Transgressive Nature Of Women In Gothic Literature

Coinciding with the romantic era, Gothic was considered as a literature that inhabits the liminal and marginal space of the literary scene. It thus, becomes a productive form of transgression and subversion. Botting explores the transgressive nature of women’s gothic: “ A challenge to, or interrogation of, forms of fiction dominated by patriarchal assumptions, Gothic novels have been reassessed as part of a wider feminist critical movement that recovers suppressed or marginalized writing by women and addresses issues of female experience, sexual oppression and difference” (). In this context, Kilgour maintains that this literary genre gives much leeway for female protest as she writes “in its potential as a vehicle for female anger the Gothic

Gothic novels, as he argues, “transgress the proper limits of the aesthetic as well as the social order in the overflow of emotions that undermined boundaries of life and fiction, fantasy and reality” (4). It not only transgresses the realist form of the novel but also the moral conventions and social boundaries, “reinforc[ing] the values and necessity of restoring or defining limits” through the presentment of the horrific outcomes of transgression (Botting 7). Generally, these transgressions articulate the current anxieties of the age concerning the disruption of gender hierarchy because of the rise of the New Woman; concerning the risk of degeneration of humanity and concerning the dissolution of pure national identity. Transgression can be achieved through the recurring use of the supernatural monstrous creatures. Accordingly, Karen Stein reveals that “[m]onsters are particularly prominent in the work of women writers, because for women the roles of rebel, outcast, seeker of truth are monstrous in themselves” (qtd. in Senf 178). In Stein’s formulation, monsters are predominantly written by women because they epitomize the rebellious spirits. Nineteenth-century Female Gothic invents the female monster’s figure as an exemplary expression of the liberating rebellion and fury seething within the consciousness of its women writers. In their book of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar trace the evolution of female monster recognizing that the patriarchal society confines women within “extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her” (17). The angel