The fearful transience of identity: analyzing the gothic antiheroine in Claire Messud’s the Woman Upstairs and Lauren Acampora’s the Paper Wasp

The Woman Upstairs and The Paper Wasp suggest that modern narratives featuring the antiheroine utilize Gothic techniques in order to expose the tension between convention and subversion of traditional feminist ideals in female-female relationships. This paper makes two arguments: firstly, that the initial process of identification with the idealized female friend results in the Gothic antiheroine’s sexual, maternal, and artistic awakening; secondly, that these alignments with the “feminine” expose the contradictions and complexities of the Gothic antiheroine figure, resulting in a challenge to the traditional, and problematic, trajectory of the antiheroine narrative. The Gothic antiheroine’s confrontation with the self thus exposes cultural anxieties surrounding motherhood, the female (abject) body, and sexual desire, all of which are aligned with the Female Gothic mode.