Inside and Outside: Terror’s Penetration of the Indoors in Wuthering Heights and ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’

Abstract

Gothic fiction draws a distinction between indoors and outdoors: the safe indoors with (ostensible) psychological safety and sanctuary, and the tumultuous, dangerous outdoors beset with psychological turmoil and exposure to the Hellish sublime. Gothic fiction’s preoccupation with indoor spaces (for instance, haunted houses, childhood homes, large castles) plays on the fearful possibility of outside evil breaching the defence of the indoors. The indoors are safe, but not certain: the Gothic suspense derives from the possibility of terror penetrating the indoors. This essay first establishes this trend in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s somewhat neglected novella ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’. The outdoors in this novella are seductively dangerous: the entrancing moonlight draws Beckett to the Countess, the object of his near-downfall. The Countess temporarily penetrates the safety of the indoors by luring Beckett inside and trapping him in a coffin, but the novella reasserts the inside/outside boundary when the police invade and she is ejected. It also explores this phenomenon in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel endlessly concerned with indoor and outdoor boundaries. Heathcliff’s evil is associated with the Heights’s vulnerability to Nature, whereas Edgar’s peace is bound up with the Grange’s comparative insularity.