REORIENTING THE FEMALE GOTHIC: CURIOSITY AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

This dissertation investigates the mode of the Female Gothic primarily by examining how texts utilize the role of curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge, paying close attention to how female characters employ these attributes. Existing criticism is vital to understanding the Female Gothic and in presenting the genealogy of feminist literary criticism, and yet I argue, this body of criticism often produces elements of essentialism. In an attempt to avoid and expose the biases that essentialism produces, I draw from Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer phenomenology to investigate the connections between the way that women pursue and circulate knowledge through education and reading and writing practices in the Female Gothic. What women are allowed access to these practices, and what women are denied access? I argue that curiosity positions characters towards objects of knowledge in a positive and active way. I trace the trajectory of the Female Gothic beginning with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. I also examine the following novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters. I end the dissertation by examining the Female Gothic’s impact on the pop cultural imagination by analyzing the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its surrounding transmedial texts, such as the comics published by Dark Horse and Boom, and the podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer.


INTRODUCTION
"Curiouser, and curiouser!" -Lewis Carroll "Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment it is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive." -Angela Carter "[Buffy attempts to find out the secret ingredient of Doublemeat burgers.] Buffy: Sorry, I was just curious.
Manny the Manager: Curiosity killed the cat.
Some of the oldest stories in the world serve as warnings or rebukes against the dangers of curiosity. Pandora's curiosity unleashes countless ills upon society, while Eve's curiosity causes the fall of humankind. And yet, curiosity is the impetus for the greatest discoveries in our world. If people did not have the drive, the desire to know, would we have ever evolved into the creatures we are now? In our present moment, when the answer to many questions is at the tip of our fingers in the shape of a smart phone, are we more curious than ever before or are we in the period of the "Great Stagnation" as Tyler Cowen a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia has called our contemporary moment. Cowen argues that it is harder now to raise the education level of the populace. Rather than just getting more people to school and university, the new challenge is finding ways of making more people hungry to learn, question, and create. Has our curiosity died in the gleam of a 2 smartphone? More people are attending university than ever before, but are we actually creating curious and inquisitive thinkers or slaves to a bureaucratic system? puzzling over them, in some cases for centuries, hence the world of literary studies, and in a non-academic setting, fandom communities. These two worlds do not have to be segregated, for example, the aca-fan (an academic fan) bridges this divide, but I am merely showing the different ways that stories incite curiosity in individuals, and in turn how this curiosity creates communal spaces where people come together to discuss stories. A story produces a desire to know more about the world created within the pages. I argue that the way to overcome the cultural stagnation that Cowen and Phelps argue we are experiencing is through an investment in storytelling. Stories work to push us to learn more about others and the world around us. They lead us into curiosity spirals, where the whole world seems like questions refracting back upon us in a multitudinous fashion. Story pushes us to learn about other ways of life and may distract us from the monotony of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds. The love of stories creates academic disciplines and fandoms wherein communities are 3 created. In these communities, curiosity urges people to discuss and debate multiple possibilities of a word, a turn of phrase, or the actions of a character. Curiosity pushes us past stagnation and into an urge to discover, and stories help ignite this drive.
For the purpose of this dissertation, I investigate the way that curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge help to liberate women from patriarchal constraints of thinking.
Curiosity in women is often denigrated. We need to look no further than the stories of Pandora and Eve mentioned above to see that women's curiosity has traditionally aligned with negative ramifications. The curiosity of women is frequently relegated to the realm of gossip or frivolity, but I argue for its ability to be an empowering agent in female character's journeys in the realm of the Female Gothic.
This dissertation begins with the assumption that, while existing criticism is vital to understanding the Female Gothic and in showing the genealogy of feminist literary criticism, it often produces elements of essentialism. In an attempt to avoid and expose the biases that essentialism produces, I draw from Sara Ahmed's theory of queer phenomenology to investigate the connections between the way that women pursue and circulate knowledge through education and reading and writing practices in the Female Gothic and how curiosity positions characters towards objects of knowledge in a positive and active way. Ahmed's theory addresses questions concerning the way that social relations are arranged spatially and the disruption that can occur by refusing to follow accepted paths. Texts are to be examined from both British and American literature as a means of interrogating the geographical progression of the mode as it grows and develops from its British beginnings into 4 contemporary American popular culture. Re-orienting the Female Gothic allows for a turning away from the essentializing paths taken by former scholars.
In 1976, Ellen Moers coined the term Female Gothic in order to successfully carve out space in the literary canon for women writers engaged with the Gothic mode. The term would grow in Gothic scholarship to encapsulate more than Moers's simple definition of the term: "the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic" (90). Moers's work created a space for women writers to be inducted into the literary canon, but also helped advance the academic considerations of the mode of the Gothic itself.
However, since the 1990s the term Female Gothic is much contested as many critics argue that it limits our view of the literature. For Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, the term Female Gothic is essentializing and becomes too beholden to archetypes.
Furthermore, they argue that the critical mass around the genre of Female Gothic has also tended to be bound to second wave feminists' political goals and particular psychoanalytic readings of texts (2000). While the term Female Gothic has and continues to be contested, many critics have offered other names for the mode such as "feminist Gothic" (Hoeveler, 1998), "lesbian Gothic" (Palmer, 1999), "women's Gothic" (Clery, 2000), and "postfeminst Gothic" (Brabon & Genz, 2007). Others such as Wallace and Smith (2009) argue that Female Gothic should be retained as it is vital to acknowledge the roles second-wave feminist critics played in bringing both women writers and the genre of the Gothic into the academic fold.
Another criticism of the collection of texts that tend to make up the Female Gothic is that they have often been analyzed through essentialized gendered lenses 5 that have reified gendered depictions of masculine aggression and female victimization (Hoeveler, 1998). Historically, the criticism surrounding the Female Gothic is interested in representative metaphors of women's experiences, examples of the domestic, anxieties about the boundaries of self, and critiques of capitalism in relation to gender. The prior scholarship on the Female Gothic serves as important scaffolding to my project as it helps enrich our understanding of women's access to knowledge, female victimization, oppressive patriarchal structures, and more, but I also want to push back on some of the more essentialized readings that are produced in the scholarship concerning the Female Gothic. I am retaining the term Female Gothic as a means by which to characterize a set of canonical texts, but also to examine texts outside of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that clearly show the influence of the Female Gothic. I am not interested in maintaining gender essentialism, but I am interested in continuing to investigate the impact and legacy of women writers on the Gothic. Gender is inextricably bound to this mode, and as such turning a blind eye to gendered issues would be folly.
The knowledge that women are permitted to possess in eighteenth and nineteenth century novels of the Female Gothic is highly monitored; any act of transgressive learning is shaped as disobedience and can be seen as an undisciplined act of reaching for forbidden knowledge, although I work to show how this is not always the case, especially in the case of Emily from Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. However, in subsequent twentieth century reworkings of the Female Gothic, the curiosity displayed by female characters no longer emphasizes her transgressive disobedience, but more so, the largely damaging effects of patriarchal control and the 6 harms that restricting knowledge from certain groups has upon society as a whole. By employing Sara Ahmed's theory of queer phenomenology that looks at the way we orient ourselves towards both physical and metaphysical objects, I tease out the way that contemporary Female Gothic reworks the representations of curiosity by both characters and authors in a self-reflexive manner, which ultimately produces a more complex view of the essentialized gendered assumptions that appear in the body of scholarship on the Female Gothic.
One of Ahmed's generative questions is that the "body gets directed in some ways more than others. We might be used to thinking of direction as simply which way we turn, or which way we are facing, at this or that moment in time. Direction then would be a rather casual matter. But what if direction, as the way we face as well as move, is organized rather than casual?" (15). Ahmed's use of the term "organized" focuses on the way that the state and other forms of community require bodies to go in a particular direction. Drawing from Judith Butler, who in turn draws from Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation, Ahmed is not just interested in the subjects who turn around when hailed by police in Althusser's famous example. When this event takes place, the person becomes a subject and is called into being. Butler reads this as "turning" upon hearing oneself as the subject of the address. While the physicality of the movement is not necessarily regarded by Althusser or Butler, Ahmed is interested in which way a person turns, putting physical and proximal questions into the act of the turn. Taking my cue from Ahmed's ideas about "organized" direction and the action of "turning" to objects, I trace the way that female characters' curiosity in the Gothic mode orient them to specific ways of pursuing knowledge. Does the character's pursuit of knowledge cause them to turn and follow a different line of thinking?
Curiosity emerges in the Bluebeard myth and is refashioned in numerous Gothic texts. Curiosity becomes an operative term to consider the way that female characters in the novels are impelled towards certain modes of knowledge. Curiosity itself can be linked to associations of desire and thus can be used to chart new lines of desire for women in the gothic that have gone unnoticed. For example, curiosity itself was gendered well into the eighteenth century. Barbara Benedict asserts that while male curiosity is linked to active movement and the progression of knowledge, "Female curiosity was idle, ignorant, prurient, useless or even socially destructive" (118). However, I argue that the Gothic mode formulates women's curiosity as an active pursuit of truth and understanding. In Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily's curiosity impels her to uncover horrifying secrets and correct past wrongs, while also physically propelling her out of domestic confines and into a physical journey that allows her to experience different environments, and links her to the active movement associated with male curiosity.
The journeys embarked on by Gothic heroines, as well as the lines inscribed by those journeys, may be fruitfully investigated drawing from Ahmed's contemplation of the nature of lines and how we follow and create them. Lines are created by the repeated action of following the same path. In landscape architecture, lines that deviate from the planned path are called "desire lines," lines that, according to Ahmed "describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow" (19-20).
8 Deviating from the planned path helps to "generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways. Such lines are indeed traces of desire; where people have taken different routes to get to this point or to that point" (Ahmed 20). Examining how knowledge and curiosity circulate in the Female Gothic, I want to ask: How does the pursuit of knowledge in the Female Gothic retrace conventional lines or present new desire lines? By employing Ahmed's theories as a method to examine the Female Gothic, I trace the re-orientations of subjectivity as seen through female characters' relationship to curiosity, knowledge deployment, and the ways in which knowledge is circulated in a manner that has not yet been adequately studied in the existing scholarship.
Retaining the overarching term of Female Gothic allows me to examine texts within the defined mode, as well as the effects that these texts have had on subsequent forays in the ever-widening realm of the Gothic. This permits a close interrogation of Much scholarly criticism concerning the formation of the mode of the Gothic consists of a gendered reading, separating the mode into two distinct gendered spheres: the male and the female Gothic (Moers, 1976, Fleenor, 1983, Miles, 1995, Becker, 1999, Clery, 2000, Heiland, 2004, Blackford, 2005, Brabon & Genz, 2007, Delucia, 2009, Bloom, 2010. For example, Robert Miles (1995Miles ( , 2000 uses quintessential Gothic texts such as Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as prime exemplars of the gendered differences of Gothic texts that subsequently lead to divergent narrative stakes and narrative structures. Male Gothic is often aligned with horror elements, while the Female Gothic is often aligned with elements of terror (Miles, 2000). The Female Gothic, made famous by Radcliffe, included the generic traits of the explained supernatural phenomenon and a return to normalcy at the end, which often led to a marriage or some kind of reunion. Much of the scholarship on the Female Gothic has run parallel to second wave feminist efforts to recuperate texts by women writers into the canon of British and American literary works (Moers, 1976, Gilbert & Gubar, 1979. The "Male Gothic" (exemplified by Matthew Lewis) included tropes such as the supernatural phenomenon that remains supernatural and is never explained and generally includes more gore and violence.
The "Male Gothic" often ends in horror and a lack of restoration at the end of the novel. The insistence on classifying many early 18 th and 19 th century Gothic texts as either male or female Gothic novels concretizes gendered readings of the Gothic and limits the potential of alternative readings.
However, with the rise of queer theory in the academy in the latter part of the twentieth century, the Gothic was freed in part from the constricting binary readings of the male and female Gothic. Hughes and Smith have argued that the Gothic is and has always been queer, though not only in the sexual sense. "The queerness of Gothic is such that its main function is to demonstrate the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream, between reciprocal states of queerness and non-queerness" (4).
Queerness, in this case, unsettles the binaries of previous criticism of Gothic fiction and disrupts the idea of absolutes when it comes not only to gender but also to the way that characters may spatially be oriented. What does their representation of spatial orientation produce? By applying a queer phenomenological lens to Gothic texts that have previously been considered as Female Gothic, I plan to interrogate these texts and their relationships to each other to recognize new "desire lines" and new points of connection between the texts. In other words, what do we overlook when we reside within the familiar-in this case, the Female Gothic? What are the things that have been left out of analysis by thinking along the lines of feminist metaphors of victimization, erasure, and domestic spaces?
Furthermore, by employing the theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology, what can be uncovered when well-worn narrative paths such as those present in the Female Gothic can be made to re-orient themselves? Bringing to those texts Ahmed's productive questions concerning objects of perception and how our consciousness becomes turned towards objects and how these objects then make impressions upon us begins to relocate this body of work. "Orientations involve directions toward objects that affect what we do, and how we inhabit space" (Ahmed 28 to or to orient themselves to practices of reading and writing? How does curiosity work to direct the characters to these practices? How does curiosity begin to etch new desire lines onto the familiar mode of the female gothic? The character's relation to knowledge makes them active participants in the story with a sense of agency, as opposed to the victimized depictions of Female Gothic characters in past criticism. The first chapter of this study titled "Mapping the Discourse of the 'Female is Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). This text has been selected as it is a canonical touchstone text within Female Gothic criticism and helps to define the early foundations of the mode, while also pointing a way towards the rethinking about the way curiosity and education is structured. In order to complicate and subvert the gendered dimensions within the Gothic mode, the way curiosity emerges in female characters is carefully traced. Focusing on curiosity complicates previous gendered readings of the female Gothic that stigmatize curiosity and aligns it with gossip (Benedict, 2002). This chapter also examines the literary genealogy that is produced by Brontë's Jane Eyre. Ahmed's interrogations concerning queer genealogy aids in re-orienting the links between these texts. Ahmed's theorization of lines and alignments also shapes the way that these texts can be read. As Ahmed argues, when lines are transposed on top of one another, alignment occurs (66). However, if one line does not appear, it gives the general effect of being "wonky or even queer" (66). Focusing on the mechanizations of curiosity and the progression of what impels these female characters away or towards knowledge retraces the lines of the female Gothic in new ways. While earlier Gothic texts aligned knowledge with depictions of male gendered consciousness or as violent transgressions, the twentieth-century works begin to reshape the relationship between knowledge, curiosity and the inherent victimization of the female. Diane Long Hoeveler (1998) suggests that women in the Gothic move from victim as seen in early progenitors of the mode into the monstrous feminine that is displayed in the twentieth century. Two novels and one novella that show this shift 14 are Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca (1938), Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979), all of which can be seen as extending the Bluebeard motif from Jane Eyre and reshaping it along different lines to call attention to altered fears surrounding the loss of autonomy and the way in which curiosity impels these women down active paths of resistance against previously inscribed gender norms. While critics such as, Becker (1999), Blackford (2005), Bonikowski (2013), Brabon & Genz (2007), Clery (2000), Davison (2009) Delmotte (1990, Delucia (2009), Fleenor (1983, Gilbert & Gubar, (1979), Heiland (2004), Hoeveler (1998), Miles (1995), and Pyrhönen (2010)  Ahmed's queries of who is allowed to face the writing desk or table. The scholars' inquisitive natures urge them towards specific orientations of understanding the supernatural through scholarly discourse. These women are also allowed to orient themselves towards research and the writing desk in more direct manners than their literary predecessors.
Aside from the self-reflexive qualities of the new Gothic scholar heroine, the 21 st century continues to re-negotiate the way knowledge is pursued and circulated in the Gothic. Octavia Butler's Fledgling (2005) begins with Shori, a powerful child vampire suffering from amnesia after a brutal attack on her family leaving her the lone survivor of her clan. Shori's curiosity about her past is more than a wish to fill in the gap of her knowledge, but also necessary for her survival as she is still being hunted by the perpetrators of the attack that destroyed her family and her memory. Without her family as support, Shori begins to build a new family. Community is essential for Shori's survival and also as a device to help her reclaim her memories. Elizabeth Lundberg argues that in the sex scenes between Shori and Wright that there is a "language of both freedom and obligation…the sex scene also highlights the novel's rhetoric of consent and control" (566,2015). This focus on the rhetoric of sexuality within the novel becomes a site for knowledge resumption as Shori must relearn everything due to her memory loss. Analysis of Shori's symbionts (i.e., the humans that enter into a symbiotic relationship with Shori) help explore Ahmed's concept of orientation to otherness: "the otherness of things is what allows me to do things 'with them.' What is other than me is also what allows me to extend the reach of my body" (115). Later on in the novel, the reader learns that Shori is the work of multiple science experiments. The Gothic heroine as a moral vampire and a more fully evolved being also complicates the previous incarnations of the monstrous feminine popularized in twentieth-century texts. Issues pertaining to colonialism and "othering" play a large part in the way knowledge is pursued as well.
Furthermore, the perception of self as monstrous but something to rejoice in is presented in Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017). Karen Reyes spends her time carefully chronicling and detailing everything that goes on in her neighborhood in '60s Chicago while she also tries to solve a murder mystery. In between Karen's sleuthing episodes, she also reads as many horror magazines as she can find. Importantly, Karen is depicted as a precocious werewolf as this is the way she sees herself, not as monstrous, but as something stronger and better than human.
Being a monster is a chosen method of representation. Karen's knowledge of the world around her comes from horror magazines, stories from her neighbors, and observations she records from around her neighborhood. The way Karen pursues and uncovers information positions her in a remarkable way. Karen sees things that others miss by looking underneath the facades of society. Importantly, Karen is also a child protagonist and the inclusion of this text adds to the conversation of not only women character's orientations towards curiosity and knowledge revelation, but girls as well.
Furthermore, this text is a work of graphic fiction and allows for a conversation about how the form of the female gothic has developed over time.  Radcliffe (1826) argued that she disappeared from the literary scene because she ultimately valued "personal character above literary fame" as many journalists of her time "attacked her as a sorceress responsible for corrupting the minds of her young readers" (Norton 4 She argues that terror is characterized by "obscurity" in its treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy that leads the reader toward the sublime.
Horror, in contrast, "nearly annihilates" the reader's responsive capacity with its displays of atrocity (Radcliffe, Ultimately, the way that physical space is portrayed in the Female Gothic illustrates heroines inhabiting constructions of confinement. Gilbert and Gubar focus on images of enclosure and escape, and how these images in the novels are also mirrored by the women writers themselves, stuck and enclosed by the paradigms of patriarchy. Women writers were both trapped in the physical sense of having to be the ladies of the home, thus enclosed in the architectural spaces of the male-dominated society, but also by male writers and their poetic traditions (Gilbert & Gubar, xi). Gilbert and Gubar go on to argue that "heroines who characteristically inhabit mysteriously intricate or uncomfortably stifling houses are often seen as captured, fettered, trapped, even buried alive…[the] imagery of enclosure reflects the woman writer's own discomfort, her sense of powerlessness, her fear that she inhabits alien and incomprehensible places" . Gilbert and Gubar's work is predominantly concerned with expressing the inexpressible in female experience, and as Wallace and Smith argue offer a "universalising interpretation of women's writing" (2). Furthermore, Fleenor places much weight on the relationship of the mother as one of the defining aspects of the female experience. She argues that "this relationship defined and shapes the lives of women and the works that they write" (Fleenor 27).
Additionally, Fleenor calls attention to the dichotomies that form the Female Gothic: "the patriarchal dichotomy between the supposed complementary female and male, the feminist dichotomy between woman's prescribed role and her desire and hunger for change, and the dichotomies of good and evil projected by men upon women and consequently internalized by them" (28). Fleenor's definitions and the ones found in the subsequent arguments by the authors in the collection provide a more nuanced exploration of the field of the Female Gothic. Female Gothic novels promote a feminist ideology based on the projection of professional femininity, yet also becomes the site of the origin of victim feminism.
Hoeveler argues that the heroines of the Female Gothic masquerade as blameless victims of a fraudulent and tyrannical patriarchal society while employing masochistic strategies to triumph over that structure. Hoeveler considers how female writers engage "the distinctly social and political realms of female-created economies, the ideological reconstruction of the body, the family and society at large" (xii).
Furthermore, Hoeveler defines Gothic Feminism as deliberate strategies of "female power through pretended and staged weakness" (7).
The work of these scholars of the Female Gothic became the foundation of the scholarship and helped to inaugurate a flourishing field of feminist criticism and literary studies. But more recent scholarship regarding the terrain of the Female Gothic has sought to contest many of the arguments made by the earlier vanguard. The name, Female Gothic, itself has become a point of some contention. The proliferation of other names for the Female Gothic has flurried since the 1990s due to poststructuralist's misgivings and qualms surrounding identity categories. Some of the attempts to deconstruct the old model of the Female Gothic and provide a new terrain have included the "lesbian Gothic" (Palmer, 1999), "women's Gothic" (Clery, 2000), and "postfeminist Gothic" (Brabon & Genz, 2007). While other critics such as Wallace and Smith (2009) argue that the "Female Gothic" should be retained as it is vital to acknowledge the roles second-wave feminist critics played in bringing both women writers and the genre of the Gothic into the academic fold.

