Burger, Lewis, and Southey's works all evoke a lower status of women at the time, portraying them as grievously dependent, unfaithful and materialistic, and maniacal, respectively. Burger's ballad "Lenora" especially calls to mind Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the character of Ophelia. If you recall, Ophelia is a woman who is so infatuated with Prince Hamlet that she devolves into a state of madness and commits suicide. The equivalent of this overwhelming emotional dependency in Burger's piece is evidenced by Lenora's cry: "My hope is all forlorne;/ The grave my onlye safeguard is--/ O, had I ne/er been born." Clearly this romantic historical poet relied on the stereotypical gendered characters of a former artist, reviving and reinforcing the widely-held preconceptions of woman's frailty and propensity to succumb to earthly passions and desires. Such semblances of misogyny also reigned in classical pieces such as Homer's "The Iliad" in which Helen of Troy and several of the female goddesses engaged in acts of manipulation, frivolity, and debauchery.
I agree that gender is a key part of these poems. In many cases, the writers are using gender to share their message. Women are in many ways manifestation of the Gothic. The Gothic indulged in the extreme, in emotion, in the dark, and the horrific. Women, it seems, in most of these poems indulge in similar things. Women in these poems such as Lenora are characterized as being very emotional. And in this emotion, they are forced to deal with the moment where love and horror meet. I wonder if the writers were really critiquing women or if they were using the classical representation of women as being the "weaker" sex (and thus more apt to fall into emotion) for their own purposes. it seems to me that the authors are using women because since antiquity women have been represented as emotional creatures. Gothic writers recognized the inherent connection between their own interests (dark, extremity, emotion) and the classical characterization of women as emotional and extreme.
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