Children’s Literature in Education

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9343-0

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Vampires and Witches Go to School: Contemporary

Young Adult Fiction, Gender, and the Gothic

Michelle J. Smith1 • Kristine Moruzi2

 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract In the twenty-first century, the Gothic has experienced a cultural resur-
gence in literature, film, and television for young adult audiences. Young adult
readers, poised between childhood and adulthood, have proven especially receptive
to the Gothic’s themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and
sexuality (James, 2009, p. 116). As part of the Gothic’s incorporation into a broad
range of texts for young people, the school story—a conventionally realist genre—
has begun to include supernatural gothic characters including vampires, witches,
angels, and zombies, and has once again become a popular genre for young readers.

Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. One of her
primary research areas is Victorian girls’ literature and culture and she is currently completing a study of
female beauty titled ‘‘Beautiful Girls: Consumer Culture in British Literature and Magazines,
1850–1914’’. Michelle is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian,
Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840–1940) (U of Toronto P, 2018, with Clare
Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls,
1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011). She has also co-edited four books in the fields of children’s literature and
Victorian literature, including Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and
Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Moruzi and Elizabeth
Bullen).
Kristine Moruzi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin
University, Australia. She recently completed an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career
Research fellowship on The Charitable Child: Children and Philanthropy in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries (2014–2017). She is the author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical
Press, 1850–1915 (Ashgate, 2012) and is co-author (with Michelle J. Smith and Clare Bradford) of From
Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s
Literature (1840–1940) (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her most recent publication is an edited
collection on Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for
Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017, with Smith and Elizabeth Bullen).

& Kristine Moruzi

kmoruzi@deakin.edu.au
1
Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
2
Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

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In the past decade, in particular, a large number of Gothic young adult series with
female protagonists set in boarding schools have been published (These include
Shadow Falls (2011–2013) by C.C. Hunter, Covenant (2011–2013) by Jennifer L.
Armentrout, House of Night (2007–2014) by P.C. Cast, Mythos Academy
(2011–2014) by Jennifer Estep, The Dragonian (2013–2015) by Adrienne Woods,
The Morganville Vampires (2006–2014) by Rachel Caine, Blue Bloods (2006–2013)
by Melissa de la Cruz, and Fallen (2009–2012) by Lauren Kate). In this article, we
will consider the first books in three such supernatural Gothic series that feature
vampires and witches: Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy (2007), Claudia Gray’s
vampire romance Evernight (2008) and Rachel Hawkins’ Hex Hall (2010). These
books are significant for the ways in which the traditional school story is adapted
and transformed by the Gothic to define models of contemporary girlhood. Although
Diane Long Hoeveler suggests that ‘‘the ‘body’ that emerges from female gothic
textuality is a highly gendered one’’ (1998, p. 18), what we see in these texts is how
the school story setting enables Gothic female protagonists who are unique, dis-
ruptive, and potentially transformative, despite the limitations enforced by the
heterosexual romance plot. We argue that these novels, while conservative in some
respects, rework the school story genre in that they foreground the sexual and
romantic desires of girl protagonists regardless of the threat they constitute to the
institution and the safety of others.

Keywords Gothic school story
Romance
Girls
Vampire Academy

Evernight
Hex Hall

Girls’ School Stories, the New Girl, and the Gothic

The world of the traditional girls’ school story is one in which girls’ values and
accomplishments are celebrated, and which offers opportunities for popular
conceptions of femininity and girlhood to be redefined. The history of the girls’
school story dates back to Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or The Little Female
Academy (1749), which instantiated the didactic tradition of the genre in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The school story is historically a realist
genre that became immensely popular for gendered audiences of boys or girls in the
early- to mid-twentieth century, when it was typically published in series form. The
pervasiveness of the school story in Britain and its colonies was spurred by the real-
world extension of education to English children in the late nineteenth century.
However, school stories were most commonly set in small, isolated boarding
schools that did not reflect the schooling experience of most children. As Sally
Mitchell explains, these historic school stories did not aspire to reflect reality and
are better understood as depictions of fantasy, although they do not depict fantastic
events (1995, p. 99). By the 1880s and ‘90s the traditions of the modern girls’
school story had become more commonplace. Clear generic conventions typically
meant that plots of girls’ school stories focused on the arrival of a ‘‘new girl’’ at a
school who would need to progressively learn the rules of the school and earn her
place among a friendship group and the esteem of the school community. The new

