Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 132.Įve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 145. Norton, 1961), 68.Īngela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1984), 77.Īnn Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 662. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose (London: J. Helen Taylor (London: The Women’s Press, 1986), 91. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Įllen Moers, Literary Women, introd. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Particular attention is given to the reworking of the motif of the forbidden room in the traditional Bluebeard fairy tale. This chapter explores the relationships between desire, texts and death, including the connection between dangerous reading and sexual knowledge out of which spring archetypal narratives of female disobedience. 2 Her predecessor may be found in the ‘Bluebeard’ fairy tale, which in turn is a reworking of the archetypal narrative of female disobedience prompted by curiosity which appears in classical mythology as in the tale of Pandora’s Box, and in the Bible as the story of Eve. Ellen Moers, who coined the term, refers to the novels of one of its earliest exponents Ann Radcliffe, whose typical heroine is ’simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine’.

‘Female Gothic’ is a contested term which, when unveiled, is characterised by a number of recurring plots written by women writers.

Bluebeard and the bloody chamber