“In Gothic writing, women are presented as either innocent victims or sinister predators or are significantly absent.” Consider the place of women in gothic writing in light of this comment.

“In Gothic writing, women are presented as either innocent victims or sinister predators or are significantly absent.” Consider the place of women in gothic writing in light of this comment.Women hold extreme significance in Gothic literature; it is around them that stereotypes can be formed, such as the pursued maiden, or the crazed madwoman. Gothic literature allows opportunity for presentation of gender stereotypes and sexism by placing women in compromising and often taboo situations, while equally demonstrating where women subvert the often narrow-minded traditional expectations set on them by society or the context of the literature. In Gothic writing, there is a tendency to box women into opposing categories, with them either serving as the innocent victim or the sinister predatory character; there is little scope for in between, and the alternative is that women are overlooked completely. Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, often considered the hallmark Gothic novel, provides a typical fragile maiden in the form of Isabella, and to some extent this theme is continued into Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’, with the narrator of her stories usually arising in the form of a victimised female. Equally, these ideas are mocked with the presence of characters such as the protagonist of ‘The Erl King’ and the young bride in ‘Puss In Boots’, who are vindictive and sexually aware in a way that destroys the mould of virginal pathetic women. Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ presents an equally fragmented view of women; Isabella Linton experiences an arc of character development that makes her nigh-on impossible to categorise, while Cathy Earnshaw seemingly represents the spiteful crazed female protagonist, but is more complicated than the one-dimensional stereotype offered by typical Gothic writings. Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ predates the existence of the Gothic genre but is unmistakeably so, and characters such as Lady Macbeth in particular are written as a cautionary tale as a form of social commentary on the desired role of women in society.