T'was a dark and stormy night. You're stranded in the chaos of swirling rain and wind, lost with no where to go. Just as you are about to abandon hope and give into death's cold grip, a light suddenly appears in the distance! You scramble towards the eery beacon, so desperate you fail to notice the sign reading: DO NOT ENTER. As you inch nearer, the source of the light comes into focus. A large, dark, gloomy, run-down house with boarded windows and rotting wood remains still as a mountain amidst the ongoing storm. For the first time you hesitate, but a large gust of bone chilling wind reminds you of your purpose. You run up the creaky porch with a fist already raised, prepared to knock for entry, when suddenly you realize the door is already ajar. A lone specter waits in the gaping mouth of the dark residence, as if anticipating your arrival. You say hello and ask for shelter. There is no response. Wiping the rain from your eyes you try once more to say hello, only to see an empty doorway to a house that no longer offers any light or hope of enduring the cruel weather.
What a bone-chilling scenario! The feeling of being stranded with no where to go amidst a violent storm is familiar for most people of this era. Not so much because we've actually experienced it through first hand situations, but because we've experienced it through novels, movies, and stories. Think for a second and try to remember every book or movie you've ever read or seen that opened with a stranded protagonist looking for shelter. Eventually, this protagonist ends up in an eery setting where chaos and paranoia ensue. The movie, The Woman in Black, which came out just a few years ago starring Daniel Radcliffe, was about a man who got trapped in a haunted estate due to a flood and had to survive encounter after encounter with the residence's notorious ghost. The Disney Channel movie properly titled A Haunted Mansion, starring Eddie Murphy, had almost the same scenario, just more kid friendly. But where did all of this start? Why is this story structure so popular when writers want to creep out their audiences?
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| An illustration from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights |
Well, all of these stories are rich with elements of the gothic. Gothic novels were becoming increasingly popular during the early nineteenth century. Novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein shocked their audiences with themes of death and activity of the paranormal that had never been explored before. However, the most interesting of these dark gothic tales came in 1847 when Emily Brontë wrote her one and only novel Wuthering Heights. Brontë used the stuck-in-a-storm scenario along with many gothic elements in much more passive, yet effective, ways than anyone before or after her. It starts off her plot as one of her narrators, a certain Mr. Lockwood, must stay the night at Wuthering Heights, a large decrepit old house, during a violent storm. That very night, Lockwood finds himself in the clutch of a ghosty hand belonging to a mysterious woman! The rest I'll leave for you to discover on your own.
