Dangerous Desires & Gothic Pastiche: Crimson Peak

The official film poster for
Crimson Peak (2015).

There is something alluring about the Gothic. The Gothic is a malleable, fluid category of the scary story, one focused rather broadly on the aesthetics of isolation and gloom, the fascination with the things that terrify and attract us, and on the hold that the past has on the present. It is about the monstrous thing that is right before us, about taboo desires, and about that heady mixture of pleasure and fear bubbling just beneath the surface of everyday life.

For many of us who study the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, the Gothic genre, adaptations, and/or literary gender studies, a film like Crimson Peak marks an exciting addition to the category of the Gothic, in part because director Guillermo del Toro has been very candid about his literary influences and these influences are palpable in the film.

Among others, del Toro has mentioned the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations. There are also links in the film to the story of Bluebeard, Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and to Rebecca—and undoubtedly many others.

In an interview, del Toro said that he has taken many of the ideas of the earlier Gothics but added contemporary gender politics into the mix. While the horror genre, writ large, has offered in recent years more opportunities for strong female protagonists to fight actively against the evil that threatens them, much of the classic Gothic genre features female protagonists who must be saved by others.

Illustration from The
Mysteries of Udolpho.

Classic Gothic texts like The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, and Dracula feature women who are threatened, locked up, and either killed or saved by male characters. Although Charlotte Brontë’s Jane is ultimately able to run away from the bigamous Rochester and finally accept him on her own terms, her financial independence that allows for the final reunion comes from an inheritance from her uncle. Even Emily Brontë’s virulent, violent Cathy can only control Heathcliff once she is a ghost.

By contrast, the protagonist and central antagonist of Crimson Peak are both women—the independent-minded, aspiring writer Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) and the gifted pianist but very creepy sister-in-law Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), respectively. Tom Hiddleston’s character of Sir Thomas Sharpe resists recreating the traditional Gothic villain, as he is equal parts romantic suitor, child-like inventor, and partner-in-crime to Lucille, whom the film ultimately paints as the instigator of evil at Allerdale Hall.

The character of Edith obviously draws on past Gothic heroines through her initial innocence, symbolically represented by her bright yellow flowing hair and her elaborate fin de siècle dresses and coats, as well as through her romanticization of Sir Thomas, a man her father does not wish her to marry. (The 1901 American setting and Edith’s imposing businessman father remind one vividly of Henry James’s “Washington Square.” This is unsurprising as del Toro has mentioned James as a major influence and has said that Edith’s name is an homage to another fin de siècle writer, Edith Wharton.)

 

Like many a Gothic heroine, Edith is innocence embodied;
it's her curiosity that will get her into trouble--or possibly save her?

Still, Edith manages to come into her own, even as she yields to other Gothic conventions: she allows herself to be swept away to an isolated, decaying old English manor hour; she cannot overcome the curiosity to explore the house that has been forbidden to her; and she refuses to see the dreadful secret of Sir Thomas and his sister until it is too late.

On the other hand, Edith is sexually assertive in her relationship with her husband, and the film keeps its female bodies clothed, resisting the spectacle of female nudity (though not necessarily that of male nudity!). In the second half of the film, once Edith must acknowledge the danger of her situation and the various threats to herself and her survival at Allerdale Hall, she fights back. The mixture of Gothic conventions with those of contemporary slasher flicks in the last twenty minutes of the film allow for Edith and Lucille to meet on the battlefield with no men to interfere (at least, not physically).

Thematically, of course, the film is borrowing from and embroidering various Gothic themes that exist even in texts where the female characters don’t have much power: the monstrous feminine, transgressive female desires, the fear of female sexuality, familial violence and revenge, etc. Crimson Peak is pastiche homage to the Gothic, giving us the spectacle of female power that is not wholly unique, but irresistible nonetheless.

In part, the gender politics of the Gothic, which are often both conventional and transgressive, traditional and queer at the same time, are part of the genre’s allure.

Eva Green's "Vanessa Ives" is another
Gothic heroine remade from the Gothic
novels the show draws on.

The literary elements of the film, as well as the film’s homage to various Hitchcock films, old B horror dramas, as well as classic Gothic films of the twentieth century (such as The Haunting of Hill House) make Crimson Peak, like other Gothic imitators (The Woman in Black and Penny Dreadful come to mind) alluringly familiar as they walk the fine line between high drama and camp, sexy and sexually perverse.

