Browsing by Author "Rochat, Nicole Aletta"
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- ItemFearful spheres and domestic rebellion : reading the Female Gothic in selected twentieth century literary texts(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Rochat, Nicole Aletta; Oppelt, Riaan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Due to the nature of the separate spheres of Western society during the mid-Nineteenth to mid-Twentieth centuries, men were put into the public sphere to learn and contribute to knowledge, create and pass laws, and lead society. Women were forced into the private sphere, taught to stay within the domestic, and to conform to the oppressive expectations of gender norms. This thesis will explore the troubled relationship between women and the domestic, where the literature devoted to this study comments on popular fictional tropes for women in selected Gothic texts, where seemingly the only way to avoid being denied agency is through madness and death. This study aims to pursue such troubled legacies by looking at selected female-authored texts within the genre of the Female Gothic and Magical Realism. By aligning myself with critics like Diana Wallace, I explore texts such as Charlotte Perkins- Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” by examining the Foucauldian power struggle within medical discourse in the Western late Nineteenth Century, access to knowledge, and gendered ways of reading. By comparing Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber”, I aim to show the construction of an imagined version of a place through shards of conversation, which slightly intersects with Walter Benjamin’s theory of the auratic when showing the difference between engaging with something authentically, or engaging with an imagined version of reality. I discuss the palimpsesting nature of rewriting familiar stories, drawing attention to how the texts, written many decades apart, point to the voicelessness of women within even modern revisited texts. I then discuss Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, exploring the allure of the domestic for those who seek a home, and showing how Jackson reveals that for her, madness and death were written as the only escape from domestic imprisonment. Finally I approach a postmodern Mexican novel, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, examining the palimpsesting nature of parody based on the Nineteenth Century tradition of monthly instalment magazines for housewives in Mexico. Here I also explore the intersection of the Female Gothic within the practice of Magical Realism in literature, where the domestic realm is both a prison and a space of empowerment for the main character. I aim to draw attention to the ways in which the selected texts show how inherited female traditions root women within prescribed gender roles and a rigid domesticity, of which authors from the Nineteenth Century until contemporary times still seem to comment on the outworn conclusion that the only escape for women characters in Gothic texts of domestic imprisonment is through madness and death.