RECONCEPTUALIZING THE GOTHIC HEROINE’S AGENCY IN THE MARITAL GOTHIC: QUESTIONING EPISTEMOLOGY AND MEDIATION IN GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CRIMSON PEAK by Sarah Taylor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah December 6, 2022 Approved ______________________________ Dr. Julia Panko ______________________________ Dr. Rebekah Cumpsty ______________________________ Dr. Emily Petersen Julia Panko (Dec 12, 2022 11:31 PST) Rebekah Cumpsty (Dec 12, 2022 12:32 MST) Taylor 2 A confrontation with simple binaries and reliance on ambiguity are fundamental to the Gothic genre. A prime example of this ambiguity can be glimpsed in how numerous Gothic texts have destabilized the gender binary. In 1764, when Horace Walpole published the first Gothic novel and best-selling sensation The Castle of Otranto, he established a trope that would remain a Gothic staple through countless literary and cinematic successors: the damsel in distress. The trope has morphed over the centuries, from Isabella’s panicked flight from her villainous suitor Manfred in The Castle of Otranto, to Victorian Gothic heroines like Jane Eyre and Mina Harker wandering lost on the moors or struggling against vampiric influence, right up through the terrified camera close-ups of Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project. This emphasis on Gothic heroines as the victims of circumstance is so pervasive that it has even spawned subgenres like “the Marital Gothic,” focusing on heroines’ relationships with their husbands, and the “Female Gothic,” focusing on Gothic writing by women authors that explores gender. Over its 250-plus-year history, women in the Gothic have tended to be either—to borrow Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s foundational terminology—the “madwoman in the attic” or the damsel in distress. In either case, these Gothic women lack agency. How, then, might a contemporary, Neo-Victorian update to this Gothic precedent depict women’s agency? How might the clash between the nineteenth-century setting and contemporary values in the Neo- Victorian genre influence themes about women’s agency? To address these questions, this paper takes Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak (2015) as a case study to interrogate the agency of Gothic heroines in the Neo-Victorian genre. While scholars have often imposed an active/passive binary to theorize the agency of the film’s heroine, I argue that the multiple ways in which the heroine’s agency is mediated by epistemological frameworks, patriarchal social institutions, and cinematic representations actually destabilize this simple binary framework. Taylor 3 The majority of prior scholarship on Crimson Peak has engaged with broader Marital Gothic genre questions about women’s individual choices and relative autonomy in navigating patriarchal expectations, gender roles, social institutions, and interpersonal relationships. Women’s agency is an issue from the beginning of Del Toro’s film, which follows the traditional Marital Gothic romance plot. Edith Cushing is a wealthy young American heiress who marries the impoverished English Baronet Thomas Sharpe against her deceased father’s wishes. Despite this early agency, she becomes a kind of Gothic damsel in distress: she is confined to the crumbling, isolated feudal estate of Allerdale Hall with Thomas and his sister Lucille Sharpe. Edith begins to have multiple encounters with the gruesome specters of dead women. As a spiritualist medium who can communicate with the dead, Edith converses with these specters, who guide her to phonograph recordings, photographs, and legal documents that reveal the ghosts’ identities: they are her husband’s three poisoned former wives and murdered mother. As the denouncement builds, Edith, whom the Sharpe siblings have been slowly poisoning, is forced to rely on the assistance of her friend Dr. Alan McMichael, who is wounded by Thomas in the course of trying to help Edith. Alan and Edith attempt to flee the estate before her husband and sister-in-law can succeed in killing her and taking her fortune. In the climax, Lucille, who harkens back to the madwoman in the attic trope, kills her brother (who is also her incestuous lover) in a fit of jealous rage and chases Edith through the house in a violent confrontation. The fight concludes when Edith calls on Thomas’s ghost to distract Lucille long enough for Edith to deliver the final killing blow and escort an injured McMichael to safety. In her active pursuit of the truth, Edith uses her relative autonomy within the house to successfully circumvent patriarchal restraint, reveal the Sharpes’ history of exploitation and murder, kill her would-be killer, escape this haunted house, and, finally, narrate her tale of trauma. Yet, in the spirit of Taylor 4 Gothic ambiguity, scholarship about the film often narrows into a reductive debate about whether Edith is an active or passive character. The subject of women’s agency is a longstanding issue in the genres Crimson Peak draws from. Set in 1901, Crimson Peak is an excellent example of the Neo-Victorian genre—fictional works set during the Victorian era (1837-1901) by contemporary writers who use the historical setting to reinterpret the past and frame contemporary debates.1 A film that draws on literary and cinematic predecessors from Horror, Gothic Romance, and the Female Gothic—such as the work of Ann Radcliffe, Hammer Film Productions, Mario Bava, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Daphne Du Maurier—Crimson Peak appears to consciously incorporate allusions to tropes from these genres. Therefore, Del Toro’s film seems well positioned to build on its Marital Gothic roots to depict the contemporary “rage of women entrapped in traditional, reductive and confining notions of femaleness, and the uncanny environment of the institution of marriage itself” (Mitchell, “Reclaiming the Monster” 53; see also “Why Crimson Peak is Not a Horror Movie;” “Influences of Crimson Peak”). As an aspiring author who declares that she would “rather be Mary Shelley” than Jane Austen, Edith’s work on a ghost story indicates a deliberate commentary about the role of women authors in the Female Gothic, as they often use ghosts as metaphors to subtly challenge societal norms (Kindinger para. 7-9). Such careful attention to Female Gothic and Marital Gothic genre concerns in a Neo-Victorian film seemingly promises to grant the heroine and the madwoman the agency and voice that Gilbert and Gubar describe in The Madwoman in the Attic. For many scholars, however, the film’s subtle yet complex depiction of women’s relative autonomy in patriarchal systems, its visual commodification of the 1 The Neo-Victorian genre encompasses contemporary works of fiction that are set in the Victorian period (1837- 1901). Though the exact date of origin for the genre is debated, multiple scholars argue it emerged in the 1960s with works such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Cox). For more on the Neo-Victorian Gothic genre and how it constructs our cultural memory of the Victorian Era, see Kate Mitchell and Marie-Luise Kohlke. Taylor 5 Neo-Victorian damsel in distress, and its inconclusive Gothic ending fail to truly overthrow the patriarchal system of abuse at the heart of the haunted house. For all her detective work in uncovering the secrets and repressed voices in Allerdale Hall, Edith still hesitates to flee in the climax because she continues to crave her husband’s affection. This complex engagement with the Marital Gothic, and with the relative autonomy of Gothic heroines, fuels the scholarly debate about whether Edith is primarily an active subject or a passive object. Prior scholarship has explored Crimson Peak’s gendered dynamics—and the agency of its protagonist in particular—yet scholars’ dismissal of Edith’s more subversive challenge to patriarchal restraint in the Marital Gothic overlooks how women’s relative autonomy is restrained and mediated by social systems and relationships. Amy Montz argues that Edith diminishes from “active participant” to a “passive object” in the audience’s gaze due to the cinematography and the ways she is punished for her sexual autonomy (52-56).2 Similarly, Emilia Musap casts her as a damsel in distress who is “virginal and vulnerable, radiating childlike innocence and naivety” (1-4). In contrast, Evangelina Kindinger, who concedes that Edith visually conforms to the white-nightgown-clad damsel, concludes that Edith transforms into the film’s hero by saving her male rescuer in the climax (para. 22). Yet Montz argues that the same escape reduces Edith “from active subject . . . to passive object, leaving the final scene of the movie under the wing of another man” (56). Dourly, Montz concludes that “rather than presenting a post-modern heroine for a Neo-Victorian gothic movement, Crimson Peak leaves its audience with a standard, defeatist ending” (56). This scholarly disagreement and dissatisfaction 2 Amy Montz argues Edith is reduced to a passive object due to