What Hides Under Your Bed: Gothic Literature and the Innate Desire to the Unknown
Blog Writer // Gabrielle Finucan
An open closet door staring you down. The rattle of branches tapping your window. Two faint traces of glowing orbs staring at you from the dark. From the Boogeyman to Bigfoot—we have all heard of creepy and unsettling figures that bask in the mystical unknown of the night. Ones that exist from our peripheral vision as we try to sleep, and the ones that leave our hearts racing in anxious anticipation to see if anything truly emerges out of the dim-lit corner of the room.
Eerie and bone-chilling stories have existed for centuries. Yet the mystical sense of haunting figures and the supernatural is primarily popularized with Gothic Literature.
Gothic literature emerged during the European Romantic period, and became more notorious around the Victorian Era. This type of literature focuses on elements of picturesque terror. With very gloomy, haunting atmospheres filled with mysticism, fear, and melancholy. Most of the time, gothic writers employ the supernatural into their works, or any form of symbolic being that further pushes the intent of the work while maintaining a foreboding tone.
One of the most notorious examples of Gothic literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein depicts the harrowing tale of young scientist Victor Frankenstein and his poisonous ambition. Frankenstein grows obsessive over the concept of recreating human life—and constructs a monstrous creature that exists over his morals and sanity like an immovable stain. As the story progresses, the more depraved Frankenstein becomes as he attempts to rid himself of his guilt, his creation, and his past. Yet in classic gothic fashion, he ultimately fails to do so.
The story is wrapped in a consistently moody and off putting atmosphere that haunts the readers from the beginning to the end. Despite being such a grotesque examination of desire and ambition, the book is renowned as a trailblazing novel for the genre—and is typically required reading for most forms of academia.
Another, more digestible piece of popular gothic literature is The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde. This story is considered to be the perfect introduction to gothic literature, due to its digestible length. This piece depicts the tale of a beautiful young man named Dorian, and how he sells his soul to live within a painting in order to stay young, beautiful, and desirable forever. Yet as Dorian falls into a hedonistic lifestyle and gradually turns to crime—his portrait rotten as greatly as his soul does. The story ends with his ugly soul as his ultimate demise in search for the most picturesque life.
What is it that draws us to these stories? Why do we devour pages upon pages of paranormal horrors and mysterious plot lines? Romanticize these unexplained monsters and awe at their mysticism?
For the same reason we sit through horror movies and walk into haunted houses: innate humane curiosity.
We all feel it, when something is so troubling that you simply can’t look away. The desire to understand the incomprehensible. To see what is hidden.
Gothic literature reveals the humanification of our most unsettling and obscene desires and flaws brought to life in a horrifically romantic manner. The monsters under our beds tucks us under the covers and reassures us that these obscure feelings exist within us. Within me. Within you. Within Victor’s decrepit laboratory. Within Dracula’s grandiose manor, and it is okay.
It is okay to indulge in the spooky, the obscene, the terrifying. To want to be terrified. Because we are human, and this kooky genre wouldn’t exist if we all didn’t want to get a little creeped out by the congealed crevices of our minds.
So, as the lingering chill of October carries into November, indulge yourself in these diabolical curiosities and pick up some short stories by Daphne du Maurier, or one of Shirley Jackon’s chilling novellas.