23 results in Women and the Gothic
13 - Virtual Gothic Women
- from Part III - New Directions
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- By Catherine Spooner, Lancaster University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 199-213
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Summary
Women at the Interface
Gothic and new technologies have always been closely allied, from eighteenth-century phantasmagoria shows to the digital revolution. As Jeffrey Sconce has shown, recurring fictions of uncanny disembodiment and an ‘electronic elsewhere’ accompany electronic media throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Sconce 2000: 9). The emergence of telegraphy, radio, television and computers each in turn produced fantasies of spectral presence and an otherworldly space from which that presence emanates or through which it travels. Women's position within this alliance is complex: often the mediums through which technologies are Gothicised, they frequently provide a hinge between the embodied human subject and a pure realm of disembodiment. This uneasy positioning of a Gothicised female subject across the Cartesian mind/body dualism is reiterated in contemporary fictions that engage with the possibilities of digital technologies. Virtual Gothic heroines seek liberation into a realm of pure mind, but remain haunted by the needs and sensations of the body. In the texts considered in this chapter – Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894), William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995) and Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y (2006) – virtual Gothic women are constructed as double agents, travelling through and acting upon two parallel worlds, and providing an interface between pure cerebration and sensory embodiment.
The digital culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries projects a persistent fantasy of a virtual realm, a synthetic space in which real actors may interact with varying degrees of consequence. This space is realised in video games, in Multiple User Domain (MUD) virtual environments such as Second Life, and in the space of the World Wide Web itself, in which users are freed from their immediate physical constraints to communicate with their counterparts across the globe. While these actualised forms of virtual space may be mundane, in fiction they are frequently and explicitly Gothicised. For writers such as William Gibson, the unofficial figurehead of the cyberpunk movement, the virtual realm is represented as a labyrinthine space, replete with doubles and ghosts enabled by cloning and digitalised memory. Virtual reality becomes the latest iteration of the magic lantern show or phantasmagoria which, as David J. Jones demonstrates, was a crucial context for the development of Gothic literature in the eighteenth century (Jones 2011).
Part III - New Directions
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 167-168
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14 - Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Games
- from Part III - New Directions
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- By Tanya Krzywinska, Falmouth University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 214-227
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Summary
Digital games are an established feature of contemporary popular culture. They are no longer confined to desktop computers or consoles. We find them embedded in social media, on our smartphones and tablets. While digital games were once designed for and played by those with high levels of technological and gaming literacy, they now reach into a far wider market, with elements of games employed in advertising, business, training and education, as well as consumer and communications cultures. Freed from the constraints of interfaces such as keyboards or game-pad controllers and from expensive, dedicated hardware, games have extended their invitation to a more varied range of people. In addition, it is also increasingly easier to make games, with simplified drag-and-drop interfaces provided by game engines such as Unity. As a result, games are losing their technological opacity and extend beyond the tastes and competencies of the traditionally maledominated market (Ofcom 2014). While these developments are positive and create a broader and more gender-inclusive participation in digital game media, game development companies are nonetheless still largely populated and led by men. Resistance to equality-driven change is also in evidence, with mainstream news channels in the closing months of 2014 featuring misogynist voices claiming to represent gamers angrily expressing a minority desire to preserve games from ‘feminist insurgents’. Representations of gendered embodiments, psychological profiles and role functions within games commonly make use of stereotyped and often gender-exaggerated modes to attract players. This is particularly the case in big-budget high-risk games made for the ‘Triple A’ market, which target male players (such as the Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty series, for example). Less risk-averse and lower-budget games do design for other markets, however. Indeed, powerful, agentic and often complex female characters are not completely absent from the field of games.
Within this group there is a particularly high proportion that draws on the Gothic, often sold under the rubric of horror or fantasy. Game development companies often use Gothic as form of branding to attract a pre-established market; in so doing they take advantage of Gothic fiction's appeal across the gender divide to reach beyond the usual male market for games. As distinct from other games, a relatively high percentage of Gothic games are designed by women.