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girl was transformed as she learned to abide by the rules and codes of school life and
came to understand her role in conforming to definitions of femininity that were
often based on conservative ideals.
Only recently has the school story genre become predominantly co-educational,
with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) at the
forefront of this resurgence. This co-educational setting enables the heteronormative
romance plots in the books we discuss here since the schools are often set in remote
locations that limit the movement of the students and prevent them from
accidentally meeting anyone outside the school environment. One of the most
transgressive acts that a girl can perform is to leave the school grounds without
permission, as in the case of Rose Hathaway and Lissa Dragomir in Vampire
Academy.
The stories we discuss here have clear links with the school story genre, yet they
also ‘‘reveal traces…of competing genres’’ (Clark, 1996, p. 3), in this case the
Gothic and the romance. Scholars have explored how the Gothic manifests in
contemporary fiction and film set in schools. What has been termed ‘‘Schoolhouse
Gothic’’ predominantly relates to realist fiction in which students are subjected to—
and reject—the overbearing authority, enforced conformity, and oftentimes
violence, of schools and teachers. Sherry R. Truffin defines ‘‘schoolhouse Gothic’’
using adult fiction by Stephen King, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, and others
to suggest that ‘‘the school produces psychopaths, zombies, and machines, usually
from the raw material of the student’’ (2008, p. 5). In their discussion of schoolhouse
Gothic, Thomas A. Atwood and Wade M. Lee draw on young adult realist fiction
including John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Robert Cormier’s A Chocolate War,
and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye to argue that these stories ‘‘subvert the
didactic role of children’s literature and critique the school’s function in
normalizing and socializing students’’ (2007, p. 102). In contrast with these realist
texts that produce metaphorical monsters, the young adult novels we consider are
populated by actual monsters who grapple with ordinary coming-of-age issues
within boarding schools for supernatural pupils. Moreover, unlike the schoolhouse
Gothic, they are not, in the main, critical of the socialising process inherent in the
formal and informal education provided by the school. These Gothic school stories,
in fact, are somewhat conservative in their reinforcement of many of the familiar
ideologies and tropes of the traditional school story relating to socialising young
people, and especially girls, despite the subversive capabilities of their protagonists.
The central concerns of Gothic YA remain consistent with those of canonical
Gothic texts, including ‘‘the growth and transformation of the child, the crisis of
adolescence and the sometimes painful transition into adulthood’’ (Georgieva, 2013,
p. 13). According to Margarita Georgieva, the Gothic child of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries was often characterised by ‘‘ambiguity, mystery, liminality,
violence and monstrosity’’ (2013, p. 12). Similar qualities imbue the young adult
fictions that we analyze below as they foreground the emotional challenges of
becoming an adult, including taking on new responsibilities, becoming an
individual, and managing more complex relationships, as well as the physical
changes associated with puberty. In the novels under discussion here, the female
protagonists are subjected to experiences that further their growth, and they carry

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‘‘the promise of heritage and stability, or, alternatively, of usurpation and

