Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. University Park (PA): Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.

Grinnell library catalog page

In this book, Hoeveler asserts that female gothic novelists constructed ideologies--"a set of literary masquerades and poses" (non-paginated introduction)--that allowed female characters and female readers to attain a mastery of masculine spaces within fiction. Hoeveler calls this pose "professional femininity." She contends that “white, bourgeois women writers have not simply been the passive victims of male-created constructions but rather have constructed themselves as victims in their own literature, and that they have frequently depicted themselves, as have men, as manipulative, passive-aggressive, masochist, and sadistic (4).

Hoeveler dismisses prior categorizations of the female gothic tradition and argues it “became a coded system whereby women authors covertly communicated to other women--their largely female reading audience--their ambivalent rejection of and outward complicity with the dominant sexual ideologies of their culture” (5). Labeling this ideology “gothic feminism” and likening it to W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness” phenomena, Hoeveler believes the novels represent women who “actually subvert the father’s power at every possible occasion and then retreat to studied postures of conformity whenever they risk exposure to public censure” (6). In sum, Hoeveler presents her female gothic as a signifying system. In addition, she incorporates psychoanalysis throughout the discussion and mobilizes the theories of Norbert Elias, Michael Foucault, and contemporary French feminists.

Five different chapters focus on Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, Anne Radcliffe’s Early Gothics, her Major Gothics, Jane Austen and Mary Shelly, and the Brontes and Romantic Feminism, respectively. Chapter titles or theses include, for example, “Gendering Victimization” and “Hyperbolic Femininity.” Hoeveler’s tone is personal and passionate, e.g. the afterward includes discussion concerning her interpretation of the film Gone With the Wind.

Entered by Elisa on 19 July 2004 at 1:09 AM.