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Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës
As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontes to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class.
Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity"--a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions--best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters--and readers--fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system.
Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.
Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity"--a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions--best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters--and readers--fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system.
Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 4, 2020
if ur interested in gothic women then this is so informative and lush xoxo
November 25, 2023
As much as I enjoyed reading this and learning about the lives of those oh so famous female authors that trail-blazed their way through the literary circuits, I'm not ashamed to say that so much of this went right over my head. Hoeveler has clearly done a lot of research around this subject and for the book specifically, and that really comes through. I just really could've done with a glossary or idiots guide type thing to get my head around the general meanings, philosophies etc. that are discussed so I could follow things better. I feel that this will need a re-read when I've gone away and looked at these things and have at least a vague understanding of them so I can fully appreciate the concepts that Hoeveler puts forward and discusses. Might also need to read/re-read all of the main novels referenced as relying on my memory didn't work massively well either.
February 1, 2026
My goal this year was to learn more about the Gothic genre and feminism, so when I found that there was a book that brought both of those things together, I was eager to give it a try. With that said, this is not a book for a beginner. It is incredibly dense, Diane Long Hoeveler a much beloved and respected voice in academia. I would be lying if I said that there weren't several passages I had to reread in order to understand, and even then there is so much background knowledge about the genre, historical texts, and critical theory that the reader is assumed to be at least mildly familiar with that there were parts I wouldn't be able to understand without significantly more research than I was willing to put in. The only reason I rated this 4-stars instead of 5 is that there was a heavy emphasis on Freudian psychology that turned certain literary aspects of the genre into symptoms of repressed and deviant sexuality. I just didn't quite agree with her assessment - which is an arrogant thing for someone without all the degrees to say, probably, but it just seemed as though she was ascribing thoughts and feelings to long dead women that I couldn't see being true.
March 2, 2018
very insightful
April 1, 2017
This has very useful information that I could not find anywhere else. Well researched.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews