Gothic novels are pyromaniacs. Things seem to be set on fire.

Not necessarily the characters themselves. Not always the marriages. But the houses – well, they seem to burn down all the time.

One of my favourite books is Rebecca by Daphne De Maurier. While, the novel focuses on the psychological haunting of the previous wife, Rebecca, I couldn’t help but become enamoured with Manderley itself. Its lush grounds are filled with gardens of lavender and roses, the scent of fresh florals lingers while you can hear the soft tumble of waves. It has stood for hundreds of years, filled with history and vibrancy and secrets.

And then it burns down.

Suddenly, I no longer care about the protagonist – who can care about what happens to them when Manderley has turned to ash?

I am not sure why Manderley was so devastating for me – a little voice in my brain had known that it couldn’t make it out.

It seems in gothic novels, no one gets to keep the house.

Think of Jane Eyre, The Fall of the House of Usher, We have Always lived in a castle, and The Haunting of Hill House. Again and again, the structure collapses.

The marriage can last. The transgressions go unpunished. The doomed are saved. But the house? It has to burn.

The first gothic fiction is credited to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. As described by Sarah Gray in A Guide to Gothic,

“Within the first chapter, readers encounter a prophecy, the supernatural, a beautiful virgin, a dutiful abandoned wife, a persecuted maiden, ridiculous servants, a young, handsome peasant and, a ghost, all set within the labyrinthine corridors of the eponymous castle.” - Sarah Gray, Chapter 1, A Guide to Gothic

Here we can see not just the birth of a genre, but the birth of the Gothic house.

Gothic Fiction emerges at a moment of European ideological shock. In Protestant Britain, Catholic Europe was excessive and dangerously idolatrous – a culture of relics, images, and ritual spectacle. But behind this suspicion lay a deeper anxiety: that legitimacy and authority were unstable. After Henry VIII’s break from Rome, the execution of Charles I and the Jacobite uprisings, sovereignty no longer felt permanent. Across the Atlantic, the American Revolution proved that permanent systems could fracture. In France, aristocratic estates were physically torn down. Industrialisation unsettled inherited hierarchies as the middle class rose against feudal excess.

The world was watching old structures fail. The gothic did not debate this instability directly - it translated it into architecture. The Gothic does not choose houses arbitrarily. Aristocratic authority was not abstract. It was visible in stone. It stood in castles, abbeys and estates, structures that embody lineage and legitimacy. Gothic fiction stages this tension spatially: the crumbling castle versus the rational present. The decaying mansion versus bourgeois respectability.

The return to the home is not accidental. The house becomes the genre’s most efficient metaphor. Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the moment the familiar becomes estranged — is spatially enacted in the Gothic house. What is more familiar than a home? It is intimate, where families enact their lives and where secrets gather like dust on baseboards, but it is also structural – a visible manifestation of wealth, control, and historical continuity.

A large part of gothic literature is containment. The horrors do not spill into the world; they remain enclosed within corridors, attics, locked wings. Gothic literature is not concerned with a social apocalypse, but it relocates social anxiety into the private architecture of the home. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that the house is our most intimate psychic space, functioning as the site where memory settles and identity forms. The Gothic exploits this – it does not terrorise strangers but inhabitants.

Would Jane Eyre be half as efficient if the whole countryside were ravaged by the poor woman in the attic? Jane Eyre’s moral transgression of desiring Mr Rochester is not a unique experience to her alone yet, burnt and charred in isolation, Thornfield becomes symbolic of their particular imbalance. Intimate yet reflective of society. A private haunting.

In Gothic fiction, the house is male.

As Gilbert and Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic, nineteenth-century domestic space becomes a site of female repression. Women enter these houses through marriage, employment, or dependency. They inherit the house’s histories but not its power. They are folded into pre-existing structures. The estate predates them. The lineage excludes them, and the future is elusive to them.

Bertha is confined above the narrative attic. Rebecca lingers in the corridors of the house that erased her.

Nic Helms writes in “Housefires as Symbolism for a shift in Power Dynamic in Jane Eyre and Mexican Gothic,” that gothic houses function as more than a setting but embody patriarchal control over female characters and enforces an unequal power dynamic. The architecture and isolation of the homes mirror how the patriarchs manipulate and confine the protagonist, making escape from oppressive structures difficult – metaphorically and literally.

