Masse, Michelle.  In the Name of Love.  Ithaca : Cornell, 1992.

Moers, Ellen.  "The Female Gothic."  In Literary Women.  London :

Poovey, Mary.  "Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho."

Radway, Janice.  Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and

Restuccia, Frances L.  "Female Gothic Writing: `Under Cover to

Arno , 1980.

Thompson, G. R., ed.  The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism.  Olympia : Washington State , 1974.

Thurston, Carol.  The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for

Notes on Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market":

Lizzie (like Christ) intervenes offering a womanly holy Communion; she changes her sister from a lost whore to a virginal bride

poem presents a world where men hurt and women redeem

poem posits a matriarchal world and more covertly, a lesbian world

girls eventually find redemption in the heaven of bourgeois domesticity

eating fruit recalls Paradise Lost's presentation of fruit as "intellectual food"

eating fruit enacts an affirmation of poetic and sexual selfhoodeating words; tasting power but the taste of words (artistic creativity) causes guilt

genius and sexuality are diseases in women, like madness

what are the goblins?  it/id-like inner selves; desirous little creatures that live in the haunted minds of women artists

poem suggests the need to suffer and renounce the self-gratifications of art and sensuality

Lizzie, the word made flesh, forces Laura to devour her repressive wisdom, the wisdom of necessity's virtues

poem as a lesson in renunciation

notes from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 564-752

Excerpts from criticism of "Goblin Market":

Mary Wilson Carpenter, "'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in CR's GM,"  Victorian Poetry 1991:  CR constructs a "marketplace" in which "appetite" puts women at risk, but where her salvation is to be found not in controlling her appetite but in turning to another woman; GM suggests that female erotic pleasure cannot be imagined without pain, yet the poem not only affirms the female body and its appetites but constructs sisterhood as a saving female homoerotic bond.

Janet Galligani Casey, "The Potential of Sisterhood: CG's GM" in Victorian Poetry 1991:  "The concept of a female Christ figures prominently in Cassandra and GM, for both Florence Nightingale and CR believe that women, like men, may be redeemers.  For both of these writers, women have been unfairly relegated to the roles of Mary/Martha and Eve, when the role of Christ is within their grasp as well."

David F. Morrill, "'Twilight is not good for maidens': Uncle Polidori and the Psychodynamics of Vampirism in GM," in Victorian Poetry: Polidori published his novel The Vampyre in 1819 and committed suicide in 1821.  "Suck" is the central verb in GM, suggesting the erotic/oral compulsion in childhood sexuality.  CR equates the sexual act with a vampiric transference of energy; in love relationships one partner gains mastery and fattens emotionally as the other wastes away.

Paula Marantz Cohen, "CR's GM: A Paradigm for 19th-century Anorexia Nervosa":

Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in CR's GM":

Dorothy Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood in GM":  two girls live alone; they encounter goblin men; they have children.  Except for the word "wives' which legitimizes the children, there is no mention of any men but the goblins, who are explicitly male.  The children are apparently all girls and are exhorted to keep the female circle closed and complete.  This is a world in which men serve only the purpose of impregnation.  Once both sisters have gone to the goblins and acquired the juices of their fruits, they have no further need of them.

ENGLISH 186; THE FEMALE GOTHIC

TAKE-HOME MIDTERM EXAMINATION

ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM SECTION A AND ONE QUESTION FROM SECTION B:

SECTION A:

1.  The doubled or split woman is a dominant characteristic in female gothic fiction and poetry.  Analyze how she functionswhat she symbolizesand how she contributes to the meanings of "Goblin Market" and "The Yellow Wallpaper."

2.  Fear of sexuality, anxiety, and nausea/disease are featured in female gothic literature, most of the time as responses to the constrictions and oppressive power of the patriarchy.  Analyze how the patriarchy is presented and attacked or subverted in "Goblin Market" and "The Yellow Wallpaper."

SECTION B:

1.  Norbert Elias's History of Manners presents his theory of "the civilizing process," a gradual transformation of society by which the middle class aped aristocratic values but increasingly justified its dominance by pointing out the corruptions of the upper classes.  Discuss the impulse of the middle class to criticize aristocratic values and characters in Jane Eyre and Rebecca at the same time it celebrated a middle-class heroine.  How does the female gothic genre participate in justifying the middle-class takeover of society?