her sexuality. Montz argues that—by punishing Edith for marital sex—Crimson Peak “reinforces Victorian stereotypes about the dangers of female sexual autonomy” (51). While a valid argument about Neo-Victorian depictions of women’s sexuality, my study aims to deconstruct the active/passive binary underpinning Montz’s argument. For more about how Neo-Victorian Gothic texts continue to reinforce reductive stereotypes about women’s sexual autonomy, see Montz. Taylor 6 with Edith’s subtler forms of resistance—such as actively seeking out the ghosts of her husband’s dead wives and prodding her husband to leave Allerdale Hall—exposes the Neo- Victorian genre’s complicated relationship with the Gothic heroine’s deceptively passive role. It also, however, reflects a fundamental misreading of women’s relative autonomy in the Marital Gothic genre. All Gothic heroines—even passive ones—make choices regarding their actions and reactions to restrictive systems. The act of dismissing the Gothic heroine as passive because her actions do not fit audience expectations of an active character who challenges the system overlooks her subtle choices and continues to favor the active in the active/passive binary. Because the film validates Edith’s active supernatural detective work—which relies on a perceptual epistemology and spiritual mediumship that deconstructs rationalist worldviews—it thus raises intriguing questions about how the Gothic heroine’s subtler forms of agency continue to be misunderstood, undercut, and dismissed in Neo-Victorian films today. To assume that women are either active subjects or passive objects in patriarchal structures risks oversimplifying the complex interplay of epistemology and relative autonomy in navigating patriarchal institutions. Beyond the Active/Passive Binary: Reconceptualizing the Gothic Heroine’s Agency What prior scholarship has overlooked is both the degree to which Edith’s agency is deeply tied to her mediumistic abilities—she is able to perceive and communicate with the ghosts of dead women—and how the depiction of her autonomy is complicated by the ways that Edith herself is mediated in the Neo-Victorian genre’s patriarchal institutions, cinematography, and historical setting. In other words, Edith’s agency has not been fully understood because scholarly debates about whether or not Edith is an active or passive character fail to acknowledge the degree to which issues of relative autonomy within networks of power, epistemology, Taylor 7 mediation, and social relationships inform her agency. To effectively deconstruct the active/passive binary, scholars need to reconceive Edith’s agency as mediated—and at times constrained—by her sensory perception, by the relative and constrained power within the social institutions of the historical and patriarchal setting, by audience expectations of the Gothic and Neo-Victorian genre, and by the male gaze embedded within Neo-Victorian cinematography. Building on prior scholarship about Victorian women’s prominent role in spiritualist mediumship, recording media’s role in destabilizing the Gothic genre’s epistemological framework, and the mediation of women’s bodies in Neo-Victorian cinematography, I argue that Crimson Peak fundamentally dismantles the active/passive binary when it comes to the question of Edith’s agency. Edith is an active protagonist who has agency through her supernatural access to truth and spiritualist mediumship with the ghosts, but her agency is constrained in multiple ways. As a woman spiritualist medium actively seeking the truth, Edith relies on a “perceptual epistemology,” a mode of knowing characterized by an uncanny feminine perception rooted in sensitivity to and sensory perception of the supernatural. Edith’s perceptual epistemology draws on the historical belief that women were uniquely suited to spiritualist mediumship because they were passive mediums with uncanny access to the supernatural by virtue of their gendered bodies. Drawing on these uncanny capabilities, Edith is an active agent in constructing spiritual networks with the ghosts of dead women. These networks embrace and ethically engage with the ghostly Leviansian Other to develop a feminist praxis that resists domestic violence against women. Thus, this paper will demonstrate how perceiving Edith’s agency in a false active-or-passive dichotomy obscures Edith’s more complex challenge to the patriarchal system. Furthermore, I argue that reconceptualizing agency as mediated rather than binary reveals how Taylor 8 Edith successfully navigates the haunted house despite the limitations placed upon her, resists the horror of domestic violence and objectification, and escapes to write her story on her terms. In this thesis, I will demonstrate how Edith is an active subject whose agency is mediated by larger networks of power that complicate the simplistic active/passive binary in four ways. First, there exists a perceptual epistemology that has traditionally been coded as feminine, which is grounded in assumptions about uncanny feminine sensory perception of the supernatural and strongly tied to a history of passive spiritualist mediumship that is relevant to the movie’s setting during the Victorian spiritualist craze. Edith’s perceptual epistemology challenges a masculinist rationalist worldview, and the film validates her epistemological challenge by confirming the existence of the supernatural. This perceptual epistemology gives Edith agency as a spiritualist medium by placing her in an ambivalent position of power that blurs the line between passive conduit for the supernatural and active subject who subtly uses gendered assumptions to actively construct social networks to achieve her goal. The result complicates our understanding of women’s historical passivity to redefine agency. Second, recording media recontextualize Edith’s perceptual epistemology and her spiritualist medium agency to further complicate this binary. Although recording media appear to destabilize Edith’s spiritualist mediumship by offering an alternative framework of knowledge that circumvents the ghosts entirely, both mediations ultimately convey similar ghostly hauntings, thus confirming rather than challenging Edith’s supernatural knowledge. The film also challenges recording media’s false assumptions of stable truth because characters who rely solely on the media intervene in situations they do not fully understand and fail to rescue Edith as a result. Third, in contrast with recording media that objectify the subject, Edith’s spiritualist mediumship enables a feminist praxis network that recognizes an ethical responsibility to the repressed ghostly Other and engages with the ghosts as Taylor 9 active subjects. Finally, the symbolic mediation of Edith herself by the cinematic medium visually depicts her as a damsel in distress whose body is objectified by what Laura Mulvey has termed the male gaze.3 However, the film’s mediation of women’s bodies also takes this objectification to its logical and horrifying extreme by using the heroine’s physical vulnerability and the ghost’s grotesque forms to visually expose and critique the body horror and psychological trauma inherent in domestic violence. Viewing Edith through an active/passive binary oversimplifies this complex depiction of her individual autonomy and overlooks her deconstructive challenge to, and subversion of, patriarchal restraints and Neo-Victorian cinematography. Deconstructing this active/passive binary, this study redefines agency to better acknowledge Edith’s individual choices and relative autonomy within power relations. In her article protesting assumptions about compulsory heterosexuality, Adrienne Rich highlights “a maze of false dichotomies which prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole” (37). Critiquing these false dichotomies, this study builds on the work of Catherine Brekus, who defines agency as “the ability to take action” and defines “an agent . . . [as] someone or something that has the power to make something occur” (23). As Brekus argues, historians who define agency as open defiance of social structures risk obscuring agents who consciously use their agency to uphold and reproduce the social structures that give meaning to their lives (24, 28). Therefore, rather than revert to binary terms that assume subjects do or do not have agency in strict opposition to social structures, it is more prudent to reconceptualize agency in more 3 In cinema, the term male gaze describes how the visual representation of women is often distorted by a heterosexual male perspective. For example, the cinematic male gaze often depicts women as “erotic object[s] for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object[s] for the spectator within the auditorium” (838). For more about how the male gaze upholds patriarchal ideology through the objectification of women, see Laura Mulvey’s pivotal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Taylor 10 relative terms that acknowledge individual choices in navigating “the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination” through central mechanisms that “construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance” (Bordo 2098; see also Brekus; Edwards, “Introduction”). Reconceptualizing agency as mediated in such networks enables us to identify the various mechanisms that enable control and explore how “the subject at times becomes enmeshed in collusion with forces that sustain her own oppression” (Bordo 2098). Therefore, this study perceives agency as mediated by networks, relationships, and epistemologies to better acknowledge how Edith actively navigates the constraints of patriarchy, class relations, masculinist rationality, and genre. Exploring Patriarchal Systems in Neo-Victorian and Marital Gothic Genres To understand how Crimson Peak reflects contemporary debates about agency, relative autonomy, and patriarchal institutions, it is crucial to first establish that the nostalgic use of the Victorian era (1837-1901) in the Neo-Victorian genre perpetuates a cultural memory of the time period, rarely restrained by historical fact, to frame contemporary debates and to explore our relationship with the past. More specifically, our historical knowledge of the past is often constructed and mediated in a process of historical remembrance, recollection, and representation that is rarely neutral, with Neo-Victorian fiction writers shaping our cultural memory of the Victorian era by revisiting, rewriting, and reinterpreting the past from a contemporary mindset that reflects a nostalgic return to past certainty and resolution (Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory; see also Craig et al.; Botting, Gothic Romanced). Scholars of the Neo-Victorian emphasize that the genre uses this cultural memory of repressed nineteenth-century realities in order to explore more contemporary debates about civilization and progress, family trauma, abuse, gender roles, sexuality, and domestic violence (Mitchell, History and Taylor 11 Cultural Memory; see also Kohlke and Gutleben; Botting, Gothic Romanced). For example, the crumbling Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak reflects the characters’ anxieties about lost social status, isolation, perversion of family values, constrictive gender roles, women’s sexuality (more specifically how women are punished for their sexuality), incest, domestic violence, and childhood neglect at the hands of a stern mother who continues to haunt the house (Musap 10-11; Pedro 79-80; Montz 51).4 Due to the genre’s contemporary focus, our cultural memory often perpetuates misconceptions of the Victorian era. For example, Antonija Primorac argues that the tight-laced corset in Neo-Victorian texts symbolizes more contemporary concerns about sexual restraint and suffocating gender roles for women today because historical publications actually condemned tight lacing as a medically dangerous and conceited fetish (102-103). By mediating our cultural memory through recycled (often erroneous) cultural images of the Victorian era, the Neo-Victorian genre reinterprets historical structures in order to frame contemporary debates about gender roles and sexuality (Kohlke 248). In the case of Crimson Peak, the film uses its depiction of patriarchal systems to explore women’s relative autonomy in restrictive societal structures. By choosing to marry Thomas and pursue a sexual relationship with him, Edith elects to uphold the patriarchal institution of heterosexual marriage rather than remain a wealthy spinster. The Marital Gothic genre often demonstrates how marriage operates as a patriarchal institution complete with gender roles and behavioral expectations, yet narratives in this particular genre have historically struggled to find clear-cut answers to its common theme of patriarchal abuse. 4 A lot of scholarship on Crimson Peak analyzes the Sharpe siblings’ incestual relationship to identify contemporary anxieties about disruption of the nuclear family, domestic abuse, and long-lasting trauma from authoritarian parents. This focus on the incest and abuse is not crucial to my study’s emphasis on the debate about Edith’s agency and relative autonomy. For more on how the Neo-Victorian film uses its historical setting to explore contemporary anxieties about gender roles, the domestic sphere, domestic abuse, and the nuclear family, see Pedro and Musap. Taylor 12 Indeed, they sometimes unwittingly reinforce patriarchal assumptions about marriage by having the heroine perceive love to be the reward for enduring Gothic uncertainty, adapt to gendered behavioral expectations, seek agency by participating in the abuse of other victims, dramatize her victimization to make her oppressors repent, echo trauma through “repetition compulsion,” and/or overvalue the abuser’s perceived ills, authority, and affection (Massé In the Name of Love; Ellis; see also Gilbert and Gubar; Kohlke; Massé, “Gothic Repetition”).5 In a similar way, empowerment for the Neo-Victorian heroine has become coded within a capitalistic framework of personal choice, consumption, heterosexual desire, and sexual liberation that leaves thematic questions unresolved on a collective and societal level because she cannot mount a full assault on the patriarchal system that ensnares her (Primorac; Botting, Gothic Romanced; Kohlke). As a rich American heiress, Edith has the economic wealth to choose who to marry. She believes she can marry an impoverished baronet despite her father’s misgivings and still write her ghost stories in a “can have it all” attitude. A more Neo-Victorian take on the Marital Gothic heroine, Edith rejects the uncanny house, openly voices her discontent, and attempts to persuade her husband; however, marriage within a patriarchal repressive structure still curtails her choice to better fulfill the patriarch’s financial ambitions and reduce her to a weakened body. Even after his duplicity, Edith chooses to wait for Thomas in the film’s climax. This interpretation of the Marital Gothic genre foregrounds Edith’s decision to pursue a heterosexual relationship but also risks dismissing her pivotal relationships with the ghostly deceased women. Edith willingly and actively pursues a sexual relationship with her husband, 5 Michelle Massé, in particular, expands on her theory of cultural masochism that encourages women to mutilate and sacrifice themselves to earn the patriarch’s love. Edith is interesting in this regard because, despite attempting to flee multiple times, she willingly waits for Thomas in the climax when he declares love for her and asks her to wait for him. For more on cultural masochism in the Gothic, see Massé “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night” and In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Taylor 13 but she gradually relies more on the ghosts of dead women—the repressed Other—for information and support as she uncovers the house’s supernatural secrets. When her husband and sister-in-law dismiss her concerns, she turns to the ghosts for answers rather than blindly accept Thomas’s word that nothing is amiss. Thus, Edith forms an interpersonal network composed of women to circumvent the patriarchy. Edith and the ghosts all occupy similar subaltern positions within patriarchy, and their spiritualist network offers a kind of equality and mutual aid that counters the power imbalance in the film’s heterosexual relationships. Unlike her faith in her husband, Edith’s trust in the supernatural ghosts never falters. This counter to the heterosexual assumption in the Marital Gothic genre enables a more feminist and deconstructive critique that still acknowledges how heterosexual patriarchal institutions shape subjects but also recognizes counter perspectives and relationships that challenge that assumption (Rich 34-37; see also Bordo). As an active agent seeking companionship and love, Edith chooses to uphold the patriarchal institution of heterosexual marriage; however, I would argue that Edith also comes to prioritize her relationship with and responsibility to the repressed and supernatural ghostly Other. Ontology and Epistemology in Crimson Peak: “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” Because Crimson Peak is a Neo-Victorian Gothic film that consciously incorporates the supernatural, this study requires a crucial distinction between the film’s depiction of ontology and epistemology within the narrative. Building on Matthias Steup and Ram Neta’s concept of “perceptual knowledge,” which describes “the psychological nature of the perceptual processes through which we acquire knowledge of external objects,” I argue that Crimson Peak relies on “perceptual epistemology”—a theory of knowing and of establishing the ontological existence of objects through the direct and indirect sensory perception of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. In other words, Edith—as a spiritualist medium—perceives supernatural ghosts through her senses. Taylor 14 According to Steup and Neta, an epistemological framework requires belief, truth, and justification