7 - The Female Gothic Body
- from Part II - Trangressions
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- By Marie Mulvey-Roberts, University of the West of England
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 106-119
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Summary
Women have been identified primarily through the body which, throughout history, has been associated with monstrosity. This representation persists within the Gothic in various forms, from the gorgon to the vampire. For Aristotle, the female was a monster, an aberration from the normative male and, in the words of Luce Irigaray's book title, The Sex Which Is Not One (1977) (Battersby 1998: 49). As a departure from the male, the very notion of the female body has proved troublesome. The demonisation of woman as succubus, harpy, witch and any number of supernatural beings has located the female outside nature and beyond the natural order of things. In Western religious, philosophical and psychological traditions, the alignment of the female with the monstrous or animal body has helped demote the category of woman in social and political hierarchies. Within patriarchal ideology, monstrosity has been regarded as quintessential to the construction of femininity. Going back to the classical mythology of the Ancient Greeks, the snaky-haired Medusa, with her deadly paralysing gaze, allegorises the femme fatale, who encodes the perils of sexual autonomy and aberration. Originally the most beautiful of the three Gorgon sisters, she was turned into a monster by Athena for violating her temple, where she was either seduced or ravished by Poseidon. According to the Christian creation myth, the first woman originated from a male body part, Adam's rib, which aptly illustrates the ancillary nature of her role as help-mate or mere adjunct to the male. Through the fallen figure of Eve, woman has been represented as a temptress and the feminine identified with the serpent, a creature associated with evil, poison and lowliness as it slithers along the earth.
This representation continued into the theological misogyny of the Middle Ages, typified by Bishop Marbod of Rennes (c.1035–1123), who pronounced: ‘Woman [is] the unhappy source, evil root, and corrupt offshoot, who brings to birth every sort of outrage throughout the world … Woman subverts the world; woman the sweet evil, compound of honeycomb and poison’ (Gilmore 2001: 86). These sensual and deadly metaphors point to female flesh as a corrupting and poisonous influence. During the Renaissance, the sexual nihilism of Christian Europe equated reproduction with sin and demonised the pregnant female body as a fecund house of horrors and woman as a ‘two-legged she-beast’ (88), shunned by the church.
9 - Female Gothic and the Law
- from Part II - Trangressions
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- By Sue Chaplin, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 135-149
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter offers an analysis of the complex nexus between Female Gothic and law as it has developed over at least two centuries. From its point of origin in the late-eighteenth century, the extent to which the Female Gothic mode has foregrounded, and often sharply interrogated, the position of women in relation to patriarchal legal systems could be regarded as one of its structuring thematic principles. Even in its most conservative forms (see, for instance, the fictions of Eliza Parsons discussed below), Female Gothic repeatedly deploys the conventions of Gothic fiction in order to represent the extent to which the law in various ways facilitates the incapacitation and maltreatment of the female subject.
As it developed in the 1780s and 1790s, Female Gothic came to establish certain precedents in terms of the ways in which later Female Gothic fictions were to conceptualise and critique the rule of law. This chapter examines the juridical and literary contexts out of which Female Gothic emerged and developed. It considers aspects of eighteenth-century English civil law that began tentatively to construct a certain civil legal identity for women in response to modern democratic ideals, only to render this new mode of female juridical subjectivity exceptionally problematic in so far as it conflicted with well-established patriarchal juridical norms. Certain connections also emerge in this period between developments in literary theory and literary culture, and shifts in juridical theory and practice from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Legal and literary theory begin to converge upon questions to do with verisimilitude, authenticity and authority, and both discourses came to posit the ‘feminine’ as inimical to questions of truth and reason in literature and law. This had significant implications for the production and reception of Female Gothic fiction and the manner of its engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal and literary contexts. The second section of the chapter considers these early Female Gothic negotiations of textuality, female identity and law, particularly in terms of the complex figurations of Gothic space that emerge in the fictions of Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe and Eliza Parsons.
Moving from nineteenth-century Female Gothic through to the new millennium, this chapter seeks finally to establish a connection between early Female Gothic and the most popular contemporary form of Female Gothic fiction in the early-twenty-first century – vampire romance.
8 - Spectral Femininity
- from Part II - Trangressions
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- By Rebecca Munford, Cardiff University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 120-134
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Summary
The ghost … is a paradox. Though non-existent, it nonetheless appears.
(Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 46)Spectres are the lifeblood of the Gothic. Ghosts, phantoms, apparitions and revenants return to the Gothic scene again and again, giving expression to its preoccupation with the fragile thresholds of mind and body and the phantasmatic aspects of language. Owing to its cultural associations with the territories of irrationality, otherness and corporeal excess, femininity has been particularly and peculiarly susceptible to ‘spectralisation’. From the ‘spectral presence’ of the ‘dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing’ (Kahane 1985: 336) that haunts the Radcliffean Gothic heroine and the feminist critical imagination alike, to the female revenants and ghoulish women conjured in the macabre writings of those such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, the Gothic brings into view the troubling movements of wraithlike women.
Etymologically related as much to the sphere of vision as to the realm of phantoms, the ‘spectre’ (from the Latin specere, meaning ‘to look, see’) signifies both that which is looked at and the act of looking. It is owing to this connection between the spectacle and the specular, suggest María de Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, that the spectre is especially suitable ‘for exploring and illuminating phenomena other than the putative return of the dead’ (2013: 2). In Specters of Marx (1993), a text that insistently ghosts discussions of spectrality, Jacques Derrida offers ‘hauntology’, with its evocation and radical unsettling of ‘ontology’, as a new way of thinking about being (with ghosts). According to Derrida, learning to live with ghosts would be to live ‘otherwise’ and, crucially, ‘more justly’; for ‘being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance and generations’ (Derrida 1994: xviii). A way of living ‘between all of the “two's” one likes’ (1994: xvii), Derrida's hauntology attributes to the ghost a paradoxical status as neither being nor non-being that brings into view the spectrality of identity. Most particularly for this discussion, Derrida's account of the spectre emphasises its uncertain status as ‘a furtive and ungraspable visibility, or an invisibility of a visible X … the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone or someone other’ (1994: 6).
1 - Heroines in Flight: Narrating Invisibility and Maturity in Women's Gothic Writing of the Romantic Period
- from Part I - Family Matters
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- By Angela Wright, University of Sheffield
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 15-30
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Summary
Rack well you hero's nerves and heart,
And let your heroine take her part;
Her fine blue eyes were made to weep,
Nor should she ever taste of sleep;
Ply her with terrors day or night,
And keep her always in a fright,
But in a carriage when you get her,
Be sure you fairly overset her;
If she will break her bones – why let her:
Again, if e'er she walks abroad,
Of course you bring some wicked lord,
Who with three ruffians snaps his prey,
And to a castle speeds away;
Those close confin'd in haunted tower,
You leave your captive in his power,
Till dead with horror and dismay,
She scales the walls and flies away.
(Mary Alcock, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, in Poems)Published in 1799, Mary Alcock's parodic recipe for novel-writing repeats much-echoed commonplace assumptions about the comparative youth, fair complexion, victimisation, nervous constitution and tendency to flight that characterised the Gothic heroine of the 1790s. In playful tone, Alcock's recipe endows the heroine with the superhuman abilities of scaling walls and fleeing tyranny, underlining at the same time the unrealistic expectations that author and reader project onto a heroine. Still, despite the humorous vein, there is something disturbing about the way in which her poem conflates the role of Gothic authorship with the fictional role of villain. The imagined addressee of this poem (‘you’) holds the heroine captive, like the villain, subjects her to a carriage crash, kidnap, imprisonment and perpetual flight. It is an astute conflation on the part of Alcock, suggesting that any female author's exploitation of a heroine involves, in turn, an abrogation of femininity on their part. In other words, exploiting a heroine for commercial gain is a masculine pursuit, unsuitable for proper women writers.
Of course, Alcock did this in the spirit of parody, in order to distance herself critically from the commercial exploitation of the Gothic heroine. Her recipe was one in a long line of parodies that targeted the unimaginative regurgitation of a heroine as virtuous and blue-eyed. ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1798), ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1797) and Alcock's ‘Recipe’ all reproduced the stable set of ingredients for composing a Gothic novel, implying that if any author or reader was naïve enough to devour these recipes, then they must already be lacking in imagination and enterprise.