Re-orienting the Female Gothic
In order to re-examine the Female Gothic, I draw on Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006 immobilizes Emily, and is a detriment to her progress. While the curiosity associated with consuming knowledge and utilizing the education she receives from her father and her travels is critical for Emily's survival.

Gendered Minds, Education, and Curiosity
The Mysteries of Udolpho hinges on the mind of Emily St. Aubert. It is Emily's mind that guides the narrative of the text and it is Emily's mind that the reader is asked to indulge in readerly sympathy with. Radcliffe uses the representation of Emily's mind as a didactic model of how to properly restrain sensibility and impulsive emotions which are coded as feminine ways of thinking as she is asked instead to adopt the more masculine qualities of reason and rationality. Emily's mind serves twofold, as both a model of instruction and a warning to female minds-warning them of the dangers of excessive sensibility. It is through this sympathetic readership that we as readers are given instruction on how to think and at the same time, as we identify with Emily's mind, we become enmeshed in the pleasure of mutual sympathy.
Furthermore, Emily is taught to repress her more female inclinations of the mind, such as fancy, and rely on a more stereotypical masculine mind. Her lack of female fancy and the repression of her female mind garners Emily praise throughout the novel and allows male characters in the novel as well to readily sympathize with her. While at first it would seem that Radcliffe ultimately champions a male consciousness and denigrates the female mind, we can see that Radcliffe never fully abandons either way 33 of thinking, but instead creates a tension between the two that is never fully settled.

David Sandner argues:
The Mysteries of Udolpho puts into play a number of paired opposites related to the supernatural and the natural-superstition and science, the sublime and the beautiful, horror and terror, passion and sense-but never just to banish one term to uncompromisingly embrace the other; rather, Radcliffe seeks to hold opposites in tension-elevating one term, but never letting go of either.
This prevalence of tensions between diametrically opposed items, I argue, pushes even further into the discourse of gendered minds. Emily is more a hybridization of both sexes in regards to her consciousness, but so is our male protagonist, Valancourt.
Valancourt's excessive emotions often get the best of him and his overabundance of sensibility at times aligns him with the stereotypical female gendered mind. These gender crossings in Valancourt's and Emily's states of mind can be seen as valorization and not a denigration of the female consciousness. Instead, it promotes a kind of parity between the two consciousnesses; one cannot exist without the other.
In order to understand the way that Radcliffe is thinking about and using sympathy it is helpful to consider Adam Smith's theories concerning sympathy. For Smith, sympathy is heavily reliant and dependent on the use of the imagination. which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body .
Therefore, the only way sympathy operates is by the use of our imagination. We can never actually feel what the other person feels, but must use our imaginations to offer up an idea about what it may feel like in their experience, but of course we have only our experience to base this on, therefore we have circuitously ended up back at imagination. The role of a reader is obviously one that is invested in the role of the imagination. Through reading, we are able to produce a sympathy with literary characters and we are able to live safely but vicariously through them. Since the role of sympathy is located in the imagination, it seems only natural that readers must use sympathy as way in which to invest themselves in the novel. Sympathetic readership is the way that fictional characters can instruct readers. It is through this ability to sympathize that the reader becomes a part of the narrative in some ways themselves, the mimetic response of reader and heroine is one way that sympathetic readership is enacted. Smith tells us: Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator [in our case the spectator is the reader of Emily's trials and tribulations]. Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their Smith's analogy of literary characters, or, as he calls them "heroes of tragedy and romance," help us to think about the sympathy that is tempered through the act of reading. Smith also broadens the way that we can think about sympathy by stating that: Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever. (13) Thus, it is not just with Emily's sorrow that we sympathize, but all of her moments of passion. Being able to sympathize with a myriad of Emily's emotions opens up the connection the reader shares with Emily. Furthermore, this echoed in early reviews of the novel as Moers states "no matter how often her [Radcliffe] story threatens to be about horrid deeds, her heroine stands in the foreground of her books, pure, tenderminded, elegant, and conscious of the etiquette each situation demands" (135).
Sensibility is privileged in Radcliffe's Emily, and yet at the same time her flights into fancy and imagination are what allow the reader to experience the specific terror of the Gothic that was to become Radcliffe's special brand. Therefore, Radcliffe produces a split in the character's psyche which allows the reader to witness noble actions of sensibility but also indulge in the imagination of fancy, and the tantalizing rewards that curiosity bestows. Emily's curiosity spurs on the actions of the novel, but the form of a Gothic novel itself plays upon a reader's curiosity. The mysteries of a Gothic novel compel a reader to continue consuming the novel in order to find out what it is that Emily sees behind the veil or what is the source of the mysterious music? The reader's experience of the novel is predicated on an urge of discovery and curiosity.
Importantly, Emily's mind is not the only model for sensibility and curiosity that we witness. Emily and her father's mind are bonded in the novel first, and later Emily and Valencourt will be shown to have similar minds. Pleasure is shown to be derived from being able to sympathize with another. The pleasure one derives from witnessing another person describe an emotion that sparks recognition in the self is immensely gratifying. As Smith states "But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a 37 fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast" (17). The pleasures in having another understand your feelings about an event or object helps to alleviate feelings of isolation but also shows the connection of minds. It is also imperative that Radcliffe shows these sympathetic gestures happening between genders as this provides a unifying element into the equality of gendered minds. One of the first moments of shared pleasure in sympathy in the text occurs between Emily and St. Aubert:

40
The readerly sympathy and connection with Emily's mind starts early in the novel as Emily is explicitly instructed in how to control one's mind and especially gird the mind against moments of excessive feeling. St. Aubert watches Emily carefully as she grows up and determines that Emily is too susceptible to the dangers of excessive emotions, she appears to be inclined to these excessive emotions and fancies naturally through merely being born female. The role of fancy is often in a denigrating manner associated with women. With the loss of St. Aubert's sons, the scrutiny of Emily's growth is focused on her mind as the way to provide her with future success in her life, but also for the futurity of his own family line.
One daughter was now his only surviving child; and, while he watched the unfolding of her infant character, with anxious fondness, he endeavoured, with unremitting effort, to counteract those traits in her disposition, which might hereafter lead her from happiness. She had discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace. As she advanced in youth, this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits, and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty, and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposition. But St. Aubert had too much good sense to prefer a charm to a virtue; and had penetration enough to see, that this charm was too dangerous to its possessor to be allowed the character of a blessing. He endeavoured, therefore, to strengthen her mind; to enure her to habits of self-command; to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, and to look, with cool examination, 41 upon the disappointments he sometimes threw in her way. While he instructed her to resist first impressions, and to acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counterbalance the passions, and bear us, as far as is compatible with our nature, above the reach of circumstances, he taught himself a lesson of fortitude; for he was often obliged to witness, with seeming indifference, the tears and struggles which his caution occasioned her. (Radcliffe 5) St. Aubert's training of Emily's mind is described as an "unremitting effort." Thus St.
Aubert's education and evaluation of Emily's mind becomes his full time job in a sense, he has no other occupation as he has been retired in the country for some time and now puts forth all his effort and energy into shaping and strengthening Emily's susceptible female mind. St. Aubert's steady instruction and evaluation of Emily's mind also produces the way that the patriarchal figure (St. Aubert) is the one with the knowledge and foresight to be able to see how best to shape Emily's mind. St. Aubert is granted the authority in the text to be the mind instructor. It is through the counsel and advice of the father figure that Emily is shown how to best instruct her mind. St.
Aubert also sees the problems inherent in Emily becoming an "interesting object" as opposed to a virtuous person. The objectification of Emily St. Aubert shows in the way that other people interact with her. St. Aubert can see how Emily can be viewed as an "interesting object" but then it is through St. Aubert's reading of Emily's mind (his "too much of good sense") that he decides that this "charm" is not really a "virtue." Therefore, Emily must control these seemingly feminine urges and "strengthen" her mind in the masculine sense, in order to not be merely an object. The strengthening then of one's mind is in rejecting "first impulses" and "first impressions" we get the sense that for Emily to educate and control her mind is to go against the natural first impulses of her being. These natural moments are the feminine impulses of her mind that St. Aubert urges her to fortify her mind against.
Furthermore, the narrator continues to inform us of the ways in which St.
Aubert shapes Emily's mind by instruction in academic subjects. The education of a female mind was not as openly determined in the year 1584 when the novel takes place. The pursuit of Emily's mind in the academic realm is coded as a male pursuit. Pinch's insight about the nature of the Gothic novel itself helps us to further think about this text as a didactic form of emotional response. It is compelling to note that Emily receives an education on par with that of men of her time.
One of the hallmarks of the early Female Gothic was in the idea of didacticism.
Ann Radcliffe herself valued propriety of moral character and left the literary world after her character was besmirched by critics. Radcliffe, appeals to the readers in her didactic move of teaching sensibility, as she also works to affright the readers with moments of intense terror and spur them on through engaging their curiosity; however, the lesson of modulation is never far away. As Emily is taught how to think and how to behave, the reader is also taught to emulate these same behaviors and thoughts. The reader is taught to sympathize with Emily, to share in her joys, sorrows and other passions, but also to learn with her and to be educated with her, to be formed with her-thus a readerly sympathy emerges. Tania Modleski argues that: One of Ann Radcliffe's explicit purposes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, the prototype of the famed Gothic, was to warn women against indulging in paranoid fancies and to extort them to keep busy in their solitude, the breeding ground for such fancies. Over and over again, Emily St. Aubert's superstitious fears are quieted as they are shown to have quite reasonable explanations (63).
Radcliffe's motivation, therefore, is to show the fallacies of the mind that occur when one allows their mind to fall into the indulgent ground of fancy and superstition.
Emily's mind has been educated by her father to not indulge in these whims, and we as readers also must try and fight the urge to fall into these traps of excessive imagination and fears. Whenever we as readers assume the supernatural about something that has occurred in the text we are shown that is in fact a natural occurrence. There are no ghosts, goblins, or even dead bodies, but instead wax figures and easily explainable moments of natural occurrences. The unexplainable is always explained, which becomes a hallmark of Radcliffian Gothic. The reader is somewhat admonished for their outlandish thinking when at the end all is rendered as natural.
The explained supernatural, which becomes a signature of the Female Gothic, is also interestingly intertwined with the action of writing. This recalls the question that Blanche was silent; Dorothee looked grave, and sighed; and Emily felt herself still inclined to believe more of the wonderful, than she chose to acknowledge.
Just then, she remembered the spectacle she had witnessed in a chamber of Udolpho, and, by an odd kind of coincidence, the alarming words, that had accidentally met her eye in the MS. Papers, which she had destroyed, in obedience to the command of her father; and she shuddered at the meaning they seemed to impart, almost as much as at the horrible appearance, disclosed by the black veil. (Radcliffe 491) It is significant that Emily is talking to other female characters in this moment. It is these women and their willingness to indulge in fancy that makes Emily try to teach them to not trust in fancy. Emily attempts to give a didactic lesson to them, but at the same time, she cannot seem to help herself as she falls into the fancy and the curiosity of those spectacles she has yet to uncover. Curiosity consumes her, even while she is trying to teach against it. Emily is reminded of the mysteries that have not yet been able to be fully explained by reason. Almost guiltily, she returns to these two moments that have obviously been wreaking havoc on her fancy and thus choking out her reasonable mind. In this moment, as Emily attempts to dispel the lingering effects of supernatural fear, she is reminded of two events that have not been properly explained, and begins to fret again about these moments; however, at the end of the novel we are shown that these moments too are explainable moments and that nothing supernatural 47 has occurred during the entire course of the novel. The entire novel has been a way of teaching one not to give into the excesses of emotion and to trust the rational brain.
The great mystery of the text of what is behind the veil is revealed to be merely a wax figure: "had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax" (Radcliffe 662 'Ye are to know, Signors that the Lady Laurentini had for some month's shewn symptoms of a dejected mind, nay, of a disturbed imagination. Her mood was very unequal; sometimes she was sunk in calm melancholy, and, at others, as I have been told, she betrayed all the symptoms of frantic madness. It was one night in the month of October, after she had recovered from one of those fits of excess, and had sunk again into her usual melancholy, that she retired alone to her chamber, and forbade all interruption." (Radcliffe 290) The focus of Montoni's story about Laurentini is the focus of her troubled and excessive mind. The way Montoni frames Laurentini's story by her emotions and seeming madness thrusts her in the very feminine role of a woman unable to control her emotions. Her madness and seemingly mysterious disappearance also serves as a catalyst to produce fear and anxiety in not only the listeners of Montoni's tale, but in Emily as well. Annette, the superstitious servant, and another example of someone who is moved by her passions as opposed to her reason, also tells Emily the story of Laurentini and through the telling of the tale is able to "infect" Emily's mind with superstitions and terrors: "Emily, whom Annette had now infected with her own terrors listened attentively" (Radcliffe 239 Emily in this moment forgets the education of her mind in the rational and quite literally begins to hallucinate superstitious images of ghostly apparitions, including the figure of her father. We are told that her forays into these moments of superstition are "lamentable" and instances of "momentary madness." The fall of Emily into these instances of excessive feeling are then likened to that of Laurentini's madness as well.
The excessive nature of emotions, hence leads to the maddening and loss of capable thinking faculties.

