Women in the Gothic are often presented as one-dimensional as either the virgin or the temptress. How far do you agree with this assessment of the female characters in the Gothic texts that you have studied?

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women in the gothic are often presented as one-dimensional  as either the virgin or the temptress.”                 how far do you agree with this assessment of the female characters in the gothic texts that you have studied?

The role of women in Gothic texts is often reduced to two stereotypes: one is the virginal maiden, vulnerable and innocent, waiting for a man to save her; the other is the temptress, the strong, dangerous predator who is beyond male control. Such is the case in many Gothic texts, including the seminal work ‘Dracula’. While this is the case in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, in Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Webster’s ‘The White Devil’ it is not always possible to classify women in such a clear way. The females in both texts are rarely one-dimensional, and if they ever are (as they occasionally are in Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’) they are made so consciously in order to contribute to a pointedly more complex destination.

There are very few females in Books I and II of Milton’s epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’. Of course, Eve is alluded to in passing (“… say first what cause/Moved our great parents in that happy state/… to fall off from their creator”), but in both books only one female appears in the course of the narrative: Sin. Even from her initial description, it appears that she is not ‘one-dimensional’, that she is a complex character, though admittedly not as complex a character as Satan. She is shown to be beautiful, a “fair” woman, but also “foul”, with a “serpent armed with mortal sting” and “hell hounds… about her middle round”. This description of Sin as half beautiful, half terrible is indicative of a split personality; indeed, there is evidence of her being both a damsel in distress and a seductress. References to her as a “snaky sorceress” having “attractive graces (which won over) “the most averse”, added to the fact that Satan took incestuous and sexual “joy” with her, seem to align her to the position of temptress; her rape at the hands of Death (for which Milton employs a distorted syntax to mimic the confusion of the rape and show her vulnerability) and her final submission to Satan, conversely, show her to be a more helpless creature. Milton, then, has incorporated both stereotypes into one character, the only female character in the first two Books. When it also take into consideration that Sin is an allegorical character, more of a symbolic plot device than a developed character in the way Satan is, it becomes clearer that Sin is not a complex character, despite her dichotomous nature. She is merely a symbolic combination of two stereotypes, and as such does not do much to disprove the statement in the title, instead showing that the only woman to appear in the first two books of one of the greatest poems in English literature is, at best, two-dimensional. Satan is the complex anti-hero to whom Milton devotes most of the first two Books developing as a human character; Sin is far less important to the overall poem, and as such Milton leaves her as a fairly undeveloped amalgam of two Gothic stereotypes.

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With Eve hardly being the best character to show that women on Gothic texts can be more than temptresses and innocent virgins (as she combine these roles as well), it seems that Milton has made the women in ‘Paradise Lost’ conform to stereotypes. Part of the reason for this may be the simple facts that ‘Paradise Lost’ was written in the 17th century, a time when women were, for the most part, very much subordinate to men, and that Milton himself was a man. This being the case, one would expect ‘The Bloody Chamber’ to include stronger and more complex female ...

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