Gothikana

“Corvina wanted that. She wanted to belong, to be loved, to be absolutely adored, no matter what happened, despite her past.”

This passage introduces the theme of The Fear of “Madness,” as Corvina worries that her genetic predisposition toward mental illness renders her unlovable. Corvina’s longing “to belong” also speaks to the isolation of her upbringing, which has left her both socially inexperienced and emotionally vulnerable as she enters the university. A key part of her character arc will be learning that her value as a person does not depend on her mental health status.

“She must have looked a ghostly sight with her white gown and long raven hair and the candlestick in her hand.”

While the novel presents the lack of cell and internet service as a plausible reason for why Verenmore students don’t have access to the outside world, it does not offer a similar explanation for why the castle lacks electricity—or, indeed, the ability to have a battery-powered flashlight in lieu of a candle, for example. The novel presents these details less as plot holes and more as an overall commitment to the aesthetic of the gothic novel over pragmatism or logic. If Corvina wears a ghostly nightgown, therefore, it is because she is a gothic heroine and that is what gothic heroines wear.

“Sure, people stared at her as she walked by. But at Verenmore, their gazes were more curious than antagonistic like the ones she’d been used to her whole life. She loved the acceptance she felt there every day.”

Corvina finds that her outsider status, which she has felt as a burden for her whole life, is not as obvious in Verenmore, as many of the students have unconventional backgrounds. In showing the way that this positively affects Corvina’s sense of self, the novel contends that being “odd” is not something that is inherently negative but instead something that merely requires finding a community of like-minded people.

“Corvina felt something warm take root in her stomach, fluttering in her belly as she watched the silver-eyed devil casually defend her. Her eyes had always been something she’d been teased or taunted about. No one had ever defended her. Even with her mother, she’d been the one doing the defending. This felt new, unfamiliar, yet enlivening.”

Unusual eyes are a convention in gothic literature, commonly affiliated with a character’s proximity to an “untamed” nature. For Corvina, this sense of feeling uncontrolled exacerbates the fear of “madness” she experiences until she connects with Vad, who also has unusual eyes. This shared trait indicates that the two are well-suited for one another and that their wildness will be well-met in each other.

“It struck Corvina sometimes, how much older she was than the kids in her class. They were eighteen-year-olds just coming to college for undergrad, the seniors being either nineteen or twenty, and she was almost a twenty-two-year-old first-year. Sometimes she felt a century older than the new friends around her.”

The novel emphasizes Corvina’s age to play with the taboo nature of the student-professor relationship between her and Vad without suggesting that this relationship is truly coercive or inappropriate. RuNyx plays both sides: She notes the relatively small age gap between Corvina at 22 and Vad at 28 to legitimize their relationship, instead focusing on the professor-student rules of Verenmore to provide the thrill of their forbidden relationship.

“Her own mind was unreliable.”

Corvina’s lack of faith in her own perspective plays with the fear of “madness” in the novel. While Corvina is not an entirely reliable narrator, this is in part because the castle is not an entirely reliable setting: Things routinely happen that cannot be explained, even when they are witnessed by characters that are more reliably “sane” than Corvina. Corvina’s hallucinations blur the line between the real and the unreal, contributing to the spooky atmosphere of the gothic text.

“The idea [of the danse macabre] emerged in the Late Middle Ages. The idea that there is universality in death, that regardless of who you are in your life or your station or how much you possess, you will have to dance with death in the end. Kind of beautiful, if macabre, isn’t it? […] In literature, in particular, this became an allegorical device that inspired the use of many motifs to represent and even foreshadow death in stories.”

RuNyx plays with various elements of metatext, which—like the perception of the real and unreal at Verenmore—is an unreliable indicator of truth in the text. Vad’s description regarding how to read the “danse macabre” in literature does not, as he outlines, foreshadow death—at least not either Corvina’s or Vad’s deaths. Instead, this serves as a red herring to build dread in the novel, but does not actually manifest as an accurate prediction.

“‘I’ve known lust. This is something worse. This is a barbaric need to possess, to eliminate, to own. This is madness.’