to be viable; therefore, it is crucial to first establish whether the film treats the supernatural as a verifiable truth that can be discovered and justified epistemologically. On an ontological level, Crimson Peak accepts and repeatedly reinforces the existence of ghosts through a perceptual epistemology that relies on Edith’s sensory perception of ghosts. For example, the framing of the film stresses their existence to the viewer with Edith asserting in voiceover “Ghosts are real. This much I know” at the beginning and ending. By opening and ending with this statement, the structure of the film encourages the audience to accept the ontological validity of the on-screen ghosts that Edith and the audience can perceive via sight and sound. The knowledge Edith gleans from her perceptual epistemology consists of direct sensory perceptions—which Steup and Neta define as direct realism—because the ghosts directly interact with her visual, auditory, and tactile senses. Furthermore, this perceptual epistemology reflects an indirect realism located outside of her direct senses because the ghosts also interact with other external objects in the room, such as door handles (Steup and Neta). By immersing the viewing and listening audience in glimpses of Edith’s perceptual epistemology and verbally reinforcing the existence of ghosts in narration, the film’s structure reinforces a similar reliance on sight and sound in the audience that supports the existence of ghosts within the film. The Sharpe siblings’ reactions to the concept of ghosts and to the information that Edith gleans from her supernatural encounters further support the ghosts’ existence. Rather than dismiss the supernatural outright in his initial meeting with Edith, Thomas Sharpe hints that “ghosts are not to be taken lightly.” Even in their private scenes without Edith present, the Sharpe siblings avoid discrediting the existence of ghosts and prioritize covering up their crimes. Taylor 15 For example, after Edith receives an audible warning from a red ghostly woman sitting in a bathtub with a meat cleaver buried in her skull, she pleads to be allowed to follow the ghost’s warning: “She knows who I am and wants me to leave.” The Sharpe siblings deliberately obstruct and undermine Edith’s perceptual knowledge through misdirection and insinuation that the encounter was nothing more than her imagination. The overall film does not entertain this ontological questioning of the supernatural for long, however. In the subsequent scene, Lucille immediately asks her brother “What is she doing? How could she know about mother?” While Lucille’s response fails to explicitly confirm the character’s beliefs about the supernatural, her pointed question indicates that Edith’s perception of the ghostly figure reflects an ontological truth. Despite gaslighting Edith about the true horrors of Allerdale Hall, it is Lucille, not Edith, who first realizes Edith is describing the ghost of the Sharpes’ murdered mother. Here, Lucille reinforces the idea that ghosts reflect an ontological reality in this film outside of Edith’s perspective. As I discuss in detail below, the former wives’ recordings also reflect a testimonial knowledge that further confirms other women have previously lived in the house. In short, the film’s insistence that ghosts do exist, combined with Lucille’s question of how Edith could know, stresses that the underlying question is an epistemological one about how the characters might discover and know the past rather than an ontological debate about the ghosts themselves. The film’s validation of the ghosts’ ontological status within the narrative is crucial to Edith’s perceptual epistemological approach because the ghostly Other symbolizes a challenge to a rationalist worldview. In “Technospectrality,” Fred Botting describes what he calls the four orders of “modernity’s spectrality,” ranging from pre-Enlightenment belief in ghosts as real “manifestations of a supernatural sphere” to spectrality as the postmodern product of a “disordered consciousness” that indicates an uncertain relationship with reality or technical Taylor 16 simulations that reflect hyperreality (19). Botting’s analysis emphasizes how ghosts frequently represent specific—often distorted—relationships with reality that blur the binaries of a rationalist worldview (19). Building on Derrida’s argument that the liminal figure of the specter blurs the binary of life and death, Colin Davis emphasizes that “the ghost becomes a focus for competing epistemological and ethical positions” because, according to Botting, they lend more definitive “shape, difference and substance to the systems that excluded them” (Davis 379; Botting, “Technospectrality” 18). Imbued with symbolic potential, the spectral Other represents an “artificial creature that is uncannily like us and completely different from us all at once” and thus conjures questions of identity and embodied subjectivity that represent a thematic challenge to societal practices, cultural values, rationalist worldviews, and stable binaries (Hogle 303; see also Botting, “Technospectrality”).6 In other words, the Other in the Gothic genre metaphorically symbolizes a deconstructive challenge to rationalist worldviews and stable binaries, thereby reevaluating the historiographies, discourses, and systemic practices that create the Other through marginalization (Davis 376; see also Botting, Gothic Romanced; Briggs; Edwards, “Introduction”). In particular, Davis stresses that the ghost operates as “the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks” (373). According to Bettina Bergo, the Levinasian Other thus presents an ethical opportunity “to rethink the meaning of existence” through dialogue that recognizes and respects the Other. By establishing the liminal ghosts as ontologically real and deserving of sympathy within the narrative, the film lends credence to Edith’s perceptual epistemology. As a result, her spiritual mediumship places her in a position of authority to initiate an ethical dialogue 6 Jerrold Hogle stresses that, due to the cultural misrepresentation of the Victorian era, the spectral Other in the Neo- Victorian genre often reflects our false misconceptions about the past. More specifically, Hogle argues “the neo- Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of that already spectral past and hence by its refaking of what is already fake and already an emblem of the neatly empty and dead” (298). For more on this distinction, see Hogle. Taylor 17 with the Levinasian Other and to challenge the rationalist worldviews that seek to silence women. Edith as a Woman Spiritualist Medium in a Neo-Victorian Film By engaging with the liminal ghosts and the epistemological challenge they represent, Edith builds on an actual historical practice of women acting as spiritualist mediums attuned to the supernatural. In his introduction to Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce emphasizes that women spiritualist mediums often enabled new modes of communication that “disassociated the gendered body from the patriarchal realm of thoughts and ideas” (12-14). These women exemplified an epistemological framework characterized by an uncanny feminine perception rooted in sensitivity to, and sensory perception of, the supernatural. This supernatural perception draws on a historical trope to portray women as passive mediums with uncanny access to the supernatural by virtue of their gender.7 As an aspiring fiction writer of ghost stories who can see ghosts herself, Edith builds on this literary and historical tradition of the woman spiritualist medium, who often served as a mediator in navigating technological and supernatural communication due to gendered assumptions about her “allegedly feminine traits: sensitivity or sympathy” (Galvan 8-12). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were often portrayed as emotionally attuned mediums and passive information conduits who served as neutral mediators in service to others, usually men in a patriarchal society (Galvan 13, 29-30, 52). In The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication, Jill 7 This study builds on the term “female medium” that Jill Galvan introduces in The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication. While Galvan’s more broad use of the term “female medium” refers to women mediating both supernatural encounters and technological communication, I have chosen to substitute the word “women” for “female” to reflect more contemporary discourse’s preference to emphasize gender (“women”) rather than biological sex (“female”). Taylor 18 Galvan highlights how the spiritualist medium’s supposed feminine sensitivity often relied on the hysterical woman trope, stereotypically reducing her to a mere body in service to others: Central to spiritualistic pursuits was the séance medium or ‘sensitive,’ a term implying important presumptions about the minds and bodies of the women who were mediumship’s usual practitioners. The medium was a passive instrument, well attuned to the subtle cues, sometimes described as vibrations, by which the spirits expressed themselves. (29-30) However, the portrayal of spiritualist mediums’ bodies and minds as merely sensitive instruments for others to convey information also risks simplifying the trope and practice itself. In fact, Galvan argues that the depiction of women as unconscious mediators and “weak-minded conduits” belies the underlying emotional work and subtler choices often exercised by these spiritualist mediums, including how they subverted or manipulated this socially assigned and culturally gendered role to act “purposefully and in their own self-interest” (14, 63).8 A real life example of this clever manipulation of gender roles and assumptions can be glimpsed in the American Fox sisters—Kate and Margaret Fox—who rose to prominence in the mid-1850s when their apparent ability to converse with the dead through “phantom knockings” catapulted them into fame and lucrative professional tours. These tours contributed to the sisters’ authority on spiritual matters and the Modern Spiritualism movement (1840s to 1920s)—despite Margaret’s later confession that it was all a hoax (Abbott; Galvan 3-4). Crimson Peak is set during this Spiritualism movement, and—much like the Fox sisters—Edith uses her supernatural sensitivity 8 In Dracula, Mina Harker is a prime example of a spiritualist medium who appears to be a passive informational conduit (through her secretarial work and her telepathic connection to Dracula) and who is positioned as subordinate within the novel’s gender hierarchy (the men exclude her from vampire hunting due to assumptions based about her gender). However, Mina consciously exercises her supernatural sensitivity, secretarial knowledge, and information channeling to direct the group’s actions against the Count and encourage more open interpersonal communication (76-84). Mina’s deliberate navigation of gender roles demonstrates how socially constructed gender roles can be circumvented (84). See Galvan for more clarification on the nuance. Taylor 19 to navigate patriarchal constraint. In Crimson Peak, Edith aims to subvert gender discrimination in the publication industry: she assumes the secretarial role of typist as she transcribes her own manuscript, hiding her “feminine” handwriting before submitting it for publication. In short, Edith builds on a pre-existing literary and historical tradition of the spiritualist medium who refuses to remain completely passive or neutral and often attempts to use her gendered traits of sensitivity, sympathy, and mediation to her own advantage when disrupting her socially assigned category as an emotionally attuned yet passive woman. As a spiritualist medium building upon this historical precedent, Edith’s unwavering belief in her abilities lends credence to her epistemological approach. As stated earlier, Edith’s narrative voiceover affirms that she believes in ghosts at the beginning and ending of the film: “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” Edith’s belief in her own perceptual epistemology stems from a childhood memory of her mother’s ghostly visit where she warned Edith to “beware of Crimson Peak.” After, Edith remains fully committed to the ontological existence of ghosts and her ability to perceive and interact with them via sense data, thus reinforcing the unwavering conviction that informs her actions. After her first nightly encounter with a ghost at Allerdale Hall, Edith acts on the information she learns from the ghost and approaches Thomas to explicitly confront him about “violent deaths” in the house. The Sharpe siblings make excuses, but—while Edith ceases to openly disagree with their version of events—she never accepts their explanations, never questions her belief in the ghosts, never doubts her ability to perceive ghosts, and thus refuses to abandon her own belief system. Instead, as she becomes more attuned to Allerdale Hall, Edith actively seeks out the ghosts and purposefully interacts with them despite their monstrous, distorted appearance: “If you’re here with me, give me a signal.” Edith’s deliberate interactions with the ghostly Other reflect Derrida’s assertion that interacting with Taylor 20 specters “is a productive opening of meaning” that challenges underlying preconceptions (Davis 377). Because Edith has an unwavering belief in her supernatural abilities, she assumes an active role in using this spiritual mediumship to create interpersonal networks with the ghosts she encounters, which she uses to navigate her own precarious situation as the next potential victim. While the film treats her approach as a valid way to uncover the past, her agency is contested by other characters’ assumptions about the epistemological value of recording media. Mediation: The Contrast Between Women Spiritualist Mediums and Recording Media Despite being able to perceive and interact with the ghosts of Allerdale Hall, Edith only recognizes the true nature of her predicament and attempts to leave after that warning is conveyed via the recording media that these murdered women left behind: phonograph recordings, photographs, marriage certificates, and a newspaper clipping about the brutal murder of the Sharpe siblings’ mother. Here, Edith’s perceptual epistemology brushes up against more testimonial evidence conveyed by recording media, which relies on similar uncanny and disembodied voices and images that communicate information in active networks of knowledge construction. The timing of Edith’s first attempt to leave the house seems to place greater emphasis on the recording media than on the spiritualist medium’s insights; however, this supposed contradiction more accurately reflects the Gothic genre as a whole. Joseph Crawford highlights the complexity of epistemologies in the Gothic: Gothic media is famous for its reflexive self-destabilisation. In a tradition that goes back to the Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gothic novels have often aggressively undermined their own textual authority, presenting readers with texts which are unreliable, incomplete, or self-contradictory, expositions which explain and Taylor 21 communicate nothing and passages of description which merely gesture helplessly at their own inability to describe their subjects. (41) Despite using the recording media as a contrast, the film reinforces Edith’s spiritual mediumship as the superior form of mediation. For example, Edith’s two primary allies—her father and her childhood friend Dr. McMichael—both conduct their own separate investigations on the Sharpe siblings but primarily rely on recording media. During an intervention with the Sharpe siblings, Edith’s father presents an early marriage certificate as proof that validates his initial dislike of Thomas Sharpe: “That document there gave me my answer.” These allies discern the horrible truth about the prior marriages and murders from legal documents and newspapers. However, their assumption that these recordings provide stable and reliable evidence leads them to intervene without fully comprehending the physical threat that the Sharpe siblings pose. To understand why this recording media evidence carries such persuasive weight with certain characters in the film, it is crucial to understand the parallels between the supernatural ghosts observed by women spiritualist mediums and the uncanny temporality of spectral media recordings. First, spiritualist mediums and uncanny recording media both convey similar ghostly hauntings, dislocated from their temporal and physical spaces. For example, Edith’s first childhood interaction with her mother’s ghost reflects this bodiless, temporal dislocation that Edith characterizes as “a warning from out of time.” Documents, photographs, and phonograph recordings represent a similar uncanny disembodiment, with media capturing ghostly virtual beings through “the electronically mediated worlds of telecommunications” that challenge simplistic binaries of human and machine, life and death (Sconce 4; see also Edwards “Introduction”). Edith hears similar out-of-time and fragmented warnings from the wax phonograph recordings produced by two of Thomas’s murdered wives: Pamela Upton and Enola Taylor 22 Scotti. Dr. McMichael likewise explains that the “genuine” latent images of ghost photography capture ghostly traces of individuals from a particular time: “Now, it’s my belief that houses, places, be it by chemical compound in the earth or the minerals in the stone, can retain impressions of a person that is no longer living.” In the postmodern framework of the Neo- Victorian genre, self-conscious and fractured found documents “reveal decentred and destructured subjects” that echo the ghosts’ fragmented identities rooted in bodiless and temporal dislocation (Brindle 286). In other words, the ghosts and these audible and visual recordings convey similar disembodied and fragmented subjects whose identities have been fractured by domestic violence. The film uses this testimonial knowledge, mediated through uncanny recording