The document discusses the distinction between male and female gothic literature, highlighting how female writers utilize different literary conventions to challenge male narratives. It contrasts the linear and transgressive plots of male gothic with the circular, restorative plots of female gothic, which focus on the experiences of persecuted heroines. Additionally, it asserts that female gothic literature offers a positive representation of female authors and their unique contributions to the genre.

1. The Female Gothic
Moers's coinage contributes to the cleavage of the Gothic into male and female. This gendering of
this tradition displays the incompatibility between male and female writers who "employ two
distinct sets of literary conventions" (Anne Williams 100). Although female gothic shares many of
the literary aspects of the male genre, it not only strives to challenge them but also to encumber
them with ideas related to women which conveniently leaves the reader with a positive image of
female novelists and their vigorous potency to create a their own tradition that conveys their fears
and anxieties of incarceration within the private space of domesticity and within the female body. I
will go beyond that arguing that Female Gothic differs from the Male formula "both in...show more
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These critics maintain that while male novelists "tended towards a plot of masculine transgression of
social taboos, exemplified by Matthew Lewis's The Monk," female writers create their own gothic
plot revolving around the story of a "persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father and in
search of an absent mother" (2). The traditional male gothic novel is based on "the standard
Bildungsroman" in which a "satanic revolutionary superman" moves towards the accomplishment of
his "personhood and individuation" (Maggie Kilgour 37). Its narrative structure is linear, motivated
by the liberation of the defiant male protagonist who refuses to conform to the social conventions
that oppress him. However, eighteenth–century women writers create a different gothic plotline that
suggests "the re–establishment of conventional life" (38). Based on a circular pattern, the traditional
female storyline foregrounds a restoration of the normalized social norms that oppress the victimized
heroine. It
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