Postfeminist Gothic Literature Analysis
988 Words4 Pages
In the last section of my dissertation I will explore the intersection of postfeminism and Gothic which informs the birth of ‘Postfeminist Gothic’ that “demarcates a new space for critical enquiry that re-invigorates previous debates on the Gothic, in particular the notion of the Female Gothic and its relation to second-wave feminism, as well as shedding light on the contemporary postfeminist conundrum” (Brabon and Genz 1). Within this nascent genre, women writers transgress the 1970s feminist gothic with its close affiliations with “victim feminism” of the women’s liberation movement. Accordingly, in her book Gothic Feminism, Diane Long Hoeveler worthily develops this point, contending that second-wave feminist criticism celebrates women’s passivity while depicting women as “passive victims of male-created constructions” and thus they make use of their vulnerable victimization as a a productive way to obtain power (105). Accordingly she reveals: “Discussions of the female gothic, like analyses of feminism have, unfortunately, uncritically participated in the very fantasies that the genres have created for their unwary readers” (105). Hoeveler maintains that Gothic feminism consolidates women’s state of weakness as women adopt a masquerade of docility to achieve their triumph over “a male-created system of oppression and corruption, the ‘patriarchy’” (). Postfeminist Gothic not only reassesses the achievements of the predecessor movement of the1970s but also tries to solve the dead end that many scholars have faced when they try expound on the orientation of Gothic women writers “to psychologically universalise the female mind or to oversimplify the cultural function of