The Bluebeard Connection
The nature of curiosity is complicated by an embedded allusion to the fairy tale "Bluebeard." The feeling of curiosity is gendered as female in "Bluebeard" stories and often results in death as the wife of Bluebeard is unable to quell her curiosity. The Bluebeard story is occupied with teaching women how to behave acceptably in arranged marriages. Briefly, the story of Bluebeard pertains to a young wife who marries the hideous Bluebeard, but tries to overlook his hideous blue beard in order to luxuriate in the riches of his large castle. Upon returning to his castle after his hasty marriage, Bluebeard is suddenly is called away upon business and entrusts the keys of his castle into his new wife's care. The one caveat is that the wife must not enter the room in the tower. Bluebeard gives her the key to this room as well, but forbids her to enter this section of the house. Of course, as soon as Bluebeard leaves, his wife produces the key to the forbidden room and enters it only to find horrors. The horrors of Bluebeard's chamber include torture devices and the dead bodies of all his former wives. In her terror to escape the room, the wife of Bluebeard drops her keys in the blood that fills the room of Bluebeard's former wives. The wife's act of transgression stains the key and she knows that upon his return, Bluebeard will ask for his keys back and find that his wife has gravely trespassed. She knows she will be his next victim in Bluebeard's room of torture and death.
In most Bluebeard tales, the wife is saved by the help of her brothers who arrive just in time to dispatch Bluebeard. Charles Perrault's story ends in a surprising moral: "Curiosity, in spite of its many charms, Can bring with it serious regrets; You can see a thousand examples of it every day. Women succumb, but it's a fleeting pleasure; As soon as you satisfy it, it ceases to be. And it always proves very, very costly" (148). This odd moral seems to inculcate women's curiosity as the thing that needs to be overcome and denied in the telling of the Bluebeard story, not the husband's murderous plans. This moral of punishing the woman for her flights of fancy and her eager curiosity can be tracked to Emily's own excursions as she looks for her missing Aunt, Madame Cheron. Emily, perhaps thinking of the Bluebeard tales 53 herself, allows her imagination to overwhelm her as she searches for her aunt. One of the guards, Barnardine, directs Emily to the place where her aunt is supposed to reside.
Once inside Emily fears she is also being led to her moment of destruction: The obscure and terrible place, to which he had conducted her, seemed to justify the thought [that this was the place of her destruction]; it was a place suited for murder, a receptacle for the dead, where a deed of horror might be committed, and no vestige appear to proclaim it. Emily was so overwhelmed with terror, that, for a moment, she was unable to determine what conduct to pursue. (345) The place that Barnardine takes Emily, is essentially Bluebeard's forbidden chamber.
The locale of the forbidden and terrifying place empties Emily of her ability to think as she is "overwhelmed with terror." Her curiosity to know where her aunt is located has thus put her in the role of Bluebeard's wife, who as Perrault's moral tells us should not succumb to the feelings of curiosity. Emily also knows that she should not fall into these moments of curious passions, because of her father's instruction, but still her curiosity overrides her reason. Upon entering the so-called Bluebeard's chamber Emily surveys the scene around her: She perceived no furniture, except, indeed, an iron chair, fastened in the centre of the chamber, immediately over which, depending on a chain from the ceiling, hung an iron ring. Having gazed upon these, for some time, with wonder and horror, she next observed iron bars below, made for the purpose of confining the feet, and on the arms of the chair were rings of the same metal.
As she continued to survey them, she concluded, that they were instruments of 54 torture, and it struck her, that some poor wretch had once been fastened in this chair, and had there been starved to death. She was chilled by the thought; but, what was her agony, when, in the next moment, it occurred to her, that her aunt might have been one of those victims, and that she herself might be next! An acute pain seized her head, she was scarcely able to hold the lamps, and, looking round for support, was seating herself, unconsciously, in the iron chair itself. (Radcliffe 348) In this scene Emily allows her imagination to override her senses and is essentially outside of her rational mind. Her imagination conjures up the bodies of the poor souls who once resided in these torture chambers and does not allow Emily to retain her equilibrium. She becomes dizzy with the race of imaginary images that transport themselves across Emily's mind. These moments of imagination become too overwhelming for her and she feels "an acute pain" in her head. Emily is thus routinely represented as losing all sense when faced with an excess of imagination.
Much like Bluebeard's wife, the curiosity that impels Emily, ultimately leads her down an even more dangerous path. A path where Emily's mind is at stake and she is unable to control her wild flights of fancy.

Finally, while Emily does sometimes indulge in her excessive emotions and
give into her feminine attribute of lacking control of her emotions, she is able to garner sympathy from the evil and conniving Montoni because of her ability in most ways to attempt to restrain or tamp down her feminine feelings. Montoni commends Emily by stating: I am not in the habit of flattering, and you will, therefore, receive, as sincere, the praise I bestow, when I say, that you possess an understanding superior to that of your sex; and that none of those contemptible foibles, that frequently mark the female character-such as avarice and the love of power, which latter makes women delight to contradict and tease, when they cannot conquer. If I understand your disposition and your mind, you hold in sovereign contempt these common failings of your sex. (Radcliffe 380) Now, of course, Montoni is attempting to elevate Emily with his false flattery so that she will sign away her property to him, but it is interesting that his approach to this machination is through the debasement of the female sex, but elevates Emily above the usual judgments of her sex. Emily's mind is therefore praised in this case for not being feminine in nature. Interestingly enough Montoni and Emily share more than one may at first think. It is through their control and stoicism that we begin to see where an uneasy sympathy between the two lies: "Emily felt admiration, but not the admiration that leads to esteem; for it was mixed with a degree of fear she knew not exactly wherefore" (Radcliffe 122). Delucia posits that "part of Emily's admiration for Montoni stems from their shared stoicism, their ability to restrain emotion under extreme circumstances. The unnamed 'fear' that accompanies her admiration for Montoni may register a suspicion that they are more alike than it at first seems" (107).
This interesting and perhaps conflicting image of the villain and the heroine being perhaps more closely linked introduces an interesting dynamic into the duality of their gendered minds.

A Reunion of Sympathetic Minds
While Emily may share a strange kind of sympathy with Montoni, she is obviously meant to share her mind and her life with Valancourt, the suitor that not only connects with Emily, but perhaps even more importantly becomes a stand in for her father's mind. Valancourt and St. Aubert enjoy each other's company and have much in common, therefore securing a kind of mutual sympathy. It is telling that the only man that Emily can love is one that was previously approved by her father, even though her father is now gone. It is his presence that lingers over Emily's ideas whether she is scared and mentally projects his ghostly appearance or whether she uses his former esteem of a person to enmesh them within her life.
He [St. Aubert] found great pleasure in conversing with Valancourt, and in listening to his ingenuous remarks. The fire and simplicity of his manners seemed to render him a characteristic figure in the scenes around them; and St.
Aubert discovered in his sentiments the justness and the dignity of an elevated mind, unbiased by intercourse with the world. He perceived, that his opinions were formed, rather than imbibed; were more the result of thought, than of learning. Of the world he seemed to know nothing; for he believed well of all mankind, and this opinion gave him the reflected image of his own heart. (Radcliffe 49 make Valancourt a substitute for the missing father of Emily. It is not a surprise that these minds then find each other even after much dispute and seemingly heart wrenching endings, but all's well at the end as these two lovers unite: Having survived more threats than her father could have imagined possible, Emily has one more hurdle to navigate. She has long been courted by Valancourt, and while her father seemingly approved him as a mate, while her aunt even endorsed their engagement (though only because she wanted the social connection with his family), their marriage is delayed until the end of the novel. Their connection is initially severed by Montoni, but later denied by Emily as well, when she learns that Valancourt spent time in the gaming houses of Paris -and even found himself in debtor's prisonwhile she was at Udolpho. Such behavior grows from a sensibility more motivated by passion and greed than it ought to be, and only when he convinces Emily that he has repented as well as reformedthat he is more like her father than like -Montonidoes she agree to marry him. (Heiland 75) Heiland's reading of the closing scenes are important to consider because it is ultimately the alignment of Valancourt with her father that creates in him the perfect match for Emily. There have been many impediments along the way, but now they are able to come together and unite: O! how joyful it is tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other-to the beloved landscapes of their native country,--to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and laboring for intellectual improvement-to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallee became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness. (Radcliffe 672) The return of the lovers and the emphasis on their intellectual pursuits and the cultivation of their minds produce the understanding of the importance of the duality of the gendered mind for these two lovers.

Coda
Ann Radcliffe's depiction of gendered minds displays how Emily aligns with masculine thinking. Her curiosity displays a dualistic form of thinking, and while one form of curiosity is denigrated (the superstitious curiosity), her other form of curiosity which is aligned more with epistemic curiosity (or her desire to know) is key to her survival. Emily's agency in her own survival is clear if one regards her curiosity in a positive manner. This reading of Emily also subverts the common reading within Female Gothic criticism that focusses on the victimization of female characters. This is, of course, not to say that the victimization of female characters does not occur in The Mysteries of Udolpho; however, by re-orienting the way we view Emily's education by her father and her ability to sympathize with male minds, a more complicated and nuanced depiction of the female mind emerges-one that can cross gender divides.
Radcliffe's work was critical in creating the mode of the Female Gothic. Her influence helps to pave the way in the future of the mode to more complicated depictions of female education, consumption of knowledge, and the way that curiosity 59 can play an active and empowering role in a character's evolution, while also pushing her to understand truths that are marginalized by male notions of knowledge.
Additionally, because of Emily's ability to traverse gendered thinking lines due to the education from her father, she is able to produce a sympathetic reading of a patriarchal tyrant's mind (Montoni) which she is able to use to her advantage. Radcliffe sets a precedent for women characters in the Female Gothic for their curiosity to not be read as a wholly negative attribute, but instead a positive impulse that helps women protect and save themselves from patriarchal tyrants.

FEMALE GOTHIC
The Ingham discerns that "it becomes apparent that Rochester is the Bluebeard-sultan with Jane as the Scheherazade of this story" (141). And Victoria Anderson states that there is "no denying the close correlation between 'Bluebeard' and the general trajectory of the Gothic novel" (111). Heta Pyrhönen argues that "Jane Eyre provides a major reading of this tale ['Bluebeard'], one that has greatly influenced the work of subsequent female authors" (7). Pyrhönen's investigation into the lineage of Jane Eyre's influence on successive Female Gothic writers explores divergences amongst the adaptations while also exploring structures of plot and mapping symbolic registers of hysteria (14-5). Pyrhönen's work maps out a compelling lineage of Jane Eyre but often focuses on the essentialist elements of the Female Gothic that have long stood as hallmarks of the tradition, such as hysteria and victimization. This chapter elaborates on the ways these texts are connected through the way curiosity is employed by female characters, which I see as a more active trait than the tropes that have linked these Female Gothic texts together in the past.
Considering Ahmed's interrogations concerning queer genealogy aid in reorienting the links between these texts. Ahmed's concept of "queer genealogy" argues that it is not about producing a new family tree, "which would turn queer connections into new lines, nor would it be about creating a line that connects two sides. A queer genealogy would take the very 'affects' of mixing, or coming into contact with things that reside on different lines, as opening up new kinds of connections" (154-5).
Ahmed is specifically talking here about the ethnic dispersion and the mixing of races within families. But by using Ahmed's configuration to apply to the symbolic familial structure of Jane Eyre's literary heirs, we can reorient ourselves away from the usual lines drawn by Female Gothic criticism, thereby tracing out different connections concerning these texts. For example, focusing on the utilization of curiosity allows us to follow different lines of inquiry to create new connections between these texts.
Ahmed's theorization of lines and alignments is crucial to consider when formulating a queer genealogy of these texts. For Ahmed, the normative axis which produces bodily horizons and spaces for actions is produced by the "repetition of bodily actions" over time (66). The vertical axis only seems straight when it is aligned with other lines. Ahmed uses the metaphor of a tracing paper to explain the effects of lines being drawn over lines: "when the lines on the tracing paper are aligned with the lines of the paper that has been traced, then the lines of the tracing paper disappear: you can simply see one set of lines" (66). This effect creates alignment. Therefore, when a line is out of place or if one line does not appear, it gives the general effect of being "wonky or even queer" (66). By considering the "Bluebeard" tale type as an important originary line for the Female Gothic, it is conceptualized as a vertical axis in which all other iterations are traced on top of it. However, these texts do not create alignment. While some lines are traced, other lines drop off or are reconfigured altering the adaptation of the "Bluebeard" tale. How these collections of texts trace and retrace these narrative lines will illuminate how they diverge from the normative originary vertical axis line. This divergence will help to track how the mechanisms of curiosity and the progression of what impels these female characters away or towards knowledge evolves over time. The central feature of curiosity in the "Bluebeard" trope evolves, and every time the trope is repeated it produces a divergence from the previous iteration.

