The autorship of female gothic revered in The Merciful Women, by Federico Andahazi

Abstract

In 1816, Lord Gordon Byron and his few guests spent the summer at Villa Diodati, in Switzerland, and as amusement they made a competition of fantastic narratives. The classic novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, emerged from this amusement, but the less well known short story “The Vampire”, by John William Polidori, Byron’s personal assistant, also emerged from this. This paper assembles some inferences about fantastic literature and female gothic literature by analyzing the novel The Merciful Women, in which the Argentine author Federico Andahazi reproduces the fantastic universe of the classic gothic narratives of the nineteenth century and reveres the female gothic genre in narrating the process of elaboration of the short story The Vampire, by Polidori.