of him being pseudo-gendered as a girl – one such example is Baron Kelvin regarding Ciel's existence as a ‘cold moon.’
The moon is a classic gothic symbol that serves as an agent of both comfort and danger, truth and mystery – it accompanies the heroine in her nightwalks, though it implies it is night in the first place; it shines a revealing light in the dark, but its radiance is not strong enough to illuminate the girl's way. The duplicitousness of the moon parallels Ciel's ambiguous role as the watchdog, his justice brought through unjust means.
Furthermore, the moon has been associated with femininity across numerous cultures, the lunar wax and wane mirroring the menstrual cycle, its receptive and softer glow when compared to the sun embodied by female goddesses in ancient pantheons.
For the sake of intellectual honesty, this is not the case in the Japanese and English tradition, which consider the moon as a masculine entity. However, in both instances there has been a shift in modern views, strongly influenced by the flipped Greco-Roman mythology, resulting in cultural manifestations such as Sailor Moon and Wicca that connect womanhood to the moon.
Ciel has been implicitly compared to the moon by Sebastian as well, when he states he swore his human form's identity to the moon (which is to say, to Ciel.)
Additionally, Baron Kelvin associates Ciel's beauty to that of a bisque doll, porcelain collectibles that mostly represent women in appearance, and so does the one in the panel used for the comparison.
Despite being anime only, given how filler arcs turned out to be relevant, Claude deserves an honorary mention when it comes to the male cast's creeping on Ciel.
During his stay with Claude, Ciel is bound and forced under water so that he can be broken into a complacent victim. His abuse is reminiscent of the medical torture used against many gothic heroines, famously the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman who begins to lose her grip on reality while confined to an upstairs room by her husband as treatment for her depressive state.
The traumatic manipulation Ciel undergoes has clear effects on his sanity, and it causes a split in his psyche. His body becomes the overwhelmed vessel of a double identity, his own and Alois’, Claude’s previous contractor.
The haunting of the heroine by a woman who used to be in her position is a recurrent motif in Gothic literature. In Rebecca, the protagonist is continuously reminded of her husband's late wife, who possessed much more beauty and elegance than her.
Alois – the late wife archetype – serves as a hidden warning to the protagonist: her mysterious death is often caused by the husband himself, revealing the violent and deceptive nature of the man the heroine should trust.
Likewise, in Rebecca, the previous wife was murdered by the heroine's husband, though before the truth comes out, it's inevitable for the heroine to compare herself to the other woman – a representation of an unattainable ideal of femininity that fuels her insecurity. At the end, the heroine is nonetheless reassured of her own adequacy, as it's revealed that the deceased woman had a poor character and was guilty of infidelity.
This mirrors Ciel holding a ‘superior’ soul to Alois, prompting him to be desired by both Sebastian and Claude. However, Claude is only devoted on the surface, not hesitating in tricking or harming Ciel and showing shallow preoccupations with him that are limited to details such as his appearance – Claude's meticulous grooming of Ciel includes dressing him up in a dainty, feminine nightgown.
The nightgown is a classic attire for a gothic heroine, worn in moments of vulnerability as she sleeps or meanders alone in the dark, prey to the attention of malevolent beings with the same perverse nature of Claude.
On a related note, Viscount Druitt takes an interest in Ciel after he cross-dresses, and with an exaggerated feminine look at that – dress ruffled and pink, hair long and flowy and tied in twintails.
This specific episode offers yet another moment in which Ciel's wishes are disregarded in favor of someone else's wants: madame Red has always dreamed of having a daughter, therefore Ciel must go undercover to the party in women's clothes, even if it makes him uncomfortable.
Ciel's entire life is in fact subjugated to what others demand of him – emblematic in this sense is his loyalty to the Queen, who is the very embodiment of Victorian society, and thus, of external pressure. Whenever the Queen wants something, Ciel must obey, to the detriment of his physical and mental wellbeing.
But what about what Ciel wants?
When Ciel wants something, he's greedy, because the gothic heroine isn't allowed to desire (only to be desired) – that's comparable to a sin.
And for the heroine to not only desire, but dare to obtain what she wants, the entire patriarchal structure needs to crumble.
The father needs to die, the older brother needs to be sacrificed. Rather than turning to the hallowed, male-centered institution of the church and its god, the woman needs to appeal to the subversion of social order: thus, the devil.
