I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors recently.
Earlier this month, I took a trip to New Slains Castle at Cruden Bay: an imposing, crumbling ruin perched on a rocky cliff edge looking out over the North Sea. Before it fell into disrepair, the castle inspired countless writers, including Robbie Burns, Walter Scott, and—perhaps most famously—Bram Stoker. Cruden Bay is a prominent location in Stoker’s work. Featuring in The Mystery of the Sea and The Watter’s Mou, the coastal village is perfect for stories filled with wraiths and smugglers. It was in Cruden Bay, as he settled on a rock near New Slains Castle, that Stoker’s most notorious creation is said to have first crept into his imagination: Count Dracula. The castle’s peculiar octagonal hall which features in the novel’s Castle Dracula is a key giveaway of the setting’s influence, and local legend suggests early drafts of Dracula brought the bloodsucking Count to rural Scottish shores, rather than the bustling city of London.
New Slains Castle, Cruden Bay.
It’s easy to see why Cruden Bay has inspired so many. It’s immensely peaceful. After exploring the castle, my travelling companion and I set off along the rocky cliff edge, following a path marked by the flattened grass of others who had made the journey before us, eventually stopping to sit on the mossy ground, surrounded by the pinks, purples, and yellows of the wildflowers, watching the crashing waves below us.
It was a moment of calm I hadn’t realised I needed.
We sat in silence, listening to the hush of the waves as they swept over the rocks and the call of the seagulls as they glided above the salty water. Although all my senses were engaged, I felt—for the first time in a long time—totally at peace. I could feel the scattered thoughts of everyday life—the worries, pressures, grumbles—click together like puzzle pieces in my mind, solutions and ideas gently materialising in my subconscious.
We stayed there until we felt ready to continue our adventure. As I tramped through the tall grass like a Gothic heroine, I understood why Ann Radcliff’s Emily St Aubert was so drawn to exploring the deep woods and towering mountains, and the Brontë sisters’ heroines were tightly connected to wild moors and angry storms. It made me think that perhaps we’re not as far removed from the swooning maidens of Gothic literature as we might like to believe.
Gothic literature emerged as part of Britain’s larger Romanticism movement in the late 1700s. A direct response to Enlightenment, it rejected the notion of reason, realism, and a well-regulated society. Instead, the Gothic embraced imagination, going so far as to conjure the supernatural in their stories. The fantastical worlds of Gothic fiction were seen as being dangerous and corruptive, entirely uncontrolled by reason. Women flocked to the genre, both as writers and readers, no doubt enchanted by the Gothic’s penchant for deconstructing daily life during an era where women—particularly married, middle-class women—were viewed as little more than possessions or objects.
While Gothic fiction started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), female writers made the genre their own. It’s primarily thanks to their work that Gothic literature rocketed in popularity. It provided a space for women to step outside of the societal expectations of the era, using their fiction as a tool to share revolutionary ideas. You’ve probably heard of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the OG goth girl. Daughter of “Britain’s first feminist” Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, it’s hardly surprising that Shelley crafted texts which challenged conventional thought. But many of these Gothic authors notoriously disrupted domestic settings, targeting the repressive nature of the home.
A typical 18th Century Gothic novel would see a fair and intelligent maiden become orphaned. Suddenly uprooted from her stable life and cast out of her safe environment, she journeys into the Gothic where she must learn to depend solely on herself: perhaps fleeing through a dark forest (à la Snow White), or being sent to live with a cruel relative, or—worst of all—married off to an evil suitor who lives in a decaying castle and cares only for the heroine’s wealth and body, not her mind and spirit. The heroine navigates the Gothic elements, encountering ghosts and atmospheric settings—which can provoke bouts of fainting if too intense—before finally overcoming her tormentor and asserting herself as a new, independent woman.
Gothic heroines almost always secured their right to choose before agreeing to courtship or marriage to the tale’s handsome hero at the end of the story. Their adventures may have been imaginative and terrifying, but their choice to return to the safe domestic sphere and societal norms is a rational one, usually arrived upon when they had independent security: Emily St Aubert owns property at the end of Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), while Jane Eyre has comfortable wealth she can call her own before agreeing to marry Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontê’s classic novel, published in 1847.
