Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

the unfavorable conditions under which female authors were producing texts and how
they had to “limit” themselves in order for their work to be “accepted” by the institutional
authorities which were predominantly male. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar maintain that certain female authors carefully disguised
elements of sedition in their work as to avoid persecution. In addition, the treatment of
female characters in various novels may indicate how the sexes related to each other and
in particular how women are portrayed and to which were the roles they were ascribed.
One could argue, for example, that female characters are portrayed more sympathetically
in Radcliffean romances than in The Monk, which, by considering the role of Matilda as
temptress and the quiet resignation of other female characters, can be perceived as both
misogynistic and sadistic.
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In The Failure of the Gothic, Napier attempts to reject the subsequent claims that
have been conferred on the Gothic by these various critical approaches. In alluding to the
psychoanalytic approaches to the genre for example, she argues on the one hand that “the
Gothic has simply been subjected to overreading, an activity that derives from a recurrent
desire to find in the Gothic a transitional form that links, through greater emphasis on the
human psyche, the classical and the romantic periods” (4). While she dismisses the
psychological value conferred on Gothic works, she acknowledges the Romantics’
indebtness to the genre with regard to the devices of fragmentation and disjunction (7).
What seems rather surprising, however, is that by supposedly unveiling the “failures of
the Gothic” as her title suggests, she is only reinforcing its stature as a form of cultural
expression by engaging in yet another series of critical exchanges with the genre, which