The devil appears to Ciel in heels and with long, painted nails, suggesting a feminine-coded and/or queer identity that starkly contrasts with the masculine image of the Christian god.
During GWA, the occult figure of Baphomet is referenced as part of devil worshipping practices. As an icon, Baphomet has androgynous characteristics, possessing breasts and the caduceus of Hermes in lieu of a phallus – a symbol of balance found in the unity of masculine and feminine energies.
Satanism has a philosophical affinity to subversion, proposing the challenging of status quo and authority. It's inevitable then for Ciel to fall back on the devil, as he feels abandoned by god and in a broader sense by the christian values that should have enforced a respectable, safe society, that turned out to be anything but.
Gothic fiction increasingly questioned whether religious institutions truly embodied the Christian ideals they claimed to uphold, hence depicting run-down cathedrals crumbling like faith itself, and plunging sacred spaces in darkness to symbolize the corruption lurking in the church.
The Monk demonstrates the disillusionment of the Gothics with religion through Ambrosio, a monk who leads a depraved life made of serious crimes and constant falls into temptation.
It's only by relinquishing religion – and simultaneously, his adherence to the social conventions it enforces – that Ciel obtains the power to make his wishes come true.
What Ciel reclaims through his pact with Sebastian is his agency (as shown by the scene of him coming back to his senses in GWA); his ability to make choices for himself, regardless of what others want from him and the stifling rules of the environment he lives in.
The gothic heroine conquers the right to build the life she wants after a series of challenges, one of them being the loss of her innocence; previously, she lives in a state of cluelessness while unaware of the secrets that endanger her.
That's why Ciel's presented story begins in childhood – and his age is significant when it comes to his feminization, as the lack of sexual development forces him within the constraints of a not-yet-realized masculine form, an amorphous phase in which one is not yet branded as one sex or the other.
The transitional state in which he's suspended softens his features, limits his strength, dollifies him into the boy who looks good if dressed as a girl.
It was common for young boys to wear dresses and frills in the Victorian age (something Yana herself is aware of), a practice that nearly erased the difference between sexes in clothing until around age 4 to 7, reinforcing the blurring of gender binarism.
Interestingly, Ciel continues on to dress more femininely than normal – in particular, it's worth noting that one of his thematic colors, as well as the one he wears most often, is blue.
Rather than pink, in the Victorian era blue was the color traditionally associated with girls, for it was viewed as a delicate shade with a link to the Virgin Mary.
This association is made clear in the second Nijishitsuji anthology, in which Madame Red is compared to Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene contrasts the Virgin Mary in Christian art, literature and theology, and is often depicted dressed in the color red in opposition to Virgin Mary's blue.
The Eden-like state that characterizes the start of Ciel's life is disrupted at the beginning of his adolescence.
There were already signs, naturally, that the heroine wasn't equal to the men around her: Ciel took after his mother and was crippled by her same illness, a representation of the disadvantages that accurse a woman through generations. @/lethiflora has expanded on this.
His poor health forced Ciel to stay home, occupying the domestic sphere expected of women, and made him feel limited in his sense of freedom and self-worth. The gothic heroine is often fragile and plagued by physical ailments, and has a tendency to faint – Matilda, the main character of the novel The Recess, swoons up to eight times.
But it's on the symbolic cusp of his adolescence, the very day of his tenth birthday, that Ciel's life takes a turn for the worse. Puberty marks a scission with the total dependence on family one has during childhood, and thus metaphorically, Ciel's parents die; he's orphaned like many heroines, a pattern frequently found in the Radcliffean gothic protagonists.
Besides the separation from family, puberty is also a time when one’s violently faced with their own sex and gender identity – an awakening that can't be anything but traumatic for a woman growing in a misogynistic context.
The heroine realizes that her value from now on depends on superficial qualities such as her lineage (Sir Percival Glyde pursues Laura because of her fortune in The Woman in White) or her beauty (Carmilla's intense physical attraction to Laura comes primarily from her appearance.)
Ciel is priced by the human traffickers accordingly – his maturing body is no longer only his, but it becomes an object that is observed, judged and used by the world around him.
