Beyond the Gender Binary: Fear and Confinement in Gothic Fiction
An Analysis of and Comparison between Gothic Works from Horace Walpole’s Eighteenth- Century The Castle of Otranto, to Charlotte Brontë’s Nineteenth-Century’s Novel Jane Eyre,
and Shirley Jackson’s Twentieth-Century Novel The Haunting of Hill House
Marjon Léonie Ruzius S2511533
Supervisor: Dr Suzanne Manizza Roszak Second Assessor: Dr John Flood
16,500 words 17 March 2023
Marjon L. Ruzius, 2023
Beyond the Gender Binary: Fear and Confinement in Gothic Fiction
Abstract:
This thesis examines the influence of oppressive patriarchal systems on men and women characters’ fear of confinement in Gothic literature from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth century authors like Horace Walpole, and Edgar Allan Poe, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Shirley Jackson. Through analysing the fears of literally and metaphorically confined men and women characters in these works, this thesis challenges the assertion that the fearful experiences of these characters in Gothic literature merely adhered to patriarchal convention.
Moreover, this thesis uses that analysis to illustrate the shift in gender perception from nineteenth century literature onwards. Thereby, it aims to highlight the importance of challenging traditional gender categories. To this end the experience of fear of confinement of female characters has been compared with the experience of male characters, addressing the function and role of the fear of entrapment incited by the patriarchal dynamic of the dominant male and his submissive female counterpart. Through feminist theory, gender studies, and sociohistorical context, this thesis shows that the fear of literal as well as metaphorical confinement within marital, sexual, parental, and familial relationships presents itself in gendered forms in Gothic literature. However, while both men and women characters are subjected to physical and psychological confinement in a dissimilar manner, this thesis argues that both gendered characters’ subsequent fears are essentially an expression of the fear of loss of will, agency, or freedom as a results of oppressive gender roles that dictate how both men and women are expected to behave. This means that gendered fears are not necessarily a result of inherent distinctions between genders, but in fact a result of patriarchal social structures and corresponding gender norms. Ultimately, this thesis establishes the presence of shared fears
that transcend traditional gender categories and reflect the shifting gender constructs from the nineteenth century onwards.
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 5
Chapter One: The Dread of Spatial Confinement ... 17
Chapter Two: The Dread of Domestic and Sexual Confinement ... 27
Chapter Three: The Dread of Familial and Parental Confinement ... 36
Conclusion ... 46
Works Cited ... 52
Beyond the Gender Binary: Fear and Confinement in Gothic fiction
Introduction
The ‘boundary-breaking and troubling of horror’ in Gothic literature creates a space in which gender is played out in its most extreme, unstable, and transformative forms and presents those who diverge from the norm as ‘develish Others’ (Wisker 171). According to Gina Wisker, the Gothic ‘names and dramatises that which otherwise is unthinkable, unnamable, indefinable, and repressed’ (9). Indeed, ‘all tale tellers know that fear is a potent spell’
(Birkhead 19), as fear grasps the readers’ attention and holds them in state of suspense. So, fear, one could say, is the essence of Gothic literature. Moreover, Gothic literature, as David Punter suggests, as a ‘discourse of fear and horror’ (1)—which involves what Dale Townshend calls ‘the signature generation of horror and terror’ (4)—is a potentially revealing medium. The Gothic novel inspires fear through physical threat and psychological terror that rouses expectation and produces tension that is ultimately relieved climactically. In other words, one distinct element of Gothic literature is that it can elicit in those who consume it a response of
‘grateful astonishment’ as well as a ‘welcome sensation of fear’ (Drake 90). Through its use of horror, the Gothic genre can explore and expose societal anxieties surrounding issues such as gender, race, class, and politics, among others. Furthermore, by presenting these anxieties in an exaggerated or extreme form, Gothic literature can bring them to the forefront of public consciousness and spark conversations about them. Although there has been prior discussion of the gendered dimensions of fear in Gothic literature, there remains more to say about the details of male and female manifestations of fear and their socio-cultural implications.
Therefore, this thesis aims to explore the intersections between gender, confinement, and fear in Gothic literature, focusing on how these Gothic conventions expose and subvert patriarchal patterns of oppressing women within eighteenth through twentieth century Anglo-American
society. By examining the portrayal of fear and confinement in Gothic literature written in this time, this thesis will demonstrate how gender plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of fear and its effects.
Gothic fiction arose in the second half of the eighteenth century in England, with the appearance of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (subtitled A Gothic Story) in 1764. It was further popularised throughout Europe with the novels of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s—
above all The Mysteries of Udolpho—and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818 and frequently adapted on stage thereafter. In that sense, the popularity of Shelley’s novel has depended on adaptation from the time of its arrival. This Gothic narrative continues to inspire movies, series, books, music, games and so on to this day. After their success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gothic novels continued to appear in the Victorian era, from works such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The Gothic tradition shows different perspectives on the human experience overtly characterised by terror—especially Anglo-European Gothic, since the American Gothic tradition is altogether different.
Living out such terror vicariously through literary characters appeals particularly powerfully to an audience that has been following social convention and has been trained to repress desire and appetite—especially those that go against said oppressive social conventions. Subsequently, as rebellion often does, it is in the early 1800s that this is taken to the extreme in Gothic literature and ‘see horror take centre-stage: many of these texts are filled to repletion with violence, imprisonment, torture, murder, parricide, sex, rape, incest and cannibalism’ (Spooner and McEvoy 21). Social convention defended itself, of course, and in many reviews these novelists were called ‘a numerous class of caterers to the public, ready to minister to any appetite, however foul and depraved’ (22). As a result, its enthusiastic readers—
like Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s fictional examination of the
genre, Northanger Abbey—experienced an unprecedentedly strong feeling of fear and shock—
but also fascinated curiosity. Thus, ‘reading Gothic fiction, has a therapeutic dimension’
(Punter 210), as it confronts its readers with the fears and desires that often stem from the external social structures unconsciously imposed upon us. Therewith, Gothic literature allowes for addressing socio-cultural issues.
So, Gothic fiction as a tale of terror, does not merely satisfy its readers’ urge for a thrill, it also offers socio-cultural critique, and often dramatises them in a gendered manner.
