Wallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith, Eds.: The Female Gothic: New Directions
2012; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoWallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith, eds. Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 219 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-230-22271-7. $80.00. In Female Gothic: New Directions, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith collect twelve essays that explore numerous aspects of the Female Gothic, both as a literary genre and as a field of academic study. Relying heavily on the work of Ellen Moers, the progenetrix of the term, they argue that the Female Gothic is shaped by issues including national identity, sexuality, language, race and and that its significance lies precisely in how it challenges and complicates these issues (10). As should be obvious from this list, they believe that the Female Gothic is ultimately about identity--both that of the author and the (female) characters in the stories--and the included essays support this. editors note that their intentions for compiling this anthology were twofold. First, they wanted to prove the many critics who feel that the Female Gothic is outdated wrong and that it remains a fertile field for investigation (6). Second, they wanted to retain a sense of in the face of the rapidly expanding numbers of Female Gothic works (11). While one might think that this focus on history would have resulted in the essays being arranged in some form of chronological order, this is not the case. Instead, the essays are merely numbered 1 to 12 and arranged with no discernable logic. This is actually the one major flaw of the book as it makes it somewhat difficult to draw connections between the essays, and could have been easily fixed if the book had been divided into thematic sections like most essay collections. Accordingly, for the purpose of this review, I have divided the essays into four categories: historical explorations, author studies, tropological explorations, and regional/national four essays that make up the category of what I am calling historical explorations not only highlight the origins of the (Female) Gothic, but also attempt to prove the legitimacy of the Gothic, both as literature and as a field of study. Three of the essays attempt to do this by looking at the Gothic itself. Lauren Fitzgerald, in her article, The Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies, shows how Moer's conception of the Female Gothic rescued the reputation of both Female Gothic writers and Gothic Studies. In a more specific reading, Robert Miles shows how the aesthetics of Anne Radcliffe forever transformed the Gothic in 'Mother Radcliff: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic. Unfortunately, there is nothing new or groundbreaking found in this essay. In contrast, Angela Wright pushes some boundaries in Disturbing the Female Gothic: An Excavation of the Northanger Novels, even though her subject is just as common in Gothic Studies. She shows how Austen's Northanger Abbey ... problematises assumptions about gendered reading habits that were already prevalent in the 1790s since both male and female characters read and discuss Gothic novels (62). These three essays legitimize both Gothic literature and Gothic Studies by focusing on the Gothic alone. In contrast, the final essay in this category, and the most revolutionary, Diana Wallace's 'The Haunting Idea': Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory, attempts to legitimize the Gothic by looking at the larger academic world. She does this by showing how feminist theory is built around Gothic metaphors, mainly those related to ghosts and haunting, due to women being almost invisible in the historical record. This expands the importance of the Gothic beyond the bounds of the literary, which none of the other essays in the book do: just like ghosts haunt the Gothic, the Gothic haunts feminism. Through a different utilization of the metaphor of haunting, both of the essays in the author studies category look beyond the scope of their subject's Gothic literature and draw parallels between their fiction and non-fiction works. …
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