The Bluebeard Connection
Brontë utilizes specific tropes from the Bluebeard myth in the overarching plot of Jane Eyre. The fairy tale of Bluebeard recorded by Charles Perrault tells the tale of a young woman who discovers the mutilated bodies of her new husband's former wives in his secret room that she has sworn she will not enter. In her fright, the new bride drops the key to the room in blood, which stains the key and tells of the wife's Rochester guards his secrets in a protective fashion; and most notably, he incarcerates his former wife in the attic. Furthermore, there is Jane's explicit comparison of Thornfield to Bluebeard's castle: "I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storynarrow, low and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle" (Brontë 126). The spatial imagery and construction of labyrinthine passages adds to the confusion of navigating the patriarchal homestead.
The correlation between the Bluebeard tale and Jane Eyre is crucial to understanding the trajectory of the Female Gothic. Stephen Benson argues that "Jane Eyre is a prime example of the fusion of Gothic romance and the fairy tale, in particular 'Bluebeard'" (233). This fusion of the fairy tale motifs found within Bluebeard are also used as an explicit example of the punishments doled out to women who become too curious or behave in so-called "monstrous" ways. Anne Williams argues that Bluebeard distills all the central generic conventions of the Gothic: "a vulnerable and curious heroine; a wealthy, enigmatic, and usually older man; and a mysterious house concealing the violent, implicitly sexual secrets of this man" (22).
Not only do the conventions of the fairytale become easily boiled down into the broader strokes of the Gothic convention, but the way in which place is utilized also becomes indicative of the major themes that play out in the Bluebeard story. For example, Heta Pyrhönen observes that "like Bluebeard's mansion…the Gothic house always reflects its male owner. Not only does the chamber mirror his guilty secret, but also the layout of house echoes his duplicity. The public spaces of his mansion proclaim his wealth and respectability, while the secret closet refers to the crimes he commits in private" (9). The relationship between space and the acquisition of knowledge through curiosity which now appears as curiosity about a man's "private" domain, and thus about the very division between public and private, and who it benefits will be an important line to trace through the Female Gothic texts that utilize the Bluebeard tale as an important cornerstone of their narratives.
Additionally, another "Bluebeard" theme to trace is the treatment of the previous wife. Gilbert and Gubar focus on Bertha as Jane's double, who as Rochester's first wife is dealt the punishment of incarceration and finally self-inflicted death. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Brontë sends out an important warning that is also made explicitly clear: transgress normative patriarchal codes and have one's autonomy removed.

Jane Eyre
The emphasis on space in the novel also directs our attention to the ways characters are oriented towards objects and other characters. What characters are allowed to inhabit certain spaces? And while in these spaces what objects or people do female characters turn towards? Are they allowed to turn to practices of education and knowledge? Are they permitted to let their curiosity wander, or are they contained and shut up? It is useful to consider the way that Ahmed uses the verb "wander." For Ahmed, "wander helps us track the significance of attention as a mode of turning toward. To wander can mean to ramble without certain course, to go aimlessly, to take one direction without intention or control, to stray from a path, or even to deviate in conduct or belief" (29). Thus, we can ask the question who is allowed to wander?
Curiosity is conceived as a wandering of thought. Who is able to be curious and who is not?
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is a Gothic tale that uses spatial imagery to call attention to particular tensions and anxieties in the text produced by being a woman in 19th century Northern England. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Brontë's novel "explores the tension between parlor and attic, the psychic split between the lady who submits to male dicta and the lunatic who rebels" (86). The parlor is the public space where women who submit to patriarchal control are allowed to be shown off to an extent, and the attic becomes a place of confinement. These spaces are also racialized by the fact that Rochester's first wife Bertha, the foreign "other," is the one restrained in the attic, while Jane and Rochester's ward Adele are seen fit to inhabit more public spaces like the parlour. It is also important to note that when women are not around, parlours go unused, as if there is nothing to display to the public's eye. For when Jane reunites with Rochester at Ferndean, she notices that "the parlour looked gloomy: a neglected handful of fire burnt low in the grate" (Brontë 499). Without Jane or any other woman around to populate the parlour with life, it appears gloomy and lifeless. The structure of the house and the spaces that are coded for purposes by specific genders recalls Bluebeard's house as the wife is allowed to wander freely in all the rooms except for the locked room at the top of the house.
Prior to Jane's reunion with Rochester at Ferndean and before Thornfield is set to blazes, Jane spends much of her time in the parlour at Thornfield with her pupil Adèle. Many lessons and conversations are had in the parlour, which again allow the parlour to be normalized into a public space of decorum, and a place where normative knowledge is dispensed. On the other hand, the attic is the space of confinement and a barrier of knowledge for Bertha who symbolizes the rebellious and racialized feminine spirit. Problematically, Bertha is characterized as "repressed, raging, and revengeful" (Wood 108). Bertha thus acts out the frustrated and repressed passions of the imprisoned woman who is confined against her will by patriarchal forces. By living in the attic, Bertha lacks any communication with the outside world other than by Grace Poole her caretaker. Bertha's curiosity about the world outside and her problematic vengeance urge her to escape her confines and appear as a ghostly visage to Jane at one point as she attempts to burn down Thornfield. Later, she succeeds at this goal.
Bertha is not supposed to wander, and thus she is not allowed to be curious, but the pull to escape her confines urge her to escape. To confine a person, is to attempt to restrain their curiosity. Bertha's curiosity and wandering is coded as harmful, while Jane's wandering and curiosities are presented as knowledge seeking. The divide between the two can be seen as a racial one.

70
The qualities of Bertha's mental state are explicitly tied to her race and family line. Importantly, Anna Neill states that "After all, Bertha is not only transported, imprisoned, and physically restrained by her captor, she is also powerfully raced. As the product of a diseased line whose mental incapacity is tied to the torrid climate it has inhabited for so many generations, she becomes a subject, not just of her tyrant husband but of the technologies of imperial management" (8-9). Bertha is exposed as a moral and mental defective that has only grown worse because of the oppressive heat from her home in Jamaica. Rochester moves back to England with her in hopes of curing her madness. Rochester's urge is also a patriarchal mode of domination in an effort to corral the way that Bertha thinks. Her exposure to the outside world is withdrawn and her mind rots in the attic away from the public spaces of exchange of knowledge like the parlour which becomes a space off limits to Bertha.
The imperialism inherent in Jane Eyre also extends in some parts to Adèle who is remonstrated often for her French passion. However, where Rochester feels that Adèle can be taught and molded into a proper woman, Bertha's race and geographical upbringing have proven to make her a lost cause. Rochester reports that "Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard...Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points" (Brontë 337). Rochester's incrimination of Bertha's degeneracy points specifically to her bloodline as being deficient. Bertha has inherited these defects from her parents. Borrowing from Ahmed's conception of "inheritance"-"to receive and to possess," we can see Bertha's defects as that which she has "received" from her parents, but also as that by which she is now possessed (126). In this respect, she is thus aligned with demonic possession, and as Jane hears her eerie laughter, she asks "is she possessed with a devil?" (Brontë 173). The possession of these traits and her behaviors are continuously aligned with the supernatural as the sounds Bertha makes are described as "goblinlaughter" and "unnatural sounds" (Brontë 173).
The characterization of Bertha as unnatural and demonic is a common way that those in colonial positions of power dehumanize the racial "other" as a means to make them seem strange and unfamiliar. Ahmed states that "this world, too, is 'inherited' as a dwelling: it is a world shaped by colonial histories, which affect not simply how maps are drawn, but the kinds of orientations we have towards objects and others.

Race becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to
perceive and to do 'things' with" (126). Bertha is raced by her connection to Jamaica, a British colony, and her racial otherness is solidified by the statement that her mother was a Creole. Rochester attempts to shape her behavior by orienting her into a place of confinement and deprivation, an approach that he does not share with Adèle, who he believes he can shape and mold by hiring Jane as her governess. Partially due to age, but mostly having to do with race, Adèle has a chance to be directed towards the "right" kind of imperial knowledge, whereas Bertha is chalked up to a lost cause because of her racial otherness.
Furthermore, as Bertha is "a type whose moral and mental fibre is slackened by excessive heat [which] may be corrected and improved by transplantation; where degeneration is apparently so advanced that even a change of situation cannot check it, it must be restrained, silenced, and subdued" (Neill 9). Rochester's lack of control 72 over Bertha, causes him to remove her from open and public spaces, such as the parlour and forces her into the confines of the attic, as a way to attempt to contain and dehumanize her. Rochester's colonializing attitude towards Bertha is echoed by Jane as she describes Bertha's disturbing apparition as having "a discoloured face-it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments" (Brontë 327). Bertha's violence and savagery are linked to the color of her skin and therefore confirm the later remarks by Rochester that unlike Adèle, who can be trained, Bertha's madness is inherited and cannot be undone.
The racially charged attitudes directed towards Bertha operate in different manner when compared to Adèle. When Jane finds out that Adèle is the "illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl" Jane tells Rochester that "Adèle is not answerable for either her mother's faults or yours [Rochester's]" (Brontë 170). Adèle's youth may also play a role in her ability to not be inculcated by her parent's actions, as inheritance through offspring is formed by producing what Ahmed calls a "good likeness" (127). Rochester attempts to shape and mold Adèle's likeness as a child into a respectable English woman by employing Jane as her governess. Adèle's pursuit of knowledge is directed by Jane through her education at a young age, and will allow Adèle to be shaped by the ideologies that Rochester adheres to, whereas Bertha is too far gone and thus must be concealed and confined.
Concealment works in multiple ways in the novel. Self-concealment can be a way of attempting to harness a sliver of autonomy over one's being. Jane at times conceals herself willingly, and when she does a unique space of female creativity and thought flourishes that is not afforded in either the spaces of the parlour or the attic, 73 which are under patriarchal control and surveillance. When we first meet Jane, she describes herself as concealed in "a small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase; I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement" (Brontë 10). This first concealment is important as Jane willingly removes herself from the public space of the drawing-room. Once out of the public space of the house, she is allowed to indulge in meditative thought. First, Jane does this by looking out the window onto the rainy day outside, but also by reading her picture book. Significantly, she also aligns herself with the racial "Other" in the simile of sitting "cross-legged, like a Turk." Thus, Brontë sets up the parallel between confinement and the racial "Other" that will later be made more explicit in Bertha's forced imprisonment. Jane must "other" herself in order to escape from the patriarchal spaces she is normally forced to inhabit. Jane's imagination soars as she leafs through "Bewick's History of British Birds" for "each picture told a story; mysterious often to [her] undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting" (Brontë 11). As Madeline Wood argues, "Here her enclosure engenders her creativity: these dreamy images are clearly the basis for the otherworldly paintings Rochester examines later. This episode enriches our understanding of the way in which enclosure operates in Jane Eyre: selfwilled as well as enforced, potentially liberating as well as stultifying" (100). This first episode of concealment for Jane utilizes the relationship of space to illustrate that not only does Jane need to escape from the public space of the parlour to read and be 74 caught up in imagination, but also that she ensconces herself behind a red curtain. This foreshadows the "red room" incident whereupon enclosure becomes enforced. Being able to withdraw and read is also a luxury that will help Jane later in life as she is employed as a governess. This incident also points to Jane's curiosity and eagerness to learn. Jane must escape spaces controlled by patriarchy in order to allow her curiosity to wander free.
Ultimately, John Reed infiltrates Jane's space. He is the avatar of patriarchal violation in Jane's first childhood traumas. He violently upsets Jane's reveries. John Reed also asserts his patriarchal dominance and ownership over all spaces as he reprimands Jane for reading "his" books and states that "all the house belongs to me" (Brontë 13). John Reed's assault against Jane results in Jane's unfair confinement to the "red room" that becomes a critical flashpoint for Jane in the rest of the novel. It is here that Jane experiences the paroxysms associated with Gothic terror. Gilbert and Gubar refer to the "red room" as a kind of "patriarchal death chamber" (340): "Mr.
Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state" (Brontë 17). The room is "gothically haunted" as it represents the "spirit of a society in which Jane has no clear place" (Gilbert & Gubar 340). Without a father figure, Jane rests in a precarious position but due to her British whiteness not as precarious a position as Bertha. "Panicky, she stares into a 'great looking glass,' where her own image floats toward her, alien and disturbing…But a mirror, after all, is also a sort of chamber, a mysterious enclosure in which images of the self are trapped like 'divers parchment.' So the child Jane…correctly recognizes that she is doubly imprisoned" (Gilbert & Gubar 341). The curiosity that Jane experiences in the Red Room is one manipulated by the threat of patriarchal control and ultimately confinement. This curiosity manifests terror and dreadful apparitions that cause Jane to fall ill.
Concealment also works in other ways in the novel as a tool to try to suppress particular passionate behaviors in women. Jane is imprisoned as a child in the Red Room early in the novel for her passionate outcry. Jane's concealment also appears to induce a kind of mental break due to the solitude of the room coupled with the fear of the dead (as the Red Room was the room where Mr. Reed had breathed his last breath). Although Jane is not racially othered like Bertha, she is othered in alternative ways such as class and the loss of her parents. Jane is able to recover and eventually, through her schooling at Lowood to grow and mature albeit through loss and grief, whereas Bertha's foreign otherness does not allow her these kinds of opportunities.
The "Red-Room" scene takes on special significance as it becomes a "paradigm of the larger drama that occupies the entire book: Jane's anomalous, orphaned position in society, her enclosure in stultifying roles and houses, and her attempts to escape through flight, starvation, and madness…Jane's pilgrimage consists of a series of experiences which are, in one way or another, variations on the central, red-room motif of enclosure and escape" (Gilbert & Gubar 341). The continuous return of the "red-room" episode threads the threat of enclosure throughout the novel.
Anxiety concerning particular spaces and feelings of claustrophobia has dominated the Gothic, and not just women writers at that. Architecture has long been used as a convenient literary trope for mirroring the mind. However, women writers, in particular, express a dual sense of entrapment for their characters as they reflect the 76 way that patriarchal culture suffocates and confines in both the physical structure of the house as well as mentally. Gilbert and Gubar state "We tend to think of Jane Eyre as moral gothic…the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can't quite figure out the mansion's floor plan)" (337). The significance of this passage stems from the fact that Gilbert and Gubar use the metaphor of the mansion to explain the relationship between Rochester and Jane. The relationship dynamics of this explanation situate Rochester as the architect of his home and Jane merely the outsider who cannot figure out the rules set by a patriarchal order. In fact, not only is Jane lost within the confines of Thornfield, but the unruly woman is also illustrated by Bertha who is quite literally confined and constrained in the attic after not living up to patriarchal standards.
In their elucidation of the phases that women must go through in her life, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that "Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at Lowood), madness (at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End)." (339). The importance of this statement resides in the fact that during each stage that "everywoman," i.e., "Jane" (obviously this statement is a bit essentializing as Jane's whiteness and class status, allows her many privileges that other women, especially women like Bertha, do not have access to) has to go through is situated in accordance with the space that she is currently occupying. It is symbolically significant that each of these homes represents a stage that Jane must overcome. She must orient herself within these structures, each time facing different threats that attempt to confine her in various ways.
By the end of the novel, Jane effectively is confined forever in the culmination of the romance that has played out between Jane and Rochester. Marriage to Rochester seems to remove any autonomy Jane once clung to: "I have now been married ten Not only has Jane's independent self-undergone erasure due to her marriage to Rochester, but her career has been demolished by her marriage. Jane has prided herself on Adèle's education and has throughout the novel been proud to be her governess, however at the end of the novel Jane has excised any progressive career developments by becoming Rochester's fulltime caretaker: "I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another-my husband needed them all" (Brontë 518 Ferndean-a place that Rochester has earlier pronounced as a remote and cold place and a place that was deemed unacceptable to house even Bertha: "Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have had lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of the wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement" (Brontë 347). Yet, this is now the place that Rochester resides in and will ask to Jane to dwell in as well. As Jane approaches the manor the feeling of isolation permeates throughout her description of the property; "The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. I had heard of it before…He would have let the house, but could find no tenant, in consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site" (Brontë 496). The deeply buried Ferndean isolates Jane from the rest of the world and makes her rely solely on Rochester for all of her social needs.
Jane isolates herself socially and gives up her autonomy in order to become everything to Rochester. "I will be your companionto read to you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to you" (Brontë 502). Jane enumerates all the things of herself she will be for Rochester saving nothing to be hers alone. Isolated and away from the social world and ensconced in Ferndean, Jane gives up her place in the social sphere and instead devotes her life to an isolated private sphere of domesticity to her one patron-Rochester. Rochester values the maternal doting of Jane. Valuing the nursemaid characteristics of Jane relegates her ever further into the domestic sphere; therefore Rochester only values Jane's domesticity and not her intellect. "You, perhaps, could make up your mind to be about my hand and chairto wait on me as a kind little nurse (for you have an affectionate heart and a generous spirit, which prompt you to make sacrifices for those you pity), and that ought to suffice for me" (Brontë 502). Rochester imagines Jane perfectly happy playing the part of his nursemaid forever. Jane's curiosity and thirst for knowledge seem to be stoppered by her relegation to the traditional domestic sphere. Jane, in the end, is essentially confined like Bertha in the exile that is Ferndean. Rochester as the Bluebeard character ultimately triumphs. The perceived romance of the story is actually quite perverse as the autonomy of Jane is essentially erased as she gives everything up to be the eyes for the blind Rochester. Jane states at the end of the Ultimately, Jane's curiosity and ability to wander in spaces and conceal herself voluntarily in the novel, allow her more access to knowledge. Jane is also able to discover secrets and other forms of knowledge that are meant to be concealed from her. She is able to run away from Thornfield when faced with the knowledge that Rochester already has a wife. Jane's mobility is one of the things that differentiate her from Bertha, who is forced to be locked up and contained. Bertha's curiosity is coded as dangerous and something that is eventually aligned with madness, because of her inherited racial "defects." Adèle works in the median between the two other women, because it is believed that through education, her fiery French attitude can be squelched. The rooms of the house that the women of the novel are allowed to occupy carry connotations with them of the knowledge that is allowed to be consumed. The 80 knowledge that is performed in the parlour is patriarchally sanctioned and public, whereas the attic hides and demonizes the thinking of Bertha in private. Bertha's mind is viewed as so dangerous, that not only must she be hidden from view, but she must also be restrained physically, which does not allow her to wander. In the instances when Bertha does escape her confines, her wandering is shown as violent and dangerous, whereas Jane's wandering often saves her or gives her access to knowledge that she desperately needs. Disappointingly, at the end of the novel, Jane sacrifices her autonomy in order to be Rochester's wife. Jane loses her mobility and her ability to even think for herself, as their minds coalesce into one. By the end of the novel, Jane has willingly confined herself to the remote Ferndean, and is content to surrender the liberty that her curiosity gives her in order to be locked up with Rochester as Bluebeard.

Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca retreads the "Bluebeard" narrative much like Jane Eyre. The "Bluebeard" figure    her. In this way, the narrator is able to present herself as someone "young and inexperienced" which is the way she paints herself as appearing to others in the hotel including Max himself (DuMaurier 10). In this way, she also fashions herself as a person that is not curious, and will be happy to be manipulated by Max, and perhaps importantly, not ask too many questions about the disappearance of his first wife.
Mrs. Van Hopper also serves as a device to help drive the narrator into the hands of Max. The character is able to use her knowledge of Mrs. Van Hopper's antics to manipulate Max into comparing the two's actions. As Linkin argues, "She [Mrs.
Van Hopper] is repulsive in her consumption of rich, creamy food, and in her insatiable appetite for juicy gossip, which prompts her to pander a pin-up photo of her sunbathing daughter-in-law to Maxim" (227). The narrator on the other hand is shown (much like Jane in Jane Eyre) to be in more control due to her ability to deprive herself, especially of the lurid traits of femininity-those that Max, a man of containment, find to be distasteful. It is in this way that the narrator begins to interpret Max's conversations about flowers as obvious metaphors for womanhood. As Max tells the narrator about his home, Manderlay he speaks of the flowers with great detail.
In the description of the flowers the narrator becomes interlinked with the primrose "a homely pleasant creature" and as Max continues his description of the primrose, it is shown that Max believes he can contain the primrose: "although a creature of the wilds it had a leaning towards civilization, and preened and smiled in a jam-jar in some cottage window without resentment" (du Maurier 31). Max also makes a point that "no wild flowers came in the house at Manderlay" (du Maurier 31). There is a certain level of approved femininity that Max will allow inside Manderlay and this excludes the unruly woman (that of his first wife, Rebecca) or other excessive women such as Mrs. Van Hopper that do not easily fit into the ordered structure that Max wishes to maintain within his home. The narrator uses this information to further gain Max's trust that she is not like a wild flower, she will not invade Manderlay, but will play the hapless innocent primrose, and allow Max the belief that he can civilize and contain her within the walls of Manderlay. impactful is the R on the narrator's psyche, that the initial consumes her own given name, of which not a single letter is revealed" (69). It is true that the greatest mystery of the entire novel that is never solved is the name of the narrator. The lack of a name also allows her to be subsumed entirely into the definition of herself as Max de Winter's wife.
However, Rebecca is not that easily erased or contained even in death and upon arrival to Manderlay, the narrator feels burdened by the haunting presence of her.
"We were amongst the rhododendrons…They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before" (du Maurier 66). The metaphoric monstrous rhododendrons serve as a constant reminder of Rebecca. They also illustrate that Rebecca's memory and mark on the land is unlike the previous conceptions the narrator has with expressions of femininity: "for to me a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour, standing one beside the other in a neat round bed. And these monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful, they were not plants at all" (du Maurier 66). The narrator's value system again becomes apparent in the way she classifies the rhododendrons.
The view of femininity that the narrator is projecting is that of the contained and domestic woman who is unnerved by the sight of these unruly flowers as they go against her conservative notions of femininity. This recognizes the ways in which females can help support and uphold the patriarchy. Auba Llompart Pons argues that "du Maurier's portrayal of villainy in Rebecca is not directly related to gender, but rather to the patriarchal abuses of power by those characters who find themselves in powerful positions, in terms not only of gender but also of class" (72). The narrator, herself, gains much in her marriage with Max, not only the impressive estate of Manderlay and all of the material worth that goes along with an estate of that size, but also the upward mobility of her class. After all, one must not forget that at the beginning of the novel, the narrator is a merely a companion to the seemingly grotesque Mrs. Van Hopper but one who is far above her in class standing. The narrator begins the novel wistfully longing for all that she has seen of the upper class, but as only an observer. Her intentions of not only marrying Max, but then continuing by his side even after she has learned that he is a murderer point to the powerful motivation of upward mobility.  In tracing this lineage of the Bluebeard adaptation story, we find that the narrator like Jane happily ends confined with the Bluebeard character at the end of the novel. However, where Jane is shown at the end with Rochester due to a kind of romantic love (albeit one that severely limits her) where she has forgiven him for his lies concerning Bertha, the unnamed narrator positions herself to be with the Bluebeard character because she also appears to share misogynist ideals towards women and is happy to shield his crime from the rest of the world. The narrator masks her curiosity throughout the novel, as a way in which to get closer to Max. The focus here is on how the narrator rejects femininity and feminine thinking in order to perversely share a marriage with a murderer. The narrator happily subjects herself to submission, and does not view her interest in Rebecca as curiosity but instead rivalry.
Even though the dinner party scene where she dresses up as Rebecca, points to a desire to be Rebecca.
We can return to Ahmed's spatial interest in wandering. Much like Jane, the narrator is prohibited from wandering into two specific spaces, Rebecca's bedroom, and the boathouse where she was murdered by Max. These spaces of prohibition attempt to keep knowledge out of the hands of the narrator. These secrets also create a curiosity and a desire to know within the narrator; although she would be loathe to admit it. The secrets Max (much like Rochester) keep prompts the narrator to seek the knowledge that is being withheld. However, when Max confesses to the narrator and provides her with the knowledge she has been seeking, the power dynamics switch, and now the narrator holds more power than Max. His confession allows her to follow him in his actions: "I had listened to his story, and part of me went with him like a shadow in his tracks. I too had killed Rebecca, I too had sunk the boat there in the bay" (du Maurier 297). Max's confession allows the narrator to wander along his journey, tracing his steps, and enacting his actions, and ultimately reveling in his movements. Instead of running away like Jane, the narrator cozies up with Bluebeard immediately and becomes more powerful than he because of the knowledge of his confession.

Wide Sargasso Sea
In the lineage of Female Gothic texts that spring from Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys' Rochester is accustomed to. Rochester constantly compares the scenery and culture to that of his ethnocentric view of England. The atmosphere begins to affect not just Rochester's aesthetic inclinations, but also his mental capabilities. Upon his arrival, Rochester falls ill with fever: "I was married a month after I arrived in Jamaica and for nearly three weeks of that time I was in bed with fever" (Rhys 61). The fever adds to the disorientation of the Englishman in the exoticized environment that is the Caribbean. By turning to Ahmed's conceptualization of the term, disorientation will help to unpack Rochester's actions. Ahmed argues that disorientation occurs when "the proximity of such bodies [minorities and racialized others] makes familiar spaces seem strange" (135). Proximity to these othered bodies makes things appear "no longer in line" and thus disrupts a person's normative worldview (135). The illness acts as a symbol of Rochester's inability to adapt to a foreign setting and serves as a pathologizing of his disorientation. Rochester confines himself to his bed in order to recover from his illness, but this also serves as a convenient way in which Rochester can restrain himself from the native influences that tantalize him. This self-imposed confinement to rid himself of temptation will end up being the same kind of confinement he forces on Antoinette once they move to Thornfield, his English estate.
After Rochester regains his health, he sets off to his new bride's residence.
Antoinette's home for Rochester is merely a poor "imitation of an English summer house" (Rhys 65). Rochester compares the foreign and exotic to the only thing he knows-that of the hegemonic ideals of England. Everything else that Rochester perceives is merely an "imitation" of his precious England and a poor one at that. The surrounding landscape and the furthering of Rochester's introduction into the foreign land of the Caribbean, leads Rochester's ordered British mind into confusion.
Rochester is unable to maintain his coherence of thought as he is sucked into the whirling chaos of the foreign land: "As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up" (69). The blanks in Rochester's mind signify that there are things that his colonizing brain does not want to remember. Rochester is attempting to suppress moments of unrepressed and uncontrolled moments of frenzy and desire in which he gives into the excesses of the culture around him. In addition, these lapses in memory show Rochester's unreliability as a narrator of his own story. The more Rochester submerges himself into Antoinette's world far from the hegemonic eyes of London, the more Rochester begins to lose his submission to the hierarchical laws of patriarchy.
Rochester allows his desire to take control of his self, he becomes an antithesis to the ordered and moderate Englishman he was upon arrival. The oppressor begins to take on stereotypical characteristics of the oppressed. The sexual relationship that begins to develop between Rochester and Antoinette becomes excessive and deviant compared to patriarchal heteronormative standards. Rochester begins to find perverse desire in sexual relations between him and his wife; his developing nature reflects an unrestrained passion. Rochester refers to his desire as turning him into an "other": "One afternoon the sight of a dress which she'd left lying on her bedroom floor made me breathless and savage with desire" (Rhys 85 (Rhys 127). In the morning Rochester sees Amélie through the lens of the colonizer and sees her as grotesque. Pyhrönen argues that for Rochester "all women are one and the same mad Bertha, whose cunning, deceit, and murderous impulses require constant vigilance from Rochester. Such vigilance is best kept in a secluded place" (96). The revulsion that Rochester feels for his own indiscretion becomes the catalyst for the way he will punish Antoinette for the harm that he himself instills on her.
In order to repress his desire for the unruly women in his life, Rochester must In this encounter, Rochester is again cast as the Bluebeard character.
Antoinette's stepfather betroths her to Rochester, a seemingly respected man, but who quickly becomes monstrous. Rochester not only robs Antoinette of her material wealth, he also manipulates her emotions and does her bodily and psychic harm by 100 imprisoning her in his mansion after committing acts of adultery. Antoinette's confinement in Thornfield at the end of the novel is prefigured in the burned ruins of estate houses that litter the Caribbean landscape early in the text, including her childhood home that is set on fire as she and her family barely manage to escape. The imagery of escape through fire is revived in the final act of the novel as the burned ruins set up a parallel for the fire that Antoinette will set at the end of the novel at Thornfield, which will provide her with her final release from her bondage.
Rhys' adaptation of Jane Eyre gives voice to both Bertha (Antoinette) and Rochester. The perspectives of both characters, allows the reader's insight into the actions of both characters. Antoinette is caught in an act of repetitive trauma. The line that Antoinette traces over and over is the same path of destructive marriage as her mother lived through. She is caught in the same cyclical traumatic path as her mother, and we can see this as reflective of many women trapped under imperialist and patriarchal rule. When compared to Brontë's novel, Bertha is conceived as merely a monster and is never given a voice. Her actions are mediated through Jane's consciousness and Rochester is the only one to tell her story to Jane. Rhys gives voice to Bertha, but her fate ultimately remains the same at the end of both novels, as this is the tragic story that Rhys has inherited from Brontë. Rhys also allows the reader access to Rochester's voice which provides insights into how the colonizer is able to justify his cruel actions. Trevor Hope argues that "Wide Sargasso Sea, revisits and reinhabits the architecture of an earlier text, Jane Eyre, so as to emphasize its internal heterogeneity" (52 Bertha and Rochester, which reveals a critique of imperialism.

"The Bloody Chamber"
Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber," a feminist retelling of the Bluebeard fairytale, retreads familiar ground but offers up new pathways. Carter makes significant changes to the tale of "Bluebeard" that mostly closely aligns with Perrault's version of the tale. In Perrault's version, the young wife is saved by her brothers, whereas in Carter's retelling, the wife is saved at the end by her fierce mother: "You never saw such a wild thing as my mother…On her eighteenth birthday, my mother disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head" (39-40). Not only does the mother become the hero of the piece, something that is rarely seen in fairy talessubverting conventions of the wicked stepmother and other such monstrous woman archetypes, but she is shown to have always had strength, even as a young woman protecting her village from killer tigers. The mother also possesses the superpower of preternatural mother's intuition about the mental state of her daughter based off a seemingly innocuous phone call exchange earlier in the story. The daughter calls her mother crying but attempts to mask her unhappiness by saying she is crying over the beauty of golden bath taps that are fashioned to look like dolphins.
Another major change in the narrative is the way that Bluebeard's temptation is handled. Instead of seeing the young bride's entry into the forbidden chamber as an act of risky feminine curiosity, Carter instead places the blame on the machinations of the Bluebeard character-the Marquis. The manipulative nature of the Marquis is shown as the narrator recognizes her defeat: I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. (Carter 34) The curiosity of the young woman is not something that ought to be punished in a blistering moral fashion. Instead, the fact that curiosity exists in a person and is able to be manipulated by a cunning sociopath says more about the manipulator than the manipulated. This moment instead of presenting the dangers of female curiosity, illustrates the "act of transgression as conditioned by the sadistic and dominating desire of man" (Sivyer 2). Furthermore, the urge to fight back against this monstrous man is evident when she attempts to seduce her husband prior to his discovery of her transgression: "If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then" (Carter 35). The agency granted to the young woman is far greater than her predecessors. In the past, the victims of Bluebeard do not even attempt to fight back, resigned to their fate, they attempt to stall or flee, but to physically fight back does not cross their minds. While the young woman is not able to put her plan into motion, the insight into her mind demonstrates her urge to fight back and save herself. Thwarted by her attempts at seduction and distraction, she is forced to relinquish the bloody keys.
The story also ends on a different note than other retellings of the "Bluebeard" tale. As the mother is able to easily dispatch of the villainous Marquis, it allows the young woman to continue her romance with the blind piano turner. The healthy relationship between the two blossoms and her mother remains close to the couple.
The young woman does not have to remain in isolation in the way that Jane does at Ferndean, or the unnamed narrator in Rebecca who will always be on the run as they cover for Max's crime, or spend the end of her days confined to an attic like Bertha.
Instead, the young woman is surrounded by her mother and her lover and is opening up a music school. The large amounts of wealth inherited from the Marquis are given 104 away mostly to charity. The happy and healthy ending of Carter's revisioning of the Bluebeard tale is a first and counteracts the beginning of the tale when the young wife is marrying the Marquis mainly for money. Over the course of the story, the young bride is painfully aware of the material need for the marriage, but by the end she is happy to give most of her capital away to live a quiet life with her mother and blind piano tuner.
The impact and influence of "Bluebeard" over the Female Gothic is evident.
Griselda Pollock questions if the staying power of "Bluebeard" in the cultural imagination has to do with the explanation of the "tale's representation of masculinity as the psychological puzzle of desire linked to violence. Or does the tale fascinate us thanks to its representation of curious femininity as a necessary byproduct of patriarchal culture?" (xxviii). Women's curiosity as a byproduct of patriarchy proves evident, as much information is left out of women's grasps. Women are consistently given half-truths or full on omissions of the Bluebeard figures deeds. These blanks in knowledge must be filled in, and this is where curiosity often comes in. Curiosity is the urge to know, and if women are consistently kept from knowing, it is only logical that curiosity would flourish. Curiosity also must be coded as dangerous for women in a patriarchal world though, because the curiosity of these women often lead to a sense of freedom. Jane is able to run away and of her own volition return to Rochester on seemingly more equitable grounds, although I do quibble with the complete formulation of the equity of their relationship at the end of the novel. They are certainly more equally paired than when Jane was kept in the dark about Rochester's secrets. For the unnamed narrator in Rebecca, she is able to finally to be her true self 105 after she realizes that Max loathed Rebecca. Instead of trying to morph herself into the imposing figure of Rebecca that has haunted her every move, the unnamed narrator revels in her ability to lock herself up with her Bluebeard in his chamber. She also gains power over Max, as she holds his confession in her mind. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is given voice and finally freedom, albeit a freedom through death and destruction at the end of the novel. And finally, the young woman in "The Bloody Chamber" proceeds to experience the most good will after her curiosities are satisfied.
She is able to be reunited with her mother and marry the man she actually desires. The limitations of the success for these women is certainly contained by a patriarchal framework of oppression, but as the texts progress in chronological time, we see that curiosity becomes a greater key to freedom and instigator of agency impelling the young women into new situations armed with knowledge of their oppressor. Pyrhönen argues "Over the years the adaptations, however, have begun to shift the focus from the successor to the predecessor. Bluebeard's first wife, portrayed by Bertha in Jane Eyre, has gradually emerged as the true heroine: she has been wronged and abused, but has remained courageous and unyielding" (241). The monstrous woman as she is first conceived in Jane Eyre begins to acquire depth, sympathy, and ultimately align our perspectives with the formerly "othered" in the Female Gothic in new and encouraging ways.

