Fogle's article in Gothic Studies argues in sum that anxieties about women's roles--traditional and submissive versus equal and active, following Enlightenment critiques of male privilege such as Wollstonecraft's--are the shaping factor in the generic and formal uncertainties of Christabel's Gothic.
He enlists Kristeva's concept of abjection to characterize Geraldine's horrors, and suggests a phenonenon he calls "abjecting" is a corollary of 1790s anxieties about where women were going in British society.
Is his account too neat, a familiar strategy of seeing the text embodying ideological tensions? Is his use of Kristeva a real engagement with her ideas or more like critical updating without much intellectual substance?
How might Christabel look in light of Williams' theory moves in her reading of the Mariner?
And Kristeva--do we need to think more and look more at what she is about?
Sunday, February 7, 2010
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