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<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe&rsquo / s late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period.</p>

Abstract This study examines the connection between power and identity in three Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Following the identity theories of Erik Erikson, I argue that identity has biological, psychological, and social aspects that are subject to change over time. As individual agency—the ability to function as a person—depends on a relatively certain and stable sense of personal identity, Gothic villains—both individuals and institutions—gain and maintain their power by disempowering their victims. In order to do so, they work to compromise these victims’ sense of personal identity, causing them to suffer identity crises that greatly reduce their ability to function. Employing various means—including threats of rape, destruction of reputation, imprisonment, forced exile, denial of freedom of thought, torture, and others—Gothic villains attempt to weaken their victims by placing them in situations that cause the fears that Erikson argues all people share to become paralyzing and debilitating states of anxiety, states in which the victims suffer from a temporary, or, in extreme cases, permanent loss of agency. These Gothic victims’ paranoia, identity crises, and subsequent loss of agency underscore the importance of individuals’ identity and constitute the horror that is at the heart of Gothic fiction.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-358 ).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "August 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-219). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Magister Artium / The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe's late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period. / South Africa

My thesis draws connections between today's network society and the workings of gothic literature in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Just as our society is formed and affected by the flow of information, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was formed by the merging and flow of scientific "technology" (or new scientific discoveries) and societal norms and rules. Gothic literature was born out of this science-society network, and in many ways embodies the ruptures implicit in it. Although gothic literature is not a network in the same sense as informationalism and the culture of sensibility are, gothic literature works according to the logic of networks on both a microscopic and macroscopic level. These correlations between networks and the gothic potentially illuminate two of gothic literature's strange and signature qualities: the subversive nature of the gothic convention, as well as the incredible—and almost inexplicable, considering its libeled and unpopular reputation—staying power of the genre. In Chapter One, I compare the society of informationalism and the eighteenth-century society of sensibility in order to extrapolate a three-pronged logic of networks: networks are subversive, networks are exclusive, and networks are based on codes. In Chapter Two I trace this logic through eighteenth-century gothic conventions as they are portrayed in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Matthew Lewis's The Monk. This shows how the gothic, like network society, depends on the paradox of containing the ideology that it subverts. In Chapter Three I investigate this paradox on a macroscopic level by examining the connections between "tales of terror" in Blackwood's Magazine and gothic literature in both the pre-Romantic and Victorian literature. By both adopting and subverting the conventions of Radcliffean gothic, these tales are a key node in the web of the gothic stretching backwards to into the eighteenth century, forwards into the nineteenth century, and beyond.

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The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The purposes of both responses are to civilize readers and their respective representations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition are central to this process. I examine the role of the Inquisition in The Monk and contrast it with the depiction of the same institution in The Italian. Lewis's book subordinates the ecclesiastical world to the authority of the aristocracy and uses graphic scenes of torture to support conservative forms of social control based on shame. The Italian, on the other hand, depicted the Inquisition as a conspiratorial body that causes Radcliffe's protagonists, and by extension her readers, to question their complicity in oppressive systems of social control and look for alternative means to punishment. The result is a push toward rehabilitation that is socially progressive but questions the English Enlightenment's promotion of the carceral.

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