Gothic and Gender: An Introduction

by Donna Heiland

Gothic novels tell terrifying stories of patriarchal societies that thrive on the oppression or even outright sacrifice of women and others. Donna Heiland’s Gothic and Gender offers a historically informed theoretical introduction to key gothic narratives from a feminist perspective.
The book concentrates primarily on fiction from the 1760s through the 1840s, exploring the work of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Smith, and Charles Brockden Brown. The final chapter looks at contemporary fiction and its relation to the gothic, including an exploration of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Fall on Your Knees
A Coda provides an overview of scholarship on the gothic, showing how gothic gradually became a major focus for literary critics, and paying particular attention to the feminist reinvigoration of gothic studies that began in the 1970s and continues today.
Taken as a whole the book offers a stimulating survey of the representation of gender in the gothic, suitable for both students and readers of gothic literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Gothic

231 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 2004

Reviews

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

And what an introduction it is! Donna Heiland's feminist study explores Gothic narratives from a gendered perspective and manages to cover a couple of centuries' worth of texts within a relatively short number of pages. We begin with the inception of the genre with an exploration of patriarchal values in such authors as Walpole and Reeve before seguing into an engaging look at sublimity in the works of Lewis and Dacre. The chapter on Ann Radcliffe naturally flows on from these early chapters, and then we're into Wollstonecraft and Shelley, and a particularly fine look at the presence of the uncanny in WUTHERING HEIGHTS and JANE EYRE which builds on leading work from the likes of Gilbert and Gubar and Sedgwick. Colonialism is delved into with a section on Charlotte Smith and Charles Brockden Brown, and then we jump to the modern presence of Attwood. It's all very readable, well argued, and concise; a satisfying read overall.

[Caitlin]

good stuff