Gothic Tropes: Burning Houses

In Gothic literature, the setting of the story functions almost like a character itself. These castles, estates, and manor houses are given names, along with their own history, personality, and secrets. And as with living characters, sometimes the novel needs to end with their death. In one common trope, house fires are employed as a means of destroying the central setting at the end of the novel, often with symbolic significance.

The most iconic example of this trope occurs in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Though the action of the novel is spread out over several different settings, Thornfield Hall is at its heart. Jane arrives at Thornfield nervous about her new job as a governess, but it soon begins to feel like home as she adjusts to her new life and begins to fall for Mr. Rochester. The mansion’s ultimate fate is foreshadowed earlier in the book, when Jane wakes in the middle of the night to rescue Rochester from a fire set by a mysterious culprit, who turns out to be his mad first wife, Bertha. At the end of the novel, Bertha once more sets the house ablaze, but Jane is not there to put out the flames. Bertha leaps to her death and Rochester is blinded and crippled in the fire, while Thornfield burns to the ground. Only after these horrific events does Jane return to Rochester and they finally get their happily ever after.

Arguably, the new life Jane and Rochester make together could only have been born out of the ashes of the old one. One of the most important consequences of the fire is Bertha’s death, which allows Rochester to finally remarry without committing the sin of bigamy. More abstractly, the fire serves to cleanse Rochester of his past misdeeds—the rooms in which he lied to Jane and toyed with her heart are gone, as are all traces of Bertha that have haunted him for years. In a practical sense, leveling Rochester’s fancy estate helps bring him down to Jane’s level, in terms of money and power. At the beginning of the novel, unequal power dynamics color their relationship: Rochester is a much older, wealthier man and Jane’s employer, while she is young, poor, and at his mercy. By the end, Jane has come into some money while Rochester has lost some, and his injuries make him dependent on Jane to balance out the ways in which she was once dependent on him.

The fire at the end of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) serves a similar purpose of cleansing, but without quite as uplifting a sense of happily ever after. The novel features an unnamed narrator, who marries the wealthy widower Mr. de Winter. After coming to live with him at Manderly, his estate, the narrator finds herself haunted by an obsession with her husband’s first wife, Rebecca. Though at first preoccupied by the possibility of her husband’s lingering feelings for Rebecca, the narrator’s attention is later drawn to the mysterious circumstances around Rebecca’s death. After finally unraveling the truth of Rebecca’s marital relationship and death, the narrator and Mr. de Winter return home to find Manderly ablaze, apparently perpetrated by Rebecca’s devoted housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.

Even before the reader understands the significance of losing Manderly, the novel’s opening sequence hints at the symbolic value of its loss. The narrator dreams she “went to Manderly again,” and sees the great estate reclaimed by nature, yet with the rooms still bearing witness to the life they had lived there. She says, “The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.” As in Jane Eyre, the drama of the preceding events has been erased by the fire so that the characters can move on without their trauma as baggage. As she dreams, the narrator sleeps in a bare hotel room, where she lives a quiet, uneventful life with Mr. de Winter, finding peace in how far they are from Manderly and the events that occurred there.

Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes a slightly different approach to this trope. Instead of starring a pair of lovers who must burn down their past to begin their future together, this novel focuses on a pair of sisters who become trapped by one particular event in their past, which even the fire cannot burn away. Merricat is the youngest survivor of the Blackwood family, almost all of whom were poisoned at dinner one night when she had been sent to bed early. Her sister Constance was the main suspect, as she was the only one present at dinner not to eat the arsenic-laced sugar, though she was acquitted at the trial. The last surviving member is their uncle Julian, who lived through being poisoned and is now weak and sickly. The three Blackwoods become increasingly isolated in their house, avoiding the townspeople who both fear and mock them, until a distant cousin arrives and upends their lives. Toward the end of the novel, Merricat sets the house on fire in a move that initially reads as an accident but ultimately indicates Merricat’s destructive tendency and her skewed perceptions of reality and personal responsibility.

Villagers arrive to put out the fire, but then begin looting the house and destroying it further. Uncle Julian dies in the fire, and afterward Merricat and Constance hole themselves up in the few rooms that remain intact within the blackened husk of their family home. They refuse all contact with the outside world, even as it edges closer to their doorstep in the form of villagers gawking at the house and children playing in their yard. The burning of the house destroys the last remnants of the Blackwood family history and legacy as upperclass outsiders in the village. But it also helps melt away the villagers’ animosity toward the sisters. Though Merricat and Constance can’t leave their old home behind for a new location and truly enter in to the future unfettered (as the heroines in Jane Eyre and Rebecca do), they can carve out a small happy future for themselves in the charred remains of their past.

All of these examples can be read as a variation on the ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s much earlier story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Though Poe’s story does not feature fire, it does portray its setting as an almost sentient character, and the house’s destruction is deeply symbolic. As in Jackson’s novel, the house represents a family legacy that has become corrupted. And as in all three examples above, the house’s destruction signals an end to the horrors that have been happening within.

Have you come across any other examples of this trope in your reading? What other tropes would you like to see me cover? Let me know in the comments! And if you’d like to read more about Gothic tropes, you can click on “Tropes” under the categories listed in the left-hand menu.