Food in Gothic Novels: Pleasure or Poison?
In Gothic fiction, food rarely nourishes in any straightforward way. It drips with symbolism, suspense, and moral ambiguity—an atmospheric device that reflects desire, danger, and decay. A feast in a Gothic novel isn’t just a meal; it’s a warning. Sometimes, a curse.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contrasts two stark realities: Victor’s privileged world, where food is abundant yet ignored in his obsessive quest to create life. The Creature’s first sustenance, wild berries and river water, is consumed in secret and desperation. It’s a primal communion with nature, starkly different from Victor’s sterile laboratory and social inheritance.
In Dracula, Jonathan Harker is greeted with a sumptuous banquet in Transylvania, but the moment is fraught with unease. The meal is rich, even sensual, but beneath the table’s civility, a predator waits. Soon, food and blood become indistinguishable. Lucy and Mina begin with dainty bites of bread and meat, and end as passive vessels for transfusion, victims of a darker hunger.
Rebecca uses the dinner table as a battleground. The second Mrs. de Winter sits before exquisitely prepared roasts and gleaming silver, but the meal is asphyxiating. The grandeur of Manderley’s kitchen cannot mask the presence of the first wife, Rebecca, who lingers like a specter, shaping every forkful into a performance of inadequacy.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray revels in decadence. Food becomes another layer of excess, an extension of Dorian’s descent. Oysters, quail, and overflowing wineglasses adorn the table, not to sustain but to stupefy—to distract from the rot beneath the velvet.
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber cloaks food in opulence and threat. A dinner of lobster and pastry seems refined, almost tender, until it reveals itself as stage dressing for horror. The Marquis feeds his bride as one might fatten a bird before slaughter.
Even the simplest meal carries weight. In Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Hepzibah’s bread and tea for her cousin Clifford speak of fallen fortunes, but also of guilt, endurance, and a desperate grip on dignity. The absence of abundance becomes its own kind of ghost.
In Mademoiselle Frankenstein, food underscores themes of care, ritual, and survival. Océane, trained in herbalism and healing, often prepares food as medicine for others and for herself. Yet nourishment is never uncomplicated. As she journeys toward the Arctic, meals dwindle to the barest signs of life. At the novel’s end, she eats frozen baby shark eggs as an act of sheer will against extinction.
Food in Gothic literature is never just food. It’s seduction, repression, memory, and control. It evokes the body and all its frailties. It shows us who holds power—and who hungers.
Which Gothic scenes of food or feasting have stayed with you, and why?