2 - Madwomen and Attics
- from Part I - Family Matters
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- By Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 31-45
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Summary
The solitary life, which Emily had led of late, and the melancholy subjects, on which she had suffered her thoughts to dwell, had rendered her at times sensible to the ‘thick-coming fancies’ of a mind greatly enervated. It was lamentable, that her excellent understanding should have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses into what can be called nothing less than momentary madness.
(Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 102)In Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), spectres are often the product of a nervous young maiden's inflamed imagination or alarmed fancy. Ghosts are nothing but the heroine's own ‘spirits’, and her journey consists, therefore, in learning how to control them before she can be happily married. To do so, the Radcliffean heroine, driven by an irrepressible curiosity, is led to unveil the stories of other women, and gradually realises that the passionate female characters who fail to tame their wild nature end up locked up in turrets, convents or prisons of sorts. As Eugenia C. DeLamotte contends, ‘the discovery of the Hidden Woman’ is ‘a staple of women's Gothic’, and:
Gothic romances tell again and again this story of the woman hidden from the world as if she were dead, her long suffering unknown to those outside – or sometimes even inside – the ruined castle, crumbling abbey, deserted wing, madhouse, convent, cave, priory, subterranean prison, or secret apartments. (DeLamotte 1990: 153)
For DeLamotte, just like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1984) in the now classic feminist study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, the discovered woman who has been buried alive may fall into one of two main categories, the ‘Good Other Woman’ or the ‘Evil Other Woman’, both the angel and the demon suggesting women's confining roles and the social conditions of Victorian patriarchy (DeLamotte 1990: 153).
Among the numerous examples of locked-up women, the trope of the madwoman in the attic is perhaps one of the most potent images of Gothic fiction. As this chapter will show, the madwoman was first and foremost a conventional sentimental icon.
4 - The Gothic Girl Child
- from Part I - Family Matters
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- By Lucie Armitt, University of Lincoln
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 60-73
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Summary
Critical interest in the Gothic child has been vibrant since the new millennium. In 2004, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley edited Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, in which three of the fourteen essays associate queer children, in whole or part, with the Gothic. In one, Kathryn Bond Stockton identifies an innate ‘queerness’ in all children, simultaneously recognising that ‘We are in a world not ready to receive this historical formulation’ (Stockton 2004: 281). The collection as a whole understands ‘queer’ as ‘sexual alterity’ and also ‘deviation from the “normal”’ (Bruhm and Hurley 2004: x) and Stockton extends that terrain to include ‘the lurking child, the shadowy child, the indirect child … the obedient-child-as-fearful child, the not-stopping-what-otherboys- begin child’ (Stockton 2004: 284).
In my book, Twentieth-Century Gothic, I argue that questions of haunted childhood especially differentiate contemporary Gothic narratives from their antecedents. We create our Gothic monsters to give shape to what are otherwise vague but preoccupying social anxieties. Thus, in the face of the ever-increasing tabloid media fascination with child disappearances, child deaths and child abuse, children and death populate many recent Gothic literary and cinematic texts. Thus do we trace out ‘an obsession in society which cannot make up its mind whether it is appalled or enthralled by children and the dangers by which, in their name, we are haunted’ (Armitt 2011: 46–7). It is in this paradoxical manner that the Gothic girl child is best understood: as an enigma; a cipher for the appealing nature of things not always fully understood; one who is alluring, but potentially dangerous. In essence, one might argue that she, above all characters, best embodies the very attractiveness of Gothic literature itself.
In this chapter I examine ten fictional treatments of the Gothic girl child, published between 1845 and 2009. In researching the chapter I was surprised to discover that, though the narrative form develops in line with societal shift during that period, and though the sociocultural expectations of women have shifted dramatically since the midnineteenth century, the girl child of 1845 shares much common ground with her twenty-first-century sister, for Gothic literary depictions of girls remained surprisingly unchanged.
