Olivia Moore

RUNNER UP

Recognising Gothic Architecture in the Valleys

I used to think Gothic meant black eyeliner, horror films, and a lot of unnecessary blood - something closer to Halloween and Hollywood than relatable and meaningful literature. It seemed more like a phase or an aesthetic. Gothic, as far as I understood it, wasn’t serious. It wasn’t something I could relate to or understand. However, that changed in my college classroom. My English tutor, with her sleek eyeliner and cream roll neck jumpers, would sit at the front of the classroom with a quiet coolness and introduce Gothic literature not as a novelty or cliché, but as something quieter, stranger, and far more complex. 

I soon realised it wasn’t just gore or jump-scares. It was about atmosphere, lies, deceit, the human psyche (Freud would have a field day with some Gothic novels.) The Gothic is about landscapes that feel alive and overpowering and an unsettling sense that something is wrong, when everything looks fine. The uncomfortable part was how familiar and real it felt.

I’ve lived in the Welsh valleys my entire life. The sky is rarely blue and the hills seem to fold in on themselves. It’s beautiful in an unconventional way. Days when the sun doesn’t shine and the fog wraps around everything, the hills feel heavy and watchful. The weather doesn’t settle but lingers, you feel as though you’re waiting for something. 

I come from a working class background and had felt that some pieces of literature belonged to someone else. Someone more privileged than me. Perhaps I had been misunderstanding it and underestimating myself and where I come from. 

Gothic literature offered an escape, but not in the way I expected. We might not have vampires in the literal sense (although we all know someone who can drain the life out of a room), but we understand what it means to feel drained and hopeless. To forget yourself and your purpose. To be belittled and used by “monsters” who use their power to mask their ill intentions. The Welsh valleys and it’s history had already taught me what the gothic was. I just hadn’t had the language for it.

Whilst there aren’t any grand castles or candlelit corridors, there are bordered up buildings and graffiti stained walls, places where darkness creeps in and trouble seems to hold. A landscape that can shift your mood and grow secrets.

Gothic literature gives shape to feelings I didn’t always know how to describe. The landscapes it creates between its pages, both literally and emotionally, feels contained and strangely familiar. Not because I’ve experienced them (I definitely haven’t married the man I work for to then find out he’s locked his first wife in the attic!) but because they seem to echo and mirror something that has always been within me. It made something abstract, concrete and the feeling of being understood and seen is powerful. 

There’s also something about the way people come together in Gothic stories. It’s rarely neat or written in the stars, it’s unlikely and sometimes uncomfortable. People who don’t quite fit find themselves tied together by circumstance, by mystery, by survival (or science in Jekyll’s case).

It’s not always friendship in the obvious sense, but it becomes something close to it. It presents the complexities of human relationships and connections. A found family that is built out of necessity and circumstance rather than choice. 

The honesty and rawness is refreshing - no filters or technology just real feeling and thought. Relationships that aren’t perfect, people who don’t match on paper but stay anyway. 

I’ve always been shy, the kind of person who listens more than they speak, hating school presentations and teachers choosing me to answer a question. For a long time, that felt like a disadvantage. As if being quiet meant being forgettable or having no real thought. 

Gothic heroines don’t always follow the known conventions or characteristics. Characters like Marian Halcombe, Mary Yellan and Jane Eyre aren’t loud or effortlessly captivating in the usual sense. They’re observant, thoughtful, sometimes unsure, but they keep going.

They’re don’t walk into a room and become its centre. They notice things in the background. They question and wonder, and that soon becomes its own kind of strength. I think that’s why these novel’s stayed with me. They felt possible and real. They’re not the type of women you’re told to become by society, and that why they mattered to me. Unruly and unflinching like the moors, but truly and unapologetically themselves.

The gothic has changed my perspective. I didn’t just discover a genre and great pieces of literature, I began to recognise things I’d been taught to overlook and undervalue. My background, my surroundings, my character, things that have meaning. Gothic literature was never an escape but rather a mirror. A mirror that made me notice things I hadn’t before. Now when gothic literature is mentioned, I don’t inwardly groan and think of Bela Lugosi with his slicked black hair and cloak, walking down a spiral staircase. I think of the fog that closes in, the mountains that have a heavy presence and the people whose lives and secrets encompass the valleys. 

Gothic literature didn’t provide an escape but recognition of what is already there. It turns out you don’t need a castle or vampire to be in a Gothic story, just the Welsh valleys and it’s weather - although I probably wouldn’t try to avoid a vampire as they always seem financially insightful and I could use some of that in this current climate.