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Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. By Diane Long Hoeveler. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xix + 250 pages.
In Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes, Diane Long Hoeveler offers a more generous version of the project she promised in the preface to her brilliant work on canonical male poetry, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (1990), "a companion study of masculinist ideologies in the female gothic novel" (xix). It has been well worth the wait for several reasons, among them that scholarly access to a wider array of Romantic-era women writers has made it feasible for Hoeveler to include gothic novelists like Charlotte Smith and Charlotte Dacre in her compelling discussion of the literary tradition she labels "gothic feminism": female gothic novels that promote a feminist ideology based on the projection of professional femininity. Hoeveler planned to use the same theoretical lens for the female novelists as for the male poets, but discovered herself needing a critical apparatus that discerned the historical as well as the psychoanalytic, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault in tandem with Sigmund Freud and Luce Irigaray. Where Romantic Androgyny demonstrated how the male poetic imagination operated primarily on a psychosexual plane, Gothic Feminism considers how female novelists engage "the distinctly social and political realms of female-created economies, the ideological reconstruction of the body, the family and society at large" (xii). Gothic Feminism does pick up where Romantic Androgyny left off, however: just as Romantic Androgyny explored how male poets sought to contain symbolic women in their masculinist psychosexual plane, Gothic Feminism argues that female novelists try to write themselves out of those containers by reconstructing masculine spaces "more benignly as 'feminine'" (xii), not "simply" to project "women's achievement of psychic maturity or socioeconomic inheritance" but as a "veiled critique of all of those public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women" (xii-xiii).
The seven novelists Hoeveler discusses-Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Dacre, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte--aim to domesticate the "masculine institutions that exist to define the sexuality, not to mention the sanity, of women. The optimistic dream that most often concludes the female gothic novel requires that juridical violence, paranoia,...