Part II - Trangressions
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 89-90
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6 - Wicked Women
- from Part II - Trangressions
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- By Anne Williams, University of Georgia
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 91-105
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Summary
Etymology says it all. ‘Wicked’ derives from the Old English wicce, a witch. Thus any discussion of Wicked Women in the Gothic demands what Mary Daly has called ‘the process of freeing words from the cages and prisons of patriarchal patterns’ (Daly 1987: 3). Nowadays ‘wicked’ sounds archaic, evoking ‘Snow White’, or ‘Hansel and Gretel’, or the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). (‘Wizard’, though defined as ‘a male witch’, is derived from the Middle English wys or wis, meaning ‘wise’ or ‘smart’.) L. Frank Baum's Wizard was a fraud, but his witches have real power over nature, and like those of the Brothers Grimm imply children's anxieties about mothers’ possibly supernatural powers. Older witches express men's fears of emasculation. The witch hunter's manual, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), reports one who kept a collection of penises in a bird's nest – the largest belonging to the local priest (Kraemer and Sprenger 2013: 108). The witchy women of Gothic fiction usually threaten not literal but more symbolic forms of castration: rebellion against their patriarchal roles as dutiful daughters, faithful wives and self-sacrificing mothers.
The history of wicked Gothic women is a history of rebellion and subversion and a demonstration that representing female subjectivity requires a revolution in literary form. The first epoch of Gothic fiction (1764-c. 1820) coincided with women beginning to publish their writing in great numbers. In portraying their gender, they began to explore and eventually to escape their assigned ‘female’ role as patriarchy's dark, dangerous ‘Other’. Paradoxically, however, the literary foremother of these Gothic wicked women is a female impersonation: Eloisa, in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717). Writing a heroic epistle, an Ovidian genre authorising a male poet to write as a woman abandoned by her lover, Pope paraphrased John Hughes's translation (1713) of the twelfth-century nun Héloïse's letters to her lost, beloved Abelard. Pope's poem exploits the patriarchal stereotypes of women obsessed by romantic love and the interior of the female self as secret and dark, complex and irrational. Thus he places Eloisa, whose convent was Romanesque in style, within a Gothic structure, where literal stone and verbal vows are equally claustrophobic. As a woman imprisoned by the Law of the Father, she is driven virtually mad by unresolvable conflicts.
12 - No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic
- from Part III - New Directions
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- By Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Leeds Beckett University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 184-198
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Summary
People ought to be one of two things: young or dead.
(Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 596)Old Age, at least in the West, has recently become a pressing issue for several reasons. The ‘demographic time bomb’ ticks away inexorably, prompting new interest in researching the implications of an ageing population. The emergence of age studies in cultural studies, pioneered by thinkers such as Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kathleen Woodward in the USA, designated pots of money in the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council for research into age-related issues, the UK coalition government's decision to dedicate an extra £6 million to research into Alzheimer's Disease (2014): all of these signal that ageing needs ‘dealing with’, whether from a cultural, medical or social perspective. Although there have been initiatives to think about older people more positively and to get them back to work – or, one might say more cynically, exploit them as an economic resource – the sense that the aged are a ‘problem’ is still widespread, particularly in highly sophisticated technological societies driven by the young. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out over forty years ago: ‘Modern technocratic society thinks that knowledge does not accumulate with the years but grows out of date. Age brings disqualification with it: age is not an advantage’ (de Beauvoir 1985: 210). As with women's internalisation of masculine values, so the internalisation of societal perspectives on the old can lead to a sense of dislocation and, at its most extreme, existential crisis, in even the most talented individual. W. B. Yeats wrote of himself as ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’, for example, and Daphne du Maurier expressed horror at her appearance in photographs taken when she was 58 that made her look ‘like an old peasant woman of ninety’ ([1965] Malet 1993: 194). This ‘Othering’ of the self is due partly to the recognition of inevitable physical change and decay in one's own body and the sense of split subjectivity it can produce, and partly to the acceptance of social attitudes which see the old as irrelevant and an (increasingly heavy) economic burden.
It is clear that gender and age are both culturally inflected dimensions of subjectivity. Whereas medical science decrees 65 as the age at which senescence begins for both men and women, patriarchal societies tend to devalue women at a much younger age.