The subsequent abuse Ciel undergoes is mainly sexual – it could be viewed as a symbolic representation of the heroine's anguish when first presented with the reality of sex, due to the sexual act defining her existence by reinforcing submission; Ciel is forced into a passive role by suffering sodomization, the non-consensual nature of the assault stating the insignificance of the heroine's wants.
It is not for the heroine to derive pleasure from intercourse – a woman's sexuality was demonized, quite literally so in the novel Zofloya where the unusually liberated Victoria acts out her lust under the influence of Satan, and is punished for it with annihilation at the end.
Sex for women was inextricable from pregnancy, their bodies viewed as an object whose function was to bring forth new life. Influenced by Christian values, Victorian attitudes towards sex stressed the importance of focusing on procreation rather than sexual gratification.
During the ritual, Ciel's body is used as an instrument for the summoning of a demon, in other words for the materialization on the physical plane of an entity that wasn't previously present, paralleling gestation.
Summoning a demon requires a blood sacrifice, like giving birth necessitates intercourse – the sexual act to the inexperienced maiden appears as violence, and in its phallocentric standard it culminates with penetration.
As sex couldn’t be depicted freely in Gothic novels (due to the censorship enforced by the 1857 Obscene Publications Act), sexual explicitness was often implied or sublimated through a series of metaphors: exchange of bodily fluids through blood-drinking or transfusions, virginity and sexual repression symbolized by locked rooms, passion and release erupting in fire and storms. Similarly, penetration was accomplished through the act of stabbing with the phallic knife.
What makes penetration terrifying to the virginal heroine is the potential for a symbolic death it carries – pain, blood, and her life as she knows it ending; there was a social cost for losing one's virginity and carrying the proof of it, as sex outside of marriage was a taboo that resulted in unwed mothers being relegated to the lowest rungs of society.
In Kuroshitsuji there's multiple references to a virgin's apprehension at the prospect of sex, and it's significant that one of such instances are lyrics written presumably by Sebastian or Ciel, or the two of them together.
In the sacrifice scene, Ciel isn't watching someone else – he's witnessing himself. There's a deliberate attempt at fusing the two Phantomhives that begins with them being identical twins, and it concludes with Ciel taking the identity of his brother. He sees his future on the altar and fears the end of his agency, the estrangement from his own body and desires.
The other twin is but a proxy for Ciel's own anxieties about himself – will the heroine be forever treated like a spare, someone to be used and discarded, with no say on her own life? Is what awaits her a loveless marriage and sexual abuse, now that she's a woman? These are the core conflicts of a gothic heroine.
The older twin's death is, of course, symbolic of the end of Ciel's childhood and his initiation into adulthood as well. Ciel loses his innocence, and his budding sexual maturity is accompanied by heavy menstruation imagery: the ring, which is to say a small, round-shaped object (ovum) is taken out of Ciel’s lower stomach (released from the ovary), in a pool of blood nonetheless.
There's more to be said regarding Ciel and the themes of womb/pregnancy, and both @/existingtm and @/zimowahistoria-sbcl raise great points about it.
In order for the heroine to truly come of age, though, she needs self-actualization. Ciel conquers it primarily in two ways: first, he finds protection from the ones who want him dead through his servants, and swears on defeating his family's enemies.
Secondly, he builds his own source of income and influence by becoming a successful entrepreneur in the field he dreamed of as a child, which happens to be female-oriented.
Both Ellena and Jane at the end of their hardships are rewarded with marriage, and this is where Sebastian comes into play, incarnating the hero to Ciel's heroine.
These endeavors follow two fundamental goals the gothic heroine needs to achieve before reaching her happy ending: halting the villain's plans, like The Italian's Ellena who is rescued after a long conspiracy against her, and constructing her own independence, the way Jane Eyre did after leaving Thornfield Manor and managing to run a school.
It's only after Jane becomes independent and refuses to become Rochester's mistress that she eventually marries him. Just as seeing his unhappy future as a wife sacrificed on the altar terrified Ciel, Jane recognizes herself in the fate of Rochester's spouse, dreading becoming trapped and going insane like the other woman if she agreed to a subservient future she didn't want.
my next analysis will focus on how sebastian parallels a gothic hero and what this means for seb and ciel’s relationship <3 if you feel like you've made points that can expand on this analysis please feel free to link them in the comments, or to share your own observations too!!
