Feminist Gothic: Anonymity and intersectionality of oppression in Eva Figes's The Tenancy.

The Gothic genre has historically been adopted by women writers to express their subversive gender views. In The Tenancy, Figes depicts the systematic oppression of the patriarchal society against women during the latter half of the twentieth century. She also revises the traditional Gothic topos of "oppression" in terms of three aspects: victim, intersectionality, and the source of oppression. Female victims no longer hold traditional gender values; they are new women who are oppressed for their nonconformity. This novel also shows that, with the development of technology and urbanization, patriarchal oppression has become more anonymous and more systematic, during which process gender and class parameters intersect with each other. Figes's revision upon the "oppression" topos reveals a more revolutionary insight than most Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, The Tenancy marks a significant transition from the female Gothic to the feminist Gothic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]