Feminist Gothic

This examination of thirty-two ghost stories by twenty-one Victorian women writers defines a new genre, feminist Gothic, that utilizes the Gothic structure and its uncanny atmosphere of ambiguity to deploy competing narratives that seek to undermine patriarchy by simultaneously upholding and subverting its dominant myths. While the surface reading of these tales interprets the outer, public, overt voice that is often one of patriarchal appeasement, a second reading uncovers an inner, private, co