media, to confirm rather than challenge the spiritualist medium’s perceptual epistemology. Despite their similarities with spiritualist mediumship, recording media appear to carry more persuasive weight with Mr. Cushing and Dr. McMichael in the film because the characters falsely assume that recording media are stable and present a neutral truth. On the surface, the act of viewing a photograph or listening to a recording appears to position the viewer or listener as a passive receiver; however, viewers’ and listeners’ interactions with media actually parallel the interactions within Edith’s supernatural networks. According to Sconce, viewers and listeners consciously engage in similar “interrelated and interdependent” networks in order to consciously construct knowledge based on the textual data provided by recording media (8). For example, Justin D. Edwards stresses that “the experience of the filtered sound is located in the situated space of the listener and can only be embodied, or rather re-embodied, in this listening process” (“Eerie Technologies” 53). In other words, listeners interacting with recording media have distinct parallels with spiritualist mediums because they retain an active role in constructing Taylor 23 knowledge beyond the data presented in the recording. In Crimson Peak, McMichael makes assumptions that go beyond the information presented in The Cumberland Ledger newspaper— another example of technologically mediated information—when he deduces that Lucille was responsible for her mother’s murder: “A convent education in Switzerland the news account says, but I think a different type of institution.” Likewise, Enola’s phonograph recording accusing the Sharpe siblings of murderous intent envisions a sympathetic audience who will bring her killer to justice: “Should they [the recordings] be found, let it be known that they did this. To whoever finds this, know that they are killing me. The poison is in the tea. Find my body. Take it home. I don’t want to die.” Listening to the recordings in secret, Edith immediately recognizes herself as the next potential victim and attempts to flee the house. Just like with spiritualist mediumship, recording media’s users must engage with fragmented information provided by disembodied voices and images to reconstruct and act upon knowledge. Unlike the spiritualist medium, however, the listener or viewer retains a false sense of certainty from recording media due to a misleading perception that recording media are stable and convey an objective truth. The characters’ belief that the recording media are reliable rests on the misconception that recording media are more transparent and stable than supernatural encounters. In Crimson Peak, McMichael’s explanation that the “genuine” latent images in ghost photographs have “retain[ed] impressions” of deceased individuals conveys this assumption that the camera can capture moments “invisible to the naked eye.” Here, the photograph is taken as evidence more reliable than the human eye alone, more reliable than Edith’s perceptual epistemology despite both relying on the sense of sight. However, Kate Mitchell clarifies that the photograph only appears to offer visual proof that conveys a concrete historical record: Taylor 24 The photograph’s intimation of unmediated knowledge and absolute veracity, its perceived incapacity to lie, promised itself to positivist history’s project of depicting the past ‘as it really happened,’ pledging to provide ultimate representation and authentication for the historical record. (145-146) Yet, this depiction of visual truth as neutral and recording media as stable can be misleading because this assumption about reliability “implies that the photograph provides knowledge beyond its own image” but also overlooks the context of how that image is constructed, such as the photographer’s influence in staging the photograph (Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory 145). Furthermore, the viewer’s relationship with the photograph also influences knowledge construction because the viewer’s perspective of the photograph often objectifies the past image (Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory 148). In Crimson Peak, Edith discovers photographs that depict Thomas with various women who she discovers to be his past wives. Unlike their ghost counterparts, the women in the photographs remain objects for the character to gaze upon, just like the audible recordings remain incapable of further direct commentary with the listener. In short, recording media’s perceived stability locates the viewer or listener in a false position of power over meaning in the information network, which risks objectifying its recorded subjects. Due to these assumptions about objectivity, other characters mistakenly prioritize recording media as stable and neutral, but Edith’s information network creates a more active and respectful engagement with its ghostly subjects. The ghosts represent Edith’s ethical encounter with the Levinasian Other: “This other speaks to me, implores or commands me. In responding, I discover my responsibility to them. This is the ground of ethics or indeed our concern with ethics as the good of the other person” (Bergo). Like Edith’s own troubling of the active/passive binary, the ghosts resist simplistic subject/object classification because Edith’s form of mediation Taylor 25 enables the ghostly victims to have more agency in their interactions with the living. As is the case with photographs and phonograph recordings, Edith perceives the ghosts visually and audibly. She sees their skeletal, decaying, red-clay-covered figures and hears their agonized moaning, creaking, and sobbing. Unlike recordings that risk the viewer or listener objectifying their subjects, however, the ghosts mediated via a spiritualist network can physically interact with their present environments to communicate their warnings about the past, present, and future. Combined, the murdered women lead Edith to the linen closet containing the phonograph recordings from the past, point Edith toward the Sharpe siblings’ incest in the present, and audibly whisper warnings about the future. Edith’s mother warns a young Edith about Crimson Peak, and Thomas’s mother foreshadows Thomas’s death: “Leave here now, Edith. His blood will be on your hands.” In short, Edith’s role as a spiritualist medium allows the ghostly women to transcend the constraints of recording media. The ghosts maintain more control over how they interact with the living. Rendered powerless through their death and disembodiment, the only form of agency left to them is to ally themselves with Edith and warn her about the true dangers of married life and the domestic sphere (Kindinger para. 12). Whereas the dead women risk objectification and decreased autonomy in information networks based on technologically mediated recordings, the ghosts retain a personal agency and identity that resists simple objectification in their interactions with the spiritualist medium. Edith’s approach offers the heroine a more active role in using her liminal status as a spiritualist medium and newcomer to Allerdale Hall to form an information network that respects the ghostly Other. However, as established earlier, other scholars still undercut Edith’s agency. For example, even when acknowledging how Edith actively uses spiritualist mediumship to construct this spectral network, Montz argues that “instead of a revelation of feminist agency, Taylor 26 what we see is the heroine providing hope for the abject. What she provides, instead of her own autonomy in the text, . . . is symbolic hope for those the text’s society discounts” (49). Because Edith visually conforms to genre and audience expectations of the Gothic damsel in distress, Montz argues that “Edith moves from the subject position that we desire for our contemporary heroines back to the object status more likely in the Victorian text” (53). To further bolster her claim, Montz quotes Laura Mulvey to stress how the visual language of the male gaze—and its binary “split between active/male and passive/female”—reduces Edith to a passive object (qtd. in Montz 53; Mulvey 837). In short, as the heroine of a Neo-Victorian film, Edith and her spiritualist mediumship are complicated by how the visual medium of the film Crimson Peak— and by extension the Neo-Victorian genre—mediates women’s bodies to objectify them for the male viewer and to emphasize their physical vulnerability. While Montz makes a valid critique about the male gaze objectifying Edith, this overemphasis on the film’s visual mediation of Edith’s body inadvertently reverts to an overly simplistic active/male and passive/female binary. Labelling Edith as a passive character because she is mediated through a heterosexual male gaze obscures her active contribution to the film’s epistemological framework and the film’s deeper critique about the body horror of domestic violence. Neo-Victorian Cinematography: The Mediation of Women’s Bodies as “Mediums of Culture” To better