disruption’’ (Georgieva, 2013, p. 13). Each of the three female protagonists are
thrust into environments that are already threatening, and it soon becomes clear that
maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. Instead, these girls prepare to
disrupt the existing school and social hierarchies to ensure the safety of their school
and friends.
The Gothic is constantly being reinvented in ways that address the current
historical moment, as is the cultural construction of monstrosity, which is
historically conditioned. As Jeffrey Cohen explains, ‘‘the monster is born only at
this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a
time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear,
desire, anxiety, and fantasy…. The monstrous body is pure culture’’ (1996, p. 4).
Nina Auerbach influentially explained that ‘‘every age embraces the vampire it
needs’’ (1995, p. 145), but Glennis Byron and Sharon Deans have also recently
suggested that ‘‘each age group does so too’’ (2014, p. 89). The current popularity of
Gothic YA fiction suggests that the questions raised by the Gothic are insistently
relevant to young readers, and particularly girls. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels,
for example, were the five highest-selling titles in the UK in 2009, constituting 10
per cent of all books sold for young people that year (Harrison, 2010). The
phenomenal sales of Twilight alone undoubtedly fostered a strong enthusiasm
among publishers to produce and market vampire and other Gothic fiction with girl
protagonists.
In each of the novels under discussion here, the female protagonist is unique in
some way that is not fully understood and that begins to disrupt the traditional
expectations of the typical gothic heroine, who is often ‘‘fairly passive, finding her
way out of one disastrous situation after another only because someone comes along
to rescue her’’ (Heiland, 2004, pp. 28–29). These passive female heroines continue
to appear in other contemporary texts such as Lauren Kate’s Fallen and Meyer’s
Twilight, but they feature human protagonists who are not otherwise particularly
extraordinary. In Vampire Academy, Hex Hall, and Evernight, however, the unique
supernatural qualities of the protagonists enable them to breach the confines of
traditional femininity and become extraordinary in ways that Twilight’s Bella Swan
and other human characters cannot. Yet this uniqueness functions as a site for the
fear and anxiety referenced above about the protagonist coming of age. What
happens to the school story when the ‘‘new girl’’ cannot be contained within a
known, specific category of being? In these contemporary texts, the traditional
school environment, which is based on history and tradition, fails to cope with the
challenges raised by the modern supernatural girls who challenge its norms.
Vampire Academy begins with Rose, who is half vampire and half human, on the
run with her vampire friend Lissa from the eponymous Academy. After Lissa uses
her healing powers to restore Rose’s life, the two girls share a unique spirit bond
that is not well understood at the Academy. In particular, Rose’s impetuousness
makes her stand out from the crowd of traditional and obedient students. At the
same time, because she is not part of the ruling elite, Rose offers new possibilities
for how society might be changed to adapt to the threat of the evil vampire Strigoi.
She is explicitly a liminal figure who is called ‘‘shadow-kissed’’ because she has

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‘‘crossed into Death, into the other side, and returned’’ (Mead, 2007, p. 317). This
liminality enables her unique mental connection to Lissa as well as her transgressive
behaviour, which includes fleeing the Academy when she believes Lissa’s life to be
in danger: ‘‘That’s why you’re so reckless in the things you do. You don’t hold back
your feelings, your passion, your anger. It makes you remarkable. It makes you
dangerous’’ (Mead, 2007, p. 317). This difference can be coded as monstrous, but
the novel generally positions it as a positive element that allows Rose to collapse
some of the constraining, hierarchical frameworks operating in the novel and
enables her freedom to pursue her goal of protecting Lissa. Her dedication to
protecting Lissa is significant because it indicates that girls are capable of protecting
those they love. Moreover, Rose’s supernatural ability as a guardian is tied to her
liminality as a girl. Her female transgressiveness enables her to break the rules and
save Lissa.
In Evernight, the protagonist Bianca Olivier is rare as she was ‘‘born’’ a vampire
to vampire parents, rather than being bitten and turned into one. As the first-person
narrator, Bianca is able to conceal her vampirism, and that of both of her parents—
who are teachers at Evernight Academy— from the reader throughout the first
section of the book. Her initial concerns about not belonging to the school
community seem innocuous, as she imagines herself as the ‘‘gawky new girl’’
(Gray, 2008, p. 25) and is preoccupied with finding her place within the evolving
cliques. Most of the vampire students are considerably older than Bianca, and she
stands out because of her youth, inexperience, and the fact that she has not
consumed human blood. When she becomes romantically involved with a human
boy at the school, Lucas, she gives into temptation while kissing him and drinks his
blood, which ‘‘marks’’ him and places him on the brink of transformation into a
vampire.
The new girl trope is mobilised in Hex Hall when protagonist Sophie Mercer is
exiled to Hecate Hall, an isolated reform school for wayward supernatural beings
(or Prodigium), when she fails to control her powers as a witch. She commits
several mistakes on her first day, including befriending an outcast, upsetting the
popular girls, and developing a crush on the most attractive male student, Archer,
who is eventually revealed to be a member of the Eye, an organisation that wishes to
exterminate the Prodigium. Her ability to fit into existing hierarchies has particular
significance because Sophie is believed to be a dark witch and therefore the only girl
in the school who can complete a coven with three other pupils. The coven
represents a conflict between the traditional urgency for the new girl to belong to the
group and a more modern, neoliberal sense of individualism. Sophie’s determina-
tion to stand by her lesbian vampire friend and roommate Jenna marks her as unique
at Hecate, although even she has doubts about Jenna’s monstrosity. When Sophie
discovers that she has demon blood in her veins, she is forced to acknowledge that
she, too, is a monster: ‘‘I’d liked thinking of myself as a witch. It was a lot nicer than
demon. Demon meant monster to me’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 319). Sophie has
prejudices to overcome as she accepts Jenna’s vampirism and comes to terms with
her own monstrous identity. Both characters transgress the limits of female
monstrosity since vampires are most often coded as male predators upon women

