Of narpay faculty the department of the english language and literature course paper

1.2.The rise of Female Gothic: Ann Radcliffe
During the late eighteenth century, women start to feel interested about Gothic literature which leads to the expansion of women’s professional writing. Ann Radcliffe is the precursor of Female Gothic, which depicts women’s fears and offers fantasies of evasion from them. Ellen Moers introduces the term Female Gothic for the first time in 1977 and defines it as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” As opposed to traditional male Gothic fiction in which the heroine is a minor character in the story, in Female gothic the central character is a young woman who is a persecuted victim and a brave heroine at the same time.
Radcliffe is the first female author who combines a Gothic plot with some aspects of domestic fiction, a mixture which is later explored and developed by female authors belonging to the Victorian period, such as The Brontë sisters. As previous Gothic novels, Radcliffe’s works are located in the past and in exotic locations, such as the south of Europe. However, the protagonist of the story is always a female character.
This kind of Gothic represents the fears of women about the private domestic life which serves as a refuge and prison at the same time. Moreover, the feeling of confinement imposes a sentiment of power in the courage of the heroine.
In her novels, Radcliffe wants her readers to consider the importance of the status of women Her heroine Emily St Aubert from The Mysteries of Udolpho may be viewed as the typical damsel in distress of previous Gothic novels. She describes her as a young and innocent woman who possesses the qualities of humbleness, chastity and modesty. She is raised in an idealized environment of protective paternalistic society in which she lives blind to the world outside. This type of life develops the quality of sensibility in her personality which is represented as determined by an excess of imagination and an unstable temperament. After her father’s death, she is forced to live in the castle with her aunt and her uncle-in law Montoni who portrays the typical tyrant of Gothic novels: a handsome and self tortured man consumed by ambition and dark purposes, Emily’s inheritance. The castle does not only represent a Gothic atmosphere of terror per se but a figure of patriarchal power out of law. The ancient gothic castle with its decaying grey walls, dark rooms and desolate surroundings acts as a prison for the heroine.
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity ¹
Moreover, her sensibility and naivety creates an imaginary terror in her mind. Montoni has a group of cavaliers to protect his castle who, according to Emily’s innocent mind, are banditti who want to abuse her sexually. The concept of banditti emerges as a new device of Gothic novels in the late eighteenth century. The banditti were outlaws who usually lived in the mountains of the south of Italy and they came to represent a picturesque example of Italian manners. Emily’s sensibility makes her feel threatened by the idea of rape or murder when Montoni confines her and her aunt after discovering that someone has poisoned his wine. However, she manages to escape from the castle thanks to one of her secret admirers and recovers her legacy. At the beginning of the novel, Emily is protected by her father in a domestic enclosure but when this life is destroyed, she is drawn into gothic terror. However, in the end, she demonstrates to herself that Montoni’s authoritarian power exists only until the point that she stops believing in it.
On the one hand, Radcliffe represents the beginning of the feminine Gothic in which the innocent heroine is forced to leave her protective domestic life to start a new one ruled by patriarchal power in a desolate castle, and, on the other hand, she also introduces a new principle to Gothic fiction: the domestication of the supernatural, or as she calls it, the supernatural explained.This principle is characterized by the fact that all mysterious or superhuman events have a rational explanation. The supernatural explained becomes a characteristically type of writing in the late eighteenth century with writers such as Regina Maria Roche and Eliza Parsons. The subsequent paragraph could serve as an example of how Radcliffe uses her innovative principle to create an atmosphere of terror which maintains the readers in a continuous suspense. The heroine Emily is horrified at the image of a lifeless body which lies behind a black veil inside a dark chamber. Nevertheless, she later discovers that the imagined corpse is a wax statue. It may be remembered, that, in a chamber of Udolpho, hung a black veil, that had overwhelmed her with horror; for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands. Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, For more information about these authors see Frank Frederick S. Gothic Gold: The Sadleir- Black Gothic Collection. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997 and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax. Anne Radcliffe influenced later female writers of the Gothic such as the Brontë sisters and Elizabeth Gaskell as we shall see in what follows.
The gothic in Victorian female narrative During the Victorian period, literature experiences some important changes. Romanticism gives way to Realism, which becomes the hegemonic literary genre of this epoch. However, along with the realistic novel, there are other types that do not lack importance. This is the case of the Gothic fiction which experiences a revival in literature.With regard to the theme in novels belonging to nineteenth century fiction, the romantic spirit of the weird and the eerie is blended with the spirit of realism.
In what follows, I will focus on two aspects of Victorian Gothic. One the one hand, I am going to discuss the trend of revisiting romanticism that is developed mostly by women writers, such as the Brontë sisters. These authors write novels settled in a realistic or domestic frame. Additionally, they use elements from the eighteenth century Female Gothic which depicts women’s fears about domestic enclosure. Moreover, they have the figure of Ann Radcliffe as their role model. However, these writers change some aspects of the traditional gothic such as the figure of the heroine who sets aside her innocent personality to overcome her fears with strong determination. On the other hand, I will discuss two gothic short stories written by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who is considered one of the main women writers of the nineteenth century. Although her work may be also influenced by Radcliffe’s legacy of Female Gothic, her short stories are based on traditional gothic too. However, the main plot of her short stories does not follow the same general narrative pattern of old gothic novels:
the damsel is persecuted by the villain through the castle that is haunted by ghosts or other supernatural creatures. She manages to create the same effect of fear thanks to the mixture of myths, legends and ghosts.