"the Female Gothic narrative of the persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father and in search of an absent mother.3 Studies exploring a distinction between ‘Female Gothic’ and ‘Male Gothic’ had seen this plot as typical of female writers, while male writers tended towards a plot of masculine transgression of social taboos"

"In her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995), another contributor, Anne Williams, argued for the existence of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ formulas, which differ in terms of narrative technique, plot, their assumptions about the supernatural, and their use of horror/terror.5 She looked back through the use made of Greek mythology by Freudian psychoanalysis to locate the origins of the Female Gothic narrative (typified by female point of view, happy ending, explained ghosts and an adherence to terror), in the myth of Psyche and Eros, as opposed to the Oedipal myth which underpins the male version."

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/TheFemaleGothic-ThenNow.pdf

Julia Kavanagh's last words, in French, were: “Oh Mama! how silly I am to have fallen.”

its frustrating to me how womens writing is always derided as sentimental or poorly written when the same flourishes that make them so are celebrated or imbued with Purpose in a man's. im thinking mostly of 18th century literature and how all of the classics save the obvious exceptions are men when women were turning out so much incredible shit that is hard to find now because as a culture we've left them behind. mens stories are permanent, womens are ephemeral. when a man twists convention we make allowances and call it style but if a woman does the same thing, she's seen as derivative. and "derivative" is always reserved for women, whereas men are inspired, men show lineage. and that lineage is only possible because we canonize men and we don't canonize women because we don't respect their art on its own, but only in relation to men's.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/17/unseen-even-of-herself/

"It’s unclear whether Madame Roland believed that a woman’s moral worth stood and fell together with her sexual purity, or whether she was simply ambitious enough to want to avoid disgrace at all costs. Either way, one of her surprising rhetorical moves was to depict her submission to a stifling standard of feminine virtue as a source of its own “voluptuous charm.” In the same way, she can argue that “the study of the fine arts, considered as part of a girl’s education,” should inspire “a taste for hard work … enlarging the range of her interests,” because “that is the way to escape boredom … preserve oneself from the perils of sin and—worse still—of temptation.” Madame Roland rarely distinguishes between the hard work it took for a girl in eighteenth-century France to cultivate a sensibility or widen the scope of her authority and the hard work it took for her to preserve her maidenhood. It’s as if she was more comfortable arguing for the former if she could extol the latter in the same breath."

Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least.

Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, Olympe de Gouges