Metaphors of rape culture in the female gothic: isolation and community
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Date
2017-09-29Author
Thomason, Jannea
Advisor(s)
Roth, Christine
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Scholars have struggled to define the Gothic as a cohesive genre. As a genre it
defies restriction, though it does not loose it’s meaning as a category. In his introduction
to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick provides a unifying exploration of
these definitions, which illuminates the terms used in this project. He defines the Gothic
genre as texts that “will invoke the tyranny of the past . . . with such weight as to stifle
the hopes of the present” (xix). These tyrannies are often authoritative and patriarchal
institutions like Catholicism, American slavery, or colonialism. Baldick concludes that
Gothic texts remain popular because of their ability to function as “a way of exercising
such anxieties,” even though most of these institutions no longer have unmitigated
authority (xxii). Baldick understands that the Gothic genre is a process or experience for
the reader. His definition also points out a timelessness of the genre. Past horrors can
trigger present ones, so the texts remain applicable to all readers.
Since the 1970s when Ellen Moers conceptualized the Female Gothic as Gothic
texts written by women, scholars have debated the range and validity of the subgenre and
struggled with its problematic qualities. With the same concepts that produced New
Wave Feminism, the Female Gothic of the 1970s can be re-explored and re-envisioned in
order to be better understood in the current scholarly discussion. I alter the definition of
the Female Gothic genre to be those Gothic texts that have a female protagonist
threatened by patriarchy. This definition does appear broad, but it is not all-inclusive. It
draws limitation from the elements of what makes up the Gothic genre and focuses on the
patriarchal threat, instead of being limited by the application of the term “Female.”
Building from Baldick’s definition, I explore Female Gothic texts as an
experience of past patriarchal threat that invokes current social anxieties fomented by
rape culture. The isolation that occurs in these texts via the geographical displacement
and lack of community mirrors the isolation that women experience today that occurs
because of the exclusion of women’s sexual experiences from public belief. In Ann
Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), there is the element of helplessness. In Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), there is the element of horror. Then in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
(1847), there is the element of hope. I read these three novels as metaphorical
representations of the helplessness, horror, and hope that typify reader’s fear of or
experience with rape culture today. These elements manifest through the interaction of
the female protagonists with the isolation and sexual threat. This interaction creates a
shared experience for the reader.
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http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/76952Description
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts-English