Discuss the difficulties women face in two of the Gothic short stories and novel that we’ve studied so far, excluding Perrault’s “Bluebeard” (those by Warner, Carter, Le Fanu, Du Maurier, etc).

Discuss the difficulties women face in two of the Gothic short stories and novel that we’ve studied so far, excluding Perrault’s “Bluebeard” (those by Warner, Carter, Le Fanu, Du Maurier, etc). Comparing your two chosen works, discuss what the Gothic genre suggests about women in a patriarchal world, women’s status and privilege (or lack of it), women’s fears, women’s situation in the home, women’s sexuality, or alternatively, middle-class fears of immodest, powerful or immoral women. Are these narratives repressive or subversive in their depiction of women? Do they suggest, as one critic explains “a fear of [female] sexuality itself as a demonic force, that, awakened by one fatal kiss, can change one utterly and irreversibly” (Macdonald 201)? Or, in their transgressive and subversive properties, do these narratives open up new perceptions gender roles and sexuality for both men and women, but especially for women? You may also choose to focus on only one of the works we have studied this term (particularly works by Le Fanu, Du Maurier, or Carter), which contain women but if so you must comparatively discuss two different treatments of female characters within these works.

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