Gothic Auntie

I can feel the lit snobs bristling from here, but it’s true; Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and a lot of gothic classics all fit the brief for dark romance. What’s more, the moral panic that dark romance has inspired is the exact same one that played out over gothic literature in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The belief that women will be corrupted by reading scary, sexy things, that they can’t tell fiction from reality or know their own minds is an old and frustrating one. The fact that many of those hand wringing now will gush about the Brontë’s novels, because they’re part of the literary canon and therefore above reproach, just adds a level of sad irony to it all. Someone is incapable of reading critically here, and for the most part it’s not the ladies devouring mafia romances.

Alright, sure, some of you are probably saying, I can see how Wuthering Heights fits the bill. The whole point is that Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is so toxic it ruins lives for multiple generations, and Heathcliff is so creatively horrible that he’d probably scare Byron himself, at least a little bit. A lot of early gothic novels have the hallmarks of dark romance to them, but Jane Eyre? To which I say, especially Jane Eyre.

The thing about Jane Eyre is that Jane herself tricks you into thinking everything going on is a lot more reasonable than actually it is. She’s got such a practical, pragmatic voice that you end up forgetting you’re even in a gothic novel at times, and nodding along when she tells you the ending is a happily domestic one. But let’s look at Rochester. The man imprisons his wife in the attic and pretends she doesn’t exist in order to trick a vulnerable woman with no support structure or financial resources into believing that she’s marrying him. This is classic dark romance behaviour.

Impersonating a fortune teller to try and convince her that he’s the one for her? Setting up a fake wedding and somehow persuading a priest to go along with it? Literally imprisoning his previous partner in an attic? Rochester is a dark romance love interest. He’s a sexy villain willing to do anything to acquire the woman he loves, no matter the harm it causes her, or anyone else. He lets her go when she discovers his secret, but then he’s already got one captive wife who hates him, he doesn’t want another. He wanted Jane to continue being her sweet, domestic self, adoring him and grateful for his elevating her to the status of wealthy wife, or mistress — adding another Fury to the attic would defeat the purpose. Though I’ll admit that his choosing not to do that does take away, at least a little, from the dark romance element — I’m not sure Heathcliff would have cared.

Jane is convinced he’s reformed at the end but then, has he? Or is he just no longer capable of enacting all the villainy he wants thanks to his injuries from the fire? Yes, he got them risking his life to try and save Bertha — or so he tells Jane at least, we’ve only got his word for that after all — but having qualms about letting your prisoner burn to death does not signify a total personality change. It just means that there are limits to his depravity, and trying to keep the woman you’ve held captive in your attic from burning to death is a low bar, even if she did set the fire herself. Jane thinks he’s changed, but in reality he’s just dependent on her thanks to his injuries, he’s still the same deceptive, possessive man with a cruel streak we met right at the beginning. And with his eyesight returning at the end of the novel it’s entirely possible he’s going to return to his old ways soon after the final chapter closes.

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