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and demons typically embody an animalistic monstrosity that is incompatible with

femininity, unlike the feminised figure of the witch.
The school setting enables the girls’ maturation and the development of their
knowledge about their distinctive qualities. It brings together a variety of normative
supernatural creatures, yet each girl’s unique qualities offer an opportunity for her to
disrupt the traditional environment of the school and to define a new model of
femininity that allows her to become the hero of her story. These female
protagonists are different, and this difference enables their critique of the
hierarchical structures of the boarding school. Bianca as a ‘‘born’’ vampire, Sophie
with her demon blood, and Rose as ‘‘spirit-kissed’’ are each positioned to interrogate
the rules and regulations that limit her agency and often fail to keep her safe.

The School as a Safe Environment

While the school environment offers opportunities for new knowledge and
understanding, each female protagonist soon learns that this space is not
fundamentally safe. In all three novels, the monstrous Gothic figures have been
separated from the public sphere through the isolated locations of the schools in
remote areas. The boarding schools depicted in these contemporary series are, as in
early twentieth-century school fiction, what Erving Goffman describes as ‘‘total
institutions’’ (1961, p. 4), which restrict contact with the outside world.1 In these
Gothic school stories, the protagonists are separated from their familiar environ-
ments, asked to cope with new rules and expectations, and then challenged by
threats to the seemingly idyllic school setting. These threats not only disrupt the
school, its teachers, and the students, but they particularly offer opportunities for the
girls to develop and expand their skills and capabilities.
The threat to the school setting is all the more dangerous because the boarding
school is in effect operating as a home. In all three cases, the boarding school is
designed to protect its students from the dangers of the outside world. Ironically, of
course, the threats come from within, from students who have already been admitted
to the school and whose presence is not viewed with suspicion until late in the
novel. In Vampire Academy, the remote setting is designed as a protective measure
to keep the Moroi safe from the Strigoi attacks, yet the safety of the school setting is
seen for the illusion it is when Lissa is kidnapped. In part, the rationale for the
schools’ isolation is based on controlling who has access to these supernatural
students as well as limiting the students’ access to the human world.
This is also the case in Hex Hall in which the school building is approximately
200 years old and located on a remote island. Hecate Hall is ‘‘the premier

1
Goffman explains that these features are common to a range of enclosed workplaces and residences
including monasteries, concentration camps, and orphanages. The characteristics of a total institution
include: (1) the conduct of life in the same location under the same authority figure; (2) an
individual’s day unfolds in the presence of a large number of other people who are also required to
undertake the same activities; (3) The day is rigorously scheduled by a ruling body; (4) the required
activities cohere to support a unified plan that is designed to meet the institution’s aims. (Goffman, 1961,
p. 6).

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reformatory institution for Prodigium adolescents’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 9), including

