Consuming Passions: Gothic Romance and the Brontë Sisters

A pair of tortured lovers, with pale faces and burning eyes, stand against the backdrop of a menacing natural world. Between them lie great chasms of difference, terrible secrets, and their own conflicted hearts. Surely that tall, dark, handsome man is a threat to the girl he loves; perhaps he will seduce her and destroy her honor, or her hopes of wealth and comfort, or her very life itself.  Perhaps she is afraid of him, and perhaps she is only afraid of her own desire.

If you describe this scene to any teenage girl today, she’ll probably identify those suffering lovers as Edward and Bella of the Twilight craze, and there’s a very good chance that an adult you ask will reply that it must be Bill Compton and Sookie Stackhouse of the Southern Vampire books or the True Blood television series.  The current fad for vampire romance has done a great deal to popularize this classic Gothic image, but neither Stephenie Meyer nor Charlaine Harris could have brought their characters into existence without the inspiration provided by earlier novelists like the Brontë sisters, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, those English North Country siblings who eked out a restricted middle class existence while their imaginations ran wild across the stormy heaths and moors of their homeland.  Much of today’s popular Gothic literature and film owes a great debt to the mysterious men and convention-defying women who populate the Brontës’ novels, and my talk today focuses on the traditions that the Brontës both followed and created in their immortal tales of passion, violence, and the forbidden zones of the human heart.

The Brontës themselves lived a very Gothic life, full of domestic tragedy and unrealized hopes and dreams. The Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife, Maria, produced six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, before tuberculosis first struck the family and caused the death of Mrs. Brontë. Maria and Elizabeth also died of tuberculosis when an outbreak of the disease occurred at the boarding school that they and their sisters Charlotte and Emily attended. Their father managed to bring the younger girls home in time to save their lives, but the dreaded disease continued to ravage the family. The only Brontë son, Branwell, was artistically talented and the family’s great hope, but he became addicted to alcohol and laudanum, which only served to mask the symptoms of illness until he, too, died of tuberculosis at the age of 31. Emily was the next to succumb, followed by Anne, and, last of all, Charlotte. Their father survived his entire family and lived to the age of 84, cared for at last by Charlotte’s husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had been married to Charlotte for only a year before her death in 1855.  Throughout their lives, the sisters endured periods of time as both students and teachers at girls’ boarding schools, an environment that proved uncongenial to them at best. Literary success came too late for most of them; Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey were all published in 1847, but by 1848 Emily would be dead, with Anne following soon after in 1849.

If the inspiration of their own lives was not sufficient, the Brontë sisters had plenty of models to follow in the literary culture of the age. The Gothic had sprung to life as a genre when Horace Walpole published his wildly imaginative Castle of Otranto in 1765. Writers in the late eighteenth century and the Romantic Age ran with the new style, producing dozens of Gothic novels, and the genre became popular with women writers and readers, in particular. Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith were two of the most successful female authors to pen Gothic fiction; in fact, Radcliffe was one of the most successful and popular novelists of the entire eighteenth century, and her novels, first published throughout the 1790s, would have been readily available to the young Brontë sisters in the early decades of the 1800s. Less accessible to middle class ladies were texts like Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, published in 1796, because its scandalous content made it forbidden reading for polite members of the fair sex. These novels helped to establish the conventions of the Gothic genre, which included ruined buildings, secret passages and rooms, sublime landscapes, and the occurrence or appearance of the supernatural. The heroes and heroines of these novels were usually quite genteel, with the ladies in particular prone to fainting at the scenes of horror and distress which unfolded before them, while the villains were outrageously bad, demonic forces of pure evil who sought to manipulate, marry, or destroy the heroines, depending on whichever option yielded the most pleasure or profit to them. 

Many young ladies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries spent their leisure hours gripping the pages of these stories and delighting in their spine-tingling pleasures, including the young Jane Austen, who makes allusions to such tales in her 1817 novel, Northanger Abbey. Of course, Austen’s novel parodies the thrilling scenes of the Gothic, which might explain why Charlotte Brontë didn’t like her. Brontë had this to say about the novels of the illustrious Austen:

Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores....Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman), if this is heresy--I cannot help it.

