There is an inherently Gothic lexicon at work in Betty Friedan’s landmark feminist study The Feminine Mystique (1963), connecting ‘the problem that has no name’ with the burial alive of the typical 1960s housewife. That language of unspeakable or unnameable enclosure recurs throughout the female Gothic and transcends the perceived disparity between its popular and literary manifestations. Victoria Holt’s popular Gothic romance, Mistress of Mellyn (1961), is shown to encapsulate just as successfully as more ‘serious’ Gothic texts many of the political concerns of second-wave feminism, including domestic incarceration, sisterhood, objectification by the masculine gaze and the allure of a ‘Super-Male’. Turning to the literary end of the Gothic spectrum, the chapter discusses these themes in selected works by Angela Carter; in Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Rapunzel’ (1971); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); and in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002). Thereafter it examines the interface between second- and third-wave feminist generations, noting how often, in Gothics, older women continue to be associated with monstrosity or sexual redundancy. While, in the Gothic, women are depicted as the victims of libertine sexuality, violation and coercion, this chapter also explores the roles that women themselves perform in the patriarchal exploitation of their sisters.

Centred on the period of the French Revolution (1789–1804), this chapter explains how the revolutionary decade marked a distinct change in the type of fiction available on the French literary market, with the paradoxical increase of translations from the English at a time during which England and France were at war with one another. By focusing on mostly forgotten and overlooked French translators of the English Gothic novel, the chapter shows that French translators of the English Gothic were not only men and women of a certain notoriety, but were also deeply implicated in contemporary political events. Such figures not only actively participated in the circulation of the French new national identity, but also played a significant role in the intercultural exchanges between France and England. Finally, the chapter demonstrates the participation of Gothic novels in the diffusion of republican values, and their coincidence with the sociological emergence of a new and ever-growing ‘democratic’ French readership that had experienced revolutionary events first hand.

This chapter provides a survey of Gothic Spanish literature of the nineteenth century to continue the critical task of re-integrating Spain with the literary trends from which it has been traditionally separated. It traces the role of early translations of novels by British and French authors in creating a literary Gothic language in the early nineteenth century, before turning to the output of indigenous writers such as Agustín Pérez Zaragoza and José de Espronceda, as well as to the development of the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) in the 1840s. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s historical legends (1857–71) mark another milestone in the development of an unmistakably Spanish Gothic tradition. The mad scientists that populate the short stories of José Fernández Bremón and Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara illustrate the country’s ongoing participation in transnational tropes by the century’s close. Similarly, the Gothic becomes an effective tool to denounce women’s lack of agency in the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, a local offshoot of the border-crossing Female Gothic.