Title

Review of The Contested Castle: The Gothic Novel and the Subversion of the Domestic Ideology by Kate Ellis

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1992

Source Publication

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Abstract

Kate Ellis's purpose in The Contested Castle is to examine the relationship between two "epi-phenomena 0f middle-class culture the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic"( pp. ix-x). According to Ellis, the point of connection between the two is the female reader a newly empowered figure, eagerly courted by publishers for her discretionary time and income. The new gothic novels that these women read so voraciously however did not simply reinforce the gender construction that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century capitalist culture proferred. The gothic novel also worked to subvert those constructions, particularly the ideology that imprisoned middle-class women in their homes like so many captives in a fictitious paradise regained

Comments

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 1992): 658-660. Permalink.