2.  Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca make heavy use of similar patterns of meaning and imagery: young penniless governess-type in love with older father-figure; blocking older female-figures; and animals (birds, dogs) as surrogates for the characters' emotions.

REMEMBER:  No plot summarywe've all read the works.  Offer a clear thesis in the introductory paragraphy, and then provide support for your ideas by using specific passages from the literary works you are analyzing.  Your conclusion then restates your thesis and points toward larger related is sue s.

ENGLISH 186:  THE FEMALE GOTHIC

SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR GROUP OR INDIVIDUAL REPORTS TO CLASS

The following are suggestions only.  Please feel free to come up with your own ideas, but check with me before beginning research work:

the life and poetry of Christina Rossetti:  how does Goblin Market fit into her career?  what interpretations can you propose for its meaning?

Asylum Piecea contemporary novel about a woman's stay in a mental hospitaland its relevance to Yellow Wallpaper

choose one scene from three or four filmed versions of Jane Eyre: how does each filmmaker transform the scene to suggest his interpretation of Jane or Rochester 's character?

Harlequin Romancessupermarket gothicand their relation to Jane Eyre

a report on the governness in Victorian society: her class status, role, and treatment in real life as contrasted to her treatment in JE

fairy tales as sources for JE

Rebecca as film: the Hitchcock version contrasted to the BBC and A&E versions

"The Haunting" as an adaptation of Jackson 's novel

"Wide Sargasso Sea "censored version shown in class with discussion of its relation to the novel's treatment of Bertha and her mother

the gothic fiction of Joyce Carol Oates

black gothic:  Beloved as gothic

Southern gothic: Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty

THEORIES OF FANTASY AND THEIR RELATION TO LITERATURE:

"The day-dream is a shadow play, utilizing its kaleidoscopic material drawn from all quarters of human experience, but also involving the original fantasy, whose dramatis personae, the court cards, receive their notation from a family legend which is mutilated, disordered and misunderstood.Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality" in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin

For Freud, fantasies, like nocturnal dreams, are an imagined scene representing the fulfillment of a wish: "a happy person never fantasizes, only an unsatisfied one (SE: "Creative Writers and Daydreaming")

Every fantasy, however, is also an articulation of a lack

For Freud the primal fantasies are the "seduction of three children [called the heritage or seduction fantasy], the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse [called the primal scene or origin fantasy], and the threat of castration [called the fantasy of sexual difference]."  "These were once real occurrences in the primeval times of the human family, and children in their fantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth" ("Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis").

The three primal fantasiesheritage, castration, and seductioninvolve the human subject's desire to solve the riddle of its existence, to explore the is sue of origins: who as I in relation to my heritage?  what is the origin of my body's anatomy? what is the cause of my drives, my desires?

Fantasies also generally center on scenarios of self-aggrandizement:  the plentitude of childhood is recaptured in the possession of a protecting house, loving parents, and a safe autoerotic objects for the dreamer's affectionate feelings

Fantasies are the means by which a hysteric can disguise the real traumatic events of her childhood by translating them into an imagined scene that veils a reminiscence without entirely obliterating it.  Fantasies also mark the moment of mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, given that under the censoring aegis of repression, they merely screen an impossible traumatic knowledge by modulating this forbidden knowledge into a belated and distorted articulation.

Freud:  "If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in fantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality.  This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these fantasies were intended to coverup the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane.  And now, from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a child's sexual life came to light."

THE STRUCTURE OF THE THREE UR-FANTASIES AND THE PHYSICAL/PSYCHIC MANIFESTATIONS OF EACH:

Definition:  Fantasies are psychic structures of meaning that disguise real or imagined traumatic events of childhood by translating those traumas into an imagined scene that veils a memory without totally obliterating it.  The fantasy, in other words, allows the adult to master the childhood trauma in a substitute formation.

Fantasies mediate between the conscious and unconscious mind because repression will screens a trauma that can only be expressed after the event and in a distorted fashion.

