Penny Dreadful won the hearts of mere goths who decided to watch it. Seamlessly, it blended the Victorian Ripper-esque aesthetics with the drudgery and morality of age-considered ethics. Goth evaded the atmosphere, because the dark colour palette became the characters’ wardrobe and emotional sensitivity. From Frankenstein’s creature to Dorian Grey, it has all of the unconventional Victorian villains that they themselves loved.
The Forbidden fruit in the fangs of the flawed
It is set in Victorian London and has both original characters and well-known characters like Dracula, Van Helsing, and Dr Frankenstein, all of whom are entangled in a web of paranormal terror. The protagonist of this terrifying story is the mysterious Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), a medium who fights the evil that wants to take her soul. The show delves into the intricate relationships, anxieties, and aspirations of its multifaceted people, all against a stunningly gloomy and unsettling backdrop.
But is the series socially and historically accurate? Yes, in a sense, not in the existence of Vampires and bloodthirsty maniacs, but in reference to the psychological landscapes and Victorian morality. During the late nineteenth century, society was plagued by the ethos of upper-class prestige while the disadvantaged lived on London’s grimy fringes. The hierarchy served the rich, while the latter were conflicted with their drudgery of suffocated norms and sexuality. For instance, blood is the metaphor of sexuality. The Victorian sphere was tight-laced with female-male sex considered to be immoral and ‘savage.’ Promiscuity and same-sex relationships were frowned upon. One can enter the society if they become a sexless, emotionless, extroverted model of a textbook Victorian ideal man/woman. This is where Vampires enter. They live under the banner of respectable society; their bloodlust is their sexual device to penetrate people’s necks with their fangs. They are evil yet extremely tantalising. Dracula abducts Mina Harker, the daughter of Sir Malcom Murray.
Malcolm Murray, an adventurer-explorer, and the enigmatic Vanessa Ives employ Ethan Chandler, an American gunman and roadshow performer, to assist in saving Murray’s daughter from an inexplicable entity. Victor Frankenstein, a young doctor who helps them, is shortly pursued by an undead creature he once reanimated and left behind. Ives develops romantic feelings for the attractive, creative Dorian Grey, but she is also plagued by Lucifer’s desire to marry and rule her. Every being is connected to the supernatural. Dracula’s abduction of Mina and Ives’s sexual fantasy with the devil advocate their innate consciousness to taste the forbidden fruit. The uncanny mirrors the regressive fears of humans, for instance, monsters under the bed, or transgressive desires like homosexuality, fluidity in the Victorian era. Venessa wanted a man matching her own sexual freakiness, which transgressed the borders of moral sexuality prevailing during that time. Dorian Grey, a character from Oscar Wilde’s literature, is immortal because he fell in love with his own portrait. Youth was revered while old age was the harbinger of death and disease.
Unburying what was killed- desire and Darwin.
The ancient Egyptian god Amun-Ra’s quest for his immortal beloved queen, Amunet, who is reborn in Vanessa Ives, a Catholic woman with “a complicated history with the Almighty,” appears to be the most potent and all-encompassing driving action in Penny Dreadful. One stated, “In fact, this pursuit is yet another element that places Penny Dreadful in the Gothic tradition, despite its focus on the contemporary. Gothic also offers a space in which the past can persist in a modified form.” This echoes the plot of 1999’s The Mummy, where an Egyptian priest, Imhotep, wants to resurrect his mistress from the world of the dead by sacrificing Evelyn (the only human woman who reminded him of her). Here, Amun-Ra and Amunet reflect the spiritual anxieties in the face of rapid mechanisation in the late 1800s. But in the race of spirituality, Darwin is not to be left behind. Dr Frankenstein created Proteus with love, but filled his original creation with hate and abomination towards all mankind. The initial creature is the epitome of the ‘survival of the fittest ‘ and the grotesque. Dracula is another subversion of the fittest. The latter doesn’t hide its malformed desires of blood and violence. He thrives in the confines of darkness. Frankenstein abhors darkness. This is the same quandary with Dorian Grey and Ethan Chandler; they don’t confine themselves to the norms of their sexuality. Their kiss is the kiss of conformed desire bursting forth in Victorian peril.
Alas, the seances of the Dreadful’s wishlist revealed that monsters are perhaps not under your closet but in the humanistic ritual of intrinsic nature that is shaped by society. Women, men, werewolves, and Vampires do have one thing in common- desire. In any form, sexuality, spirituality and Egyptology reveal the fractured fragments of society that once existed.
