Gothic Fantasy and Female Bildung in Four North-American Women Novels PDF

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of
Debrecen CAHS
GOTHIC FANTASY AND FEMALE BILDUNG IN FOUR NORTH-AMERICAN WOMEN NOVELS

Author(s): Edina Szalay
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 6, No. 2,
CHANGING PICTURE SETTINGS (Fall, 2000), pp. 183-196
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274104
Accessed: 18-02-2017 03:17 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274104?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University
of Debrecen CAHS is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hungarian
Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Sat, 18 Feb 2017 03:17:07 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GOTHIC FANTASY AND FEMALE BILDUNG
IN FOUR NORTH-AMERICAN WOMEN NOVELS
Despi
mode
with women writers as well as readers. Tania Modleski is not alone
believing that the Female Gothic, even in its romance form, helps women
to deal with problematic figures in their lives because these narratives
"explore women's primary relationships: mother-daughter, father-
daughter, and as an extension of the latter, husband- wife" (132). The
uncertainties that characterize these relationships in contemporary
Female Gothic are presented not mainly as resulting from the heroine's
personal instability but, emphatically, have a gender-political aspect.
While the Female Gothic has historically been related to the female
condition in its presentation of female incarceration, pursuit, and escape,
the contemporary version is primarily occupied with reflecting both "the
inner and outer situation of women" (Marino vich 194; emphasis added).
As Emily Ann Griesinger argues, the typical Gothic imagery which
juxtaposes extreme opposites seems especially suitable to describe "the
conflicting hopes and fears, desires and frustrations inherent in the female
situation" ana thus may actually explain the enduring popularity of the
genre with women (53).
A most basic line of connection among the protagonists of Alice
Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Margaret Atwood's Lady
Oracle (1976), Gail Godwin's Violet Clay (1978), and Joy Williams's
Breaking & Entering (1981) is their apparent problems with self-image.
For one reason or another all these women suffer from the consequences
of an unresolved and disturbed development of self. The main result of
their lacking a sense of coherent identity is that, being desperate to find
some firm ground of self-construction, they all come to rely heavily on
stereotypes offered by Gothic romances. In some cases, like for Joan in
Lady Oracle or Del in Lives of Girls and Women or Violet in Violet Clay,
this literally implies the reading, writing, or illustrating of Gothic books.
Joan casually remarks that she spent a whole summer feverishly reading
and internalizing Gothic romances: "It was these I used in the story of my
life" (150). Violet also recalls the sensation of being "submerged to a
sensuous degree" in the maze of the books she illustrates (3). As regards
Liberty in Breaking & Entering, no such apparent links exist; however,
she embodies Gothic feminine passivity and helplessness to a greater
degree than the other three protagonists.
The fact that three of these four women are that closely involved
in the creation as well as consummation of Gothic romances is especially
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2. 2000. Copyright by

All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
relevant here, for this genre has been generally accused of encouraging a
particularly intimate relationship between text and reader. Either
degrading the Gothic as cheap and fake escapist fiction, or appreciating it
for providing a virtual reality for women, critical consensus finds the
unusually strong bonds of identification that characterize this reader-text
symbiosis a feature of primary importance. William Patrick Day, for
example, emphasizes that because it is the redefinition of self that stands
in the center of most Gothic (especially Female Gothic) novels, and
because this genre offers a genuine capacity of participation, its most
pervasive effect is that it presents the reader with a self-image (65).
Other critics, however, find women's attraction to the Gothic more
troubling. The dividing line between these two "parties" in Gothic
scholarship lies in their evaluation of the relationship between women's
lives and Gothic art. While critics like Day, Anne Williams, or Modleski
see the genre as a constructive, empowering as well as powerful form of
sublimation, another significant group of critics argue, as Elizabeth
Napier argues, that the "reading of Gothic fiction is purely an escapist
enterprise, that relevance to 'real' life is tangential and that direct
connections are few" (67). According to Eugenia DeLamotte, the biggest
danger of readers' identification with Gothic heroines lies in the fact that
the genre "reinforces the heroine's ability to 'bear' her suffering 'with
equanimity' rather than giving her strength or inspiration to end it" (182).
Most critics who find the seductive power of the Gothic plot especially
destructive approach the genre from a feminist point of view and blame it
for the extremely restrictive choices of action and behavior it offers readers.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, an otherwise sympathetic critic of the Gothic,
concludes that "the Radcliffean maiden may act courageously [. . .] but
finally she, too, reveals woman's socially enforced weakness" (qtd. in
Williams 136). According to Williams, however, the misconceptions of
feminist critics concerning the genre spring from these critics' failure to
distinguish between the two major narrative types of the Gothic, that is,
between the Male and Female Gothic. Williams is not alone when she
argues that the features that disturb feminist critics (especially the
hopelessly incarcerated and emotionally-physically abused heroine) are
more characteristic of the narrative that critics commonly identify as the
Male Gothic (best exemplified by Horace Walpole's The Castle of
Otranto and Gregory Lewis's The Monk). On the other hand, the Female
Gothic plot (whose champion is inevitably Ann Radcliffe) depicts
heroines as much more in control of their lives and typically insists on
the significance of the reasoning abilities of women as the only escape
route from the seemingly unfathomable world of the villain.
Because it keeps the exploitation of major conflicts of women's
lives at an unconscious level, the Gothic romance is characterized by
producing the Freudian Uncanny through initially depicting an exotic
dreamworld of extreme emotions. This dreamworld then turns out to be
another site for displacement where the familiar rules of the real world
184
will indeed apply while assuming dimensions of Gothicism. It is exactly
this double bind of the familiar and the fantastic that evokes the complex
and intensive response in readers. This way the Gothic may be seen not
so much as simplistic escape fiction but as a narrative providing "a
virtual reality" (Williams 96), that is, an experimental world where,
through the power of imagination, the reader may convert the fearful into
pleasure with therapeutic results.
It is also important to note at this point that, as regards the
problematics of female individuation as affected by the Gothic, it seems
necessary to distinguish between popular Gothics (or Gothic romance)
and the militantly feminist Gothic novel best represented by Mary
Wollstonecraft's Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). The main
difference between the two types follows not so much from one ignoring
while the other emphasizing the problems that occur in the real lives of
women, rather, as Modleski contends, from the circumstance that "the
latter explores on a conscious level conflicts which popular Gothics
exploit, yet keep at an unconscious level" (84).
TTie Gothic romances which Joan, Del, and Violet identify with embody
all the appeals of formula fiction. The set type of plot, range of characters, and
sentiments provide these women with confidence through the pleasure of
repetition. As these three protagonists all struggle with uncertainty regarding
their self-image and their understanding of the world around them, they come
to conduct their lives more or less unconsciously along the parameters of the
Gothic formula. In some cases, such as for Joan in Lady Oracle , the fantasy of
romance may be perceived as more realistic than the "truth": "This was the
reason I fabricated my life, time after time: the truth was not convincing" (150).
Godwin's Violet feels at home when walking the dark labyrinthine corridors of
Harrow House Gothics because there she can be absorbed in the world of her
favorite romances: "The walls were papered in a dark rose color, with fake
wainscoting. [. . .] you might easily convince yourself you were an orphaned
relative, wandering through the eccentric picture gallery of a Victorian aunt"
(48). The main root of the protagonists' (as well as any of the genre's
consumers') desperate longing for the world of Female Gothic is best described
in Joan's own words: "I longed for the simplicity of that world, where
happiness was possible and wounds were only ritual ones. Why had I been
closed out from that impossible white paradise where love was as final as
death, and banished to this other place where everything changed and shifted?"
(284).
Of the six definable variations in plots of formula fiction that Kay
Johnson Mussell distinguishes, it is the "return to the home," the "search," and
the "family gothic" that stand out as most important for these protagonists
(173). This choice of plots is not at all surprising because they are all connected
by the search motif (physical or mental return to the place of the heroine's
childhood in the hope of discovering a past secret which often concerns her
identity) as well as by the figure of the mother who looms large in the
background of the narratives of the heroines' search for themselves.
185
The Gothic Family
The most decisive identity-shaping factor in the Gothic is

