Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Female Gothic (First used by Ellen Moers in her essay, "Female Gothic…

- - - - “[S]lavery is a curse to the whites as well as the blacks. It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depths of their degradation” (Jacobs 96).
      - “I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me.” (100).
    - - Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias": The Female Gothic uses heterotopia, which is a place in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 3). That is to say, the female heroine is often confined to a space where a salacious patriarchal figure acts in a manner he is not allowed to beyond the heterotopia i.e. attempts to rape her. Jacobs subverts this conventional use of heterotopia, by using the Garret as a place to undermine the authority of the aforementioned figure.
        
        Glissant, "Closed Place, Open Word": According to Glissant, the Plantation is an enclosed space that, paradoxically, has the “symptoms of extroversion” (Glissant 67). Brent uses the garret as a place to spy on Dr. Flint, a place where she can wage warfare against him. The Plantation, which professes a clear division of power, contains “loopholes” (Jacobs 204) that Brent uses to assert her power.
    - - Sentimental Literature: Brent uses sentimental language ("Give me liberty, or give me death!"): “I seemed to hear my father’s voice come from it [the grave], bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave” (163).
      - Concerning Ellen: "I thought how well it would be for her if she never waked up." (157)
      - Concerning the birth of Benny: “Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy” (114).
      - “It is hell in missis’s house. Pears I can never get out. Day and night I prays to die” (88)