The gothic’s real subject is shelteredness, not protofeminist protest against rape

Evidence

Such films indeed invite us to return somehow to history: the central scene of Something Wild—or at least the one on which the plot structure pivots decisively — is a class reunion, the kind of event which specifically demands historical judgments of its participants: narratives of historical trajectories, as well as evaluations of moments of the past nostalgically reevoked but necessarily rejected or reaffirmed. This is the wedge, or opening, through which a hitherto aimless but lively filmic narrative suddenly falls into the deeper past (or that deeper past into it); for the ten-year reunion in reality takes us back twenty more, to a time when the “villain” unexpectedly emerges, over your shoulder, marked as “familiar” in all his unfamiliarity to the spectator (he is the heroine’s husband, Ray, and worse). … I think it would be a great mistake to read such literature as a kind of protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy and, in particular, a protopolitical protest against rape. Certainly the gothic mobilizes anxieties about rape, but its structure gives us the clue to a more central feature of its content which I have tried to underscore by means of the word sheltered. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 631

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what is the ‘more central feature’ of shelteredness Jameson gestures toward but leaves underdeveloped here?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own interest in how aesthetic form encodes social position — the ‘sheltered woman’ gothic as an economic/class allegory, resonant with Jameson’s larger style-as-economy thesis.