Eighteenth-century gothic novels and gendered spaces: What\u27s left to say?

This study employs Horace Walpole\u27s Castle of Otranto , Ann Radcliffe\u27s Mysteries of Udolpho, and Jane Austen\u27s Northanger Abbey to evidence how gender differences are reinforced or revised in specific domestic spaces in early British Gothic novels. This study conceptualizes space and place in terms of social relations including gender, class, politics, and geography. Concepts of gender and productions of idealized female and male behavior in particular places create gendered spaces. Examining social boundaries frequently reveals domestic spaces and the objects they contain, oftentimes identifying these objects with gender or function. I suggest that our understanding and experience of domestic space within these early Gothic texts merit further attention in order to establish space as a socially constructed element. While texts from scholars like Gaston Bachelard, Henri LeFebvre, Shirley Ardener, and Doreen Massey have shown the connections between social identity and the physical and spatial constituents of one\u27s surrounding environment, investigating how space and place are created and demarcated may lead us to more profound considerations of Gothic elements and defining character relations, not only in eighteenth-century literature, but also in today\u27s. Julia Kristeva\u27s theories of abjection, the Symbolic and Semiotic, and Kenneth Burke\u27s rhetorical theory of dramatism provide important lenses for examining the uses and meanings of gender and space embedded in narrative constructions and socially performative actions in the Gothic novel. While not necessarily meant to be merely theoretical, my study does examine the purpose of the home and its rhetoric in these early Gothic novels to help determine the uses of space in connection with gender. I hope to show how these spaces reflect various borders and enclosures necessary for scholars to recognize a more distinct vulnerability of those borders created by construction (and deconstruction) of gender tropes. In turn, new ways of theorizing about gender and its role in Gothic texts may follow. Both Kristeva\u27s and Burke\u27s notion of openness, of possibility, and of ongoing conversation with texts and life not only imbues this project, but also remains its directive in the establishing of new ways of reading Gothic texts