Nosferatu, The Female Gothic, and the Terror of Petty Evils
I recently watched Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu for the first time. I have not watched Murnau’s 1922 original film, although ironically it cannot itself be called an original, but am told there is a crucial difference in that Eggers’ rendition centres Ellen’s point-of-view to a greater extent. Eggers comments on this himself in a Rotten Tomatoes interview, wherein he says “that was the reason for even making the film.”
Eggers’ greatest praise of Murnau’s Nosferatu is that it carries the trait of being a “simple fairy tale” on from Stoker’s novel, Dracula, and ends with the female protagonist becoming the heroine; allowing Nosferatu to suckle on her blood to distract him from the approaching dawn. And there, in that finale, Eggers saw the potential of turning this simple fairy tale into a female gothic that played on psychological horror.
In his ScreenRant interview (which occurred in the same round of interviews as the Rotten Tomatoes), Eggers says “…as much as it is a scary horror movie… it’s a gothic romance and a tale of love and a tale of obsession…” But even more than a gothic romance, Nosferatu is a female gothic; a sub-genre that emerged as authors such as Ann Radcliffe used ghosts and monsters both as avatars for their desires and symbols of oppressive systems that frustrated them.
Princess Weeks expertly explores this in her YouTube video, “Nosferatu & The Gothic Appetite,” and what’s more, uses the Death and The Maiden motif to illustrate the traditions that Eggers draws on.
When monsters are brought into the domestic space, and a female protagonist pitted against them, the supernatural intrusion bears no more terror than that of a home invasion or the danger of living with an abuser, or living within a society that enables such violence and provides no recourse to the violated.
In this, there is much similar with the Female Gothic and the Comedy/Fantasy of Manners; as the true main encumbrance on the characters are the societies they live in - be it covertly or otherwise.
And this reminded me of Jane Austen, and Louisa May Alcott, and that Ellen Kushner quote: “…my novel featured petty evil rather than grandeur…” Here, Kushner is talking about the old rivalries of her characters, but my mind quickly moved to the institution of marriage which has often been explored by female authors as an unwanted expectation thrust on them, or a prison full of torment. When it comes to high fantasy such as A Song of Ice and Fire, dragons desolating towns abound; but the cruelty of Cersei’s marriage to Robert is just as horrific a prospect. When truly inspected, the evil of The Others is no more grand than the ingrained culture of trafficking women across a continent to secure social, political, and economic favour.
Those great writers of the 19th Century saw that the Gothic could be more than an aesthetic for a fairy tale or a quaint little ghost story, but envisioned it as a vehicle to tell profound truths about their everyday lives to a society that viewed them as second-class citizens; tapping into the basest forms of human fear that even their most staunch opponents could understand.
So what is a Petty Evil? Is it something that is simply unjust? I suppose that tracks when your opponent is an unjust society. An evil of small things. An unequal marriage, a broken vow, an abandoned child. Evil that is parcelled out to individuals who may not have the resource nor the courage to act out against it. But when that evil is collated, it engulfs us all; and then, I imagine it can be very grand indeed.