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| Our 2023 pumpkin army is a vision of Gothic decrepitude! |
If you know me AT ALL, you will be so surprised to learn that I think that you should watch The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series with your teenagers before you read the book!
It's really good, first of all, and it stars one of the guys from Leverage, which is another teenager favorite around here, and it's so genuinely scary that my one chicken teenager actually noped out of the experience, and it's a terrific set-up to the Gothic literature genre, especially the idea of the decrepit old house as a representation of the darkness inside ourselves... AND it's completely different from The Haunting of Hill House book in every important way, BUT has enough nods to the book that when you read it with the teenagers afterwards, they can discover all the little connections for themselves as an aid to interest and an encouragement for close reading.
The only thing to be wary of is that my teenager loved the Netflix series so much that she was Big Mad that the book was completely different, and therefore decided that she Did Not Like the Book, which is a shame because it is so good, just... different. So if your teenager, like mine, is spiteful and loves herself a grudge, maybe rethink this order.
For all the other teenagers, it's 1) the TV series, then 2) the book!
Genre studies are very good for high schoolers, because a genre study gives them a lot of practice picking out themes from different artifacts and doing a lot of comparison/contrast, all supported with lots of evidence and that good flow of logic that connects evidence to conclusion.
Gothic literature makes an excellent high school genre study for a few reasons:
1. It's not exactly horror, so it shouldn't actually scare off the scaredy-cats, but it IS horror-adjacent, and has a kind of aesthetic that really appeals to a lot of teens. Even kids who aren't super emo tend to appreciate Gothic vibes!
2. It's a genre that's covered a lot of ground, historically, so it gives teenagers more practice reading and analyzing older works than they're often used to. A lot of the teenagers that I've worked with get so fussy when asked to read anything with challenging language/syntax, including just about anything that's not completely contemporary. But they'll work harder for something that they find genuinely interesting, and I have a lot more luck making Frankenstein interesting than I do Romeo and Juliet!
3. Speaking of Frankenstein... there are so many excellent female authors within the Gothic literature genre, and this study is a great chance to focus on Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and other important female authors within the canon. Gothic literature is, as far as I know, entirely Eurocentric, but there are plenty of Black voices to add, especially if you delve into one of my favorite sub-genres, Southern Gothic. Researching to find works by other POC or authors across the sex/gender spectrum or other continents (now I'm thinking that some Japanese horror could also work?) would make an excellent final project for a teenager!
For our The Haunting of Hill House study, I got my teenager's buy-in because that Netflix series was so good. After we finished, I asked if she would want to read and study the book version next.
Reader, she did!
After that, I'd planned to go on a whole Shirley Jackson deep-dive with her, doing some short stories (including "The Lottery" of course!) and then my own personal favorite Jackson book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Alas that she didn't love the book version, because it caused me to scrap those plans, but to be honest, broadening the study out to cover other authors over a larger time period was more academically sound, anyway.
For a semester-long, in-depth study that you could put on your kid's transcript as its own English course, I suggest reading several entire novels together. A lot of very early Gothic is super messed up, though (*cough, cough* The Monk *cough*), sooo... pre-read! But even without the most messed-up stuff, though, you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. I don't usually like to get too invested in authorial intentionalism, but author studies of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde would make good rabbit trails if your teenager seems especially interested in their works. Or utilize those author studies in their history course to add more inter-disciplinary work.
More modern Gothic choices could include Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby is the more obvious choice, but The Stepford Wives plays with the theme of place in the Gothic genre in some interesting ways that your high schooler can use for their compare/contrast paper), Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. If you do Interview with the Vampire, consider contrasting it with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is just as schlocky as it sounds, but actually has some interesting things to say about enslavement.
Here's a New York Public Library list with even more Gothic literature books.
If you don't have an entire high school semester-long course to dedicate to Gothic literature, I also like the idea of covering the same ground via short stories. This list of Gothic short stories has Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner on it, and also includes "The Yellow Wallpaper," mandatory reading, in my opinion, for any Liberal Arts major in the making.
Here's a list of Black authors of Gothic fiction that I've put on my own must-read list. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in undergrad as a slave narrative only and I've only read Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Parable of the Sower, so I'm very interested in reading/re-reading the works from this list through a Gothic lit lens!
I'm trying very hard not to raise a bunch of hopelessly unemployable Lit majors like myself, so even with high school English, and EVEN with high school AP English Literature and Composition, which is the teenager's current study, I like to extend the analyses beyond just written text to a wide variety of other cultural artifacts, and the work beyond just reading and writing to a wide variety of other intellectual explorations.
Fortunately, movies, music, and theatre are all very easy to incorporate into a literature study, because you can use many of the same analytical processes with them. They tend, especially movies and theatre performances, to hit the same plot and thematic beats in much the same way as literature does, so it doesn't feel like a big stretch for a teenager to write about them while writing about literature. But you can then help your student notice the parts that ARE different, like costume and setting and acting choices and audience, and adding those analyses helps them deepen their thinking on their topic.
As part of this study, we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both at a family-friendly live show and (because the teenager fell asleep during it, lol) at home. Especially if your student has already studied Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is semiotically rich with its overtly mad scientist and self-aware Frankenstein's monster and heroine who is required to choose between man and monster. If you watch a live show, you also get to add in the audience as further cultural artifact; the concept of a self-aware, non-consensually modified character has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, and witnessing an audience seeing the experience as a celebration instead of a taboo is enriching.
I also recommend The Hunger and Pan's Labyrinth as semiotically rich Gothic horror films, although Pan's Labyrinth scares the snot out of me!
For a more in-person folklore/social history/anthropology element, and depending on how scaredy your own teenagers may be, it can be very fun and intellectually rewarding to visit a haunted house (in October), or attend one of those paranormal/ghost hunting excursions that a lot of cities have. Even my own corn-fed Indiana locale hosts several such events. Place semiotics is easy to see during these activities, and although analysis of a first-person event can be extremely challenging for this age range, it's a useful skill that teenagers should start developing.
Other hands-on activities for this study include creating one's own Gothic art (take a rabbit trail down the path of Gothic art for a day or two first, because that's another whole entire fascinating exploration!); DIYing a model haunted house that fits into some of the themes you've explored (if you do this, add in some extra STEM skills by incorporating this Pepper's Ghost element); or, of course, writing one's own Gothic short story or poem. If you've got a bit of a reluctant writer, or just one who gets writer's block, it's fun and low-stress to first have them write themes, elements, characters, etc. on notecards to pick at random to be included in the work, or even to write a circular story, in which every five minutes you pass your stories back and forth and collaborate on all of them.
And in my family, we end essentially every study with a themed family dinner and movie night. Is the most Gothic dinner food bloody finger breadsticks, or is it mummy head meatloaf?
You're all wrong. It's mashed potatoes carefully unmolded from my skull pan, with pats of butter melting in the eye sockets.
P.S. Want even more high school lit studies? My kids really love the Gothic vibe, and we've done full studies on both Frankenstein and Dracula!
P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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