Monstrous creators: the female artist in nineteenth-century women's gothic
Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Using archival research, as well as literary, cultural, and media criticism and the theoretical frameworks of women's studies and disability studies, this dissertation creates a new understanding of the "Female Gothic," as it demonstrates that the presence of the artistic heroine is the genre's true defining feature and that the issue of women's art is its much-contested focus. The work analyzes distinctions among nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century figurations of the female artist in Gothic texts by women across a variety of media, from Jane Austen's novel <italic>Northanger Abbey<italic> through Sandra Goldbacher's Neo-Victorian film, <italic>The Governess<italic>. It illuminates how and why anxieties regarding women's economic and social independence, gender norms, sexuality, ethnic and racial difference, physical disability, and questions of representation have been and continued to be filtered through a Gothic lens.
Description
Keywords
British, Bronte, Emily, Female Gothic, Gothic, Nineteenth-century, Women authors, Bronte, Charlotte