INTRODUCTION
Violence is a notable threat against women because it has an impact in
maintaining or disregarding their subjectivity and role in society. So far, women have
suffered from different kinds of violence; therefore, women’s writers try to express and
critique such violence in Gothic Fiction. However, Feminists provide theories and critical
devices to unfold women’s experiences with violence and their resistance to it in fiction
showing the effect of such experiences on them, their subjectivity, and roles in society.
Regarding this, De Lauretis(1994,7) claims that, Feminism conceptualizes “‘experience’
in relation both to social-material practices and to the formation and process of
subjectivity”. Thus, this dissertation aims to explore violence and its effects on women
and their role in patriarchal society in Gothic Fiction from a feminist perspective. It
consists of an introduction, literature review, three main parts and conclusion.
The first chapter concerns with both the Gothic and Female Gothic Fiction. It
provides the gothic setting which according to Fred Botting (1996, 2) reveals the sense of
menace and violence. Such violence within gothic setting affects women’s subjectivity
and self in both Angela Carter’s "The Bloody Chamber” from The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories (1979) and Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm (1981). However, the Female
Gothic explains women’s experience within the gothic atmosphere and physical, societal
and cultural violence through the previous texts.
The second chapter deals with Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism in Gothic
Fiction. It defines Feminist Literary Theory /Criticism and differentiates between them
providing specific critical devices to analyze the primary texts: Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride”
from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976). It
also, discusses patriarchy and gender violence against women and the resistance to it.
Further, it provides different kinds of subjectivity in Feminist Literary Theory and
analyzes them within the primary texts.
The third chapter is concerned with violence, its definition, kinds, and its effects
on women, their subjectivity, and their role in society. It explains how physical, verbal,
cultural and structural violence interacts with each other to affect women. In addition, it
interprets violent gaze and colonial violence and their effects on women in some of the
previous literary texts and Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple” from Fireworks: Nine
Profane Pieces (1974).
The conclusion will sum up the different issues and arguments highlighted
throughout this dissertation regarding different kinds of violence and their effects on
women, their subjectivity, identity and their role in patriarchal society in gothic fiction.