Bluebeards and Brontëan Imaginings in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015)

Abstract

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) could be considered a neo-Victorian adaptation that reimagines Brontëan narratives, particularly Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), alongside Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938)—which is, in many ways, a rewriting of Jane Eyre. As a twenty-first-century Gothic film, Crimson Peak engages with a recognizable Brontëan cinematic language—characterized by motifs such as the isolated manor, the hilltop lovers, the incest taboo, the question of female identity, and the heroine’s confrontation with hidden horrors, especially with the murder plot typical of the Bluebeard tale—all of which contribute to critique the patriarchal, capitalist, and colonialist structures that materially and psychologically dispossess the characters inhabiting these fictions. Despite its contemporary context, the present analysis questions whether del Toro’s film critically reconfigures its literary predecessors’ ambiguous yet incisive interrogation of these structures of power or instead simplifies and aestheticizes their tensions, ultimately reinforcing rather than subverting their problematic discourses.