Charlotte’s criticism underscores the extent to which she, and her sisters by extension, were in sympathy with the emotional turmoil that welled up in the pages of Gothic fiction. Rather than parody the genre, as Austen had done, the Brontë sisters harnessed it for their own ends.

Many traditional Gothic elements appear largely unaltered in the Brontë novels. The themes of persecution, romantic misery, claustrophobic social constraint, madness, and cruelty all come into play. The appearance of the supernatural opens Wuthering Heights, which starts with Lockwood’s encounter with the ghost of Cathy, and forms the emotional climax of Jane Eyre, when Jane “hears” Rochester calling out for her even though they are separated by many miles. In Villette, Lucy Snowe is terrified by the sight of a seemingly ghostly nun, although, in true Radcliffian fashion, the specter turns out to be a mere mortal in disguise. Even the deathbed of Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is surrounded by a sense of supernatural terror; one can almost imagine demonic figures cavorting before the dying drunkard’s eyes.

 The sisters also shared a strong appreciation for sublime Gothic landscapes; the moors of their Yorkshire home served as a perfect example to them of the “terror and awe” that the sublime strikes in its observers. Emily captured that terrible but compelling vision best in Wuthering Heights, where the sublime qualities of the natural world, full of storms, dangers, and rough, untamed strength, reflect the interior landscapes of her protagonists’ hearts.  We see that same sense of the natural world in Jane Eyre, as Jane passes through the wilderness in her flight from Thornfield Hall, and in the mysterious, apocalyptic storm that concludes Villette. The ideas of domestic space as a trap and of the family as the source of persecution, rather than a shelter from it, also come straight from the pages of the Gothic playbook, where father figures are more likely to be villains than protectors and suitors often transform themselves into tormentors once the heroines are entangled in their embraces.

The dark, brooding hero was another element that came from the Gothic tradition, although the type had only really been formed as such in the Gothic texts of the Romantic Age.  Called “Byronic” after George Gordon, Lord Byron, who presented some striking examples of the type in both print and his own personal life, the emotionally troubled, secretive hero was a far cry from the masculine paragons of polite eighteenth-century literature, like Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Instead, the new hero took his cues from another of Richardson’s characters, his wildly popular and seductively evil anti-hero, Lovelace, the admirer and antagonist of Richardson’s eponymous heroine in the blockbuster bestseller, Clarissa. Lovelace himself had been inspired in large part by Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, and the Gothic heroes of Byron, Mary Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, and John Polidori, among others, all traced their lineage back to these potent literary fathers. The Brontë sisters must have been all too aware of the popularity of this new breed of hero, and they clearly felt his appeal themselves. Heathcliff, Rochester, and Arthur Huntingdon are all variations on the theme of the Byronic hero. Insidiously attractive, all three characters present a threat to the women who love them, with Heathcliff being the most intentionally destructive of the lot, and only Jane Eyre’s Rochester being really redeemable by his novel’s close. The allure of such heroes was the same combination of sexuality and menace that had made Lady Caroline Lamb describe Lord Byron himself as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

As much as the sisters borrowed from these established elements of the genre, they also revised earlier Gothic conventions, putting their own spin on the plots and characters that were the cornerstones of the genre. Brontë heroines resemble their forebears in their situations - friendless, without money or influence, subject to persecution from the very people who ought to defend them – but they differ in their responses to those situations. Gone are the fainting, meekly beautiful angels who dominate the traditional Gothic novel. Brontë women fight back against the world that seeks to control or destroy them; they take action with grim determination, sometimes for good and sometimes for their own selfish reasons.  Charlotte, in particular, rejects the traditional Gothic heroine in her preference for protagonists who are NOT beautiful; rather, the force of their personalities constitutes what charm they have. Moreover, these women are all too aware of the charms of the Byronic heroes who pursue them; their desire for the bad boy, even when they know it to be wrong, and even when they themselves deny that desire, fairly pulses throughout the pages of their novels.

