The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (review)

REVIEWS 367 often equate with the sentimental, epistolary novel. Finally, Hoock-Demarle successfully avoids the tendency to label writers according to period. In doing so she usefully sets the work of a writer such as Sophie von LaRoche in a wider context. In assessing the weaknesses of this study, it is important to consider for whom the study was intended. It appears from the virtual absence of a discussion of secondary literature on women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Hoock-Demarle intends her study more for generalists than for specialists. Moreover, as titles and quotations in German are translated into French, it seems clear that her study is primarily directed to a French audience. Finally, the bibliography consists of a relatively short list of general secondary sources; it offers an extensive bibliographic listing of contemporary texts on the French Revolution, however, as well as of memoirs, correspondence, and novels by women between 1790 and 1816, information extremely useful to any scholar of women's literary history. Stephanie B. Pafenberg Queen's University—Kingston Kate Ferguson Ellis. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. University of Illinois Press, 1989. xviii + 226pp. US$24.95 cloth; US$9.95 paper. ISBN 0-252-06048-2. The strength of Kate Ferguson Ellis's The Contested Castle is in its linking of the Gothic novel with a bourgeois ideology that specified the role and place of women in its system. Building on Marxist, feminist, and Foucauldian theoretical principles, she has mapped out ,the genre's dramatis personae and their journeys in relation to the needs of the middle class. David Punter (The Literature of Terror), Terry Lovell (Consuming Fiction), and others have argued convincingly the relevance of Gothic fiction to its reading public in the eighteenth century, but by focusing on the new domestic ideology of the time, Ellis maps out her own original territory: "The strand of popular culture we call the Gothic novel can be distinguished by the presence of houses in which people are locked in and locked out. They are concerned with violence done to familial bonds that is frequently directed against women. ... [W]e can begin by asking what fears and expectations the audience for Gothics might have brought to its reading, and what problems the writers of Gothic were facing, which, for both groups, the haunted house could metonymically represent" (p. 3). The castle becomes the locus, on the one hand, for the idealized female, the Eden of a paradise regained, in contradistinction to the evil of a male capitalist world of competition, and, on the other hand, for a place of terror for those enclosed within. Domestic violence thus speaks through this genre as a hidden truth beneath the veneer of an ideological construct of peace and protection. These castles are failed homes holding those inside constantly at risk while those excluded wander the face of the earth plotting their return and their revenge. The Contested Castle argues that the Gothic novel both reinforced and subverted the ideology of separate spheres. If the bourgeois home was to be a safe place, protecting its inmates from the political, physical, and moral dangers abroad, then, as Ellis argues, it would take "immense vigilance" (p. xi). In Foucault's terms, the Gothic novel, that most popular of forms, provided a mode of vigilance. By foregrounding the home as fortress, "[d]isplacing their stories into an imaginary past, [the Gothic novel's] early practitioners appealed to their readers not by providing 'escape,' but by encoding, in the language of 368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:4 aristocratic villains, haunted castles, and beleaguered heroines, a struggle to purge the home of license and lust and to establish it as a type of heaven on earth" (pp. xi-xii). The middle class's fight against the aristocracy, the Roman Catholics, and the lower orders is metonymicaily played out in these novels, in which the woman's sphere represents bourgeois ideals. On the other hand, this popular form acted subversively to undermine the illusion of security. Both males and females are at peril because of the separation. The Contested Castle charts these struggles in novels written by Horace...