Gothic House Equates to Mysticism

Further into the semester one of my peers had done a presentation on Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She used the Audley house and its multicultural dimensions for her main analysis. She argued that the multicultural atmosphere of the house has something to do with the phenomenon of time. I want to add on to this point of ‘time’ and to the ‘dimensions’ of the house. The interior multicultural atmosphere of the house is interconnected with the experience of mystics like Julian of Norwhich who connect a separte room Church buildings in order to experience, like I have mentioned before, death without actually experiencing it. The random additions to the Audley court represents these types of random additions to church buildings.

Looks like a castle 🙂

The Gothic mansion, as we know, is often connected to themes of mystery, darkness, and the supernatural. It offers us to look at underlying ideas as well, such as loneliness- which is, interestingly enough, a crucial component of mysticism.

In many mystical traditions, the physical environment is seen as a reflection of the spiritual realm, and architectural spaces suc has ancient castles, monasteries, and mansions are believed to hold hidden spiritual meanings and energies. The Audley Court is indeed mysterious in this way too. Its rooms are specifically personified, as they are all inherintly different and are meant to bewilder people:

“A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place—a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber.”¹

Because of its mystical, and mysterious, atmopshere it almost feels like the rooms of the house are humanistic in some way. They seem like they are trying to delibertly confuse and scare people away. Why? What type of secrets are hidden within this mansion that make the rooms mystical as well?

The Gothic mansion serves as a symbolic representation of the human soul. Audley Court is just that: a spirtual portal into the secrets of Lady Audley. To digress, this adds onto it a mystical level. The dark atmosphere of the mansion can symbolize the inner struggles and fears that one must confront through their transcendent journey. In this way, the Gothic mansion can be seen as a metaphor for the mystical journey of self-discovery and spiritual transformation. Moroever, it could also allow the readers to adapt a mystic persona, as they travel with the characters and emobdy the emotional transformation that the characters embody.

1. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, Oxford English Classics edition, pg 3 ↩︎