vampires, witches, and fairies. The school was established in 1967, when the
overseeing Prodigium Council ‘‘realized that it needed a place to train and mould
young Prodigium who were using their powers without the proper level of
discretion’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 74). Sophie’s mother is happy to send her to Hecate
Hall because, as she says, ‘‘this place is safe’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 16). The premise
for the reform school is, as in Evernight, to provide some degree of protection
through the education of monstrous teenagers, with reckless supernatural behaviour
in the presence of humans constituting a threat to all monsters. Again, this is typical
of the humanisation of the monster and Othering of the human in contemporary YA
Gothic, as the story is focalised through the monster’s perspective with empathy for
their fight to survive among humans. In a history lesson about the school designed to
shock incoming rebellious students, film footage of Prodigium being brutally killed
by humans is screened. Principal Mrs. Casnoff explains that Hecate, for whom the
school is named, is not only the Greek goddess of witchcraft but also ‘‘goddess of
the crossroads’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 74), flagging the students’ need to reform or
continue to place themselves and other Prodigium in danger.
Although Hecate Hall is designed to protect the human population from the
dangers of uncontrolled witches, fairies, and shapeshifters, it also supposedly
protects the students from the dangers of vengeful humans seeking to destroy the
monstrous students. What Sophie soon realises, however, is that the monsters are
already within the walls of the school. A series of attacks on students at the school
has resulted in one death, which is soon blamed on Jenna because she is a vampire,
despite the lack of evidence. As Sophie observes, it is easier for the headmistress
and the Council to blame Jenna: ‘‘Anything else might mean admitting they were
wrong or, worse than that, not omnipotent’’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 282). Yet after
Sophie kills the demon Alice, she comforts Mrs. Casnoff in the face of evidence that
her protection has been woefully inadequate. The tables have turned, with Sophie
becoming the comforter and Casnoff the comforted, in a move that reflects Sophie’s
increasing maturity as she copes with new challenges. This switch is another
symptom of the collapse of binary oppositions in contemporary Gothic that we
outline below in that adults are no longer necessarily the saviours and young people
the ones needing to be saved.
Evernight Academy is an old-world setting, with the school building a ‘‘huge,
hulking, Gothic stone monstrosity’’ (Gray, 2008, p. 6) built in the 1700s, complete
with gargoyles and situated in dense forest. The school is isolated from the general
public in a similar way to the cloistered or country settings of the traditional girls’
school story in which the pupils’ movement could be controlled. In Evernight,
teachers monitor the halls every evening to prevent students leaving in an intense
surveillance system (Gray, 2008, p. 55) and the school is unnaturally, for a modern
institution, technologically isolated, with no cell phones, internet, or television
(Gray, 2008, p. 95). In this Gothic novel, the literal separation of the school from
civilisation and practical separation from technology helps to maintain the
verisimilitude of the school as a safe space for vampires.
Evernight adheres to the general trend in postmodern Gothic fiction to collapse
the opposition between good and evil, with vampires often being depicted as

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empathetic, loving creatures, while humans are exposed ‘‘as capable of being as
equally murderous as vampires’’ (Smith, 2013, p. 192). The dilemmas of the
vampire teen are also subsumed into that of the stereotypical American teen, with
many of the girls ‘‘dieting’’ from their usual intake of blood in order to become
‘‘thinner’’ for the school dance (Gray, 2008, p. 185). The central premise of
Evernight is that the school has functioned as a sanctuary for vampires for two
centuries, uniquely designed to assist them in surviving throughout time. An
essential aspect of ensuring the continued survival of vampires is the maintenance of
the safety of the humans who live near the school and that of the newly admitted
human pupils.
The school setting in all three novels is deliberately ambiguous. Established as a
safe space, the school inevitably fails to prevent the monsters from entering and
doing harm to students. Thus, although the girls gain knowledge and skills, they also
learn that they cannot always depend on the institution to operate with their interests
in mind or to make the best decisions, especially when those decisions require
flexibility and adaptability. It indicates both a lack of faith in adults to solve
problems for young people and that the institution is only as good as the people
working within it.

