56 pages • 1 hour read
Tamsyn MuirGideon the Ninth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Catholic Aesthetics
Gideon the Ninth relies heavily on Christian theology and biblical allusions. These are symbolized through the Catholic aesthetic that suffuses the Houses. The Ninth House is full of nuns and priests who pray with rosaries made of human bone. The Ninth House guards the Locked Tomb, which features a dead individual who may rise from the grave and a rock rolled in front of its entrance. These are traits borrowed directly from Jesus’s tomb as it is described in the Gospel of Luke.
The Catholic aesthetics within Gideon work as symbols that strengthen its themes of original sin, redemption, and guilt, and they further complicate Muir’s themes of LGBTQ+ love and allegories of LGBTQ+ struggle. LGBTQ+ people who grow up in Christian communities often experience a conflict between their conservative, heteronormative religious traditions and their identities. Catholicism generally does not approve of relationships between members of the same sex, and Muir’s use of Catholic aesthetics in a dark story about LGBTQ+ characters with traumatic backgrounds suggests a complex relationship with the religion and its symbols.
The Gothic
The Gothic exists in Gideon the Ninth in both genre tropes and motifs. The Gothic as a motif lets Muir play with grimdark conventions through the lens of Catholic aesthetics and theology, as well as through tropes borrowed from Victorian Gothic horror, such as haunted castles, family secrets, and lurking monsters. Canaan House is a haunted castle, filled with the tortured souls of thousands and “the sum of all necromantic transgression” (144). Canaan appears in the Bible as the promised land of the Israelites who have left Egypt, but in the novel, the “promised land” is turned on its head and becomes a monument of suffering that is common in grimdark fiction.
The Ninth House is a kind of haunted castle as well, with the Locked Tomb representing the source of Harrow’s family’s dark secret. Its remote location and darkness make it a prison from which Gideon cannot escape. Gideon and Harrow embody the trope of monstrosity, and the same is true for the lurking monster Cytherea, who is the “vengeance of the ten billion” (374).
Cartesian Dualism
Dualism is an idea coined by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, which asserts that the mind and body are separate entities. The body cannot think or act on its own, rather, the mind, or soul, controls and uses the body to interact with the world. Dualism is integral to Christian theology, which states that the soul is a wholly separate entity from the body. Muir’s use of dualism is an extension of the Catholic aesthetics within the novel.
Dualism allows Muir’s system of magic to function: Souls can be removed from their bodies, bodies and skeletons can be animated as thoughtless machines, and so forth. Dualism shapes the cavalier and necromancer relationship as they are two parts of a whole. Necromancers are generally physically frail and study scientific necromantic theorems for power. Cavaliers, on the other hand, are physical fighting machines and the body of the duo. They are meant to obey their necromancers to the letter without input or interpretation. Muir turns dualism on its head by wrenching the “body’s” soul from the cavalier to place it in the “mind” of the necromancer, instead of placing the “mind” into the “body” as dualism would have it. The grimdark genre lets Muir invert the classic Christian motif to create a more monstrous, original interpretation of a dualistic universe.
