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• Victorian Literature from feminist Perspective

• Published in 1979

•A hall mark of Second wave of feministic criticism•It gives analysis of troupe found in 19th Century literature•Gilbert & Gubar discuss the angel/monster troupe in the novels written by female writers•The rage is often shown through the figure of madwoman

Virginia Woolf says Women writers must kill

the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves

have been killed into art

• A structure that oppresses him•A plot of masculine transgression of social taboos

• A rebellious hero • Alienated from society • Promotes independence

The Monk by Mathew Lewis

Idea presented by Allan Moore• Traditional female pattern is circular• Female gothic emphasize mother-

daughter relation• Reverse Oedipal stage

• “A bourgeois aesthetic, as it creates a circle of defamiliarization and

estrangement by re-establishment of conventional life.”

(Kilgour,38)

“I dreamed I was walking in forest Not alone. Someone who hated me was with

me”

Lacan’s concept: Between the two

Deaths

Parallel dreams are used by Rhys like Bronte in Jane Eyre

“Is it true that England is like a dream, one of

my friends wrote and said London is like a cold dark

dream.”

Theme of

Dreams &

Foresight

Thornfield Hall

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains

too high, the hills too near”

Caribbean Landscape

“There is no looking glass here and I don’t know what I am like now”

• The notion of “segregation”• Sargasso Sea

• A double outsider•White nigger for Europeans and ‘ White Cockroach for blacks

• Neither white nor black

“Like Sargasso Sea, a mass of seaweed surrounded by swirling currents in the Atlantic Ocean, the novel’s troubled heroine is suspended between England and West Indies and belongs fully to neither.”(McKenzie)

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so white people did. But we were not in their ranks”

• Colonial Ownership• Cockpit of

Europe

West Indies….. Mistake by Christopher Columbus 1492Possession & re-naming

Jamaica- Coulbri (Spanish colony)Britain seized it in 1655Spanish history is still there

Sargasso Sea……

Dominica / Honeymoon Island

England…..

Woman and madness…. Hysteria

Missing Mother figure

As a result of oppression they drink, sleep too much or attempt suicide to forget their painful experience

Rhys creates a mother in Annette who is genuinely

incapable of offering love to her daughter, who repeatedly fails

to mirror Antoinette’s

attitudes and behavior. (Anne

Simpson)Jacques Lacan’s Psyche

structure:1. The Real

2. The Imaginary3. The Symbolic

Depiction of different levels of madness

Many archetypes for the demonstration of hatred

In her unfinished autobiography, published after her death Smile please: An unfinished in 1979 she said“I must write if I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject to myself. I will not have earned death”

Kristeva asserts that “other” is threat to the final boundaries to the human identity

shaped by additional psychoanalytical theories. The traditional notion of the

identity of boundaries on hierarchically constructed binaries oppositions such as white/black, sane/insane, pure/impure,

rational/emotional, and male/female

David Punter:“Gothic fiction is a erotic at root, it knows that to channel sexual activity into the narrow confines of conventionality

is repressive. In the end it is highly dangerous that is denial of Eros and that Eros so slighted returns in the form of threat and violence. The beast within cannot be killed, but that is because it drives it strength from the pressure with which it is held down by smooth faced man on the

outside. It is our repressions that kill us because they conjure up forces within which are far stronger than our fragile conventionality can withstand.” (Terror Vol 2 191)

Along with the sight clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from mother and father who

prefer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sigh of their desires. ‘I’ do not want to listen, I do

not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an other for me, who am only in

their desire, ‘I’ expel ‘myself’, I spit myself out , I abject ‘myself’ within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.

(Kristeva, Powers 2-3)

•Annette & Antoinette•Bertha & Antoinette•Bertha & Jane

•Autobiographical elements.•Alienated

•Creole •Mocked by the “other” in England

•Belonged to the same setting•Marginalized