It’s important to remember that the Gothic fiction boom preceded the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to own, buy, and sell property, keep any inheritance, and hold their own wages. The Act granted women autonomy, meaning they were no longer completely reliant on men. Nearly a century earlier, during Gothic fiction’s peak, writers had identified that marriage and the subsequent domestic lifestyle could be akin to a prison sentence for some women: their lack of independence or the trading of women as assets rather than, you know, being valued as human beings was being tackled in the genre’s works.
Landscape plays a significant role in Gothic literature and the heroine’s ascent to independence. This was common in Romantic literature of the period too, where expansive passages clearly detailing impressive scenery was lauded in poetry, while Jane Austen’s leading ladies would typically take to the garden when they had a problem to solve or a worry to ponder. Building upon this trope, Gothic heroines would usually encounter a tremendous landscape that struck awe into their hearts. This became known as '“the sublime”.
Believed to be the most powerful emotion the mind is capable of feeling, the sublime is the recognition of a tremendous power that invokes a sense of terror, usually felt towards something that cannot be contained or controlled: typically, nature. It’s the feeling you get when you reach the peak of a Munro and peer dumbstruck over the edge, taking in its enormous size; when you stand under a huge tree in the middle of a crowded wood when you’ve strayed off the path; or when you realise just how small you are when you stand at the foot of a mountain range. It mixes feelings of pleasure with a sense of danger. It’s the complete antithesis to the orderly, pruned gardens of the domestic sphere.
The sublime can be felt standing amongst the haunting hills of Glen Coe.
Ann Radcliff’s landscape descriptions led her to become one of the most applauded authors of the Gothic fiction movement. Her heroines navigated intense landscapes with joy and wonder. It’s a defining feature for Emily, the heroine in The Mysteries of Udolpho, who enjoys rambling in “the wild wood-walks that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain’s stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur impressed a sacred awe upon her heart.” Awe is important in Gothic literature, as it typically leads to growth. The Gothic heroine’s ability to independently navigate these landscapes gave her the strength and confidence she needed to confront the societal structures holding her back, be it her haunted house or evil husband. There’s powerful symbolism in the dank, run-down castles being left behind at the conclusion of a Gothic tale, hinting towards the real world’s crumbling patriarchal structures.
It can be suggested, then, that nature helps us grow and evolve. While the mental and physical health benefits are indisputable, the outdoors plays a crucial factor in creativity and problem solving too. In the late 18th Century, Romantic poets began taking excursions to the Alps to find immediate connections to nature. In a peculiar turn for the era, these trips weren’t about reaching God but exploring the link between rural environments and our imaginations. I’ve previously discussed horror’s warnings of the belief in humankind’s ability to tame or conquer nature, but horror fiction also shows that living alongside nature and embracing its sublime challenges can help us confront our own personal battles.
Gothic literature has continued to evolve over the years and often has a revival in times of upheaval and change. Novels embracing the genre have been steadily creeping back into book charts over the past few years, with titles like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst, and Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians being amongst those which have recently captured the attention of readers. Coupled with our increasing desire to escape Work-from-Home office setups and spend more time outdoors, with people leaving cities behind to live in rural areas, it appears that we may be readying ourselves for societal change. We’ve become the Gothic heroines of our own stories, seeking to navigate the outdoors as we search for the power to confront the ghosts that haunt us in our own lives, chipping away at the repressive structures we find ourselves living beneath.
Breathing in the salty sea air at Cruden Bay, taking in the sublime landscape around me as we watched the water whirl and crash against the rocky cliff face, I came to recognise the shape of my own Gothic castle, covered in cobwebs, the bricks rotting, and something mysterious hiding behind a locked door in the East Wing. I saw with clarity, and a heavy heart, that I’d spent eighteen months repeatedly prioritising work over health, happiness, personal relationships, and even loss because that is what is expected of us today. The domestic setting has once again become a prison as offices have infiltrated the home and career productivity has seeped into every pore of our daily lives.
But the classic heroines have taught me that with clarity comes power, which leads to the confidence to make plans so I can eventually leave my haunted mansion to rot away to ruins, societal expectations be damned!