Notes on Contributors
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- 22 February 2016, pp 228-231
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Index
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 232-239
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5 - ‘A Woman's Place’
- from Part I - Family Matters
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- By Diana Wallace, University of South Wales
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 74-88
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Summary
In Norah Lofts's story ‘A Curious Experience’ (first published in Woman's Journal in 1971) a young writer goes to live in a rented house in suburban Suffolk while her husband is away in New York. She is not, as she tells her husband when he proposes, ‘the domestic type’ but the newly married couple have been ‘happy as larks’ (Lofts 1974: 110). The house is rented fully furnished at a rent so ‘astonishingly low’ as to arouse the narrator's ‘darkest suspicions’ (111) because the arthritic owner is confined to a ‘Home’. The ‘rot set[s] in’ (113), however, when the narrator, anxious to finish her second novel, is overtaken by a curious compulsion to clean the house. The ‘good spirit’ had ‘gone from me’ (113), she writes, that ‘Deadly’ loss, ‘The thing we [writers] all fear’ (113). Over the next weeks she does so much cleaning – shining windows, tackling the ‘offensive’ (115) cupboard under the sink, and taking loads of linen to the launderette – that she damages her wrist. Finally, she makes a surprising diagnosis:
I never studied psychology, but I had read enough to know what was wrong with me. Fundamentally, I thought, I did not like, or was not satisfied with the story on which I should be working. […] And I was taking refuge from my predicament by pretending to be busy with other things. (Lofts 1974: 116)
Her novel, she recognises, should be written in the first person and not third. But just as she starts to type again, the owner's niece, Mrs Willis, arrives to announce that she must move out because the owner has finally found a housekeeper, which will enable her to return ‘home’. Struck by a thought, the narrator asks, ‘Would you call your aunt a dominant personality? […] And was, I mean is she house-proud?’ (118). Answered in the affirmative she realises, ‘I knew what had got into me, I'd been for a month possessed’ (118; my emphasis). On one level a comic allegory about writerly procrastination, this story also deftly exploits the language of the Gothic – ‘darkest suspicions’, ‘rot’, ‘spirit’, ‘haunting’, ‘deadly’, ‘fear’ – to explore how women can become ‘possessed’ by the domestic. As Anne Sexton puts it in ‘Housewife’ (1962), ‘Some women marry houses’ (Sexton 1991: 64) and Lofts's narrator struggles to resist precisely this kind of entrapment.
Part I - Family Matters
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 22 February 2016, pp 13-14
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3 - Mothers and Others
- from Part I - Family Matters
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- By Ginette Carpenter, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Women and the Gothic
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 September 2017
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- 22 February 2016, pp 46-59
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Summary
The discursive panopticon that monitors and proscribes performances of femininity is particularly vigilant in relation to mothering. The pressures attendant on contemporary motherhood have been documented extensively in texts such as Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions (2002), Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels's The Mommy Myth (2004) and more recently in Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion (2010: 179- 202) and Rebecca Asher's Shattered (2012). These accounts all suggest that advance of feminism is precarious and that women continue to be defined and constrained by tenacious models of the maternal that merge with a loudly trumpeted post-femininity to overwrite patriarchal confinement with illusions of choice (McRobbie 2008: 1–5; Power 2009: 29–37). This chapter reads two contemporary films through the prism of women's Gothic to demonstrate the maintenance of a hegemonic version of the maternal that offers only compliance or abjection. Since Ellen Moers's famous claim that Mary Shelley utilised the fantastic potential of the Gothic to covertly represent the hidden horror of pregnancy and mothering (Moers 1978: 91–9) the figure of the monstrous m/Other has been identified as a site of rupture that serves a dual function: voicing the obfuscated experiences of maternity while simultaneously reinscribing the fictions that maintain the occlusion. Gothic texts (and their monsters) have always performed this contradiction, both policing and transgressing the borders between ideological inscription and resistance (Botting 2014: 8–12) and the films under discussion here operate in this way, both reasserting and troubling constructions of the m/Other and thereby articulating a range of anxieties that attend their maintenance.
Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) and Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin (WNTTAK) (2011) seem at first to have little shared territory depicting, respectively, a dystopically imagined future and a realist nightmare. Prometheus is set in the late-twenty-first century on a high-tech spaceship and a desolate, inhospitable planet; WNTTAK is almost entirely enacted within the mundane, and primarily domestic, spaces of contemporary America. However, the films’ representations of the maternal and the monstrous – of mothers and Others – can be seen to reflect corresponding cultural anxieties about the production, maintenance and interrogation of twenty-first-century gender roles and the continued surveillance of maternity.