inevitably the family. However, the Gothic family unit (and the Home
associated with it) is not at all a blissful and uncomplicated sphere but a
most conflicted structure of extreme frustration. If, as Michel Foucault
remarks, the family implies two competing systems of social order then it
"increasingly creates and nurtures those beings that it also confines and
encloses" (qtd. in Williams 95). Because of this embedded dichotomy,
the family is most closely connected with Fear, the central emotion of
any type of Gothic. If the home incarcerates as much as it protects, if
family sentiments torture as much as they nurture, this supposedly safe
sphere "becomes an uncanny place of alienation" (Kilgour 29).
Although the family plays a most pervasive role in both the Male
and Female Gothic, due to the culturally sanctioned assumptions about
women's domesticity it is the female formula that centers almost
exclusively on family relationships. In what follows, I will focus on the
ways fathers and mothers influence the heroines' process of individuation
and will point out the parallels between the dynamics of Gothic
parenthood and feminist psychoanalysis, the latter represented by Nancy
Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, and others.
Before I turn to the all-affecting figure of the mother, it seems
necessary to say a few words about the fathers, remote or absent as they
may be. In the novels under discussion the fathers are either completely
absent, as in Violet Clay where the biological father dies before the
heroine's birth, or are, as in the other three novels, highly ambiguous
figures, whose identity remains disturbingly unclear all along. Even
though the central mother-daughter psychological struggle pushes the
fathers emotionally into the background, even out of sight, they still
generate fear in the heroines for different reasons. On the one hand, due
to their remoteness, fathers become obscure fantasy figures. At the same
time, they represent uncanny power in relation to the wife/mother who -
as perceived by the heroine/daughters - is tortured by the husband's
indifference and lack of appreciation. Identifying with their mothers even
in acts of rebellion, the heroines/daughters are torn apart by a desired
alliance with the powerful father and a sense of fear once they realize that
they are as neglected by the father as their mothers are.
In Lives of Girls and Women Del's admiration and attachment to
the father gradually melts away because she has to learn that the process
of becoming a woman ultimately separates her from the father, who no
longer sees her as his child but as a girl, as an Other. Even if some form
of alliance exists between fathers and daughters, the intensity of these
bonds does not even come close to what ties daughters to mothers. The
basis of these father-daughter relationships is mainly rooted in the
daughters' frustration with the overbearing mothers. All these heroines,
however, are surprised to realize that the fathers are non-instrumental as
186
regards support of any form against the daughters' fear of being engulfed
by the mothers. What the fathers are willing to offer is some vague
sympathy at best, as in Breaking & Entering, or icy indifference, as in
Lady Oracle , where Joan, although originally trusting her father, comes
to realize that both her mother and herself have been victimized by Dr.
Delacourt. (Due to his lack of care, Delacourt "left both of them
emotionally starved for his affection" [Tennant 95].)
Gothic Mothers
Although earlier readers of the Gothic saw it as a genre preoccupied

