GOTHIC HEROINISM IN 18TH-CENTURY BRITISH GOTHIC FICTIONS AND 19TH-CENTURY SLAVE WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING
Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Wallace, Miriam
Area of Concentration
English
Abstract
This thesis examines how the Gothic heroine is a model to evoke readerly sympathy, and explores the place of ideology in fostering readerly sympathy. Chapter one outlines how the Gothic heroine manifests an ideology of ideal femininity that is capable of maintaining sexual and social virtue under threat. I establish the conflation of virtue with vulnerability in examples of Gothic heroines from M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, and finally Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Female characters in each of these texts embody properties of both vulnerability and virtue, and elicit reader sympathy while navigating threatening obstacles. I then shift my focus from the Gothic heroine as a figure that founds an ideology of femininity, and examines the role of Gothic heroine-like characters in selected nineteenth-century slave narratives from the southern United States. I focus on Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, asking what our study of British Gothic fiction’s construction of readerly sympathy helps us see in these later American works. This thesis argues that female slave narrative authors are conscious of the ideology inherited from the Gothic heroine and use their understanding of the Gothic heroine to garner sympathy and undermine notions of race-difference and hierarchy that justify their oppression.
Recommended Citation
Peterson, Bailey, "GOTHIC HEROINISM IN 18TH-CENTURY BRITISH GOTHIC FICTIONS AND 19TH-CENTURY SLAVE WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING" (2016). Theses & ETDs. 5257.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5257