Why do we return so often to the Gothic? In part, it must be because the Gothic embodies so clearly the idea of the sublime, which crystallized in the Western imagination around the same time as the Gothic itself. The idea that we can experience terror and that we can explore certain taboo subjects within the “safe” confines of literature (and now also film and television) is alluring, exciting, and seductive.

The Gothic is also better dressed than many of its horror relatives; it is as much about the spectacle of interiors as it is about interiority, as much about velvet and lace as it is about spiders and ghosts. It holds out to us the possibility of elegance now lost, fashions of the dusty past, and those elaborate arabesques of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s eponymous yellow wallpaper.

Finally, the Gothic is a genre (if I can go so far as to call it one) in which gender and sexuality are at the front of center of the story. Gender roles, sexual desires, and the body are elements of every Gothic story, and even the most seemingly conservative of such stories, like The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, hold out the possibility of transgressive femininity, an idea that excites and terrifies even now in 2015.

Two Feminisms: Mary Astell and Hortense Mancini

Hortense Mancini,
Duchess of Mazarin

It happens more often than I’d like to admit: despite writing an entire dissertation on cross-dressing women in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, I find I’ve overlooked a prominent female cross-dresser. Today’s case is that of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and one of Charles II’s many mistresses.

Mancini’s flamboyant, exciting, and at times perilous life has been documented and described not only in books, like her biography The Mazarin Legacy, by Toivo David Rosvall and in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s The King’s Mistresses, but also in various wonderful blog posts on the blogs Two Nerdy History Girls, The Monstrous Regiment of Women, Wonders and Marvels, as well as MadameGuillotine.

 I, however, learned about Mancini just today as I was considering including Mary Astell, the “first British feminist”, in the Month of Dangerous Women on my own blog. Astell’s Some Reflections UponMarriage was written in direct response to the case of the Duchess of Mazarin and her husband’s suing for divorce after many years of separation.

Protofeminist Mary Astell

Astell’s opinion of the case is tinged with condemnation of Mancini’s behavior; Astell was, after all, a rather conservative feminist. She writes that “Had Madam Mazarine's Education made a right improvement of her Wit and Sense, we should not have found her seeking Relief by such imprudent, not to say Scandalous Methods, as the running away in Disguise with a spruce Cavalier, and rambling to so many Courts and Places, nor diverting her self with such Childish, Ridiculous, or Ill-natur'd Amusements, as the greatest part of the Adventures in her Memoirs are made up of.”

Oh yes, did I mention? Mancini published her memoirs…I can’t wait to get my hands on those!

In any case, however, to return to Astell, I was intrigued, naturally, by her claims. Some quick research into the life of Mancini revealed not only that she frequently cross-dressed as a man, but also that she openly had lovers of both sexes and, at one point, engaged in a duel with swords with Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, the illegitimate fifteen-year-old daughter of Charles II by another of his mistresses, Barbara Villiers. Lennard was most likely also one of Mancini’s female lovers at court. 

Whatever Astell thought of Mancini and her “ill-natured amusements,” Hortense Mancini reminds us that there were women in the past who lived life fully, dangerously, and dashingly, with little regard to what the rest of the world thought of them. This is not to say that Astell was wrong about everything either. Astell’s thoughts on marriage and divorce reveal a woman far  beyond her time, one who believed that

“To be yoak'd for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied ones most innocent desires for no other cause, but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them, is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it.”

Clearly Astell believed that men and women should have simpler, more direct recourse to divorce in cases where the relationship is of no benefit to one or both of sides of it. In the Reflections, as well as in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Astell eviscerates many of the common marital practices of her time period while advocating for greater educational opportunities for women.

For these reasons, this week’s contribution to the Dangerous Women series is a double-whammy. Hortense Mancini and Mary Astell were both “dangerous women” by my definition—they dared to step beyond the “traditional” role of women, to assert themselves as independent, free-thinking individuals, and to challenge society’s expectations for their sex.

The lives of these women and their writings also made me think about the different feminisms and forms of female empowerment that women espouse today. Feminism is still stigmatized in our society—as are women of strength, independence, power, and intelligence.

