Unsaintly Hunger

Unsaintly Hunger: Gothic Love as Literary Disease

Good literature– whether the appreciation or creation of such– is merely a symptom of mental illness. Among the plethora of all-consuming and debilitating psychological ailments haunting literary expression, none is more ruinous than love. Love given, love taken, or love only imagined– it rots the heart, corrodes the mind, and curdles the soul. Truly it is a tale as old as time. Beginning with the original sin, Eve's love and lust for knowledge, followed by Solomon's love of foreign women and vast riches, and King Ahab's love for a domineering queen– quickly love leads to the lap of destruction. This is indisputably the foundation for gothic literature, beginning in the earliest human documents and leaving trails through our history until the grotesque blossoming of 19th century literature. A plague that drives frail and ghostly young women to drown themselves and brooding byronic men to suicide– an ointment we apply to the gaping pus-filled holes inflicted by the venomous teeth of past loves.

Gothic literature, in its truest form, worships both slow burning descent and fever-pitched spiraling madness, arresting sickness, inexplicable haints, and the unearthly macabre. At least one of these elements will be found in every piece of gothic literature– a favorite of mine being La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats.

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“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew… I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild…”

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In the same spirit of Keats, Lord Byron, and the Brontes– my own works are not spared from this dually cherished and despised mantle of misshapen passion for elegies of obsession– drenched in psychological turmoil and decorated with congealed ink, transcribed for those infected by madness.

Madness is the birthright for the spiritual children of macabre fiction. In these chronicles, to be entirely and unwaveringly conscious is to be afflicted, to see and fully behold what others disavow, to materialize that which cannot be borne aloft, to know love in her truest form as a malady and the self as an inescapable bondage. Settings in this genre are especially important as they are a portal into the character’s or the author’s mental state. The peak culmination of gothic fiction began in the 19th century in the midst of the Victorian and Edwardian eras– a time where numerous noble families became separated from their ancestors’ wealth but managed to retain ownership of their residences. These family estates became decaying shrines in memory of past glory— empty ballrooms with cracked plaster walls, overzealous ivy strangling the exterior of century old manors, and exceedingly disgruntled heirs who have only inherited an antiquated and rotting carcass constructed centuries ago. The house itself may be ruinously decayed but the psychological magnitude of this is significantly amplified by the equally perverted mind seeking a form of comfort by surrendering one's senses to humusation– a holy form of self harm disguised as self-imposed Renaissance.

Why is that gothic insanity almost always blossoms from love rather than hatred? And in the event a story as we know it seems to begin with hatred, it is only because we have arrived too late to see the hatred grow, for hatred to grow a seed of love must have been planted and then infected by some kind of vile and malicious bacteria. Grief, guilt, desire, and repression– festering byproducts of septic love and burdensome emotions every human faces but only a select few have been cursed enough to understand them on a spiritual level. Gothicism is not a cloak you can slide over your pure body, it is a mark you’ve been born with or a keloidal scar inflicted upon you. When your eyes are covered by the veil of unsaintly passion your soul understands and finds beauty in symbolic obstacles central to gothic tales and your mind begins to fully grasp the metaphors of disaster. One of which being fire, the all consuming heat that incinerates our guilt, a small thread of hell we weave into our cognizance and silently pray will wipe away our affliction.

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In Jane Eyre, Bertha– “the madwoman in the attic”– sets fire to Thornfield representing the fiery and consumptive chaos of madness, repression, and silent revolt. The flames, sparked by Mrs. Bertha Rochester herself, gorge themselves on the suffocating walls of her husband's estate physically ravaging the manor and exhibiting her own feelings of the current irreconcilable state of her marriage. Bertha’s act of arson is not senseless destruction, but a final, inarticulate cry—a pyre constructed from prolonged isolation, earth shattering betrayal, and stifling confinement. The estate, once a monument to refined patriarchal order and strict control, is unraveled by the very woman its bulwark sought to conceal

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In literature another fascinating allegory we see is love represented by cannibalistic consumption. To love in gothic literature is to be devoured. The act of love, a hunger unsatisfied, is a visceral dance of gnashing teeth and soaked flesh. It is the body consumed, the soul drained, yet the lover remains, ravenous, never sated. In love, we feast on each other, even as we starve ourselves. The hypothesis of love as Thyestean consumption has primordial roots, winding through both myth and religion, from the sacred communion of Christ's blood and body, to the cursed and somewhat erotic vampirism of the undead. In the Eucharist, love in its most pure and undefiled form, is embodied as Christ’s flesh, laid before his believers and then torn apart by unworthy hands and savoured by eagerly penitent mouths—a holy sacrament of life brought forth through the ultimate sacrifice. Similarly, in Carmilla and Dracula, love and hunger are unquestionably intertwined, each bite an invitation to endless desire. These creatures of the dark halls of Tarturus do not simply siphon blood, they consume the very essence of the soul—erotic and perverse, this form of intimacy transcends the physical. Love in the gothic is not a feeling—it is a taste, a liquid that slides down the throat and pools in the stomach, until your body rubenesque and your teeth stained red. To be wholly consumed, or to personally consume, is to feel pleasure in obliteration. Gothic love is truly an appetite that knows no end, an insatiable hunger that demands to be fed continuously, leaving only a drained carcass, and the echo of a kiss that devours all.

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My love for you gathers in my throat, depriving my lungs of this damp putrid air, You will be the death of me, undoubtedly so— whether physically or spiritually you will be the death of what minute good there is in this hollow shell or the death of my perpetual yearning and agony— which would be the destruction of my truest form.

My longing for you a blockage in my esophagus, how could I even begin to consume you? Would you be enough to satiate my hunger? I have an insatiable appetite my love, an unquenchable thirst.

You the death of I? No— I the death of you I most assuredly would choke you out- my ribs, bloody and gnarled fingers wrapped around your being, and you, my heart, firmly set in my sternum. Slowly, slowly I will crush you.

~an excerpt from the soon to be

Published book “The Midnight Vows”

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Thus, we return to the central affliction of worthwhile literature: love—unadulterated is not a virtue but a virus. In the mad tradition of Bertha Mason’s unrelenting fire, of Keats’ fevered love sick knight, of Christ’s battered and torn flesh and Dracula’s hungry blood stained lips, we see that love festers, it burns, it consumes. It is not a partner to sanity but its natural and overpowering predator. This is the curse of gothic literature: to know that beauty decays, that devotion is a knife, and that to love is to invite one’s own desecration. Inherited madness, ancestral guilt, and the longing to return an idealized Eden all collapse into a single revelation of truth—gothicism is not a genre, it is a psychological condition. We—the lovers, the pen masters, the afflicted—do not merely create suffering for art’s sake. We simply transcribe the symptoms of our incurable desire: to rot beautifully, to ache meaningfully, and to consume, or be consumed, in the name of a love that leaves the body rubenesque and the soul gorged. Gothic love is never a moment. It is a slow, sacred devouring.