These protagonists, so different from the proper ladies who normally populated women’s fiction at that time, made the Brontë novels different in a way that unsettled some reviewers. Those reviewers were unhappier still because the heroines’ sufferings and tortured courtships take place not in faraway continental castles but in alarmingly real country homes and schools, and the depiction of cruelty and violence in those hallowed institutions laid bare a far more uncomfortable kind of Gothic terror. Debate about the sex of the authors, given that the sisters wrote under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, colored some of the responses to their work. If it was questionable for a man to present such horrors, it was certainly scandalous for a woman to do so. Reviewers called The Tenant of Wildfell Hall “morbid” and “unhealthy,” the Rambler denounced Jane Eyre as “one of the coarsest books we have ever perused,” and conservative writer Eliza Rigby even condemned Jane Eyre as “anti-Christian” because of its heroine’s personality and attitude.  Of Wuthering Heights, the anonymous reviewer for Graham’s Lady’s Magazine wrote, “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors...” while the Atlas reviewer opined that “We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity.”

 In terms of Gothic fiction, English writers had been presenting equally if not more outrageous scenes of suffering and depravity since Horace Walpole first penned The Castle of Otranto, but the Brontë sisters had taken the foundations of Gothic fiction and stripped away the veneer of fantasy that made its messages coded rather than explicit. Once the full force of the genre’s implicit passion was unleashed, the whole enterprise seemed shocking and vulgar, although of course there had been critics who had pointed out the torrential undercurrents of the Gothic all along, usually in order to denounce such works as inappropriate reading material for young ladies, wives, and servants.

Despite the reviewers’ concerns, and precisely because of the elements that concerned them, the Brontë sisters’ novels held on to the public’s imagination, and they have yet to let go. Cathy and Jane Eyre, along with Heathcliff and Rochester, have been brought to life on both the big and small screens countless times.  In 1939, Merle Oberon played Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff, while 1944 saw Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles take the lead roles in Jane Eyre. Daphne du Maurier used Jane Eyre as the template for her own tale of secrets and seduction, Rebecca, which, interestingly enough, saw Olivier again as the Byronic hero and Joan Fontaine as the heroine in its 1940 film adaptation. Val Lewton capitalized on the Gothic horror of Jane Eyre’s plot in his post-colonial film revision, I Walked with a Zombie, which was released in 1943, and in 1966 Jean Rhys offered a prequel to the events of Jane Eyre in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Like the novels of Jane Austen, the Brontë works have inspired endless modern sequels, prequels, and revisions from authors of varying skill and intent, the best and most interesting of which might be Sheila Kohler’s 2009 work, Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel, which presents a fictionalized biography of the Brontë sisters. The most inventive of the lot might be Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, in which the characters of Jane Eyre literally come to life and leave the pages of their book.

But what of those pale lovers standing in the moonlight? The current passion for Gothic entertainment has taken the vampire lover and his human beloved as its central image, but the fangs are merely a modern marker for the differences that class, wealth, and gender presented in earlier centuries. That vampiric anti-hero is as much Heathcliff as Count Dracula, sometimes even a heady mix of Rochester and Austen’s Mr. Darcy.  Emily Brontë’s gypsy-like orphan might well have been a demon in human form, and it isn’t hard to imagine the puppy-strangling Heathcliff with fangs and a taste for blood. In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, Gothic lovers Bella and Edward even proclaim Wuthering Heights to be their favorite novel, a revelation which sent Emily’s work soaring up onto the bestseller lists in 2009, according to the UK Guardian. I have no idea what to make of the impending release of Sherry Browning Erwin’s Jane Slayre, which recasts Charlotte’s heroine as a vampire hunter and Bertha Rochester as a werewolf, but if Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can be a hit, then surely Jane Eyre is even more fertile territory for such treatment.  Television series like True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Moonlight, Forever Knight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dark Shadows, and the Canadian show Blood Ties have all demonstrated our ongoing appetite for supernatural Gothic horror heavily influenced by the Brontë model, in which lonely, independent heroines fall for dangerous, wounded men. The consuming passion that pulsed through every page of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights has proved vampiric itself, enjoying deathless vigor even as its creators succumbed to the grave all too soon. If the mania for Gothic fiction today leads a new generation of young readers to discover the genius and raw power of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, then we can only be grateful for that, even if it comes with fangs attached.  For the “sleepers in that quiet earth,” the sisters themselves, all passions have ceased, but those of their creations will live forever. 

NB: This lecture was originally given at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library for the 2010 English Author Tea. Citations for quotations are not included because of the nature of the presentation, and I have not added them because they would only encourage plagiarists. Plagiarists should be warned that vampires come and eat people who steal other people's work!

The Housekeeper in the Gothic Film Tradition

Margaret Hamilton plays the creepy housekeeper in 13 Ghosts.

Good Haunted Housekeeping: The Housekeeper in the Gothic Film Tradition

The Gothic tradition features a host of particularly striking stock characters. We have the mysterious first wife, whether missing, mad, or murdered, the brooding Bluebeard lover, the inquisitive orphaned heroine, and, perhaps the most iconic in modern popular culture, the creepy housekeeper, a curator of keys, cupboards, and the family’s closeted skeletons. In her book, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, Helen Hanson identifies two major tasks set for the housekeeper character in the traditional Gothic film: the first is “to mark the heroine as an outsider,” and the second is “to act as keeper of knowledge about the family” (75). These roles underline the unique power of the character as part of the typical Gothic machinery. In the genre’s often feminized world, the housekeeper’s function as a woman with dominion over the domestic space and its secrets can make her a formidable ally or enemy to the heroine. Her loyalties, however, may not lie with the intruding newcomer; she may choose to protect the secrets of the family or may even devote herself to the house itself. In Gothic films, the housekeeper becomes an especially potent creator of terror and dread through her penchant for lurking in shadows, watching the heroine, and manipulating both characters and audience with her ominous movements and expressions. Looking at classic Gothic films like Rebecca (1940), Dragonwyck (1946), and The Haunting (1963), we can see the housekeeper’s development into a crucial figure of the genre, while later incarnations of the character in films like Young Frankenstein (1974) highlight her importance while simultaneously mocking the clichéd representation of her type.

Tracing the development of the housekeeper character and appreciating her importance to the Gothic film tradition requires some sense of her earliest appearances. Like the modern Gothic novel, Gothic film has its roots firmly planted in the literary traditions of eighteenth and nineteenth-century England. There is no menacing housekeeper in Horace Walpole’s original Gothic text, The Castle of Otranto, but the type had already been established by the time Walpole’s novel first appeared on the scene in 1764.  Going as far back as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, we can see the housekeeper as an important stock character with a marked potential for duality. Richardson’s novel offers us two opposing but suggestively linked housekeeper models: the first, Mrs. Jervis, is a kindly matron who befriends and defends the heroine, while the second, Mrs. Jewkes, is a masculine monstrosity who threatens and imprisons her. Their shared “J” names hint at their function as two sides of a single character type, and in their complex relationships with the virginal Pamela they also form a version of the archetypal trinity of maiden, mother, and crone.

