Female Gothic and the Law

The Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century as a potent literary critique of modern Western forms of law. At the same time as the law itself the Gothic began to take shape and rapidly diversify in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter suggests that Gothic writing by women in particular interrogates the ontological instability and physical vulnerability of the female subject before the law and that it does so through repeated evocations, in various historical and cultural contexts, of the relationship between law, sacrifice, trauma and shame. Points of continuity between older modes of Female Gothic and its more contemporary manifestations are identified through analyses of novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe and Eliza Parsons followed by an examination of female-authored vampire fictions by Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Drawing on Juliet MacCannell’s work, the chapter argues that these diverse narratives articulate the trauma and shame of female subjects constructed in and through the law as sacrificial objects of exchange between ‘brothers’. Contemporary female Gothic fictions, it concludes, expose the trauma and shame of the law itself as its ontological coherence begins to disintegrate under the conditions of late-modernity.