REORIENTING THE FEMALE GOTHIC IN 21 ST CENTURY LITERATURE
The twenty-first century Female Gothic revisits Gothic tropes concerning Empire, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and reorients these formulations to offer alternative histories of cultures that have been historically repressed. Curiosity serves as the impetus for the characters in twenty-first century Female Gothic to explore non- Ahmed's queries of who is allowed to face the writing desk or table. The scholars' inquisitive natures urge them towards specific orientations as they seek understanding of the supernatural through scholarly discourse. This investigative impulse is also found in Butler's novel, as its protagonist Shori, suffering from amnesia after a vicious attack on her family, must rediscover her origins. Additionally, Karen Reyes, the young narrator of Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters, draws herself as a werewolf detective in order to solve the grisly murder that occurred on her block in Chicago.
Contemporary Female Gothic is, unsurprisingly, influenced by detective and crime fiction. 1 J. Halberstam attests that "there are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form-the monster-that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption" (2). As Halberstam points out, the Gothic has often coded the deviant "Other" in a monstrous form. The twenty-first century Female Gothic tends to use the role of the monster in a recuperative way, as it seeks to reinvestigate the ways in which we have historically coded others as monstrous. In the twentieth century the sympathetic monster was given a voice and an interiority. Having been imbued with greater emotional depths, these sympathetic monsters are not simply villainized in a two-dimensional form, as seen in some earlier Gothic works, like Stoker's Dracula, but instead are shown to not be monstrous at all, just simply different and the viewer is invited to identify with them. However, the twenty-first century Female Gothic is more interested in the assimilative monster. Catherine Spooner defines the assimilative monster as one "who is no longer a sympathetic outsider but who is, or at least attempts to be, one of us" (Post-Millennial Gothic 85). The role of difference no longer creates the fear that is felt in earlier Gothic works, but instead the terror comes from those that attempt and enforce assimilation, resisting change and progress.  Spooner notes that the Gothic is "championed by feminists and queer theorists for its level of attention to women and non-heteronormative sexualities; the reading material of the masses; the space in which the burdens of colonial guilt could be explored" (Contemporary Gothic 24-5). The ability for the Gothic to address these issues also speaks to the way in which the Gothic persists. The Gothic is able to persist in the twenty-first century through its ability to metaphorically express cultural and social anxiety, which is something that the Gothic has always been particularly adept at doing. As these stories are retold and refocused, we find that the metaphors of fear and anxiety shift and produce new narratives from familiar threads. Robert Mighall reminds us that "The Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols…That which is Gothicized depends on history and the stories it needs to tell itself" (xxv). Thus, the Gothic is reliant on always a backward gaze, and then a turn to face towards the front to re-orient one towards the future. (1897)  Dracula becomes marked as "Other" not only due to his geographic location in Eastern Europe but also from the description of his body. Jonathan Harker performs a rudimentary form of physiognomy as he attempts to understand his newest client:

Bram Stoker's Dracula
His face was a strong-a very strong-aquiline, with the high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with a lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.  Harker's intense scrutiny of the Count's physical features puts Dracula's foreignness and monstrosity on display and hardly dismissible as it appears on the visual surface of his body. Later on in the novel, Dracula's rampant sexuality and his affinity for the lunatic Renfield, will produce, as J. Halberstam argues, "a composite of otherness that manifests as the horror essential to dark, foreign, and perverse bodies" (90). Dracula's monstrosity is located in his body and is thus tied to political concerns of alterity and the pollution that racial others could spread to the idealized depiction of a homogenous population of western Europe.  (Stoker 13). Harker concludes that her religion and culture are superstitious in nature and less than rational. Harker regards her in a removed anthropological manner by essentially studying her as a subject of curiosity.
Furthermore, as Harker is about to depart the inn and head to the Count's castle, he is surrounded by the townspeople who represent a diverse grouping of people speaking in a tangle of languages: "I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from the bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were 'Ordog'-Satan, 'pokol'-hell, 'stergoica'-witch" and so on" (Stoker 13). Harker thus represents the east as a mixture of "many nationalities." This mass of people thus come to represent a primitive and superstitious community where language is cacophonous and often undecipherable aside from a word or phrase here or there. Harker attempts to use the symbol of his western rationality, his dictionary, to decipher the language but this only allows partial access. The crossings of cultural boundaries are thus shown to be a difficult and messy venture. Dracula himself embodies a dangerous foreign entity that can cross these boundary divides with relative ease. Halberstam states "he [Dracula] is the boundary, he is the one who crosses (Trans-sylvania = across the woods), and the one who knows the other side" (89). The threat that Dracula poses is that he is able to easily cross these worlds, unlike Harker who fumbles along. Dracula is represented as seamlessly taking on other identities, destabilizing the ideologies of nationhood held by British bourgeois society.
Dracula's permeability of boundaries gestures towards the panic of a culture afraid of invasion by an outside force.
Contextually, it is essential that Stoker uses Transylvania in particular as the representation of the foreign "Other" because as Arata notes: "Transylvania was known primarily as part of the vexed 'Eastern Question' that so obsessed British foreign policy in the 1880s and '90s. The region was first and foremost the site, not of superstition and Gothic romance, but of political turbulence and racial strife: (165). By placing Dracula, not only in the east but also in a place with a storied history of invasion and conquests, Stoker sets the ground for the fear and anxiety of what Arata calls "reverse colonization" that will permeate the novel. Dracula himself paints the description of his homeland as a site of consistent invasion and mixing of races: We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many Europe and what threatens the homogenized culture of Victorian Britain. As Arata will remark, "Vampires are generated by racial enervation and the decline of empire" (166). Vampires walk in the aftermath of this decline, and thus Stoker makes vampires "bear the weight of the culture's fears over its declining status" (166). This is another way to say that colonizer's fears are thus put onto the fear of the racial "Other" and the potential for pollution and degeneracy that happens to a nation in decline.
One of the original ways that this "Othering" is symbolized and put into motion is the Gothic tradition's obsession with blood and thus bloodlines. Gothic monsters for Halberstam are also "always an aggregate of race, class, and gender" (87). Dracula as previously explored is clearly marked as a racialized and white-haired as the action proceeds, while Dracula, whose white hair grows progressively darker, becomes more vigorous" (167). Thus as Dracula feeds upon the residents of England the racial "Other" grows in health and virility. The images of a rapacious foreign "Other" are often used as a troubling metaphor in both Gothic novels and racist propaganda. people, and creatures. The vampires in these twenty-first century texts are found to be a part of communities, and instead of being feared for their otherness, they are often shown as combatting fears of alterity through their communal connections with others.

Epistemic Curiosity in The Historian and A Discovery of Witches
The depiction of scholarly curiosity in fictional worlds is often that of intellectual minds attempting to unravel a quizzical puzzle or being on the cusp of making a profound discovery. Popular culture representations of researchers in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are often shown as a kind of detective or seeker of truth. This depiction of scholarly endeavors tends to be the template used in a spate of recent Gothic tales including The Historian and A Discovery of Witches that use scholarly investigations as the impetus of a Gothic journey through history to uncover facts about supernatural beings. Importantly, the curiosity that is presented in these texts is indicative of an epistemic curiosity that illustrates the complexity of curiosity in our twenty-first century world.
Epistemic curiosity is indicative of a search for knowledge that goes deeper into the understanding of a topic of interest. In the 1950's British Canadian psychologist, Daniel Berlyne charted curiosity along two main axes: epistemic and diversive. Diversive curiosity is usually aligned with children and their urge to try everything novel. A child who reaches for everything, but quickly discards one shiny toy to examine the next is practicing diversive curiosity. In adults, diversive curiosity tends to manifest as a restless curiosity that moves people from one desire to the next, wherein they never feel entirely satisfied. We might imagine the way adults mindlessly scroll through their social media apps, finding only fleeting interest in a post before quickly scrolling to the next image or text. Epistemic curiosity is when diversive curiosity becomes transformed into a quest for knowledge and understanding. It is a deeper and more disciplined form of curiosity (Leslie xx Helen becomes embroiled in Paul's search for Rossi, her father. In the beginning, Helen's aim is to be the first to publish and to "know more than anyone in the world about the legend of Dracula" (Kostova 142). Paul soon discovers that Helen's real drive is to learn more about her father, Rossi, a man she has never met.
Rossi and Dracula's lives are intertwined and thus the more Helen learns about her past via her father's letters and research, the more she realizes she is in search of truths about her own origins and bloodline. Much of the mystery involves Helen and Paul employed in scholarly activity, such as archival searching, analysis of primary sources and other texts, interviews, and checking or cross-referencing sources (Kostova 116).
Furthermore, research in the novel encompasses a robust need to fulfill curiosity: "I craved answers" (Kostova 118). Helen craves answers for more information about her father, and thus her own inheritance. Epistemic curiosity pushes her along the trajectory of devouring every piece of epistolary evidence she can find. The need to satiate this kind of craving for knowledge is only accomplished through the deep research that the characters enact. The trio of researchers (Helen, Paul, and Rossi) are on a quest for knowledge and understanding, and while this quest nourishes their minds and scholarly interests, it is not without risks.
The closer a researcher comes to uncovering Dracula's tomb, the more death looms as a spectacular threat. After Paul stumbles upon a librarian's corpse with the telltale signs of a vampire bite, he reassesses the information he has collected concerning Dracula. "Dracula, if he were at large, seemed to have a predilection not only for the best of the academic world…but also for librarians, archivists. No-I sat up straight, suddenly seeing the pattern-he had a predilection for those who handled archives that had something to do with his legend" (Kostova 118). Here, the supernatural threat has, as Frances Kelly argues, "penetrated to the cloistered heart of the university, the archive" (525). Rossi details that upon finding a map of significance, it is apprehended by a mysterious figure. The trail of research is dangerous and the act of researching itself in the novel comes with a risk of bodily harm. While research is esteemed in the novel, it is also depicted as ghoulish; as the bloody historical research that is turned up showcases "a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight, or over centuries" (Kostova 55). Research is also not shown to be good or bad but simply necessary. Rossi states "Scholarship must go on. For good or for evil, but inevitably, in every field" (Kostova 33). This perpetuation of scholarship does not require morality but instead a continued forward motion.
Furthermore, Rossi tells Paul that "anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad" (Kostova 28). Research and scholarship can be seen in the novel as a form of vampirism itself. The living on of research through generations is also shown in the way the narrative conceives of its multi-generational narrators. The story of Vlad Tepes (Dracula) and the research concerning him is passed down not only through scholarly archives but also through storytelling and memories cultivated by Rossi and passed down to subsequent generations. This generational telling illustrates an inheritance of knowledge to some degree, but also a point of danger as the dragon book brings hardships and curses to the family. The more one knows about Dracula's past, the more that person is endangered.
While the information at hand may be dangerous at times, it is also based on the way in which curiosity is often relational. Curiosity is dependent on what others know and the urge to then know what they know. The storytelling framework of The Historian illustrates this as the narrator of the tale (Rossi's unnamed granddaughter) is hearing the story from her father (who we later learn is Paul). The curiosity of the unnamed narrator pushes her to learn as much as she can from her father. There is effort in the telling of this story though: "There would be more discussions of Dracula on that journey. I was soon to learn the pattern of my father's fear: he could tell me this story only in short bursts, reeling it out not for dramatic effect but to preserve something-his strength? His sanity?" (Kostova 21). The daughter longs to hear more of the story and learn everything that her father knows, while also being aware of the toll it takes on his health. However, becoming enraptured with her father's story pushes the young girl to begin researching on her own. The drive for more knowledge on this topic pushes her into the archives. "Because I felt constraint with my father, I decided to do a little exploring by myself, and one day after school I went alone to the university library" (Kostova 36). The research in the archive opens up more questions for the girl and leaves her with the haunting images of the atrocities committed throughout time by Vlad Tepes (Dracula): "Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen the truth-really seen it-you can't look away" (Kostova 37). Being face to face with the research concretizes the stories told from her father in a specifically unique fashion. Archival research presents the truth in a way that is different and more real than the stories told from her father's point of view.
This research feeds epistemic curiosity. This relates back to the reverse colonialism inherent in Dracula. As each scholar uncovers more about their history, they realize that they are closer and closer to uncovering their own history of aggression, as it turns out that the Rossi's are related to Vlad Tepes. The monstrous other, is actually the enemy within.
The important relationship between knowledge and understanding is stressed in many ways in Kostova's The Historian. Dracula's first encounter with characters in the novel is not that of a bite but instead he leaves them with the ominous dragon book. These texts are ancient, produced by hand, and are empty of any text or drawings save the image of the green dragon in the center of the book. Once the books have been delivered, they cannot be given away. Every time a character attempts to give away his book or dispose of it by other means, it magically reappears. John Hoglund argues that "the menacing nature of the book is an obvious threat, a warning, while the uncertain origin and the blank pages encourage the receiver to start his or her historical research, to locate its origin and fill the blank pages" (9). The curiosity of the book itself and the urge to fill the pages with research urge all characters who receive the book to set off on research trips to learn more. The ability to write and recover history is what pushes Dracula forward and urges him to prey upon scholars in particular. Dracula offers Rossi free reign of his library: "You have the free run of what is certainly the finest archive of its kind on the face of the earth. Rare works are open to you that, indeed, cannot now be seen anywhere else" (Kostova 585). The temptation that Dracula provides to Rossi is that of knowledge and the ability to satiate epistemic curiosity. Moreover, Dracula knows that history is malleable and the writing of history is a very unique and human quality. It is the way that Rossi produces 128 scholarship that has garnered Dracula's attention: "You are a man of unparalleled sense and imagination, of keen accuracy and profound judgment. I have much to learn from your methods of research, your synthesis of sources, your imagination. For all these qualities, as well as the great scholarship they feed, I have brought you here, to my treasure-house" (Kostova 586). Dracula's treasure house is a library full of more works of literature found in any other part of the world. Dracula has been able to secure copies of texts that do not exist in the human realm. Dracula's plans for Rossi are to use his scholarly tools, not to merely feed on the man in the usual vampiric sense, but to feed on his scholarly skills and aptitude. Dracula essentially wants Rossi to serve as his historian. Dracula tasks Rossi with cataloging his immense library.
Rossi will be the best person for the job because of Rossi's determination and boundless curiosity that has caught Dracula's attention in the first place, and it is because of Rossi's unwillingness to halt his investigation of Dracula that has made him a target of Dracula, thus showing the dangers inherent in research and curiosity inherent in this novel. Importantly, "the threat and allure of Kostova's Dracula is epistemological rather than ontological, although the two aspects are always interrelated" (Hoglund 10). Kostova's Dracula leaves behind books as opposed to a trail of corpses. These dragon books help him to locate potential historians who could help catalog his immense library. This intimates a crucial relationship between the past, present, and future. Dracula is able to see the way that knowledge can be used to manipulate narratives of his life and narratives of the world writ large. His urge to control the narrative of not only his life but the history of the world is not through mere violence of the corporeal, but a more insidious violence of the archives and a 129 rearranging of history in order to build a future that suits Dracula's motivations for a different world. The real menace Dracula poses is not directly related to his vampirism, but to his aforementioned understanding and ability to manipulate and change history. Dracula's power resides as much in his knowledge of history as in his corporeal form, and it is through this manipulation of knowledge that Dracula may be able to further his own form of societal transformation. We are meant to believe this evolution of history will continue as the unnamed narrator finds herself at the end of the novel in a library as she takes a break from her academic conference on medieval artifacts. Amidst the stacks, she loses herself, and as she is leaving, a librarian hands her some of her belongings that she had accidentally left behind: The notebook was mine, certainly, although I thought I that Diana feels emanating from the text alerts her to the fact that there is something mystical, and yet she is drawn to the text due to her scholarly and hence epistemic curiosity. Diana delegates her curiosity to two distinct binary distinctions: one that is scholarly and one that is supernatural. She attempts to keep these curiosities siloed. At this time in the novel, Diana cannot understand how these two worlds can merge and intermingle. She staunchly attempts to keep these worlds separated until she learns that she is personally attached to this mystical text. Diana sends Ashmole 782 away and rues the fact that she allowed her magic to interfere with her reason.
Later in the novel, Diana learns that she is the only witch that may summon the text. Diana's innocent recalling of the text from the library, produces the text, but if others were to recall the text, the librarians would tell them that the book was missing.
Her powers are particularly in tune with the text and it has been foretold that she will be the only one to open the tome that contains all the secrets of how to create life within its pages. The secrets to life in this world are not only constrained to human beings. In this world, humans co-exist alongside witches, daemons, vampires, and other creatures. Ashmole 782 is special in that the information that is nestled within its bindings holds the keys to many generations worth of answers. Matthew Clairmont, a vampire who is also a biochemist, has spent years in search of Ashmole 782 and the secrets of life that the book contains. Matthew's research in biochemistry has done much to assess the lives of the magical beings in the world. In recent years, Matthew 132 has noticed a decline in the supernatural population. Matthew is afraid that these ancient races are rapidly dying out and needs Ashmole 782 to help him solve this puzzling conundrum.
Matthew begins to follow Diana around and attempts to understand how she discovered the sacred text so easily. As Matthew is searching Diana's quarters for the mysterious book, he pauses over her scholarship and muses: "He suspected she used magic in her scholarship, too. Many of the men she wrote about had been friends of his-Cornelius Drebbel, Andreas Libavius, Isaac Newton. She'd captured their quirks and obsessions perfectly. Without magic how could a modern woman understand men who had lived so long ago?" (Harkness 29). Matthew is later shocked to realize that Diana has restrained herself from using magic in almost all aspects of her life since her parent's death. Diana is ignorant to most of the magic that she can produce; until a blood test performed by Matthew reports that, she has multiple magical abilities.
Matthew's research and scholarship has consistently worked together with science and magic uniting the two, unlike Diana's compartmentalization. Diana restrains herself as part of the grieving process to deal with the violent and sudden loss of her parents, both witches themselves. Diana thinks that if she can stymie her natural magical inclinations, she can be safe from the supernatural horrors that killed her parents.
Through researching the elusive text and attempting to find the missing pages of the manuscript, Diana and Matthew begin to fall in love. Diana learns that the Congregation (a panel that consists of vampires, daemons, and witches that create rules and laws specifically for creatures) has outlawed the romantic relations between different creatures. The anti-miscegenation laws of the Congregation are challenged when through using the information found within Ashmole 782 coupled with evolutionary science that Matthew practices it is surmised that "cross-species breeding is the next evolutionary step" (Harkness 473  text Ashmole 782 and also through the research skills she has amassed as a successful academic. Likewise, Helen and her daughter work to defeat the menacing patriarch of not only their family but of the world in their hunt for Dracula and to keep the tomes of his library out of unsafe hands. Again, it is their ability to practice strong research that makes them formidable opponents against Dracula as they attempt to bring the truth of his life, not the histories and falsities that he wants historians to spin about his life in order to obscure his identity and allow him to continue to hide in the shadows, manipulating history and the present through his library. These strong women do not assert their power through "pretended and staged weakness" instead; their powers are oriented around the power of writing and academic investment. This re-orients the female scholar as an active agent who follows the lines of scholarly engagement. Sara Ahmed argues that "lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as lines of thought…are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition" (16). The lines of thought that are forged in scholarly writing utilize the works that have been written before. The lines direct us down towards familiar paths but can also lead to new lines and inquiries. Furthermore, Ahmed clarifies that "following a line is not disinterested: to follow a line takes time, energy, and resources" (17). The scholars in these novels follow the lines of research not as passive victims blindly following a clear path, but as intrepid investigators searching for the lines of thought that have been obscured or

