Identification and Gender: The Law of Ligeia

Abstract

In tracing these elements in the Gothic, however, we need also to return from the Gothic hero to the crucial question of the female Gothic, and in this chapter I mean to start from a partial reading of Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), which is relevant in many ways. A great deal of the material on which Bronfen bases her argument is Gothic; indeed, almost all the canonical Gothic texts in the British tradition, and a good many of those in the European and American traditions, are referred to and many are treated at some length. The triple linking of death, the female and the aesthetic seems to take its place naturally on the terrain of the Gothic; we might say that the extraordinary force of Bronfen’s analysis seems gained at times precisely from its recapitulatory status: these images, these connexions, are latent within modernity, but here they are brought together in new and subtle ways, and in the service of an argument which might be characterised as relentless in its accumulation of detail in the service of what, in another context, might be referred to as a master-narrative of Western culture, a narrative of abjection and necrophilia, of the disavowal of the body.

A word is neither totally absent, nor present, it lives on as a kind of life-in-death.¹