The dual functions of the housekeeper remain distinct in Charlotte Brontë’s influential Gothic novel, Jane Eyre, which first appeared in print in 1847. Much of the Gothic film tradition that developed in the twentieth century depends on this text, for Jane Eyre is the cornerstone on which both Rebecca and Dragonwyck are built, just as Pamela serves as the cornerstone for Jane Eyre itself. In Brontë’s novel, the official housekeeper of Thornfield Hall is Mrs. Fairfax, a generous, maternal woman who accepts Jane as part of the domestic community and provides her with much-needed companionship, as well as information about the hall’s inscrutable master, Mr. Rochester. Mrs. Fairfax, however, does not possess all of the keys to unlock the mysteries of Thornfield. Her mysterious counterpart in the house, Grace Poole, has knowledge that Mrs. Fairfax and Jane both lack, but Grace Poole keeps the heroine at bay and refuses to answer her questions about the ghostly presence that haunts the hidden room of Thornfield’s highest floor. Like Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela, Grace Poole displays a rough, masculine appearance and functions as a jailer, although it is the heroine’s predecessor, mad Bertha Rochester, who is her prisoner. Mrs. Fairfax, as her name suggests, represents the fair side of the housekeeper figure, a supportive feminine presence capable of educating the heroine about her new home. Grace Poole, however, is the dark secret keeper of the house, the guardian of a forbidden zone hidden within the larger domestic space.

As the Gothic begins to appear on film, the menacing Grace Poole version dominates as the more potent form of the character. We get an early taste of housekeepers to come in the old dark house picture, The Cat and the Canary. Directed by Paul Leni, this 1927 silent film is memorable largely because of its creepy housekeeper, a dead-eyed horror humorously christened Mammy Pleasant. Like later and more familiar Gothic housekeepers, Mammy Pleasant acts as a menacing presence, constantly watching the heroine but refusing to divulge the secrets of the house to her. In addition, Mammy reveals the housekeeper’s evolving taste for a rather morbid, deadpan brand of humor. In one conversation, another character says, “You must have been lonely here these twenty years, Mammy Pleasant,” to which she replies, “I don’t need the living ones.” Mammy also operates as a predictor of doom, alarming the houseguests with her assertion that “something terrible will happen here tonight!” Mammy’s dark hair, dour expression, and thin, tight lips become the standard equipment of Gothic housekeepers forever more, making her an important figure in the character’s cinematic development.

Of course, the lynchpin figure in the evolution of the Gothic housekeeper is Mrs. Danvers, the terrifying antagonist who protects the territory of her dead mistress in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, Rebecca. The nameless heroine recalls her first encounter with Mrs. Danvers thus:

Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.

She came towards me, and I held out my hand, envying her for her dignity and her composure, but when she took my hand hers was limp and heavy, deathly cold, and it lay in mine like a lifeless thing. (67-68)

The heroine’s language loads Mrs. Danvers with images of death and horror, and it also sets the stage for the housekeeper’s function as the guardian of the dead Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers is the housekeeper not of a living home but of a tomb that enshrines the memory of her lost idol; she rejects the new mistress of Manderley as an interloper and seeks to drive her away. Obsessive, manipulative, and in total control of the house, Mrs. Danvers imprisons the new Mrs. de Winter in Manderley while simultaneously trying to eject her from it. When she feels that Rebecca’s ownership of Manderley can no longer be protected, Mrs. Danvers sets fire to the house rather than see the second Mrs. de Winter successfully inhabit it.

            Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation of Rebecca is a watershed moment in the history of the female Gothic film, not least because it perfectly captures the menacing allure of Mrs. Danvers’ character. Among its eleven Oscar nominations was a Best Supporting Actress nod for Judith Anderson, who delivers a truly iconic performance as Mrs. Danvers. Her appearance in the movie owes something to Mammy Pleasant while capturing the spirit of du Maurier’s description, if not the letter, for Anderson’s version is menacingly alive, with piercing eyes and a coiled braid of black hair perfectly arranged above the severe white line of her part. On screen, Mrs. Danvers controls the heroine with her gaze and her gestures; we can see her watching Joan Fontaine’s mousy victim with a predator’s glittering interest. In the famous bedroom scene in which Mrs. Danvers tries to drive the heroine to commit suicide, Hitchcock faithfully recreates du Maurier’s written description, but the visual representation lends the moment an additional sense of suspense and horror. Mrs. Danvers leans over the heroine, her burning eyes intensely fixed on her victim, her power over the younger woman tellingly displayed in their physical positions. In this scene and in others throughout the film, Anderson creates a definitive image of the Gothic housekeeper, endowing her with characteristics and mannerisms that will be hallmarks of the character in the popular imagination from 1940 onward.