Scientific Curiosity in Octavia Butler's Fledgling
Octavia Butler's Fledgling follows Shori, a dark-skinned Ina (Butler's term for vampire), who survives a brutal attack on her family. It is Shori's genetically modified body that allows her to survive the attack against her family. However, Shori survives the attack with a case of amnesia. She learns that she is integrated with human DNA, and so she has been "born with better-than-usual protection from the sun and more daytime alertness" (Butler 77). These human attributes mixed with her vampiric or Ina nature marks Shori as both monstrous, but also more powerful. It is because of Shori's mixed blood that she survives the attack against her family and is thus proven with their humans in a communal way that is necessitated by touch-not always sexual but sometimes just as intimate. Symbionts protect Ina during daylight hours, while the Ina also protects their humans. The codes of protection become familial, and a kind of close-knit community is created between Ina and humans. This symbiotic relationship is quite different from the parasitical relationships in previous vampire lore. Importantly, vampires can be seen as "boundary creatures whose bodies reflect and produce cultural identity" (Goddu 127). Thus, vampiric figures work to function in complex sites that can "contest, reiterate, produce, and transform the cultural anxieties and fears of their age" (Young 211). Butler's Ina becomes an articulation of the specific scientific concerns about genetic modifications in contemporary American society.
Thus, Butler's Ina mythology is structured much differently than that of Bram Stoker's vision of the vampire in Dracula as a creature created through constant slaughter and invasion; the Ina is viewed as a race that evolves and grows alongside humans. Due to Shori's amnesia, she must be retaught the origin myth of her people.
Shori's curiosity stems from a need to know where she comes from. She is told the history of the Ina was written down on clay tablets thousands of years ago and circulated longer before that in oral tradition. This sounds, of course, very familiar to indigenous history. Shori is told that "We [the Ina] had already joined with humans ten thousand years ago, taking their blood and safeguarding the ones who accepted us from most physical harm" (Butler 188  Shori's amnesia works narratively to help the reader understand this world as Shori must relearn everything in her world. The curiosity of learning impels both Shori along her path in the story, and works at casting that same curious spell over the reader. However, the amnesia also works as a way in which to connect to past historical trauma. Curiosity about the past is often based on the urges to not repeat past mistakes although there are those that dismiss historical pasts. Hershini Bhana Young makes the argument that "a commonplace argument against reparations claims that there is no need to redress slavery as it lies behind us and we are more 'evolved' than our ancestors who were products of their racist times. Reinforcing this notion that the past is over is the fact that those filing the claims can no longer directly remember the privileges and injuries of slavery" (214). The push to remember and the curious urge to recover the details of not only Shori's past but also the past of her people makes remembering historical trauma crucial. While Shori is unable to remember anything about her attackers, there is still a need to redress the brutal violence that was enacted.
Butler's novel works to show that the hatred and racist violence has persisted since the eighteenth century. Racial tensions are defamiliarized as the previously homogenous Ina society is introduced to racial difference for the first time through genetic experiments with human DNA.
The next step in evolution for the Ina requires human DNA. Scientific curiosity and the urge to continue improving their race, shape the Ina's evolutionary experiments with DNA. Shori is unique due to the human DNA she has inside her, but humans will look down on them. When I came to this country, such people were kept as property, as slaves" (Butler 272). Katherine's diatribe indicates that she fallen in line with racial prejudices espoused by humans. After this outburst, the council confers to see whether Katherine is fit to remain serving on the board. The majority of the council agrees that Katherine should be dismissed. Importantly, one of the council members, Alice Rappaport, votes to dismiss Katherine due to her witnessing of the racial prejudices amongst humans: "Over the centuries, I've seen too much racial prejudice among humans. It isn't a weed we need growing among us" (Butler 274). Ferris's text itself urges the readers to reorient themselves to the process of reading by engaging with the book in an uncommon way. The spatial dimensions of the text encourage readers to approach it "slantwise" as one must constantly reorient one's self to the images of the text. Furthermore, Ferris eschews the normative conventions of a traditional comic structure by not employing panels in her text. The images and text are not confined by normative comic conventions and instead refuse to be restricted as they explode off the page at times.

As
Karen revels in her "otherness" portraying herself as werewolf cub in her drawings as she investigates the murder of her next-door neighbor. Karen represents herself as werewolf not because she feels monstrous in a shameful way, but because she revels in monstrosity and her misfit status. Monsters hold a keen fascination for Karen. She sees monsters in a dualistic manner: The bad monsters want the world to look the way they want it to. They need people to be afraid…They don't live in their lair and mostly mind their own biz… I guess that's the difference… A good monster sometimes gives somebody a fright because they're weird looking and fangy… A fact that is replaced by physiognomy, the landscape of fear is replaces by sutured skin" (28-9).
Ferris's use of intertextuality helps to create a vision of monstrous bodies juxtaposed against seemingly normative human bodies. The fear of the other is crystallized in the way that the social outcasts perform as monsters within Karen's diary pages.
Likewise, the fear of otherness in regards to sexuality is also given a monstrous makeover as Missy (the girl that Karen is attracted to) morphs into a vampire when the two are alone and sharing private moments together away from the prying eyes of Missy's mother. Missy states in her vampire form "The times when I'm with you are the only ones when I'm…myself" (Ferris). The monster body becomes the body of true self. Halberstam tells us "the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities" (27).

Ferris's text presents us with this celebration.
My Favorite Thing is Monsters is set up to look like Karen's diary. The lined pages and the random doodles, as well as the more elaborate horror posters that are 147 interspersed throughout these pages give off this effect. The stories that Karen records in her diary are in part her story but also interweave the story of her deceased neighbor Anka's Holocaust story. The form of a diary then allows for a re-orientation-a kind of looking back, which S. Ahmed argues, "still involves facing" and by facing backward at our imperfect past "an openness to the future" presents itself (178) S. Ahmed states that "a queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way of inhabiting the world by giving 'support' to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place" (179). We can envision Karen as acting out this orientation as the precocious werewolf girl who walks the streets of Chicago, eager to befriend and support the oblique and the strange.
Imperialist policies work along a nexus of so-called discovery and invasion.
The It is essential to address television in a literary analysis of the Female Gothic as televisual media is of increasing concern within contemporary scholarship on the Gothic (Tibbetts, 2011, Redding, 2011, Nelson, 2012, Piatti-Fernak & Brien, 2015, Spooner, 2017. The Gothic has always been an integral part of the televisual landscape stretching back to the days of shows like Dark Shadows (1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971) for example. The first Golden Age of television occurred in the early 1950's but the 151 phrase has often been echoed in scholarship discussing the rise of prestige television in the '90s and early aughts before streaming services changed the landscape of television forever. This period is sometimes--a bit confusingly--referred to as the Golden Age of television or the "New Golden Age." While many prestige shows of the "Golden Age" of television included shows such as The Sopranos (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) and Breaking Bad (2008Bad ( -2013  BTVS's feminism is rarely intersectional. BTVS's tendency to present characters of color as "Others" is well known in the field of Buffy studies. Patricia Pender states, "Buffy's racial politics are inarguably more conservative than its gender or sexual politics" (171). Naomi Alderman and Annette Seidel-Arpaci argue that despite Buffy's "impressive grappling with all sorts of 'difference' and 'otherness'…we will find a lingering preference against the 'non-white' or 'non-Christian' which subtly undermines the show's message of individual empowerment." While focusing on how the show deals with the pursuit of knowledge and curiosity, I will trace who is allowed access to knowledge and whose access is barred.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Female Gothic
BTVS centers on the world of a teenage girl (Buffy) who has to hide her true self (the fact that she is a vampire slayer), problems arising from closeting one's identity and other queer issues have resonated within the show, as well as the more overt feminist themes the show encapsulates has garnered much critical attention. show also portrays alarmingly realistic depictions of gun violence, death from illness, and rape.

Enter All Ye Who Seek Knowledge
A major theme in BTVS is the pursuit of knowledge, which relates to curiosity.
Curiosity often fuels our pursuits of knowledge. The Sunnydale High School itself has the phrase "enter all ye who seek knowledge" written in Latin on the outside of the school. Not only does this phrase serve as a useful tool to allow vampires to enter the grounds as an invitation for those who seek knowledge, but also positions knowledge as an important theme in the show. Buffy's strength that is needed to stop the evil acts. This knowledge is gathered through careful and meticulous research, and it is the research that is often the thing that helps to stop mystical rituals, or guides the way to reverse a spell gone awry.
Moreover, research explains a demon's weakness and informs Buffy of how she can effectively eliminate the evil. In essence, research allows Buffy to go into combat with a plan and a knowledge of her enemy, as opposed to running madly into the fray.

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Overall, without research, Buffy would often be at a loss as to how to stop evil from running rampant through Sunnydale.
Giles, as a watcher and a librarian, has been schooled and trained in research.
His labor and knowledge is crucial in aiding the slayer in her fight against the forces of evil. However, the series does not rely merely on Giles' innate knowledge, but his ability to share that knowledge and teach his research skills to other members of the Willy the Snitch. This kind of "street" information is also supplied from Spike (a vampire) later on in the series after he has been rendered harmless by a government experiment that has implanted a chip into his brain that does not allow him to hurt any living creature. Spike often becomes a source of information for Buffy about the goings on of the demon world, but usually not without a bribe of pig's blood and money first. The knowledge that circulates between Buffy and her friends is shown as unique when compared to government agencies (the Initiative) that combat supernatural forces in a much more bureaucratic and generally ineffectual manner.

Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born
In the lore of BTVS, one slayer is called when another slayer dies, for there is only one slayer in the world at a time. Additionally, the line of slayers is a queer Whedon, who has said, "Canon is key, as is continuity. If you are a massive nerd, which I am, I believe there is a demarcation between the creation and the ancillary creations by different people. I'm all for that stuff, just like fanfic, but I like to know that there's an absolutely official story-so-far, especially when something changes mediums, which my stuff seems to do a lot" (Dowdell, 2016 Paratexts are not simply add-ons, spin-offs, and also-rans: they create texts, they manage them, and they fill them with the meanings we associate with them…a program is but one part of a text, the text always being a contingent entity, either in the process of forming or transforming or vulnerable to further formation or transformation. (6-7) BTVS's paratextual elements help to exemplify the change in viewer habits. Viewers in the twenty-first century are used to consuming media in multiple platforms and through a myriad of sources. Mark Duffett argues that audiences and fans of shows now may "meander across the surface of different media in their quest for meaning" Buffy and Spike's relationship through season six is a rocky and tumultuous one, which hinges on sadomasochistic desire. Sadomasochism is a marginalized and misunderstood lifestyle that focuses on aspects of play, which is at times sexual in nature. However, play is a complex term in the S/M community and the term "references recreation and leisure and evokes a romantic sense of innocence and freedom from encumbrances" (Newmahr 8). Moreover, "S/M is more easily understood as an all-encompassing lifestyle that represents liberation from the oppressive plight of the everyman and nurtures identities of marginality" (Newmahr 9 Michel Foucault discusses in The History of Sexuality how in the creation of sexuality "perverse pleasure" needed to be "assigned a role of normalization or pathologization with respect to all behavior; and finally, a corrective technology was sought for these anomalies" (105). The process of normalizing perverse pleasure creates guilt by those members who derive pleasure from the perverse but have been taught that pleasure is something that needs to be corrected. After all, we think of the term perverse as meaning doing something against one's better interests, but when Buffy states that "last night was the most perverse degrading moment of my life" (Noxon, 2001), the viewer has to wonder whether we agree with such a statement. It is after all through her relationship with Spike that Buffy discovers many things about herself and begins her recovery from her post-resurrection depression. Desire renews her, gives her life again, Willow may have brought Buffy back from the dead, but it is Buffy's perverse sexual desire that truly brings Buffy back to life. Even more than that, it is important to consider Buffy's curiosity about exploring parts of herself that she has not allowed herself to feel. Buffy's exploration with kink in season six is also a way of orientating herself around ideas of "not me." Ahmed explains that ideas of "otherness": …of things is what allows me to do things 'with' them. What is other than me is also what allows me to extend the reach of my body. Rather than othering being simply a form of negation, it can also be described as a form of The 'not me' is incorporated into the body, extending its reach. (115) Buffy importantly refers to Spike as a "thing" and is able to engage in this kind of activity at first because she thinks of him as "below her." However, it is through her actions with Spike and her discovery of pleasure in her sexuality, as well as her physical strength that she is able to shake off her post-resurrection depression.
Importantly, Buffy is able to learn about herself and her sexual desires through her actions with Spike. The consumption of knowledge is not always literary as in the Scooby gang sitting around the library, but instead some knowledge is learned through the body. Buffy as a Female Gothic heroine is able to learn about her body in ways that previous Female Gothic archetypes were forbidden from or punished for.
Buffy's non-normative desire in season six, is not the only time that kink desire is presented as standard fare. Any relationship with a vampire is after all heavily saturated in necrophilic subtext. Terry L. Spaise argues that: The act of necrophilia, though rare in reality, has always been linked in literature with vampirism. The embrace and bite are a parody of the sexual act, particularly because they are traditionally performed by a male character on a female victim who is passive and seems to welcome his touch. As a result of the pain of the bite and the loss of blood, she even experiences a pseudoorgasm, which Buffy herself illustrates when she cures a poisoned Angel by letting him feed on her in ''Graduation Day, Pt. II." (745) Thus, Buffy's relationships with the male vampires in her life that may set a heteronormative precedent at first, but can ultimately be read in a queer manner.
While much of the queerness in Buffy may stem from the subtext in the television show, the comics unconstrained by network stipulations delve more explicitly into Buffy's desires and sexuality. In one panel, from season eight Buffy is shown fully clothed wrapped in chains with her two (un)dead lovers Angel and Spike, naked on either side of her. The visualization of Buffy's erotic fantasy shows her desiring a ménage a trois and perhaps even double penetration. The look on Buffy's face, as well as the positioning of her body, makes it clear that Buffy is in control of this fantasy. The bodies of Angel and Spike are exposed and vulnerable contrasted against the clothed Buffy, as she also seems to be guiding the movements of Angel and Spike's bodies. Later in the season eight arc, Buffy explores her bisexual desire as she engages in an affair with Satsu, a fellow slayer, thus queering Buffy's sexuality and allowing us access into Buffy's bisexual desire that is never explored beyond subtext on the television show most notably in season three with Faith Lehane. The queer subtext between Faith and Buffy is something that Whedon decried, when fans began to invest heavily in the homoerotic content of the girl's relationship on early message boards. After investing more time into delving into fan's theories concerning the homoerotic subtext of Buffy and Faith, Whedon had to concede that indeed the subtext was there. Whedon, thus, coined the term "BYOsubtext" and admitted that fan interpretations of the subtext of his work were, while being subjective, still plausible and at times quite undeniable (Bianculli, 2009). While Buffy's relationship with Satsu does not last long, the exploration of Buffy's queer desire seems to be an express love letter to the queer fans that always hoped to have Buffy's bisexuality examined more thoroughly. The comics have opened up queer visual spaces that allow for a more nuanced exploration of female desire. While the comics have provided a queered visual space to extend the narrative from the television series, the life of the show has also continued and evolved in other paratexts, such as with fandom podcasting. Buffering the Vampire Slayer is a current weekly podcast in which the hosts Jenny Owen Youngs (professional musician and recreational Whedonverse aficionado) and Kristin Russo (professional writer and self-pronounced former goth teen, who is also a queer advocate and activist who runs the online advocacy and support groups for "Everyone is Gay" and "My Kid is Gay") discuss Youngs and Russo lovingly critique the show but also do not hold back when problematic issues arise, i.e., anytime Xander opens his mouth. Xander can be seen as symbolically embodying the problematics of patriarchal boyhood on into manhood.

How to Smash the Demon Lizard Patriarchy and Other Lessons that
His comments frequently represent offensive misogynistic policing of women's bodies and sexuality. While he is coded as the "good guy," he still expresses problematic views stemming from toxic masculinity. Additionally, the podcasters also take on the cultural insensitivities spectacle during the episode entitled "Inca Mummy Girl," where cultural appropriation is on full display at the Bronze. "Inca Mummy Girl" (S2 E4) concerns the cultural exchange event at Sunnydale High. Buffy houses an exchange student from Peru-Ampata. Ampata is actually a mummy brought back to life who must sustain herself with the life force of other humans. The episode ends with a dance at the Bronze where the students are dressed in highly culturally insensitive costumes. The dance and furthermore the episode as a whole is full of problematic stereotypes that are thoughtfully unpacked by the podcasters. Youngs and Russo use these problematic moments in the show to educate new and old viewers as to why cultural stereotypes and negative representation is harmful. In another culturally problematic episode "Pangs", a spirit from the Chumash tribe is unleashed onto Sunnydale in a cringe worthy Thanksgiving episode. The commentary the show makes about indigenous people feels pandering at best-Willow corrects Giles that "we don't call them Indians anymore, we call them Native Americans" and deeply problematic at its worst. The Chumash spirit Hus is an angry spirit working to murder his oppressors (first the anthropology professor who unearths the hidden mission where Hus and his people were exposed to disease and died, next a priest whose church has historical ties to the mission, and finally he attempts to kill Buffy, because as the most physically strong of her people, Hus regards her as the warrior of her people "We don't say Indian anymore we say Native American," cause y'all trying so hard, "Pass the oregano, I don't want to hurt him," yet y'all still act like Custer.
Can you even see him? Beyond your beliefs of wild savages, people murdered, sacred objects housed in your anthropology departments.
Same refrain, the only good Indian is a dead Indian.
This week's big bad is America's original sin: Artichoker points to the importance of knowledge and how knowledge becomes compiled, typically in imperialistic ways "housed in anthropology departments." They explicitly call out methods of white washing history, and caution the reader to question who gets to tell the stories (in this case explicitly calling out the writers of the show, a white woman Marti Noxon and a white man Joss Whedon) that are made up of "what we haven't been told." In the show, Hus is never given more motivation than pure vengeance and rage, but White-Hat Artichoker via the podcast is able to provide a more fully fleshed out vision of the character and the cultural complexities and facts that are often missed when white people represent indigenous people in media.
Youngs and Russo make it a point to use the term "patriarchy" at least once an episode to indicate when oppression occurs that stems from patriarchal constructs.
They have even created a patriarchy jingle that they play during patriarchal moments of oppression during the show. In addition, after the season two episode "Reptile Boy" that centers on the abuses of power enacted by a fraternity against girls in order to appease a reptilian demon who bequeaths the members of the fraternity with wealth and prestige (Greenwalt, 1997), the podcasters termed the phrase "smash the demon lizard patriarchy." The phrase has become a paratextual entity in its own right as it has become emblazoned on shirts, hoodies, mugs and perhaps most importantly, a free downloadable poster meant to be printed on poster board for political marches and protests.
Furthermore, Youngs and Russo honor a pair of characters with the sexual tension award every episode. The sexual tension award is often bestowed to the characters that display the most homoerotic desire. A few of the winners of the sexual 182 tension award are Angel and Xander, Giles and Ethan Rayne, Willow and Cordelia.
Most notably in season three, the relationship between Buffy and Faith is given special attention as the podcasters emphasize the homoerotic undertones on the show. They have even gone so far as to create a new version of "Baby It's Cold Outside" that replaces the lyrics with those driven by Buffy and Faith partaking in the flirtatious banter of the redone Christmas carol. The revised song can be looked at as a form of slash fanfiction as the show never materializes more than subtle hints at the desire between the two women.
The podcast not only smartly discusses each episode, but it has become a haven for the queer community as well. Youngs and Russo have had many other queer podcasters and entertainers guest star on their show. Furthermore, the use of technology, such as Facebook live allows Youngs and Russo to participate in a "live watch" of particular episodes online. Fans from all over the world watch the episode together, while also watching Youngs and Russo provide commentary. The viewer utilizing the Facebook messaging function may live chat with one another as well. A show that has not aired "live" in essentially 20 years is being revived once more and being watched at the same time by people all over the globe.
Moreover, the inclusion of the original song at the end of each podcast also speaks to new world building. The songs, while being an homage to the series, produce a new archive detailing the narrative and emotional trajectory of the show.
Youngs performs the songs written by herself and Russo and generally produces them from the perspective of Buffy allowing us a glimpse of interiority that may not have been present otherwise.

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It can certainly not be denied that much of fandom relies on the urge to collect and consume material goods. Fans can, thus, be seen as "specialist consumers, whose fandom is expressed through keeping up with new releases of books, comics and videos," and I would add clothing, jewelry, games, action figures, prop replicas, among other ephemera related to fandom to this list (Hills 29). Jenkins articulates a persuasive argument that relocates the perception of fans from passive consumers to active participants in that "media fans are consumers who also produce, readers who also write, spectators who also participate" (208). This move positions the active fan, such as Youngs and Russo, in a unique locus.
The consumption of the text is one way in which the fan becomes always already a consumer, but fandom also relies on the need to encounter the text multiple times. The act of rereading a text is considered an integral element of fandom.
"Rereading is central to a fan's aesthetic pleasure. Much of fan culture facilitates repeated encounters with favored texts" (Jenkins 1992, 69). Jenkins, by way of Roland Barthes, suggests "that rereading runs counter to 'commercial and ideological habits of our society' and thus books are constructed to sustain our interests only on a first reading 'so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book'" (1992,67). Essentially Barthes and, therefore, Jenkins argue that this return to the material disrupts the consumer cycle because instead of purchasing a new text you are returning to the one you have already bought, thus, not consuming more material.
However, it seems that the mere act of rereading a text has lost a bit of its radical denial of the commercial with the rise of streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.
Streaming sites with monthly subscription costs have commodified the urge to 184 rewatch. You can easily choose to repeat your viewing of a television show, but you are still always paying for that pleasure.
There may still be a way that rewatching a text can be seen as a resistant act to the formation of commercial consumerism. The act of rereading a text in the streaming age now no longer runs counter to the commercial habits of our society. However, I argue that we can read podcasts as the radical intervention that disrupts commercial promotional T-shirt where 100% of the proceeds went to support the #TimesUp movement, which has established a Legal Defense Fund that provides subsidized legal support to those who have experienced sexual harassment, assault, or abuse in the workplace, and another fundraiser to provide aid to the animals harmed during the fires in Australia. Additionally, for their "Pangs" episode they donated 100% of the profits from their lyric sheets to the Native American Rights Fund. I find these examples to be encouraging ways in which fandom can disrupt the typical capitalist ensnarement of consumption that has traditionally plagued fans. Fandom's relationship to merchandise is undoubtedly complicated, but podcasts like Buffering provide a new and potentially fruitful way to think about fandom and consumption.
By rewatching Buffy in the twenty-first century alongside the Buffering podcast, Buffy proves that she is the hero we still need today when we have a president and a government that threatens women's reproductive rights and the rights of LGTBQ+ folks. Buffy helps to empower people to stand up to oppressive forces.
After all, at the end of the series, instead of gaining more power for herself, Buffy changes the entire future of the slayer line by sharing her power, allowing all girls who might be slayers to become slayers. After the 2016 election, Youngs and Russo offered statements of solidarity, as they mourned with the queer community and much of America about the events that transgressed that fateful November 8th. The podcast was gearing up for the season one finale, wherein Buffy faces the Master-the ancient vampire who has been prophesied to rise from his underground prison, kill the slayer and unleash literal hell upon Sunnydale. When Buffy learns she is fated to die, she tries to run away from her responsibilities. However, Buffy learns that the Master's minions have slaughtered numerous high school students on campus. Buffy's best friend Willow sits beleaguered on her bed as she explains to Buffy that the vampires had made our world theirs. Buffy, determined to no longer run from her doomed fight, meets the Master in his underground lair where he drowns her, and Buffy momentarily dies. Luckily, her friends find her, and Xander revives her with CPR.
Once alive again, Buffy knows the fight is not over and proceeds to track the Master 187 down and properly stake him (Whedon, 1997). Buffy's urge to "just keep fighting" becomes an anthem that songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs notices. The song that Youngs performs for the last episode of season one of the podcast resonates with Buffy's final trials against the Master, but more importantly crystallizes the mournful but impassioned pleas that so many felt during the last days of 2016…to just keep fighting. The following is a verse from Youngs' song "Prophecy Girl":  (Youngs, 2016) The probing question of "what will come if our world belongs to them" relates back to Willow's fears of the vampires making our world their own, but even more so the shackles of television studio constraints, while the podcast is free from any overarching constraints to shape its discourse and format in whatever way the hosts deem suitable. Ultimately, we do not live in a post-Buffy world, and we still need our favorite vampire slayer to remind us to "just keep fighting." The pursuit of knowledge in the series sketches the problematic elements of the show's centering of whiteness. The transmedial texts that come after and build upon the Buffyverse, point towards viewer's understandings of the problematic way that the original show dealt with race and class issues. It will be interesting to see how the planned reboot (air date to be determined) that has stated that the slayer will be a woman of color, as well as employing a woman of color as the showrunner will add to this conversation of diversity in the Buffyverse. By tracing the active way that curiosity plays out in BTVS we can see that curiosity becomes an agent for change, and an action that is rewarded but requires labor. The pursuit of knowledge is an important mechanism in both the show and points to the way that fandom cultures interact with texts. To trace the lineage of the Female Gothic through BTVS, shows how the mode has changed and grown and highlights the changes that still need to occur in the mode, as in decentering whiteness and overcoming dominant middle class ideologies. Buffy's strength, agency, and power point to the subversive edge of the Female Gothic, but her whiteness and middle class upbringing only allow the Female Gothic to progress so far. As Donna Heiland writes, the patriarchy "is not only the subject of gothic novels, but is itself a gothic structure" and on which often demands, "the outright sacrifice of women" (10-11). Therefore, one of the ways in which the Female Gothic may counter these demands is by imbuing its female characters with complexity and agency, which Buffy inhabits, but also allowing the intersections of race and class to be a more dominant part of the mode. While BTVS does not have the best track record with intersectional practices, the transmedia texts that come after illustrate a more diverse Buffyverse.