with a seductive father figure, more recent criticism often places the dead
or absent mother at the heart of the Gothic. Claire Kahane, among others,
argues that the Gothic, especially Female Gothic, primarily presents the
female oedipal drama in that it "involves the mysteries of identity and the
temptation to lose it by merging with a mother imago who threatens, all
boundaries between self and other" (340). Kahane also observes a shift in
the depiction of the mother from a "diffuse spectral mother," more
typical of early Gothic, to an "embodied actual" mother figure which is
characteristic of modern variations of the genre (343). Juliann Fleenor
also supports this view when she claims that the "central conflict is with
the mother and not with the husband/lover/father" (15), that is, it is the
mother who becomes perceived as the main antagonist of the heroine,
and that the heroine is imprisoned not so much in a paternal castle/house
as in her maternal inheritance, her femaleness. The heroine may think
that she is actually trapped by a sinister villain who means to hurt her;
however, she is "really on a quest to find the mother, who holds the
secrets of feminine existence" (Marinovich 192).
The anxiety of the mother, which has come to characterize both
modern Gothic writing and criticism, runs strikingly parallel to
significant developments in women's psychology, especially in feminist
psychoanalysis. Feminist scholars of the Gothic claim that the
popularized, idealized mother-child relationship is challenged by the
Female Gothic (Marinovich 201) because the two most characteristic
fears which operate in the Gothic world - "the fear of terrible
separateness and the fear of unity with some terrible Other" (DeLamotte
22-23) - have been argued to be the cornerstones of any mother-daughter
relationship. Chodorow, whose ground-breaking book The Reproduction
of Mothering has influenced all branches of scholarship that attempt to
deal with issues of womanhood, describes a girl's relationship with the
mother as mainly based on alternation "between total rejection of a
mother who represents infantile dependence and attachment to her[,]"
which ultimately results in the daughter's "feeling herself her mother's
double" (138). For some feminist writers of the 1970s, as for modern
Female Gothic, the content of plot, as Marianne Hirsch argues, is "not a
187
process of successive distancing but, rather, is a struggle with a bond that
is powerful and painful, that threatens engulfment and self-loss even
while it offers the very basis for self-consciousness" (133). The
matrophobia, which to some extent characterizes all the four novels in
question, springs not so much from the fear of "one's mother or of
motherhood but of becoming one's mother ," Adrienne Rich points out
(235).
The quality of care offered by the mother figures of these novels is
perceived as less than satisfactory by the heroine/daughters. Munro's Del
is continuously ashamed by the "perverse" extravagance of her mother,
which manifests in the latter' s untamed desire for knowledge. Del carries
out her frustration initiated by the "sly and gloating and pitying looks" of
other people on the mother: "Suddenly I could not bear anything about
her [. . .] and most of all her innocence, her way of not knowing when
people were laughing, of thinking she could get away with this" (68). Joy
Williams's Liberty is quite simply ignored by her self-indulgent mother,
who hovers around her daughter's life in a ghost-like manner only to
inflict more pain on Liberty on the rare occasions she actually bothers to
talk to the daughter. It is no surprise that, when her parents make up their
minds to move to another town, Liberty decides to stay with the Stone
family because "the thought of going off into some strange place with her
parents terrified her" (139). Violet, in Godwin's novel, suffers from
laving too many mothers indeed - her early-deceased biological mother,
ler over-bearing grandmother, and the even more frighteningly powerful
godmother (Big V.) from whom, Violet fears, she was to inherit not only
her name but also her unflattering femaleness. The most intricate pattern
of the mother-daughter relationship undoubtedly emerges in Atwood's
Lady Oracle , where Joan and her mother enact the female oedipal drama
in its most classic form - one that turns Joan's obese body into their
primary battlefield.
All of these daughters feel victimized by their mothers due to their
perception of the absence of any consistent pattern of interaction (the
intimacy of holding, feeding, and caring being absent from these
relationships). What results in such cases, psychologically, as Chodorow
points out, is the child's inability to "develop what Benedek calls
'confidence' and Erik Erikson 'basic trust,' constituting, reflexively, a
core beginning of self or identity" (58-59). Simultaneously angered by
the lack of care they receive, and tortured by a sense of ineptness, the
heroines develop a sense of "basic fault" (Chodorow 59) and become
convinced that they will never have the capacity to satisfy their mothers
or anyone else, and that there is something seriously lacking in them,
which will ultimately deprive them of the appreciation and love of others.
The "false self" they develop functions on patterns of either tame
conformity or rebellion, or both. At first all heroines attempt to adapt to
expectations: Violet rushes into marriage with a promising young lawyer,
the son of a prestigious Southern family; Del, feeling intoxicated by the
188
"exotic" primitiveness of her criminal lover of elemental taste and desire,
is willing to give up her plans to get a scholarship and go to university.
Liberty's sense of self is so seriously jeopardized by the lack of
satisfactory care that she almost melts into her hero/villain Willie, an
angel of death, and remains utterly obscure both to others and herself.
Joan, although seemingly the most rebellious of the four, can never free
herself from the myths of femininity represented by her mother as well as
the sentimental Hollywood movies that so fascinate them both.
Along with conformity, attempts to rebel against the mother are
also present. Violet, panic-stricken by her suffocating marriage, divorces
and, dizzy with dreams about having carnal sex in a New York taxi, flees
to New York to become an artist. Joan defies her mother on the most