Introduction
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- By Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Women and the Gothic
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 22 February 2016, pp 1-12
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Summary
Since the early debates about ‘Female Gothic’ in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by Second-Wave Feminism, the theorisation of gender has become increasingly sophisticated and has resulted in a long interrogation of the category ‘woman’. There was, however, a political price to pay for this, in so far as feminism gave way to the problematics of post-feminism, now itself being interrogated by a younger generation of women. The contributors in this volume tackle such conundrums in lively chapters that explore Gothic works – from established classics to recent films and novels – from feminist and/or post-feminist perspectives. The result is a book that combines rigorous close readings with elegant use of theory in order to question some ingrained assumptions about women, the Gothic and identity.
Ranging from late-eighteenth-century Gothic fiction to twenty-firstcentury science fiction films and Gothic video game-playing, as well as recent novels dealing with virtual reality, this volume offers coverage both of established classics within the Gothic canon (for example, novels by Radcliffe, Braddon, Stoker and du Maurier) and less well-known, more recent texts (work by Yvonne Heidt, Cate Culpepper and Scarlett Thomas, for example). Several rather disturbing key features emerge from the analyses of such wide-ranging material. Despite the considerable economic, social and legal progress (at least in the Western world) made by women, Gothic texts still frequently convey anxiety and anger about the lot of women. Many of the works analysed in this volume reflect women's lack of agency; the continued polarisation of women through patterns of antithesis such as good/ bad, saint/sinner and virgin/ whore; a continued use of stereotypes; and the pathologisation of women who fail to conform to traditional expectations. While these vary in expression and representation across the centuries and across cultures, they are depressingly constant and suggest that women have been and still feel disadvantaged and disempowered. On the other hand, the use of Gothic effects to celebrate transgressive female energy and iconoclasm is perhaps greater and more subtle now than it was when Charlotte Dacre wrote Zofloya, or The Moor in the early nineteenth century.
While works by male Gothic authors are discussed in several of the chapters, the main focus of Women and the Gothic is unashamedly on women: women characters within texts; women as Gothic authors; women as readers; women as critics; women as theorists.
Contents
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Women and the Gothic
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 22 February 2016, pp v-vi
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10 - Female Vampirism
- from Part II - Trangressions
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- By Gina Wisker, University of Brighton
- Edited by Avril Horner, Kingston University, Sue Zlosnik, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Women and the Gothic
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 22 February 2016, pp 150-166
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Summary
Vampires were supposed to menace women, but to me at least, they promised protection against a destiny of girdles, spike heels and approval.
(Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires Ourselves, p. 4)Disruptive and troublesome, female vampires are an embodied oxymoron, a thrilling contradiction, fundamentally problematising received notions of women's passivity, nurturing and social conformity. Female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments and complacencies and reveal them as aspects of constructed gender identity resulting from social and cultural hierarchies. This chapter explores this destabilisation in Gothic fiction, arguing that performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of the construction and representation of female vampires, so that there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. The exciting threat offered by female vampires in Victorian texts such as Le Fanu's ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Stoker's Dracula (1897) is terrifying, punished, but lingers, re-read as disturbing potential. The fiction of Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Jewelle Gomez, shows female vampires at the height of their representation as liberating, sexually transgressive feminist figures, provoking questioning and undermining received certainties of identity, family and hierarchies based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Recent texts such as Nalo Hopkinson's culturally inflected ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’ (2001) and Charlaine Harris's ethnicity-focused, neighbourhood novels refocus the female vampire in a more socially engaged role. The popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series (2005–8) suggests that the female vampire, at least in the United States, has been reclaimed for neo-conservatism as her Young Adult vampire romance endorses both eternal (quite chaste) romantic love and family values. There are, however, encouraging signs that something more topical and subversive has emerged to challenge the imaginative impasse of the vacuously flamboyant or merely mundane female vampire. This may be seen in two fascinating texts, each filmed: Byzantium (2013), a twenty-first-century tale of survival, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), an Iranian feminist vampire tale written in comic vein. So, contemporary women's vampires have arisen energetic and crusading, indicating a new feminist energy.
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