Abstract
In this study, I analyze how the gothic heroines and narrative structures of three radical feminist-authored texts – Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1797), Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock (1795) – challenge pre-existing social prejudices against women as a public and private entity. At the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the definition of gender understood by British society takes a radical turn: where earlier decades understood gender to be projected or performed by dress and behavior, the 1790s bore witness to a rising, bio-essential understanding of gender as an undeniable quality one is born with. By and large, the fair sex and feminine gender is a popular subject with conduct books and literature promoting idealistic and sometimes unrealistic expectations for women’s social roles and conduct. By both answering Abby Coykendall’s call for queer narratology and elaborating on Sarah Winter’s notion of the “novel of prejudice,” I examine how these novels challenge social ideas and concepts pertaining to bio-essential understandings of gender in the final decade of the eighteenth century. All three novels by Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Fenwick not only use similar gothic elements to project the narrative world into the realm of uncanny possibilities, but each gothic heroine’s experiences of gender prejudice inform an audience of empowered feminine expressions defiant of social prescriptions of gender.