Neil Bowen on
When Ellen Moers wrote of the "Female Gothic" in Literary Women in 1977, she coined a new term and a laid the foundation for a new way of thinking about women and the Gothic genre. Certainly, generically gendered distinctions had been made before Moers' book; eight years earlier, Hume had distinguished between "the novel of terror" and "the novel of horror," positing Ann Radcliffe's books as epitomizing the former and M.G. Lewis' the latter. Hume, however, focused his piece on the male-dominated horror-gothic, dismissing Radcliffe and her many emulators as "not serious." This dismissal has since been rectified by a flood of critical attention to both the Gothic genre itself and the female authors within the Gothic tradition, but that flood has produced its own questions. What specifically differentiates between the "Female Gothic" and other kinds of Gothic? From other kinds of novels? Can we read "Female" as "Feminist," or do these novels simply reproduce the patriarchal structures their heroines inevitably struggle against? Is the Female Gothic somehow "personal"? Political? Psychological? And in the final count, to borrow from Jane Tompkins' famous question, is the Female Gothic any good?
In Literary Women, Moers claims that the Female Gothic is "easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic" (Moers, 90)