Free Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger Page B

confused and disoriented character.
    The only joyful item in these madness-inducing landscapes is the possible reunion of principals with their loved ones and families. Inevitably, the gothic heroine is separated from friends and family by choice or circumstances and is reunited with those she loves. Jane Eyre models the prototypical gothic romance ending in Jane’s reunion with Rochester. Emily Brontë ends Wuthering Heights with Catherine and Heathcliff ’s ghoulish reunion both in their shared grave and the generational echo of Hareton and Cathy, Jr.
    And the clichéd gothic trappings . . . an ancestral curse or prophecy; a fascination with tainted or polluted blood; a corpse where it shouldn’t be; graveyards; sacrificial bravery and hopeless defiance; memories and dreams galore; a found book with amazing information, even magical properties (a favorite stylistic device is for the story to be told as if it’s the diary or record found in an antiquarian’s collection); a signature deformity or scar; the stranger, preferably a foreigner from Southern or Eastern Europe—but being Catholic alone will suffice for the exotic; and confusion about the hero or heroine’s birth status and origin (you’d think from the number of orphans in these stories that parents in the distant past never lived beyond a child’s birth).
    Distant past? None of these stories reviewed here were set in medieval times, though that is a gothic favorite. Almost all, though, reflect the gothic social/political tension of an aristocracy or hereditary gentry in decline being displaced by a rising, aggressive merchant class. Here Count Dracula is the archetype, but there are definitely class issues in the Eyre/ Rochester relationship and in Heathcliff ’s agony in overhearing Catherine say it would be “demeaning” to marry him (and also in Heathcliff ’s determination to avenge himself by owning the Heights and the Linton . . . ).

Victims/Heroines and Conscience-Deprived Antiheroes
    Here is the formula for your standard “pure” gothic romance from the late eighteenth century onward:
    • A young female is stripped of her familial support, her mother usually dead before the novel begins, her father or other guardian dying in the early chapters.
    • The lover (if any) who might protect her is sent away or prevented from seeing her.
    • Depending upon the period of the novel, she may be kidnapped, fall into the hands of an unscrupulous guardian, go out as a governess, or marry hastily.
    • Out in the world her troubles multiply. People want to kill her, rape her, lock her up in a convent for life, and make off with her small fortune.
    • Her task is to defend her virtue and liberty and resist evil. She must penetrate disguises by unmasking villains, learning to trust in less-than-obvious heroes, and thereby rebuilding a support system that will restore her to a quiet life.
    • With pluck and luck, she manages these near impossibilities and is rewarded with the discovery of lost relatives and/or the promise of reliable domestic love in a household of her own. 3
    Jane Eyre conforms to type here but few of the other tales do. They all have the victimized heroine (sometimes male), though, whose circumstances conspire to put her or him into a trying, seemingly impossible situation from which to escape with virtue and dignity intact. The heroine’s job is to resist defiantly and to find the honorable way out, almost always a harrowing flight from a dungeon or a manor, to escape a supernatural evil or just a wicked male in the flesh. Mina Harker—with her histrionic prayers to God about her being “unclean” after drinking Dracula’s blood—also conforms to type. Her heroism is in her resistance to the bond of blood and the curse of the vampire within her. She feels God is treating her unfairly despite her trying “to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days. God pity me!” ( Dracula, chapter twenty-one). These stories, as you can