The Female Gothic - Essay Example

Inserts His/her Inserts Inserts Grade 10 March 2009 Female Gothic The genre "gothic" has since always been closely linked to the women writers and readers. Many feminist critics have described it in the following words: "Gothics are particularly compelling fictions for the many women who read and write them because of their nightmarish figuration of feminine experience within the home."1 It was Ellen Moers who came up with the term "female Gothic"2. She used it to describe the tradition of women's writing, which she traced back to Anne Radcliffe. She said that this writing used the gothic's "paraphernalia of claustrophobic castles, villainous dominating men, and beleaguered heroines to thematize women's sense of isolation and imprisonment within a domestic ideology fast becoming hegemonic by the end of the eighteenth century."3 It was Anne Radcliffe who managed to make the gothic novel acceptable by society. Ironically, a sudden degradation of its fame followed. Radcliffe was very successful and this called on many imitators. Most of them were lowly, thus the genre started to be viewed generally as inferior. Along with other features, Radcliffe brought about the threatening figure of the gothic villain. This later turned to the Byronic hero. Many of Radcliffe's novels turned out to be bestsellers. The most successful was The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). However, in spite of this the well educated society viewed such novels as sensationalist women's entertainment, although many men enjoyed them too. By the time the Victorian era had started female gothic had become an increasingly complicated as well as contradictory genre. Along with symbolizing women's fear of domestic imprisonment it also managed their fantasies of escape from the physical and psychological custodies of the domestic and typically described feminity. One more change that took place in female gothic by this period was the fact that by the 1860s there were also male gothic novelists. One such example being of Wilkie Collins4. Collins appropriated several of its concerns and designs. The fiction reviewers of the 1860 didn't view the type of writing which has all together been called female gothic as just a tradition of writing by women, but they also said it was a feminized form of writing. In the novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte is a lot of suggestion of gothic. All three writers were keen readers of the gothic stories that were published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. All three Brontes helped in refashioning gothic; even the author of Wuthering Heights, a very uncategorizable novel. They did this by taming and psychologising it. This happened in the Victorian era. In order to domesticate gothic, the Bronte sisters located their stories of female captivity, custody, or harassment (either physical or psychological) in daily, domestic surroundings and among the tolerable classes of society. In fact, much of the odd influence of their novels originates from this juxtaposition of the domestic and the fantastic, as one of their first reviewers observed: "in spite of its truth to life in the remote corners of England - Wuthering Heights is a disagreeable story. The Bells [the Bronte pseudonym] seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects - the misdeeds or oppression of tyranny, the eccentricities of 'women's fantasy'."5 Bronte intentionally busied in rewriting gender codes and the evidence for this can be in her structural Gothicizing6. However, as our attention is limited to only a few examples of some supposed "female Gothic" and as we mainly know of only Anne Radcliffe as being the antecedent for Bronte, we do not know how her modification of gender codes also serves her professionalism7. A usual reader of the Brontes would certainly remember so many scenes from their novels whose uncanniness is "unhomely". One such is the claustrophobic site of observation that is Madame Beck's school and the home of Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853). Here, Charlotte Bronte seems to be holding onto the usual gothic use of an unfamiliar area and a Roman Catholic tradition as the place of tyranny. However, her option of bourgeois Lebassecour (Belgium) as the area of her heroine's gothic experience is parodic or anti gothic. The Monk's relics in Villette is a story of replacements and ownership, which talks to Bronte's effort to get hold of possession of herself as a woman, an author and an inheritor to literary conventions. As Luce Irigaray thinks of the impasse: "How find a voice, make a choice, strong enough to cut through these layers of ornamental style, that decorative sepulchre, where even her breath is lost. Stifled under all those airs."8. However, the voice which Charlotte Bronte discovers while channelling out from inside the tomb of the gothic novel has a greater part than just making "female gothic" enthusiastic or mourn the "feminine carceral" of domestic space9. This Bronte's novel can be called "new Gothic" due to the fact that it makes women's approval of replacement, demonic in Lewis, heroic10. Critics have argued that a tension is present in this novel between realism and Gothic romance11. According to Masse inventive creations like the gothic, along with reflecting reality, also "begin responsibility -- that of women for their own psyches and bodies"12 Gothic fictions have enable women readers to become increasingly aware of how traditional customs often contradict to the women's benefits. Works Cited Allingham, Philip, V. The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 - "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment". (n.d.). 10 March 2009. Chorley, H. E. Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion. Volume 2. David, Deirdre. The Cambridge companion to the Victorian novel. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. E. D. H. Johnson, 'Daring the Dread Glance': Charlotte Bronte's Treatment of the Supernatural in Villette,"N CF20, 4 (March 1966): 325-36; Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Tamar Heller, 'Jane Eyre, Bertha, and the Female Gothic," in Approaches to Teaching Bronte's 'Jane Eyre," ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), pp. 49-55 Heilman. Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic, in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T Hillhouse, ed. Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 118-32. Laurie Taylor. (n.d.). March 10, 2009. Luce Irigaray, "Any Theory of the 'Subject' Has Always Been Appropriated by the 'Masculine, "'in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985, pp. 133-46, 143. Masse, Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Reading women writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Smith, Andrew & Wallace, Diana. The Female Gothic: Then and Now. Gothic Studies. Manchester University Press. Volume 6 Issue 1, May 2004, pp 1-7 Wein, Toni. Gothic Desire in Charlotte Bronte's "Villette". Rice University. 1999. pp. 733-746. Read More