Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The ascendancy of women's Gothic romance in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English writing marks a shift in what romance means and who reads it. From the time of its first appearance, Gothic romance has been viewed as a source of entertainment for middle-class female readers. Kay J. Mussell suggests that a part of this enjoyment comes from the predictable nature of its plot which “always has a dual character; through identification with the heroine, the reader finds in escape fiction a world in which excitement, mystery, danger, and action occur side by side with the domestic activities and social roles that women have traditionally performed” (Mussell 1983: 58). That pleasure may seem the sugar coating of what is often seen as a bitter pill – women's Gothic romance performs the difficult maneuver of inscribing social roles for women while also affording an escape from those roles. In other words, Gothic romance is seen to perform a confinement for women equivalent to that which occurs within its pages. The narrative traced in this essay, while being mindful of this perspective, will explore a slightly different point of view. To consider the excitement that must have been felt by those women writers, critics, and readers to whom in its very newness Gothic romance was neither predictable nor formulaic suggests a liberating sense of pleasure, the significance of which extends ... log in or subscribe to read full text