Sex in Gothic Literature: The Ghastly, the Grief-Stricken, and the Grotesque
Spoiler Alert: Don’t look if you haven’t read the book!
Sex in Gothic literature is rarely erotic. It is transgressive. A fever dream. A haunting. A punishment. It does not romanticize the bedroom—it drags it into the crypt.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, sex is conspicuously absent, its omission a thunderous silence. Victor turns away from consummating his marriage. Victor’s mother, Caroline Beaufort, is described as a chaste wife. These refusals are a form of sexual repression, lethal in Victor’s case.
In Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, sex is a vampiric seduction—female, sapphic, and threatening. Carmilla’s nightly visits to Laura are charged with eroticism, with language that hovers between dream and dread. In the Gothic imagination, desire is rarely safe.
Dracula follows this path. The vampire women in Jonathan Harker’s dream are terrifying in their sexuality—beautiful, ravenous, and powerful. Lucy Westenra, once the picture of English innocence, becomes sexually voracious after her transformation. She is staked and killed because sex awakens monsters, and monsters must be destroyed.
In Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, sex is the unspeakable undercurrent. Maxim de Winter’s power over the narrator is built on secrets and lies, with Rebecca—the absent, beautiful first wife—haunting every glance, every bed, every locked room. The narrator is denied sexuality until she is fully immersed in the horror of Rebecca’s death and the rot beneath the estate’s surface. In this modern Gothic, sex is not demonic but psychological, buried beneath layers of control and shame.
In Beloved by Toni Morrison—a Gothic novel rooted in American trauma—sex becomes both brutal and redemptive. Sethe’s memories of sexual violation coexist with moments of intimacy that try, haltingly, to reclaim her body. The ghost of her daughter, Beloved, becomes a spectral and erotic presence—a child, a lover, a revenant. Here, Gothic sexuality exposes the inherited wounds of history, of ownership, of intergenerational possession.
In The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, the Gothic is retold through a feminist lens, full of dark eroticism and mythic violence. In the title story, the young bride enters her husband’s Bluebeard-like castle and discovers a chamber of mutilated women. Sex and death are inseparable; to be desired is to be endangered.
In my novel, Mademoiselle Frankenstein, the unspeakable takes shape. Océane, isolated in her grief, transplants her husband’s heart into the patchwork form of the Creature. She does not think of this as science, but a sacrament. Her act is not clinical, but conjugal. Her mind, shattered by war and death, convinces her that if she can preserve his heart, she can preserve his soul.
So she opens her body to him.
This is not love. It is Gothic: driven by delusion, haunted by grief. Océane believes that the man she loves has returned. The Creature—uncomprehending, yearning, unfinished—is all confusion. The coupling is not erotic but necromantic. The tragedy is not that it fails. The tragedy is that, for a brief moment, it succeeds.
And that is the most horrifying of all.
What is your opinion about sex in modern novels vs Gothic novels? What are the pros and cons of each? I’m interested in your thoughts!
