Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
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Chiara Battisti,
Chiara Battisti is researcher of English Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Literatures, Department of English Studies, University of Verona. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).Sidia Fiorato is researcher of English Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Literatures, Department of English Studies, University of Verona. Her research interests include law and literature, detective fiction, literature and the visual arts, literature and science, literature and dance. She is a member of the following associations: European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura) and AIRdanza (Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sulla Danza).
Abstract
This essay will analyze how the Gothic representation of wives imprisoned, effaced and even killed by their husbands, literalizes and thereby demystifies the legal abstraction of coverture. Under this legal principle, the wife became an unperson, because her legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. Through a literal or metaphorical death (enclosure in a castle, convent or a madhouse), the Gothic genre portrays the civil death and the effacement of women's legal identity. The trope of the dangerous male relative (mainly the father or the husband) reflects the patriarchal legal reality responsible for the social death of the woman. Specific attention will be devoted to the novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (posthumously published in 1798), in which Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage by which women are exchangeable commodities and are denied their natural rights, and uses the sexualized female body as a revolutionary medium of communication; the essay will then analyze Catherine Perkins Gilmore's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), in which the protagonist, enclosed in a room of a country mansion, entrusts her denounce of the punitive, patriarchal set of institutions that require and actually effect the suppression of women's autonomy and self-expression to her writings (her book of evidence), thus claiming her own individual voice and her struggle for the preservation of her identity.
About the authors
Chiara Battisti is researcher of English Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Literatures, Department of English Studies, University of Verona. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
Sidia Fiorato is researcher of English Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Literatures, Department of English Studies, University of Verona. Her research interests include law and literature, detective fiction, literature and the visual arts, literature and science, literature and dance. She is a member of the following associations: European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura) and AIRdanza (Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sulla Danza).
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Identity
- In Search of a Legal Identity: Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta
- A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula
- Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
- Voice and Identity in the Fairy Tale: Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch
- “Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence
- Between Bioethics and Literature: Representations of (post-)human identities in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood
- Law and Literature: Jewish and Christian models
- The Vitality of Emotional Background Knowledge in Court
- Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination
- Book Reviews
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Identity
- In Search of a Legal Identity: Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta
- A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula
- Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
- Voice and Identity in the Fairy Tale: Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch
- “Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence
- Between Bioethics and Literature: Representations of (post-)human identities in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood
- Law and Literature: Jewish and Christian models
- The Vitality of Emotional Background Knowledge in Court
- Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination
- Book Reviews
