It’s time for another installment of Gothic Settings, a series of posts in which I explore recurring landscapes and structures that serve as the backdrop to innumerable Gothic stories. So far, we’ve explored such iconic settings as the classic castle and the romantic moors. This week’s setting is one of my very favorites: the ancestral home.
The ancestral home is, in many ways, a more modern successor to the castle. Though lacking the castle’s sense of medievalism and association with fantastical court romances, the ancestral home can be just as sprawling, with a labyrinth of rooms, secret passageways, and subterranean crypts. Or it can be a more modest home, just large enough to hold a family and their accrued baggage. An ancestral home can be located in any town, city, or isolated landscape, in any country, allowing the Gothic to extend into new climes not visited before. This was particularly important to the development of the American Gothic, given our unfortunate lack of castles (or moors, for that matter). The defining feature of the ancestral home is that it has housed the same family for multiple generations and become the repository for that family’s sins, secrets, and sense of identity. The house may have locked doors, forbidden wings, or abandoned sections that are falling into ruin. It may be haunted by literal or figurative ghosts and often contains physical evidence of past misdeeds or tragedies. Other physical links to the past include portraits of ancestors and family heirlooms. Below are a few examples of ancestral homes in classic Gothic literature ranging from prominent to relatively obscure.
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
This famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839 is one of the most obvious examples of an ancestral home—it’s even named in the title! The house in this story becomes nearly synonymous with the Usher family. Indeed, it has no other name than simply “the House of Usher.” The house is described as seemingly sentient, and its physical decay mirrors the family’s mental deterioration and ultimate destruction. Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last in a long line of Ushers to have lived in the house going back to feudal times, and they seem destined to be the end of that line, as they both suffer from unexplainable illnesses. (There are some hints that these illnesses are inherited and may stem from a tendency toward incest in the family tree.) The ancient house also seems unlikely to stand much longer—its walls show signs of decay and a large crack runs the length of the building. The house is riddled with hidden nooks and crannies, including long-disused vaults, one of which Roderick and the narrator use to temporarily inter Madeline after she succumbs to her mysterious disease. Of course, as it turns out, Madeline was interred prematurely, and she emerges bloody from her tomb in a terrifying scene that ends with the death of both Usher siblings. Just as the Usher family line is snuffed out, the house fissures along its crack and crumbles into the lake below. The fate of the structure and the family are tied together, and the title of this story refers to the simultaneous destruction of both.
The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 novel is yet another Gothic story to name its ancestral home in the title. In this case, the descriptively named House of the Seven Gables, an old Massachusetts mansion, has been home to the Pyncheon family ever since a Colonial-era ancestor, Colonel Pyncheon, acquired the land through underhanded means. He accused the original owner of the land, Matthew Maule, of witchcraft, then seized Maule’s assets and built himself a large home—but mysteriously dropped dead before he could enjoy it. Now, the colonel’s current descendants must reckon with the consequences of their forefather’s misdeed. A portrait of the old colonel hangs in the house, a visual reminder of his legacy, and bears a creepy resemblance to Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, who seems to share not only his ancestor’s features but also his blatant disregard for ethics. Judge Pyncheon tries to blackmail his cousins Hepzibah and Clifford into handing over the deed to a plot of land—following in the conniving footsteps of the colonel. Just like the colonel, however, the judge seems to fall victim to the family curse, dying suddenly and mysteriously. The family curse is broken—and an ancient wrong righted—when Phoebe, a young Pyncheon relative, marries a descendent of Matthew Maule named Holgrave, thus uniting the feuding families and restoring the property to its rightful owner. Just after Phoebe and Hoglrave declare their love, the house gives up its secrets: Holgrave helps reveal the hiding place of the deed Judge Pyncheon had been after.
Contested ownership over an estate or ancestral home has been a common theme in Gothic literature since the genre kicked off with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. In this case, the House of the Seven Gables is both the site of a generations-old sin and the physical manifestation of the continued enmity between the two families. It is haunted, not just by reminders of the old colonel, but also by symbols of other family members who became casualties to the feud—including the rooftop posies and abandoned harpsichord of poor Alice Pyncheon. By the end of the novel, the surviving Pyncheons decide to leave the old family estate behind and start a new life free from the haunting reminders of their family’s past.
“There ought to be a ghost in a house like this … so many generations of men and women cannot have been born and died in this house without leaving some trace of themselves for us who come after….” —“The Weird of the Walfords”
“The Weird of the Walfords”
Here’s a more obscure example for you, but one of my favorites! “The Weird of the Walfords” is an 1889 short story by Louisa Brown, which I first encountered in the lovely collection Women’s Weird, volume 1. The story’s protagonist, Humphrey Walford, inherits his family’s estate, Walford Grange, when he becomes squire. Along with the stately home comes some ancient furniture, including a large oak bed that has been with his family for three centuries. Generations of Walfords have died in that bed, or been laid out on it after dying elsewhere. The bed represents the prestigious legacy of the Walford family—having once been slept upon by King Charles II during a royal visit to the estate. But Humphrey becomes fixated on the bed’s association with death, and he refuses to lie on it himself. To further ensure it cannot claim him, Humphrey has the bed destroyed by a local carpenter and leaves the room in which it once stood locked up and empty. Despite these efforts, the bed comes back to haunt him. When Humphrey marries, his new wife, Grace, is drawn to the locked room, eventually demanding to use it as a nursery for their expected child. Unknowingly, Grace purchases a cradle made from wood salvaged by the old bed and places it in the old bedroom. Humphrey’s ominous premonitions about the bed come true when the infant dies after being placed in the cradle. Not long after, Grace wastes away in the very same room. In an attempt to escape his own fate in the heirloom bed, Humphrey managed only to displace that fate onto his wife and son. In order to free himself entirely, Humphrey ultimately sets the estate on fire, making this yet another example of the Burning Houses trope in Gothic fiction.
It seems that if you want to live a life free from family curses or tragic destinies, you’ve got to leave your old ancestral home behind. In fact, might as well burn it down for good measure! What other examples of ancestral homes in Gothic literature can you think of? And what other iconic settings would you like to see me explore? Let me know in the comments!