Blizzards, Fog, and Hurricanes: The Role of Weather in Gothic Literature
In Gothic literature, weather is never just weather. It’s atmosphere, emotion, foreshadowing, and often a form of judgment. A sudden storm doesn’t merely inconvenience the characters—it reveals the chaos brewing inside them. Fog conceals more than the landscape; it hides truths and dangers. Soul-numbing cold can induce strange disassociations.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is full of elemental violence. Lightning animates the Creature. Mountains and glaciers reflect Victor’s despair. A storm rolls in every time grief or horror draws near. It’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be. Gothic weather is operatic—it’s the scream behind the silence.
Consider Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The lightning that splits the chestnut tree is a metaphor too perfect to miss: a doomed romance, severed at its core. Or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where howling winds and bleak moors aren’t background—they’re the emotional climate of the story itself.
Even 20th-century Gothic works use weather as a psychological mirror. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the mists around Manderley make memory and identity dreamlike. In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the creeping rot of the house is accompanied by a kind of eternal autumn—static, decaying, uncanny.
In Mademoiselle Frankenstein, I rely on weather the way a painter uses shadow. Weather is both a mood and a moral force. The Creature is brought to life in the belfry of an abandoned church during a blizzard that smothers the rest of the world. It creates a silent space for the birth of something unnatural. Later, Océane, the Creature, and the ship’s captain encounter each other at the Northern Pole, where the ice locks them in place and the sky never fully darkens or brightens. Minds fray. Cold seeps into the bones and the psyche. There, at the top of the world, they go quietly, slowly mad.
Why does weather matter so much in this genre? Because Gothic fiction is always about what cannot be said directly. It’s about aura and unspoken tension. The weather becomes emotional shorthand. And sometimes, it’s the only character honest enough to say: Something terrible is about to happen.
Have you noticed how thunder echoes just as a secret is revealed? Or a murder committed? Or how the snow starts to fall when someone crosses a moral line? Share your favorite Gothic weather moments. I’d love to hear how nature speaks to you through the stories you read and write.