Madness. It felt like madness, didn’t it? A different kind of madness than she was used to, but madness, nonetheless […]

‘If this is madness,’ she showered almost against his lips, ‘drown me in it.’”

Despite her intense fear of being labelled “crazy,” Corvina here is able to see “madness” as a potentially positive force when she thinks of it in terms of her consuming desire for Vad. This parallels the novel’s ambivalence about forces that are conventionally considered malevolent—ghosts, devils, and hallucinations, for example. The novel contends that these things aren’t innately bad, but rather that it is one’s approach that renders them positive or negative forces.

“God, she missed her mama. She missed her scent of soil and sage and all things love. She missed the food that she grew herself. She missed pouring the wax as she sat and worked the jars. Her mama might not have talked to her, but Corvina never once doubted the love between them. And she missed that.”

Though Corvina feels acute fear that she will end up with the same mental illness as her mother, she is careful not to demonize her mother’s condition. Instead, Corvina’s memories focus on all the ways that her mother was a kind and loving parent. This highlights how “madness” in the novel is a complex topic, rather than one that can be distilled to just its scientific or emotional elements.

“‘You’ll learn after a little while how much power the legend actually has here, Jax,’ Troy corrected. ‘That’s the major reason the university doesn’t have a rule for students not wandering around at night or going into the woods. Nobody who’s heard of them would dare to anyway.’”

Troy argues in favor of the power of storytelling, something that has material effect in the novel. Troy’s warnings also add to the atmosphere of foreboding, suggesting that the woods are a site of danger. This passage also speaks to the appearance versus reality of evil, as while the students fear the woods, the true evil—the false Jade and her murderous schemes—is actually already within the campus, not outside of it.

“[Dracula] has a devil in an ancient castle falling in love. What can be more interesting than that?”

RuNyx teases the reader with her textual allusions; Dracula is the most frequently referenced, though nods to Stoker’s text are more often red herrings than true foreshadowing. Though Vad is often framed as a “devil,” and he does fall in love in a castle, the novel’s hints that Vad might prove to be a vampire never come to fruition.

“The giant, stunning architectural marvel she’d thought beautiful at first sight in daylight months ago seemed foreboding in the night. The tall turrets looked deadly, an air of gloom clinging to their stone walls. Small lights did more to add to the ominous glow than curb it, the light eclipsed by shadows all around.”

Verenmore acts as a reflection of Corvina’s emotional state as well as a setting. When Corvina finds the castle to be an optimistic possibility for growth, she sees it as a marvel; when she realizes that inexplicable things are happening in the castle, the structure itself becomes a source of dread.

“‘I don’t want to be crazy,’ she whispered softly, admitting to the deepest, most fierce desire of her heart. ‘And talking about it, I’ll sound it.’

[…] ‘This castle is crazy, Corvina,’ he told her. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’”

Vad here re-characterizes the idea of what counts as being “crazy” in order to help console Covina over the fear of “madness” that she experiences. He implies that if she is in a “crazy” setting, then it is actually rational to be experiencing “crazy” things, which helps Corvina feel accepted.

“Roy looked toward the stairs. ‘We can never really tell, can we? Everyone deals with their pain in different ways. He could’ve been in a lot of pain, and no one could have known.’”

Roy’s appearance in the lake is one of the unsolved mysteries of the novel. Her comment here, though nominally about Troy, suggests that there might be something causing Roy pain that she does not reveal to the other characters in the text. This both creates a broader atmosphere of unease in the castle—the possibly supernatural elements of Verenmore affect more than Corvina and Vad—and opens the possibility for further novels that take place at the University of Verenmore.

“Rest your pretty head, witch. I’m the devil you know, not the devil you don’t […] It means that while I’m not a good man, not by any stretch of the imagination, I’m not the evil haunting this place. I’m the evil hunting for it.”

Vad’s secrecy contributes to the novel’s theme of Honesty and the Challenges of Trust. Once he admits his background to Corvina, however, his mysteriousness stops framing him as a potential antagonist, instead putting him in an anti-hero role as he does whatever it takes to fight the evil that haunts the castle, even if this means acting immorally himself.

“This was her sexual awakening, and she realized Jung had been right—one discovered a lot about oneself though sexuality.”

