Radcliffe’s authorial project was sensitive about the reality of women in a male oriented-society. She fictionalized their nagging worries about their mundane lives and trivial visibilities coupled with their innermost fears of being entrapped within the stifling private space of the home where they slavishly performed the role of docile wives and/or devoted mothers. In doing so, Radcliffe managed both to domesticate the Gothic, bringing a ‘realistic’ touch to the plot and to Gothicize the domestic transforming it metaphorically into a claustrophobically grotesque place. Maggie Kilgour further explained that “[t]he female gothic itself is not a ratification but an exposé of domesticity and the family […] by cloaking familiar images of domesticity in gothic forms, it enables us to see that the home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy of ominous patriarchal authorities” (9).
