Wicked Women

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the villainesses of early male Gothics, such as Lewis’s Matilda in The Monk, are characters of romance, wherein we expect to find types and stereotypes rather than realistic psychological portraits. They can be unambiguously wicked because they are women in a metaphysical system that blames Eve as the root of all evil. ‘The female’- constructed by patriarchy as instability, materiality, sexuality, irrationality, darkness, evil – appears even in the architecture of early Gothic texts. The chapter argues that since the 1790s the Gothic tradition has been engaged in challenging and deconstructing the notion of ‘wicked women’, reflecting cultural notions of female psychology. Psychoanalytic theory is used to examine representations of the sexually desiring woman as ‘hysterical’, focusing in particular on the figure of the rebellious nun. Many Gothic texts are fraught with anxiety pertaining to mothers, often represented as witch figures. Expression of sexual desire by female characters, in texts such as diverse as Zoyfloya the Moor, Jane Eyre and Rebecca, is associated with an adopted masculinity and with wickedness. Williams concludes by looking at works by Shirley Jackson and Henry James and examining how they exploit the ambiguities inherent in the familiar Gothic conventions used to portray feminine evil.