ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that every gothic heroine suffers and much has been made of the gothic heroine's victimization by an aloof and overpowering villain in the novels of Ann Radcliffe and her contemporaries. Some critics have gone so far as to claim that the heroines harbour an attraction for the brooding hypermasculinized villains that torment them. The chapter focuses on gothic fiction from this perspective and explores the relations between powerful female figures and the weak and at times abject gothic heroines to suggest one of the shapes that gothic sexuality might take. Adriana Craciun explores that central to feminist literary criticism on British women writers is the usually unspoken aim to demonstrate that women as a class eschew violence, destructiveness, and cruelty, except in self-defense or rebellion, like Gilbert and Gubar's imprisoned madwoman in the attic'. Craciun goes on to say that critics usually exempt female writers from exploitation and objectivication', which is seen as masculinist' behaviour.