Romance and Sexuality in Gothic YA

Romance and sexuality are central concerns in all three novels. In two of them, the
danger to the girls comes from their romantic relationships, and, in the third, the
romantic relationship is a key plot point that enables the Strigoi to attack the school.
In Evernight, Lucas is twenty-one, but poses as a human teenage student while
actually being a member of the Black Cross and gathering information designed to
help his organisation kill the school’s vampires. In Hex Hall, Sophie’s love interest
seemingly attempts to murder three witches, and succeeds in one case. In Vampire
Academy, Lissa’s kidnapping is enabled by one of her schoolmates while Rose is
distracted by a charm that makes her act on her attraction to the guardian Dimitri.
Heteronormative romantic and sexual relationships are depicted in all three novels
as potentially dangerous to the girls’ health and wellbeing.
The heterosexual romance is one of the key narratives in Western society by
which girls and women are inscribed as subjects. The primary narrative of the
romance, which offers security in ‘‘unsettling times’’ (Gill, 2007, p. 226), ‘‘is
constructed around a series of obstacles that must be overcome in order for the hero
and the heroine to fall in love’’ (Gill, 2007, p. 219). Its plotting and structure follow
romantic conventions that ‘‘explore power relations, shape desire, construct
femininities, and demarcate sexual difference’’ (Christian-Smith, 1990, p. 45).
The recent re-emergence and popularity of the Gothic romance can be explained by
the incorporation of Gothic motifs, in which the addition, or return, of elements of
darkness and misfortune to the romance ‘‘injects something else, something
different, into an evacuated form, renewing intensity and revitalising desire with
objects and plots that seem more dangerous, real and credible’’ (Botting, 2008,
p. 22).

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Most Gothic YA texts contain a romance plot, often because the protagonists
typically occupy the liminal space between childhood and adulthood demarcated by
sexual experience. The only major study of young adult romance novels was
published in 1990 by Linda Christian-Smith, prior to surge of interest in
incorporating Gothic themes into YA texts. She describes teen romances as a ‘‘site
of ideological struggles for young women’s hearts and minds’’ (Christian-Smith,
1990, p. 2) in their emphasis on hetereonormative coupling and motherhood. While
none of the texts here are focused on maternity, the romance plot is a strong element
of each. The heroines’ romantic interests place them in conflict with the ultimate
aims of the institutions to protect their pupils, conservatively linking their sexual
maturation with danger to themselves and others. In Vampire Academy, for
example, Rose’s attraction to Dimitri is deemed inappropriate because of the age
difference of seven years, his role as her mentor, and their shared guardian duty to
keep Lissa safe. Yet Rose increasingly sees Dimitri in sexual terms, wondering how
his power and strength in physical combat would manifest while making love.
Although Rose has some experience, she has not yet had intercourse, a point which
is made multiple times in the novel.
Rose is seen as a sexual object, particularly by the Moroi, who find dhampir
women especially attractive because of racial differences: ‘‘It was ironic that
dhampirs had such an allure here, because slender Moroi girls looked very much
like the super-skinny runway models so popular in the human world. Most humans
could never reach that ‘ideal’ skinniness, just as Moroi girls could never look like
me. Everyone wanted what she couldn’t have’’ (Mead, 2007, p. 51). Rose enjoys her
sexuality and dresses to capitalize on it, but this sexuality operates within her
definition as a strong young woman: ‘‘First they saw my body and the dress.
Testosterone took over as pure male lust shone out of their faces. Then they seemed
to realize it was me and promptly turned terrified. Cool’’ (Mead, 2007, p. 271). In
the context of contemporary rape culture, Rose is able to reject unwelcome
advances and possesses the physical strength and skills to stand up for herself,
suggesting to girl readers a fantasy of empowerment and equality.
An outside threat to the school includes a compulsion spell that enables Rose and
Dimitri to act on their suppressed desires. Were it not for this spell, the reader is left
to understand, Dimitri, at least, would not have acted on his attraction to Rose. For
Rose, the opportunity to pursue her attraction for Dimitri in a physical sense is both
exciting and scary: ‘‘I’d never been completely naked around a guy before. It scared
the hell out of me—even though it excited me, too’’ (Mead, 2007, p. 284). The
relationship remains unconsummated, and Rose knows it is illicit and that Dimitri
would be fired if it came to light. Although Dimitri encourages Rose to report what
happened, he does not come forward, leaving her with the responsibility for keeping
(or not) their secret. Ironically, the antagonist Victor, who prepared the compulsion
spell, is the only adult who knows and condemns Dimitri for his attraction to Rose:
‘‘He should have demonstrated more control in hiding his feelings’’ (Mead, 2007,
p. 316). The unresolved nature of Rose’s romantic relationship at the conclusion of
Vampire Academy (as with Bianca and Sophie in the other novels) offers the
protagonist agency that would be undermined if she was paired off in a heterosexual
couple. Nonetheless, the unresolved relationships in all three texts provide some of

