American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013

Sheila Morris 

What is Feminine Gothic and Why Should I Care?

After reading Danielle Maldonado’s “Essay 2B: Gothic Elements in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I asked myself, with all the different Gothic narratives available, what is meant by Feminine Gothic and how might that affect me?  To find my answer, I first needed to decide the meaning of The Gothic narrative. As it turns out, defining The Gothic is not easy because it comes in many different forms and employs numerous devices such as dank and dreary castles, ghostly apparitions, stormy weather, Byronic heroes, monstrous villains, arduous journeys, love and extreme loss, physical and psychological dangers and much more.  I found that while The Gothic explores the extreme dark side of the sublime, it all boils down to a tiny four-letter word that motivates every human in the world: fear.

Fear may be a small word, but it is a complicated term. What is frightening to one person may not be so scary to another.  Fears are different for different people, including different genders, thus the distinction between Masculine and Feminine Gothic narratives.  In The Female Gothic: Then and Now, Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace contend that male writers tend toward a plot of “masculine transgression of social taboos” while the “Female Gothic articulated women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society.”  Smith and Wallace went on to discuss Ellen Moers, Literary Women.  They wrote,

Moer’s 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 center of the female tradition.

I took Moers’s quote to mean that women’s fears were often more psychological than physical even if the Gothic narrative often portrays the heroine as victim. Another article that discusses the Feminine Gothic psychology is Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic, by Eugenia C. Lamotte, who wrote, “The fear of power embodied in Gothic Romance is a fear not only in super powers but also of social forces so vast and impersonal that they seem to have supernatural strength.”

In Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, Elaine Showalter notes that Gothic novels were tools that women could use to fight “patriarchal tyranny in a passive-aggressive manner.”  Who are some of these writers that fought male tyranny and attempted to change the world with their words?  Just Google The Gothic narrative and one name comes up over and over, Ann Radcliffe.  Radcliffe was considered a pioneer in the Gothic genre, Radcliffe published six novels: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Gaston de Blondeville, The Italian, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Romance of the Forest, and A Sicilian Romance.  In Then and Now, Smith and Wallace describe Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance as being about a “persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father in search of an absent mother.”  This type of narrative was typical for female Gothic writers.  Other Gothic novelists include the Brontë sisters.  Examples of their work include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which is about a governess that falls for the brooding master of the house only to learn that he has a dark secret, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which is a love and great loss story between Catherine Earnshaw and her father’s adopted son, Heathcliff.  The previous examples are English writers who wrote during the height of the Romantic period.  These women paved the way for future Feminine Gothic writers.

As time passed, so too have women’s fears.  In Sister’s Choice Showalter notes “the Female Gothic takes on different shapes and meanings within different historical national context.”  Examples of recent American Gothic Feminine writers include Charlotte Perkins Gilman with her psychological tale, The Yellow Wallpaper and, more recently,  writers such as Anne Rice, writer of the Vampire Chronicles and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series and Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight Saga.

So, what is Feminine Gothic and why should I care? Besides the fact that I am a female, the Feminine Gothic was just one way that women spoke out against the unfairness and injustice of living in a male-controlled society, this genre gave and still gives women a voice in a world where, too often, gender is still an issue.  And, as an added benefit, the Feminine Gothic has also provided great literature and entertainment throughout the years.  Whether researching “foresisters” like  Ann Radcliffe, The Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley like or more modern writer’s such as Sylvia Plath, Ann Rice, and Stephanie Meyers, readers are bound to be thrilled and frightened at the same time.

Works Cited

De Lamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic. Oxford University Press. 1990.

Maldonado, Danielle “Essay 2B: Gothic Elements in “The Yellow Wallpaper” http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5431rom/models/2010/mtrms/2shess/mt10shmaldonado.html

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Showalter, Elaine.  Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing.  Oxford: Clarendon P.  1991.

Smith, Andrew and Wallace, Diana. The Female Gothic: Then and Now. University of Glamorgan.  2004.