The Mysteries of the Gothic, Psychoanalysis/Feminism/The Female Gothic

National Library Bibliothèque nationale m*I of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellingtori OttawaON KlAW4 OttawaON K1AOCJ4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence dowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de rnicrofiche/fi.lm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur consewe la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. This thesis provides critical strategies for examining the gothic novel. Traditionally, the gothic has been canonically marginalized as a genre, and furthet displaced from novelistic discourses of power by the critical practice of placing gothic writings by wonen in a separate genre ghetto entitled *@The Female Gothic. The critical methodology utilized here understands the gothic as deserving.of a major place in textual practice because of the ways in which the intersecting discourses of psychoanalysis and feminism-or alternative constructions of their dominant versions--impact on the writing. Seven woman-authored gothic novels (or texts which manifest traditional gothic thematics) are explored for their recessed narratives of female subjectivity in the patriarchal order. The texts examined range from late seventeenth-century works of Ann Radcliffe, to those of contemporary writers. In each of the six chapters, particular strategies are pursued through separate readings of the individual texts. In the first chapter, for example, the semiotic theory developed by Julia Kristeva is utilized as a aeans of identifying the recessed mother at the heart of the gothic text. Again, in chapter five, Mikhail Bakhtin's influential analysis of the nove18s roots in carnival is valuable as a way of comprehending the theory of disguise as a major textual trope. Two of the textç analyzed have been made into films. These are looked at briefly as examples of the ways in which textual representations of women are mapped ont0 popular culture. However film theory is used throughout the thesis, largely because its feminist practitioners have made it their business (and pleasure) to make their work gender specific, thus keeping the discourse relatively honest. The oedipal complex, through which gender-coding and consequently heterosexual narrative is accomplished, is seen to be negatively informed in this Vernale gothic," thus revealing this writing as a challengeto patriarchal ideology with its easy assumptions about womenrs place in the social order. The gothic noval's various mysterier, in fact, may be the several ways in which these texts permit the heroines to scrutinize, and sometimes reject, patriarchal practice. understanding the gothic in this way opens the genre to questions concerning the codes/tropes of female desire. iii Introduction: Learning the (T)ropes...............m...m 1 1 . The Mother Function .........................m.m....17 2 . The Methodology of Madness ....................... ..71 3. The Maimed Male .........................m.........114 4 . ~othicIn/sights: The Gaze. The Look. and the Mirror ............... 135 5. D(u) ress Codes: Carnival. Veil. and the Masquerade ...............179 6 . (O)edible Complexities: Nature and Natural Food .......................... 237 This Thmai8 ir Dodicrtad Ta: My mother, MoE* Drew, Journalist. The women in my "creative ~omen~s@~group: Patsy Campbell, Mary-Louise Luck, Anna Wagner-Ott, Nela Rio, and Gai1 Taylor. Patsy Campbell for twenty-one years of feminist friendship. ~nne-LouiseBrookes for friendship and inspiration. Dr. Ann (Rusty) Schteir, teacher and founding menber of the Emily St. Aubert fan club. Barry Cameron and Wendy Robbins, advisors and friends. My partner Leo Ferrari, whose love sustains me. And to gothic daughter survivors everyvhere, especially: Emily St. Aubert Ellena Rosalba Lucy Snowe Joan Foster Eleanor Vance Mary Katherine Blackwood Ruthie Stone These are my sisters. 1 would like to thank Nancy Burnhan, at the University of New ~runswick,for her patience in inducting me into the mysteries of the computer. Introduction: Louning the (T)ropem Requests for a definition of the gothic novel usually elicit from me a standard response beginning, "you know those books with cover illustrations of a woman running away from a castle.. .?@O Required now to produce a definition more detailed (and less f lip) then the above, 1 find myself in diff iculty. How is the gothic novel def ined? 1s it a romance? Sonietimes. 1s it horror? Most of the time. 1s it tragedy, comedy, science fiction? Check one or al1 of the above. For me, the gothic novel evolved from literature8s attempts to define the social order through fictive constructs. Classical realist fiction, the nove18s traditional form, documents the narrative of individual subjectivity from the private/family realm to the public/social one in the case of the male. The female gothic,' with which f am concerned, positions the female in the fatherOs house and from there negotiates her movement into the materna1 position in yet another family; in other words from one private sphere to another, through acquisition of her own means of production, the male. The transition is circuitous and iraught with danger. To effect it, the gothic utilizes certain narrative tropes traditionally associated with the genre. These include madness or other forms of unreason, masquerade, semantic practices involving the insertion of other genres into the '~eeJuliann Fleenorts discussion of this term in her introduction to The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983), 3-28. novel (poetry, Song, fable) the thematic castration of the male characters (who nevertheless retain their phallic potency), vast textual spaces where the henaeneutic code operates in ex ces^,^ and a petsistence in fore-grounding the space that critic Julia Kristeva designates the semiotic position,) a locus critically assigned to the pre-oedipal phallic mother , Furthemore, the culmination of these narratives represents closure only at the socio/cultural level, not the emotional one. There is enough dis/ease on the part of the female protagonists (and indeed of the texts as they themselves are written by their traditional oedipal plots) to generate a sub-plot of narrative displeasure. Women s inscription in patriarchal culture and the oedipal drama through which its subjects are constituted masculine or feminine has always and already ken a complex and uneasy one. Freud's formulation of the oedipus complex situates the male as the inheritor of the father position culturally sanctified by the Law, destabilized by lack, and supported by the superego and the (never realized) promise of the phallus. For the female, the journey to the symbolic is different; in fact An explanation of the herneneutic code is found in Roland Barthes8 S/Z: An Essay, trans., Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19. Leon Roudiez explains this term in his helpful introduction to Julia Kristevats Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Llterature and Art, ed., Leon S, Roudiez, trans., Thomas Gora et al. (New York: Columbia UP, 1980), 6. it marks her difference from the male. The desire of both sexes is constituted in the mother; however only the female, attracted to the phallic potential signified by the penis, is required to turn away from her own sex towards the male other, thus experiencing a more intense caetration/loss than that sustained by the male sub ject. 1 emphasize here that anatomical difference is understood as deficiency only in relation to culture. As Kaja Silvennan uncompromisingly states: What is at issue here is not the female subjectfs biological inferiority, but her synbolic exclusion or lack--her isolation, that is, from those cultural privileges whf ch def ine the male subject as potent and sufficient. (Subject of Semiotics 42) The result of female desire for plentitude is fear (and sonetimes loathing) for the mother and a reification of the father as the parental figure of value. The paternal figure thus becomes symbolically privileged, while the materna1 figure occupies the margins of signification, patticularly the unconscious as it manifests itself in dreams and discursive lapses. This, of course, has tremendous significance for language and its most important manifestation, writing, specifically as it relates to the critical reading/writing practfce of this culture88 always and already gendered subj ects . 4~ereand elsewhere 1 am indebted to Silverman for her extremely elucidating analysis of female subjectivity, particularly as it relates to the negative oedipus conplex. See The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983) . However, finding the appropriate mate is neither the beginning nor the end of female desire in these discontented and indeed disconnected discourses. Desire is rather imbricated in negotiations through the minefield of tangled emotional and familial relationships that constitute the gothic heroine's

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