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The Female Gothic
Ann Radcliffe was pivotal in the birth of The Female Gothic.

The female author Ann Radcliffe crafted the birth of the Female Gothic genre with the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1792). The emergence of gothic fiction coincided with the rise of modern-day feminism. According to Moers, the Female Gothic can be simply defined as: "the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the gothic." As Wallace notes: "Gothic is a notoriously slippery term, 'Female Gothic' perhaps even more contentiously so. Critics have argued over whether the Gothic is a literary form, genre, or sub-genre, a mode of writing, a set of conventions or a historical period." As Shajirat notes: "While gothic ruins are typically discussed in terms of moldering castles and crumbling historical monuments, the Female Gothic tradition of the long eighteenth century calls attention to another set of ruins: the physical and mental decay the Gothic heroine undergoes on the path from childhood innocence to adult experience."

Pioneering Texts Within the Female Gothic Genre

Core Texts

• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

• Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

• Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

• Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

• The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

• The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

• Beloved - Toni Morrison

• The Woman in Black - Susan Hill

• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Emergence of The Female Gothic as a Literary Term

Ellen Moers Literary Women (1976)

In her groundbreaking work Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers introduced the term “Female Gothic” to describe how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women novelists employ certain coded expressions to describe anxieties over domestic entrapment and female sexuality. The term touched on something vital to women’s experience, generating robust feminist scholarship exploring the urgency and persistence of these themes in women’s writing and lives. Moers’s work and that of many other-second wave feminists (Margaret Doody, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Leona Sherman, et al.) reclaimed a wealth of textual material written by women and created a place for it within the canon. Gothic writing by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and the Brontës played a central part in that movement. The institutionalisation of Gothic Studies within academies is due, in large part, to those pioneering second-wave critics.

While several critics have attempted to destabilise the term Female Gothic, its usage persists as a short-hand form to describe narratives in which distressed female heroines are imprisoned in the domestic sphere and threatened with extortion, rape and forced marriage. The discussion about gender’s relation to the Gothic mode becomes further complicated when one considers genre. As with most Gothic Studies, discussions of the Female Gothic have disproportionately focused on one genre, the novel, and one novelist, Ann Radcliffe. Within the Gothic novel, many scholars’ choice to begin their discussions of the Female Gothic with Radcliffe distorts a more robust genealogy of women’s literary history. For example, Diana Wallace demonstrates the profound influence that Sophia Lee’s brand of historical Gothic in The Recess has on Radcliffe and the historical novel generally. Women wrote important Gothic poetry (for example, Mary Robinson's Haunted Beach ), plays (for example, Joanna Baillie's Orra ), and chapbooks too numerous to name. Women’s Gothic novels—including Radcliffe’s—also served as rich fodder for adaptation, some of which is written by men, leading to a whole host of other generic questions.

Feminism and the Female Gothic

To start with, gothic fiction has had, from its advent in the eighteenth- century, notable feminine / feminist associations. Some of the earliest contributors to the genre, including Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley , were women. The themes they treat have female relevance. The labyrinthine passages and castle vaults in which Radcliffe portrays her heroines losing their way have been interpreted by critics as symbolically representing, in an age when upper- class girls were often kept ignorant of sex, female sexuality and the body. The plot structure of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its brutal erasure of the female characters, is read by Mary Jacobus as representing an image of patriarchy and its tendency to suppress and even annihilate women. In addition, certain key gothic concepts and motifs, in particular the uncanny and the ghost, are metaphorically applicable to lesbian existence. As critics increasingly perceive, reference to same-sex female desire and erotic relations between women occurs in eighteenth and nineteenth-century gothic literature. In addition, Daphne Du Maurier in her 1930s novel Rebecca, and Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House published in 1959 , wrote gothic fiction with lesbian resonances. However it was in the 1980s and 1990s, in the context of the lesbian feminist movement, that Lesbian Gothic emerged as a specific form. During this period Anglo-American writers moved from prioritizing realist forms of fiction, such as the ‘coming out’ novel and bildungsroman, to experimenting with the recasting of popular genres, some involving fantasy. Gothic fantasy is one form that attracted them. Novels and stories of this kind, while differing in narrative line, have features in common. They all employ gothic motifs and imagery as a vehicle to represent and explore lesbian sexuality and experience. Wellknown motifs that they utilise include the witch and the vampire, as well as different forms of spectrality, including the ghost, the spectral double and the haunted house.

