“On opening the little door,” recounts Wuthering Heights’ Mr Lockwood, “two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the light; while a mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton put the copestone on my rage and humiliation.” Mockery abounds in Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel, with comparatively little wholesome laughter. Indeed, Brontë invites the reader to deride the hapless Lockwood; his farcical entry throws into relief the bleak atmosphere of the Heights. It’s a darkly humorous opening that accentuates the wickedness to come.
Aspects of the upcoming film adaptation have been met with some derision, which, unlike Brontë, the director probably didn’t intend for. Whether the movie will be unintentionally comical remains to be seen. Of course, many Gothic works and horror stories have been met with ridicule over the years, such as the penny dreadfuls and sensation fiction of the nineteenth century; to this day Dracula Daily pokes fun at Bram Stoker’s novel with internet memes and wry comments.
Satire of the Gothic is essentially a whole genre in itself, of which Northanger Abbey is possibly the predominant work. Chiefly satirising Radcliffian melodrama, in Jane Austen’s novel the genre is employed didactically; deluded young women are mocked for taking Gothic romances too seriously. Catherine Morland’s misreading of General Tilney as a Gothic villain culminates in the bathos of the laundry list scene, when she expects to find murder evidence but instead unearths an inventory of linen. Also notable, of course, are Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Mrs F. C. Patrick’s More Ghosts!, and Mary Charlton’s Rosella; even Edgar Allan Poe, though defined in the popular imagination by his morbidity, often infused his stories with a sardonic wit, as in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘Hop-Frog’.
Meanwhile, Cold Comfort Farm lays bare the folly of such generational repression and poetic misery as can be seen in Wuthering Heights. The depiction of Gibbons’ titular farm lampoons the pastoral sublime of the Heights, with Brontë’s description of “crumbling griffins”, “gaunt thorns” and “large jutting stones” satirised by the mundanity of Cold Comfort Farm—“Its stables and outhouses were built in the shape of a rough octangle surrounding the farmhouse itself, which was built in the shape of a rough triangle. […] One could not get into the attics at all. It was all very awkward”. Later in the novel, Mr Meyerburg tells Flora of his absurd theory about the Brontë sisters: that they “were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot”, and would “steal [Branwell’s] work and sell it to buy more drink”.
Gothic theatricality, moreover, edges into camp; later adaptations of Wuthering Heights (and responses such as Kate Bush’s high-pitched homage) lean into this campiness. The events of the story seem to inhabit a liminal space between horror and farce, whilst Nelly Dean, ever the practical housekeeper, relates the baroque cruelties and emotional derangements she’s witnessed with deadpan detachment, itself bordering on comical at times. Other characters spend their time brooding over sublime horrors, or perhaps being confused because everyone shares the same handful of names. Whilst Austen’s parody gently disciplines female fantasy, and Cold Comfort Farm lampoons the pastoral sublime, Wuthering Heights internalises its own absurdity; the novel’s extremity renders it ripe for parody.
The Castle of Otranto, generally deemed the very first Gothic novel, too has an undercurrent of farce to it, such as when the giant casque crushes Conrad, or the comic relief of Bianca’s frivolities, or the castle’s “deep and hollow groan” resultant from “pent-up vapours” (one of many fart gags in the literary canon). Shakespeare’s Macbeth, very much a progenitor to the Gothic, also has a great sense of irony and humour—for instance, the anticlimax of Macbeth’s “’Twas a rough night”, or even his blunt response to the news of his wife’s death, “She should have died hereafter”, which can only inspire incredulity. Paradise Lost, another major influence, displays irony in Satan’s overblown rhetoric—“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”. From the outset, the Gothic never shied away from the comic. Transgression lends itself both to horror and comedy, so it seems only natural how the two are interweaved into the genre.
In the modern day, cinema has drawn on much of this legacy through horror-comedies, from the award-winning The Substance to the Scary Movie franchise, which is apparently still going. Respecting television, such shows as Wednesday and What We Do in the Shadows have proved popular, and I found Scream Queens rather enjoyable at times. That isn’t to say Lucy Snowe’s sardonic wit and Denise Hemphill’s line “Shondell, why you got a knife in your throat‽” are exactly comparable, but there does seem to be a comic throughline in the Gothic and its scions. After all, in a genre so concerned with social criticism, a sense of irony is not only valuable but essential.
Words by Andrew Whitfield
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