In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt underlines the "changed nature" of the mainstream literary production of the 18th century which witnesses a textual revolution since the birth of the gothic genre, which gains its popularity with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) (qtd. in Hock-soon Ng 1). In contrast to the realist narratives of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, which mark the beginning of the century, Gothic writers tease their works with fantastic events, breaking with the Enlightenment ideological discourse that valorizes rationality (Botting 3). However, the Gothic genre has been vilified as a literary form “marginalized” compared to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century. Juliann Fleenor, in The Female Gothic, further clarifies this: “The Gothic has generally had a negative critical reception. From the beginning he was seen as outside the mainstream of literature […]. [C]onpared to the realistic novel, critics argue that the latter is superior because it is more real” (cit. in Anna Haningerová 14). Indeed, her peripheral position seems “congenial” to that of women in nineteenth-century patriarchal society (14). Consequently, women writers take up this genre which becomes a consolidated modality in their literary texts starting from the 18th century. Indeed, it is feminized with the literary works of Ann Radcliffe and consolidated by her female successors who participate in the "rise of the female Gothic novel" and the inauguration of an autonomous "female Gothic tradition." In examining her nineteenth-century narratives, Anne Williams argues that the feminine gothic has a “counter-feminist” purpose (qtd. in Greta Olson 13). Its traditional plot maintains the conventional portrayal…middle of paper…weirdness of their characters. They centralize their narratives around the story of monstrous women who are neither foils to the heroines nor stand-ins for the authors. Instead, they are given ample leeway to articulate their authorial “I” and verbalize their stories in which they assert their agency and individuality. Through their new Gothic monsters, 20th-century Gothic women writers manage not only to construct a counter-discourse in which they subvert all kinds of binary mechanisms, but also to present a new feminist approach to the traditional female Gothic, which suggests ways in which can undermine the conventional perception of identity, gender and sex as fixed and natural categories. Consequently, I will refer to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to read their narratives as stories of gender and sexual construction..