| This dissertation examines a female tradition in literature recently, and problematically, named "female gothic." It compares and contrasts five novels written by women in the twentieth century with Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1848) in order to illuminate what is traditional and what is original or "re-visionary" in contemporary portrayals of women's experience. Included are analyses of Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Susan Schaeffer's The Madness of a Seduced Woman (1983), Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City (1969), and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972). More specifically, I look at adaptations of the quest for love which involve expression or release, rejection, perversion, or denial of an "emancipated" female sexuality (Chapter IV); reinterpretations of the "madwoman" which evoke or create the anger and fear of modern women who are, or think they are, going mad (Chapter V); and, in conjunction with the feminist debate about God, revisions of the supernatural which convey the ambivalence of contemporary women towards God-as-Man, and more fundamentally in patriarchy, men-as-gods (Chapter VI). My larger goal is to investigate the claim made by some feminists that today's female authors are bound by tradition, imprisoned within prior texts, "folded and wrinkled," as it were, in the pages of their literary foremothers. That this is not always the case is evidence by the novels to be studied here, which sometimes reject, and other times revise, reformulate, or reinterpret their literary precursors and the tradition to which those precursors belong. By examining the revisionary relationship that exists between "modern variations" of the female gothic and their literary precursors, Udolpho and Jane Eyre, this study will enable us to evaluate the process and function of literary revision itself, particularly in women's literature, and to think critically about its role in redefining the values, and ultimately, the sense of reality that literature portrays. |
