Female Gothic Literature Analysis

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Female Gothic tradition is approached and relished by many women readers and writers who managed to push the frontier of this literary genre. The surge in popularity of this new-emerging tradition transcends the geographical barriers succeeding in populating the American literary scene. Seeking to understand the emergence and efflorescence of this literary genre and to offer a transatlantic conception of its fictional productions, this work will obviate “national borders in order to explore the central role that cross-cultural exchange played in the development of the Gothic” (Bridget M. Marshall and Monika Elbert 1). It will undertake a broad-based study of narratives generated by British, American and African American women writers across …show more content…
Accordingly, twentieth-century postcolonial women writers create textual space in which they revise the distorted representation of the subaltern woman through giving her a voice to tell “her story.” They explore their ex-centric female experiences of displacement due to colonization and the harshness of uprootedness and alienation that contribute to their female protagonists’ depression and despair and examine their heroines’ process of looking for their personal and cultural identity. Their rebellious textuality consists in their propensity to bestow on their heroines fluid and plural subjectivities that enable them to celebrate their hybrid cultural identity and to deconstruct the concept of stable and coherent self. In so doing, they subvert the notion of origin and explore new concepts such as hybridity, belonging and in-betweens in order to delineate their journeys to define their identity. They show that identity is constructed in a process which is never completed. Correspondingly, their texts take the same form as they are characterized by their open-endedness, fragmentation and ambiguity. African American writers make use of Gothic in order to convey the terrors of American social history. They evoke experience of loss, fragmentation that characterises the black experience. Although the nineteenth-century was interested in the representation of the institution of slavery focalising on “horrifying scenes of torture and entrapment, lascivious masters and innocent slave girls, and curses on many
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