Gothic Deviations

Here are some quotes from "Gothic Feminism"

• Long Hoeveler, D. Gothic Feminism : the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës
• University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c1998.
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• "...I discovered that these novelists were not trying to reshape their worlds subversely or benignly through their writings. They were instead constructing a series of ideologies - a set of literary masquerades and poses - that would allow their female character and by extension their female readers a fictitious mastery over what they considered an oppressive social and political system through the pose of what I am calling 'professional femininity'." XII
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• - Terry Eagleton - "...bourgeois feminization of discourse" - "prolongs the fetishizing of women at the same time as it lends them a more authoritive voice."
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• "...to see the gothic novel functioning as a public coded and veiled critique of all those public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women." XIII
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• "...help women adjust to their confusing and often contradictory status in a newly emerging bourgeois culture."
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• "...fictional feminization of the masculine world."
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• (Of Rachel Brownstein) "She is a young woman perfectly chaste, dutiful, obedient, religious, useful, orderly, charitable, thrifty and kind. She acts and requires others to act according to a firm ethical standard. But her essence is aesthetic. In effect the bourgeois Christian Exemplar is an adaptaion of the cliche' that a woman is a goddess, a convention of courtship, literature, and polite society that, as Richardson knew and Mary Wollstonecraft was soon to say, has long served to enslave women."
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• Matthew Lewis on female authors - " I hold, that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that in the proportion that she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy: I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man."
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• "...slow motion followed by sudden flurry, the revolving cycles of inertia and mania - is characteristic of the long - winded, hysterical prose of the female gothic."