Edith Barrett as Mrs. Fairfax

The box office success and Best Picture Oscar of Rebecca inspired a wave of female Gothic films in the early 1940s, including, somewhat ironically, a 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, also starring Joan Fontaine as the heroine. For the housekeeper character, however, this is a throwback to the pre-Danvers era, back to the dual figures of good and bad household guardians. Edith Barrett plays a nervous, rather frail Mrs. Fairfax, with English stage actress Ethel Griffies in an uncredited appearance as Grace Poole (Hitchcock fans might remember Griffies as the skeptical ornithologist in The Birds). Barrett again plays the family secret keeper in the same year’s Eyre-inspired Val Lewton horror film, I Walked with a Zombie. Lewton’s picture has no menacing housekeeper; the most important domestic servant is Alma, a cheerful young black woman played by Theresa Harris. Barrett, however, fills in for the housekeeper as Mrs. Rand, the mother of the two male leads; she alone knows what really happened to her son’s first wife, the zombified Jessica. Like the motherly housekeepers of older Gothic stories, Mrs. Rand tries to help Frances Dee’s heroine even as she withholds the most important family secrets from her, but she lacks a menacing female counterpart.

More interesting, perhaps, is the 1946 adaptation of Anya Seton’s 1944 novel, Dragonwyck, written after both the original novel and the film version of Rebecca and thus ostensibly able to capitalize on the evolving conventions of the female Gothic genre. The film trailer, in fact, proudly announces the new picture’s appeal to fans of the earlier work. Like Rebecca, Dragonwyck draws from Jane Eyre as its source material, but it translates the Gothic action to nineteenth-century New York and the upper class Dutch society of the Patroons. Differences between the novel and the film affect the representations of the housekeeper characters, but both offer some insight into the type’s importance to the genre by showing the pitfalls of tinkering with effective conventions.

The novel itself takes a problematic dual approach to the housekeeper figure. As in Jane Eyre, we have two domestic characters who highlight the heroine’s outsider status and possess power and information that might be able to help or harm her. The official housekeeper, Magda, resents the heroine’s arrival and persistently gives her the cold shoulder, reserving her loyalty for the mistress of the house. Seton does very little with Magda, failing to provide even a single detailed description of her appearance. She gives greater attention to the other, more ominous domestic secret keeper, the ancient mixed-race servant, Zélie. Zélie gets all of the creepiest, most Gothic scenes, revealing to the newcomer the haunted history of Dragonwyck and foretelling the doom of the Van Ryn family members. Seton gives this character a suitably striking introduction:

The door opened and a strange woman walked in, shutting the door behind her. A thin old figure in a shapeless black dress who came over to the bed and gazed down at the frightened girl. The woman was nearly six feet tall and erect, her coarse black hair, which showed no gray, drawn back into a scraggy knot, her face a ruddy brown crisscrossed with wrinkles from which peered two shrewd little eyes as black as dewberries

“What do you want?” whispered Miranda.

“Me old Zélie,” said the woman in a harsh accented voice, touching her slab-like chest. “I want to see what you look laike.” (49)

Unfortunately, Seton abruptly writes both Magda and Zélie out of the book about a third of the way through, and no similar character fills the resulting gap. The problems with Seton’s treatment may help to explain why her novel is little read today, since she mishandles two different variations on one of the genre’s most important character types.

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film adaptation makes some marked changes to Seton’s novel, especially in the housekeeper department. Sadly, the movie completely drops Zélie, who would be quite provocative, to say the least, to see on screen. It transfers her ominous warnings and insider knowledge to Magda, revising Seton’s flat, barely described character into something audiences might more properly expect in a female Gothic tale. Played by the very capable character actress, Spring Byington, the movie Magda embodies both the menacing and the maternal, and the result is a woman who strikes both the audience and Gene Tierney’s heroine as slightly insane. In one early scene, for example, Magda suddenly veers off from seemingly friendly talk to warn, “One day, you’ll wish with all your heart you’d never come to Dragonwyck.” Byington’s character occupies a middle distance between Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Danvers, which makes her interesting in terms of the housekeeper’s changing role in the genre, but the movie, like the novel, drops Magda midway through, and thus the potential for a really serious engagement of the housekeeper figure remains unrealized.