 

Another early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, believed like Astell that women needed
education in order to empower themselves and their countries.
This quotation of hers, however, is ambiguous enough to encompass a variety
of different ways in which women today might gain "power over themselves."

Mancini epitomizes women who live as they wish, who use their relationships with men to facilitate and support their lives and interests, who live freely but perhaps without knowledge of or interest in academic debates on feminism. Conversely, Astell epitomizes women who believe that if women want equality and respect, they must be educated, intelligent, and aware of how their behavior may at times contribute to their oppression.

These are only two attitudes, of course, towards female empowerment and feminism, and many men and women’s ideas may fall somewhere in between. Further, many of us draw on both of these women’s attitudes during our everyday lives. I don’t think these ideas and attitudes have to be opposed to each other, either. Contemporary feminism emphasizes choice, and I choose to admire both Mancini and Astell for their determination, intelligence, independence and panache, however they ultimately chose to express themselves.

18th-Century Female Pirates

Black Sails on the Horizon: Female Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read

From “The Life of Anne Bonny”, A General History of the Pyrates (1724)

“…she became acquainted with Rackam the Pyrate, who making Courtship to her, soon found Means of withdrawing her Affections from her Husband, so that she consented to elope from him, and go to Sea with Rackam in Men’s Cloaths…”

“The day that Rackam was executed, by special Favour, he was admitted to see her; but all the Comfort she gave him, was, that she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

The stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read are fascinating and confusing, surprising and entertaining. They were printed in A General History of the Pyrates, now attributed to Daniel Defoe, which recounts numerous tales of piracy from the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, including the tale of the infamous Captain Teach, aka Blackbeard. The volume, available through Dover Thrift, numbers over 700 pages, and includes masses of information not just about various pirates, but also their trials, lists of vessels, maps of the Caribbean, and illustrations of many of the pirates profiled in its pages.

Among the list of pirates appear the names of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both of whom, according to their stories, were passed off as boys while still children, came from impoverished backgrounds, and entered into piracy for the love of men. They passed themselves off as men in order to maintain their gender a secret aboard ship and, according to the section on Mary Read, eventually the two women met aboard Captain Jack Rackham’s ship, leading to an interesting case of mistaken identity:

“Her [Mary Read’s] sex was not so much as suspected by any Person on board till Anne Bonny, who was not altogether so reserved in Point of Chastity, took a particular Liking to her; in short, Anne Bonny took her for a handsome young Fellow, and for some Reasons best known to herself, first discovered her Sex to Mary Read; Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and so to the great Disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman also.”

The text goes on to mention how Rackham became jealous of Mary Read in her male persona, thinking that she/he was a threat to his relationship with Bonny. Bonny had to reveal that Read was also a woman so he wouldn’t “cut her new Lover’s Throat.”

The stories of the female pirates, as related in Defoe’s History, are less interested in recounting battles and fights than they are in detailing their cross-dressing as children (in the case of Anne Bonny) and various sexual liaisons the women had with men aboard ship (in the case of Mary Read). Nevertheless, as the quotations from Bonny’s history at the beginning of this post indicate, the women were thought to be remarkably vicious, strong-willed, and conniving, “pleading their bellies” once they were caught by the authorities to avoid hanging.

 

The illustration of Anne Bonny and Mary Read from the General History.

The Stars show Black Sails has mixed fact with fiction and created two characters out of these narratives for the show: Captain Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) and his cross-dressing consort Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). The costumers appear to have done their homework, as Bonny’s character appears in loose trousers and jacket, much like in the engraving of Anne Bonny and Mary Read included in the General History.

 

Paget and Schmitz as Bonny and Rackham on Black Sails.

From there, however, it seems that the television show has left the rest of their stories behind, and, as yet, the show does not have a Mary Read character. The character of Anne Bonny, though, seems just as vicious and violent as her literary predecessor and, as I gear up to watch season 2 (yes, I’m behind!), I hope her role will blossom even more.

The enduring appeal of these characters does not stop at their recreation on Black Sails, as I also discovered that Read, Bonny, and Rackham are also characters in the video game Assassin's Creed, which, judging from the Wiki description, also alludes to information from the General History. 

The stories of these women, whether wholly or partially fabricated, suggests new avenues of representations in the tired old pirate stories of men on ships, just as the story of Teresia Constantia Phillips suggests a new variation on the old theme of a woman caught in a bad marriage.