Why YA Gothic Fiction is Booming - and Girl Monsters are on the Rise

An 18-year-old girl prepares to die to enable the birth of her half-vampire baby. Her spine is broken in the process, and the fanged baby begins to gnaw its way through her stomach before the girl’s husband performs a vampiric Cesarean section. This is a crucial moment in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novel series, published from 2005 to 2008.

Zoey Deutch in the film Vampire
Academy (2014). Angry Films,
Kintop Pictures, Preger Entertainment.

Meyer’s books heralded a new, and continuing, wave of Gothic fiction for Young Adult readers, which revisits familiar literary Gothic conventions: ancient, ruined buildings and monstrous supernatural figures like the vampire, werewolf, ghost and witch.

The Gothic romances of the 18th century, such as the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and the enduringly popular Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), sought to recreate feelings of terror and horror for an audience of adult readers. Today, however, most Gothic fiction is being published for, and read by, young people. Surprisingly, it has proved to be the ideal genre for exploring the grotesque and frightening aspects of coming of age, and metaphorically representing pressing social issues such as racism and gender inequality.

The phenomenally popular YA genre, targeted at readers between 12 and 18 years old, evolved from realist novels of the 1960s. These books were preoccupied with the struggles of adolescence set against a backdrop of social issues. Now, though, the genre often looks to the supernatural. Beyond Twilight, some of the most popular YA Gothic series also focus on the “lives” of vampires who are protagonists rather than foes.

Richelle Mead’s six-book Vampire Academy (2007-2010), now adapted into a TV series, is about a teenage girl who is a Dhampir (half-human, half-vampire). She becomes entangled in a forbidden romance with her instructor as St Vladimir’s Academy, while learning how to defeat evil vampires named Strigoi.

Ashley Lyn Blair in Vampire Academy: The Officially Unofficial Fan
Series (2016). idmb

The YA Gothic revival has also embraced a wide range of supernatural entities. Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles, a cross-media franchise that includes the Infernal Devices and Mortal Instruments novel series, charges angel-blooded humans with the task of protecting regular humans from a range of supernatural beings.

The Nephilim, or Shadowhunters, are busy controlling demons, warlocks, werewolves, faeries and vampires, but critically, it is their part-supernatural status that enables them to serve as protectors.

Clare has said that she did not write her series for young adults (and indeed almost half of the readership of YA fiction might be adults). Nevertheless, her teenage protagonists have resonated with readers of the same age.

The Gothic, and its newer sub-genres like paranormal romance, have a unique resonance with teenagers. They are poised in a transitional space between childhood and adulthood, neither quite embodying the stage they are leaving behind nor fully the thing that they are in the process of becoming. It is unsurprising, then, that they have eagerly embraced the Gothic’s themes of the liminal and the monstrous, as well as its fixation on romance and sex.

Another significant element of the current YA Gothic revival is the emergence of the girl monster. In earlier manifestions of the “female Gothic”, first published in the 18th century by women writers, female protagonists were often courageous, but simultaneously passive and victimised. The plots of the female Gothic reflected the comparative powerlessness of women at the time and their fears about their vulnerability and entrapment within domestic roles and patriarchal society.

In contemporary YA Gothic, girl monsters, who can constitute a threat to others and themselves, disrupt the plotline of male monster and female victim.

Why now?

The most obvious catalyst for the embrace of Gothic conventions in literature for young people is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Its popularity signalled a warm embrace of fantasy fiction that confronted the eternal dilemma of the battle between good and evil, charging a child - and later teenage protagonist - with the ability to save the world. While Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was not necessarily Gothic, the Potter phenomenon opened the way for the publication of numerous titles that embraced the possibilities of young protagonists with supernatural abilities.

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Read more: Rethinking Harry Potter twenty years on

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Most significantly, Meyer’s Twilight series about human Bella Swan and “sparkling” vampire Edward Cullen, combined this staple figure of Gothic fiction with the teen romance novel. The Twilight novels were bestsellers internationally and the saga was voted into the number one position in Australian book chain Angus & Robertson’s Top 100 Books poll of 2010. The Twilight universe expanded from books into a highly successful film series.