“Thornfield Hall is characterized as an extension of Rochester’s eyes and hands, Jane’s fleeing under the cover of darkness is to avoid Rochester’s literal gaze as well as symbolic of avoiding the watch of Thornfield Hall. The difficulty of leaving represents the struggle of escaping the grasp of both Rochester and Thornfield.” – Nic Helms, Sprockets and Springes 2024.

The house watches. The house grasps. The house enforces.

A fire does something demolition cannot: it purifies and erases simultaneously. Historian and writer Mircea Eliade described fire as destruction that transforms – annihilation that clears the ground for something new. The Gothic chooses the flame as it leaves nothing structurally intact.

When Thornfield collapses, Rochester not only loses his property but also his physical dominance over Jane. The architecture that once elevated him above Jane is dismantled, and with it the imbalance that structured their relationship. What survives is not the estate but the marriage, no longer scaffolded by hierarchy.

A similar thing happens at Manderley. Before the fire, the unnamed narrator lives inside a house saturated with Rebecca’s presence – a structure that magnifies her perceived failures as a woman, and renders her perpetually second. When it burns, that architecture of intimidation disappears. Mr de Winter loses the estate that embodied his status, and the narrator loses the physical reminder of her inadequacy. Their post-Manderley life is marked by this dynamic shift. Stripped of grandeur, smaller and quieter.

Shirley Jackson’s, We Have Always Lived in the Castle sharpens this pattern. When Blackwood house burns, it does not restore social order – it releases Merricat and Constance from it. The fire destroys the last visible symbols of aristocratic legacy and class separation. In the charred shell of the house, the sisters exist outside the village’s expectations of propriety, marriage, or reintegration

The gothic novel seems to understand something we are still learning: you cannot redecorate a rotten foundation.

When I first read Rebecca, I mourned Manderley. I wanted it spared. But Gothic fiction does not preserve beautiful structures, for they are often built upon imbalance. Gothic literature tells us, you cannot safely inhabit a space designed to diminish you. So I ask of you, burn the house down.

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References

Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1957)

Brontë, C. (1847). Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder & Co.

du Maurier, D. (1938). Rebecca. Victor Gollancz.

Die Rabe. (1912). Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. NYPL Digital Collections. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/10/18/brief-history-gothic-horror

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Harcourt. (Original work published 1957)

Freud, S. (1919). The uncanny. Imago, 5(5–6), 297–324.

Frei, V. (2020). Rebecca: Murray Barber – VFX supervisor & co-founder, Milk Visual Effects. Art of VFX. https://www.artofvfx.com/rebecca-murray-barber-vfx-supervisor-co-founder-milk-visual-effects/

Fukunaga, C. J. (Director). (2011). Jane Eyre [Film]. Focus Features.

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Gray, S. (n.d.). Introduction to Gothic literature. In J. A. Laredo (Ed.), A guide to Gothic literature. Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.pub/guidetogothic/chapter/chapter-1/

Helms, N. (2024, May 8). Housefires as symbolism for a shift in power dynamic in Jane Eyre and Mexican Gothic. Sprockets and Springes. https://nrhelms.org/2024/05/08/housefires-as-symbolism-for-a-shift-in-power-dynamic-in-jane-eyre-and-mexican-gothic/

Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1940). Rebecca [Film]. Selznick International Pictures.

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Jackson, S. (1962). We have always lived in the castle. Viking Press.

Kamat, N. (2012, June 2). Two-sided character of Maxim de Winter. WordPress. https://kamatn.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/rebecca/

New York Public Library. (2018, October 18). A brief history of Gothic horror. NYPL. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/10/18/brief-history-gothic-horror

Poe, E. A. (1839). The fall of the house of Usher. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.

The Gothic Library. (2021.). Gothic settings: Ancestral homes. https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/gothic-settings-ancestral-homes/

The Gothic Library. (2019). Gothic tropes: Burning houses. https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/gothic-tropes-burning-houses/

Kennedy, P. (2025, April 29). Gothic literature: Characteristics and examples. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/gothic-literature-2207825

Walpole, H. (1764). The castle of Otranto. Thomas Lowndes.

Wheatley, B. (Director). (2020). Rebecca [Film]. Netflix.