Female Gothic Motifs in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael

Abstract

importance as one of the key New Woman figures of fin-de-siecle Britain. Most of her novels, with the notable exception of The Daughters of Danaus (1894), remain unpublished and unavailable to the modern reader. The few critics who choose to include Caird's work in their analyses typically emphasize the radical feminist, anti vivisection and anti-eugenic content of her writings rather than her novels' aesthetics or artistic achievement.1 Caird's fictional oeuvre, discussed in a wide socio-historical context, is habitually linked with her non-fictional writings (such as the accomplished and influential essays collected in The Morality of Marriage /1897]) and treated either as an expression of radical first wave feminism, or as a pr?figuration of the concerns of the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s. Content, then, remains the main focus of critical interest in Caird's writings, even though her aesthetic principles and narrative techniques may occasionally be evoked in discussions of feminist poetics and literary canon. If, in the words of Ann Heilmann, "\fjin-de-sikle fiction became the site of contestation between masculinist (decadent) and feminist (ethically grounded) aesthetics of art, between (high) 'art' and the world of mass culture and commerce" {New Woman Fiction 156), Caird's novels may be perceived as an excellent illustration of the latter, feminist, aesthetics in the making. This essay seeks to