Female Gothic Histories

Gender, History and the Gothic

By Diana Wallace

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2013 Diana Wallace
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2574-2

Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgements,
1 Introduction,
2 The Murder of the Mother: Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5),
3 Be-witched and Ghosted: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Historical Tales,
4 Puzzling over the Past: Vernon Lee’s Fantastic Stories,
5 Displacing the Past: Daphne du Maurier and the Modern Gothic,
6 Queer as History: Sarah Waters’s Gothic Historical Novels,
Afterword,
Notes,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

* * *

The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929)

If the rationale of History is ultimately to remind us of everything that has happened and to take it into account, we must make the interpretation of the forgetting of female ancestries part of History and re-establish its economy. Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference (1989)

From the late eighteenth century, women writers, aware of their exclusion from traditional historical narratives, have used Gothic historical fiction as a mode of historiography which can simultaneously reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. If the Gothic with its blatant flouting of realism is always already, as I will suggest here, a kind of metafiction avant la lettre, then Gothic historical fiction, the subject of my study, can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history. In the hands of women writers, Gothic historical fiction has offered a way of ‘interpreting’, or symbolising, what Luce Irigaray calls ‘the forgetting of female ancestries’ and of re-establishing them within ‘History’.

In doing so these novels throw into question what exactly we mean by ‘History’, or indeed, ‘history’, or ‘the past’. That is, how do we shape accounts of what happened in the past (the events of ‘history’) into narratives (‘History’)? How does our understanding of gender influence such processes? What happens to those accounts when women are either left out, or added in? And, if the ‘economy’ (to borrow Irigaray’s term) of ‘History’ is based on the assumption that public and political events have more ‘value’ than private and domestic events, and are more worth recording, how can we revalue, or re-imagine, women’s unrecorded experience in the past?

Furthermore, if (married) women were for over two centuries regarded as ‘civilly dead’, what kinds of ghostly traces can we retrieve from the texts of history? Mary Beard traces back to 1765 the notion that ‘women were a subject sex or nothing at all – in any past or the total past,’ attributing its genesis to Sir William Blackstone’s influential statement of the legal position of married women:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing.

This legal concept of the married woman as ‘civilly dead’ led, Beard argues, to what she calls the ‘haunting idea’ that woman in the past was ‘a being always and everywhere subject to male man or as a ghostly creature too shadowy to be even that real’. The language of spectrality used by Beard here suggests the particular power of the Gothic to express the erasure of women in history