According to Punter, ‘Gothic is […] a psychology’ (1), which ‘appeals to deeply rooted instincts’ as Edith Birkhead points out (41). In other words, terror in Gothic literature serves as a means to expose ‘unresolvable contradictions at the heart of our psyches or societies into fearsome mixed forms’ as Jerrold Hogle states (312). Hogle also notes that Gothic literature places ‘fictional women […] into the shadow regions of patriarchal structures’, allowing readers to ‘imagine their ideological construction of reality’ as separate from ‘such anomalies’
(312). Gothic literature and its ‘rooted instincts’ of psychology, then, address anxieties both collective and individual, and it prevalently shows the disadvantages of women in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, ‘the subject of [women’s] fear’ in Gothic literature is repeatedly ‘a disguise for […] anger’, remarks Eugenia DeLamotte (Perils viii), which reveals the ‘artifice of the female trapped in “subterraneous regions”’ (Hogle 311), confining women to a position as the Other as a result. These ‘contemporary ideologies of womanhood would not permit authors to acknowledge [these fears] overtly’ (DeLamotte, Perils viii) in ‘Gothicised fictions from those of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s to Charlotte Brontë in the 1840s and 50s, and beyond’
(Hogle 311). Where gender is concerned, Gothic ‘amplifies stereotypical gender roles and the conflict inherent in their idealization’, according to Kathy Fedorko (ix). However, while fears in Gothic literature may often be gendered, men and women characters also share experiences of physical and metaphorical confinement as well as the fear that accompanies literal
entrapment and entrapment within relational and social structures. A gender focused analysis of instances of Gothic fiction shows that fears specific to women are a result of patriarchal social structures that give women a different experience to men. However, as there are also commonalities between the apparent gendered experiences of horrific confinement, the position of women as the Other in these patriarchal structures is invalidated.
Especially Anglo-European Gothic tradition is proposing the ‘Other’ as demonic and bad; this alternate reading of Gothic literature tends to focus on its foreign settings and Othered figures, based on nationality, race, religion, and gender—the latter of which is the focus of this thesis. As Tabish Khair states, ‘it need scarcely be stressed that Otherness is a central concern of Gothic literature in general’ (4). With the rise of the Romantic movement as ‘an antidote to the coldness’ of the Enlightenment (4) in Germany and England from 1770s onward, Romantic thinkers proclaimed that nature and the world could ‘not be apprehended without the imagination’ (Mahoney 92). Accordingly, the realm of the ‘supernatural’, as Anne Williams puts it, ‘was gradually displaced from ‘up there’ to ‘down here’ and finally to ‘in here’, within the human psyche (202-3). Furthermore, Gothic fiction focusses much psychological turmoil on various interpretations of the Other as the main cause of this Gothic malice, as ‘the Other remains the lynchpin of all perceptibly ‘Gothic’ action […] and they usually end with the predictable destruction or containment of this Otherness’ (Khair 6). The fetishising and demonising of the Other makes Gothic fiction a revealing force, as it reveals itself as treating these monstrous elements as different and belonging to something else.
Therefore, given the Gothic’s popularity then and now there is much to be gained from a survey of fear in Gothic literature, especially in relation to gender. Analysis of the terrors that protagonists in Gothic fiction are exposed to shows that fears (a reflection of a society’s fears, both collective as well as individual) often differ between men and women characters. Yet as prior studies of Gothic fiction show, critics such as David Punter, Eugenia DeLamotte, Edith
Burkhead, and others, do not specify to what extent these fears are gendered, nor whether they are necessarily restricted to a single gender. I have selected incidents, passages, and chapters of several Gothic texts from the period between 1764 and 1892, as well as one twentieth- century instance. The inclusion of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth century texts shows that the gendered experience of fear and the way in which they cross gender boundaries is diachronic. Furthermore, the influence of patriarchal social systems on one of the mayor Gothic interests—social anxiety—is visible across the history of Anglo-European Gothic as well as American Gothic. From the late eighteenth century, I have selected instances from The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho. Then, from the early to mid-nineteenth century, I will discuss scenes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Additionally, I will draw upon the anxieties displayed in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
(1892), as well as the modern Gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959).
This sampling of works written by both men and women writers from different centuries reveals a trend that is shared across time; that these experiences of horror are not just shared among characters, but that this tension also exists among both men and women writers implies that these experiences cross gender boundaries. A comparison between the experience of horror of men and women characters in these instances of Gothic literature unearths the myriad of fears that is shared across genders in this variety of texts. Because these common experiences of fear do not align with patriarchal gender categories, they work to destabilise the conception of women as the Other, breaking with the gender binary. What is more, where fears are gendered within these Gothic narratives, these gender differences tend to be represented not as a result of some essential difference between men and women but instead as a result of oppressive patriarchal systems that affect men and women characters differently, creating the
gender categories from which gender inequality is built. This thesis will look specifically at instances of literal and metaphorical fear of confinement, namely the fear of spatial confinement, confinement in the domestic sphere or through sexuality, and confinement within familial or parental relationships. Moreover, by taking this diachronic approach, this thesis will show that the pattern of using specific Gothic conventions to critique gender issues continues over the span of three centuries and continues in late nineteenth-century Gothic works such as
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and modern ones like The Haunting of Hill House.
To compare the experience of the fear of confinement of men and women characters in Gothic literature, this study uses a literary analysis approach. The literary works that are chosen for this analysis are selected based on their representation of the experience of literal and metaphorical confinement of both men and women characters. The analysis of these works will focus on identifying the specific fears that accompany the confinement of these characters, as well as how these fears are categorised as either gendered or shared across genders. A close reading of the selected Gothic works will help to identify key passages and themes related to the horrific experience of confinement of men and women characters. To this end, this analysis is grounded in feminist theory, gender studies, and cultural and historical contexts, which emphasises the importance of exploring and exposing gender and power relations in social and cultural contexts. Most notably, the concept of gender as a social construct will be used as a theoretical framework to analyse how the experience of confinement in Gothic literature is shaped by patriarchal gender categories. This analysis will also explore how the shared experiences of fear across genders work to destabilise traditional gender boundaries as well as the gender binary, which position women as the Other. Additionally, this analysis will consider how patriarchal systems create gender differences that contribute to gender inequality in Gothic literature.
The societies in which these works are produced are also relevant to this analysis of fear and gender, as they provide important cultural and historical information about the social structures on which these character’s lives and positions are based on. Understanding the patriarchal structures of the late eighteenth century, when The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho were written, illuminates the expectations of women characters to be obedient and subservient to men characters. Similarly, in the early- to mid-nineteenth century women were largely confined to the domestic sphere, and ‘the domestic sphere’, as ‘a place for women […] has been largely defined by men’ (Hodges 160). This is reflected in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre. Notably, the cultural and historical contexts of these works also reflect the changing social and economic conditions of the time, as well as the initiation of changing gender roles. However, despite
‘making the shift to a growth economy’, society seemed to want women continually ‘confined to the home, their labor devalued, and their political rights perpetually denied to them’
(Armstrong 128). These societal structures and changes are reflected in the way that men and women characters are portrayed in these Gothic texts. What is more, this thesis will build on former analysis of the position of the ‘entrapped and struggling woman protagonist’ (Manizza Roszak 14) in Gothic literature, which Suzanne Manizza Roszak introduces in her exploration of childhood in American Gothic, Uncanny Youth, as ‘a horrific form of figurative and sometimes literal imprisonment with pointed sociopolitical implications’ (14). Ultimately, by examining these social contexts and how they are reflected in the socio-critical works that is Gothic literature over time, we can gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which gender roles and patriarchal structures shape our fears and anxieties.
As introduced, gender roles in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century British society started to shift. Earlier literature often reflects a society in which ‘women were predominantly subordinate to men’ (Horowitz 6). This adheres to the crooked and ‘rigidly
defined gender roles’ that defined the relationship between men and women prior to and during the Romantic period (Fernald 3). Moreover, ‘Victorian ideas on womanhood’ and sexuality deemed a woman ‘to be feminine (and thus truly woman) only if sexually responsive to a man’
(Shuttleworth 72). Women were expected to be passive, submissive, and sexually virtuous, and any deviation from these norms was often met with shame and moral condemnation. These societal expectations imposed strict limitations on women's sexual expression and contributed to the gendered fear of confinement that was common in Gothic literature, where women's sexuality was often depicted as a source of danger or a trap. Furthermore, there was no proper place for female angst as women were to ‘offer a refuge for men from the conflicts of life and to offer peace and repose in the home’ (Cardwell 113). Jane Eyre offers an example of this societal shift by challenging ‘traditional domesticity’ (Horowitz 4) and opposing the
‘nineteenth-century myth that it is the duty of women to save dissolute men from themselves’
(Matus 100). So, women’s position as the inferior sex in nineteenth-century society is slowly redefined, though not much is clear on whether female fears mirror this ongoing shift and reflect the continuous interaction between literature and society.
Furthermore, the horror genre that is the Anglo-European Gothic tradition ‘can play out, in the most fantastic forms, expressions of patriarchal repression and violence or […] how to facilitate resistance to this dominant mode’ (Shail et al. 1). In turn, Gothic fiction offers self- reflection and reveals and criticises these (patriarchal) norms by emphasising their confining nature across genders. But the question arises, are such fears and desires shared among people and genders or are they (also) time- and culture-bound? ‘Fears’, Christopher Baldick argues,
‘are themselves subject to history (we are not usually afraid of bubonic plague or devils today, but then Chaucer did not spend any sleepless nights worrying about nuclear fall-out)’ (5).
However, certain ‘deep fears […] undergo little historical change’ (5). Baldick’s general point about the historical embeddedness of specific anxieties like the Plague and nuclear war is no
doubt just; but this analysis elects to concentrate on the ‘deep fears which undergo little historical change’ he mentions (5). For these fears are partly subjected to the gender binary but are also shared across genders as well as historically constant. Such as the dread of physical incarceration, the fear of domestic and sexual entrapment—fear of losing one’s agency—, and the dread of familial and parental constraints.
A survey of the experience of horror for men and women characters in Gothic literature shows that at first sight, horror in Gothic literature is, as the scholarship has so often suggested, gender specific. The critical literature on fear in Gothic writings frequently highlights how the Gothic uses horror to incite fear in its readers and how the terror and horror that is essential to Gothic literature is often gendered. However, there is little discussion of the similarities and differences between male and female dread, nor how Gothic literature demonstrates that seemingly individual and gendered fears are often universal anxieties shared by both genders, common to men and women alike. In Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton Kathy Fedorko confirms Gothic literature to be made up of ‘disorienting extremes’ (xi). She continues that ‘the Gothic encourages its readers to enter their fears and know them viscerally.
One of the most fundamental fears’, she goes on, ‘derives from gender identity and the mutual terror, anxiety, and dread that women and men arouse in one another’ (ix)—especially in past eras (such as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) significantly more sexually dimorphic than our own. Many prior critical works generally follow a gender distinction, accordingly.
This gendered response comes out of analysing basic gendered fears. Gender studies related to Gothic literature, such as Eugenia DeLamotte’s Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, often centre around how womanhood is feared by women and manhood by men. Subsequently, as this is what ‘a large proportion of scholarship on the genre argues’ it leads to the analysis of Gothic works as ‘designated as Male or Female Gothic’
(DeLamotte, Perils 4). This approach entrenches ‘understandings of the Gothic novel as written
by women as departures from or reactions to male-authored texts’ (4). As Jenny DiPlacidi explains, this gendered approach is the standard view and ‘divide[s] representations of sexuality into distinct male or female modes’ (4). As mentioned previously, women were required to be submissive and subject themselves to men, which leads both men and women to fear the social roles that defines and confines them. This understanding of the male and female mode is corroborated by distinguished Gothic scholars such as David Punter. However, these divided representations into male or female also concern gender (identity). What is more, the divergent from the standard mode are not exclusive to female-authored text, which gives us grounds to rethink male-authored texts that also divert from the standard mode of patriarchal representations of gender and sexuality and view them as valuable additions to the discussion of gender and fear. In The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk—both also excellent instances of gendered Gothic—gender anxiety and desire are prominently displayed, the former from a female point of view (dread of entrapment, isolation, and sexual assault), the latter from a male one (desire of violent possession).
In this thesis, however, I suggest that whereas some anxieties and desires might have gendered implications or manifestations, they are often similar in their origin and shared among genders. So, even though horror and terror can be induced by gender-specific fears, these fears can derive from a shared or general anxiety of losing control of one’s autonomy, will, and individuality. Comparing these experiences will show that incidents of different gendered literary characters are often rooted in prevalent social conventions and are shared rather than exclusive to one gender; they are comparable in nature and they stem from the fear of (physical) confinement, parental authority, and the dread of sexual contact with the opposite gender.
The first chapter of this thesis introduces literal instances of confinement, spatial and physical confinement, which are explored through a close reading with a focus on the fear that accompanies this entrapment. The chapter explores physical confinement of both men and
women characters in Gothic texts, thereby showing gender differences in their experiences and the patriarchal reality those experiences reflect. This takes a literal form for a man—as it can also do for a woman, for example in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho—in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846). Even though literal imprisonment and metaphorical imprisonment are closely related, Poe’s story features a clear instance of literal confinement: inside a cellar. The most overtly present anxiety in this work of Gothic fiction is the horror of (imminent) incarceration as experienced by Fortunato. Male characters like Fortunato as well as the protagonist in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Roderick Usher, are either imprisoned by others or themselves, and overtly experience fear. In contrast, women characters like Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane in Jane Eyre are physically stripped of their freedom and agency by someone else, often a man, and share a consuming fear of spatial confinement in domestic dwellings.
The texts discussed in chapter two of this thesis explore fears induced by confinement as a metaphor for entrapment within the domestic and sexual spheres of patriarchal social structures. In the domestic sphere marriage is the most prominent example, and confinement within the sexual sphere arises from the sexual expectations and obligations dictated by patriarchal structures in society. Women characters in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Eyre,
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and The Haunting of Hill House express fear and trepidation about the power dynamics of (sexual) relationships based on patriarchal structures. The women characters in these texts are often seen as mere commodities to meet male characters' desires and are oppressed by patriarchal control through marriage, sexual choices, and domestic duties.
The corresponding pressure to conform to societal expectations of marriage and femininity, as well as the loss of sexual innocence, and a sense of autonomy and independence in the institution of marriage, are portrayed as confining forces that restrict the agency and freedom of these women characters. Similarly, the male characters in these works experience a fear of
loss of control and power, which is often a motive for maintaining male dominance over women. Finally, this chapter shows that the experiences of these characters’ domestic and sexual confinement are different ways in which patriarchal systems exert control over individuals within relational social structures.
Chapter three further examines the fear of metaphorical confinement, but within familial and parental relational structures. While women are often confined within the domestic sphere, men are often burdened with continuing their family line and legacy. The Castle of Otranto, for example, features a metaphorical instance of fear of confinement taking the form—for the main character, Manfred—of anxieties concerning ancestry, patriarchalism, and the preservation of the male line. The dread of a prophecy and of the end of his familial line turns Manfred into a sexually violent predator, almost without his will. Similarly, Roderick Usher in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ succumbs, physically and mentally, to the existential dread of failing to continue his lineage. Their experience is not unlike the female protagonist in The Mysteries of Udolpho, who is made responsible for her family’s social status by two parental figures. Furterhmore, in some cases, women are defined by their ability to produce and parent offspring, and their perceived failure to do so leads to their confinement. In a similar manner, men like Victor Frankenstein share the fear of the bonds and responsibilities of parenthood and procreation. So, the theme of confinement within familial and parental structures is not limited to a single gender or period in Gothic literature. Instead, as these chapters show, the confinement of domesticity, sexuality, family, and parenthood in Gothic literature is shared among different gendered characters.
Ultimately, this analysis delves into fears experienced by men and women characters that are produced by being imprisoned both literally as well as through the fundamental Gothic tendency of employing contemporary social anxieties to evoke fear, which are in this instance metaphorical experiences of entrapment. The metaphorical deals with dreads and desires, many
of which could not be discussed directly at the time the Gothic arose. The anxieties that arise from these dreads and desires take gendered forms yet appear to emerge from a shared longing to gain or regain control over one’s life. I argue that, despite the different forms and gendered appearance of these fears, there are actually many similarities between fears of men and women characters and that these fears are in essence shared among genders. This is especially significant because of the de-Othering function that these similarities serve in breaking down strictly binaristic views of masculine and feminine as belonging to separate spheres.
Chapter One: The Dread of Spatial Confinement
In Gothic literature, three broad categories of fears emerge and reassert themselves over and over: the fear of literal confinement in a physical space, the fear of metaphorical confinement enforced by domesticity and sexuality, and the fear of metaphorical confinement rooted in familial obligation and parental responsibilities and oppression. Focusing on these three widespread anxieties from the inception of the English Gothic intro the twentieth century shows that these fears are responded to in gendered ways, as men and women characters and authors respond to different social and psychological pressures in different ways. Yet, some of these fears are also shared among both the male and female genders despite the oppressive patriarchal systems in which these characters are represented and that tend to create a distinct gender binary between men and women. This analysis will start with the fear of spatial confinement, as this is the fundamental theme from which subsequent metaphorical fears of confinement arise.
There are, of course, many examples of spatial confinement in Gothic literature. In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ a man is literally bricked up behind a wall, while in his ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ its protagonist, Roderick Usher, confines not only himself but also his deceased sister to their ancestral home—her in fact in a coffin. Such
involuntary confinement also occurs in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Eyre, and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, however, these are instances of female entrapment and portray a woman’s experience of fear. In The Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert is held captive in a castle, Jane Eyre in the ‘red-room’ of her childhood home, and the speaker of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
in a bedroom in a summer house. Moreover, like Roderick Usher, Eleanor, the female protagonist of The Haunting of Hill House, confines herself to a haunted building. Notably, most of these instances of spatial confinement take place in residential places, more specifically, in eerie or antiquated houses and castles; this domestic confinement serves to emphasise the patriarchal power dynamics at play. However, most importantly, the divergences in spatial confinement across genders illuminate women's ‘special’ position within patriarchal systems. For instance, male characters are captured by brute force or by strong (mental) forces, while women characters are confined by patriarchal expectations of the man as the dominant gender. Additionally, the captivity of a man needs to be morally justified, whereas female captivity does not. However, there are also similarities in spatial confinement across genders that resultantly de-Other women protagonist, as both men and women characters are stripped from their freedom and agency when they are captured. Moreover, both gendered characters respond to their captivity with fear, presenting the experience of physical confinement as an experience shared among genders.
The mechanism of terror through incarceration from a purely male perspective is found in one of Poe’s short stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; Roderick Usher is physically confined to his ancestral home through phycological terror, and subsequently confines his deceased sister Madeline in a coffin in a cellar of the house. The Usher mansion’s owner, Roderick, finds himself ‘a victim to the terrors he had anticipated’ (Poe, ‘Fall’ 93). His terrors are threefold: he fears the end of his lineage and his responsibility for it, he is anxious about his sister’s death, as it would make him the last Usher in existence—both issues that will be
explored in Chapter Three—, and he is afraid of being confined within a physical space ‘in the mere form and substance of his family mansion’ (85). Roderick feels ‘enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard’ to the house, whence Roderick ‘had never ventured forth’
(85). Roderick’s confinement is confirmed by the story’s male narrator, who indeed ‘found [Roderick] a bounden slave’ to the family mansion by ‘an anomalous species of terror’ (85).
Roderick’s fear of the house has strongly obtained dominance over his spirit and renders him physically incapable of leaving it. In his self-created prison, Roderick lives anxiously as
‘extreme terror […] habitually characterized his utterance’ (90). Similarly, the narrator shares Roderick’s experience of fear of the house as he ‘struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over [him]’ (90). So, both men are ‘overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable’ (90) due to the Usher mansion. As they long for freedom from the ‘mansion, [the narrator] fled aghast’ (93), unlike Roderick, who finds freedom from it in death. Thus, Roderick’s fear and confinement are mirrored by a masculine outsider, the narrator, who justifies the horrifically confining disposition of the mansion and emphasises male captivity to be an active and forceful matter.
