By presenting Radcliffe as an anomaly-a special case-critics such as Walter Scott could acknowledge her artistry without having to re-evaluate the aesthetic contribution made by women authors in the emerging Gothic.
Gothic literature authors professional#
In the late eighteenth century, Radcliffe’s ability to garner an artistic reputation within a commercial genre de-stabilized vulnerable literary hierarchies and accepted notions about professional female authorship. I use the career of Ann Radcliffe as my central example, because her writing was central to nineteenth-century critics’ attempts to legitimize the novel and twentieth-century feminists’ attempts to canonize women’s writing. I argue that the origins of this discrepancy can be traced back to how Gothic women’s writing was received in the early nineteenth century and how that reception history shaped the discursive strategies of second-wave feminist literary critics. As I and others have argued elsewhere, however, women’s early Gothic writing-a great deal of which is only accessible to us because of the recovery work of feminist scholars-is much more aesthetically, politically, thematically, and generically diverse than the Female Gothic categorization suggests ( Kelly, 2003, Wright, 2003, Potter, 2005, Coykendall, 2005, Ledoux, 2013).
Women-authored texts that do not feature “Female Gothic” tropes-a distressed heroine, domestic incarceration, threats of sexual violence, anxiety about monstrous or absent mothers-are often given little critical attention. While critics, including Robert Miles, Alison Milbank, Emma Clery, and Diane Hoeveler among many others, have attempted to refine the term Female Gothic, its usage has limited the ways in which scholars approach women’s Gothic writing. It addresses the reception history of women-authored Gothic texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, suggesting that the category “Female Gothic” more accurately reflects the ideological goals of second-wave feminist literary criticism than it represents the narratives of early women Gothic writers, such as Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee and Charlotte Dacre. This discussion takes a slightly different tack and questions why such a problematic term has had such a sustained and profound impact on feminist literary criticism up to this day.
Other critics have examined closely the categorical problems inherent to a term that links a stable notion of gender to a notoriously slippery literary mode. Yet, I have wanted to write this article for some time, because categorizing a work as part of the Female Gothic seems to create more problems for analysis than it solves. It seemed ungrateful to question a literary category that made my scholarship and that of many of my peers even possible. So, I entitled this piece, “Was there ever a Female Gothic?” with a sense of hesitation. The institutionalization of “Gothic Studies” within academies is due, in large part, to those pioneering second-wave critics ( Fitzgerald, 2009: 13–20). Gothic writing by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and the Brontës played a central part in that movement. Moers’s work and that of many other-second wave feminists (Margaret Doody, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Leona Sherman, et al.) reclaimed a wealth of textual material written by women and created a place for it within the canon. The term touched on something vital to women’s experience, generating robust feminist scholarship exploring the urgency and persistence of these themes in women’s writing and lives. In her groundbreaking Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers introduced the term “Female Gothic” to describe how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women novelists employ certain coded expressions to describe anxieties over domestic entrapment and female sexuality.
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It is argued that the answer to this question rests in looking at how Gothic women’s writing was received in the early nineteenth century and how that reception history shaped the discursive strategies of second-wave feminist literary critics. This essay asks why criticism clings to an understanding of this genre as one depicting female victimization despite overwhelming textual evidence that represents a much more complicated picture of women’s use and engagement with the Gothic mode. While several critics have attempted to destabilize the term Female Gothic, its usage persists as a short-hand form to describe narratives in which distressed female heroines are imprisoned in the domestic sphere and threatened with extortion, rape and forced marriage. This article examines the reception history of women-authored Gothic texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, arguing that the generic descriptor “Female Gothic” more accurately reflects the ideological goals of second-wave feminist literary criticism than the narratives of early women Gothic writers.
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