«Beautiful Things Are Fragile»: Intertextual Connections and the (Re)Construction of Identity in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015)

Abstract

This chapter argues that the consciously intertextual nature of the 2015 film Crimson Peak did not only enable Guillermo del Toro to render a heartfelt homage to time-honoured classics in the gothic tradition; it also operates at a strategic level in the enactment of a multi-layered rite of passage operating at three levels. On the one hand, with regard to its leading characters, it explores the physical and psychological traumas embedded in the transition between innocence and adulthood: the sharp contrast between the pervasive, apparently threatening, presence of ghosts and the predatory urge of other human beings around gradually transforms the former into allies in one’s quest for self-assertion. On the other, in relation to viewer experience, the film replicates the function developed by these supernatural beings from beyond by uttering a well-measured warning against the danger of appearances and the blind pursuit of one’s dreams. Likewise, within the dynamics of identification and differentiation between Edith Cushing and Thomas Sharpe’s ill-fated wives, we may perceive a clear reflection of the film’s eclectic construction and negotiation of meaning with the tradition anticipating it. Therefore, our study pinpoints and analyses the integration of literary and film referents –firmly rooted in the gothic tradition– into Guillermo del Toro’s proposal, which is seen as a lively exercise of appropriation and resignification clearly withdrawn from soulless repetition. The film succeeds in the attempt of redefining the identity of the leading protagonist, the role of the audience with regard to the film, and its own construction: it ultimately brings forward a fruitful dialogue between fiction, reality, tradition and modernity.