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?

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 characters, written as it is by a 20th century feminist. Carter obliges, including characters such as the “indomitable” mother, who had killed both a man-eating tiger and the leonine sadist who threatened her daughter in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, to the Beauty in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ who was headstrong in her own way, possessing “furious cynicism” and independently narrating her plight in first person. These characters are neither ‘virgins’ nor ‘temptresses’, and are certainly not one-dimensional or predictable. Virginal characters that appear in the collection include the helpless narrator of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, who lacks the independence to break free of the rules imposed upon her by the very man who she knows means to kill her, and the unequivocally bland and material Beauty of ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, which is often cited as the weakest story in the collection for its conventional style. However, in these cases, Carter’s inclusion of these female stereotypes serves only to emphasise the progressive nature of the mother in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and the Beauty in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. The girl in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the Marquis’ “lamb chop”, his “bargain”, his “virgin of the arpeggios”, is so weak that she serves to make the headstrong ferocity of her mother all the more pronounced. In a similar way, the determined individuality of the Beauty in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ is made all the more prominent by the conventional and insipid Beauty of ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’. These unconventional women contribute to Carter’s challenging of gender boundaries, which forms the ultimate destination of the collection. Out of all of the stories in the collection, though, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ presents the most complex portrait of women and their roles in respect to men and the classifications in the title. Superficially, the Countess and her servant, the ‘crone’, are both temptresses, enticing “shepherd boys and gipsy boys” to their deaths with “smiles and gestures” and distracted chatters and food, with the Countess calling “Suivez-moi” to lure her victims. However, it is clear that the Countess “helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”, that she has a “horrible reluctance for the role” she plays. In this way, she is just as much a victim as any of those shepherd boys. Similarly, it is assumed that the crone has no choice but to satiate her helpless mistress’ desire for “fresh meat”; they are both trapped into their roles, introducing complexity in their characters which transcend the limits of the reductionist classification of ‘temptresses’. As an interesting side-note, it is the man in this tale who is virginal; indeed, he is protected by it, as “he does not yet know what there is to be afraid of”. This shows Carter further breaking the conventions established in the character of Sin in ‘Paradise Lost’. She not only transfers the virginal stereotype to a man, but endows it with positive connotations. Carter, then, only pigeon-holes women as virgins in order to accentuate the subsequent breaking of these stereotypes, and in other instances makes a concerted effort to break free of these conventions.

The classifications in the title are tagged as ‘one-dimensional’. Sin in ‘Paradise Lost’ fits into these classifications as her motives are fairly straightforward: she fits as a virginal damsel because of the threat Death poses to her; she fits as a temptress because her sexual energy leads her to act seductively. In ‘The White Devil’, however, Webster makes the women Isabella and Vittoria to fit both classifications to illustrate their intelligence. Flamineo may be the primary ‘Machiavel’ in the play, but both women exhibit signs of cunning in order to serve their own ends. Isabella states that she will win her husband Brachiano back by “(charming) his poison… (thereby keeping) him chaste from an infected straying”, that she will keep him faithful by seducing him, and when she later converses with him she states that Brachiano is as “welcome to (her) longing arms,/As (she) to (him) a virgin”. She thus consciously changes her disposition between the two stereotypes in order to achieve her aims. Similarly, Vittoria tempts Brachiano into engineering the deaths of Isabella and Camillo through a “foolish idle dream”, which Brachiano “sweetly… interpret(s)”, in order to bring their adultery to fruition. As with Isabella, she also models herself as a modest, faithful and humble woman in her trial, maintaining her dignity in the face of vicious and sustained attacks from Cardinal Monticelso. Regardless of the fact that Vittoria’s duplicity is more the product of Flamineo’s will than her own, her two-facedness nonetheless shows a complexity and development in character which surpasses the simplicity of the labels of ‘temptress’ and ‘virgin’. These complex amalgams contribute to the centrality of the Machiavellian mentalities in the play, and show that the statements in the title are not always true.

In their own ways, then, all of the Gothic texts in question disprove the view proffered. Sin in ‘Paradise Lost’ is not “either the  virgin or the temptress”; she is a (barely developed, admittedly) combination of the two stereotypes – not quite one-dimensional, then, but very close. Carter incorporates fairly one-dimensional only to highlight the unconventional and complex women they interact with or are set against. The women in ‘The White Devil’ combine the stereotypes as Sin does, rebutting the view in the title, but goes further by making the women conscious of their dichotomy, as they play to both stereotypes to achieve covered motives. Isabella and Vittoria act as they must in order to serve their own ends, and as such cannot be labelled as ‘one-dimensional’: if any such label must be affixed to their characters, “Machiavellian” would be a much better fit. All three texts, then, challenge the given view.