Female Monstrosity In Gothic Literature

Female monstrosity is manifested in different dimensions. Mladan Dolar, in this respect, argues that: “The monster can stand for anything our culture has to repress; the proletariat, sexuality, other cultures, alternative ways of living, heterogeneity, the Other.” (qtd. in Walser, 2). In other words, monsters represent a site of threat for the Western notions of normalcy. Mittman argues that monsters not only “challenge and question; they trouble, they worry, they haunt. They break and tear and rend cultures, all the while constructing them and propping them up. They swallow up our cultural mores and expectations, and then, becoming what they eat, they reflect back to us our own faces” (Mittman 1). Examination of the selected narratives will

Nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle witnessed the emergence of the New Woman who is “an outspoken, independent and thoroughly modern woman, whose “masculine” behaviours made her something of a monster” (199). In fact, monstrosity in nineteenth-century gothic productions is “largely interpellated by the Symbolic gaze” that relegates the New Woman’s transgressive acts to oddity (Hock-soon Ng 2). Women’s assertive and aggressive behaviours contradict with “the Symbolic normative” that inscribes them within the discourse of monstrosity (2). In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar explain that women’s “assertiveness, aggressiveness – all characteristics of male life of “significant action” - are “monstrous” in women precisely because “unfeminine” and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of “contemplative purity” (28). The she-monster thus, not only crosses the boundaries of normativity but also jeopardizes the constructed conception of femininity and humanity. In this context, Becker maintains that her subversive conduct “resist le propre in terms of femininity and to disrupt the ‘proper’ plots for heroines, thus exposing their constructing and appropriating ideology” (172). The devastation of such a hegemonic discourse unveils the laden ideological practices of the official patriarchal system. The hybrid grotesque creature whose ambivalent position produces a sense of unease coupled with fascination, humor and/or horror can also be manifested in the combination between feminine and masculine attributes, the female grotesque challenged