ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the BBC production draws upon the Gothic as a mode to render the time period of the novel’s setting. The depiction of an inquisitive female heroine navigating the contours of her home to investigate the secrets housed within the architecture is a recurring image in female-centric films, as exemplified by Secret Beyond the Door, The Innocents, The Others, The Duke of Burgundy, and Crimson Peak. Constructed within the iconography of the Gothic tradition and exploiting the recognisable aesthetic and obligations of the Old Dark House, the house on Soldier Island is presented as a murder house and one that houses secrets. Wheatley perceives the domestic space of the Female Gothic to be configured as a place of anxiety, entrapment, and prison, a place engulfed by family secrets, but a space the protagonist works through to achieve a cathartic resolution.
