Gallant

The Gothic is a mode of fiction defined by a pervasive sense of fear, foreboding, and paranoia. Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, about a man struggling to preserve his family line in the face of illness and cryptic prophecy, is often cited as the genre’s progenitor. Many of the tropes and aesthetics present in Walpole’s novel—such as ghosts, decaying buildings, and entombed characters—have gone on to become touchstones of the genre. Works by 19th-century writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker continued to develop the Gothic mode, providing a foundation for later writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado to use the Gothic to reflect the shifting concerns of 20th- and 21st-century literature.

Gallant engages many aspects of the Gothic tradition. The eponymous house is a thoroughly Gothic structure in both the architectural and literary senses, with its foyer that “arches like bones of some great beast” (49), its secret passages, and its walls hung with the portraits of the Priors who have died on its grounds. Gallant is quite literally haunted by the ghouls of Grace, Arthur, and—by the novel’s end—Matthew, but it is also haunted by the specter of a past Olivia is trying to understand. Olivia’s bedroom, which was once her mother’s, is brimming with articles of clothing, tchotchkes, and old journals that give clues about who Grace was and what became of her, but never offer the full truth. As Olivia continues her investigation and presses into the darkness on the other side of the garden wall, this truth finally makes itself known. Literary critics borrow Freud’s concept of “the return of the repressed” to describe this motif of Gothic fiction: A buried history, like the truth of what’s happening to the Priors, makes itself known in a moment of violent upheaval that endangers the protagonist’s life, sense of self, or both. For Olivia, this moment comes when she discovers the double of Gallant on the far side of the garden wall. The denizens of this shadow world reveal hidden truths about her family history and the struggles the Prior family must face.

This mirrored world on the far side of the garden wall is also a deeply Gothic feature of Gallant. The novel is filled with doubles: Grace’s twin journals, the clocklike structure depicting the two houses, and even the portraiture assignment from Olivia’s past that resulted in self-portraits that were “distorted…strange, unnerving” (199). The use of the double to create a sensation of uncanniness is a hallmark of Gothic fiction. Schwab uses doubling in Gallant to undermine Olivia’s sense of certainty about her own reality: Grace’s journal, for instance, is the one piece of her mother that she feels she truly understands, but the house shows her that there’s a second journal revealing aspects of her mother’s history that are entirely foreign. Here, doubling defamiliarizes Olivia with people and places that she thought she understood. The resulting sense of dread and unease is a staple of the Gothic. Schwab’s use of the elements of Gothic fiction creates a narrative that is tense, atmospheric, and interested in how characters cope with difficult family legacies.