#gothic femininity

[kaotic-youth]

At first she could discern nothing, the windows being closed, but after a short time she began to perceive that the floor was all covered with clotted blood that reflected the dead bodies of several women suspended from the walls. These were all the wives of Bluebeard, who had cut their throats one after the other... She drops the key in her horror; when she tries to cover her tracks, she learns the key is enchanted and reveals the blood to her wife-murdering husband. “You wanted to enter the room! Well, madame, you shall enter it, and you shall take your place among the ladies you saw there,” Bluebeard thunders.... In the original telling, Perrault puts the fault at the heroine’s door, appending a moral warning against the dangers of a woman’s excessive curiosity:

Something Is Wrong in This House: How Bluebeard Became the Definitive Fairy Tale of Our Era by Kelly Faircloth

[kaotic-youth]

Hallorann, in typical male fashion, fights Jack until bested, whereas Wendy flees, seeking to avoid violence. Even when confronted by the violent male power, Wendy retaliates solely to escape rather than pursue further conflict. If destruction is male, then preservation is female.

Overlook Abbey: Whispers of the Female Gothic in Stephen King’s The Shining by Justin Montgomery

[kaotic-youth]

Considering the Victorian woman’s experience, as well as earlier ones (though published in the Victorian era, Bronte set the novel in the Georgian era) the red-room may be red for a variety of symbolic reasons: menstruation (Jane is ten at the novel’s beginning and will soon enter puberty); passion; torment; blood. Furthermore, Jane’s imprisonment in the red-room stems from punishment for confronting her male cousin after he hits her and insults her because she is dependent on his family and because the books she reads are not her own. She suffers for rebelling, for educating herself and living in an environment where she does not possess her own independence, so the surreality of her break with reality emphasizes the terror of her experience as a girl approaching womanhood.

The Sublime’s Effects in Gothic Fiction by Emily Deibler

[kaotic-youth]

For women in Victorian England (1837-1901), the sublime is triggered through a fear of confinement and suppression based on societal expectations; an example of this fear appears in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In the beginning, Jane experiences terror when her aunt locks her inside the red-room, the former chambers of her dead uncle. As her imprisonment lingers, the experience takes its toll on Jane, and she soon believes her uncle’s ghost, a patriarchal symbol, will rise and attack her.

The Sublime’s Effects in Gothic Fiction by Emily Deibler

[kaotic-youth]

The gothic house is often synonymous with a person or a mind. “One need not be a house” to be “haunted,” Emily Dickinson reminds us; “The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material place”, and in Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette opens “doors” in her mind to be “somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer.” “She herself is a haunted house” states the epigraph of my novel, taken from “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter.

For Gothic Heroines, Haunted Houses Are Always Too Big by Jane Healey

[kaotic-youth]

Raw‘s focus on ritualism that is done to everyone makes Justine’s reaction sit in contrast. Everyone eats rabbit liver, but only Justine and her sister become cannibals. Everyone has sex, but only Justine wants to take more than a playful bite out of her partner. The idea that puberty is a singular and unprecedented experience unique to the teenager is a core source of teenage anxiety. Justine’s cannibalism is the classic, “my body is hideous and changing in a way no one else’s is” assertion pushed to its cannibalistic extreme. Tying Justine’s cannibalistic coming of age to ritual is a further way to highlight that her cannibalism is intrinsic to her womanhood, a point the film underlines clearly at its conclusion.

Nevertheless, She Feasted: Why Girls Get Hungry in Horror Movies by Francesca Fau