In gothic literature the female self is divided between the feminine and her forbidden desires. In society the woman must appear passive, courteous, and flirtatious though never sexually aware but in the gothic mirror the woman is reflected as rebelling against those points. As a result, the complexity of the characters challenges traditional and social stereotypes, revealing the hidden self as a sort of monster. This hidden monster is different from the true monsters who encompass terrifying bodies and the frightening urban and natural landscapes which make up the gothic novel and instead these monsters reveal the self as censored, concealed beneath social normalities in an attempt to live a complacent life free from conflict. If the women in these stories wish to reveal their true, censored selves they must submit to madness first and use it as a way to decry the social archetypes holding them back from independence and choice. If they succeed, they can learn to identify and rectify personal beliefs with which society has previously denied them.

Perhaps one of the more disheartening versions of the self as a monster can be seen in John Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1897 Carmilla, a novella which employs traditional gothic motifs but under the sweeping desolate country sides and the murderous oupire lies a story with more meat and substance. Laura is raised motherless by her father in an isolated estate in Styria and when a cart accident forces the lovely Carmilla to stay at their castle Laura finds herself drawn towards the stranger, stating “she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging” (25). At the same time she’s disgusted by her, and, after Carmilla emotionally declares her love for Laura, she says:

It was unmistakably the momentary breaking out of repressed instinct and emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother’s volunteered denial, subject to brief visitations of insanity?... Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health. (30)

While Carmilla is comfortable enough in her sexuality to express her feelings of fondness, Laura holds back, dismissing her admissions as momentary lapses into insanity. In her book Women and Madness writer and psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler unpacks the meaning of insanity in a similar context, saying, “What we consider ‘madness,’ whether it appears in women or in men, is either the acting out of the devalued female role or the total or partial rejection of one’s sex role stereotype” (93). If we are to assume that Carmilla represents Laura’s monster self, and therefore her repressed sexuality, then Carmilla is to act as a reflection for which the narrator must discover her hidden self in. We can see this as Laura begins to copy Carmilla’s nervous behaviors, stating, “The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them” (45). By mimicking instead of renouncing Carmilla’s activity, Laura begins her journey of self-acceptance and, in doing so, she immediately begins to experience symptoms of madness. She becomes weak, melancholic, and obstinate, all of which are symptoms frequently seen in eighteenth and nineteenth century asylum patients (Chesler, 70). In her essay, “Doubling out of the Crazy House: Gender, Autobiography, and the Insane Asylum System in Nineteenth-Century France”, Dr. Jann Matlock explains the terror imposed behind these asylums, stating, “[f]emale identity is jeopardized as much by the incursion of the censor into previously private spheres as by the man’s right to sign any woman mad who endangers his (familial) authority over her. The asylum exchanges women by marking women’s refusals to submit to traditional, socially accepted forms of exchange. It registers them for attempting to challenge the forms of expression to which they have been assigned” (170). Women who rebelled against their roles as pious daughters, domestic housewives, or loving mothers were committed to these institutions by their fathers and husbands who saw them as weak or dangerous and they were restrained so that society could control what they viewed to be uncontrollable. After Carmilla is exposed as the oupire and killed, Laura returns to her traditional, socially acceptable roles and we are left with the bitter knowledge that, in killing the title character, Laura lost her only chance at reclaiming her true identity and sexuality.

In a similar vein, stories such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar focus on motherhood and the enduring anxieties the narrators exhibit as they seek to reclaim control over their own bodies. “The Yellow Wallpaper” describes the inevitable breakdown of a mother suffering from untreated postpartum depression while The Bell Jar reflects on Esther Greenwood’s search for identity outside of relationships, motherhood, and the domestic roles enforced upon her by her sex.  In her book Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976), academic and literary scholar Ellen Moers coins the term “the female gothic” to describe a piece of literature which solely centers on the female and her complex relationship to marriage and motherhood. While not strictly gothic in a traditional sense, these stories employ what Eugenia C. DeLamotte describes in her research, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic as, “[t]he ‘fear of power’ embodied in Gothic romance is a fear not only of supernatural powers but also of social forces so vast and impersonal that they seem to have supernatural strength” (17). As a result, we’re privy to a different type of monster that what was experienced in Carmilla. Instead of finding themselves trapped in forbidding mansions and being hunted by the oupire these twentieth century gothic females are locked in less glamorous rental houses and psychiatric facilities as well as figuratively trapped in their roles as women, and their monster self is revealed as freedom from domesticity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is brought to the countryside to recuperate from what is suggested to be postpartum depression but her husband, John, “a physician of high standing” dismisses as a “temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency” (3-4). Whenever the narrator attempts to acquire some control over her treatment or mental health John scoops her into his arms and calls her his “blessed little goose” or “little girl” (7, 11, 12), and when she insists that she is not getting better and the illness is in her mind he shrugs off her concerns and patronizes, saying, “Bless her little heart!... She shall be as sick as she pleases” (12). The narrator is further isolated in knowing that the countryside is full of “Johns”, such as her brother, who would continue to disregard her as a woman with peculiar fancies and no logical sense. Similarly, Esther in The Bell Jar encounters her own challenges after she’s forced to have electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at a mental health treatment center in an experience that strangely mirrors her own thoughts regarding a woman she watched giving birth towards the beginning of the novel:

Later, Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a twilight sleep.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been. When all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (702)

I told Dr. Nolan about the [ECT] machine and the blue flashes and the jolting and the noise. While I was telling her she went very still.

“That was a mistake,” she said then, “it’s not supposed to be like that.”

I stared at her. “If it’s done properly,” Dr. Nolan said, “it’s like going to sleep.” (1991)

Similar to the woman giving birth, Esther was intended to be ignorant of her pain during her ECT treatments so that she would do them again and again until she was complacent and dull. Because she doesn’t--at least, not at first--she is aware of the pain and refuses further treatment. Consequently, Esther is committed into in a psychiatric hospital where she is forced to undergo ECT until her “mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air” (2255), suggesting that the fight and intelligence, which had originally been sharp and clear in the narrator’s consciousness, had been quelled.

Meanwhile, although John hates for “The Yellow Wallpaper” narrator to “write a word” (6) she begins to rebel by writing in secret and slowly becomes more and more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. She describes a woman trapped inside the paper who appears to be behind bars and only reveals herself when exposed to moonlight. Her journaling reveals her fear of losing her own voice and the woman in the wall reflects the narrator’s fear of losing her autonomy and independence, as the narrator’s also trapped in a room with bars on the windows. The narrator is further infantilized when John forces her to sleep in a former nursery, further taking away her freedom of choice by not allowing her to move into another room. In tearing down the wallpaper which represents the bars holding the women behind the paper, she declares, “I got out at last” (20), signifying her freedom from the confines of social obligation. But by refusing to leave the room she suggests that her freedom has come at the cost of further confinement, arguing the question: is the cure worse than the disease?

While isolation imposed by motherhood can be a condition of the female gothic, so can the story’s lack of mother. In her essay, “The Missing Mother”, Ruth Bienstock Anolik writes, “Although all gothic women are threatened, no women is in greater peril in the world of the Gothic than is the mother” (25). By denying the character a mother and therefore robbing them of a nurturing, dependable parental figure which would foster their independence and curiosity, the female character is left stunted and childlike, likely to be “owned” by a father, husband, or male relative. Anolik goes on to say that an absentee mother in literature leads to “the inability of women to create and to sustain a female tradition within the patriarchy” (30), echoing Chesler’s sentiment that “women are motherless children in patriarchal society”. We can find this in Carmilla, as the stark difference between Carmilla and Laura is brought a step further as Carmilla has a mother, albeit absent, and is comfortable exploring her forbidden desires and true self while Laura herself is motherless and repressive of her sexuality. We again see this in “The Yellow Wallpaper” when the narrator who is kept from her baby it shows that the father has more of a right to her child than she does, resulting in the cause for her mental instability. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Rappaccini's Daughter, the title character, Beatrice, is obedient, beautiful, virtuous, and motherless. Like all the other gothic stories we’ve discussed Beatrice experiences confinement as she’s locked inside her father’s garden of poisonous plants and flowers but unlike the other stories she isn’t mad. It’s her complete lack of maternal parental figures that makes her story different, because unlike the other characters who have had, in some way, a female figure to rely on, Beatrice does not and she’s further isolated from the rest of the world because her father’s mad science experiments have rendered her touch and breath to be poisonous. Because she has no knowledge of life outside the garden she has no desire to rebel, leaving her puerile and adolescent, her complacent manner ideal of a nineteenth century woman. We can see this because, similar to the infantilizing of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Beatrice is viewed by her love interest Giovanni as a child. He describes her as “a girl tending her favorite flower” and “half childish and half woman-like” and having the “tender warmth of a girlish woman” (210, 215, 223), giving Hawthorne’s readers the impression that Beatrice’s youth and naïvetés have allowed her to appear pure and unreachable to an outward character, and therefore void of sin/madness. But, despite this, we also see Giovanni pushing away and rejecting childishness, such as when he dismisses Professor Baglioni after speaking about an Indian woman with the same condition as Beatrice in a tale laden with meaning:

“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life”

“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair. “I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense among your graver studies.” (225)

There are two things that recur throughout Hawthorne’s story and they are deeply connected: poison and referring to Beatrice as “Rappaccini's daughter”. The connection between the two are intermingled because poison is representative of the patriarchy and, by calling Beatrice “Rappaccini’s daughter”, the narrator is deliberately stripping her of an identity and assigning her as a thing of ownership. In Baglioni’s tale about the Indian woman she is “nourished with poisons” since birth until her life had become so imbued in it that she herself became poisonous. Beatrice is alone in the garden and coerced into doing the biddings of her father who cannot tend the plants without himself becoming poisoned, suggesting that the poison she is being nourished with is the poison of the patriarchy. She is forced to take on burdensome duties with a smiling and friendly disposition which is similar to the ideal behaviors surrounding motherhood and domesticity roles at the time. When Beatrice finally rejects her role it’s far too late and she is subsequently killed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the patriarchal system at crushing individuality and identity.

In gothic literature madness and monsters are two sides of a single coin but in the lens of the female gothic they become even more interchangeable. Stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper”,  Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Bell Jar are void of monsters but their use of madness and isolation gives readers a sense of disorientation and fear, while Carmilla reveals that true monsters are not always the expected and they can not only live inside us but can restrict our identity and choice. As we gain a better understanding and compassion for mental illness and sexuality it’s no longer a taboo subject as it was in gothic literature. The language of madness can take many titles: eating disorders, depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, postpartum depression, and phobias name a few. As our knowledge of mental illness grows, so does control over our own female bodies, allowing the female self and mind to slowly regroup, developing their own identities and allowing oneself to no longer view their own selves as monsters.

Works Cited

Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 33, no. 1/2, 2003, pp. 25–43. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3195306.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. 2nd ed. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. Print.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne’s Short Stories. New York: Vintage Classics, 2011.

Matlock, Jann. “Doubling out of the Crazy House: Gender, Autobiography, and the Insane Asylum System in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations, no. 34, 1991, pp. 166–195. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928774.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. UK: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2000. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harpers, 2000. Kindle.

Sheridan Le Fanu, Joseph. Carmilla: A Critical Edition. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013. Print.