This also reprints Joanna Russ's "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic" (1973). More details about the original version can be found here.
Descriptions of the essays are given in the introduction:
Conflicting analyses of the readers of the Gothic and the nature of the Gothic heroine are presented in the first section, Mystique: The Popular Gothic. The differences in the inferences of two essays - authored by Joanna Russ and Kay Mussell - might be explained by the critical assumptions of the authors. Russ analyzes the Gothic novels from a literary point of view while Mussell looks at them as documents of popular culture. One suggests that the Gothic foments rebellion, or at least expresses ambivalence, while the second suggests that the Gothic is a drug.
The other three essays in this first section fall into the two categories established by the first two, that the Gothic serves as social reinforcement or as a statement of rebellion. The heroines of Victoria Holt's Gothic romances are passively seeking new families in a quest of initiation. (17)
---
Mystique: The Popular Gothic
This section establishes the two different approaches taken by many of the essays in this anthology. Is the Gothic an expression of rebellion and ambivalence toward the woman's sphere, or does it confirm and clarify that function? Joanna Russ suggests that the Gothic novel displays ambivalence toward the female role, while Kay Mussell asserts that it lends credence and reinforces the role of women. The woman is either a passive protagonist in an adventure in which her ambivalence toward the dominant male provides the tension - in other words, she does not act; she merely feels - or she is a decisive protagonist acting to preserve and to protect the family. Consequently, Russ proposes that the Gothic is read by women for its protest while Mussell assumes that the Gothic affirms the popular role of women and that women read and reread the Gothic for this affirmation.
The third essay in this section, Barbara Bowman's "Victoria Holt's Gothic Romances: A Structuralist Inquiry," supports the conclusions of Kay Mussell by suggesting that Holt's romances are identity quests. She agrees that the heroine moves from one family to another, from one male-dominated family to a second male-dominated family, from father to husband. No female models guide the heroine; instead they resemble the fairy-tale's stepmother or stepsister. To escape the taint of sexuality Holt's father-figures must be idealized; only the husband can be, as Bowman puts it, "vital."
Supporting Joanna Russ' conclusions, that the Gothic expresses rebellion and that women read the Gothic for its ambivalences, Kathleen L. Maio suggests that the Gothic hybrid, the Had-I-But-Known school, originated by Mary Roberts Rhinehart, celebrates women's strength. It does so by using the mystique to establish a female community. If the popular Female Gothic presents a patriarchy, the HIBK genre presents a matriarchy. Maio asserts that in no sense do the male figures - the male detectives - control this world. HIBK accepts and amplifies the patriarchal dichotomy between the masculine and feminine spheres and uses it to illuminate the strength of a traditional female ability - intuition. This stereotypically feminine trait is contrasted to masculine logic.
A second source of strength in this matriarchal form is the presence of strong alliances between women, as in the fiction of Mabel Seeley. The popular Gothic depicts the wicked stepmother; the good godmother exists in HIBK. (18)
This also reprints Joanna Russ's "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic" (1973). More details about the original version can be found here.
Descriptions of the essays are given in the introduction:
---