wandering child

Swoony type, / long hair, bedroom eyes, cheeks like wine.

By night, beloved, tie your heart to mine and let them both in dreams defeat the darkness.

From the late eighteenth century, women writers, aware of their exclusion from traditional historical narratives, have used Gothic historical fiction as a mode of historiography which can simultaneously reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. If the Gothic with its blatant flouting of realism is always already, as I will suggest here, a kind of metafiction avant la lettre, then Gothic historical fiction, the subject of my study, can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history. In the hands of women writers, Gothic historical fiction has offered a way of ‘interpreting,’ or symbolising, what Luce Irigray calls ‘the forgetting of female ancestries’ and of re-establising them within ‘History.’ […] My argument is that the Gothic works as a ‘mode of history’ which has had particular attractions and importance for women writers. Women writers have used Gothic historical fiction with its obssession with inheritance, lost heirs, and illegitimate offspring, to explore the ways in which the ‘female line’ has been erased in ‘History.’ The very literariness of the Gothic, its repetition of, and play with, obviously stylised generic conventions, draws attention to its own constructedness, makes it, indeed, a kind of metafiction. “The fantastic,” as Rosemary Jackson has argued, “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made absent.” Gothic historical novels harness that potential, but root it within the material specificity of history. Here fiction has a close relationship with historiography: the metaphors women historians often use to figure women’s relationship with history - of women being ‘outside,’ 'underneath,’ or 'hidden from’ history - are Gothic images of a past which is obscure, dark, buried, needing to be unearthed. The use of such metaphors by historians, as well as writers of fiction, suggests the importance of the Gothic to the way sin which we think about women and history.

There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

friend: don’t you ever worry about men thinking you’re high maintenance?