Notes on: The Gothic Monster Girl in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Margaret Atwood's "Lusus Naturae"
By Manuela López Ramírez, 2025 Universitat de València
When I was putting together a Gothic Anthology on Incest for a class, one of the things I specifically was looking for was an example written by a Black author, since that was a gaping hole in the curriculum that my professor had given us (I also told him he should put Toni Morrison on the reading list if he ever taught the class again, since she reads like a dream and gives more dimension to American Gothic Lit than some of the other authors he chose). This essay, which I had pulled up to narrow my choices down to The Bluest Eye, is what got me to read and use that story in the anthology. I also saved this for Claudia purposes, so while I'm rereading it to do some Claudia character study, I'll give you a chance to read parts of it along with me.
Beware: this is not a short post.
Important terms:
Abjection (as defined by Julia Kristeva) - "that which does not respect borders, positions, rules" and "disturbs identity, system, and order." The abject is fundamentally related to essential themes, such as "sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body, and incest"
Gothic Monsters - the embodiment of the Other, often equated with evil, who cross the socially-sanctioned norms of white male-dominated patriarchal society, symbolizing its fear and anxieties.
Female Gothic - Gothic narratives centering on a woman's rite of passage into womanhood and her ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology -- depicts dangers, dread, and anxieties within domestic life and the patriarchal home
Bildungsroman - "formation novel," it is a story that intertwines the character's ethical, psychological, and spiritual growth to be the resolution of the conflict. A "coming of age" novel.
anti-Bildungsroman - a story that purposefully undermines the trajectory of a Bildungsroman. Often depicts stagnation, regression, or the failure of a protagonist to achieve growth.
While I am not sure I wholly agree with the way Barbara Creed expresses the comparison of patriarchal values and racism, what I do think is important to highlight that the Monstrous Other can be found and explored in the ways that the existence of whole groups of people are abjected into the margins. Black women, who are caught by two intersections of Othering, find themselves in stressed position of belonging, which leans dramatically into the types of Gothic anxiety that the genre is seeking to depict. More Black Women in Gothic, please.
And this is where we go from setting-up of concept, to where I find Claudia in this essay. This paragraph delivers Claudia's Season 1 interpersonal conflict with Louis and Lestat: when attempting to shape her sense of self and identity, she is becomes non-compliant and presents herself as unlovable. She is attempting to assert her independence, and by doing so threatens the normativity of life at Rue Royale.
In the revisited memory in 2x08 of Claudia's turning, Lestat does warn Louis that she will be stuck in the turbulent emotions of adolescence: the highest of highs and lowest of lows. A life caught in a moment of transitional and transformative social trauma. This is what makes Claudia's age increase a dramatically intelligent adaption change; she is a monster, and a monster caught in dramatic and developing tribulation
This is also Claudia's arc within season one. Episode 1x04 is a microcosm of this transition -- as Claudia is changed from mortal girl to vampire girl, poor slums girl to rich girl, young girl to stuck girl, exploring her sexuality and sexual agency, and also leaping into the breakdown of the family and social networks that Loustat still feed off of for the next three episodes.
"whose struggle for identity and self-worth is doomed to failure," is much more complicated in Claudia's story than it is in The Bluest Eye or "Lusus Naturae," simply because Claudia doesn't just make it out of her domestic horror story, her struggle for identity and self-worth extends past the home into Paris. Armand would say she is doomed to failure -- one could say he has read/seen enough stories of this style to understand their natural conclusion, but one thing that makes AMC Claudia separate from the Gothic Monsters of Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood is that the forces that take Claudia to the end of her story aren't reflections of an uncanny reality, but rather the purposeful and organized machinations of a societal system that has determined she needs to be humiliated and die. Claudia may have been faced with a future haunted by anti-Bildungsroman, but she was the victim of a lynching that didn't even let her live to the natural end of her story.
This section reminds me of season 2s arc for Claudia. In season 2, we see Claudia experimenting more for more mature clothing, makeup, hair styles, ect. She is choosing to interweave herself into this new and reinvented beauty standard that is making waves in post-war Paris, and through that she is attempting to establish her social identity with the coven--one of a confident and beautiful woman. However, Armand literally traps her in the clothing of her negative self-image, which dramatically drains and scrapes on her psyche.
At all stages, Claudia's attempts for self-actualization are denied. She wears soldier's clothing in 2x01 because she must soldier on through both her and Louis's despair. An attempt to dress as a newly-made woman, with her purchasing the lavender dress from Madeleine in 2x02, is initially mocked and refused. Her clothes of choice are taken from her, trapping her in the clothes and performance of a little girl. Even as she meets Loumand again in the cafe in 2x06, wearing a simple yellow dress, no makeup, and hair that has not been stretched and straightened to meet societal beauty standards --as naturally Claudia as she has ever appeared in season 2-- she is dragged into hell and made to stand on stage to have her humanity denied to her.
I mean, no notes. That is what Claudia is faced with at the trial. An angry mob she must assert her humanity in front of, something she has always struggled to assert for herself.
There's a mention above this snippet, however, of the entanglement of blackness and animality/monstrosity/the abject, which has historical connections to chattel slavery. We see this is the repeated bird (fledgling) imagery that Claudia is compared to: from where Lestat mocks Claudia for her breakable and bird-like limbs, the "crow" slur the Romanian boy says to her in 2x01, the fledgling sparrow Dreamstat spits from his throat, to "I don't like Windows When They're Closed." (special mention for Armand's "puce" or "flea"). The collapse of human and animal boundaries, often used against women in the depiction of vampires, succubi, bitches, ect, reveal the fear of the uncontained. In each of the moments Claudia is made to suffer the most abjections with the animal comparisons are the times when the ones who use it against her wish to contain her.
One thing that I have loved about the depiction of Claudia in the series is that in season 1 we had the monstrosity of Claudia attempting to make companions for herself (her childbearing capacity), but she is unable to reach it. Symbolically, this would most likely be because she was cut off before she could reach reproductive competency.
So the menstruation is injected into her story through Madeleine (literally, since Madeleine bleeds through her padding on screen in front of her), which reveals another push towards Claudia's puberty and self-actualization in womanhood. At that moment in time, Claudia could be interpreted as realizing exactly how much she wants Madeleine as her fledgling, and how she will have to rely on another to endure that process for her.
Another thing that makes this section of Claudia's story special, I think, is that unlike many Gothic Horror which depict menstruation as an extra impure horror, Madeleine is flippant and humorous about it. She holds no shame in her maturity and womanhood, which is one of the things that makes Claudia hunger for her. With Madeleine, Claudia's coming of age is something positive, rather than another traumatic experience.
I mean, Claudia thirsts for blood with a child's demanding, so this should speak for itself for the most part, right?
One thing that has always fascinated me about what the show chose to include/exclude in season 2 is that whatever is going on with Claudia at the theatre, one thing we don't know is WHAT SHE IS EATING. She is given a feast as Armand is trying to entice Louis and Claudia to join the coven, but afterwards? Is she eating the two mortals a day that she did in New Orleans? Has her appetite settled? We saw her vicious attack on the humans that were attacking Madeleine, was that kind of reckless behavior due to a kind of starvation? I want to know, and the fact that we don't know shows that either it doesn't matter narratively, or it was a detail obscured through Claudia's dodging of her thoughts while working at the theatre that the eating-disorder brothers (Loumand) never caught.
Either way, the last paragraph reveals a lot about the nasty and racist imagery the projections used in 2x07 during the trial, and what that looked like to people who didn't know and love Claudia, and wow we should kill the coven again holy fuck.
The rest of this section goes into sexual awakenings, traumatic and devastating sexual experiences used as tools of oppression specifically against Black women, and how these result in humiliation and (self-)hatred. There's a lot to think about in regards to Bruce and Claudia's traumatic experience with sexual assault that results in a kind of loss of innocence that encourages her to return home to Louis and Lestat. I know a lot of people have strong feelings about the narrative inclusion of rape in Claudia's story, but considering how the section of this essay phrases the combination of adolescence, Blackness, and the fragmentation of identity, I have always liked how the series handled it. Delainey's monologue in season 2 haunts me, and I appreciate its inclusion in the narrative.
I mean, also no notes. Claudia, Rue Royale, Paris, and just everything we see from the moment she's introduced to the last rattling of Loustat's shutters in season 2. Family is the focus of season one, and failed community is the focus on season 2. It is the patriarchal power structure (literally, Lestat established the theatre) that leads to her downfall.
Goodness, the Unholy Family summed up so perfectly, do I even have to put it into words? Violence... yep. Resentment is Louis's whole thing with being a vampire until the end of HIS story ("I didn't know it was a gift") and of course Claudia is resentful of both of her father figures, and self hatred is the name of the game with all three family members. The annihilation of identity is what frayed the fabric of the family, and it is what makes Claudia rise even further into the monster of it.
Some people who may have mixed feelings about Louis and Claudia's mother/daughter dynamic may look at the next section of the essay and go "oh a mother's ambivalent feelings, huh? How it creates a monster?" I'm gonna have you go ahead and turn that thought around because wrong parent. If you haven't read The Bluest Eye, it is one of the hardest books I've read (emotionally), and the ambivalent mother is one who turns her blind eye to her daughter's pain and condemns and shames her. She is the one who completely fails as Pecola's caregiver, which is significantly more on Lestat than it is on Louis.
Now I'm not going to go into Unholy Family dynamics, because I simply can't be objectively analytical about it, but I do want to note that Louis's failures as a parent to Claudia definitely do not come from ambivalence, but more from the fact she was an extension of him rather than someone he truly could treat as her own autonomous being.
I mean this is the section that perfectly lays out conceptually what is happening in Rue Royale as season one progresses. As Louis and Claudia fail heroine roles in Lestat's life, they become more and more governed by his patriarchal threats and become entrapped. And, to both Louis and Lestat, it is Claudia's presence that transforms their home from a house with haunted things in it, to a haunted house itself because of the stark inclusion of a child that almost asks them to begin considering women's roles.
The second half of this always reminds me of Lestat bringing Claudia to Lover's Lane. The first half is essentially why I think it's absolutely bonkers to go too far one way on determining the gender boundaries of the characters in Anne Ricean properties, but I will not press the point.
Monstrosity partly stems from the cultural association between women and wild uncontrolled nature, as well as from social alienation. Monsters are figures of alienation. . . The process of othering and abjection makes the monster girl feel socially alienated, at a time when supportive social relations and a sense of belonging are crucial to her personal and social development. In their excruciating loneliness and absolute alienation, both the vampire girl and Pecola become social outcasts in their excruciating loneliness and absolute alienation. They learn the hard way that they will never partake of the pleasures of family life and community.
I mean, is this not what Claudia's deepest desire is? Family? Community? That there's just one vampire out there who isn't the fucking worst?
I need to kill Armand. And watch Santiago get decapitated again. God. Justice for Claudia.
Just imagine I'm standing in front of you and sobbing.
I've skipped a lot of fantastic analysis of community and internalized anti-blackness in relation to monstrosity, since those are two elements of the stories chosen for the essay to comment on. While I see the connection with parts of IwtV, I do confess that I struggle to articulate those connections I see, and I'd love if someone would pop in with a yes-and because ahhhhhhhh
Once again: the trial, summarized in something not even about the trial.
i'm pretty sure I've blocked everyone who consistently says IwtV is not about race, but just in case it wasn't clear before... this show is about race. Claudia's death is about race. Her societal and familial oppression are about race, and the ways she finds joy, satisfaction, and contentment are about race.
Making Claudia and Louis Black is the best thing the show ever did, because the elevation of story-telling it gave us, for the character themes and emotional intensity, and societal commentary, are so good I hope I never see another version of this story where they aren't Black. And I mean that sincerely.
If you got to the end of this post and are like "hey I kinda wanna read this," please feel free! I went out of my way to find an Open Access to it.
Read-a-Long: The Incest Trope in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak by Dina Pedro, 2020
Note: this is not Open Access, unfortunately! It is a fantastic read, though.
A lot of people ask me why I like incest as a motif so much, and it's really because I think it exposes two hidden anxieties that a "normal" life would want you to disregard: one is that the family is unsafe, and over-relying on family as a means to escape outside pressures just leads to creating new monsters. The other is that the taboo of incest - as grisly and disgust-generating as it may be - does not create monsters, nor is it perpetuated by monsters. It is perpetuated by humans, and creates resonating experiences that shape a person's environment.
Is that contradictory? Perhaps. Yet, they are still both true.
The reasons why Gothic uses the motif is to specifically highlight societal flaws or blind-spots by not letting them be ignored, concealed, or treated with maiden-like delicacy.
In Crimson Peak, the incest is reflective of Victorian Nuclear Family values that hide family traumas. If the family just stays together, and continues their legacy as broken as it may be, then they'll just survive, right? It's the world against the family, right?
If you continue to read past this, get comfy. This is not short.
"What all of [Guellermo's work] have in common is that they look back into the past in order to expose traumatic experiences that were concealed from public view."
If you are ever looking for the key to name a successful Gothic story, this is probably one of the most important factors. The idea that hidden historical traumas will make themselves apparent is a a keystone to the Gothic. It's like painting over wallpaper - at some point, the pattern will bleed through the paint and make itself known. It's one of the reasons Gothic feels so psychological, because it is often connected with horrors and traumas that could not have been named in the past they were experienced in, but will catch up to the characters who profit off of them despite it.
And here's the piece that echoes from Jenny DiPlacidi, as incest challenges heteronormative sexualities. Now, most people who are countercultural and queer may balk at also being in the group of sexualities that challenge heteronormaltive sexualities, but it's why the taboo is often correlated with queer identities as an accusation. Old school homophobia, where all homosexual men are groomers and pedophiles, are created because all of those traits challenge heteronormative standards of how sexuality should performed. To them, it's all the same, despite the fact that the other named taboos create a monster/survivor in their connection, while most queer sexuality relationships do not.
Something that I love about Del Toro - and Anne Rice - is that they aren't interested in monsters as antagonists, but more of monsters as misunderstood and alienated peoples. Del Toro makes his monsters all become very understandable, and I love the way he refuses to let them be "saved," but there also is a part of you that becomes very sympathetic despite their flaws and monstrous actions.
One thing that is always exciting to read papers about is how many overlaping keyterms in academic writing there are. Wide Sargasso Sea is mentioned here as one of the books that inaugurated Neo-Victorianism as a genre, but I also recognize it as a book widely considered to be postcolonial. It acts as a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre, focusing on Bertha Mason in her homeland of Jamaica, and how the events and stresses in her life eventually led her to become the Attic Wife depicted in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel.
Depending on who writes and and what the books are focusing their dialogue on, a book could be neo-Victorian, postcolonial, or both. Postcolonial literature would specifically be looking at how the colonial realities are hidden in Victorian literature, and focusing on whose reality is being hidden by focusing on Victorian English colonials. A real postcolonial novel would also need to be written by someone from the cultural group whose reality was hidden by Victorian frameworks.
Lucille as the madwoman in the attic, and who is set free. There's so much to say about how Del Toro actually gives voices to the anxious tropes created from Victorian Gothic. It's clear that Del Toro, by asking about the traumas collected in the attic, also asks "and what if she had to carry that with her? would she return to the attic afterwards?" Because of the timplication that Lucille was sent to a home for the criminially insane after killing her mother, the attic became a much more valued place where Lucille felt she was in control of herself. The safe space she made, rather than the one she was forced into because she's been forced into a much worse attic in the "Academy" run by nuns. Already, we have reasons as to why Lucille would be motivated to return to the incest taboo to feel in-control again.
Everything makes me think of Louis de Pointe du Lac. I love you Louis de Pointe du Lac. Your position as a figure presenting pressures on little-challenged environmental and genetic conditions, and how that is refracted in modernity, will never go unappreciated for me.
This was such a great movie. Ugh. I love the incest motif and I love Del Toro. Confronting social anxieties and clearly presenting concealed abuse that societal norms silence is my bread and butter, and why I love the Gothic genre so much.
I talk a lot about trauma theory in connection to IwtV and The Vampire Chronicles, so it's really interesting how RECENT this type of theory working is. I've mentioned before that incest wasn't really a topic treated any worse than a moral failure by American law until the mid-to-late 1970's feminist movement, and this is one of the reasons why. Hell, keep in mind, trauma theory in the flawed psychoanalytic sense wasn't even given much scholarly thought in Euroamerican scholarly circles until Freud and Satre in the inter-war/post-WWII period, so we're using thoughts and concerns that are only 100 years old by "Western" standards, and only 50-ish years old in solid theoretical sense when applying it to fiction. This includes a sudden-drop off of scientific studies on incest in the 90s, leaving little-to-no trends in data because of fears of mis-reporting and social stigma that compounded the difficulty in even collecting reports of abuse.
If you want the irl impacts of how difficult it was to get to this point, I suggest further reading of Virginia Woolf, and how as a survivor of CSA she was treated publicly. (this reference is Open Access :) Although, the authorship repeatedly refers to Woolf as a victim, which is very stalling and stunting language and isolates her to that moment. It has been mentioned many times to me that using "survivor" helps people who have experienced that type of abuse be seen as people with that experience, rather than people stuck in that experience, if that makes sense. The essay does quote Woolf's physical descriptions of the abuse, so discretion is advised.)
"...trauma theory foregrounds the tropes of haunting and spectrality, since phantasmagoric haunting occurs when a shameful, unspeakable event needs to be repressed or kept secret."
Basically, if there's ghosts, there's something that's been hidden. Ghosts will call attention to that hidden thing, and will haunt you until you can address it.
Me: VAMPIRE MENTION 👀
The Sharpe family has a legacy that has built it's name on mining - and in order to continue that mining, they must bring in new blood (money) that will let them continue their extractive work and mining. There's some very interesting colonial ideas here, since the Sharpe siblings have to travel to other countries in order to bring in the right "blood" to fuel their extraction. Their selection of wealthy and vulnerable heiresses with great wealth -- who at this point in time absolutely created that great wealth by taking advantage of colonial systems -- means that they are the imperial draw on colonial "allies" who generate the wealth for them. Since the clay is used to make brick, primarily, there's some interesting subtext in how much blood has to be spilt to build a home with legacies that cannot support it, and take advantage of it instead.
The attempt to reclaim a "glorious past" with the production of building materials, while they live in a house with a hole it's roof is delicious irony, and creates that wonderful thematic tension through every interpretation you seek to glean from the movie.
This is just for me and the vampire fans. Mmmm yes tell me more about vampires and socioeconomic relations between nations. Mmm yes. I'm staring Anne Rice's ghost in the eye as I type this.
I copy-pasted this whole thing, just because I've always found Del Toro's ability to use lighting and color purposefully to be incredibly admirable. While I think it's very easy to take this in bad faith and claim that Del Toro is presenting a romantic view of America, I think there's more to be said about movement and the future. It is less that America is a positive force, and more that it is one full of movement and possibility - something that many foreigners who arrive to America either find or WANT to find. Edith is presented as someone who should have endless opportunity is this brightly-lit America, but she isn't considered an equal part of the household and neither are any of the women. Her home's wallpaper is literally vertical bars, like a prison or cage. The brightly lit veneer is still hiding shadows, and Del Toro's script states that plainly. In the opposite, Allerdale Hale is lit with cool and dim colors, and little moves there that isn't immediately noticed by those who know the creaks and groans of the house, but there is a deeper sensation of equal treatment (part of what the sibling incest is generating in the motif) even in the gloom. Edith's actions are treated with a sense of danger because of how she creates movement, that she can't achieve in the constantly moving American atmosphere.
Will I ever escape from vampires? The "sucking the blood out of the earth until it dries, and even then, refusing to let it go," is extremely distinct colonial imagery, which 🥰 vampires as colonists is one of my Things that I will talk about more. Eventually.
This whole section is about the color contrasts of Edith and the siblings, where Edith wears light-colors to represent innocence and life as the Gothic Maiden, and the twins wear dark colors to represent misery and corruption. One thing that I think is so helpful with reading/watching gothic media is to keep track of two or three repeated descriptions, since those will often be important the symbolic story-telling. Because Gothic fiction is leaning on melodrama, psychological ideas such as paranoia and anxiety, and horror, the genre style leans into repetition and symbolism to guide an audience member through the story. Even noticing that Edith's clothes tend to be styled like butterfly wings ends up rewarding early-on, since Lucille mentions that the only wildlife at the ancestral home are moths that feed on butterflies. An uncanny line coexists with visual language, making the movie feel cohesive AND threatening.
One of the many reoccurring and central themes of Gothic Horror includes commentary on decay and isolated families, which is why incest is such a reoccurring motif. In attempts to maintain or purify a rotting interior, many gothic depictions of families will include purposeful or incidental isolation to maintain or "refurnish" their tarnished past. With homes - like Allerdale Hall - functioning as both birthing grounds and haunted spaces; life and death, past and future, familiar and unfamiliar, become blurred. The entrapment to the house/legacy/bloodline is often a point of tension in the genre, and is the central point of tension between Edith, Lucille, and Thomas in Crimson Peak.
"Verisimilitude" is one of my favorite writing terms, and it means "the appearance of being true." This doesn't necessarily mean that a story with verisimilitude is rooted in Realism, just that its internal logic doesn't regularly float on ambiguity; instead on consistency and regularity. The neo-Victorian Gothic genre's sacrifice of verisimilitude is usually maintained by melodrama - in Crimson Peak, the flowing gowns sweeping down steps, the floorboards and walls oozing red muck, and happenstance of plot points, are all examples of melodrama - and that is what helps create the uncanny atmosphere that lets abuse be exposed without needing direct-to-the-audience examinations and explanations of morality.
One of the tripping-points I often see people who analyze Gothic media stumble into is trying to find the verisimilitude, and treating any plot holes or lack of consistency as poor-writing or outright harm done to the subject. This is just simply the wrong way to approach the genre, because they are creating more paranoia in trying to find regularity. Much like a gothic damsel stuck in a mansion, that's a good way to drive yourself insane. Rather than letting the strong ambiguous elements of Gothic storytelling be the guide, they find the genre lacking in meaning and longevity. Being flexible and knowledgeable about writing short-cuts and skills usually ends up being the most rewarding way to approach the genre, since that's what writers will base their consistency on. Thus, why symbolism, motifs, and themes are important 😂
BACK to the screenshot above though, the environmental story-telling of the setting is also a fantastic aid in reflecting the hidden worlds of what is going on in the character's minds and conflicts. Sometimes it feels like you're the guy at a corkboard with red string trying to prove something with no evidence when it comes to talking about settings and character reflections, but it is incredibly rewarding if you are suspicious about a character or conversation. Just looking into the background and learning how to read the environmental story-telling details will display so many unsaid tensions and fears.
Aha! Now for the meat, and one of the foundational ideas that makes up my own discussion of the incest motif.
"I argue that they try to cope with this family trauma by engaging in an incestuous relationship since they are alone in the world and can only find each other... The presence of incestuous narratives in new-Victorian fiction might also be derived from the contradictory conceptualisations of incest during the Victorian eria --from both ethical and aesthetic points of view-- that we have inherited and perpetuated."
"From the ethical point of view, incest was constructed during the Victorian period as an immoral practice and a sexual deviation that was not socially acceptable, which is one of the reasons why Lucille and Thomas Sharpe are forced to conceal their forbidden romance. On the other hand, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the incest trope might be understood as a way to make repressed sexual traumas visible in order to overcome them. Historical fiction tends to be concerned with the lack of representation of sexual traumas in Victorian culture and its main aim is to unveil precisely those experiences that were concealed from public view in nineteenth-century texts."
One of the things that this last part is referring to, is that a distasteful act - erotic, horrific, tabooed, transgressive - faced a lot of social stigma about propriety. One of the things you'll hear a lot of people say is that "this character shouldn't have done that, it was disrespectful," despite the fact that these are fictional characters. The presentation of such disrespect or distaste is seen as socially transgressive as the act in real life. This is one of the things Tumblrinas refer to as "Puritan" attitudes, which isn't exactly wrong, but it definitely is part of a cultural tradition of repressing topics that may be alarming, sensitive, sensual, and "wrong." This is a tradition passed down overwhelmingly from the Victorian era, as the quote states, and is why it is often difficult in "Western" saturated social groups to culturally confess harms and abuse for the fear of rejection or disruption.
Now I literally study media criticism, so I know that threading the line between "criticizing the depiction of an idea as harmful or perpetuating negative stereotypes" and "this work is flawed and/or presents acts such as slavery, homophobia, and abuse without criticism, yet still exists as a meaningful work" can be difficult to place. Different critical theories will put stress on different ideas, and interpretation is varied and criticism is often criticized. However, one good rule of thumb - especially in regards to incest and any feared "romanticization" of the topic - is to check how it speaks to the genre tools it is told with, and what the character's conflict with the subject is. This doesn't mean that every tabooed topic has to be presented in a way that you know it's bad, but that the tabooed topic is saying something about human nature that doesn't talk down to people who have actually experienced the tabooed topic.
Lucille and Thomas, children who sought escapism and comfort within isolation to soothe the trauma of their abuse, could be seen as romantic. The movie itself has subtle romantic cues, such a lingering gazes, lack of physical boundaries, and matching outfit motifs. The meat of the subject, though, is that their escape into the taboo still comes at the cost of limiting their freedom, choices, futures, and desires. The incest is a coping mechanism; one that is empathetic and prevents the incest from being seen as villainous, but also an obstacle to both of the character's growth. It becomes a tragedy, instead of a villainous origin story and "proof" of their immorality.
Another thing to note, as all narratives that approach abuse with care and attention, is that the victims of the abuse aren't one-note and overtly sympathetic, but there is still a clear person orienting the power dynamic. Thomas is not a perfect victim, and has ugly actions and collaborates with Lucille without much dissension, yet it is clear that Lucille is the one who benefits from this relationship the most. She is the one who willfully perpetuates the decay, and she is the one who ends up refusing alternative paths that potentially lead to less control. And narratively, all of this still leaves Lucille as sympathetic - if monstrous.
I'm going to argue with the gender binary analysis here with some queer theory:
Lucille adopting masculine traits as the "power" center of the house only emasculates Thomas in the ways that Thomas's agency is limited. Lucille being the active force just means that the traits typically associated with masculinity are just centered in her role as the authoritative head of the house, as her mother was, making this a matriarchal tradition that is limited in movement and flexibility because of the patriarchal foundation the house is built on.
Lucille -outside of the home- only has as much power as the heteronormative patriarchal society allows her, which is why she is so attached to the power she holds within the home. Thomas, a supporter of women's rights and wrongs, is the figurehead of power when dealing with outsiders, and doesn't seem particularly distressed until Lucille emasculates him by emotionally and physically detaching him from his agency.
Outsiders, seeking to impose heteronormative systems on the matriarchal tradition, seek to free Thomas, rather than negotiating with Lucille as the inheritor of the tradition because they were blind or disturbed with the ease the Sharpe siblings exist in their home dynamic.
Basically, Lucille is definitely evil, but definitely became more evil because everyone treated Thomas as the important/powerful one, which resulted in cold-hearted resentment. If at least one of those girls was sapphic and reassured Lucille's tradition of power and desirability... Thomas may have had a point when he said a threesome would work, he just made the point after decades of Lucille being pinned in place by the patriarchy, meaning she felt threatened by her brother turning on her, too. (I may be a Lucille-is-a-closeted-lesbian apologist. Edith and her just had such great chemistry...)
Another one of my favorite uses of the incest motif is that it stresses gender roles and family orientation. In real life, daughters often take up the role of mothers when caring for younger siblings, or ill guardians. A daughter running the house and making executive decisions is only emasculating if the man in the household believes in patriarchal gendered labor dynamics. Whatever the cultural beliefs or passive belief systems that impact family roles, one thing that often remains clear in non-incestuous family rearranging is that it works to fill a lack.
In fiction using the incest motif, they make the lack much more literal to loudly convey the toxic power dynamics. (melodrama!) Lucille becoming the head of house to fill the lack of direction both of their parents failed to maintain. It only becomes toxic because Lucille sees the family legacy as that which is lacking - resulting in the continued incest despite the threat of abuse dispersing - and encourages her brother to help her spill new blood (as she spilled her mothers) to feed their lack of purpose. This feeding on spilled blood, and it's empty pursuit, is made literal by the draining and overworked mines underneath their rotting house. Blood is wasted, as Lucille and Thomas's bloodline and legacy fails to support the isolated home, made worse by Lucille's reluctance to let in "new blood" that would challenge her power as she desperately tries to hold them together in that attic they shared as children.
I love how Del Toro loves women.
Truly insane to me to think of a world where we are reluctant to talk about and discuss gender and racial violence, but that is still technically the world we live in today.
Lucille tells Edith of taking care of her mother as Lucille is nursing the poisoned Edith. This is when Lucille felt most in power in the home, as a caretaker, and one that she consistently ritualizes as she poisons Thomas's wives and kills them - repeating the cycles of abuse long past the origin of them.
Aha, I told you my matriarchal tradition queer theory had a point. The house is a feminized space that centers power in actions of care-taking and the blood of life (like a period). It also just happens to be a matriarchal murder home. These things happen.
"Once they verbalize that domestic abuse --when they explain the origins of the incestuous relationship to Edith towards the end of the film-- Thomas comes to realize the brutality that surrounds them and becomes able to move past it. On the contrary, Lucille cannot bring herself to forgive their mother and holds on to her unnatural connection with her brother. In the end, she cannot overcome her traumatic past and becomes trapped by it, both literally and metaphorically."
This is the core function of Gothic as it explores themes of unspoken abuse, hidden pasts, uncanny realities, and psychological states. By stating the horror aloud, it has a chance to banish the ghostly power it holds over the character. Agency, as always, is an important aspect to this --seen with Lucille-- but speaking the horror's name and origin is often a theme that lifts the chains of suffering and stale decay and creates action. This action still produces horror, but it releases the building tension and paranoia that had been building because of the unspoken ills that the audience has been picking up on.