boiling issue of their fight: her weight. Joan loses weight, becomes a slim
woman with stunning red hair, and leaves for Europe where she makes
sure to have sex with the first man she bumps into. Del gets involved
with her lover mainly to be initiated into adult sexuality, and feels some
strange excitement when the first sexual intercourse takes place in their
garden, right by the wall of her mother's house, who has been
continuously warning her of the shameful nastiness of sex. Liberty not
only starts making love with Willie at the early age of fourteen but even
becomes pregnant with his child and then is forced to have an abortion.
What connects these acts of rebellion as a type of rebellion is that they all
focus on sexuality. The daughters seek to cut the ties with the mothers by
symbolically allying themselves with the other sex in sexual intercourse.
As opposed to their puritanical mothers, who see sex mainly as the
greatest danger and degradation awaiting women, the daughters define
themselves as separate by throwing themselves into passionate affairs
that, however, satisfy them neither physically nor emotionally.
What the daughters experience is best described by what Benjamin
calls a "negative cycle of recognition[,]" which manifests itself in the
mother's seemingly uncaring and nonresponsive behavior (28). In this
power struggle between mothers and daughters the desire for recognition
for both participants operates as a form of aggression, thus the person
feels that "aloneness is only possible by obliterating the intrusive other
[be it either the mother or daughter], that attunement is only possible by
surrendering to the other" (28).
The psychologically sado-masochistic plot that characterizes, to a
varying degree, all four relationships establishes the strongest bonds of
love/hate these women ever experience in life. Although seemingly
desiring to erase the mothers in most radical ways, the daughters cannot
help recreating important aspects of this unique relationship in their
affairs and marriages. Liberty, despite her utter dependence on her lover
Willie, carries on her mother's inability to relate. Her life is the
embodiment of the mother's favorite dream, to "tie herself to a canoe and
float down a quiet river, gazing through her face mask into the crystalline
depths" in Lady of Shalott style (86). Violet vacillates between the same
189
choices her grandmother had to face as a young woman: to become an
artist or settle down in marriage, convinced that the two are incompatible
with each other. Del, like her mother, is considered an odd person in
rural-Ontario Jubilee for her unfeminine intellectual capacities and
ambition. Joan has to realize that she is as unrecognized and
unappreciated by her husband as her mother was by hers, that if there is
one way she is needed by the husband it is for her to support his ego by
skillfully performing acts of incompetence.
The tendency in modern Gothics to deal with women's ambivalent
attitudes towards their mothers parallels the idea of "mutual recognition"
(23) as described by Benjamin, who insists that it is crucial to the healthy
development of the symbiotic mother-daughter relationship that a girl
realizes her need to "see the mother, too, as an independent subject, not
simply as the 'external world' or an adjunct of [her] ego" (23). The
heroines of the novels under discussion in the present work share the
uncanny sensation that they are haunted by a dim female figure (whom
they later recognize to be their mothers). Assuming alliance with this
figure, however, has disturbingly controversial results. Once they allow
themselves to identify with this woman, the heroines' coming of age is
almost completed in a Gothic manner. It is the discovery of the mothers'
unsuspected lives, and that the mothers' secrets are "identical to [their]
own entrapment in the same situation" that marks the daughters' crossing
the threshold of adult knowledge (DeLamotte 152). Even though initiated
into a somewhat paranoid view of the world where the main lesson for
women to learn is "Trust no one," the daughters nevertheless experience
a secondary, affectionate attachment to the mother, and this newly
acquired sense of "co-feeling" or "being with" finally "breaks down the
oppositions between powerful and helpless, active and passive" and
forms the basis of "the ability to share feelings and intentions without
demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating
difference" (Benjamin 48).
The process of discovering the mother as separate is complex,
ambiguous, and often painful. Still fighting against acknowledging ties
with the mother, Del comes to experience a strong sense of community
with her: "I did want to repudiate her, crawl into favor, orphaned,
abandoned, in my wrinkled sleeves. At the same time I wanted to shield
her" (54). Ultimately, she has to confess: "I myself was not so different
from my mother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were"
(68). Joan confronts her affection for her mother only after the mother's
death. Upon returning to Canada for the funeral, she is tortured by a
tremendous sense of guilt for abandoning her mother: "I felt as if I'd
killed her myself, though this was impossible" (177). Once back in the
familiar family home, the scene of their bitter war about Joan's
overeating, she rushes to the refrigerator in a desperate attempt to
provoke her mother back to life: "[I] gorged myself on the contents,
eating with frantic haste and no enjoyment [. . .] I kept expecting her to
190
materialize in the doorway with that disgusted, secretly pleased look I
remembered so well" (177). For Liberty and Violet, however, reunion
with the biological mother never materializes. Violet discovers the most
nurturing female bond in the form of female friendship with her
neighbor, Sam. Once they gain mutual self-confidence - Violet claims
feeling "good being with her; she was the young mother I'd never
known" (209) - they begin to function as surrogate mothers to each other.
Liberty, however, is so deprived of the ability to trust that she is unable to
establish such bonds of attachment and reliance. Withdrawing into the
shell of her vulnerable self, she attempts to perform the role of the
nurturing mother for herself.
Gothic Female Bodies
In the Female Gothic, the most important legacy daughters inherit

