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Nightmares of Repetition, Dreams of Affiliation: Female Bonding in the Gothic Tradition Domínguez Rué, Emma Feminisme Maternitat Feminism Motherhood Novel·la gòtica Glasgow, Ellen Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797 Feminisme Maternitat Novel·la gòtica Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797 Mary Wollstonecraft's fiction borrows the conventions of the female Gothic to portray the horrors of women's oppressive reality within a patriarchal society, which do not end with her escape from the haunted castle. Like Wollstonecraft, the writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Ellen Glasgow also use the Gothic confusion of the boundaries of ordinary reality ― self/other, past/present, reality/fantasy ― to reveal a looking-glass world where assumptions of the female as the persistent ‘other’ are reversed. The patriarchal principles of unity and chronology give way to a multiplicity of voices, mother figures, and mother substitutes that anticipate a better future for daughters within a community of women. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the recovery of that heritage constitutes a common concern of all three writers. Their fiction focuses on mothers and daughters and emphasises the circle of powerlessness that evidences the daughter's inability to escape her mother's fate, while it hints at the empowering possibilities of female affiliation as an alternative to escape that fate. Thus, either consciously or unconsciously, Gaskell and Glasgow continued Wollstonecraft’s legacy across generations and even thousands of miles across the Atlantic. 2014 info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion Versió postprint del document publicat a https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.750238 Journal of Gender Studies, 2014, vol. 72, núm. 2, 125-136 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess cc-by-nc-nd http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Taylor & Francis