Subsequently, Roderick, in his confining state of fear, detains his twin sister in a coffin under the floor, which is the feminine and passive opposite experience of Roderick’s self- inflicted imprisonment within their family home. After Madeline’s death, Roderick preserves
‘her corpse […] in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building’ (89), and confines her in a ‘coffin, […] her prison’ (93). Madeline’s confinement is similar to Roderick’s, in the sense that both are physically imprisoned within their ancestral home; this shared experience of confinement of a man and woman character shows that a man is not different from a woman when it comes to the possibility of being incarcerated. Madeline, however, is confined ‘at the request of [Roderick] Usher’ (89), her patriarchal superior who does not want to be without his ‘sole companion for long years’ (85). This passive portrayal of a captured
woman introduces what Catherine Spooner and Emily McEvoy refer to as ‘social horrors’ (31) in Gothic fiction, as active women were Othered and considered ‘dangerous’, and they could bring about a ‘disturbance of gender roles’ (31). As a result of this societal inequality, Roderick’s entrapment of his sister does not need to be justified beyond his own fears and lack of ‘necessary courage’ to venture beyond the family mansion’s grounds (Poe, ‘Fall’ 90).
Accordingly, in death, just as in life, Madeline remains within the confines of the house and her role of the oppressed Other. So, while both men and women characters are physically imprisoned within the same house in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Madeline’s confinement compasses patriarchal expectations of the female as subjected to the dominant male and his fears.
A similar instance of the fear of physical confinement from a male perspective is central to Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’; the male character Fortunato is forcefully immured by another man, Montresor, who deems his extreme confinement justified by his aggrievement.
Montresor justifies his actions on ‘contentions that men have a superior intellect and ability to rationally approach problems’ (Erickson-Schroth and Davis 36), which is similar to Roderick’s sense of superiority over his sister. When Fortunato finally realises Montresor’s intention of incarcerating him within the ‘inmost recesses of catacombs’ (Poe, ‘Cask’ 99), he screams in fright, ‘for the love of God, Montresor!’ (101). Fortunato’s explicit terror of being walled in is made audible by the ‘the furious vibrations of the chain’ (100) and ‘a succession of loud and shrill screams’ (101) as Fortunato, ‘the chained form’ (101), wildly tries to defy his restraints.
The horrific sensory richness of the setting, from its ‘walls of piled bones’ (99) to the string of screams, builds fear and anticipation for both the characters and the reader. Moreover, as Montresor ‘felt satisfied’ (101) by Fortunato’s fateful incarceration, Montresor’s attitude further illuminates how Fortunato’s spatial confinement and subsequent fear are formed by the patriarchal idea of male superiority. What is more, the author condemns Fortunato to the same
replicated space as Roderick’s deceased sister Madeline, in a casket, confined in a vault. Here, the gender division blurs as both Fortunato and Madeline are locked in a space by the male position of power as a result of the societal patriarchal norm in which men hold every position of power, even over other men; Montresor, for example, ‘vowed revenge’ for Fortunato’s insults and decides for himself that he is allowed to ‘punish [him] with impunity’ (97).
However, Montresor’s dominance over another male character requires more effort than Roderick’s dominance over his sister. For instance, Fortunato does not wake up to the fact that Montresor chains him to the granite wall as he was simply ‘too much astounded to resist’ (100) due to his alcohol intoxication. So, Poe’s representations of the fear of confinement show that male characters need to be weakened—Fortunato is intoxicated and Roderick mentally unstable—and forcefully restrained. Ultimately, these instances add to the trope of male confinement and anxiety as divergent from that of a woman, as male confinement requires moral justification and physical restraint to transpire, whereas confining a woman character is easily justified and executed in these instances of Gothic literature.
Where Poe’s works show a predominantly male experience of fear in confinement, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho addresses similar tropes but from a feminine perspective, which shows that the primary fear of spatial confinement is shared among genders. This female account, however, also follows the dominant position of men over women as well as the male centered justification for the entrapment. Furthermore, in this story terror is twofold, as the protagonist, Emily St. Aubert, fears being locked up in a castle—not unlike male characters such as Fortunato and Roderick—as well as what she would have to endure during and after her confinement within her ‘prison’ (Radcliffe 227). When Emily beholds the castle of Udolpho, in which she will be kept to ‘[conclude] her nuptials’ against her will (225), her ‘sick heart recoiled in despair’ (225). The castle’s grounds ‘awakened terrific images in her mind’
(227) —just as the narrator in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ felt ‘a sinking, a sickening of
the heart’ (Poe, ‘Fall’ 82) upon approaching the Usher mansion. Moreover, Emily felt as if ‘she was going into her prison’ (227), as her physical detainment within the walls of her ‘apartment’
(228) places her in a continuous state of anxiety, from which she sees ‘no possibility of escape’
(261). As Emily is forced to ‘endure the loneliness of her chamber’ (252) by her uncle Montoni, her ‘mind proceeds to the apprehension of what she might suffer in [the castle]’ (229).
Furthermore, since any act of defiance against male dominance was considered ‘social disorder’ (22) and the ‘public spheres were not differentiable from private spheres of experience’ (McKee 22), women were rendered powerless within and outside of the domestic sphere. Accordingly, Radcliffe presents Emily as a ‘terrified female protagonist’ (Spooner and McEvoy 23) who has ‘endured grief, and anxiety, and terror’ (Radcliffe 446) during her captivity. So, as a result of this social structure centred around male tyranny, Emily is deemed a feminine subordinate Other to the male characters who have contrived this marital scheme.
Even ‘to release her from a terrible imprisonment’ (576) Emily is depended on Monsieur DuPont, another man. Thus, Emily’s detainment is shaped by the patriarchal social disorder that turns women into frightened subjects and men into tyrants, who need no justification for female incarceration beyond their selfish needs—which will be further explored in Chapters Two and Three.