from the mothers appears to be a general fear of femaleness: the female
role, female sexuality, and female physiology. What the body of the
mother chiefly embodies is indeed female entrapment and an enclosed
space of violation. The looks of a woman are closely connected with the
role patriarchal society assigns to her, to attract and hold a man through
the power of her beauty. Beauty alone, however, is less than satisfactory;
in fact, it can be a major disadvantage if it is not tamed with qualities of
innocence and naivete. The heroines of Gothic novels these protagonists
admire are always only moderately handsome, especially if compared
with their passionate and voluptuously beautiful female rivals. While
social norms require women to pay special attention to their appearance
so as to please and attract potential suitors, their beauty is primarily
displayed to please the male but in no way approved to give satisfaction
to the woman herself. A woman who does enjoy her beauty and
consciously exploits it as a means of controlling men is depicted as
corrupt and threatening both to men and to women due to her implicitly
sexual character.
The naivete attributed to the Gothic heroines that women readers
are expected to identify with proves to be of a highly controversial
quality although it is considered absolutely necessary in order to win the
love of the hero so as to initiate the telos of happy ending in marriage.
Del's best friend, Naomi, constantly warns Del of the importance of
appearance. Joan's mother is most unhappy about her daughter's obesity
because, perceived as an outrageous parody of socially regulated ideals of
womanhood, it also proves the mother's failure to adequately socialize
the daughter. On the other hand, the very same quality of utmost
innocence bars heroines from the knowledge that would be essential for
them to cope with problems of real relationships, that is, to be able to
respond to future problems once the honeymoon is over.
Beauty and female appearance are generally perceived as disturbing
191
because they cast women in an object position, the male being the sole
possessor of the gaze that evaluates and validates a woman. The power of
the Male Gaze and its potentials of destruction have been generally seen
as a paradigmatic Gothic motif due to its links with "omnipresent
boundary violations that lead eventually to punishment" (Williams 145).
Del feels psychologically violated when Jerry Storey, one of her lovers,
spends long minutes staring at her naked and exposed body on his bed.
Likewise, Joan admires and simultaneously fears her mother's potential
to transform from ordinary woman into a fake film star a la Bette Davis
when putting on "her face" in front of a triple vanity mirror.
As opposed to the Male Gaze, the Female Gaze can be seen rather
as a creative act for it almost always connects with the drive to know, a
most essential means of salvation for Gothic heroines. As Michelle
Masse contends, the "urges to look and to know - what [Freud] terms the
scopophilic and epistemophilic instincts - are closely related to one
another" (41). While to know may result in possessing forbidden
knowledge that jeopardizes the heroine's customary innocence, it may
also serve as the only way to learn to perceive the "often ambiguous
distinctions between [good and bad] - and further to perceive that one's
survival and salvation depends upon not depending about appearances"
(Williams 165).
The creative aspect of the Female Gaze becomes most apparent in
some protagonists' acts of artistic creation for it is through art that these
women may sublimate suppressed transgressive knowledge. As Elizabeth
MacAndrew points out, "when the eyes are turned upon the inner
landscape of the mind itself, rather than discerning transcendent truths
beyond it, what they [artists] see are the fearful outlines of the
subconscious [. . .] which can only be exposed to full daylight at great
risk" (217). It is only when Del attempts to capture her Gothic fantasy of
incest and madness of the Sherriff family in the form of a novel that she
realizes the falseness of her concept. Despite their heavy reliance on the
most boring cliches of the genre, Joan's Gothic romances bear an
uncanny resemblance to events of her real life. She writes her first
Costume Gothic, Escape from Love, upon plotting the complicated
scheme of leaving her first lover, Paul. Then come Love, My Ransom ,
paralleling the breakdown of her marriage with Arthur, and Terror at
Casa Loma initiated by her sense of guilt for being unable to resist (and
actually enjoying) a stormy affair with her Byronic lover, the Royal
Porcupine. Finally, she is writing Stalked by Love in Italy while fearing to
be identified by villagers or reporters because, then, her effort to erase her
former identities by committing a fake suicide would fail. Violet first
confronts the illusions she cherished about her husband when she paints a
nude of Lewis. It strikes her how vulnerable and unimpressive the
husband is in the picture, which depicts him in a pose of physical as well
as psychological nakedness. Conversely, the nude Violet paintings of her
friend Sam reflects this woman as "suspended in [. . .] her own
192
possibilities^]" a Valkyrie in full power and control (232). What
connects these artistic performances is that art serves here not as a means
of creating a fantasy world primarily (even if some protagonists
originally attempt to do this) but as a route to discovering the truth about
others and, thereby, about oneself.
The problematic ambiguity surrounding issues of female beauty
and the Male Gaze reaches its climax when it comes to questions of
sexuality. What essentially distinguishes a true Gothic heroine from a
true Gothic villainess is the way they relate to sexuality in themselves
and others. As Coral Ann Howells explains, "just as the Gothic heroine
was the idealized image of beauty, so was she the image of sublimated
sexual fantasy [. . .] Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines turn with disgust from any
suggestion of sexuality" ( 11). On the other hand, the villainess's
passionate sexuality is "always linked [. . .] with her distasteful ambition,
greed, ruthlessness, and vanity" (Radway 149). However, the apparent
attraction of readers of the Gothic to this passionate woman hints at a
suppressed dissatisfaction with the celebrated asexuality of the heroine,
for it suggests a schizophrenic separation from her own passions. Readers
like Del, Joan, and Violet cannot help realizing that, no matter how much
they try to identify with the victimized heroine, they soon become bored
with her helplessness and more impressed by the bold, even mischievous,
acts of the villainess who dares to be bad.
Furthermore, sexuality is problematic because it marks the loss of a
nurturing female bond. As soon as the heroine is initiated into adult
sexuality through the Male Gaze embodying desire, she finds herself
competing with any other woman for the same prize, the attention of the
suitable male. Nurtured on the patterns of sexuality presented in the
Gothic romance, women learn tnat, indispensable as sexual attraction
may be to win the hero's heart, being involved in male sexual activity,
almost always in the form of rape and murder, is the biggest threat to
heroines. As Napier writes, the Gothic presents a "disturbing view of sex
as linked to violence, and the practice of love (or sex) as related to
sadism" (130). While the ineffectiveness of heroines in shielding
themselves from male sexual advances "implicitly equates goodness with
victimization, respectability with passivity[,]" the villainess' expressing
sexuality, and gaining power over men through it, inevitably leads either
to physical peril or to mental disturbance (Day 103).
Conclusion
In accord with the general thrust in women's literature of past

