SOURCE: Ballaster, Ros. “Wild Nights and Buried Letters: The Gothic ‘Unconscious’ of Feminist Criticism.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 58-70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ballaster discusses “The Monkey” as a work of female Gothic literature.

“As dream or nightmare, or both at once, [sexuality] reigns in our lives as an anarchic force, refusing to be chastened and tamed by sense or conscience to a sentence in a revolutionary manifesto.”¹ Cora Kaplan here announces the “agenda” of feminism in its “second-wave” from 1970 onwards, the attempt to analyse the role of sexuality as the key to both the oppression and liberation of women. That her pursuit of the disturbing signs of sexuality in feminist writing lights upon Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is by no means coincidental, for feminist criticism has consistently found its...