Similar to ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, there is a general fear of spatial confinement in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Jane’s fear, however, is a result of a feminine instance of confinement that indites patriarchal systems and is different from the texts with male protagonists. Young Jane is locked inside the red-room in her childhood home—a literal prison for Jane, as her captors have
‘locked the door' (Brontë 10)—as punishment for standing up to the abuse of her male cousin John, her ‘young master’ (7). The room, with its ‘sense of dreary consecration’ (9) because of the death of its last occupant, is like Fortunato’s prison in the obscure catacombs, ‘chill’,
‘silent’, ‘remote’, ‘solemn’, and ‘seldom entered’ (9). Aggravated by the red-room’s dreary disposition, Jane feels ‘oppressed, suffocated’ (13), with ‘glittering eyes of fear’ and her ‘face and arms specking the gloom’ (10)—not unlike Emily, who also turns to fear due to ‘the apprehension of what she might suffer’ in her prison (Radcliffe 229). Subsequently, as Jane’s
‘endurance broke down’ she ‘shook the lock in desperate effort’ (Brontë 13), which is reminiscent of Fortunato’s efforts to escape which caused ‘the furious vibrations of [his] chain’
(Poe, ‘Cask’ 100). Moreover, the panic that overcomes Fortunato also strikes Jane as she
‘cannot endure’ being locked up, so she resorts to ‘frantic anguish and wild sobs’ before she
‘had a species of fit’ and ‘unconsciousness closed the scene’ (Brontë 14). What is more, Jane, also like Fortunato, fears that she ‘shall be killed if—’ (14) she cannot escape. In other words, Jane’s experience of captivity is similar to Fortunato’s, Roderick’s, and Emily’s, as both gendered characters are physically detained and experience an overwhelming sense of fear because of their confinement. Conversely, Jane’s experience is that of an Othered woman—
like Emily—as her disobedience to John is the reason for het confinement; Jane, who is
‘habitually obedient to John’ (5), defends herself ‘with [her] hands’ (6) against one of John’s numerous attacks. As punishment for her stupidity ‘to fly at Master John!’ (6), Mrs Reed orders the maids to ‘take [Jane] away to the red-room, and lock her in there’ (6). In this instance, Jane experiences that in a predominantly patriarchal space, an assertive female will inevitably be locked up, thereby losing her agency and will. The lack of moral justification—other than the minor defiance of a male character—for her captivity renders Jane’s experience as fitting for a marginalised woman character. However, Jane’s general experience of fear of entrapment recalls the experiences of both masculine protagonists such as Roderick and Fortunato and female protagonists like Emily, which challenges the gender binary imposed on them by their patriarchal society.
Like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Jane Eyre, being imprisoned in a house is the focal point in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.
However, the story’s female protagonist is confined within the walls of a house as instructed by her husband and warranted by him in his position as her physician. Confinement as the mechanism of terror becomes apparent when the female speaker narrates her anxiety about her oppressed state. While she is not detained by force, the speaker’s husband, John, restricts her to a remote room upstairs in a house with ‘hedges and walls and gates that lock’ (Perkins Gilman 9). The speaker’s continuous description of the house as a prison, with ‘barred windows’, a ’gate at the head of the stairs, and so on’ (13), even in her imagination, reflects the anxiety surrounding the protagonist’s entrapment. She refers to her confines as ‘a haunted house’ (7), for ‘at night in any kind of light, […] worst of all by moonlight’, even the ‘outside pattern’ of the wallpaper in her room ‘becomes bars!’ (26). What is more, the speaker’s stay in this temporary house is a direct result of ‘the [husband’s] legal and economic control over his wife’ (Mitchell 146)—which will be further elaborated on in Chapter Two. Moreover, in his capacity as a male physician John decides that she suffers from a ‘temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency’ (Perkins Gilman 8), which is confirmed by her brother who is also a physician of ‘high standing’ (8). This power imbalance displays John’s
‘patriarchal attitudes and unwillingness to recognize her agency as an adult woman’ (Manizza Roszak 8). Accordingly, John ‘hardly [let's her] stir without special direction’ (Perkins Gilman 10), which places the female protagonist in a subordinate position. As a result of her patriarchal captivity, the speaker finds an escape in her utter retreat from reality; she cannot physically escape so she rips off the wallpaper and believes she has ‘got out at last, […] in spite of [John]’
(37). Ultimately, this instance of female captivity within a house is a representation of the literal restraints placed upon the woman character by her husband and illustrates the special and inferior position of women in its contemporary patriarchal society.
Conversely, in the twentieth-century American novel The Haunting of Hill House—in which Eleanor is confined to a haunted house by fear—the experience of confinement of a woman character is similar to that of both men and women protagonists. After years of confinement within the domestic sphere—which will be further elaborated on in Chapter Two—as a woman and a daughter, Eleanor yearns for freedom; but the house she chooses to find this in, Hill House, detains her both physically and emotionally. Within the walls of Hill House, Eleanor ‘was afraid’ and feels confined ‘like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster’ (Jackson 42). However, in contrast to Poe, Brontë, Radcliffe, and Perkins Gilman’s texts, the house’s prison-like quality is phrased apparently positively: ‘the gates are locked.
Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get away’ (67). This phrasing of the house’s inhospitable reputation is very cumbersome, the meaning of it, however, is terrifying. For, Eleanor—like Emily in the Castle of Udolpho, Madeline in her ancestral house, and Jane and the speaker in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in their respective places of imprisonment—is another woman character that is trapped in a fear- provoking building, held in a domestic space that is not meant to be a prison but serves as one, nonetheless. Moreover, her containment within the house is desired by a man, Dr. Montague who ‘extend[ed] an invitation to spend all or part of a summer at’ Hill House (5). Unlike these women, however—but similar to Roderick Usher—Eleanor finds herself unable to leave the house because of her own growing fear it. Eleanor knows that ‘it was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope’ and of which
‘exorcism cannot alter the countenance of’ (35), but she ‘won't go’ because she believes that
‘Hill House belongs to [her]’ and ‘means [her] to stay’ (245). Finally, Eleanor becomes
‘scared, but more than that’ (163), as her entire being is driven by fear. This is similar to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in which the speaker and Roderick believe they have become part of the structures they fear; Eleanor, too, is nearly consumed by
her connection with the house and the terror the house has instilled in her. Subsequently, driven by her fear of the house, she commits the only act she believes could resolve her of her confined state and loss of self; Eleanor kills herself: ‘I am really doing it, […] all by myself […] this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself’ (245). Eleanor’s suicide could be interpreted as a forceful—almost masculine—bid for freedom, liberating her from her fear of the spatial confines of the oppressive walls of Hill House by death on her on merit. So, even though Eleanor, like Emily, Jane, and the protagonist in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, is a frightened woman character trapped in a domestic structure, Eleanor, as a female Gothic character, does not comply with the gender binary entirely. Instead, her physical confinement is predominantly driven by her own psychological state of anxiety, which she shares with Roderick in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and thereby challenges the social construct of a woman Other.
