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th the good promoted while the evil punished. The novel paves the way for the developing of the Gothic novels: there are secret passages and mysterious abbey, the villainous usurper and the virginal heroine, the upright hero, the display of sadistic and masochistic emotions and the unbridled ***uality and sensuality. It exhibits its rebellious and excessive qualities. The portrayal of unanimated characters and brash plots, the eerie and horrible settings and scenery, the depiction of the institution of cavalier, however, brought it long-term criticism. With the publication of The Castle of Otranto the real history of the word Gothic begins from eighteenth century. And it mainly refers to the following three meanings: barbarous, medieval, and supernatural.From then on, a large number of Gothic novels come out with the theme sticking to the exploration of human nature and passions in forms of indulgence and irrational excess around 1790s. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Mathew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796). The latter two works are considered to be the most outstanding and influential works among the large number of the Gothic novels during Gothic decade. Ann Radcliffe is one of the most famous female novelists whose works touch upon the typical Gothic traditions. By inheriting and developing major features of her predecessors, she attaches much importance to female figures in Gothic novels, endowing her works with new characteristics and preserving their distinct ingredients. Therefore, she is highly praised for the initiatory emphasis on women and their situations within Gothic context besides her great contribution to Gothic traditions. There are typical gothic features, such as ruined castles and abbeys, isolated passageways and dark forests in her novel, as well as some unique features, which cannot be found in male Gothic novels. To some extent, she starts the tradition of the so-called Female Gothic.Female Gothic, the variant of modern Gothic, first comes out from Ellen Moers’ Literary Women. She defines Female Gothic as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode”.[13] Getting flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Female Gothic novels usually focus on a female protagonist who is chased and tormented by villainous gothic figures with unfamiliar settings and horrible landscape as the background. “No Gothic novel is without its suffering heroine, who is both ‘***ualized’ as an object of desire and ‘victimized’ by a powerful aggressor who is also a potential rapist. The first task of feminist criticism was to articulate the problem of the abuse of the female in Gothic fiction and to explore the ways in which female novelists subverted or reinscribed the cultural norms of female ***ualization and victimization. ”[14] The Female Gothic aims to socialize and educate its female readers by criticizing patriarchal dominion and serves as an expression of female independence. It “not only marks the introduction of gendered perspective into Gothic studies, but also opens up a new space for feminist literary studies.”[15] In a word, Female Gothic is a form of literature, which expresses the inner secret resistance, fantasy, and terror of the female. Women are under the oppression of men for a long time, and it is high time that women writers should subvert male dominated literary discourse and establish their own writi