'Her lion-red body, her wings of glass': iconography of the gothic body in Carter, Tennant, and Weldon
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Date
1997Author
Johnson, Heather L.
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Abstract
This thesis examines the varied references to the gothic genre in the
work of three contemporary British women writers: Angela Carter, Emma
Tennant, and Fay Weldon. It shows that the use of gothic imagery in their
fiction coincides with feminist revisions of representations of the female body
and that this appearance of the gothic is more complex than the scope
generally allowed by the critical term "Female Gothic". Whereas most critical
approaches to the gothic are grounded in a depth hermeneutics, this thesis
develops Sedgwick's attention to the surfaces of gothic imagery by focusing on
the iconography manifest in representations of the female body. The novels
under consideration increase the possibilities of the genre through a
combination of traditional and innovative tropes. Such innovation is achieved
through postmodernist conventions including the use of genre fragments,
intertextuality, and pastiche, as well as the self-conscious invocation of
modern theories of identity. Most significant is the practice of transforming
metaphor into narrative, whereby static cultural images depicting the female
body are mobilised in an exposure of their inherent humour and violence, the
nexus of which is characteristically gothic. In this literature three female figures may be discerned which are
identifiable as gothic in their expression of entrapment both within the body
and within a patriarchal system of cultural representation, and thus focus a
number of feminist and poststructuralist concerns. The figure of the
'chokered' woman is read through a feminist critique of the gendered
mind/body dichotomy central to Western culture. Next the presentation and
subversion of the black female body is discussed as a figure of erotic alterity
and the abject within colonialist discourse. The 'posthuman' body is explored
as a product of the age of technological simulation, and is positioned in
relation to the poetics of camp and the poststructuralist notion of the spectral
presence of absence. In this fiction the female body functions as a 'screen'
onto which these writers project their diverse inscriptions of the gothic.