Women in Early Gothic Fiction. The stereotypical depiction of women as femmes fatales or damsels in distress in The Italian and The Monk

Pre-University Paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, language: English, abstract: It is typical that women in early Gothic Fiction are either portrayed as femmes fatales or damsels in distress. In the following, this statement will be proved and studied. First of all, the content of both The Italian and The Monk will be shortly reviewed, the chosen women in the novels will be compared to each other in terms of both visual and characteristic descriptions. Then their relationships to other figures appearing in the stories will be analysed and in the end a brief conclusion will be drawn. Catherine Morland is the young heroine of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey that is probably the most famous parody on the Gothic Fiction stories which were pretty popular in the late 18th century. Catherine is likely the classic Gothic Fiction reader: naive, easy to excite and blessed with a strong imagination. Between the pages of her favourite novels she meets terrible villains, dark settings, mysterious secrets, adventurous flights, cold vaults, bad monks, bleeding nuns, heroic men and threatened maidens. She gets lost in those stories and the lines between her reality and the written fiction fade. The two mentioned novels Catherine reads are The Monk by Matthew Lewis and The Italian by Ann Radcliffe which show these two opposite stereotypes of women pretty well. Both novels have examples for the damsel in distress but only The Monk gives one for the femme fatale. So this seminar paper will focus on Lewis’ character Matilda as an example for the femme fatale and on Radcliffe’s Ellena embodying the damsel in distress to explain the main theory.