reconsider how Edith’s body is mediated via Neo-Victorian cinematography, this study must first address the symbolic mediation of the body itself in the film medium. According to Susan Bordo, the body serves as a “medium of culture” that becomes “a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body” (2096). When inscribed Taylor 27 in the audio-visual medium of film, bodies remain regulated subjects because “the appropriate surface presentation of the self” is conveyed in visual images, such as “clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior” (Bordo 2101; see also Crawford; Edwards, “Introduction”). For example, Crimson Peak relies on costume design to convey the stark divide between modern capitalistic progress and impoverished feudal aristocracy: Edith’s bright mid- 1890s dresses visually contrast with Lucille’s darker 1880s dresses with more antiquated bustles (Montz 54).9 Thus, the symbolic mediation of women’s bodies in Crimson Peak contributes to the thematic debate about Edith’s agency. At first glance, the film’s visual mediation of Edith’s body appears to just reflect a heterosexual male gaze that—according to prior scholars—renders her a passive object whose beautiful physical appearance, naked body, and emotional turmoil the audience can consume. This assumption rests on a long trend in the Gothic genre that reduces women to “objects of pursuit, imprisonment, [and] violation” who are deprived of autonomy and respect and then punished for any sexual activity regardless of marital status. Thus, Gothic damsels often serve as cautionary morality tales that conflate sex with violence and encourage certain behaviors in heterosexual relationships (Botting, Gothic Romanced 153; Rich 20; see also Montz; Kohlke). On the surface, Crimson Peak reflects Jane Mitchell’s argument about how “the gothic uses and abuses a woman’s body,” because the visual mediation of women’s bodies seems to stress their physical vulnerability and sexual objectification (67). For example, one of Edith’s initial ghostly encounters occurs during a bathing scene that emphasizes both her naked body and her vulnerability to an attack. Crimson Peak even “make[s] the viewer complicit in this horror” and 9 In addition to depicting a thematic clash of capitalism and feudalism, this contrast in costume choice also reflects the split between good and bad femininity as embodied by Edith and Lucille respectively (Mitchell, “Reclaiming the Monster” 58; Montz 54). For more information on the thematic costume contrast between Edith and Lucille, see Mitchell “Reclaiming the Monster” and Montz. Taylor 28 establishes a “direct relationship between the heroine and audience” in the first foreboding image of Edith as a nightgown-clad heroine covered in blood “staring directly at the camera, into the viewer’s eyes” (Montz 51-53). Additionally, the film turns her emotional and psychological pain into a spectacle for the audience to consume.10 Prodded on by Edith’s disapproving father, Thomas Sharpe ends his initial courtship with Edith by publicly breaking her heart and disparaging her writing abilities at a dinner party. Later, at the height of Edith’s physical and emotional vulnerability, Lucille burns her manuscript. In both instances, the camera focuses on Edith’s face—her teary, red-rimmed eyes and distressed facial expressions—as the actress emotes the character’s emotional distress. Here, Crimson Peak harkens back to longstanding traditions in the Gothic genre and Neo-Victorian cinematography that visually reduce the Gothic heroine to a passive body objectified and sexualized in the heterosexual male gaze. Reading Edith’s vulnerability and objectification solely through this male gaze, however, risks perpetuating cultural assumptions that foreground the heterosexual male perspective and conflate vulnerability with weakness in a strong/weak binary. More specifically, the film’s visual mediation of Edith’s physical frailty and the ghosts’ grotesque forms also symbolizes the inevitable body horror of such objectification and domestic violence. As Crawford argues, the medium of film is an imperfect “mixture of accuracy and distortion” that complicates its own symbolic depiction of the human body; therefore, Bordo argues that dissecting the visual depiction of the body in cinematography “demands an awareness of the often contradictory relations between images and practice, between rhetoric and reality” (Crawford 41; Bordo 2111). 10 On a more symbolic level, this theme of the Gothic heroine being visually consumed by the audience is reflected within the film by Edith’s butterfly motif. Edith, with her bright costume colors, is often visually linked with butterflies while Lucille is associated with the black moths that “feed on butterflies.” In one notable scene, a butterfly is literally consumed by ants, which foreshadows the Sharpe siblings’ attempts to exploit Edith and parallels how the audience consumes Edith’s visual image. For more on consumption in the Gothic genre, see Botting Gothic Romanced. Taylor 29 For the sake of this particular study, Bordo stresses how taking certain forms of femininity to an extreme can deconstruct binaries and “protest the conditions of the female world” by depicting the logical and destructive outcome of certain ideologies (2103-2105). Therefore, the cinematic representation of Edith—a visual object of heterosexual male desire who endures intense physical and emotional torment—also conveys an embodied protest against such objectification by demonstrating the inevitable body horror that results from the domestic violence committed against her and her ghostly predecessors. The distorted depictions of the murdered women’s bodies form another site of embodied protest against their own murders and foreshadow Edith's own potential gruesome fate. The physical threat to Edith’s body and person is foreshadowed in the ghosts of Thomas’s wives and mother who are visually reduced to first fragile wheelchair-bound invalids then decaying corpses and grotesque specters that encourage the audience’s disgust and pity. According to Bergo, “Levinas argued that we can approach death as possibility only through that of others and that we grasp being as finite by way of their mortality.” Thus, the physical manifestations of the Sharpe siblings’ dead victims—skeletal, shattered, decaying, and stained blood-red—reflect the physical horror of the corpses submerged in Allerdale Hall’s womb-like crypt in the basement, which harkens back to Diana Wallace’s assertion that tomb-like crevices reflect anxieties about suppressed maternal power and spatially symbolize “the heroine’s fears of what might happen to her because she is a woman” (154-155). The physical horror of the ghosts reflects Edwards’ argument that “the abnormal body of the monster-human is caught up in a matrix that elevates the productive, transformative, and manipulative body through a system of signification that clearly marks out the perimeters of normalcy” (“Introduction” 8-9). Furthermore, the fragmented, visual distortion of the ghosts in Crimson Peak reflects an extreme “subjectless Taylor 30 subjectivity” in the Neo-Victorian Gothic that symbolizes “fragmented, abjected, and haunted identities that appear unable to ever completely ‘possess’ or ‘own’ themselves” (Kohlke 223- 226). As a result, this film’s visual mediation of women’s bodies offers a contemporary critique of how patriarchy “traumatizes women and turns them into ghosts and monsters” (Kindinger para. 19). The visual horror and objectification reflect the real-life horror of physical, psychological, and sexual violence against women because, even though they remain active figures in Edith’s spiritualist network, the murdered women are visually reduced to rotting corpses. Conclusion: How to Finally Escape the Patriarchal Haunted House By characterizing Edith in either/or terms—as either an active heroine or a passive victim—prior scholarship on Crimson Peak has reinstated the very binary logic that the Gothic genre habitually unsettles. Consequently, such scholarship has obscured the complex role that mediation plays in the film. The Marital Gothic and Neo-Victorian genres continue to frame contemporary debates about contesting epistemologies, ethical responsibility toward the Other, the horrors of domestic violence, and women’s relative autonomy in restrictive patriarchal systems. Scholars’ continued reliance on an active/passive binary to interpret Edith’s agency as a Gothic heroine entails certain assumptions that have often gendered the concept of agency as active and masculine. Thus, prior scholarship has typically defined whether or not a woman can have agency through her ability to adopt masculine traits and/or her relationship with a man (Gilbert and Gubar). Crimson Peak provides an excellent case study of how this binary can limit scholarly analysis because—at first glance—Edith superficially appears to be a passive and objectified victim of both the patriarchal setting in the Marital Gothic genre and the male gaze in