Goblin Market Gender Analysis

To what extent and in what ways do The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Goblin Market and Rebecca unsettle cultural definitions of gender and/or sexuality?

Christina Rossetti, Daphne du Maurier and Angela Carter question and unsettle contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality respectively in Goblin Market, Rebecca and The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Each author, writing at different periods in history and therefore different eras in terms of both the women’s rights movement and the evolution of the modern conceptualisation of gender and sexuality, chiefly concerns the focus of her work on examining the sexual journeys of women in patriarchal culture. Each has, because of this, been to differing extents hailed as feminist in their portrayal of women who, all of them in the liminal stage between childhood …show more content…
Although each text is primarily focused on the feminine, I shall also demonstrate how they each individually deal with masculine sexual desire in order to elucidate the central ideas about female sexuality that they portray, and their place within the literary heritage of the ‘Female Gothic.’ The Gothic genre is one that deals primarily with the feelings of oppression and entrapment manifested into physical peril facing the central protagonist. These ides were co-opted by female authors in order to explore the restriction and limitation placed upon women in a male dominated society. Ellen Moers termed the body of work written by these authors the ‘Female Gothic,’ being works written primarily about the experiences of women. Among the most stringently patrolled aspects of the female experience is the lack of freedom to express sexual desire, both within and outside of the context of marriage. Whilst men have, in the past and to some extent still today, been allowed leniency in expressing sexual desire and in having affairs outside of marriage – although only