Eurocentrism in The Gothic: Preliminary Threads
This post is now exactly a week late – or as close to exactly as it can be when you’re as scattered as I’ve been. It’s about 12:32 AM the week after I was supposed to get this post written and posted, so I’ve officially shifted my schedule by exactly one week (i.e., next week the post on Mexican Gothic will be up and ready to go). In hindsight, I should’ve taken the week off when I decided to go to Ottawa for the long weekend and just enjoyed my holiday and the subsequently rocky start to the new term, but I guess that just proves that I’m overestimating my ability to get everything done right now. I’m still more fatigued than I initially thought, but not necessarily in a bad way. Things are going well considering the blindsiding events of the last year, but I’m noticing little things – like completely skipping out on a week’s content without really realizing it – that signal I’ve got a way to go before the burnout can be considered “healed.”
But enough of that. Diving right in: Eurocentrism in the Gothic pisses me off. This was probably the right post to have formulated while on holiday in Ottawa, as although the city is beautiful, it is an absolute theme park of colonialism and being surrounded by statues of European white men and buildings that emanated this fallacy of superiority was good motivation to tackle this topic.
This is a complex issue with an infinite number of tendrils branching off into other, equally complex issues – particularly in the intersection of settler-colonialism with European literature and the dissemination of those European ideas as a result – but there are a few, key issues I’d like to highlight in this post that I think are the most relevant in today’s immediate literary horror climate. Firstly, I’d like to address how the Gothic “aesthetic” is warped to favour white supremacist ideals of “tuberculosis beauty” and completely denies the rich Gothic or Gothic-adjacent aesthetics of BIPOC/POC cultures; secondly, I want to speak a little to the issues present in applying a literary framework understood as primarily European (the Gothic) to BIPOC/POC texts; and finally, I want to speak a bit on the Gothic/Horror overlap and the stunning rise in BIPOC engagement with the Gothic-inspired film and fiction in recent years.
Tim Burton – one of twenty-first-century Gothic film’s most well-known directors – has made some pretty striking comments on race in his films. The Burton aesthetic is almost universally recognizable, with College Humour making a sketch about it 11 years ago that still resonates. Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, some creepy costumes, ghost-white makeup with sunken-in eyes, a Danny Elfman soundtrack and you’ve got yourself a Burton movie. This even rings true for the animated ones, like The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This “formula” as College Humour dubbed it is completely devoid of non-white people, and Burton has attempted to defend this position, essentially concluding that “it’s offensive to ask me to cast people of colour just for the sake of representation” – and implying that his aesthetic depends entirely on whiteness. Although there are a number of discourses that he employs to prop up this fallacy, part of it – at least coming from the perspective of my research – is the prominent white gaze in medical bias that became foregrounded in the late nineteenth century.
As the bulk of my research has involved medicalization to some degree, one of the threads to this issue that I’m picking out here is the tendency for Burton’s (and other’s) Gothic Aesthetic to center “tuberculosis beauty” in its understanding of beautiful, dying bodies. Acknowledging that Western medicine still perpetuates systemic racial bias that causes harm to BIPOC/POC bodies, the aestheticization of tuberculosis is based on how the symptoms present in light-skinned bodies – an extension of the fact that, to this day, medical textbooks are designed around a white default, and symptoms on bodies of colour often go mis- or un-diagnosed.
Tuberculosis, a terrible disease that has killed millions, became known for its tendency to flush the lips and pale the cheeks in white (typically) women, and this source of the sickly heroine motif became sexualized through its focus in medical literature at a time when the Gothic was seeing a bit of a revival in nineteenth-century popular fiction.
An article from the Smithsonian magazine writes, “during that time, consumption [otherwise known as Tuberculosis] was thought to be caused by hereditary susceptibility and miasmas, or ‘bad airs,’ in the environment. Among the upper class, one of the ways people judged a woman’s predisposition to tuberculosis was by her attractiveness, Days says. ‘That’s because tuberculosis enhances those things that are already established as beautiful in women,’ she explains, such as the thinness and pale skin that result from weight loss and the lack of appetite caused by the disease.”
The Gothic’s origin in 18th century Britain didn’t establish this sickly heroine archetype. In fact, the early Gothic narratives tended to take place in Catholic (and, at the time, considered non-white) countries, which is problematic in its own right. No, this dying white European heroine archetype was born and established alongside the foundations of modern medicine in the nineteenth century – a fact which points to Burton’s inadequacies as a director, not a validation of his weak defenses.
What is the solution to this naturalization of a constructed assumption of white Gothic, then? This is a question I have been asking myself as a scholar who works in Gothic-adjacent media, particularly in media written by non-European authors. Is it not inherently problematic to apply a framework created and established in Europe to works by people who have been harmed by European intellectual culture? This is shaky ground, as the Gothic has been, since its earliest iterations, a genre of subversion and inversion of social norms. With its “emphasis on the returning past, its dual interest in transgression and decay, its commitment to exploring the aesthetics of fear and its cross-contamination of reality and fantasy” (Spooner and McEvoy 1, Routledge Companion to the Gothic), the Gothic seems to provide a flexible narrative framework that Indigenous authors in particular are using to critique the settler-colonial nation state. This is seen in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves – both excellent young adult novels that you should read, and that will be featured on this blog in the future. Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, too, incorporates that eerie, supernatural isolation into the narrative that subverts the Eurocentrism that people like Burton seek to uphold, complicating the issue of Gothic as a white genre. As they should!
Canadian scholar Cari Carpenter argues in an article on Indigenous Canadian Gothic that “rather than arguing for a neat fit of these texts within the Gothic genre, I look to ways that they in fact refigure that category in an anti-colonialist project. The Gothic, in other words, has other uses than what one might imagine; like the monsters it imagines, it rapidly changes form.” As such, as a scholar of East-Euro and Celtic origin, I can’t make the call on BIPOC/POC Gothic – nor do I want to. I will say that the Gothic has existed as a site of subversion for over 200 years, and as such it provides a useful framework for dismantling the colonial processes that helped to establish it in the first place. I will also say that there are many stunningly talented BIPOC/POC writers, directors, and artists who are doing so, and their work deserves much more attention than it is currently getting.
To wrap up this first post on a topic I guarantee will generate more content in the future, I’d like to give a brief nod to the Gothic bleed into BIPOC horror – particularly horror that is hitting the mainstream – as that potential for subversion is realized in horror written and directed by BIPOC creators. First, check out this list of books by authors of colour. I’ll be picking a few of them to read for my next content cycle on this blog, although I haven’t made any final decisions yet. Secondly, cast your memory back to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). Do you remember why they were such groundbreaking films? If not, I’ll tell you: they flipped the script on the victim and the perpetrator in horror narratives. Part of the problem of Eurocentrism in the Gothic is the idea that the white protagonist is the “good” and the “colonial Other” is the source of the horror in the narrative. BIPOC/POC horror turns that narrative on its head, showing a different reality where the white visage is terrorizing the Black protagonist, and often with the case of Peele, with clear connections to events from the recent past. I’ll probably go into more detail on these later, if there’s interest, because I think both films deserve attention even years after their circulation. The power of acknowledging a BIPOC/POC Gothic tradition is to see the Gothic crumble the bigotry of those who try to uphold it through their own myopic lens.
I hope this has given you some food for thought. I anticipate revisiting this periodically over the next year, particularly as I plan to highlight some brilliant POC Gothic books over the next few months.
This brings me to announcing next week’s post: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I’m about halfway through it at the moment, and I’m looking forward to giving my thoughts on it in the context of this Gothic subversion next week.
Until next time, dear (few) readers. And thank you.
