Abstract
In 1797, The Spirit of the Public Journals published an anonymous diatribe titled “Terrorist Novel Writing.” The piece is ostensibly meant to bemoan the popularity of Gothic romances in general, yet the author fixates specifically on the notion that Gothic heroines model behaviors that do not prepare female readers for their future domestic duties. The author asks: “Can a young lady be taught nothing more necessary in life, than to sleep in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk through a ward with assassins, and carry bloody daggers in their [sic] pockets, instead of pin-cushions and needle-books?”1 The question suggests that by responding actively to threats, the heroines model masculine agency. Rather than being “carried” through a ward of assassins; they “walk … with assassins.” Rather than being harmed by weapons, they conceal their own “bloody daggers in their pockets.” To express concern about how literature might negatively influence young women readers is commonplace. What is striking, however, is this author’s specific worry that these popular novels will encourage female readers to cultivate physical strength and mental fortitude. Such a fear destabilizes contemporary criticism’s dominant reading of Gothic narrative as a site in which female characters are often bullied and disenfranchised.
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Notes
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My thanks to Jill Rappoport’s suggestions regarding the Countess’s philanthropy. See Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
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© 2013 Ellen Malenas Ledoux
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Ledoux, E.M. (2013). A Castle of One’s Own. In: Social Reform in Gothic Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302687_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302687_3
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