Female Gothic Heroines

The very words "Gothic heroine" immediately conjure up a wealth of images for the modern reader: a young, attractive woman (virginity required) running in terror through an old, dark, crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere, from either a psychotic man or a supernatural demon. She is always terminally helpless and more than a bit screechy, but is inevitably "saved" by the good guy/future husband in the nick of time. This construct certainly has its roots in the Female Gothic of the 18th century, but the reality is much more complex than the modern reader's image might suggest. Gothic heroines, particularly Radcliffean ones, are quite contradictory in their actions and implications. The textual and critical excerpts that follow point to the real complexities in the construction of the Female in the Gothic. An initial glance at these ladies is apt to be misleading. Radcliffe's heroines, for example, seem to divide neatly into spritely and helpless (those who pick up a candle and go exploring in the hidden recesses and those who cower fearfully behind doors). Yet, as Edith Birkhead remarks with some asperity, "Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless type." They are not without talent: "In reflective mood one may lightly throw off a sonnet to the sunset or the nocturnal gale, while another may seek refuge in her water-colours or her lute." Yet their accomplishments and their supposed ingenuity and intelligence are never of the slightest practical use. Their business is to experience difficulty, not to get out of it; and by consequence, any individuality that may be imputed to them at the beginning of the novel is soon dissolved. Emily comes through all her horrors, and comes face to face at last with Valancourt, not on the final page of Udolpho but a good fifty pages from the end. That leaves time enough for Emily to resolve her prudent doubts about her lover's character, which significantly center of the rumor that he is a gambling man. The rumor is, happily, unjustified, and the marriage takes place in the final chapter...To those who have never quite made it to the end of The Mysteries of Udolpho, it is a pleasure to report that Emily ends her days in the pastoral serenity of The Valley, pensively musing on her father's memory, and confident that his injunction to demonstrate the strength of sensibility has been obeyed. If this hasty sketch of the heroine of Udolpho...sounds like a travesty of the familitar Gothic heroine, that is because of what was done with the figure by the male writers who followed Mrs. Radcliffe. For most of them...the Gothic heroine was quintessentially a defenseless victim, a weakling, a whimpering, termbling, cowering little piece of propriety whose sufferings are the source of her erotic fascination...Stability and integrity are indeed the major resources of the Radcliffe heroine; her sensibility and her decorum never falter; and however rapid or perilous her journeys, the lares and penates of proper English girlhood travel with her. She always manages to pack up her books, her sketching materials, and her lute, no matter how swiftly she is abducted from, say, Venice to the Castle of Udolpho. Locked up in a gloomy, haunted chamber high in a castle tower, Emily "arranged her little library...took out her drawing utensils, and was tranquil enough to be pleased with the thought of sketching the sublime scenes beheld from her windows." No mean-minded, authoritarian older man (the source of most of Emily's troubles) can be a match for such a young lady. "She opposed his turbulence and indignation," writes Mrs. Radcliffe in a sentence that is my choice for Emily's epitaph, "only by the mild dignity of a superior mind, but the gentle firmness of her conduct served to exasperate still more his resentment, since it compelled him to feel his own inferiority." Always for women [in the Gothic novel]...life begins with a blank. The mother, if known, has disappeared temporarily, and an aunt may substitute. The women's names suggest the blank, the white, the innocent, and the pristine: Blanche (who lives in Chateau-le-Blanc), Virginia, Agnes, Ellena Rosalba, Emilty St. Aubert, even Signora Bianchi. (In addition, the initial letter A can, I think be a cipher that signifies a blank origin where the name does not do so denotively.) It is only after experience has inscribed some of these blanks with character that the figures' true identity is "discovered," that then it is made known by a retracing of recognized traits from other faces, signally from portraits...In The Italian, the question of Ellena's identity hangs on the miniature that hangs from her neck. As Schedoni is about to stab her in her sleep, he draws aside the veil from her bosom and suddenly freezes: the miniature has tumbled out from its concealment, and he recognizes himself in it. When he wakes her, she says it is of her dead father, and Schedoni claims her as his daughter in a sudden, painful revulsion of feeling...Similarly, in The Mysteries of Udolpho Emily is placed in the context of her family by her resemblance to a miniature (actually to two identical miniatures).