Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

ecoming obsessed by the desperate desire to know her husband’s secret or terrorised for
money or for sex, making her feel helpless or confused and frightened. Moreover, she
usually has the feeling that the past keeps catching up with her, and throwing a shadow
over any prospect she might have for happiness and stability.
From this angle, feminist criticism also reports some key issues related to the
questions of identification and recognition and images of femininity within the text in the
female Gothic films. It is argued by feminists that the Gothic heroine lacks independence
or narrative agency, which is accentuated by these issues of recognition and consequent
lack of identity and through the use of multiple (and alterable) images of femininity within
the text. In addition, the female Gothic bears a political charge which is demonstrated, for
example, in the middle part of Rebecca, which deals with her investigation. The film can
also be interpreted as another version of the defeat of matriarchy by a patriarchal order.
However, there is also the position of other feminists, like that of Maria LaPlace, who sees
the female Gothic cycle as a new change in the social and cultural meanings. Moreover,
the Gothic cycle’s female authorial origins and its marketing placed it, she says, within “a
circuit of female discourse (...) by and for women” (in Hanson 2007:66). Therefore, she
concludes that these new contexts and the female Gothic’s divergent mood of romance
allowed Hollywood to explore the Gothic film from the woman’s perspective.
Whether the characterisation of the female Gothic heroine squares with feminist
criticism (particularly feminist theories of the visual and identification), the conflicting
attitude that exists towards the female expressed in film noir is relevant and needs to be
emphasised. The domestic woman of Pitfall, for example, is sexually nonthreatening, but
she is tedious when compared to the thrilling (but dangerous) femme fatale played by
Lizabeth Scott. In both types of narratives, the Gothic romance and film noir, the stability
of the couple and their union seem to be at issue. None of these types really portray the
institution of the family, the concrete representation of traditional values, and as a working
social unit. In most of these cases, in fact, relations are either not typical or are based on
the absence of a family. In the case of the Gothic heroine she appears to have a distinct
responsibility, that of exposing and exploring the prevalence of feminine ideals, the way
that they are understood by other women, and their role in identity formation.
What is also significant about the Gothic film cycle is the thematic and visual
impact it had on the noir narrative, and its resonances for the socio-cultural contexts of the
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