Uncle Silas: Forms of Desire in the Gothic House

Abstract

This article will focus on the discourse of Maud Ruthyn, in Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu, emphasising her personal and political power within a feminine Gothic frame, as a means of disclosing closed spaces that both imprison and free women. The experience of terror and desire shall be seen as a reading experience of liberation where fantastic elements function as a way of provoking uneasiness at the same time that it reveals that what is apparently “exaggerated beyond reality” may function as “difference” by – following Linda Hutcheon thought – multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality. I also intend to observe the way Le Fanu makes use of the classic Gothic genre as a metaphor for female experience, mainly through the most important element that constructs and deconstructs it: the house, that harbours the textures of gender, culture, and sexuality.