This chapter examines instances of physical confinement of both men and women characters. The differences between male and female experiences in spatial confinement in these Gothic texts help to show the ways in which the problems that they encounter are gendered and are based on our patriarchal reality. The women in particular—Emily, Madeline, Jane, the protagonist in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and Eleanor—are all stripped from their freedom and agency, predominantly by men. What is more, these women characters share their identities as captives inside seemingly ordinary yet frightening domestic dwellings rather than literal prisons as well as their identities as patriarchal subordinates. What is more, the women that are given a voice in these texts—Emily, Jane, the protagonist in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and Eleanor—, unlike Madeline Usher, share a consuming fear of the involuntary spatial confinement by a man within the walls of their prisons. Contrastingly, the men in these instances, are either forcefully imprisoned by another man or (subconsciously) by themselves—Fortunato is being bricked in, while Roderick Usher is too frightened to leave his ancestral home—, and are both consumed by the fear that their prisons inspire. Roderick
ultimately surrenders to the House of Usher, just as Fortunato, whose clanking of his chains subsided fairly quickly and he ‘grew still’ (Poe, ‘Cask’ 101), while the women in these texts only escape by the grace of another man or psychologically. However, the fear of spatial confinement is also a shared fear across genders; that Roderick shares this fear with the women from these texts creates dynamic of de-gendered experiences, which, in turn, de-Others marginalised women characters. Their physical captivity and loss of agency, however, is shared among man and woman characters. What is more, their entrapment is initially responded to in a shared manner as well: with fear. Ultimately, all these characters—men and women—
experience a loss of will that is accompanied by a fear of powerlessness because of their inability to escape and thereby crosses gender borders and de-Others the marginalised gender.
Chapter Two: The Dread of Domestic and Sexual Confinement
As explored in the first chapter, both men and women characters in Gothic literature were frequently physically imprisoned within homes, castles, and various eerie spaces such as abandoned rooms and remote catacombs. Physical confinement, however, is not the only manner of fearful confinement in Gothic literature. Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex, for instance, refers to the feminine sphere as a ‘prison’ in which women were held captive, as women were ‘confined within the conjugal sphere’ (437) from the moment they became of marital age. This analysis shows that Gothic literature exposes the fears and anxieties that many women, but also men, experienced due to confining and oppressive marital and sexual relationships during the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth century. However, it also exposes how men and women characters are bound by the rules of patriarchal social structures.
This type of metaphorical confinement is used to create a sense of unease and oppression and shows a lack of agency concerning different gendered characters. What is more, the similarities between the experience of metaphorical confinement within relational social structures of men
and women characters create a dynamic of de-gendered experiences, and further de-Others the marginalised. For instance, both men and women characters are victims of sexuality as a means of control or as a confining power and are subjected to societal and cultural expectations, such as gender roles, as a means of controlling and oppressing them. The similarities between genders may not be immediately obvious when examining domestic and sexual roles in this chapter, but they will become more apparent in next chapter's analysis of metaphorical fears of confinement within the familial and parental. Subsequently, these instances will be compared with instances from this chapter to show a shared experience of patriarchal oppression.
Conversely, the differences in the experience of metaphorical confinement within relational social structures across genders highlight women's divergent position within these patriarchal systems. In fact, as De Beauvoir introduced, women characters are confined within the domestic sphere as well as by marriage and sexual relationships. Additionally, societal and cultural expectations of femininity are used as a means of confinement and oppression for women characters, while male characters are often the executors of these restrictions. These instances of metaphorical captivity as an analogy of spatial confinement in literature address their respective society’s patriarchal norms and their restrictive nature, as a fear of confinement is shared across genders and is gendered based on patriarchal social conventions.
Consequently, this shows how these texts break down gender binaries as these shared experiences do not align with rigid gender categories.
Emily, the female protagonist of The Mysteries of Udolpho fears the confines of an arranged marriage as she is intimidated into the confines of marriage through societal expectations of femininity and the loss of agency and freedom that comes with them. Emily fears ‘the probable events, that awaited her’ (Radcliffe 224), as her uncle Montoni expects her to marry a man, Count Morano, who she does not know and does not wish to marry; both the marriage and the imprisonment it represents frighten Emily. At first, Emily does not actively
resist her family’s desire for this arranged marriage because she inherited patriarchal
‘principles’ (1) and the expectation to continue ‘the exercise of domestic virtues’ (1) from her father. However, she comes to the realisation that marriage effectively confines a woman to her husband as her aunt, Madame Montoni, laments that she is ‘chained for life to such a vile, deceitful, cruel monster!’ (281). This realisation leads Emily to experience increased anxiety and fear about her own potential marriage and she ‘shuddered to think, that she was in the hands of a man’ (284) who would hold complete control over her life. Her reflections of her aunt’s position in marriage highlights Emily’s fear of confinement in the domestic sphere through marriage and the unequal power dynamics that come with it. What is more, when Morano asks Emily whether ‘a marriage with a man, who adores you, is so very terrible in your eyes, that you would prefer to it all the misery, to which Montoni may condemn you in this remote prison?’ (263), she confirms and wishes that Morano would ‘cease to oppress [her] any longer by [his] presence’ (264). For Emily fears the loss of her freedom and independence through the social expectations placed upon her as a woman in a marriage more than physical imprisonment. However, as her captivity within the walls of the castle would lead to this involuntary marriage, she tries to escape from the castle. Notably, as Alison Milbank states, since the Gothic novel shows ‘an awareness of the contradictions inherent in the separation of the feminised private home from the masculine public sphere’ (155), Emily’s escape from the castle—rendering her a free woman in the masculine public sphere—becomes ‘an avatar for later women escaping the confines of domesticity’ (155). In other words, the Gothic genre recognises the ways in which women are confined within the domestic sphere and are excluded from the public sphere, which is dominated by men. So, Emily's experience can be seen as having a larger significance to women's shared experiences of confinement through marriage, and can thus be interpreted as an example of women's resistance of patriarchal control through social expectations and the confines of domesticity.
As we move into the middle of the nineteenth century with another woman writer, another female protagonist expresses fear and worry about the power dynamics of her relationship with a man in Jane Eyre. Jane’s fear of the confines of marriage imposed upon a woman in domestic, sexual, and social context is exacerbated by the confinement of the current Mrs Rochester, Bertha, in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Jane’s captivity in the red-room in her childhood home—as elaborated on in the first chapter—introduces Jane's fear of losing will and agency. Her fear of marital confines is alluded to with her confinement in this room, as the colours of skin, ‘a blush of pink’; of marriage and virginity, white; and the colour of blood,
‘deep red damask’ (Brontë 9) are heavily emphasised in Jane’s description of this room and the bed in particular. More specifically, the masculine redwood massive pillars and curtains that tower over the snow-white bedding eerily represent how a woman’s body is invaded and at the will of her husband once she is married. Then, as Jane witnesses her predecessor, Bertha, Rochester’s insane wife, suffering the consequences from her inequality in her marriage to Rochester—and following the ‘secondary role [of a wife] as either submissive or destructive’
(Cardwell 112)—, it becomes clear that Jane is indeed frightened of the confines of marriage.