Now, I've read a decent amount of Gothic Horror over the past couple years. I don't think that Del Toro's endings are particularly unique for the literary genre -- The Haunting of Hill House, Frankenstein, Japanese Gothic, Don't Let the Forest In, The Vampire Chornicles, ect all have endings with no closure -- but I will admit they may be unique in a Hollywood movie. The biggest reason the Gothic functions like this is because it genuinely can be difficult to properly put an end to social anxieties, cycles of abuse, uncanny realities, paranoid revelations of systemic violence and pressures - all common themes addressed in the Gothic mode. Even without verisimilitude, the melodramatic structure of Gothic media still encourages audience members to ask questions as they react to the text, and the notable result of melodrama without verisimilitude is that there is no logic that will bring you to an easy answer, just as there is little-if-any closure in real life. When there is, those moments should be treated as precious as they are.
The use of genre to recover and highlight unheard or uncared-for voices is one of the great strengths of the gothic tradition. This is as old as Victorian gothic, where female characters explored uncanny environments that were reflections of social ills seen-and-cared for by the authors. Jane Eyre faced a lot of backlash when it was published, specifically because Jane as an orphaned character was not like Oliver Twist and a perfect cherubic child, but rather a grumpy and retortive one. This exposed societal anxieties that perhaps orphaned children were not thankful for what they are given if what they are given is abuse. Many, many readers could not handle this. To our modern sensibilities, the near cousin-incest is the much more contentious subject in the book, which was not of much worry during the time when Jane Eyre was written, which is why the temporal distance of neo-Victorian fiction turns its critical eye to other socially accepted ills, like the theme of eugenics examined in Mexican Gothic.
This is why gothic media written without neo-Victorian distance generates so much discourse, because the commentary becomes less about nineteenth-century marginalized voices, and more about modern marginalized voices and crises. [Stares at the Interview with the Vampire fandom]
As mentioned in the article, the incest motif can be conceptualised from a threefold perspective: ethical, aesthetic and psychoanalytic. Neo-Victorian fiction and film draws on these three different approaches in an attempt to challenge idealised constructions of the Victorian family, as well as expose concealed family traumas. By confronting them, contemporary audiences might reflect on such nineteenth-century social concerns from a chronological and ethical distance and extend their empathy towards trauma survivors in fiction. At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, such ethical reflection might lead viewers to take an active stance vis-à-vis similar traumatic experiences undergone by survivors in the present world, outside fiction.
There are some people who say that Gothic Horror is the genre to abandon morals. This is only partially true. As quoted about halfway through this post, neo-Victorian literature focuses on centering repressed ills that were censored for "propriety" - aka, controlling the media landscape to avoid offense. These are often mistaken as morals, but what they really are is the cop in your head. In order to interact with Gothic Horror successfully, you should kill the cop in your head who blows the whistle and beats down those offensive ideas to put them behind bars. What you don't want to do is kill your morals. Those morals will be challenged, yes, but ultimately the moral challenge is meant to develop EMPATHY. Because Gothic Horror does not shy away from depictions of abuse or trauma, it wants you to look at the characters, but also the real reflections they are commenting on.
Incest, very naturally, generates a disgust response. People hate it. It makes them ill, and they will respond to presentations of it with the most heinous language I have ever seen. When they condemn these characters for the disgust the topic generates, the audience members have failed the empathy test and their morals are instead supported by their disgust. They leave the story with their anxieties reinforced, instead of questioned, which is why there often ends up being a romanticization of the topic in order to confront the disgust response and force that empathy open. This is why Gothic Horror relies so much on melodrama instead of verisimilitude, because it more successfully lowers empathetic barriers. This is also why it is so important to finish a story before passing moral judgement on it (racism tends to be the exception to this. Successful gothic presentations of racism are usually written in a specific way that creates a doubling experience and centers the characters of color as the maidens, and other books that do not do this are usually suspect and may not always be worth finishing. I'm looking at you, Anne Rice).
Gothic Horror isn't for everyone. Sometimes a story introduces an anxiety in a way that audience member isn't prepared to handle, or simply one that is pressing too hard on other stressors. It's why my first recommendation is to breathe and walk away, and my second recommendation is to stop fighting the story, and let the melodrama support you. It's there for a reason, and you are not a moral failure for leaning into it. THAT is an anxiety you should challenge, always. Adding to the story's paranoia the first time around by questioning the moral purpose of a motif or topic will only make a difficult and frustrating experience. Knowing the ending, and then generating criticism, I find is the most successful approach to the genre.
These stories want you to feel something. Put the verisimilitude down, and FEEL.
"Just a little bit of light reading," I say to myself.
But it definitely points out one of the things I've been noticing about how postcolonial theory presents itself. Even great theorists, and compassionate activists, have blind spots to who is seen, and what steps are needed to actually give them a voice. And even if they deserve a voice at all.
Anyway, Indigenous Americans are still living under colonization, and are therefore unseen. This is a great article if you want a jolt on how to uncenter Euroamerican ideas and viewpoints, and learn to look outside the frame of the picture.
A highlight from a lecture on Levinas's "Totality and Infinity," on the metaphysics of desire
Levinas suggests that our ["Western"] culture chiefly operates by familiarizing the unfamiliar-- "the way of the same". This conventional approach is essentially predicated on comprehension-- from the Latin: com- (with/together) and prehendere (to grasp). Figuratively speaking, one comprehends an object by reducing its 'otherness' into 'sameness' so that we can recognize it, know it, understand it--in other words, so that we can figuratively grasp and possess it. This is imperialism. We try to take everything that is unfamiliar (all that is other) and make it "dissolve into the same."
