CW: This article contains discussions of racist violence.
What defines feminist literature? I’m not sure, but I feel like it would be fun at the very least to creep around a manor in a flowing white dress while harboring a dark secret. The Gothic genre provides us with beautiful imagery superimposed with darkly tragic situations. It includes themes such as haunting, possession, agency, and oppression. Despite telling us that the home is no longer a safe space and to never, ever, trust your husband, it goes deeper than that. It’s easy to assume that the women of the Gothic genre are positioned as helpless victims and that we should simply be entertained by their plight. However, these dark tales often reveal a broader societal message that should not be ignored.
Toni Morrison’s 1987 classic, Beloved, follows a young woman named Sethe who has escaped from working at a plantation. She lives with her daughter, Denver, in a house that is haunted by her late daughter, who Sethe had killed years prior. Many people in the surrounding area criticize Sethe for this violent act, but Sethe stands by her claim that she did it to save her daughter from the same fate of enslavement that she was. The ghostly manifestation of Beloved is used as a metaphor for Sethe’s struggle to escape her trauma from the plantation. Her past experiences are literally and figuratively “haunting” her. Morrison explores motherhood, the cycle of violence, and racism through her character of Beloved.
Conversely, the 1938 novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier provides a depiction of a young woman who is swept off her feet by a mysterious gentleman. He whisks her off to his beautiful manor called Manderley and they start their new life together. The narrator starts to become uneasy in the maze-like house, and she feels like she is being haunted by her husband’s late wife. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that her husband ended up killing his previous wife because of her promiscuous behavior. The narrator ends up trapped in a sub-par relationship with a man that she knows is a murderer. Both of the women in Rebecca represent different ways that oppression harms the lives of women. One is assertive and is punished for it, and the other is passive and stuck with a man she knows she has no power over.
By bending the lines of reality, the gothic genre is able to provide a space for monstrous women to exist. Women are rarely allowed the full agency to express the full range of their most powerful emotions. Additionally, it provides an ample and much-needed critique of structural issues in our society, which often affect women and other members of racialized and/or marginalized groups. We are forced to confront racism and sexism (and many other “isms”) in new ways through Gothic literature.
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