Robert Pattinson and Cam Gigandet in Twilight (2008). Summit
Entertainment, Temple Hill Entertainment, Maverick Films.

The Gothic has had several major periods of popularity since its first appearance in 18th-century England, with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). In each subsequent revival of Gothic fiction, the genre has been reworked and reinvented to address current cultural concerns.
In particular, the monsters that haunt the pages of Gothic novels are transformed with shifting fears and anxieties. In her influential book Our Vampires, Ourselves Nina Auerbach explains that “every age embraces the vampire it needs”, and this comment can be extend to Gothic monsters more generally.

Contemporary YA fiction blurs the line between good and evil. In Gothic novels of the 19th century, monsters were usually wholly “Othered”. A Victorian-era vampire such as Stoker’s Dracula, for instance was depicted as evil, foreign, and frighteningly different to the British human.

Gary Oldman as Count Dracula in the 1992 film version of the Bram
Stoker novel. American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures Corporation.

But contemporary monsters are no longer necessarily imagined as racially different or set in opposition to the human. Moreover, they are often represented sympathetically, especially in stories told from their perspective.

These include the iZombie comic series, in which the protagonist must eat brains on a monthly basis to survive, and Claudia Gray’s Evernight series, in which the reader is not even aware that the girl protagonist is a vampire for half of the first book. Indeed, as Anna Jackson explains in New Directions in Children’s Gothic, “the monsters have become the heroes” in contemporary children’s Gothic.

The passive heroine

Most Gothic novels for young people contain a romance plot. This is often because the protagonists’ age places them in the transitional zone for entering adulthood, which is demarcated by sexual experience.

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Read more: How long have we believed in vampires?

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In a typical YA Gothic novel, such as Twilight, a plot in which a human or monstrous girl protagonist falls for a boy who is not her “type” can dissolve the boundaries between monster and human. These monstrous love interests range from traditional Gothic ones - vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts and witches - to newer figures such as fallen angels and faeries. The key challenge to be overcome in these novels is the barriers posed to love by supernatural monstrosity, including the physical dangers to humans, as well as social discrimination about “cross-species” love.

In one of few major studies of teen romance fiction, published almost 30 years ago, Linda Christian-Smith described these novels as a “site of ideological struggles for young women’s hearts and minds”. In particular, she refers to teen romance fiction’s emphasis on heteronormative coupling and motherhood. Little has changed with respect to depictions of sexuality since, despite the YA Gothic’s embrace of diverse human-monster relationships.

Most romances in the genre are heterosexual. They do often emphasise the heroine’s agency through her supernatural abilities and ability to choose between men or move between relationships. However, the human heroines of the Twilight series and Lauren Kate’s Fallen series, in which the heroine becomes drawn to a boy who is a fallen angel, are comparatively indecisive and continue to need rescuing.

Tellingly, Joss Whedon, the creator of the TV series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), has described Twilight’s Bella as lacking empowerment, overly fixated on her romantic options, and “completely passive”.

Novels with passive human heroines allow the reader to use the fantasy of romance as a temporary escape from real-world gender inequality. Yet they also reinforce its reality for female readers.

Kristen Stewart (Bella) and Robert Pattinson (Edward) in Twilight (2008).
Summit Entertainment, Temple Hill Entertainment, Maverick Films

The girl monster

Supernatural heroines, however, are often able to breach the confines of traditional femininity and become extraordinary in ways that Twilight’s Bella and other human characters cannot. In a number of YA Gothic novels, such as Mead’s Vampire Academy, the protagonists disrupt expectations of feminine behaviour because of their unique, and often poorly understood, supernatural abilities. These special powers become the focus of anxieties about the girls’ coming of age, as they pursue romances that place their broader communities under threat.

The Vampire Academy series was sufficiently popular in 2010 for three of its six titles to sell between 300,000 and half a million copies in hardcover in the US alone, according to Publishers Weekly. However, unlike the Twilight series, on which it likely attempted to capitalise, its protagonist, Rose, is half-vampire, half-human and a monster in her own right. Rose shares a close bond with vampire Lissa, and is driven to break the Academy’s rules in order to save her friend when she is kidnapped, highlighting that girls are also capable of protecting and rescuing people they love.

Ashley Lyn Blair (Lissa) and Jennifer Studnicki (Rose) in Vampire Academy:
The Officially Unofficial Fan Series (2016). idmb

Vampire Academy positions Rose as a sexual object, particularly in the eyes of a privileged type of vampire (Moroi), who find Dhampir women especially attractive because of racial differences. Rose enjoys her sexuality and dresses to take advantage of it, but this sexuality operates within her definition as a strong young woman:

First they saw my body and the dress. Testosterone took over as pure male lust shone out of their faces. Then they seemed to realize it was me and promptly turned terrified. Cool.

Rose is able to reject unwelcome advances and possesses the physical strength and skills to stand up for herself, suggesting a fantasy of empowerment and equality.

Lissa, meanwhile, thwarts what amounts to an attempted gang rape of a drugged girl. A group of male Moroi students attempt to take advantage of a female feeder (person who permits their blood to be sucked) at a party, “doing a sort of group feeding, taking turns biting her and making gross suggestions. High and oblivious, she let them”.

The supernatural female protagonists in YA gothic novels are responsible for their own safety and protection, yet they also have a responsibility to keep others safe. These heroines have some romantic and sexual agency in a way that can be considered progressive. However, their desire is also framed as disruptive and dangerous and there is an obsessive fixation on the pursuit of romance above the girl’s own development, education and safety.

In other words, the superficially radical potential of girl heroines with superhuman physical strength, mind-reading abilities, and the potential to kill can merely be a decorative smokescreen for the reinforcement of traditional feminine values.

The good and monstrous within

The recent proliferation of Gothic YA novels is skewed toward a female readership with a focus on girl protagonists, and significant emphasis on their quest for romance. Nevertheless, there are a number of series with boy heroes. For example, Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (the first book of which was recently filmed by director Tim Burton), focuses on a 16-year-old human boy, Jacob.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016).
Twentieth Century Fox, Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment.

Jacob has inherited an ability that makes him uniquely able to help the supernatural peculiar children of the title, who are threatened by creatures named hollowgasts who are driven to murder peculiar children in order to feed upon their souls. For Jacob, his transition to adulthood is less about romance and more about self-discovery, connections with his ancestors, and finding a way to negotiate his new-found abilities and responsibilities.

In The Gothic Child, Maria Georgieva suggests that the traditional Gothic novel is preoccupied with “the growth and transformation of the child, the crisis of adolescence and the sometimes painful transition into adulthood”. She is referring to the child’s potential to grow into the hero, heroine or villain.

However, the recent surge in YA Gothic fiction takes this fascination with the darker aspects of childhood in a different direction. The girl heroine, in learning to manage the physical and emotional shifts of her development and more complex relationships in romance, can both be a threat and a saviour to others.

The fuzziness of her nature reflects both the liminal status of the teenager and new cultural understandings of the monster, who now more often resembles the typical American teen than an undead Romanian count.

Instead of contemplating a child’s potential to head towards either good or evil, recent Gothic YA acknowledges the possibility of both the good and the monstrous residing in one person.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The literary pilgrimage: from Brontëites to TwiHards

Fan tributes on Oscar Wilde's tomb. Chrissy Hunt/Flickr

In response to the post below, I spoke with Michael Mackenzie on RN Afternoons about literary tourism. You can access the recording here.

When I first travelled overseas as a student, I visited Paris’s Pére Lachaise cemetery, resting place of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Jim Morrison. Wilde’s tomb was covered in red lipstick kisses — now thwarted after the installation of a glass barrier in 2011 — and a young goth man sat at its base reading a book of poetry.

The desire to connect with literary places, from authors’ birthplaces, homes, and graves, to sites of fictional inspiration, supports a substantial tourist trade. The reasons why people embark on literary pilgrimages are as diverse as the kinds of fiction that inspire them.

In a study of why tourists visited the ruins of Tintagel Castle in Cornwall — a site associated with Arthurian legend—Benjamin Earl found that many visitors sought to “maintain their cultural distinction and assert their cultural capital”.

In other words, travel to the historical site made tourists feel unique in comparison with people who only consume stories and images relating to the myth through readily-accessible popular culture.

The former home of the Bronte family is
now a museum
Man Alive!/flickr

Visiting Charles Dickens’ London home or Haworth and the Brontë parsonage similarly demonstrates the traveller’s literary knowledge and taste.

The homes of celebrity authors also foster a degree of connection to them. The normally private realm of the venerated author is opened up in these literary museums, allowing the viewer to situate themselves in the exact position as Dickens, looking at the very same desk at which he wrote Oliver Twist.

In the past week, annual Bloomsday celebrations took place in Dublin and around the world. June 16 has become an opportunity for the sturdy readers who appreciate James Joyce’s Ulysses to recreate the day in the life of protagonist Leopold Bloom that the novel depicts.

It might begin with a liver and kidney breakfast and continue with a walking tour that follows Bloom’s path from Middle Abbey Street to the National Library.

For most of his life, Joyce lived outside Dublin. Yet, as with Bloomsday, much popular literary tourism is fixated on visiting the real inspirations for the settings inhabited by fictional characters.
Detective Sherlock Holmes, for example, has inspired a plethora of tourist attractions in London. A number of these attempt to bring imagined places, such as the famous 221b Baker St, which operates as a museum, into being.

The Sherlock Holmes pub in London capitalises on the popularity of the
fictional character. Steve Lacy/flickr

The difficulty of assembling a museum for a fictional character for which no historical artefacts exist is evident in the often scathing TripAdvisor reviews. While the Sherlock Holmes pub in Charing Cross, which some fans appreciate as at least having been referenced in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, includes a “recreation of Holmes and Watson’s study and sitting room”.

Tours of locations that inspired novels, including Sherlock Holmes, are increasingly becoming a way for readers to express their fandom for a particular book or series.

There is a long history of fans of LM Montgomery visiting Prince Edward Island, Canada in order to see the homes and landscapes that inspired Anne of Green Gables. Anne is the most prominent feature on the island’s tourist website, which notes that hundreds of thousands of tourists visit “her island” each year.

Twilight tourism in Forks, Washington. drburtoni/flickr

Twilight fans who descend on the small town of Forks, Washington, nevertheless, won’t find traces of author Stephenie Meyer, who resides in Arizona, or sparkly vampires during their visit.

The rainy former logging town nevertheless serves, as Tanya Erzen suggests, as “a prism for fans’ collective fantasy that they might momentarily live in the marvellous world of the books”.

Each September “Twihards” gather in Forks on the date of protagonist Bella’s birthday for a full weekend of activities as part of the Forever Twilight celebration.

Similarly, in the past decade, numerous Da Vinci Code tours of the Louvre and Europe and the UK have mapped the fictional ideas and theories of Dan Brown on to important cultural and historical destinations.

In the cases of these supernatural, or at least fanciful, novels, there is a desire to find an element of that fantasy in reality. Harry Potter tours, for instance, regularly visit the medieval village of Lacock, which is described as having inspired the town of Godric’s Hollow in J K Rowling’s series.

Modern technology enables us to feel connected with an imagined group or community of people who read or view the same stories as we do . As Roger Craig Aden shows in Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages, the journey to a sacred destination — whether a football game or the Green Gables house — sharpens that sense of a bond with like-minded individuals.

This desire to seek out a heightened feeling of belonging to a literary community transcends age, class, and taste distinctions.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Twilight (Without the Penetrative Puns)

Within the children's literature community, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series is decidedly old news. Apart from noticing the recent film at the cinema or the unusual range of "Edward" merchandise in shops, all those who do not inhabit the body of a teenage girl, however, are probably unaware of the reading phenomenon that the series is. Given my interest in girls' books and the gothic, I had to belatedly read this bestselling account of human-vampire love. It took someone else to lend me the whole series (thanks Dr Kristine!), and lots of cryptic discussions about **spoiler alert** the violent birth of a parasitic mutant baby, to place the first book in my hands.

I was disappointed to find that I was not one of those people who was going to be able to spout the "I know it's tripe, but it's so addictive" line. I have concluded book one and I think this will be as far as I can make it. Many people deride Stephen King's writing. I think he writes very well (apart from when he produces something like the sleep-inducing Insomnia), but even he, a man who had his literary initiation via dime novels and horror magazines, has spoken publicly about Meyer's shoddy writing. Sometimes frustrating books can be enticing to read from a critical perspective, but I couldn't even drag that much from the first book.