decades, and paralleling new developments in theory (e.g., Julia
Kristeva's emphasis on the repressed pre-oedipal drives of the subject),
the contemporary Female Gothic is also characterized by a shift of
interest from the oedipal to the pre-oedipal. Hirsch's description of the
193
feminist family romance of the 1970s as a narrative dominated by a
"concentration on mother-daughter bonding and struggle, and the
celebration of female relationships of mutual nurturance" goes hand in
hand with the recent notion in Gothic scholarship to place the mother and
the heroine's relationships with other women at the center of the Female
Gothic (133). Despite fierce arguments about the role Gothic formula
fiction may play in imposing a sense of victimhood on women, several
feminist critics have come to see this genre as affected by the feminist
movement and, thus, transformed into an important conveyor of female
experience because, as Elaine Showalter claims, "one of the earliest
critical manifestations of the change in consciousness that came out of
the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s was the theorization
of the Female Gothic as a genre that expressed women's dark protests,
fantasies and fear" (127).
In order to be able to fulfill this role, however, the Female Gothic
had to undergo radical changes in focus and theme, triggered by women
writers' attempts to "re- vision" the genre in the sense Rich uses the term,
that is, with the purpose of "not to pass on a tradition, but to break its
hold over us" (35). The changes that the Female Gothic has undergone
are manifold and varied. Connected with the central quest for the mother
(biological or cultural), new themes like the "freakishness of the female
body, fear and disgust, guilt and anxiety in connection with pregnancy,
childbirth and maternity" emerge (Marinovich 194-95). However,
parallel with an emphasis on physical transformation, which is often
presented as frighteningly grotesque, even monstrous, the changes that
take place for female characters are also psychological. Psychological
issues did not emerge in the history of the Gothic up until the mid-
nineteenth century, and even then the authors' interests primarily lay in
depicting the deformation, deterioration of the soul. In contemporary
Female Gothic, however, psychological transformation is often described
as developmental, and the hardships heroines have to bear finally enable
them to achieve a higher level of personal autonomy.
The four novels under discussion follow the specific pattern of the
Female Bildungsroman whose concern with the decisive influence of
mothers on daughters is in accord with the argument presented by some
feminist critics of the Gothic who claim that the "central conflict is with
the mother and not with the husband/lover/father" (Fleenor 15). Although
mothers could potentially provide most natural guidance to their
daughters in their quest for identity, these women loom in their
daughters lives as either painfully indifferent or threateningly
overbearing. In almost all cases, however, they prove to be the mentors
who instill into their daughters the pleasure of identifying with the
uncomplicated world of the Gothic romance at an early age.
Since women's ignorance of themselves as well as of the world
around them is depicted in these novels as a central obstacle of female
individuation, the means of gaining relevant and authentic knowledge,
194
i.e., overcomiiig the formulas of Gothic romances, prove to be of central
significance. Three of the four protagonists are artists, and it is not
without serious implications. Although their lack of self-assurance as
Women also manifests itself in their fear to take themselves seriously as
Artists (all three end up contributing to the production of Gothic
romances), it is finally through art that they come to face their suppressed
desires and ambitions. The paintings and novels they produce come to
function as subtexts to the protagonist's "real" life; they appear as
palimpsests where the intricate and disturbingly complicated structure of
the character's life shines through the simplistic surface plot of the
Gothic romance.
WORKS CITED
Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. London: Virago, 1976.

