Ode to the Gothic Heroine (A Selection)
A woman walks into a house. Or a castle, or a ship, or a town. A woman walks in and with her comes enthusiasm, trepidation, longing, delight. Perhaps all four at once. She’s walking on the arm of someone she loves, or thinks she loves. Or she’s accompanied by a forbidding housekeeper, a bombastic butler, a sweet young maid. Maybe she’s even alone, cheerily hauling a suitcase larger than she is. She might be a guest, an heiress, the help. What matters is that the woman who walks in will not be the same as the one who walks out. She will have simultaneously multiplied and withdrawn, a hundred women into one, a single woman fragmented in the shards of the memory and tragedy to come.
The heroine of a gothic novel is a silvered, shifting archetype, often intended to be the character with whom the audience relates as she steps into the unknown. But what happens over the course of her narrative path is unpredictable—no two heroines face the same specter or monster or darkness, despite well-worn staples of the genre. My favorite of those might be the dead or absent wife, in the form of tenacious memory or true ghost, who beguiles and frightens the heroine in near-equal measure. Maybe that’s because she is so often a mirror held up to the heroine, a representation of who she could have been, who she might still become.
Even in gothic narratives with so-called “happy” endings, no opportunity beckons to return to the beginning. The house may have crumbled or stand strong, the ship may have sunk or drift into eternity on dark waters, the town may have gone up in flames or closed its shutters and spat the anomalies back out. And the gothic heroine will have undergone some essential transformation. Violence has carved new lines into her, has plumbed the depths of her consciousness. Much has been lost, and perhaps more precious things have been gained.
Here, a selection of songs tracing our heroine’s path from naiveté to wisdom, innocence to dreadful understanding, hesitance to strength. In a gothic novel that path is rarely a straightforward one; it loops back into itself, branches off wildly, hits dead ends. But our heroine keeps walking, and we follow, unseen ally, shadow of hope, anticipating the thrills and horrors lying in wait.
“Constant Craving” by k.d. lang
The beginning of every gothic story is a propulsion. In many novels this starting force lies in the heroine herself, who sets off in search of something beautiful and inevitably out of reach, something she wants desperately even if she can’t exactly name why. Discussing her classic song “Constant Craving” in an interview, k.d. lang says that she wasn’t really sure what specific “craving” held such sway over her as she wrote it, only that it was powerfully present. And isn’t that how it goes—a gothic heroine moves slowly, then faster, lured away from any semblance of safety by that quiet promise of something new.
“Pretending” by Orla Gartland
What exactly makes this person our window into the unnerving, chaotic world she is soon to find? Why is it easier to look through her eyes than those of some omniscient narrator or dispassionate watcher? Perhaps because our heroine is an outsider looking in, just like so many of us have been: she mirrors our isolation, our search for a place to call our own. As Gartland wonders in this song if the people around her can tell that she’s an imposter, so the heroine probes the barrier between the environment and herself. Each of us has gone through the experience of being alien, and we viscerally feel the heroine’s attempts to bypass that separation, to find steady ground in her surroundings.
“Knight of Noir” by Susanne Sundfør
Even before the heroine arrives at the place where it will all begin, that place bears its own scars: a history long and fraught, grim and romantic, harrowing and haunted. Whether dramatic legend or bleak truth, the setting of a gothic novel is always shrouded in mystery. Fittingly, “Knight of Noir” tells a passionate, fantastical love story, one that likely doesn’t end well, against a backdrop of fluid and eerie instrumentals. The gothic heroine will encounter many such stories of otherworldly longing in her wanderings through the book. As obscure traces and hints of tragedy coalesce, dread starts to creep in. The flicker of uncertainty she felt upon first stepping into this place may have held more truth than she could’ve known.
“Cherry Tree” by The National
The stakes edge higher when great truths are revealed to our heroine, by accident or design, a knowledge that shakes the foundation of what she believes about herself and the world she now inhabits. We have seen fear in this character, but only in glimpses, small measures. Now horror rears its head, making an appearance in monstrosities and violence she’s never before known. The National croons loose lips sink ships / loose lips sink ships over and over, and the refrain itches its way into the heroine’s head, tapping out a rhythm that ratchets the tension to a fever pitch.
“Me and the Devil” by Soap&Skin
In a classic blues song about facing death, Soap&Skin’s rendition of me and the devil / walking side by side rings so harsh and compelling that a listener can’t help but believe there’s something more: a possibility beyond calmly slipping away, a desperate reach for survival. Maybe it’s the familiarity—even camaraderie—that our heroine now feels with the terror that surrounds her. Maybe terror has become her new normal. Nonetheless she walks just for a moment in tandem with whatever devil hounds her, awful and impermanent.
“Camera’s Rolling” by Agnes Obel
We arrive sooner or later at a pivotal moment of choice, a turning point that determines the arc of the rest of this gothic story. What she needs right now is simple: resolve to live, resolve to save, resolve to be bigger than what holds her down and eats her whole. Of course, not all heroines make it past this crossroads—many fail to rescue themselves and the people around them, and many more are forced into sacrifices so large as to feel futile. Agnes Obel’s cameras are rolling. Everything, here, now, depends on the heroine’s decision.
“Weaker Girl” by BANKS
The choice has been made and a blade of light has surfaced in return, distant on the horizon but not a mirage, not a farce. If the heroine is lucky, if she has chosen right, she is hearing that faint song of hope for the prospect of leaving the grips of this place. Still, panic lingers; her turning point has passed, but the fight isn’t over yet. Now is the time to forge a new path out of the void, and BANKS soundtracks the progression from outsider to survivor: tell them you were mad about the way I grew strong / I can’t be the weaker girl. No longer will our heroine bend to the whims of her demons. She is learning to hack her way out.
“Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris” by Hayley Williams
I myself was a wilted woman / drowsy in a dark room, Williams sings, in a mess of memory and imagination that coalesces into the image of a woman drooped like a flower. Perhaps the heroine looks back here at who she used to be, whose love deserved her, whose arms gave her only betrayal and uncertainty. But maybe it’s another character singing, one who has been where our heroine was and made it through. Maybe it’s us, the readers from outside the narrative, calling her back to freedom, calling her home.
“I Will Love Again” by Bat For Lashes
We know that our heroine will never regain the wholeness, the bright-eyed purity with which she walked in. But even so, in this narrative that doesn’t have to spell despair. As she reemerges outside, forged by fire, alive despite, Bat For Lashes sings, I will turn it back around / I'll be homeward bound. What is home for our heroine by the end of her story? Can she ever come all the way back?
“Alaska” by Maggie Rogers
To find a way to the end brings with it a kind of calm, one that can feel cold, lonely in its own key. Though the heroine may have escaped with her life, how can she go back to the world she once knew, where no one around her will ever really understand what she’s been through? Maggie Rogers’ “Alaska” spans distance with dreaming: and I walked off you / and I walked off an old me / oh me, oh my, I thought it was a dream. As our heroine moves past the grip of her nightmares, she breathes deep into the present. She has lived. She has won. She will not let memory cage her.
The heart of the gothic genre is trauma: the way it lives in the body and in history, in layers of time, in bones of castles, in masts of ships. Perhaps the most important purpose of the heroine’s journey is to do the impossible—pass through the center of that trauma, hold it into the light and lay it finally to some kind of rest. She will reenter the world carrying a heaviness she might never lay down, but also with something warm and steady burning in her, the knowledge of what she has survived, what she has become. A woman walks into a house, and in that house she transforms, draws the reader into her orbit. A woman walks into a house and we walk beside her, invisible and present, glimpsing a new revelation in every breath, every darkness, every monster, every song.