Gothic Women Writers of the Victorian Era

Introduction

The gothic tradition is no stranger to the critical stratification of high and scant literature. The female gothic, for instance, has earned a wondrous place in both feminist and traditional literary canons while modern gothic romance, its sister sub-genre, derided as popular trash lacking the depth of its antecedents. In particular, the romance's archetypal subjection of a hapless heroine to a Byronic master in a malevolent manor house-earning them the moniker of Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think it is My Husband novel (Russ, pp. 31), a model hereafter referred to as STKM serves as the locus of disparagement. Critics denounce this genre both for its conventional formula and its ostensible reinforcement of the very patriarchal conventions and subjugations the female gothic renowned for undermining; they claim that modern gothic romance is not only distinct from, but in fact, antithetical to, the female gothic tradition. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) challenges such a division by revealing the novels' parallel treatment of the experiences and origins of feminine fear one which does not conform to the paradigm of male terrorization of women implied by the STKM convention. Rather, as argued, the novel consistently refute or undermine their hero's ability to frighten the heroine, locating the heroine's fear instead entirely in the novel's female actors. Jane Eyre thus belie an anticipated correlation of masculine power and womanish fear by presenting women as agents of terror and, in so doing, suggest an equal investment in the female issues that characterize female gothic. In essence, one finds that the oft-discussed divide between female gothic and gothic romance can be diminished or at times even eradicated through demonstration of the genre's shared concerns regarding female identity and power.

Discussion

Female gothic may then be seen as a version of the Gothic created by women authors, to explore formerly unspeakable, monstrous, aspects of women's lives (Stein, pp. 29), focusing on internal female oppression rather than the oedipal or patriarchal struggles fore-grounded in male gothic. In particular, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's reading of double figures in The Madwoman in the Attic introduced this emphasis into the critical tradition. By locating Jane Eyre's central conflict in Jane's confrontation, not with Rochester, but with her dark double Bertha, Gilbert and Gubar conceptualized the female gothic as a secret dialogue of self and soul, an articulation of woman's struggle against her own imprisoned hunger, rebellion, and rage. The concept, of the monstrous double thus not only gave a name and feminist slant to the schizoid phenomenon long considered a key element of the gothic, but incorporated the genre's dual concerns of female identity and woman's social orientation. Representing forces both within patriarchal culture and within the heroine herself, the monstrous double serves simultaneously as a monitory victim of male tyranny, and an ominous embodiment of latent female aggression and sexuality. While some critics finally see this as conventional gender roles rather than, as and Gubar suggest, imbuing revolutionary subtext, gothic scholars nevertheless maintain the importance of the double figure ...