women in gothic literature

Female relationships play an important role in gothic literature, espcially in the novel Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, and Lois the Witch. However, it seems that these novels bring up the different kinds of female friendships, genuine and ingenuine, and the important role that these relationships play in teh development of the female protagonists. In Lois the Witch, Lois and Faith are believed to be good, genuine friends until Faith's jealousy turns her into an ugly person, and their friendship quickly ends. It seems a common theme among many of these novels is the idea that jealousy, due to a guy, is the reason for deceit and an end to friendships. As we see similarly in Jane Eyre, Jane is in love with the master of the house and is a bit jealous of the blonde woman. There is definate tension between those two characters and the direct cause is the master of the house.
It also seems a common theme in these novels is that women of different social class and status cannot be friends. Jane Eyre is not friends with the blonde socialite, but her only friend was the red-head schoolgirl who shared a similar reality. Similarly in Lois the Witch, Lois has no true friends except for Nattee who also shared a similar fate and accusations. Lois is considered lower class because she is not truly part of the family, she is a cousin.

Novels and Society

I believe novels have a huge effect on society, whether it be subtle aspects of culture or monumental beliefs that are changed. Uncle Tom's Cabin shows how a story about a slave opened the public's eyes to the horrors and injustices against African Americans and slavery at the time.
Jane Austen is definately promoting novel reading because both the hero and heroine enjoy reading novels while Thorpe does not. Even though Catherine is not used to high-society, she behaves much better than many of her counterparts who have grown up in that lifestyle.
I think novels have a lot of power because some things that could not be said verbally at the time, could be written into a carefully crafted work, still discussing the same themes, but it gave people an outlet to express their feelings freely and sometimes anonymously. With those issues out in the open like that in literary works, it couldn't help but affect society in some way.

Jekyll and Hyde

In this novel, setting plays a particularly large role and gives the reader a sense of anticipation of what types of things are to come. Stevenson does a very interesting job in contrasting the two very different sides of London. When contrasting two streets he states, "the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighborhood." (62). Throughout the novel Stevenson contrasts two different settings, light and dark, good vs evil with a direct correlation to the charracters that were in the scene. Whenever Dr. Jekyll was in the scene, readers were left with a sense of positivity and good because of the adjectives to describe the setting. For one thing, scenes wih Dr. Jekyll took place in the light, in which there was no mystery to his appearance.
On the contrary, scenes with Hyde were almost all in the dark. Even scenes that were in the day time, as soon as Hyde would be close to entering the scne, immediate darkness and fog would enter,only mysteriously lit by moonlight or street lights, building the reader's anticipation and deepening the sense of terror and curiosity. When Utterson goes to visit Dr. Jekyll in his theatre in daylight, the setting changes drastically, "...and he eyed the windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed around with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre...and the light falling dimly through the cupola." (p.82). Stevenson's extreme contrast in setting mirrors his theme of the duality of man. I believe that he is saying everything in this world has a duality, even nature.
Stevenson's setting is a bit different from Castle of Otronto in that his setting isn't stationary like the old castle was in COO. Instead Stevenson's setting follows the characters. I got the image of this big cloud of fog constantly following Hyde to conceal his identity, let him continue to hide and maintain that sense of mystery to the novel, which only added to the sense of terror.
In addition to the settings following the characters, there were stationary settings typical of gothic novels. The windowless house of Hyde in Soho created a sense of mystery right off the bat, especially with the description of the door which "was eqipped with bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained." (63)
Setting plays a very large role in this novel and builds the readers sense of terror and anticipation.

The role of women in Castle of Otronto

Given the time period of the book's setting, the role of women had many limitations. In the story of The Castle of Otronto, the female characters are depicted as fragile physically and very pure morally. There were numerous occasions where the mother, Hypollita, fainted out of fear (and then people assumed she was dead) and all of the females were constantly being waited on by the caretakers. All of the female characters were also depicted as very pure and obedient. Even after being so mistreated by her father, Matilda didn't say one single word of disrespect, neither did Hypollita even when Manfred was an obvious tyrant. However, probably the most surprising reaction was that even when Manfred stabbed his own daughter (even though it was a mistake) Matilda immediately forgave him. That reaction was the hardest for me to relate to because I think most people in present day would obviously be really mad if that happened, not to mention his obvious forvoring of his son Conrad. The women also had to wait to let the men decide about their futures and who would marry who.
The female characters, especially Matilda and Isabella were definately the focus for reader's sympathies. Another common role was the role of the femme fatal played by both Isabella and Matilda. Their beauty captivated the two princes, who would do anything in order to have the two women.

Hi! My name is Erica and I'm a junior at TCU. I'm from Seattle, Washington. I originally came to TCU to be part of the Equestrian team because I love horses and have been competing regionally and nationally since I was seven years old.
Last semester I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain and it was one of the most amazing, uncomfortable, and memorable experiences of my life. I'm currently majoring in Economics and minoring in Spanish.
I don't know very much about Gothic Literature but in high school we read Wuthering Heights. I'm interested to know a little bit more about this type of literature and some of the famous characters that arose from this genre (like Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde).

I read and understand the terms of the syllabus.