Etymology says it all. ‘Wicked’ derives from the Old English wicce, a witch. Thus any discussion of Wicked Women in the Gothic demands what Mary Daly has called ‘the process of freeing words from the cages and prisons of patriarchal patterns’ (Daly 1987: 3). Nowadays ‘wicked’ sounds archaic, evoking ‘Snow White’, or ‘Hansel and Gretel’, or the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). (‘Wizard’, though defined as ‘a male witch’, is derived from the Middle English wys or wis, meaning ‘wise’ or ‘smart’.) L. Frank Baum's Wizard was a fraud, but his witches have real power over nature, and like those of the Brothers Grimm imply children's anxieties about mothers’ possibly supernatural powers. Older witches express men's fears of emasculation. The witch hunter's manual, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), reports one who kept a collection of penises in a bird's nest – the largest belonging to the local priest (Kraemer and Sprenger 2013: 108). The witchy women of Gothic fiction usually threaten not literal but more symbolic forms of castration: rebellion against their patriarchal roles as dutiful daughters, faithful wives and self-sacrificing mothers.

The history of wicked Gothic women is a history of rebellion and subversion and a demonstration that representing female subjectivity requires a revolution in literary form. The first epoch of Gothic fiction (1764-c. 1820) coincided with women beginning to publish their writing in great numbers. In portraying their gender, they began to explore and eventually to escape their assigned ‘female’ role as patriarchy's dark, dangerous ‘Other’. Paradoxically, however, the literary foremother of these Gothic wicked women is a female impersonation: Eloisa, in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717). Writing a heroic epistle, an Ovidian genre authorising a male poet to write as a woman abandoned by her lover, Pope paraphrased John Hughes's translation (1713) of the twelfth-century nun Héloïse's letters to her lost, beloved Abelard. Pope's poem exploits the patriarchal stereotypes of women obsessed by romantic love and the interior of the female self as secret and dark, complex and irrational. Thus he places Eloisa, whose convent was Romanesque in style, within a Gothic structure, where literal stone and verbal vows are equally claustrophobic. As a woman imprisoned by the Law of the Father, she is driven virtually mad by unresolvable conflicts.