Introduction

This special issue of Women’s Studies is devoted to new studies of Gothic works by American women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The five essays offered here provide a range of exemplary approaches demonstrating the variety of ways in which the Gothic can be transformed into a mode of feminist inquiry. Working in any genre subjects an author to certain constraints, but the conventions of the Gothic have enabled American women writers to be unconventional in important ways. These essays detail the power of the Gothic to liberate American women writers enabling them to raise crucial questions about gender roles, confront the evils and injustices of patriarchal systems, and imagine a range of new possibilities.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock explores the feminist underpinnings of one of the best stories of Harriet Prescott Spofford, arguably the most important female master of Gothic fiction in mid-nineteenth-century New England. His analysis of “The Moonstone Mass” not only details Spofford’s critique of a coarse and capitalistic patriarchy, but also offers a shrewd exploration of her radical treatment of deep time. Bridget M. Marshall uncovers an urban-industrial Gothic mode and traces its development from the experiences of the Lowell mill works to the fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis. Cynthia Murillo’s definition of ghost-wave feminism also emphasizes the revolutionary potential embedded in new forms of the Gothic. Her radically new reading of the Gothic convention of doubling breaks important ground in her revelation of the ways in which the ghostly experience can lead to new assertions of female independence and sexual desire in Progressive Era fiction. Monika Elbert demonstrates the impact of Jane Eyre on Edith Wharton’s ghostly tales, and then goes on to delineate the multiple ways in which she brilliantly reinvigorates both situation and setting into an imaginative modernist form. Eric Savoy contributes to the ongoing rediscovery of Shirley Jackson’s genius by revealing the special Gothic foundation of both her mass market comedic essays and her terrifying fiction. These essays illuminate the individual achievements of a number of important writers, but they also help map the still underexplored feminist terrain of the Gothic landscape.