BEYOND THE CASTLE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARADIGMATIC FEMALE STORY

The prototypical Gothic features a young woman who is endlessly persecuted and depressingly courageous. Her "quest" is a terrified flight, punctuated by periodic imprisonments and abortive escapes, across a fantastic landscape. From its invention in the eighteenth century on down to the present, the gothic novel has celebrated woman's role as victim. Paradoxically, women writers seem to need to retell this story of flight and fright as they seek to move beyond it. In this dissertation I hypothesize that the Gothic as written by women is the paradigmatic female story. Its characteristic depiction of aimless wandering, imprisonment within an ancestral dwelling and psychotic madness renders the psychosocial dilemma of the female's search for self-definition within patriarchy. While the gothic novel has often been seen as a tale of seduction, I suggest that the Female Gothic is concerned with a betrayal of pre-oedipal origin. For again and again the gothic novel as written by women portrays a fictive world devoid of healthy, whole adult females. The immature protagonist is thus deprived of a model in her struggle for autonomy. Motherless, she must construct an image to imitate from the array of inadequate older female figures who surround her. The by now familiar schizoid devices, first of imagery and lately of language and narrative voice, that characterize, not only Female Gothics but much writing by women, are appropriate to the representation of a primitive stage of differentiation. They reproduce the fractured effort to simultaneously acknowledge sameness and assert difference. And this effort is like a dark engine driving the most powerful fiction by women forward. I examine the most famous early Female Gothic, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, and outline a tri-partite pattern of expulsion from Eden; descent into a personal hell of imprisoning madness; regressive retreat to early symbiosis. I suggest that subsequent women writers have chosen two means of reshaping the paradigmatic female story. The tale of victimization has been altered through angry as well as through humorous repetition. Charlotte Bronte, especially in her Jane Eyre and Jane Austen, most obviously in Northanger Abbey, are representative of these two modes of gothic revisionism. In conclusion, I suggest a number of related topics which might be fruitfully explored. Novels by Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Margaret Drabble, Mary Gordon, Doris Lessing and Jean Rhys are briefly considered.