Neo-Victorian cinematography. Redefining Edith’s agency as mediated, however, reveals the Taylor 31 need for a different critical framework that acknowledges the constraints upon individual actions and that can more adequately analyze the multiple factors that limit or otherwise mediate agency within Gothic scholarship. To truly appreciate the deconstructive challenge in the Gothic, scholars need to reevaluate the false dichotomies presented by the heteronormative patriarchal ideology—such as the active-masculine/passive-feminine binary through which we perceive agency—to analyze the more complex ways agency is situated and mediated. To fixate on whether a contemporary Gothic heroine like Edith Cushing either is or is not a victim of the patriarchy is to rely on an active-masculine/passive-feminine dichotomy that obscures her relationships with other women and fails to recognize the complex and subtle ways that the heroine may use her relative autonomy to reinforce, subvert, or resist the heterosexual patriarchal system that restrains her. Edith exists not only within the patriarchal context of the Marital Gothic but also in a network of relationships with other women. By demonstrating how Edith’s agency is mediated rather than wholly negated within the film, this study has attempted to provide an alternative theoretical model for future work. In order to better theorize the agency of Gothic heroines in particular, and to better evaluate the genre’s deconstructive challenge to societal and cultural hierarchies more broadly, scholars must reassess the false dichotomies and heteronormative assumptions built into audience expectations—including how those assumptions impact scholarship centered on the Gothic. Perhaps, then, readers and scholars alike might truly find a way to finally escape the patriarchal house that haunts us all. Taylor 32 Works Cited Abbott, Karen. “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism.” Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Oct. 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism- 99663697/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2022. Bergo, Bettina. “Emmanuel Levinas.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2022. Botting, Fred. Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender, and Technology in Contemporary Fictions.1st ed., Routledge, 2008. Botting, Fred. “Technospectrality: Essay on Uncannimedia.” Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Routledge, 2019, pp. 17-34. Brekus, Catherine. “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency.” Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman, University of Utah Press, 2016, pp. 15-41. EBSCOHost, https://web. p.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAyNXhuYV9fMTQ2MTU1Ml9fQU41?si d=4e66e390-546c-45d4-b474-44e1402a317c@redis&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1. Briggs, Julia. “The Ghost Story.” A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp. 122-131. Brindle, Kym. “Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo- Victorian Gothic.” Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re- Imagined Nineteenth Century, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Rodopi, 2012, pp. 279-299. EBSCOHost, hal.weber.edu/login?url=https://search.ebsco host.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=562534&site=ehost-live&ebv= EB&ppid=pp_Cover. Taylor 33 Craig, Siobhan, et al. “Epistemology and Mediation in Historical Film and Television: How the Gendered Past is Constructed in Knowledge and Representation.” Gender & History, vol. 30, no. 3, Wiley Blackwell, 2018, pp. 570-594, doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12395. Crawford, Joseph. “Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology.” Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Routledge, 2019, pp. 35- 46. Cox, Jessica. “Neo-Victorianism.” Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ display/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0083.xml#:~:text=Critical %20debates%20have%20also%20examined,of%20the%20Neo%2DVictorian%20novel. Davis, Colin. “État Présent Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 373-379, doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143. Edwards, Justin. “Eerie Technologies and Gothic Acoustemology.” Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Routledge, 2019, pp. 48-59. Edwards, Justin. “Introduction: Technogothics.” Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Routledge, 2019, pp. 1-16. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. “Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics.” A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp. 257- 268. Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919. Cornell University Press, 2010. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gunbar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000. Taylor 34 Hogle, Jerrold. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp. 293- 304. “Influences of Crimson Peak.” YouTube, uploaded by IGN, 16 Oct. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghLINZ-woIY. Accessed 14 April 2021. Kindinger, Evangelina. “The Ghost Is Just a Metaphor: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, Nineteenth-Century Female Gothic, and the Slash.” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 55-71, necsus-ejms. org/the-ghost-is-just-a-metaphor-guillermo-del-toros-crimson-peak-nineteenth-century- female-gothic-and-the-slasher/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection.” Neo- Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Rodopi, 2012, pp. 221- 250. EBSCOHost, hal.weber.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=562534&site=ehost-live&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_Cover. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben. “The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations.” Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Rodopi, 2012, pp. 1-48. EBSCOHost, hal.weber.edu/login?url= https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=562534&site=eh ost-live&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_Cover. Taylor 35 Massé, Michelle. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night.” Signs, vol. 15, no. 4, 1990, pp. 679-709. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3174638. Accessed 4 March 2021. Massé, Michelle. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Cornell University Press, 1992. Mitchell, Jane. “Reclaiming the Monster: Abjection and Subversion in the Marital Gothic Novel.” Studies in Arts and Humanities, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 53-72. Directory of Open Access Journals, doi.org/10.18193/sah.v4i1.125. Accessed 28 Jan. 2021. Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/ handle/20.500.12657/34601/392750.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Montz, Amy. “The Dangers of Gothic Sexuality in Crimson Peak and Penny Dreadful.” Studies in the Fantastic, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 46-66. Project MUSE, doi.org/10.1353/sif.2020.0014. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 833-44. www.composingdigitalmedia.org/f15_mca/mca_reads/mulvey .pdf Musap, Emilia. “Monstrous Domesticity—Home as a Site of Oppression in Crimson Peak.” Altered States, vol. 8, no. 1, University of Tampa Press, University of Zadar, 2017, pp. 1- 14. Directory of Open Access Journals, doi.org/10.15291/sic/1.8.lc.3. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Taylor 36 Pedro, Dina. “Challenging the Victorian Nuclear Family Myth: The Incest Trope in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo- American Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2020, pp. 76-93, doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2020- 42.1.05. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Primorac, Antonija. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980).” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 11-48. Project MUSE, doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2003.0079. Sconce, Jeffrey. “Introduction.” Haunting Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Duke University Press, 2000. Steup, Matthias, and Ram Neta. “Epistemology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 11 April 2020, plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatJust. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022. Wallace, Diana. “Displacing the Past: Daphne du Maurier and the Modern Gothic.” Female Gothic Histories: Gender, Histories, and the Gothic, University of Wale Press, 2013, pp.132-162. EBSCOHost, web-a-ebscohost-com.hal.weber.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook /ZTAyNXhuYV9fNTQ3NjkyX19BTg2?sid=a08564b7-2209-4758-89b6-5c7957a60ee e@sdc-v-sessmgr02&vid=0&format=EB&lpid=lp_132&rid=0. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. “Why Crimson Peak is Not a Horror Movie.” YouTube, uploaded by IGN, 18 Oct. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsqxBnS-22s. Accessed 14 April 2021.