The Lost Children of Gothic Literature
Children rarely take center stage in Gothic literature, but when they do, their presence carries a powerful emotional charge. They represent innocence lost, corrupted, or imperiled. Their fates are usually tragic, ghostly, symbolically loaded, or creepy.
In early Gothic works like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, children exist more as heirs or victims than as fully developed characters. The young Conrad is crushed to death before he can come of age, setting the story’s supernatural horror in motion. His death emphasizes the fragility of innocence in a cursed and violent world.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of course, offers another famous and devastating example: Victor’s Creature, seeking companionship and recognition, kills young William. The murder of a child signals the complete collapse of the boundary between innocence and monstrosity—and reveals Victor’s guilt for unleashing a force he cannot control.
Children often embody a kind of doomed purity. Even when they’re not directly harmed, they are haunted by the sins of their ancestors. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline are the last heirs of a decaying bloodline, weighed down by inherited madness and isolation. The childlike elements of Roderick’s personality—his hypersensitivity, his fear—suggest a soul trapped between innocence and decay.
Modern Gothic fiction continues this dark treatment of childhood. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance’s memories of a bleak, abusive childhood shape her vulnerability to the house’s malevolent influence. In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, the death and unnatural resurrection of a young child is the ultimate horror, forcing readers to confront grief, guilt, and the monstrous cost of denying death. In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, the lingering decay of Hundreds Hall is bound to memories of lost children and broken futures. The innocence of youth is no match for the rot of history.
In my novel, Mademoiselle Frankenstein, Océane’s childhood and young womanhood are shaped by grief and violent loss. Meanwhile, the Creature she brings to life is marked by a terrible kind of infancy: “born” fully grown but emotionally newborn, his confusion and longings mirror the deep vulnerabilities of a child cast into a hostile world. Like that of so many Gothic children, his fate is a tragedy.
Gothic literature rarely allows children to grow up. They are relics of a lost ideal, warnings of corrupted futures, or echoes of grief. Alive or dead, they haunt the genre—a reminder that in a Gothic world, innocence is never safe for long.
What child in Gothic literature is most memorable to you?
