Feminism In Gothic Literature

In the award winning article, “Passages in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: Towards a Feminist Figure of Humanity?” Cynthia Pon addresses masculinity and feminism in terms of conventions, ideals, and practices (Pon, 33). She focused on whether Mary Shelly's work as a writer opened the way to a feminist figure of humanity like Donna Haraway argued. The article has a pre-notion that the audience has read Frankenstein and Haraway's article. Pon has a slight bias, due to her passion as a feminist writer. It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

This reductive literary tradition of portraying women as inherently crazy by authors is well explored in the book The Madwomen in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their tome of literary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar delve deeply through a feminist rereading of many celebrated 19th century literary works by female (and male) authors and quickly came to see the challenges these female writers encountered and the mechanisms they used as to navigate the confines of such tropes out of the scholarly and literary tools left from their male writer

The Victorian age is characterized by gender inequality. Women were confined by social restrains. Female gothic becomes more complex in Victorian age. The term ʻfemale gothic’ is used by Ellen Moers to describe the conventions of women’s writings , back to Radcliffe’s gothic novels in which she employs the

English novelist Marian Evans Lewes exists counter to 1800’s European beliefs of womanhood. Instead of adhering to society’s standards, she adopts the pen name of a man and becomes a successful author, avoiding judgement for her work based solely on her gender. In her letter to Melusina Fay Peirce, however,

With that purpose in mind, she revises some aspects of women’s place/absence in history, society, and literature and mixed it with some fiction in order to explain how she came to adopt that thesis. For example, she asks herself what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister

In Victorian society, women had the choice between two roles: the pure woman or the fallen woman. Bram Stoker plays with these anxieties revolving around female sexuality – he follows the gothic tradition of innocent damsel in distress against looming evil. The narrative structure Stoker imploys to the text through intertextuality reveals multiple point of view distinguishing a duality in Lucy - her true self and 'thing'. In order to cope with Lucy’s worsening condition, the male authoritative figures of the text assign a duality present in Lucy to make sense of her shifting from “pure woman” to “fallen woman”. Stoker exhibits in the structure of the multi-faceted narrative how certain characters are unable to cope with the duality present

They show the harsh and cruel reality of the surrounding environment that women live in without framing that reality in beautiful frame. This is obvious in William Dean Howells’s “Editha” and Henry James’s “Daisy Miller”. Both Editha and Daisy share the same characteristic of the New Woman. These two women redefine the feminine ideology of women who suffer from following the social norms of their culture. They believe that women should have freedom as well as men, and they are responsible for making decisions in their lives without under

Women’s Role’s Edith Wharton born in 1862 became a world known writer. Focusing mainly on class structure and women’s roles, Wharton portrayed to the world the lives of people during the 20th century. Gender inequality, as well as moral and ethical dilemma was a prominent issue not only in society but, became evident throughout Wharton’s writing. Determined to share her experiences with the world Wharton disguised moral and economic situations in literature that allowed readers to connect mentally. During an era where social class and wealth defined a person’s entity, Wharton seemed to focus mainly on the higher class structure.

CHAPTER I Mary Wollstonecraft criticism on traditional philosophy on concept of women Introduction: In this chapter I would like to discuss and present Mary Wollstonecraft`s criticism on traditional philosophy on concept of women. Feminist critique: Feminist criticism is concerned with "...the ways in which literature and other cultural productions reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women". Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to under-represent the contribution of women writers" (Tyson

“Writing was the world of each woman. In a world of exaltation of his imagination, feminine inscription seems single and sudden” . With the right for an education they gained skills which they used for their talent. Many social reforms led by suffragettes and their awareness of the situation in which they were, gave women writers an audience and a form in which they manifested their opinion. Women writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Kate Chopin, Gail Hamilton and many others wrote poetry, novels, letters, essays, articles in which they portrayed the often conflicting expectations imposed on them by

Ann Radcliffe is normally associated with the school of ‘Conservative gothic’ literature. Her works, laden with aspects of the gothic, are developed in a way that explain the supernatural events and dispel any belief of an ‘otherness’ that is central to most gothic works. Despite this, Radcliffe’s novel ‘The Italian’, can be analysed for its gothic aspects through the ideas and concepts of the Burkean sublime. This essay aims to analyse the work of Radcliffe through the ideas of Burk such as his understandings of how a work is made sublime.

Introduction In this paper I want to portray role of women in gothic writing by seeing qualities of the gothic novel, in the point of view of Horace Walpole 's 'The Castle of Otranto '. In 1747, Horace Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill, which was situated on the Thames close London; here he resuscitated the Gothic style numerous decades prior to his Victorian successors. It was a response against neoclassicism. This whimsical neo-gothic invention started another design incline.

Radcliffe achieves a dazzling success in Europe. In 1970s, she was the best - selling English novelist. Her gothic novels are widely read, imitated and translated.14 Thomas De Quincey, a critic, called her “ the great enchantress” 15 for her power of enchantment and romantic sensibility in describing her characters and landscapes . Although Horace Walpole was regarded , for at least two centuries in the British culture, as ‘inventor’ of the Gothic literary mode in The Castle of Otranto in late (1764), it is Radcliffe who was considered as the perfector of the form by the late 18th- and early 19th-century critics and literary historians.16 Radcliffe was regarded as the founder of the school of terror in gothic literature , in her unfinished

In the novel we follow the protagonist, a young Victorian woman who struggles to overcome the oppressive patriarchal society in which she is entrapped. It is a story of enclosure and escape, from the imprisonment of her childhood to the possible entrapment of her daunting marriage. Throughout the novel Jane must fight against her inevitable future that society has already chosen for her. We see her attempt to overcome the confinements of her given gender, background and status. She must prove her worth against the men she encounters throughout her life, showing her equality in intelligence and strength.

Rebecca West once said, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat”; feminism and other social issues are fundamental to literature, with them commonly being a driving force behind both modern and classic works of fiction. Feminism is everywhere, with women still fighting for gender equality in modern day Britain as demonstrated through Emma Watson’s United Nations speech which was broadcasted in September of 2014 where she differentiates feminism from ‘man-hating’.