ABSTRACT
There is, this work has argued, a uniquely feminine experience of the sublime possibility of 'nothing happening' that emerges in the eighteenth century out of a certain unstable and equivocal construction of female subjectivity through the discourses of law, sensibility and the sublime. This is not to say, however, that there is a singular, essentially feminine response to dread articulated uniformly through women's fiction in this period and it is to consolidate this point that this final chapter presents readings of two Gothic romances - Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) and Dacre's Zofloya (1806). These texts respond very differently to eighteenth-century constructions of femininity and to the feminine experience of sublime dread. Radcliffe's formulation of the technique of 'terror writing' in opposition to the aesthetic of horror popularised by Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) will be contrasted here with Dacre's appropriation ten years later of the horror aesthetic as a means of critiquing the 'discipline' of sensibility which fatally disempowers her protagonist.
