Graduation Year
Winter 2013
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Department
English & World Literature
Reader 1
Sumangala Bhattacharya
Rights Information
© 2013 Samantha E. Morse
Abstract
This essay investigates the integral linkages between Gothic spaces and Gothic masculinities in three texts: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). At the core of this examination is architecture, or more specifically, the physical constructions and built environments that comprise a man’s property. I explore how a man uses his property to construct, legitimize, and perform his identity. In the Female Gothic, the home is a place of anxiety for women, where patriarchal dominance and violence reign to constrain female agency. I argue that the home is also an anxiety-ridden space for men, who are similarly tyrannized by a force they have limited power to fight against: legality. The issue of legally legitimized property ownership as a means of defining masculine selfhood in these texts lead men to extreme, and arguably unnatural, resorts to cling to their coveted status as autonomous property holders and virile men. In short, I aim to define a specifically Gothic masculinity. Yet, by using Pride and Prejudice, I will argue that this Gothic masculinity is not limited to Gothic texts.
Recommended Citation
Morse, Samantha E., "Dreading He Knew Not What: Masculinities, Structural Spaces, Law and the Gothic in The Castle of Otranto, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights" (2013). Pitzer Senior Theses. 58.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/58
Included in
Common Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons
