It has been exactly five years since Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak premiered, marking a long five years of me defending del Toro’s homage to great American Gothic literature and Gothic iconography from claims of mediocrity and all surface and no substance. Now with the recent release of Campos’ film, The Devil All the Time, it seems apt to discuss this revived interest in the American Gothic upon the anniversary of the under-appreciated Crimson Peak. Crimson Peak is set in 1901 Buffalo, New York and follows Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring novelist daughter to a wealthy businessman who, upon meeting British Baronet, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), is thrust into a gothic novel of her own once marrying Thomas and leaving America for Cumbria’s Allerdale Hall. Edith, after witnessing red clay ghosts wandering the halls of the house and her dilapidating health, realises that Thomas and Lucille’s plan was to marry a wealthy heiress and inconspicuously kill her. Lucillle, who serves Edith poisoned tea, aims to steal her wealth to fund Thomas’ inventions, and continue to hide their incestuous affair.
The ruined castle of the Sharpe’s home and their incestuous affair alludes to elements of great gothic literature. Critics reviewed the character of Lucille as a Lady Havisham figure, but her madness can be seen bearing strong resemblance to the sickly Madeline Usher from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins’s story bears tonal resemblance with the thematic concerns at the heart of American Gothic literature; Allerdale Hall echoes familiarity with the Usher house, with the hall being an extension of Thomas’ and Lucille’s degrading psyche.
This film is beautifully made in terms of production design and costumes, but it runs deeper than being style over substance. The house is sinking into the Sharpe red clay mine; the blood red clay is seeping into the basement of the house and the dilapidated nature of the house is symbolic of the rotting moralities with each preceding heiress’ murder. A striking element of the house is the stylised gaping hole in the centre of the roof (which is reminiscent of the crack in the exterior of the house in The Fall of The House of Usher), admitting dead autumn leaves and snow and foreboding that the Sharpe family is on the brink of moral collapse. Lucille and Thomas’ dark costumes also meld with the dark oak of the staircase and walls, almost as if they are trapped inside the decaying house. It is poetic that Lucille and Thomas die in the finale of the film, yet only Lucille’s ghost remains trapped in the house, whilst Thomas is set free after trying to redeem himself by saving Edith.
It must be said, the power play between Lucille and Edith is what makes the films for me: playing a piece on the piano for Edith, the caressing Edith’s cheek with a butterfly, and the inherent homoeroticism of caring for another woman in bed, if one excuses this being under the guise of murdering for inheritance of course. However, Lucille instead of killing Edith over a period of time to guarantee complete ownership of Edith’s inheritance, pushes Edith over the banister, thus foiling the chance of gaining the inheritance due to hypothetical death under unnatural causes. This rivalry between Edith and Lucille for Thomas’s affections can further be read as homoerotic subtext once taking in Queer theory. By using this theoretical perspective, we can see Thomas and Lucille’s battle for Edith’s affections in Thomas’s anger at seeing Lucille alone with Edith, and Lucille’s anger at Thomas being alone with Edith (after being snowed in at the postal office) as not due to the fear of them having intercourse, but rather Lucille’s fear of losing control over Edith. Lucille only knows inflicting pain as a way of showing love, even accepting her death at the hands of Edith.
Guillermo del Toro’s allusions to gothic iconography extend further than the beautifully haunting architecture and costume design, Crimson Peak is a genuine love letter to Gothic literature of the past. Crimson Peak appears to be the last American film in recent history to truly fit into this genre of the American Gothic, with its inclusion of established gothic themes of madness, isolation, abjection and original sin. Wasikowska’s character is reminiscent of Gothic heroine Emily St. Aubert from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho; with Edith similarly losing both her mother and father, and we witness early in the film the younger Edith coming into contact with the twisted and rotting ghost of her mother warning her to “beware of Crimson Peak”. Like The Mysteries of Udolpho’s heroine, Edith’s curiosity runs rampant once being thrust into the moaning, sinking, and dilapidated mansion of the Sharpe family and left alone to wander the house whilst her husband and his sister are mysteriously absent from her side. The red clay ghosts in Crimson Peak are almost sexual in comparison to Edith’s white virginal nightgown and characterisation; they are stripped bare from having been thrown into the red clay pits in the basement. The ghosts of the dead wives do not harm Edith, rather they try to warn her about the nefarious nature of her marriage. Their naked form suggests a tension between tradition and the modern world, how any sense of individual identity and sexuality will be suffocated by Lucille’s love of her brother.
Edith’s character is a writer, fond of ghost stories as opposed to romance stories, which sets her apart from the classical naive Gothic heroine, into her being a Mary Shelley type figure. Edith even responds to a group of women mocking her ventures into becoming an author by saying she would “rather be Mary Shelley and die a widow.” The nuanced sense of power in Mia Wasikowska’s beautiful performance radiates in the film, and causes the audience to question: are we watching Edith’s story or the Gothic ghost story that she came to write?
With half a decade having passed, now seems like the perfect time to return to this film. Whilst not premiering to poor reception at the time, audiences found Crimson Peak disappointing in comparison to Guillermo Del Toro’s previous films, such as Pan’s Labyrinth. The performance of Lucille was regarded as boarding on excessive; however, in the lens of Gothic Romantic literature, the kind of madness that Jessica Chastain delivers suits the tone perfectly. This film should be regarded with fresh eyes and be appreciated for what it is, a gothic masterpiece.
Images Credit: The MovieDB
