Female Gothic Literature Analysis

Focusing on Female Gothic tradition, this work intends to explore the reasons for its revival in the closing decades of the twentieth-century. The Female Gothic’s continuous steam and its ebullient effervescence are assigned to the persistent and consistent act of revising and rewriting, ensuring thus its mutability and adaptability. I will argue that the Gothic is “an instrumental genre, reemerging cyclically, at periods of cultural stress, to negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises” (Hurley 4-5). The Gothic articulates these anxieties and fears that differ “according to diverse changes: political revolution, industrialism, urbanisation, shifts in sexual and domestic organisation, and scientific discovery” (Botting 3).
The re-appearance of Female Gothic also coincides with the rise of postmodern theory that aims to legitimize the re-development of the long trivialized genres of the past. Accordingly, Fred Botting says: “Marginalized genres have begun to prevail over their canonized counterparts” (qtd. in Tavassoli and Ghasemi 110). In fact, since its inception in the eighteenth-century, the gothic genre has been maligned as a ‘marginalized’ literary form in relation to nineteenth-century realistic literature narratives of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, which mark the outset of the century. Juliann Fleenor, in The Female Gothic, further elucidates this: “The Gothic has generally had a negative critical reception.