Fearful spheres and domestic rebellion : reading theFemale Gothic in selected twentieth century literary texts

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Due to the nature of the separate spheres of Western society during the mid-Nineteenth to mid-Twentieth centuries, men were put into the public sphere to learn and contribute toknowledge, create and pass laws, and lead society. Women were forced into the privatesphere, taught to stay within the domestic, and to conform to the oppressive expectations ofgender norms. This thesis will explore the troubled relationship between women and thedomestic, where the literature devoted to this study comments on popular fictional tropes forwomen in selected Gothic texts, where seemingly the only way to avoid being denied agencyis through madness and death. This study aims to pursue such troubled legacies by looking atselected female-authored texts within the genre of the Female Gothic and Magical Realism.By aligning myself with critics like Diana Wallace, I explore texts such as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper by examining the Foucauldian power struggle withinmedical discourse in the Western late Nineteenth Century, access to knowledge, andgendered ways of reading. By comparing Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Angela Carter'sshort story 'The Bloody Chamber, I aim to show the construction of an imagined version ofa place through shards of conversation, which slightly intersects with Walter Benjamin'stheory of the auratic when showing the difference between engaging with somethingauthentically, or engaging with an imagined version of reality.I discuss the palimpsesting nature of rewriting familiar stories, drawing attention to how thetexts, written many decades apart, point to the voicelessness of women within even modernrevisited texts. I then discuss Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, exploring theallure of the domestic for those who seek a home, and showing how Jackson reveals that forher, madness and death were written as the only escape from domestic imprisonment. FinallyI approach a postmodern Mexican novel, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate,examining the palimpsesting nature of parody based on the Nineteenth Century tradition ofmonthly instalment magazines for housewives in Mexico. Here I also explore the intersectionof the Female Gothic within the practice of Magical Realism in literature, where the domesticrealm is both a prison and a space of empowerment for the main character.I aim to draw attention to the ways in which the selected texts show how inherited femaletraditions root women within prescribed gender roles and a rigid domesticity, of whichauthors from the Nineteenth Century until contemporary times still seem to comment on theoutworn conclusion that the only escape for women characters in Gothic texts of domesticimprisonment is through madness and death.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University