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Note: the following article on children in Gothic fiction s a modified excerpt (pp. 96-97) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Children in Gothic fiction possess extraordinary allusive power. The reason is that they personify in graspable terms the ambiguous area between past and future. Children in Gothic texts become a link that both separates and connects the old and the new.

Essentially, the Gothic child becomes a metaphor for the eternal present. It carries the past within – both literally, as the continuation of the parents’ genetic code, as well as metaphorically, as the continuation of a cultural, social, or simply family tradition – yet it is also the future. More important, still, it is a potential future, that is, it is neither determined nor materialized.

Children in Gothic Contexts Become a Metaphor for Synthesis

At the same time, the child becomes a metaphor for the synthesis that can resolve the conflict between thesis and antithesis, between past and future. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s sighting of the first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, offers a telling description of this allusion:

It was a strange figure – like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin …

[A]s its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever. (Dickens 1994, 24–25)

And so, that Scrooge witnesses is a figure that, in its grotesque indistinctness, becomes a synthetic all-encompassing hybrid. In more detail, it is both old and new, and yet it is neither. It is both a child and an old man, yet, it is neither.

Children in Gothic Texts as Allusions to Hybridity

Such allusions to hybridity also exist in Dracula, where the conclusion of the novel is disturbingly open-ended, as Maurice Hindle argues:

[T]he strangest and most chilling ambiguity of the novel comes in the novel’s final ‘Note’ by Jonathan Harker. Writing seven years after the events of the story … he tells us of the joy he and his wife Mina feel that their young son’s birthday ‘is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died’ …

Harker goes on to confide that Mina holds the ‘secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him’, conveniently forgetting that something ELSE has ‘passed into’ the body of little Quincey too: Dracula’s blood. Of all Dracula’s victims, it is Mina alone who has been forced to drink his blood, having made her, as he gloatingly boasts, “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my beautiful wine-press for a while’. (2003, xxxv-xxxvi; emphasis in the original)

Therefore, in the deceptively neat and pristinely Victorian dénouement of the novel, the child is a fitting reminder of Dracula’s undead essence. Furthermore, it is an apt metaphor of the inability to completely eradicate the past.

Children in Gothic Temporalities

The child of Mina and Jonathan – and Dracula – is the synthesized eternal now, a temporal level including past, present, and future.

Moreover, it is the very ambiguity surrounding the child’s true essence, the Todorovian “duration of the uncertainty” (Todorov 1973, 25) that “cannot be situated, by and large, except in the present” (Todorov 1973, 42).

As a result, it effectively underlines the key aspects of the eternal now. That is, an inability to define its borders, along with a hybrid, synthetical all-inclusiveness characterizing the vampire/human child.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Penguin Books, 1994.
Hindle, Maurice. Introduction. Dracula. By Bram Stoker. London: Penguin, 2003.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.