Elise Bürger (1769-1833) and the Gothic Imagination

By challenging the limits of the natural, predictable, and reasonable, the Gothic offered a certain amount of freedom from the referentiality of realist texts, creating an unconventional vision of reality through conventional narrative. This article explores the productive tensions between Gothic elements and realist narrative forms, which were predominantly influenced by developmental novels in the sentimental, moralistic, and didactic traditions. Bürger's use of the Gothic not only allowed for the creation of unconventional female protagonists; it reacted against the obsessive focus on the domestic sphere and its value system and expressed formal displeasure with the increasing staleness of the possibilities of realistic writing conventions at the end of the century. (KAW)