Female Gothic: A Subversive Genre

Over the past several decades, critics have drawn attention to many women writers of gothic fiction and have explained the feature of their works as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture. Since Ellen Moers coined the phrase "Female Gothic" in her book Literary Women (1976), critics have argued about whether female gothic can be identified as a separate literary genre. In order to prove the existence of the female gothic tradition, they provide their insightful ideas in their critical works from various perspectives such as feminism and psychoanalysis.In order to prove that female gothic is a subversive literary genre, the thesisbegins with the discussion of the close relation between women and gothic fictions.Then it tries to explore the features of gothic fictions by women writers from twoaspects. One is the image of heroine; the other is the narrative technique. The heroinecreated by women writers in their works is two-dimensional. It is embeddeddistinctively in comic gothic works and tragic gothic ones by women writers. Incomic fictions, the heroine is androgynous, successful in taming man in themale-dominated society while in tragic ones, heroine becomes mad because ofself-division caused by the suppression of patriarchy. In addition, women writers alsoemployed a few unique narrative techniques: female gothic explains the ghosts(whereas male gothic does not); female gothic is certain in its narrative closure(whereas male gothic is not); female gothic is organized around the resources of terror(whereas male gothic specializes in horror); female gothic demands happy ending(whereas male gothic does not). From the detailed analysis of the two aspects, aconclusion can be drawn that women writers subvert the male dominated literarydiscourse and establish their own writing tradition. It is true that female gothic is asubversive literary genre.