Levinas spends some time discussing the nature of our senses, primarily sight and touch. These two senses in particular, he claims, tend to support the illusion of objectification. In other words, when we can touch an object (or even see it), it is easy for us to believe that we know it, that we "grasp" it. "By the hand the object is in the end comprehended, touched, taken, borne, and referred to other objects, clothed with a signification (Levinas)." Because of vision and touch, we can be comforted into forgetting the infinite--we assume that because we can see an object, it can be domesticated, made familiar and thus comprehensible.
According to Levinas, this is the thinking of totality. And it's not good; it's like colonization. This egoist perspective seeks to grasp and possess the world-- and this is the central characteristic of the "Western world," especially since the Renaissance. Recall how the key thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment taught us that the world is essentially knowable through reason's grasp. Levinas wants to break out of this attempt to cast light on the world, this attempt to know the world.
To Levinas, the pursuit of knowledge of conventionally perceived of as a need-- that is, it is an attempt to fill in what is lacking. We don't like this. Need, according to Levinas, is like the force driving the lovers who seek their long-lost other halves (Aristophanes). Need is a "nostalgia, a longing for return." One who needs is incomplete. But the important part is that the needed object is essentially already known--one has a preconceived notion of what the needed object is, even before the search begins. This, to Levinas, is unethical because it irresponsibly attempts to divest the other of its otherness.
Desire ("metaphysical Desire") is conversely the movement toward the other that is not predicated on a lack. We do like this. When following this kind of Desire, one does not know in advance what one is seeking--it is a search for the invisible or the yet undetermined. Also, according to Levinas, such a Desire cannot be satisfied because it cannot ever properly grasp the object of it's desire. Unlike need, which "proceeds from the subject," Desire alternatively "originates from its 'object'". Because of this, Desire is essentially "non-nostalgic," [and] is far more an exploration than a discovery.
"The metaphysical desire does not rest upon any prior kinship. It is a desire that can not be satisfied. for we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs, or even of moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. IF this language is possible, it is because most of our desires and love too are not pure. The desires one can satisfy resemble metaphysical desire only in the deceptions of satisfaction or in the exasperation of non-satisfaction and desire which constitutes voluptuosity itself. The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness--the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it." (Levinas, "Totality and Infinity",pg 34)
The point is that totalization is unethical, and infinite desire is good. Levinas urges us to step outside of our conventional model of thinking, which conceptualized otherness as an essentially negative trait that must be overcome. We must resist the temptation to view another person as a reflection of our sameness (a satisfaction of our lack).
Conversely, we must celebrate this otherness and leave it intact! The foreignness of the other opens our experience of freedom. We must see another as an other (one who remains unfamiliar, yet undetermined, not comprehensible yet). If we are to create an image of the other in our head, that image must be principally informed by the incomprehensibility of an untamed otherness. We must let our imagination roam beyond its traditional confines.
...
The desiring caress proves to be the alternative to the totalizing or colonizing grasp. The caress does not claim or possess; it appreciates. It bridges the gap between self and other, but it does not aim to close that gap.
-- Dr Math Trafton II, "Incomprehensibilty: on Grasping"
I pulled up the Gothic Incest Anthology I collected nearly a year ago today, to relocate some scholarly sources for a friend, and this is probably one of my favorite quotes of what I wrote:
Incest is a famously taboo topic. It incites a sensation of disgust, or perhaps a thrill of subversion, and has been utilized from the first waves of gothic novels—including The Castle of Otranto—and has lingered like a toothache into the genre conventions of today.
However, one has to ask: is the prevailing anxiety of incest one that reflects certain attitudes, hidden secrets and abuses, and certain fatal flaws of the world and her societies that lets the trope linger within the genre, or is it a grotesquely oozing wound that authors like to prod and delight in what emerges out of the sore? Depending on how one interprets incest as it occurs in stories, both cases appear to be true, however I find that both uses of the trope provide the same effect; when the world outside puts its pressures on members of the family, who in turn repress that pain, it is upon the family that those pressures in turn are projected.
As powerful and defining members of American society push narratives of family as inherently safe; as the ideal solution to anxieties about strangers and corruption, and as a successfully isolated unit where the best protections of children reside, I believe it is evermore important to present a counterpoint to the sublime face of American family values. The more the nuclear family is presented as a solution, the more important it is to remind ourselves of the gratuitous sores and historical anxieties that persist underneath the picturesque.
Just something that reflects why I approach Gothic Incest the way I do :)
This was a fun Ted Talk about romance and desire, which is always interesting to me, as an aromantic who has been learning how to write romance over the past six months. It's not long: like 19 minutes, and it's not heavy in philosophy or theory. Just a Ted Talk about sexual desire and why humans have ups and downs in desire in their relationships.
And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship,
I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs.
On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability,
for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence.
All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives
that we call home.
But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women --
for adventure, for novelty,
for mystery, for risk, for danger,
for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise --
you get the gist.
For journey, for travel.
and then this one really reminded me of the vampires I can never put away:
Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love --
mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other --
are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love:
jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief.
Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day.
You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct.
If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses,
we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this.[...]
But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word:
the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another.