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the narrative impetus in subsequent books and all three series conclude with the girls
involved in heteronormative romantic relationships.
While femininity is defined by heterosexual normativity in all three novels, only
in Vampire Academy is consent addressed. The school community is based on long-
established hierarchies, with the Moroi placed in positions of power, while dhampirs
become guardians and humans provide blood to the Moroi as feeders, in a role often
akin to a prostitute. Rose’s decision to give blood to Lissa when they escape the
Academy is one born of desperation, although she enjoys the rush accompanying the
bite. The vampire bite is typically understood as akin to sexual penetration and the
rush is associated with sexual pleasure. Although Rose enjoys the pleasure
associated with being a feeder, the novel never presents the relationship between
Rose and Lissa as anything but platonically familial. Moreover, Rose remains
disgusted by the idea of the feeders when they return to the school:
Disgust poured into me. It was an old instinct, one that had been drilled in over
the years. Feeders were essential to Moroi life. They were humans who
willingly volunteered to be a regular blood source, humans from the fringes of
society who gave their lives over to the secret world of the Moroi…. But at the
heart of it, they were drug users, addicts to Moroi saliva and the rush it offered
with each bite. (Mead, 2007, p. 44-5)
Yet the issue of consent is central to the episode that prompts the girls to flee the
school. A group of male Moroi students attempt to take advantage of a female
feeder at a party, ‘‘doing a sort of group feeding, taking turns biting her and making
gross suggestions. High and oblivious, she let them’’ (Mead, 2007, pp. 206–207).
This chilling scene depicts an attempted gang rape, and only Lissa’s intervention
saves the nameless girl. The supernatural female protagonists in these YA gothic
novels are responsible for their own safety—they can and should protect
themselves—yet they also have a responsibility to also keep others safe. Girls
with supernatural abilities are able to dictate with whom and when they conduct
sexual relationships, and are thereby exempt from the rape culture operating in the
text, while human girls are powerless. Because the story is focalised through Rose,
however, the implied girl readers are encouraged to identify with her model of
femininity in which girls can be attractive and sexual without inviting non-
consensual sexual encounters.
The liminality of Gothic figures who transgress boundaries between human and
monster is magnified by the transitional space occupied by teen protagonists who
are neither children nor adults. In Evernight, vampire Balthazar explains that
vampires are stagnant beings who remain trapped in a ‘‘perpetual adolescence,’’
which explains why some of the students ‘‘act like teenagers even when they’re
centuries old’’ (Gray, 2008, pp. 207–208). The borderland state of the teen and the
vampire is especially evident in the heroine’s emergent sexual desires. Bianca’s
monstrous, vampire identity emerges when she kisses the object of her affections,
the human pupil Lucas, and her desire for human blood is awakened: ‘‘my body had
known what I needed and wanted long before my mind could even guess’’ (Gray,
2008, p. 144). Though Bianca regularly consumes blood sourced from a butcher’s
shop and is raised with extensive vampire knowledge given her parentage, as a