Corvina equates her sexual self-discovery with a broader growth in her sense of self, something that she links back to the education she gains as a college student. This ties into the history of the female gothic, which privileges women’s desires as a source of growth and conflict.

“Sex was one thing, emotions were one thing, but life was another. She trusted him with sex and trusted herself with emotions, but life? Did she trust him with her life?”

Though learning more about Vad’s past helps Corvina work through honesty and the challenges of trust, she does not immediately move into complete confidence in him. Her debate as to whether she “trust[s] him with her life” also foreshadow the novel’s ending, as Vad will ultimately have to rescue Corvina from a life-or-death situation.

“I’m more of a preternatural believer. I believe that there are many things beyond our understanding that don’t have an explanation yet. Maybe they will in a few years. After all, a few hundred years ago there was no explanation for schizophrenia either.”

Vad’s broad ability to embrace things that may or may not be supernatural fit in with the novel’s lack of interest in definitively diagnosing phenomena as supernatural or not. This perspective also helps him embrace Corvina, by arguing that the strange things she experiences may be explainable—and therefore manageable—with a forthcoming discovery.

“She realized she had actually stopped caring so much for social acceptance as of late, feeling less lonely and more whole, and it probably had to do with the way Vad accepted her. He was empowering her through their connection, making her realize she was lovable as she was, that she wasn’t an outcast, that she belonged somewhere precious. He was the catalyst for her acceptance of herself, for her understanding that she was different and she was worthy of everything.”

Corvina’s sense of self stabilizes when Vad’s acceptance serves as a model for how she can offer herself acceptance despite the fear of “madness.” Though she notes that she cares less for “social acceptance,” the novel also emphasizes that this comes after she receives acceptance from her peers at Verenmore, many of whom also come from unconventional backgrounds. The text thus suggests that while having a strong sense of self-esteem helps Corvina distance herself from needing others’ approval, her lack of self-esteem earlier was not because of a lack of mental fortitude. Rather, it presents external acceptance as a helpful starting point for self-esteem.

“My grandma told me all about it—the blood, the sex, the sacrifice. They played so good. God, it must’ve been such a fun time.”

False Jade’s relishing comments about the brutality of the Slayers differentiates her from Vad and presents the novel’s argument that one’s heritage is not nearly as important as how one reacts to that heritage, invoking the appearance versus the reality of evil. Jade and Vad both descend from the Deverell line, but while Vad wishes to make amends for his grandfather’s cruelty, Jade wishes to perpetuate it. The novel also suggests that Corvina’s sense of eroticism around blood and violence works better in the realm of fantasy, not reality: While she can enjoy dreams inspired by Dracula, for example, Corvina’s true happy ending comes in learning to trust Vad and uncover that he is not monstrous the way Jade is at all.

“A man with everything material and nothing emotional wanted her, nothing material and everything emotional. They were an odd but perfect fit.”

Though Corvina frames herself as having emotional powers to give Vad, the novel does not necessarily agree with her sense of imbalance insofar as Vad has “nothing emotional.” Rather, Vad, in the tradition of gothic heroes, has a surfeit of emotion—just unruly emotion compared to Corvina’s high levels of emotional intelligence.

“The monsters were real, and they didn’t live in her head. What existed in the world was scarier than anything her mind could conjure. She was seeing a monster now, one with a beautiful, innocent face and energy so deceptive it had fooled her instincts.”

As the novel concludes, Corvina begins to manage the fear of “madness” as she has seen things that she considers to be more frightening than her hallucinations. This further connects to the novel’s attention to the appearance versus reality of evil: Though Corvina’s hallucinations are often frightening, they are not evil, not compared to people like false Jade.

“He was realistic enough to admit that it could happen. He also knew that if she showed symptoms enough to concern the doctors, he would move mountains to get her the help and support she would need, something her mother never got.”

Though Vad and Corvina enjoy their happily-ever-after ending the romance genre demands, the novel still offers some of the gothic’s open-ended features. Vad’s fear about Corvina’s genetic predisposition toward schizophrenia threads the needle between these two contrasting qualities—he knows the future is somewhat uncertain, but maintains his optimism about building a happy life with Corvina.