LA HEROÍNA GÓTICA ESPAÑOLA ANTE EL MIEDO: DE LA VICTIMIZACIÓN A LA SORORIDAD (1831-2019)

My dissertation examines the relationship between the Gothic and women, in their roles as writers, readers and fictional characters to accomplish different goals connected with the evolution of the women’s rights movement from the 19th to the 21st century in Spain. Applying the definition of the Gothic as a mode of representation that channels women’ anxieties and fears, I create an innovative theoretical framework which combines Cultural Studies and Women´s Studies. I postulate that the archetype of the heroine exposes the confrontations between their desire and basic needs through monstrosity, as the visible representation of patriarchal strains. In the first chapter, I argue that the heroines from the collection Galería fúnebre (1831), by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza, explore their own agency while they flee from patriarchal monstrosity. With an intermediate leap to the short stories written by Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), I postulate in the second chapter that the realist author exposes gender violence through the use of Gothic. In the third chapter, I study the advance of the evolution of the heroine from a position of victim to an executor of the violence in the works of Cristina Fernández Cubas (1945), Pilar Pedraza (1951) and Rosa Montero (1951). In the fourth chapter, I coin the term “spectral sisterhood” to draw attention to the support network of the heroine Mida, in the novel Las madres negras (2018) by Patricia Esteban Erlés, In the last chapter, I argue that the Gothic operates as a mechanism to show precarity and the mental health crisis of young female characters in urban spaces. Altogether, this dissertation offers a historical and diachronic arch of texts that encompasses the evolution of the female character from being considered a mere victim to an active agent that defends her friends even after death by returning to earth and creating a spectral sisterhood. These writers use the Gothic as a device to represent the flight of the heroine from claustrophobic spaces caused by the tensions of patriarchal structures within their socioeconomic context.