The Victorian Gothic Adaptation Is Alive. Its Meaning Is Not

Imagine being the average white bloke in the Victorian era. Questionable hygiene practices aside and a mass obsession with death aside, here’s what life looks like for you: industrialisation means machines are out to get your job. You’re employed at a factory that pays peanuts, overworks you to death, and can lay you off on a whim. There’s a new class of factory owners who have shot to millionaire status out of nowhere, while the wealth gap increases day by day. The planet is suffering because of all the progress. Trauma and psychological issues are themes discussed widely in the media, as people’s inner lives and the one they show to the public differ drastically. Everyone is trying to appear better than they are. Romanticising the Gothic aesthetic is all the rage right now. Everything seems performative; wait, that sounds too close to the present day.

And that’s because it is.

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Hollywood hit the jackpot when it decided to adapt Victorian gothic stories, at least on paper. These adaptations promise easy money: period pieces that already have loyal fandoms owing to their status as literary giants, while also giving the audience some sort of catharsis through similarities between the world they see on screen and the world they inhabit.

But something else has happened in the process. The darkness has been preserved, but the meaning has been traded for easy to digest plots.

Aesthetic, Without The Consequence

Victorian gothic fiction was never just about decay, monsters and longing. Those were just the messenger. The real subject was power. Class power. Colonial power. Patriarchal power. The terror in these novels came from systems that trapped people long before ghosts or monsters ever could. In a different article, I had explored how the Angry Young Man returns to Bollywood as an escape from social and emotional inequalities. For Hollywood, these Victorian adaptations are in the same vein. Especially when you consider that the most famous works to come out of the genre were veiled satires and social critiques that raised many eyebrows at the time.

Modern adaptations, however, have begun to treat these stories like Pinterest mood boards. The focus towards costume, yearning glances, and visual melancholy leaves social critique as a mere aftertaste. The societal anxiety on the screen, in the meanwhile, is replaced by boardroom anxieties about marketability. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, latest examples in the “showmance” trend, went on an ostensive press tour for "Wuthering Heights", their bidding romance getting called out on the internet as a PR tactic to get more footfalls in theatres. 

But the original Brontë novel is not a love story in any conventional sense. Brontë was not writing about love conquering death in her book. It was a study of violence: how it begins, how it spreads to others, and how it reproduces itself across generations.

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And this happens through Heathcliff and his racial ambiguity in Wuthering Heights. He is described as dark-skinned, and repeatedly treated as an outsider. In Victorian England, this alone would have made his integration into white upper class society almost impossible. The British Empire, at it's colonial peak in the 1800s, depended on rigid racial hierarchies. No amount of wealth could not fully erase racial otherness. 

In fact, Heathcliff, by dint of his race, would face the otherness in ways a poor white boy would not imagine in his era. And the abusive man that would be formed as a result would also simply be a psychopath if not for the double whammy of racial and class abuse that Heathcliff as a child would have received. But hey, Emerald Fennell not only removed the context, but also tames him down a lot. So he's not a psychopath, and he's not a severely wronged man either. Just abused enough to give both the leads some resemblance of daddy issues.

Selective fidelity

Not every modern adaptation abandons its thematic spine entirely. Guillermo Del Toro’s version of Frankenstein, for example, places heavy emphasis on the relationship between creator and creation as a form of parental neglect. This is a legitimate reading, agreed. Victor Frankenstein creates a man thinking he'd be the perfect creation, but as soon as he realises he is neither attractive physically, and only has the intelligence of a newborn child, he leaves it for dead in a burning building.

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But Frankenstein is so much more than a terrible father wronging his son. In Mary Shelley’s story, Victor Frankenstein is a monster who begets another monster just like him. The monster in this story kills Victor’s family just because he made him ugly and left him to fend for himself in a society that judges morality by outward appearances (that's two more recurring victorian themes flattened out already).

More than anything, Frankenstein is science fiction. The first of its kind. Mary Shelley died fighting for the scientific aspects of the book to be taken seriously in theatre adaptations. The original book has pages after pages describing how the science of making life from scratch should work. How cells would divide and know when to divide into a muscle and when to form a bone. What nutrients would go where. It's not possible for a film so extensive to capture all of it, but is authorial intent really that hard to maintain?

And speaking of authorial intent, the upcoming series, The Grays, based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, has been positioned as a critique of the beauty industry. It is also reportedly making its leads Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray, brothers.

For the unversed, Basil’s fixation on Dorian Gray is coded as romantic and erotic. He openly admits that Dorian has changed him, consumed his artistic identity, and become the sole source of his creative drive. He refuses to exhibit the portrait of Dorian that he painted because he fears it reveals too much of himself. 

But that “too much” was not a character’s dialogue for Oscar Wilde. It was his life sentence. Wilde was at the height of his fame when his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas became public. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of being a “sodomite.” Wilde sued him for libel. The ensuing trial exposed Wilde’s relationships with men and his own writings, including Dorian Gray, were used as evidence against him. Wild had written a (somewhat autobiographical) book about a society obsessed with surface morality while hiding its own contradictions. At the trial, passages containing these contradictions were read aloud in court to prove his moral deviance. Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of hard labour. 

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The trial destroyed Oscar Wilde socially, professionally, and personally. He went from being the most celebrated playwright in London to a public disgrace in less than a year. Newspapers portrayed him as a cautionary tale of moral decay. His wife was forced to change her surname and move to Europe with their children to escape the stigma. As for Wilde, he died in 1900 in Paris, largely isolated from everything that was once vying for his attention.

When smaller subtexts are removed from stories, these stories die down, too.