On Race in Gothic Literature
Classic Gothic literature has always been about the margins—of the map, of society, of the human psyche. And yet, despite its obsession with the “other,” it has often shied away from grappling directly with questions of race. The shadows of empire, enslavement, and colonization have haunted the edges of the genre from its beginnings, rarely openly, more often obliquely, through eerie metaphor.
This is true in early Gothic works such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which briefly includes an enslaved African character whose suffering is used to fuel the tale’s moral horror. Or Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, which features a dark-skinned villain, though his depiction is highly problematic. On the upside, he is supernatural; on the downside, he’s demonic.
Modern writers have reshaped Gothic fiction by putting race at the center. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the ghost isn’t a metaphor—it’s trauma incarnate. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom reclaims Lovecraft’s horror tradition, flipping it to expose how Blackness has historically been vilified or erased within horror and Gothic fiction.
Unlike Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Mademoiselle Frankenstein takes place in wartime North America during the birth of a New World. The Creature is stitched together from the bodies of soldiers from all over the world. The result is that his skin is a shocking patchwork of colors and tones. It’s startling. His appearance is not just unsettling because he’s been reassembled, but because his very body carries the multitudes of a violently clashing world. He is both horrifying and deeply human, carrying with him the contradictions of a new age.
Mademoiselle Frankenstein also includes embedded stories in the voices of slaves and native peoples, capturing the complexity of a time when one revolution for freedom was built on the back of another group’s continued enslavement or isolation. These narrative threads aren’t digressions—they’re the heartbeat of the Gothic: stories inside stories, voices rising from beneath floorboards and behind locked doors.
Professor Jerrold E. Hogle, from the University of Arizona, expressed it this way in his reading of Mademoiselle Frankenstein:
“By giving both Océane and her Creature a multi-racial and deeply historicized mixed-American background, Robin Solit makes this creation tragedy a deeply suggestive reflection on the whole history of the United States and its various peoples at the very time the USA is coming into existence.”
Gothic fiction has always been about what haunts us, and race haunts every culture that has tried to pretend otherwise. Placing race in its proper place in the world of a Gothic novel doesn’t distort the genre. It returns to its roots: stories of fear, exile, obsession, and the bodies that carry memory, however unwillingly.
Gothic stories have always held space for the unspeakable. Maybe it’s time we speak more directly about the subject of race in Gothic fiction, even if—especially if—we’re still learning, as I am. What are your thoughts?