Fantasy precedes identity.Laplanche

SEDUCTION:  CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF BETRAYAL;  fantasy of desire; oedipal rivalries; incest; solipsism/narcissism; self-loathing; gynophobia; somaphobia; emergence of sexuality; eating disorders

CASTRATION:  CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF ABANDONMENT/DESERTION;  fantasies of death and sexual difference; beating fantasies; persecutory fantasies; decapitation; fetishism; sadism/masochism; self-mutilation

PRIMAL SCENE:  CORRESPONDING TRAUMA OF SEPARATION/ OTHERNNESS;  fantasy of heritage; identity/origins; voyeurism/exhibitionism; family romance scenarios; scopophilia/epistemephilia; gossip; boundary is sue s

REBECCA and fantasy from Alison Light, "'Returning to Manderley' FR 16 (1984):

"Romance fiction deals above all with the doubts and delights of heterosexuality [and] suggests that the acquisition of gendered subjectivity is a process, a movements towards a social self, fraught with conflicts and never fully achieved.  Psychoanalysis takes the question of pleasure seriously, both in its relation to gender and in its understanding of fictions as fantasies, as the explorations and productions of desires which may be in excess of the socially possible or acceptable."

"In the course of the novel the girl idealizes Rebecca as the expression of all the other possible versions of female sexuality which her own middle-classness excludes.  Rebecca disrupts the girl's romantic model and leads her to search for a 'successful' marriage which will also legitimize female sexual desire.  For the girl to find a secure social identity (a name) as Maxim's wife, Rebecca's difference must be reinterpreted.  From being the girl's imaginary ideal, she has to become her nightmarish enemy.  No longer the perfect wife, hostess and lover, she is to branded by the end of the novel as lesbian and whore."

"What the girl has to attempt, and what she must compulsively repeat in the telling of the tale, is a kind of self-murder.  It is a violent denial of those other versions of female sexuality, which Rebecca has come to represent.  Rebecca, then, is the focus of the novel's conflicting desires for and descriptions of the feminine....Going back is precisely what Rebecca is all about: returning to Manderley, to the primal scene of the acquisition of femininity."

"The reader, like the girl, wants to be like Rebecca, but dare not.  And yet once that process of identification with Rebecca has been set in motion its effects can never be fully contained nor its disruptive potential fully retrieved.  This narrative of wishful projection and identification, displacement and repulsion is then the story of all women, of what we go through in the constructing and maintaining of our femininity."

When the embodiment of bourgeois sexuality realizes how far she is from Rebecca's polymorphously perverve sexuality, she contemplates suicide: "the two sexualities cannot co-exist.  This is the book's crisis.  Now every attempt must be made to separate Rebecca out from the girl's and the reader's identification with her.  Rebecca must be externalized, taken out of the realm of imaginary projectiosns of subjectivity and put back into the world.  This means that in terms of the text, she must be forcibly reinscribed within that range of social discourses which will condemn her difference and so legitimate the girl's."

"The girl, in becoming narrator of the crime, transfers her identification from Rebecca to Maxim, and invites the reader to do the same....she learns to accept the regulation of female heterosexuality through class differences which themselves necessitate sexual competition between women."  The book follows the "remorseless logic of a Bluebeard.  Women are all the potential victims of a femininity which is not just endlessly defining us in terms of sexual statuswe are wives, mothers, virgins, whoresbut which marks us as representing the sexual itself.  Where women's sexual desirability is competitively organized around male approval and social reward, there will always be a Rebecca who is both an idealized alternative to our elusive subjectivity and a radical undermining of it."

"For middle-class readers in the 1930s Rebecca's murder appears to offer an ideal fictive solution to those all too seductive deviant femininities.  It is less than simple, however.  Rebecca is no longer 'out there,' the wife in the attic of the Gothic text, but inside the female subject, the condition of its existence.  The process of identification which the novel depends upon is, in more ways than one, fatal.  For Rebecca does, after all, get what she wants."

"Maxim's loss of place, of Manderley itself, is a social, psychic, and fictional necessity within the terms set up by the girl's assumption of Rebecca's position....the text equates Maxim's economic loss with a psychological crippling, and can therefore atone for his crime.  Losing your stately home is a fair cop for murdering your wife."

But also note how "Rebecca is responsible for his loss of home, authority, and even for the sunset of the Empire...The death of Manderley is the real tragedy of the novel, as a place untouched by the demands of capital, a site of feudal freedom, which like Rebecca herself could at least operate outside of an encroaching bourgeois hegemony of social and sexual values."

"What romance fiction tries to offer is a triumph over the unconscious, over the resistance to identity which lies at the very heart of psychic life.  Romance fiction makes heterosexuality easy by suspending history in its formulae and by offering women readers a resolution in which submission and repression are not just managed without pain or humiliation but managed at all.  Romance uses unequal heterosexuality as a dream of equality and gives women uncomplicated access to a subjectivity which is unified and coherent and still operating within the field of pleasure."

"That women read romance fiction is a measure of their deep dissatisfaction with heterosexual options as of any desire to be fully identified with the submissive versions of femininity the texts endorse.  Romance imagines peace, security, and ease precisely because there is dissension, insecurity, and difficulty.  In the context of women's lives, romance reading might appear less a reactionary reflex or an indication of their victimization by the capitalist market, and more a sign of discontent and a technique for survival."

WILD SARGASSO SEA notes:

"When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that?  What a shame to make Rochester 's first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write the story as it might really have been.  She seemed such a poor ghost.  I thought I'd try to write her a life.  Charlotte Bronte must have had strong feelings about the West Indies because she brings the West Indies into a lot of her books, like Villette.  Of course, one upon a time, the West Indies were very rich, and very much more talked about than they are now." - Jean Rhys

from Nancy Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text:

Jan Curtis, "The Secret of Wide Sargasso Sea "  Critique 31 (1990):

Anthony Luengo, "Wide Sargasso Sea and the Gothic Mode," World Literature Written in English 15 (1976):

Ken Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background:

Leslie Fiedler defines the American Gothic as dealing "with the exaggerated and the grotesque, not as they are verifiable in any external landscape of sociological observation of manners and men, but as they correspond in quality to our deepest fears and guilts as projected in our dreams or lived through in 'extreme situations.'"

Maria Olaussen, "Rhys's Construction of Blackness as Escape from White Femininity in WSS," Ariel 24 (1993):

"The theme of the novel is the fear and the possibility of losing one's whiteness....The meaning of her sexual identity is what ultimately determines her racial identity and vice versa."

Black critics identify the mammy, the whore, and the conjure woman as the three stereotypical roles for the black woman and that they are based on a fear of female sexuality and spiritual power

Elaine Showalter:  "In contast to the rather vague and uncertain concepts of insanity in general which Victorian psychiatry produced, theories of female insanity were specifically and confidentially linked to the biological crises of the female life cyclepuberty, pregnancy, childbirth, menopauseduring which the mind would be weakened and the symptoms of insanity might emerge."

"Rhys thus invites a comparison between Antoinette's situation and that of the slaves.  Antoinette is captured, sold, given a new name, transported across the sea, and locked up."  "Antoinette's use of black strategies of resistance reinforces the meaning of blackness as freedom.  In exploring the construction of a particular white female identity, Rhys denies the existence of systematic oppression of black women.  They, in turn, become prisoners of another's desire as the white Creole madwoman is set free" (81).

"The People Could Fly" an African legend that states that some slaves knew how to fly in Africa but had to shed their wings on the slave ships.  They were able to fly away to freedom when the situation in the fields became unbearable.  Rhys uses the same story when Antoinette, like the burning parrot, jumps down from the walls of Thornfield, flying away to freedom in her death.

NOTES ON LINDEN HILLS:

"Willa Prescott Nedeed's slow recognition that her grievous plight is itself a repetition leads her to recollect and to give voice to other women from the past.  Only then can she begin to work through her own trauma.  Willa is the fourth Mrs. Luther Needed.  Each Luther finds a light-skinned wife and then, through arcane rituals, produces a dark-skinned son, also named Luther, who looks exactly like every other Luther.  The Luthers precisely control and replicate their own and the other families that populate Linden Hills through each generation: the power of birth, marriage, mortgages ( they own all of the houses), and death itself (they are all undertakers) is theirs."

"Willie and Willa are doubles to some extent."

The line of Mrs. Neededs:

Luwana Packerville (1837)

Eve;um Cretpm (1892)

Prisilla McGuire (1930s)

"The four women try to achieve recognition of their identity through the traditional sexual strategies romance suggests.  Evelyn begins to mix aphrodisiacs; Priscilla's lively eyes seek the Luther who moves away from her in photographs"

"Willa wants to deny the knowledge that her undertaker husband is a bizarrely ritualistic necrophile"

"In plots that resist Gothic conventions, such as that of Linden Hills, the emphasis shifts radically by the novel's end to the protagonist finding that she and her motives are the mystery: what she will do about her constraints, and to what extent she may have enabled them.  Willa can only begin to understand what has happened to her when she accepts the narratives of the women who have preceded her.  As she traces Bibles, recipe books, and photo albums, she is forced through repetition to relinquish the ideology of marriage and the shame of thinking her plight unique.  What she finds is a community of suffering  and shared experience; her recollection affirms the reality of all of their pain.  Finally, Willa's own partial working through suggests a systemic critique of the Gothic structures that confine women."

"The novel's somber close suggests that the fall of one Gothic house is not the end of Gothic barbarity but that it is perhaps the aggressive first step to a freedom where no woman has to give her life to have her story told and heard."

from Michelle A. Masse, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic

ENGLISH 186: FEMALE GOTHIC FICTION

TAKE-HOME FINAL EXAMINATION

DUE:  May 8, no later than noon in my office in Coughlin 247

PART I:  Answer either question one or two:

1.  Mistress of Mellyn exploits several gothic conventions we have seen in its source, Jane Eyre.  Identify those conventions, discuss how they are altered or "modernized" in Mistress, and draw some conclusions about "supermarket gothics."  How and why do they appeal to such a wide range of readers today?

2.  Wide Sargasso Sea also has Jane Eyre as its source.  Discuss how Rhys has adapted Bronte's novel and how she has changed the character of Berthaas well as the entire Caribbean settingto speak to a more race conscious audience.  Is this example of the female gothic an attack on racism or sexism or both?  How is it more self-conscious in its presentation of these themes than was Jane Eyre?

PART II:  Answer either question three or four:

3.  Linden Hills has been characterized as an example of "Black Gothic," along with Beloved and a number of novels by Toni Morrison.  Identify the gothic conventions in Linden Hills and discuss the specifically racial aspects of those themes.  In short, is there any way you can identify Linden Hills as written by an African-American woman?  Is the world she creates a specifically "black" world?  Why or why not?

4.  The Haunting of Hill House and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe both concern the nature of lovespecifically female lovein the gothic world.  Compare and contrast the types and character of love in the two novels, and tie into the themes we have identified all semester:  paternal/maternal domination, fantasy formations, incest, guilt and shame cultures, beating fantasies, and seduction/castration scenarios.

Your essay responses must have thesis statements, paragraphs of support drawn from the texts under discussion, and a conclusion that restates your thesis.

NOTES ON THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

From Patricia White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting" in Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992):

"It is a truism of the horror genre that sexual interest resides most often in the monster and not the bland ostensible heroes."

"Female scopophilia is a drive without an object...what the woman actually sees, after a sustained and fearful process of looking, is a sign or representation of herself displaced to the level of the nonhuman"

Freud identifies paranoia as a defense against homosexuality: "In all of these cases a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease" (Freud, "On the Mechanism of Paranoia" (1911)

"The woman's sexuality, as a spectator [of films], must undergo a constant process of transformation.  She must look, as if she were a man with the phallic power of the gaze, at a woman who would attract that gaze, in order to be that woman....The convolutions involved here are analogous to those described by Julia Kristeva as 'the double or triple twists of what we commonly call female homosexuality': 'I am looking, as a man would, for a woman'; or else, 'I submit myself, as if I were a man who thought he was a woman, to a woman who thinks she is a man.'"

the basic gothic formula: "the image of woman-plus-habitation"

there are two types of plot typology: the male hero's entry into a closed space and his emergence from it: "Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as a cave, the grave, a house, a woman...entry into it is interpreted on various levels as death, conception, return home and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical."

"Insofar as the cinema rewrites all stories according to an Oedipal plot, when the woman is the hero of a gothic such as Rebecca, her story is told as the female Oedipus.  Her conflicting desires for the mother and for the father are put into play only to be resolved as the mirror image of man's desire.."

"The Haunting tells the story of Eleanor, a woman whose sexualitylike that of the heroine of Rebeccais latent, not necessarily, not yet, lesbian.  Her journey is articulated as female Oedipal drama almost against her will, and is resolved, with her death, as a victory of the house and the grave (perhaps the womb)....the film shifts between homosexuality and homophobia"

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams:  "Robbers, burglars and ghosts, of whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, all originate from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence.  In every case the robbers stood for the sleeper's father, whereas the ghosts correspond to female figures in white nightgowns."

Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981):  "Theo gets her psychosexual jollies by hugging Eleanor and blaming it on ghosts.  But she is not predatory; she is just out of life's running.  She professes no interest in actively seducing either Eleanor or Luke.  The lesbianism is entirely mental, and her sterility leaves her at a dead end.  Lesbianism is rendered invisible because it is purely psychological.  And since most lesbians were invisible even to themselves, their sexuality, ill-defined in general, emerged onscreen as a wasted product of a closeted lifestyle."

Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972):  "Lesbianism had a role in drawing these two unusual ladies closer in the frightening, macabre situation to which they commit themselves and where they must cling to each other."

Dr Markway's fumbling pseudo-scientific attempts to measure the cold spot in the house come to symbolize his "attempts to explore the undiscovered country of female homosexuality...he lesbianizes the haunted house"calling it diseased, sick, etc.

Eleanor "has never belonged within the patriarchal home and its family romance. Her dark, romantic secret is her adult attachment to her mother"

"Theo's seduction of Eleanor is displaced onto the haunting that appears to occur...The process whereby the appartion of lesbian desire is deferred to the manifestation of supernatural phenomena is well illustrated by a sequence depicting the events of the first night spent by the company in Hill House"

Freud, Totem and Taboo: "When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples...which raise the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect of the death of the beloved person.  No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, no direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture."  Freud explains this guilt as a repressed component of hostility toward the dead

In Freud's "Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytical theory of the Disease," he describes a 30-something woman living with her mother who forms a paranoiac delusion to defend herself against the attentions of man.  But the persecutor of the womanin her mindturns out to be the mother, the loved person.

The scene between Theo and Eleanor in bed "transforms homosexuality into homophobiareplacing sexuality with fear"

The four inhabitants of the house read themselves into the sculpture of St Francis curing the lepers: "the female forces of Hill House are beginning to close in on Eleanor"

"The materialization of the wife seems to be part of the process where the house itself calls Eleanor home"

Eleanor is haunted by the wife, first in the library and then as Eleanor runs through the house

Library has a smell Eleanor associates with her mother

Eleanor is terrorized at the very moment of her identification with the companion, by the apparition of the heterosexual role model, the wife

"Eleanor comprehends the displacement of her Oedipal drama (the substituting of herself for the mother) by the inverted drama of Hill House (the wife's substitution for Eleanor in relation to the house's desire).  'I'm the one who's supposed to stay.  She's taken my place.'  And Eleanor dies, ironically, in the wife's place."

"The Haunting exceeds the woman's story as female Oedipal drama enacted in a gothic such as Rebecca.  In that genre the protagonist's search for the secret of a dead woman is facilitated or impeded by a key figure, an older, sometimes sinister character, variously the housekeeper, the nurse, or in some other capacity a companion to the dead woman.  These roles are truly a gallery of the best of lesbian characters in classic cinematic history.  Mrs Danvers in Rebecca or Cornelia Skinner in The Uninvited, they are a compelling reason for the young woman, recently married and suspecting it might have been a mistake, to realize that it was one....The Haunting is a crucial transformation in the manifest appearance of lesbianism.  The representation of the dead woman, the object of the heroine's desire ("Rebecca" as precisely unrepresentable in that film), and the function of the companion converge in the figure of Theodora, who is emphatically not the mother."

Notes from Janice Radway's Reading the Romance:

Radway characterizes the failed romance, or one that does not bring pleasure to its readers.  These books present their heroines (surrogates for the self reading the book) as overly degraded and excessively punished.  Suicide is also unacceptable in a romance, because these texts have to affirm the heroines.

Radway:  "If the events of the heroine's story provoke too intense feelings, such as anger at men, fear of rape and violence, worry about female sexuality, or worry about the need to live with an unexciting man, that romance will be discarded as a failure or judged to be very poor....Wne a writer can supply a story that will permit the reader several hours of vicarious experience living as a woman who flourishes because she receives the attention, devotion and approval of an extraordinary man that writer will have written an ideal romance."

