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Abstract
Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian novels display an interest in friendship. My dissertation, "The Prisoner's Friend: Feeling and Judgment in Radcliffe, Austen, Shelley, Bront, and Eliot," interrogates the prevalent critical argument that the Female Gothic genre presents us with central figures (who are literal or figurative prisoners) who liberate themselves through the use of reason. My chapters explore Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I conclude that this emphasis on reason in the Female Gothic is certainly justified when applied to the main romance plot of each narrative, but it is complicated when we examine the minor friendship plot in those very same narratives. From her experience of friendship, the Female Gothic heroine learns to develop an imaginative mode of reason that incorporates feeling, as realized by William Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey. These findings extend received theories of the Female Gothic (which emphasize female reason), to include this mode of reason that incorporates emotion. In addition to the five novels I discuss, I offer a Coda that tests my suggestions using a memoir, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). This Coda demonstrates that many of the concerns of the Female Gothic are still explored in twenty-first century literature.