Women In the Cut of Danger: Female Subjectivity,Unregimented Masculinity and the Pleasure/Danger Symbiosis from the Gothic Romance to the Erotic Thriller

Abstract: Through a comparison between Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca and Susanna Moore's 1995 novel In the Cut, this article considers the extent to which Franco Moretti's theory of the inevitable dissolution of literary genres is true, with specific regard to the genre of the gothic romance. In evaluating both novels' treatment of female subjectivity, unregimented masculinity and the symbiotic relationship between sexual pleasure and mortal danger, this article investigates the degree to which a contemporary novel such as In the Cut, which is generally acknowledged to be an ‘erotic thriller’, is heavily indebted to the gothic romance and may therefore be interpreted as a continuation of this more traditional genre, and, conversely, the means through which Moore's novel exhibits an overt and defiant resistance to the gothic romance, thereby signifying the dissolution of this particular genre within twentieth-century women's writing.