As the ’secretly imprisoned bride Bertha’ (Donaldson 22), ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’, personifies the oppression imposed upon any woman in a patriarchal society, as any woman who does not behave like an angel must be a monster and should therefore be detained (Gilbert and Gubar). Accordingly, Rochester wishes for Jane not to ‘struggle so, like a wild frantic bird’
(Brontë 303); Rochester’s patriarchally determined power lets him believe that he must control Jane by confining her, like a bird in a cage. Jane, however, knows that she is ‘no bird; and no net ensnares [her] (303), for she believes herself to be ‘a free human being with an independent will’ (303). Subsequently, she ‘exert[s]’ her free will ‘to leave [him]’ (303), as staying would mean surrendering her independence and (sexual) autonomy to a man. Furthermore, Bertha is described by Jane as having ‘a discoloured face—it was a savage face’, with ‘thick and dark
hair’, and lips that ‘were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed’ (341). In that sense, Bertha is double oppressed by Rochester, ‘who is bound to [Bertha] by marriage’ (Donaldson 22), as she is racialised and represents the dangers of the colonised and Othered other to Jane’s white and English identity. Rochester, in turn, embodies patriarchal as well as colonial forces of oppression, and to Jane, a union between them would mean surrendering her autonomy to the oppressive forces of the patriarchy. Moreover, Bertha and her actions are also exemplary of the fear of confinement through sexuality that Jane experiences. For the night before Jane’s wedding to Rochester, Bertha escapes the attic and visits Jane in her bedroom, ‘she then spent her fury on [Jane’s] wedding apparel’ (Brontë 373), which Jane describes as ‘the foul German spectre—the vampire’, an ‘it’ that ‘removed [her] veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them’ (341). Bertha’s ripping of Jane’s white veil evokes cultural mythologies of virginity and sexual innocence, and these cultural belief systems will soon be trampled on by a monstrous spectre that represents her upcoming marriage with Rochester. So, for Jane to be visited by this monstrously Othered woman the day before her wedding is terrifying, as this is about a woman character’s imminent loss of sexual innocence, (bodily) autonomy, and freedom through the institution of marriage.
A woman character’s fears and frustrations with societal expectations of women and their lack of agency in marriage and sexual matters is also apparent the American Gothic work
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The nineteenth-century society in which Perkins Gilman was born, regarded women as the lesser seks, and her ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ reflects this convention of ‘women’s subordination to men’ (Horowitz 6). The accompanying ‘rigidly defined gender roles’ changed slightly in the beginning of the twentieth century as ‘modernism announced itself as a break with the past’ (Fernald 3)—which the story hints at with the protagonist’s silent opposition. Moreover, the story illustrates similar anxieties surrounding the confining nature of marriage as our earlier Gothic texts have shown. Its female
protagonist—whose name is not even specified and therewith becomes quite the symbol of the woman Other—expresses her fear and frustration with her husband’s control over her. Her husband acts on the ideal of ‘traditional domesticity’ (Horowitz 4) and has ‘a schedule prescription for each hour in [her] day’ (Perkins Gilman 10). However, many women during that time began to express their want for ‘opportunity to work in the public sphere, and social equality’ (Horowitz 4) to escape the confines of domesticity. Accordingly, the speaker reveals that even though her husband claims that they ‘came here solely on [her] account […] to have perfect rest’ (Perkins Gilman 10), she ‘disagree[s] with [her husband and brother’s] ideas’ and believes ‘that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good’ (8).
Nevertheless, despite being ‘afraid of John’ (26) and not in agreement with him, she accepts her husband's control over her, acknowledging that ‘one expects that in marriage’ (7). So, even though she predominantly accepts John’s dominance over her through marriage and the prison in which he has placed her, she does oppose him in thought and wishes ‘he would let [her] go’
(17). Here, she exposes the social and patriarchal confines of male dominance over women and the silent submission expected of women in marriage, even when they disagree and are afraid of their husband. Consequently, like Bertha, the woman speaker becomes what Eugenia DeLamotte refers to as a ‘victimized Hidden Other Woman’ (DeLamotte, ‘Male and Female’
11) as well as an expression of Gothic’s ‘problem with freedom’ (3), especially when it concerns women. This problem with freedom and the speaker’s imprisonment is not immediately apparent, like it is with Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho, since this woman character is not locked up in ‘a remote castle’ […] in a foreign land’ (DeLamotte 3), and her
‘piercing sense of estrangement from her world does not manifest itself to her directly’ (3). On the contrary, Perkins Gilman’s speaker has been told by her husband that her stay in this house is for her own benefit. So, her expression of reluctant disagreement and defeat reveals her fear of her husband’s control over her, as he takes away her autonomy and agency in her own life,
including her own sexual and health choices. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, therefore, depicts an anxious expression of domestic confinement, not only in terms of the female protagonist’s literal incarceration within the walls of a house, but also as a wife ‘trapped’ in a patriarchal marriage.
Even though the fear of the confines of sexuality often accompanies marriage, it also manifests itself as the fear of reproduction and its possible repercussions, like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel’s central character, Victor Frankenstein, fears his entrapment in a cycle of procreation and parenthood. Victor seeks to create life from death, thereby bypassing sexual reproduction and enabling himself to perform what was previously the exclusive domain of women. However, as Victor considers it ‘hateful day when [he] received life!’ (Shelley 105), Victor's apprehension towards his own creation suggests that he may have reservations about the traditionally feminine responsibility of procreation. Some argue that this fear is gendered, as Victor's terror parallels a ’feminine dread: that of birthing and losing a baby’ (Crook 112), commonly associated with women. However, regardless of gender, the fear of procreation is present in this Gothic text. Moreover, it is shared among genders despite its occurrence being natural in its feminine form and unnatural and artificial in this masculine form. For instance, throughout the novel Victor is haunted by the thought of the ‘wretch whom [he] feared’
(Shelley 40) turning against him and reproducing, leading to further suffering and destruction.
For instance, immediately following the creation of his so-called monster, Victor’s ‘heart palpitated in the sickness of fear’ (40), because he realises that he suffers ‘the duties of a creator towards his creature’ (79), similar to the restricting responsibilities of parenthood. Moreover, his apprehension towards the limitations of sexuality is emphasised as he fabricates and
‘trembling with passion, [tears] to pieces the thing on which [he] was engaged’ (139)—the monster's female companion that is—, since ‘one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children’ (Shelley 249). Victor’s fear of his monster
