Queering the Female Gothic

Queering the Female Gothic’ examines work by women writers from the 1890s onwards who use the Gothic to create covert and/or overt queer situations and characters. These are often used to explore cultural and social concerns, such as restrictive patriarchal and hetero-normative family structures, the medical pathologisation of female and genderqueer bodies, institutions of racism and sexism within colonial and slave narratives, and contemporary issues surrounding the intersections of sexuality, race, class and gender identity. The chapter examines the work of a number of American and British women authors who have employed the Gothic as a proverbial safe space in which to explore these concerns; they include Vernon Lee, Florence Marryat, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jane Chambers, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Yvonne Heidt and Cate Culpepper. Not only do their fictions encompass queer characters and scenarios in terms of gender identities outside of the male/female binary and the full spectrum of queer sexual orientation, but the authors themselves, taken as a group, embody the full spectrum as far as gender identity and sexual orientation are concerned.

Female Vampirism

This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments. Performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of their construction and representation so there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. Ranging across a number of nineteenth-century texts, it is suggested that they can be read as indicating gaps and fissures in social certainties and as nightmares emanating from the zones of patriarchy. In the twentieth century powerful female vampires may be found in the fiction of Angela Carter, who provide templates for later authors. In these later texts and in various lesbian vampire fictions, vampires become liberating, feminist figures: sexually transgressive, they undermine received certainties of identity, family, and hierarchy based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. But they can also represent the energy of social activism as in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two recent dramatic works by Ana Lily Amirpour and Moira Buffini, in which vampires are shown as becoming angels of mercy and women become self-sufficient, despite poverty and vulnerability.

Introduction

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....

Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Games

This last chapter explores the connections between the design of player agency and formations of gender in Gothic video games. The conditions of player agency drain power from the more radical and subversive gender formations often found in Gothic fiction itself but in some games a more subtle, ambiguous or subversive approach to player agency is taken. Here alternative methods and contextualising representations are deployed by game designers to create models of player agency that do not, through the usual trope of mastery, align with dominant notions of masculinity or a phallic economy. The focus in this chapter is therefore mainly on the role of players in the thick of the Gothic game text and the gendered, contextual economy of the power (or powerlessness) that they are afforded. Such games actively invite the interest of women and girl players. Certain iterations of Gothic can be used very effectively in games to disquieten and demythologise the thoughtless formations of agency and gender that are perpetuated by many games directed at men and boy players, and may be termed ‘Female Gothic’ because of the way they show gender to be constructed or performed.

Spectral Femininity

‘Spectral Femininity’ examines the troubling spectres of femininity that have haunted the Gothic imagination since the eighteenth century. Etymologically related as much to the field of looking as to the realm of phantoms, the ‘spectre’ occupies a vital place in the Gothic’s vocabulary of haunting, revenance and (in)visibility. From the repressed daughters and buried mothers of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to the infernal images of wraithlike women in the macabre imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, femininity is peculiarly susceptible to ‘spectralisation’. With reference to the Freudian uncanny, Derrida’s notion of spectrality and the work of Terry Castle, Munford analyses Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ali Smith’s Hotel World, in all of which images of spectral femininity are used to explore questions of historical dispossession, experiences of social invisibility, and anxieties about sexual identity and generational conflict. As Derrida reminds us, the spectre ‘begins by coming back’; never fully exorcised, the spectral is always that which refuses to be laid to rest. The chapter concludes that, while images of spectral femininity often function as sites of dread and anxiety, they also work to signify powerful images of irrepressible female desire and agency.

The Female Gothic Body

This chapter begins by demonstrating that the property and inheritance rights of the early ‘transgressive’ Gothic heroine could be seized by controlling her body through marriage, domestic violence or imprisonment. The Bluebeard legend was then rewritten by women writers, including Ann Radcliffe and Elizabeth Gaskell, so as to embrace female empowerment, while Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon appear to have been influenced by the wrongful confinement within an asylum of Rosina Bulwer Lytton by her husband, Gothic novelist Edward. Throughout history women’s bodies have frequently been regarded as sites of monstrosity and the chapter argues that this cultural abjection is represented within the Gothic in various ways, from the gorgon to the vampire. Fear of the feminine continues to be articulated through the female body and its constituent parts. While the threat of miscegenation through the female body’s reproductive capacity is fragmented in Frankenstein, adaptations of Shelley’s novel by feminist writers, including Shelley Jackson and Elizabeth Hand, celebrate the autonomous patchwork self and scarred female body as representations of a painfully achieved female subjectivity. Other misogynist myths, such as the vagina dentata and the Medusa’s castrating gaze, are similarly deconstructed in other feminist fiction.