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teenager she is unable to control her desire to bite a human and drink blood. This act
threatens the school itself, as the other vampire students could be similarly tempted
by the newly admitted human pupils (Gray, 2008, p. 147). Although it is female
desire that is most often policed in young adult fiction, Bianca’s vampirism affords
her a power over her romantic interest. Lucas is eager to protect her from the
perceived threat of another boy in the school, but he is ignorant of her true capacity
to protect herself, and she maintains the fiction of male protection by reassuring him
that her father will ‘‘look out for’’ her (Gray 176). Moreover, as a vampire, she is the
one who has the power to corrupt her male romantic interest in the metaphorically
sexual act of the vampire bite. As Bianca bites Lucas twice, he becomes ‘‘marked’’
(Gray, 2008, p. 247), which places him on the verge of transforming into a vampire
and of being detectable by other vampires. Yet he is unaware of the significance of
these two bites, making Bianca’s motivations somewhat suspect. She has the power
to transform him into a vampire (with or without his consent) in an act of
penetration not typically associated with femininity. Although she seemingly takes
on the role of predator, her lack of knowledge about the consequences of her actions
undermines this reading. Instead, and somewhat problematically, her actions are a
result of her ignorance and her uncontrolled desire.
In Hex Hall, the compulsory heterosexuality of most paranormal romance is
briefly disrupted through referencing one girl’s lesbianism, but overall the romantic
conventions of the Prodigium are old-fashioned and patriarchal. All witches are
betrothed to a warlock at thirteen years of age, although the witch can refuse or
accept the betrothal or subsequently change her mind. Archer informs Sophie that
such matches are usually good ‘‘based on complementary power, personalities’’
(Hawkins, 2010, p. 159) and, crucially, that she likely has already been betrothed
because her estranged father is a powerful member of the Prodigium Council. As in
Evernight, the heroine’s love interest, Archer, is revealed to be a human who
belongs to one of the secret organisations that threatens monsters. In Evernight,
Bianca and Lucas’s love holds the potential to endure despite his membership in the
Black Cross, but in Hex Hall Archer tries to kill Sophie. However, these monstrous
girl protagonists are not simply at the mercy of human boys. Sophie is not only a
witch, but discovers that she is a demon hybrid, descended from her demon great-
grandmother Alice. This means that Sophie is by her nature ‘‘dangerous.’’ Her
grandmother, Lucy, killed Sophie’s grandfather, and her father must always be
accompanied by a member of the Council in case he becomes dangerous. Sophie’s
initial response is to reject the additional powers she discovers, and she plans to
travel to London to have ‘‘the Removal’’ to excise her demon side, although it might
kill her. The idea that she might be dangerous to those around her means that Sophie
wants to remove the threat from her body rather than trying to control her demon
side.
Vampire Academy, Hex Hall, and Evernight each depict strong female
supernatural protagonists who pursue romances that place the broader communities
they inhabit under threat. This not only suggests that female desire and sexuality are
in conflict with the aims of the institution, but also that girls will make choices that
privilege their romantic self-interest even when it threatens the safety of others.
These choices foreground the importance of the romance plot even when that

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relationship may not be in the girls’ best interests. By emphasising the romance,
these novels reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal ideologies that privilege love
over learning and safety. All three texts are somewhat ambiguous about the girls’
ability to protect themselves while safely pursuing a sexual relationship of their own
choice. This is symptomatic of the ways in which these Gothic school stories,
despite their introduction of supernatural figures such as vampires and witches, are
more generally conservative and reproduce similar expectations to the total
institutions represented in boarding school stories. By introducing supernatural
themes and giving the female protagonists romantic and sexual agency, these school
stories seem to be producing and enabling more progressive models of femininity.
Yet in many ways they remain as conservative as the traditional girls’ school stories
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The needs of the overall school
community come into conflict with those of the individual girl and are threatened by
the liminality of teen characters who are poised between childhood and adulthood,
between sexual innocence and experience. The girl’s choice of romantic partner
undermines the safety and security of the school setting, yet the consequences of
this choice enable the female protagonist to take action, demonstrating that
constructions of girlhood are neither stable nor predictable in their effects (Bruhm,
2006, p. 105). The girls in these texts embrace their unique qualities in disruptive
and potentially transformative ways that offer them choice and control over their
own narratives, even when those narratives are limited by desire and romance. The
Gothic conventions in these novels reflect ‘‘cultural anxieties’’ about girlhood,
femininity, and agency that ‘‘remain unsolved’’ (Jackson et al., 2008, p. 6) in the
first books of these series.
Indeed, as Anna Jackson explains, ‘‘the monsters have become the heroes’’
(2016, p. 1) in contemporary children’s Gothic in the new millennium. The school
stories discussed here embrace the Gothic within the traditions of the nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century girls’ school story genre, in which the girls’ school is
supposed to function as a safe, feminised space. Yet the three novels that we discuss
in this article challenge the belief that any school or home can be kept safe since the
real threats come from those who are already located within that space. This means
that the female protagonists must draw on their unique capabilities to thwart the
perpetrators of evil while also remaining steadfast in their commitment to their
community and their individual interests. While these girls become the heroes of
their own stories, they remain constrained by conservative, heteronormative ideals
that privilege romance, often at the expense of the safety of the community.

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