Things slipping between past and present: Feminism and the gothic in Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre

Abstract

The success of Kate Mosse’s international best-selling Sepulchre (2007) encapsulates the tremendous appetite for this particular type of historical novel, in which a narrative set in the present progresses alongside a narrative set in the past.¹ Located in the Carcassonne area of France, Mosse splits the story between two time periods, the 1890s and the present day, with the protagonists Léonie Vernier and Meredith Martin grappling not only with an interlinked supernatural murder mystery, but also with the constructions of womanhood in their respective time periods. The nineteenth-century woman, Vernier, is keen to explore her uncle’s links with the occult, but her curiosity leads to her entanglement in a dangerous plot against her brother and her aunt. Martin is Vernier’s great-great-granddaughter who comes to France to research a book on Achille-Claude Débussy, but instead becomes fixated on her own family history. In this chapter, I posit Mosse’s historical fiction as a representation of what feminist literary critics of the 1980s referred to as ‘the female gothic’, a term used to read gothic literature as ‘the mode par excellence that female writers have employed to give voice to deep-rooted fears about their own powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy’.² Considering the work of writers such as Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, critics such as Ellen Moers explored gothic narratives of fear, imprisonment and otherness as ways of thinking through female experiences of patriarchal oppression.³