It has been said many, many times before that “the eyes are the window to the soul.” And I believed it. The very window that lets us sink our teeth into who a person really is. Biting back the layers of their outer shells to reach the inner pearl. But Bram Stoker is one of the Gothic Greats who forgets the folly, thinking solely about the window itself. For Stoker, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, finding the window to one’s soul does not require meeting their eyes first— and that’s what makes their monsters evermore deadly.

Reading into the symbolic importance of windows in Gothic texts sounds like one of the less exciting endeavours, but the reality is that they serve as more than a standard architectural detail. For we must understand what happens when the only protection from the evil of the outside world is physically transparent. We must understand how windows, in their very nature, invite the devil inside.

‘He slid into the room through the sash, though it was only open an inch wide, just as the Moon herself has often come in through the tiniest crack…’

Bram Stoker, Dracula

I have read Stoker’s Dracula countless times and am always drawn back to the same thought: what would happen if the characters actually kept their windows locked? We might assume that Count Dracula would not have had such easy access to Lucy Westenra, he would not have been able to enter the home and attack Mina Murray, and he certainly wouldn’t have been able to entice Renfield into worshipping him. But the impossibility of keeping the Count out appears in the failure of windows to provide infallible security. In fact, the horrors of Stoker’s tale are only made possible because of the false promise that windows provide protection; you may think you are safe, but the transparent boundary is destroyed as soon as a pair of eyes look through it.

Take the killing of Lucy Westenra’s mother as a prime example of the failure of windows. Mrs Westenra tragically dies from a heart attack after Count Dracula bursts through the window in the form of a large wolf. In a brutal flash, Dracula hurls broken glass into the bedroom and is able to penetrate the room in murderous fashion. The important thing about Stoker’s window in this chapter is how easily it is shattered. Despite being secured and even littered with flowers of garlic, the promise of safety is still annihilated in the face of evil. In this moment, and many others, the window is a weak spot that the Count exploits.

It is indeed the window to the very soul that he aims to destroy.

There are various episodes in Stoker’s novel where the window allows his monster to transgress into the inside world. Yet, we cannot ignore an integral moment where the Count himself becomes a victim to the prowling eyes of the observer. In the hair-raising moment when Jonathan Harker sees Dracula crawling down his castle walls as a ‘lizard’ would, we must acknowledge the power that comes from looking through the window. At this point in the novel Harker has been imprisoned by Dracula, forced to remain in his Transylvania fortress. The window allows Harker to momentarily break from his metaphorical shackles and gain important knowledge outside of his entrapment. By using its transparent and therefore informative qualities, Harker becomes the observer, and the Count is unknowingly the observed.

Windows in Gothic literature are portals. And this idea comes even before Stoker’s time.

Mary Shelley— or the “mother” of science fiction— turns our attention to the importance of the window in her infamous contribution to the Gothic genre: Frankenstein.

On the eve of Elizabeth Frankenstein’s wedding, and while she lay soundly on her marital bed, Frankenstein’s monster creeps into the room through the window and strangles her. When the widowed Victor finds the body of his wife, he sees at the open window the abhorred monster grimacing and pointing at the corpse. Shelley reminds us of the frailty of the window as a protective device. In this instance, the sleeping bride is utterly vulnerable and ultimately destroyed because of the window’s flaws. Not only does the evil of outside invade the home when the Creature climbs through the window, but it continues to bleed through the transparent boundary even after Elizabeth is dead.

Whilst undeniably being a physical liability, the window also prompts psychological disruption in many examples of the Gothic.

Let’s read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a third signifier of the penetrable window and its usefulness for the ghouls of the outside world. To the horror of Mr Lockwood upon his visit to Wuthering Heights, the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw creeps into his nightmares, using the window to let herself in. The window is punctuated in the particularly unsettling moment where the ghost grasps his hand through the broken pane, shrieking ‘“Let me in— let me in!”’ Though dreamt, the scene provides a haunting narration of the fragility of the window and reminds us just how close we sleep to the ghouls that lurk on the other side of the breakable glass.

And finally—in my favourite of the poems that Gothic literature has to offer— the window highlights the complete psychological decline of Edgar Allan Poe’s speaker in ‘The Raven’.

‘Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;’

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’

After tapping on the narrator’s chamber door twice, the fabled raven eventually enters the room via his window. Whilst perhaps one of the less important details within a poem that screams with grief and emotional turmoil, I think that the window is in fact something to be explored. A symbol of death and mourning, the raven does not enter the room in the traditional way that a human would. Instead, it takes the more unexpected entrance despite tapping on the door initially.

The window is a message; the tumultuous emotions that come with grief do not enter our lives by knocking on the door and asking politely. They force their way in before we have the opportunity to protect ourselves. Before we have the chance to lock the doors.  

I picture a solitary speaker perched by the windowsill, imploring for any comfort as the deep-black bird invites itself inside just to remind him of his loneliness. And I can’t help but think of the Gothic window and how it, once again, allows for the darkness of the outside world to seep inside. For Poe, the window is an entry point for the narrator’s emotional despair to manifest itself over and over again. The window allows the raven to come inside and sing a melancholy tune.  

These texts are just some examples of an often-ignored Gothic lore that explores the boundary between the outside and inside worlds. The window is a symbol for entrance, for invasion, observance, destruction and force. And it is not just in the folding pages of Gothic literature that these ideas live. Tonight, I look through my window and see the yellow light of the pallid moon as it seeps in through the glass.

Breaking that boundary.

Forcing itself onto me.

It leads me to ask: if eyes really are the window to the soul – or have we been impossibly naïve all along?