The revenge of the sadeian heroine: reprising a gothic stereotype in 1970s fiction by women

Abstract

This dissertation on 1970s fiction is characterised by a tendency to echo back and forward, back to modern history’s most revolutionary moment of the 1790s and forward to fictions and literary theories of the 1990s. It contests the common view of Anglo-American women’s fiction of the 1970s as naively and prescriptively feminist, by rereading texts excluded from the feminist canon, texts which took up the problematic motif of the Gothic heroine, or, the maiden in flight, in order to twist it to different ends. My focus is not on a Gothic staple in its well-known Raddcliffean version (“virtuous” heroines who emerge triumphant and happy after temporary misfortune) but rather on heroines first introduced in the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, whose choreographed misfortunes do not find justification through any stock happy resolution but rather leave virtue unrewarded and readers exasperated or appalled. Through their thematic and narratological heresy of reprising – more or less explicitly – the narrative agency of Justine, the texts I have chosen from the seventies “crossroads” decade of the 1970s make claims, I suggest, about power as discursively produced against the mainstream seventies feminist credos which identify the enemy as singular in form. These works also anticipate the turn of 1990s literary theory towards gender performativity and an anti-essentialist re-estimation of subjectivity as historical, situated, corporeal and in constant process. At the same time they perform a parallel enquiry into the notion of the Gothic which, in its diffuse postmodern reconfiguration, borrows (in a more self-reflexive way than it did in the past) elements surviving from other narratives, removed as far as is possible from the 1790s recipe which, Angela Wright reminds us, included “An old castle”, “A long gallery”, and “Three murdered bodies, quite fresh” – as prescribed by a voracious anonymous reader of the time. Thus, the vehicle that connects the chapters of this project is the vi Gothic heroine – at times in the guise of its fairy tale double, Beauty, or of the female victim, a vital component in the detective formula. Justine, I contend, through the centuries, in the mode of a palimpsest, continues to register that part of cultural history that takes account of the changing notions of subjectivity and agency, with contemporary Gothic encroaching on many other genres, as a result of the postmodern weakening of cultural codes and boundaries. Angela Carter’s work of the seventies informs the core of this thesis, united through the language of the Gothic with works by Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, Diane Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, Elspeth Barker and Alice Thompson, authors who are rarely associated with Carter’s work. Employing a variety of theoretical frameworks, including poststructuralist feminist theory, critical narratology and recent genre theory (which sees the Gothic as a site of repetition, a counterfeit with no original, as Jerrold Hogle puts it, with links with the postmodern aesthetic), my ultimate purpose here is triple: to reread Justine as a Gothic heroine par excellence, as a French counter-Enlightenment Gothic narrative staple and as shorthand for narrative and political agency collusively rewritten by Anglo-American women in the 1970s. Although still highly controversial, these 1970s texts, I argue, have both fostered an inspired attack on passivity’s stock meaning (i.e on the glory of suffering and the sanctity of blamelessness and moral superiority), and issued an alternative to the imperative of the 1970s to depict female characters as overtly “active”, or, in other words, an alternative to the orthodoxies upheld by some of the feminisms of the time