Notes on Melodrama as a genre, specifically female melodrama:

melodrama achieves its effects with music, spectacle, action amd easily read gestures rather than subtlety of language or character.  Melodrama has developed from the theater through silent cinema into what some critics describe as the predominant dramatic form in a godless age where neither author nor audience can reach the certainty of belief in outside causes necessary for tragedy.

Research notes on anorexia nervosa as a theme in women's literature:

Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman:  "now it becomes clear how that myth in which a woman is condemned for eating reflects male hatred of the female and fear of her sustaining and strengthening herself.  Yet, fasting is also an act of revolt.  Since eating maintains the self, in a discredited world it is a compromise that implies acquiescence....Therefore, the prominence of anorexia nervosa as a female dis-ease and a theme in women's literature suggests the women's representation of food often reflects guilt and conflict about their bodies, appetites, and desires" (390).

Anorexia was first labeled a syndrome in 1873:  Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: "Anxiety over women's uncontrollable hungers appears to peak during periods when women are becoming independent and are asserting themselves politically and socially."  Anorexia, like hysteria, reflects women's internalization of competing, and indeed contesting, messages about gender.

Bordo notes that in anorexia "the same gesture that registers protest against a sexist culture can also signal retreat; that is, indeed, may be part of the symptom's attraction" (176);

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: links somatophobia, or body-hatred, to matrophobia, or women's fear of becoming as self-effacing as the mother in traditional domesticity.  Women's writing often expresses ambivalence about domesticity and motherhood through negative images of food and the female body.

Rich, Chernin, and Bordo ascribe women's somatophobia to their matrophobia, or fear of becoming like the mother who feeds others but cannot nourish her own desires

Elizabeth Spelman, sees somatophobia as an unfortunate consequence of the discomfort with domesticity in feminist thought ("Woman as Body" Feminist Studies 8 [1982] 119)

Harriet Fraad, sees anorexia as a "crisis embodied" of the contradictions of women's economic status in modern consumer culture.  Women's non-wage labor in the household is akin to a model of feudal servitudea system where service is not reduced to a price, unlike capitalism, where women's work is either unpaid in the home or underpaid in the marketplace:  "Anorectics refuse the need for food and with it the need to belong to the noncapitalist world of the household.  However, anorexia's victims obsess on the food they cannot have.  In this way the disorder enacts the need for connection and continuity with a frequently feudal past, symbolized by need, food and mothering.  Anorexia also enacts the drive for personal independence and control in capitalist careers with little tolerance for personal need.  Anorexia denies and controls women's needs for two contradictory roles, each impossible fully to achieve or to relinquish" ("Anorexia as Crises Embodied: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Household," in Bringing It All Back Home [ London : Pluto, 1994, p. 129) 

Additional bibliography on the topic:

Disorderly Eaters

ANOTHER SYLLABUS FOR THE FEMALE GOTHIC:

ENGLISH 186: THE FEMALE GOTHIC

Professor Diane Long Hoeveler

Coughlin 247

Office Phone:  288-3466

Office Hours: 12:30 - 2:00 T/TH and by appt

Email:  "diane.hoeveler@marquette.edu"

Course meets from 11-12:15 T/TH in Cudahy   137

This course is a Blackboard course.  Login and find electronic copies of most short fiction.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Reading Packet [rp] of gothic and ghost stories written by women (available for purchase at the Bookmarq)

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Houghton Mifflin)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd ( Oxford )

Louisa May Alcott, Alternative Alcott, ed. Elaine Showalter

Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (Dramatists Play Service)

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts

REQUIREMENTS FOR COURSE:

• Oral presentation (worth 25%)
• Take-Home Midterm exam (worth 25%)
• Research Paper (worth 25%)
• Take-Home Final exam (worth 25%)

RESERVE MATERIAL:

Richard Dalby, ed. Victorian Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V53]

Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ed. Victorian Ghost Stories [PR/1309/.G5/V54]

Peter Haining, ed. Gentlewomen of Evil [PR/1309/.G5/H35]

Anita Miller, ed.  Classic Ghostly Tales [PR/1309/.G5/F68]

Douglas Robillard, ed.  American Supernatural Fiction: From Wharton to the Weird Tale [PS/374/.S83/A48]

Joyce Carol Oates, ed. American Gothic [PS/648.H6/A47]

Patrick McGrath, ed.  The New Gothic [PS/648/.H6/M67]

The Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell [PR/4710/.C73]