Unlike Anya Seton, Shirley Jackson takes full advantage of the creepy housekeeper in her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted into the film, The Haunting, in 1963. The film makes a number of changes to the original text, but it faithfully preserves the unnerving housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, while also highlighting her relationship to Mrs. Danvers through casting and costume decisions. Like earlier housekeepers, Mrs. Dudley possesses insider knowledge of the house she oversees, and she resents the presence of the newcomers who disrupt her routine. Hill House has no master or mistress to command her loyalties, and Mrs. Dudley’s feelings about the house are never quite clear, just as everything else about Hill House remains shrouded in questions and doubt. Jackson does, however, hint at the connection between Mrs. Dudley and Hill House near the end of the novel, when she describes Mrs. Dudley as “shudder[ing] in her sleep” from six miles away when the heroine touches a kitchen door (171). In contrast to the visitors, Mrs. Dudley seems to understand and respect the house, never trespassing against its unspoken rules, and in return the house never affects her as it does the others.

Jackson offers little description of the character when she first appears in the novel, but she does provide a truly memorable exchange with the protagonist, Eleanor, a few paragraphs later.

“I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs. Dudley went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before the dark comes.”

“I know,” Eleanor said.

“We live over in the town, six miles away.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale.

“So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.”

“I understand.”

“We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.”

“I don’t suppose-“

“No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”

“I know,” Eleanor said tiredly.

“In the night,” Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled outright. “In the dark,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

(27-28)

The ominous warning from the housekeeper becomes a kind of nervous joke between Eleanor and Theodora, but it sets the stage for the horrors to come and provides both characters and readers with important information about Hill House. The locals are afraid of the place, none of them will have anything to do with it, and the residents can expect no assistance when their presumptuous occupation rouses the house into action. The inmates of the house laugh at Mrs. Dudley just as they laugh at the strange things that happen in Hill House; both frighten them, although they cannot necessarily explain why. 

            The film adaptation, directed by Robert Wise, reflects these elements of the novel and builds on them by making the most of the character conventions established by earlier films like Rebecca. Rosalie Crutchley, whose earlier roles had included the terrifying Madame Defarge in a 1958 adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, is just the sort of actress for the Gothic housekeeper role, with a thin face, dark hair, and a most unnatural smile. Her somber attire and pinned-up hair, both black of course, signal her sorority with Mrs. Danvers and Mammy Pleasant, and Crutchley delivers Mrs. Dudley’s lines to great effect, especially in the scene mentioned earlier. Building on the character as originally created in Jackson’s novel, the film reveals the conventional traits that have come to be associated with the Gothic housekeeper. Mrs. Dudley, as much an insider as Hill House allows, lays out the house rules to Eleanor and the other guests in a way that emphasizes her own power and position of authority. “I don’t wait on people,” she tells the newcomers firmly. “What I agreed to, it doesn’t mean I wait on people” (27). She clearly knows more about the house than she is willing to tell, and her veiled warnings serve only to alarm the visitors and the audience without helping them prepare for the terrors that they will face. Like Mrs. Danvers, Mrs. Dudley projects menace rather than maternal comfort, and the film emphasizes this aspect by eliminating a kitchen scene in which Jackson has Mrs. Dudley gossiping about the young people in a very motherly, ordinary fashion. Unfortunately, by the time the next film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House arrived in 1999, the Gothic housekeeper character had become so familiar that Mrs. Dudley is merely a cliché, another stale note in an over-played symphony of horrors.

Mrs. Slydes frightens a guest in House on Haunted Hill.

Anything repeated often enough to be a cliché is already ripe for parody, and in the years after the original film adaptation of The Haunting the Gothic housekeeper became an obvious target. William Castle had helped to entrench the conventions of the character with films like House on Haunted Hill in 1959 and especially 13 Ghosts in 1960, which featured The Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, as a creepy housekeeper complete with black dress, tight bun, and dour expressions, who also turned out to be a medium able to communicate with the ghosts who haunted her employers’ house. Today, the website, tvtropes.com, even has an entry for “Creepy Housekeeper” that identifies her major traits and aligns her with another stock character, the “Crusty Caretaker.” Most importantly, the incarnation of the creepy housekeeper chosen for the entry’s quote and image is not Mammy Pleasant, Mrs. Danvers, Magda, or Mrs. Dudley, it is Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher in Mel Brooks’ 1974 Gothic horror parody, Young Frankenstein. The character, as written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder and performed by Leachman, incorporates all of the Gothic housekeeper clichés and then revels in them, permanently altering the way in which movie audiences perceive her role. 

Young Frankenstein, as its name suggests, draws its inspiration from James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, and the origins of Frau Blücher can also be found there. In the second Whale film, Irish character actress Una O’Connor plays a frequently hysterical housekeeper named Minnie, although Whale uses her for comic effect rather than horror. Despite her shrieking, Minnie herself is all motherly concern, much like Mrs. Fairfax in Jane Eyre. In Young Frankenstein, Frau Blücher’s costume and position in the household are references to O’Connor’s character, but her creepy and often menacing behavior develops from housekeepers like Mrs. Danvers and Mrs. Dudley. Leachman also sports the thin lips, severe bun, and sinister facial expressions of the more menacing housekeeper type. In fact, Frau Blücher is so absurdly terrifying that horses whinny in fear every time her name is mentioned. Early on, the movie exploits one particularly popular housekeeper trope, in which the taciturn household guardian conducts newcomers through the mysterious domain over which she reigns, often with a large candle in hand. Frau Blücher carries a holder with three candles, all of them markedly unlit, as she warns Frederick to “stay close to the candles. The stairway can be… treacherous.” Like other Gothic housekeepers, but unlike Minnie, Frau Blücher has special insider knowledge about her house and its family. She manipulates Frederick Frankenstein into resuming his grandfather’s research, apparently out of loyalty to the deceased Victor, with whom she was in love. Brooks and Wilder, of course, play all of these plot elements for laughs, but they depend upon the already established conventions of the housekeeper role and show the extent to which the writers expect the audience to be familiar with them. The parody succeeds so well that Frau Blücher usurps the place of earlier, more serious treatments of the character to become the quintessential example of the type. 

The entwined literary and cinematic evolution of the Gothic housekeeper demonstrates the ways in which genre conventions gather force and then sometimes sink under their own weight. In this case, the housekeeper character, along with the rest of her genre’s conventions, developed first in literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then gathered new steam with the rise of film. She reached her peak when Rebecca took the world by storm, thanks in part to the ways in which the film version capitalized on her potential. After that, other literary works and films could only repeat what had already been accomplished or twist that representation for parodic effect, since efforts to tinker with the formula were problematic at best. Audiences today will come to any housekeeper character with a very distinct mental image, that developed by the earlier Gothic novels and films, but they will also almost certainly have a sense of the character as inherently clichéd and even ridiculous, given the immense cultural impact of the later parody. We haven’t seen much of the Gothic housekeeper in recent years, perhaps because Mrs. Danvers and Frau Blücher have so completely occupied the spaces in which such a character can stand. Perhaps the recent return of Hammer films will bring the creepy housekeeper back to us in a new but still eerily familiar form. For now, however, it is the housekeeper herself who has become haunted, not by the ghosts of her employers’ house, but by the enduring influence of her own most iconic incarnations.

This essay was written for presentation at the 2012 meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South (PCAS). The Works Cited page is intentionally excluded in order to discourage plagiarism of the material. This content is the intellectual property of the author and must be properly cited if referenced elsewhere. The author reserves the right to send Mrs. Danvers to have a little personal chat with any plagiarists!