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism a
Problem of Domination. London: Virago, 1990.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of
Fantasy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
DeLamotte, bugenia C. Perils oj the Night: A Feminist Study of Nin
Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Fleenor, Juliann E., ed. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983.
Godwin, Gail. Violet Clay. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Griesmger, Emily Ann. Before and After Jane Eyre: The Female Go
Some Modern Variations." Diss. Vanderbilt U, 1989.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoa
Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Mysery: Feeling in Gothic
London: Athlone, 1978.
Kahane, Claire. The Gothic Mirror. The (M)Other Tongue: Ess
Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ed. Shirley Nelson Garner
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 334-51.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: C
UP, 1979.
Marinovich, Sarolta. The Discourse of the Other: Female Gothic in
Contemporary Women's Writing." Neohelicon Acta Comparationis
Litter arum Universarum 21 .1 (1994): 189-205.
Masse, Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for
Women. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. New York: Sienet. 1 974.
Mussel, Kay Johnson. "The World of Modern Gothic Fiction: American
195
Women and Their Social Myths." Diss. U of Iowa, 1973.
Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of the Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an
Eighteenth-Century Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
Radway, Janice. "The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances
and 'Feminist' Protest." American Quarterly 33 (1981): 140-62.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
New York: Norton, 1976.
bhowalter, blame. Sister s Choice: Tradition and Change in American
Women's Writing. New York: Clarendon, 1991.
Tennant, Colette Giles. Margaret Atwood's Transformed and Transforming
Gothic. Diss. Ohio State U, 1991. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999. 9201764.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995.
Williams, Joy. Breaking & Entering. New York: Vintage, 1988.
196

Gothic Fantasy and Female Bildung in Four North-American Women Novels PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gothic Fantasy and Female Bildung in Four North-American Women Novels PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of

GOTHIC FANTASY AND FEMALE BILDUNG IN FOUR NORTH-AMERICAN WOMEN NOVELS

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2. 2000. Copyright by

The most decisive identity-shaping factor in the Gothic is

Although earlier readers of the Gothic saw it as a genre preoccupied

Gothic Female Bodies

In the Female Gothic, the most important legacy daughters inherit

In accord with the general thrust in women's literature of past

Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. London: Virago, 1976.

You might also like