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Lizzyxx头像特训寒假班第2期

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荔枝Lizzyxx头像特训寒假班第2期

institutions that enforce women’s confinement to domestic ideologies dictated by patriarchal rule. 2. The Recess Gothic fiction was seen as a feminized mode as it incorporated many features of sensible and sentimental literature. For instance, sentimental literature seeks to morally enlighten the reader by focusing on the feelings and emotions between the characters and the readers. This form of literature functioned as a didactic model to teach people correct morals and reactions through the characters' actions in the novel. Both gothic and sentimental genres have been read as “the province of women” and became feminized forms of literature. Heiland writes that sensibility is a symptom of what society has repressed, and “what has been repressed is pleasure, desire, and the possibility of social change. Sensibility can point the way to the dissolution of the self (in male writers), to the restructuring of gender relations (in female writers), and to different 21 ways of being male and female (in both)” (12). Both Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe embrace the feminized, domestic literary sphere to criticize sexist and patriarchal divisions between men and women. The Recess explores and challenges women’s confinement and oppression within literal and domestic spaces through a narrative rooted in the historical rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. The novel is based on the fictional premise that during her imprisonment by Elizabeth, Mary married the Duke of Norfolk and gave birth to twin daughters, Ellinor and Matilda. Mary remains imprisoned while her husband fights and dies during a battle against Elizabeth. Their infant daughters are sent to a recess, a secret, subterranean abbey in the ruins of a convent to protect them from the vengeful Elizabethan Court (Lee 22). The daughters grow up in the Recess and eventually learn their birth story; however, their mother’s claim to the throne means that they have one too, leading Queen Elizabeth I and her Court to attempt to contain Ellinor and Matilda’s threats to her reign. As a result, the sisters spend their formative years sequestered in the Recess. The enclosure is a refuge from the Elizabethan court, but it simultaneously serves as a prison that keeps them confined and isolated from the outside world. Lee illustrates the complexities of eighteenth-century gender politics by creating a narrative of two heroines bound by gender and using architectural metaphors to represent entrapment. The recess is a physical refuge to conceal Matilda and Ellinor’s identities from the Court of Elizabeth that would seek to find and capture the sisters if their relationship with their mother is publicly revealed. The Recess as a Refuge The novel begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It (1693) and foretells themes of confinement, isolation, and persecution that the heroines will encounter. The 22       epigraph speaks to Ellinor and Matilda’s fond attachment to the Recess but prophesies the truth that will be revealed to them throughout the novel's plot. The epigraph states, “Are not these Woods / More free from peril than the envious Court? / Here feel we the penalty of Adam / The seasons’ difference” (qtd. in Lee 4). The Shakespearean epigraph establishes the rural, pastoral setting of the novel and romanticizes Ellinor and Matilda’s exile from society, both literally and figuratively. Matilda narrates that the recess is surrounded by “a long avenue of broken arches, intermingled with brambles and wild wall-flowers, in the paths of which the grass grew very high … – nothing could more fully prove the unrequitedness of the spot,” camouflages the location of the recess as the environment has no indicators of human inhabitance (Lee 37). The epigraph alludes to the story of Adam and Eve before they were banished from the Garden of Eden after committing the ultimate sin. Before Adam and Eve committed the ultimate evil, the Garden of Eden was in a perpetual summer. One of the consequences of their actions was the annual changing of seasons. The epigraph implies that Ellinor and Matilda do not experience the “season’s difference,” allowing readers to infer that while they live in a perpetual summer, their circumstance is far from idyllic. The sisters’ confinement within the Recess serves as a double-edged sword as it protects them from the Elizabethan Court while simultaneously imprisoning them inside the walls of the underground abbey and adjacent edifices. The Recess incorporates Gothic Revival-styled architecture as a physical setting and uses these gothic structures to represent women's hidden desires, entrapment, and solitude. Matilda and Ellinor are “shut away from the world” and confined to a recess (Lee 9). Sophia Lee uses gothic architecture to expose women’s confinement within domesticity with descriptions of the abbey that encases them. Using these 23       metaphors and symbolizations, Lee reveals the various socio-political and cultural fears women had following the shifts instigated by the British Enlightenment. Lee highlights the positive aspects of the Recess and how Ellinor and Matilda’s confinement emphasizes the importance of female relationships in the novel. With the gothic genre becoming popularized as a space for women to address their concerns and sentiments regarding their daily lives, it became a unified space for female writers. Megan Lynn Isaac's essay “Sophia Lee and The Gothic of Female Community” describes how Sophia Lee uses the gothic genre to highlight the importance of female friendships and the necessity for female voices in historical writing. Isaac describes Lee's work as a demonstration of “the typical problems women encounter in society … demonstrating not only the limitations faced by women operating under a patriarchal system but portraying as well how women cooperate with and participate in a system which diminishes and denies the feminine potential” (204). The abbey that confines Ellinor and Matilda is underground, surrounded by ruins, and in a private location. Women were