TheFemaleGothic ThenNow
TheFemaleGothic ThenNow
TheFemaleGothic ThenNow
When Ellen Moers first used the term ‘Female Gothic’ in Literary Women (1976),
she thought that it was easily defined as ‘the work that women writers have done
in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called “the
Gothic.”’1 A definition of ‘the Gothic’ was, she admitted, less easily stated, ‘except
that it has to do with fear’ (90). Moers’ analysis of Female Gothic texts as a coded
expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the
female body, most terrifyingly experienced in childbirth, was extremely influential.
It not only engendered a body of critical work which focused on the ways in which
the Female Gothic articulated women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society
and addressed the problematic position of the maternal within that society, but
placed the Gothic at the centre of the female tradition. By the 1990s, however,
partly as a result of poststructuralism’s destabilising of the categories of gender, the
term was increasingly being qualified and there has been an ongoing debate as to
whether the Female Gothic constitutes a separate literary genre. Today, over 25
years later, the terms being offered – ‘women’s Gothic’, ‘feminine Gothic’, ‘lesbian
Gothic’, even ‘Gothic feminism’ – appear to suggest that Moers’ definition is too
much an umbrella term, and, possibly, too essentialising.
In his introduction to the special number of Women’s Writing on Female Gothic
Writing in 1994 Robert Miles suggested that the term Female Gothic had ‘hard-
ened into a literary category’,2 arguing that the early feminist criticism had reached
an ‘impasse’ (132). The essays in that number were invited explicitly to explore,
extend or challenge the critical validity of the term, and it was particularly sug-
gested that essays might investigate materialist directions, re-assess the use of psy-
choanalysis, or use the ‘Male Gothic’ to contextualise their discussion. In
retrospect, these essays, which do all these things as well as, in Miles’ words, ‘chal-
lenging . . . the concept of gender itself ’(134), offered a state-of-the-art snapshot
which indicated some of the most important directions in which criticism of the
Female Gothic would move in the ensuing decade.
Miles’ own Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (1995) the following year offered
not merely a comprehensive account of this central figure but also, in his reading of
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open up her work but also intervene in the debates around the Female Gothic
itself.9 The Female Gothic formula, as outlined by Williams and earlier by Eugenia
DeLamotte, which resists an unhappy or ambiguous closure and explains the
supernatural, for instance, does not fit du Maurier’s work.
Following on from the work of Terry Castle and deploying postructuralist
theory, Paulina Palmer’s Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (1999) was based
on the understanding that ‘Gothic and “queer” share a common emphasis on
transgressive acts and subjectivities.’10 The growth of ‘lesbian Gothic’ fiction over
the past 25 years, she argued, developed out of a specific historical context – the
feminist movement and the growth of lesbian/queer studies, which in turn cre-
ated a readership for texts which appropriated, reworked and parodied Gothic
modes and motifs to articulate lesbian subjectivities. Arguably, Palmer’s concept
of ‘lesbian Gothic’ could be projected backwards to illuminate earlier texts. Inter-
estingly, for instance, Rictor Norton’s Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann
Radcliffe (1999), the first full-scale biography which offers the contextualisation
which has been missing for so long, reads the novels in terms of their ‘lesbian
subtext.’11
Above all, perhaps, the 1990s has witnessed the move of the Female Gothic from
the margins into the mainstream. It is included as a matter of course in Maggie Kil-
gour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995), David Punter’s seminal The Literature of
Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day (1980, second edi-
tion 1996), and Fred Botting’s Gothic (1996).12 Recent collections of essays, such as
Andrew Smith, Diane Mason, and William Hughes’ Fictions of Unease: The Gothic
from Otranto to The X-Files (2002), include readings of women’s texts, such as Laura
Kranzler’s essay on the Black Lace imprint of modern erotic Gothics, alongside
essays on Walpole, Stoker, Le Fanu and Collins.13
The most recent development in the field is the return to historicist readings. E.
J. Clery’s Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (2000), ostensibly a
modest undergraduate guide, actually provides a valuable new reading of women’s
Gothic texts grounded in original historical contextualisation. She counters the
common picture of women writers in the Romantic period as operating under
unfavourable conditions of restraint, concealment and self-censorship, by high-
lighting their acknowledged status as professional writers, influenced and enabled
by the powerful figure of Sarah Siddons as an ideal of female genius. Her title sig-
nals a move away from the psychoanalytic readings of these texts as parables of
family relations within patriarchy typically associated with the ‘Female Gothic’.
Instead, she argues that their key concerns are ‘the legitimation of visionary imag-
ination in women writers, methods of representing the passions, the issue of
arousing the reader or audience, and the profit motive.’14
Like the 1994 number of Women’s Writing, this special edition of Gothic Studies
was conceived as a way of assessing the current state of play in the criticism of the
Female Gothic. Judging by the impressive response to the call for papers, this is one
of the most thriving areas of literary studies, hence our decision to make this a
double issue of the journal.
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Radcliffean Female Gothic, meaning that they could offer a more radical critique
of male power, violence and predatory sexuality than was possible in either
the realist, or indeed Gothic, novel. For Wallace the ghost story functions as the
‘double’ or the ‘unconscious’ of the novel, giving form to what has to be repressed
in the longer, more ‘respectable’ form.
An additional, although largely unexplored aspect of the Female Gothic, the
issue of race, is explored in ‘“Collusions of the Mystery”: Ideology and the Gothic
in Hagar’s Daughter’ by Eugenia DeLamotte who examines the representation of
race in Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (1901/2). She argues that the novel pro-
vides a revision of the Female Gothic and also exploits narrative devices familiar
from detective fiction. The solving of the ‘mystery’ that lies at the heart of the novel
is one which explodes the ideological ‘mystery’, and the national crime of slavery,
which separates Black and White, masculine and feminine, home and state, and
African American and Euro-American families.
One of the characteristics of the Female Gothic plot is its representation of
romantic love. Andrew Smith in ‘Love, Freud, and the Female Gothic: Bram
Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars’ explores how Stoker’s novel raises some complex
questions about love through its use of a male love-struck narrator, who appears
to be caught in a Female Gothic plot which casts him as its hero. In the novel ‘love’
becomes increasingly sinister as it turns into a destabilising and dangerously irra-
tional emotion that ultimately aligns love with feelings of justified horror. Jewel
(1903, revised 1912) thus develops a male reading of a Female Gothic plot in which
the idea of female empowerment becomes defined as horrific. However, this idea
of a pathologised love, Smith argues, is not unique to Stoker and can be linked to
Freud’s account of love, which reveals how social issues relating to male authority
appear within psychoanalytical debates about emotion at the time.
That twentieth-century Female Gothic heroines are more likely to be trapped in
domestic spaces than semi-ruined castles is explored in ‘Skin Chairs and other
Domestic Horrors: Barbara Comyns and the Female Gothic tradition’ in which
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik explore the work of the English novelist Barbara
Comyns whose best-known works were published between 1950 and 1985. They
focus on The Vet’s Daughter (1959) and The Skin Chairs (1962) and explore how
Comyns’ use of parody, wit, and humour exposes the horrors of domestic life. For
Horner and Zlosnik this constitutes a Female Comic Gothic which is grotesque and
blackly comic in its critical assault on patriarchal plots, and so constitutes a partic-
ular form of the Female Gothic which became popular in the twentieth century.
Gina Wisker in ‘Viciousness in the kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s Gothic’ extends the
argument about the horrors of domesticity. She argues that Plath’s domestic Gothic
exposes the duplicities of women’s roles and the surprising paradoxes of fear and
love, Otherness and self in representations of mothering and marriage. Using
Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’, Wisker suggests that Plath’s poems defamiliarise
the familiar roles and expectations of women’s lives. Above all, Plath exposes the
dangers of complacency and the losses that come with the acceptance of a limited
(patriarchal) world view.
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Notes
1 Ellen Moers, Literary Women, [1976] (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), p. 90. All
subsequent references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
2 Robert Miles, Introduction, Women’s Writing: the Elizabethan to Victorian Period,
Special Number: Female Gothic Writing, 1/2 (1994), p. 131. All subsequent references
to this special issue are given in parentheses in the text.
3 Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
4 Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Bas-
ingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Alison Milbank, ‘Milton, Melancholy and the Sublime in
the “Female” Gothic from Radcliffe to Le Fanu’, Women’s Writing: the Elizabethan to
Victorian Period, Special Number: Female Gothic Writing, 1/2 (1994), pp. 143–160.
5 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press, 1995).
6 Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalisation of Gender from Char-
lotte Smith to the Brontës (Pennsylvania State University Press; Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1998), p. 7.
7 Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds, Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 1996).
8 Suzanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (Manchester and New York: Man-
chester University Press, 1999).
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9 Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic
Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
10 Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (London: Cassell, 1999), p.8.
11 Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London and New York:
Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 150.
12 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995);
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Pre-
sent Day, 2 vols, (Second Edition, London and New York: Longman, 1996); Fred Bot-
ting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
13 Andrew Smith, Diane Mason, and William Hughes, eds, Fictions of Unease: The Gothic
from Otranto to The X-Files (Bath: Sulis, 2002)
14 E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, Writers and Their Work
series (Tavistock: Northcote, 2000), p. 23.