A recent Brontë-related honor thesis:
by Blythe Meacham, Angelo State University
December 2025
Since its appearance in the mid-eighteenth century, Gothic literature has been equal parts popular and scandalous; these stories thrill audiences through their treatment of controversial topics and taboo ideas, particularly in their representation of women. Literary scholars have applied many theoretical lenses in studying Gothic texts, with gender studies and psychoanalysis being among the most prominent. Beyond the Female Gothic contributes to criticism in Gothic literature by reading two texts, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in conversation with contemporary work in the interdisciplinary field of affect studies. Affect studies draws from the disciplines of philosophy, history, literature, psychology, and neuroscience to explore how affect, which includes conscious and non-conscious emotions and embodied feeling, both shapes and is shaped by social and cultural conceptions of gender, relationships, and power dynamics. Placing affect studies alongside established literary scholarship, including critical discussions of the “Female Gothic” that explore how women are represented in Gothic literature as characters and authors, provides a unique way of looking at these novels. In particular, I will demonstrate how the language of emotion developed by the philosopher David Hume and the language of feeling developed by precursors to neuroscience in this time period inform representations of affect in Gothic literature. Through readings of these key texts that theorize affect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing on female education, I will argue that through the discourse of affect, Zofloya and Wuthering Heights theorize conceptions of feminine agency that go beyond the framework offered by the “Female Gothic.”
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