The Fantastic: A Structural Approach To A Literary Genre

In order to examine how postmodern women novelists manage to revise the figure of the female monster, it is worthy to point to the shift in the perception of the supernatural. In his seminal study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov defines uses the word “fantastic” both to define the supernatural and to denote a specific form of it. He writes:

In a world which is indeed our world, the one, we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two solutions: either he is victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination--and laws of the

Thus it can be divided into two different subgenres: when the reader decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny (41, emphasis is mine). In other words, the ‘uncanny’ supernatural which can be rationally explained in relation to the natural laws of nature and it includes, for example, weird instances of madness or occurrences of feverish delirium. On the contrary, when the reader “decides that the new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvellous” (41, emphasis is mine). In other words, the ‘marvellous’ supernatural which is inexplicable and just accepted as supernatural because it goes beyond the boundaries of the explainable and it contains, for instance, fairytales and science-fiction narratives. Yet as the reader makes a distinction between the real/unreal, familiar/unfamiliar, natural/supernatural the text is no longer perceived as a fantastic one. The gothic creates moments of uncertainty while trying to identify the real nature of the

Female Gothic creates supernatural monsters that embody their real fears and mirror their sense of unease at the life-options offered to them by the patriarchal society. Therefore, the supernatural in Female Gothic turns out to be the uncanny because it is explainable revealing thus “the mechanism of evasion or repression, by the conscious mind, of the instinctual drives of the unconscious” (Sage, Gothick Novel 22-3). Its writers, in other words, were fascinated by the depiction of the heroine’s psychological status while exploring her different fears which are usually associated with cultural, social perception of women and construction of