| As
British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social
and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois
female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny,
Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith,
Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and
the Brontës to show how these writers helped define femininity
for women of the British middle class.
Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known
as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a
new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the
new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts
at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that
"professional femininity"—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness
and controlled emotions—best prepared them for social survival.
She examines how representations of both men and women in these
novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political
representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies
that would allow their female characters—and readers—fictitious
mastery over an oppressive social and political system.
Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these
women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven
works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic
poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly
new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology. |
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