Steve as Gothic Heroine

A blogger named Mathildia has written a compelling post exploring why CA:CW is pure Gothic Fiction, with Steve Rogers as the pure, virginal heroine and the Winter Soldier as the monster. She makes a very good case -- here are some excerpts from her post:

Gothic Literature was hugely popular in the 18th and early 19th century and although the genre can be hard to define, so many elements of gothic fiction are present in CATWS it’s hard to ignore. CATWS is the Mystery of Count Udolpho, it is Dracula, it is Jane Eyre, it is The Turn of the Screw. It is a story about a pure, virginal ingenue protagonist trapped in a strange world of intrigue, horror and patriarchal authority.
. . .
Gothic fictions are romantic ghost stories. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a deeply romantic ghost story.

A classic storyline of the Gothic begins with the protagonist encountering a seemingly supernatural threat. A ghost of sorts disrupting the lives of the protagonist, and their assumed allies, with hidden motives. The Gothic is about fear of the supernatural, or how fear of the supernatural can be used to control. The supernatural threat in Gothic fiction often turns out not to be a ghost at all, but to be something far worse.

The Gothic protagonist is usually female and we usually see everything from her point of view. (Although male versions exist, like the virginal, pure Jonathan Harker in the first part of Dracula and I wrote a lot about Steve’s feminine coding in this meta.) In CATWS Steve Rogers is our virginal, pure heroine and CATWS is an unusually heavily viewpointed movie. We do occasionally see conversations Steve doesn’t, but it’s rare. For most of the movie, we only know what our wide-eyed, gauche heroine knows.

Gothic heroines are isolated. Trapped in away from their friends and unsure who to trust. Stranded in an unfamiliar world, they cling to the familiar, like walks and needlework or, in this case, kicking people in the face on hijacked ships, until this peace is invaded by an ominous, monstrous threat.

. . .

Gothic heroines struggle to know who they can trust. Alone in a world where the things they thought would keep them safe - often patriarchal authority -turn out to be corrupt. Steve finds himself surrounded by of people trying to confuse, fool and gaslight him. Who can he trust? Can he trust anyone?
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The threats that the heroine of Gothic fiction eventually faces are sexual threats. She discovers that powerful man she thought she could trust has designs on her body and wants to corrupt it. Her body becomes the battleground, the centre of a story about who gets to control her body and other bodies like hers.

Because of this, Gothic fiction is often filthy. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes by design. It is often full of transgressive desire and sexual dissidence. Obsessive love. and sexual power play. There is an undercurrent of sex and sexual threat to CATWS which is hard to deny. At least two scenes in the movie - Bucky in the vault and Steve in the elevator - are strongly coded as sexual attacks.

The ghost - the Winter Soldier - when revealed to be Steve’s presumed dead childhood friend Bucky Barnes, suddenly becomes a thousand thousand times more horrifying than the simple assassin he was thought to be. That’s the real punch of the movie - and that has nothing to do with 1970s conspiracy thrillers. That’s pure terror. That’s the point where Steve, our Gothic heroine, breaks and falls into a sort of disbelieving fugue at the sheer horror of it, before he pulls himself together for what must be done.

And Bucky is the biggest reason CATWS is Gothic fiction, because Gothic fiction is about dark folds of personal history that turn out not to have been laid to rest. It is about the dead not staying buried. Gothic fiction is about the power of the uncanny. And Freud’s uncanny is about that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. The ghost turns out to be not a ghost at all, but something real and, if anything, more horrifying, not just that but the ghost turns out to be something from Steve’s own past, a secret that wouldn’t stay buried, and a nascent threat to Steve himself.