It is fascinating to read the discussion that the books have prompted, though. Even the fans of the series who were bitterly disappointed by the final title (almost half as many as the 2,000 who have left five-star Amazon reviews) have felt sufficiently aggrieved to write thousand-word explanations expressing their disgust. Feminists have found plentiful examples of Bella's passivity to fuel dozens of blog posts and hundreds of comments. Devoted fans have jumped to Meyer's defense (King's comment provoked more than 1400 online replies, a number from outraged girl readers), and there's currently a poll on the same site with more than 5000 related remarks about whether Twilight is superior to the Harry Potter series. I'd like to champion girls' fiction and speak about how boys' books are universalised while girls' books are ghettoised, but this would be a poor example to choose to champion the merits of girls' fiction. That said, I was still aggrieved by one blog comment that remarked "these are girls' books", as if that explained the myriad gripes that critics have levelled at the series. Even Harlequin Mills and Boon novels do not necessarily have such frustratingly male-obsessed heroines.

What is interesting to me is not whether Meyer's Mormon faith is infused in her choice to depict a chaste-till-marriage turned teen-mom heroine, but why these books have had such a cultural resonance. Vampire stories have been popular at various times and for various cultural reasons throughout the past century, but in Twilight the supernatural serves as a vehicle for, as King has suggested, allowing the safe exploration of thwarted sexual feelings for girl readers. My favourite blog comment had the alias "Dubya": "Twilight is why I was president for eight years." I wonder whether there's more to be drawn out there about the American political climate during the years of Twilight's publication (one in which religious influenced abstinence-focused sexual education seemed to proliferate). This does not entirely explain Twilight's popularity outside the US, however. But something must explain it!

For anyone who has not read Twilight, I would instead recommend this 1718 word summary that is a useful substitute for the novel. The humour in it is also partial compensation for those who have suffered through the book.

Purity is Back...Alright

Purity is perhaps less welcome back today than even the Backstreet Boys. It is possibly as welcome as the return of New Kids on the Block. That said, NKOTB actually does have a new album out, inventively called The Block, and apparently thirtysomething women have been turning up to their concerts in screaming droves, reliving their teenage idolisation of the first superstar "boy band". But I digress.

Those au fait with contemporary children's literature will have heard of a little series called Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I currently have the three or four Bible's worth of paper stacked at home awaiting some holiday reading, thanks to my lovely colleague Kris. Now the religious comparison there is not without reason. Today's Age is running a story about virginity being "back" in vogue, combining a few real-world examples of young people who will "save themselves" for marriage (sourced from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and invoking Meyer's vampire quartet of novels for girls as indicative of a turn back to purity after decades of sex obsession because of vampire Edward's refusal to have sex before marriage.

The article takes an intriguing turn when we hear from a "counsellor" who did not even kiss her husband prior to marriage: "Julieanne Laird, a counsellor with the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students at Melbourne University, waited until marriage before having sex. To avoid temptation, she and her husband didn't even kiss until they were engaged; pledging not to kiss or even to dance with a man other than one's father or brother is not uncommon among the more devout pledgers." Wait a minute. We hear from an eighteen-year-old man who pledges to save himself for marriage in this article, but is there any obligation on males not to even dance with another woman other than his mother or sister?

While I'm certain that Twilight and a small number of religious groups exhibiting conservative tendencies with regard to girls' sexuality are not indicative of a radical societal shift toward abstinence, both of these examples seem to allocate males with a responsibility for controlling girls' developing sexuality, even through relatively benign milestones such as school dances.

Now I gave this post a silly title because I was thinking of a Backstreet Boys' song, but I now realise I can relate these things, as boy bands show the need for girls to gradually channel their emerging sexual feelings somewhere. Even if it is by putting it into plastering their walls with posters of men pretending to be boys. To place "promise rings" on the fingers of young girls before they've even had a chance to work through the confusing trauma of teenage desire seems a recipe for certain divorce when "the one" just doesn't live up to the marketing.