The Fearful Transience of Identity: Analyzing the Gothic Antiheroine in Claire Messud’s the Woman Upstairs and Lauren Acampora’s the Paper Wasp

ABSTRACT

The Woman Upstairs

and The Paper Wasp suggest that modern narratives featuring the antiheroine utilize Gothic techniques in order to expose the tension between convention and subversion of traditional feminist ideals in female-female relationships. This paper makes two arguments: firstly, that the initial process of identification with the idealized female friend results in the Gothic antiheroine’s sexual, maternal, and artistic awakening; secondly, that these alignments with the “feminine” expose the contradictions and complexities of the Gothic antiheroine figure, resulting in a challenge to the traditional, and problematic, trajectory of the antiheroine narrative. The Gothic antiheroine’s confrontation with the self thus exposes cultural anxieties surrounding motherhood, the female (abject) body, and sexual desire, all of which are aligned with the Female Gothic mode.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Dr Alyson Miller (Deakin University) for her helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The antiheroine is certainly gaining attention in contemporary scholarship, particularly when examined within the context of television series. See Crusie; Vaage; Buonanno; Tally.

2. Indeed, and as Suzanne Becker contends, while the Gothic has always been about “provocation and rebellion against order, control and the powers of restrictive ideologies” (Becker 4), it is also about revisiting the familiar, the old-Gothic, in order to deconstruct its ideas and to offer new ones.

3. As Carol Margaret Davison argues, it seems no wonder that the “themes and threats of incarceration, violation and death” (Davison 86) emerged as characteristics of the Female Gothic, when the home was not only the place where women spent the most time (86), but also acted as “the site where many died in childbirth” (86–87). These fears “were further compounded by the fact that women of the era were both commodified and rendered femme couvertes [property of her husband via marriage] under established law” (87).

4. Julia Mason contends that “antihero mothers may be allowed to wield power but ultimately that power will come at the cost of friends, support networks … even family” (Mason 658), suggesting an inextricable link between women and the patriarchal conventions that prioritize “feminine” attributes such as nurturance, compassion, and sensitivity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deakin University through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (RTP).

Notes on contributors

Eleanore Gardner

Eleanore Gardner is a PhD candidate at Deakin University in Geelong where she is studying the function of the antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime fiction.