Identity In Female Gothic Literature

society. The main focus is often on a female protagonist who is threatened and persecuted by an evil patriarchal figure. The nightmarish, fearful atmosphere of the Gothic world grants the opportunity for female authors to illustrate the female protagonist conflict with the values of society.94 As other genres, there is a very palpable relationship between the Female Gothic novel of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth and modern gothics and the social conditions of women at these three centuries. Gothic Female authors reflect through gothic genre the role of women in their society, their fears, and their problems particularly those concerned with gender and identity. According to Diane Long Hoeveler, the Female Gothic genre regards female identity as “a legal and social construct that could be persistently attacked, deconstructed, and dissolved in the female gothic novel”. 95 Therefore ; the gothic conventions that appeared by the end of the eighteenth century “are crucially concerned with exploring the rules of patriarchy, such as the relative powers and qualities of the masculine and the feminine and the interrelated and the mutuality supportive social structure like the family, the monarchy, and the church”. 96 …show more content…
100 Thus, Women feel trapped in the houses and in their own body, so they try to convey that feeling through Female Gothic literature. Mores does not merely focus on the ways in which the Female Gothic illustrates women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society, but sets the Gothic at the center of the female