Hybridity In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature

In Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study, Eugenia DeLamotte contends that “[g]othic terror has its primary source in an anxiety about boundaries,” particularly “the boundaries of the self” (12-13). Nineteenth-century gothic writers become obsessed by the uncanny fear of boundaries crossing that arises anxieties of “what distinguishes “me” from “the not-me”” (23). Nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle Female Gothic features the construction of pure national identity with reference to the relationship between the metropolitan center and the colonial periphery. Female monsters can also be a projection of the Victorian fear of the cultural Other that imperils the purity of the British blood through miscegenation. Judith Halberstam further examines the

Nineteenth-century women writers find in the Gothic’s incorporation of the disgusting and the desirable an outlet to explore their fascination with and fear of intermixing races. this respect, The Blood of the Vampire is informed by the nineteenth-century discourse about racial hierarchies and stratification. Marryat reproduces the white hegemonic representations of “the Other” as draws a close relationship between her heroine’s monstrosity and her cultural origin. She is represented the racially otherized female “produced by the axiomatics of imperialism” to assert the identity of the other white female characters in her novel as Gayatri Spivak contends in her essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (270). It is worthy to refer to Robert J. C. Young’s essay “The Cultural Politics of Hybridity” in which he draws a distinction between what he calls “biological hybridity” which means the inter-racial blending that culminates in the production of heterogeneous subjects and what he refers to as “cultural hybridity” (158). Harriet holds a hybrid identity and mixed blood that could ostensibly tarnish

While the latter is attributed to backwardness, the former is associated with civilization. In this respect, we can deduce that the Western self defines itself in terms its other, its racial other./Indeed, in his book Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer explores the Eurocentric prejudices which define the non-Western subjects as the