Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic by Diana Wallace (review)

In Female Gothic Histories, Diana Wallace aims to retrieve a tradition of women’s historical fiction that, she claims, has been excluded from dominant accounts of the genre’s development. Traditionally traced back to the work of Sir Walter Scott, historical fiction, according to Wallace, has “an alternative female genealogy” (5) that begins decades before Scott in Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–1785) and extends all the way to the present. To this assertion she adds a second major claim: women’s historical fiction blurs one of the essential boundaries used by Scott himself, and theorists after him, to define the historical novel — the boundary between history and the Gothic.

“To say something is ‘Gothic’ is at once to imply that it is obsessed with the return of the past, and to define it as unhistorical, not ‘proper’ history, fantasy rather than fact,” Wallace writes. By contrast, historical fiction in the tradition of Scott “is defined partly by its eschewing of the fantastic, the supernatural, and (ironically) the ‘fictional’ in the sense of the invented or imaginary” (4). But the line separating Gothic and history, she argues, was never really that clear; moreover, if we include historical fiction by women in the analysis, we find narratives of the past frequently unfolded through Gothic conventions. According to Wallace, the Gothic works as a “mode of history” for women because its signature components — “the obsession with inheritance, lost heirs and illegitimate offspring” (5) as well as ghosts, murder, sexual violence, abduction, and dispossession — help articulate women’s experiences and their problematic status in both history and historiography.

The Recess, discussed in Chapter 2, offers a fascinating example. The title of Lee’s novel refers to the underground chambers that serve as home and hiding place for Matilda and Ellinor, the twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots. Raised in secrecy, the sisters eventually emerge in the England of Elizabeth I to experience a series of romantic-political misadventures that lead to madness and death. The Recess, Wallace shows, has both literary and historiographic inter-texts. It echoes earlier experiments in spinning fictions around historical figures (Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves [1678], for example) as well as Walpole’s and Clara Reeve’s Gothic tales; and it also engages with eighteenth-century historians, mirroring their focus on the enmity between Elizabeth and Mary but — Wallace argues — complicating the stereotypical image of historic female rulers as driven by petty “feminine” motivations. Even the novel’s most prominently counterfactual element, the existence of Mary’s daughters, “actually takes off from historically documented fact: the Queen of Scots was at one point pregnant, potentially with twins.” Then again, Wallace adds, “the alternative history Lee weaves from this fact is so blatantly untrue as to encourage the reader to look for an alternative, possibly symbolic reading” (41).

That reading hinges on the metatextual implications of the twins’ contested legitimacy and of the violence that threatens, and eventually vanquishes, them and their mother. Lacking the necessary documents to prove their lineage, Lee’s heroines are “ghost-like traces haunting the edges of mainstream written history” (42) and trying to find their way into it. The fragility of an identity that depends on the protocols of historical verification combines with the novel’s multiple viewpoints to expose the fallibility of historical writing itself, especially where women are concerned. Drawing (here and throughout the book) on Luce Irigaray’s claim that the murder of the feminine, epitomized by the myth of Clytemnestra, underpins Western culture, Wallace reads The Recess as unfolding a double narrative of female disappearance. While following the violent erasure of a female line in its plot, Lee’s book also points to the way stories of women vanish from the records of history, or are distorted and trivialized by gender bias.

Chapter 3 discusses Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic short stories, which are set in varied historical times and locations...