Women

• • ‘The Castle is gloomy, forbidding, a place where maidens find themselves persecuted by feudal barons’ Punter  
• ‘Maiden is another major motif, the idea of somebody defenceless exposed to tyranny and loss’ Punter 
• • ‘The Gothic really enacts is a struggle between the genders, a struggle in which men always have an upper hand’ Punter 
• ‘The Female Gothic hinges on the motif of the castle and its relation to the constrained domestic sphere’ Punter
• • ‘The politics of liberty and progression, freedom from the past and the entrapped heroine’ Milbank 
• ‘The heroine who acts as a focus for social critique is lost in the world of her tale’ Milbank
• ‘Men are still seen as dominating  and controlling the agency by which  women are recognised as intelligent, a woman is intelligent if or because men think she thinks like them’ Cranny-Francis
• • Lucy as a vampire shows her as ‘a voluptuous, unnatural parody of the New Woman as sexual decadent’ Buzwell 
• • ‘Women then are not only virginal victims in the novel, they serve to illustrate the contradictions and ironic tensions within the Victorian value system as a whole.’ Frost