Gothic Beauty: Blessing, Curse, or Illusion?

In Gothic literature, beauty is rarely a simple virtue. More often, it’s a riddle—seductive yet suspect, radiant but rotten at the core. Beauty beckons, but ruin frequently trails behind.

The genre delights in subverting the old moral shorthand that equates outer beauty with inner goodness. In The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, Matilda appears angelic, almost divine in her loveliness—until her true nature unfurls. She is no innocent, but a catalyst of corruption, proof that charm can cloak the diabolical.

Gothic beauty often hypnotizes. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampiric women embody erotic allure, their beauty not just dangerous but disarming. Van Helsing warns that their glamour weakens the will, makes prey of men who mistake desire for safety. To look too long is to surrender.

For Edgar Allan Poe, beauty is inextricably linked to loss. His heroines—Ligeia, Berenice, Madeline Usher—are radiant, spectral, and doomed. The beautiful woman becomes an elegy in motion, her physical perfection the very thing that presages her death. Beauty is a fleeting illusion, dissolving into decay.

Oscar Wilde sharpens the blade: In The Picture of Dorian Gray, beauty is severed from morality entirely. Dorian’s preserved face becomes a mask—ageless, angelic—while the painting behind closed doors tells the real story, unraveling into monstrosity. Beauty untouched by consequence breeds rot.

In Rebecca, du Maurier makes absence itself beautiful. The first Mrs. de Winter lingers not as a corpse but as a legend, intoxicating and untouchable. Her beauty haunts Manderley like a perfume that won’t fade, stifling the living with her perfection.

But Gothic literature doesn’t only worship beauty—it mourns its tyranny. Mary Shelley’s Creature is perhaps the genre’s most devastating commentary. Denied companionship because of his grotesque form, the monster internalizes the hatred projected onto him. His soul, tender at the outset, is deformed by rejection. The horror lies not in how he looks, but in how others fail to see him.

In Mademoiselle Frankenstein, Océane confronts this dilemma firsthand. She sees flashes of beauty in her creation—strength, grace, complexity—but they collide with terror and revulsion. Her own body transforms over time as well, touched by her grief, her experiments, her journey. Beauty becomes unstable, shifting, sometimes redemptive, sometimes grotesque. Like the Arctic light she travels beneath, it illuminates and blinds.

Gothic beauty is not a comfort. It is a mirror held up to our hungers, our prejudices, our impermanence.

What book would you say contains the most shocking example of beauty and a beast?