Gothic fiction is characterized by an environment of fear, the threat of supernatural events, and the intrusion of the past upon the present. . . . From the castles, dungeons, forests, and hidden passages of the Gothic novel genre emerged female Gothic. . . . Female Gothic narratives focus on such topics as a persecuted heroine fleeing from a villainous father and searching for an absent mother.
When the female Gothic coincides with the explained supernatural the natural cause of terror is not the supernatural, but female disability and societal horrors: rape, incest, and the threatening control of a male antagonist. Female Gothic novels also address women's discontent with patriarchal society, their difficult and unsatisfying maternal position, and their role within that society. Women's fears of entrapment in the domestic, their bodies, marriage, childbirth, or domestic abuse commonly appear in the genre.
After the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, female Gothic allowed readers to grow from "adolescence to maturity" in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As protagonists such as Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced by natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may grasp the heroine's true position: "The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female."
🌹 𝔐𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔞 & 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔉𝔢𝔪𝔞𝔩𝔢 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠🥀
