The Female Gothic Narrative And Gender Politics In Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith

Sarah Waters is an established contemporary British female writer,whose novels are closely associated with historical rewriting,Gothic narrative and feminism,which can be reflected in her best-known novel,Fingersmith.As one of the representative works,Fingersmith betrays Waters? inheritance from Gothic narrative tradition in British literary history and her typical feminist writing style.Fingersmith is a typical female Gothic novel,but it embraces remarkable contemporary characteristics.This thesis mainly explores the female Gothic narrative and gender politics in Fingersmith,based on a combination of the genre study and the gender study,which aims to probe into the development of female Gothic and gender politics it contains in the contemporary context.Firstly,the author of the thesis argues that Fingersmith inherits the female Gothic tradition and shows the remarkable characteristics of contemporary female Gothic due to the integration of gender politics into its female Gothic narrative.Secondly,this thesis illuminates the confinement images and female victims in Fingersmith,which are symbols of the female Gothic,and explores the anxiety and fear experienced by the two female protagonists when they were incarcerated in the confinement places.Finally,the subversion of male-domination and the awakening of the heroines? female self-consciousness are explored,and the thesis indicates that the construction of lesbian identity is manifestation of their subversion and deconstruction of the patriarchy and heteropatriarchy.Sarah Waters self-consciously employs the genre of female Gothic as the narrative form in Fingersmith.One the other hand,she endows the narrative form with subversive and rebellious ideology,by emphasizing the subversion of male-dominated writing and the construction of female subjectivity and lesbian identity.The author of the thesis argues that the contemporariness of Fingersmith is reflected in Sarah Waters?employment of contemporary perspective when she examines the confinement and oppression of the Victorian women,and her revisionist ideological reconstruction of the history of the Victorian women.