Whatever happened to that girl? You know the one I mean: long hair, old-fashioned dress, with a dark, looming house in the distance and a look of anxiety on her face. She’s most often running from said dark house.
The girl from the Gothic novels.
I’m talking about the mid-20th century Gothic novels, not the original crop of Gothic books, like The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho. No, it’s that second wave of Gothics—termed Gothic romances—that were released in the 1960s in paperback form that I’m referring to. This was a category dominated by authors such as Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney, and their covers fixed in the minds of a couple of generations what ‘Gothic’ meant.
Most of these mid-century gothics tended to adhere to a simple formula which contained a young woman, a big house and a dangerous yet exciting man. Often the women were in subservient positions, working for the lord of the manor, orphaned, or the like. The women encountered some mystery that needed solving and eventually found love with the dangerous-exciting man, who turned out to be misunderstood (rarely was he a criminal). Although the mystery and threats surrounding the heroine seemed to be of supernatural origin, there was usually a rational explanation.
As Joanna Russ explains in her essay “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic,” the 1960s Gothic romance ultimately resembled a crossbreed between Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and publishers such as Terry Carr believed the appeal of the books was that they featured “women who marry guys and then begin to discover their husbands are strangers… so there’s a simultaneous attraction/repulsion love/fear going on.”
Whatever the plot variation, Gothic novels allowed for excitement, romance and sublimated sexual desire, as well as providing the heroine with a certain level of agency: after all, she had to survive and solve the mystery, even if the killer was inside the house with her.
This game of literary Scooby Doo was profitable. Such was the demand for Gothic books that in true pulp fashion sometimes one title would be re-issued with a different cover and a new name.
Yet, by the end of the 1970s the Gothic novel seemed to vanish from shelves. What happened? Tastes changed. Fans who had previously turned to these books now looked for the emergent, spicier romances such as The Flame and the Flower, and readers more inclined to chills were about to discover Stephen King and the joys of the 1980s horror boom.
I believe that rather than disappear completely, what happened was that the impulses behind the Gothic novel mutated and eventually gave birth to what we call the Domestic Noir.And so the genre died. Or did it? Some writers continued to write Gothic novels, even if these were less common than before—V.C. Andrews was probably the only heavy-hitter in the 1980s mining this niche with Flowers in the Attic. But I believe that rather than disappear completely, what happened was that the impulses behind the Gothic novel mutated and eventually gave birth to what we call the Domestic Noir.
In The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology Kate Ferguson Ellis argues that Gothic literature presents the middle-class home as a paradox, a site which should feel safe but instead turns horrific. Julia Crouch has defined Domestic Noir as a genre which “takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants.”
Domestic noirs emphasize the female experience with their covers and titles. Peruse the shelves and you’ll find that it’s a world of girls (Gone Girl, The Girl Before), wives (The Wife Between Us, The Silent Wife, My Husband’s Wife, The Perfect Wife), and the like. The covers of Gothic romances, with their ever-present women and manor, also hit a similar beat. No, the titles were not The Wife in the Tower—though I supposed that might have been a good choice—but the illustrations, promotional copy and even the choice of author’s names worked together to give the impression of a female space.
In The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993 Lori A. Paige states that although Gothic romances offered upright heroines, “below the surface of every story remained an undercurrent of self-conscious repression, vice and even depravity.” The same could be said of domestic noirs such as The Girl on the Train where a heroine attempts to conceal her alcoholism and the woman she is fascinated with—a seemingly perfect woman—is involved in a torrid affair. The Couple Next Door are obviously hiding a secret, the doting husband of Before I Go to Sleep is not who he seems and The Woman in the Window spies on her neighbours, the perfect family, which is not perfect after all.
Terry Carr said women liked reading Gothic romances because they featured “a magnetic suitor or husband who may or not be a lunatic and/or murderer,” a man who might frighten them and make them anxious. It sounds a bit like riding an emotional rollercoaster. In Domestic Noirs heroines might still fear their husbands, but they also seem to be frightened of a wider variety of people including neighbours, friends and even employees, the rollercoaster taking them through numerous peaks and valleys of anxiety.
Unlike the Gothic romances, though, domestic noirs tend to be firmly rooted in the present and the urban—or suburban—experience. In that sense, they are realistic while Gothic romance sought an air of unreality thanks to their great big castles, misty landscapes and old-fashioned settings.
I don’t think it’s a perfect straight line between the Gothic romances of old and the current boom of domestic noir, but they both reflect that eerie feeling that the call is coming from inside the house. And perhaps the phone has been ringing for a long time.
