Gender Stereotypes In Gothic Literature

The revival of the same Gothic staples in the second half of the twentieth-century contributes to the genre exhaustion. The Gothic has largely exhausted itself when it reproduces the worn-out trappings of female monster that has not only used-up the subversive potential of this tradition but also limited its horror efficacies while losing “the shock-value” and thus contemporary she-monsters have no longer the power to terrify the reader (). Accordingly, Maria Beville claims that postmodern Female Gothic has “‘lost its older intensity’, ‘saturing contemporary culture’ to the point where it provides normative images of ‘Vampire teens’ and soul-hunting cynbogs to the modern consumer” (8). Botting further consolidates Beville’s viewpoint when he explains that

[a] sense of cultural exhaustion haunts the present. An inhuman future is shrouded in old Gothic trappings emptied of any strong charge; past images and forms are worn too thin to veil the gaping hole of objectless anxiety. Gothic fiction, which served as earlier modernity’s black hole and has served up a range of objects and figures crystallizing anxiety into fear, has become too

Displaying its incapacity to shock or defamiliarize the reader, this male critic anticipates the end of the Gothic in the postmodern era that no longer perceives prohibition and taboo as a menace to social norms. In other words, the gothic figures that used to stimulate anxiety and fear are no longer sites of horror and terror. They become amazing and friendly instead, as Botting