Madwomen and Attics

The chapter examines the evolution of the figure of the madwoman in Gothic narratives, focusing particularly on representations of emotions and on the ways in which definitions of madness evolved in the nineteenth century, from ‘passion’ to ‘moral insanity’ and ‘hystero-catalepsy’. Recognising that locking madwomen up has always been one of the most significant features of Gothic fiction, their imprisonment putting an end to deviance and thus maintaining the status quo, it also charts the changes in madwomen’s places of confinement - coffins and deadhouses more and more replacing attics in Victorian narratives that then capitalised on fears of premature interment. In the second half of the nineteenth century, such images of madwomen locked up in attics were revisited, as madness and ‘badness’ became the object of medical investigation and as research into mental physiology attempted to probe the mysteries of brain mechanisms. Sensation novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote the clichés of the genre, finding their sources of inspiration in real-life cases and denouncing the wrongful incarceration of women in lunatic asylums

No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic

This chapter uncovers a complex dialogue in and between Gothic texts about the ageing woman – one that both reflects the fear, anxiety and revulsion evoked by the ageing female body in many cultures but that also offers counter narratives that redeem ageing as a time of energy and liberation. It suggests that post-feminism is retrograde in its attitude to age and argues that it has served the purpose of a dominant culture that marginalises the older woman. The fetishisation of the youthful body inevitably produces fears of ageing in the young and is reflected in many popular Gothic texts, such as the Twilight series. The chapter traces a long tradition of writing that represents the older woman as sinister, manipulative and predatory but notes instances of subversion and challenge to the stereotype. In the twentieth century Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers is such a figure, for example, but the older du Maurier portrays the older woman more subtly as strange, wise and emotionally prescient. Post-colonial fiction offers the figure of the soucouyant as another configuration: that of the older woman as insightful, independent and capable of supernatural transformations, while comic Gothic allows the subversion of conventional attitudes to the older woman.

Wicked Women

This chapter suggests that the villainesses of early male Gothics, such as Lewis’s Matilda in The Monk, are characters of romance, wherein we expect to find types and stereotypes rather than realistic psychological portraits. They can be unambiguously wicked because they are women in a metaphysical system that blames Eve as the root of all evil. ‘The female’- constructed by patriarchy as instability, materiality, sexuality, irrationality, darkness, evil – appears even in the architecture of early Gothic texts. The chapter argues that since the 1790s the Gothic tradition has been engaged in challenging and deconstructing the notion of ‘wicked women’, reflecting cultural notions of female psychology. Psychoanalytic theory is used to examine representations of the sexually desiring woman as ‘hysterical’, focusing in particular on the figure of the rebellious nun. Many Gothic texts are fraught with anxiety pertaining to mothers, often represented as witch figures. Expression of sexual desire by female characters, in texts such as diverse as Zoyfloya the Moor, Jane Eyre and Rebecca, is associated with an adopted masculinity and with wickedness. Williams concludes by looking at works by Shirley Jackson and Henry James and examining how they exploit the ambiguities inherent in the familiar Gothic conventions used to portray feminine evil.

The Gothic Girl Child

This chapter focuses on anxiety about intimacy between girls or between girls and women as represented in works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ and Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’. A young girl’s desire for a female Other is the unspeakable subtext of these and similar stories. Examining Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘The Pool’, Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Stephen King’s Carrie and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Armitt explores both the rivalry between sisters and the self-abjection that can result from the onset of menstruation. The common narrative trope of the double or mirror is used to produce skewed images or strange doppelgängers that reflect the fear of a new identity following menstruation and the loss of childhood innocence. Finding that bonds between girls in Gothic texts are constantly fraught with danger, betrayal and loss and that the Gothic girl child must undergo trauma on her journey towards womanhood, Armitt concludes that it is hard to find positive messages for younger women in Gothic works, a textual feature that perhaps reflects the contradictory attitudes held towards girls by society at large.