Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction by June Pulliam (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction by June Pulliam Sara Austin (bio) Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. By June Pulliam. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. June Pulliam’s book is, as its title suggests, a feminist project. She concludes, “Monsters are a girl’s best friend, and they have a lot to teach us” (178). What monsters teach us, according to Pulliam, is how young girls are socialized as gendered subjects (11). Horror fiction denaturalizes the female subject, turning her into the Other. This process shows how many of the supposedly natural attributes of femininity are social constructions that girls can push back against in order to regain agency. Pulliam begins by comparing texts with similar types of female bodies, including ghosts, werewolves, and witches, and then moves outward to compare female agency across the genre. Monstrous Bodies is divided into three chapters, each focused on a type of embodied horror narrative and a specific element of patriarchal domination. For each chapter, Pulliam selects between five and seven significant texts, including films, novels, and short stories ranging in date of publication from 1989 to 2013, though the majority are from early in this century. Pulliam defines a significant work as one that is owned by approximately a thousand libraries worldwide, and her chapter notes justify the exclusion of certain texts as outside of the parameters of her project (Sabrina is not a horror text, the characters in Charmed are too old, etc.). [End Page 97] For the texts she does choose, Pulliam gives extensive and detailed close readings paired with staples of feminist theory by authors such as Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Hélène Cixous, and Naomi Wolf. By reading the fiction alongside the theory, she is able to show supporting and contrasting examples of female agency across the breadth of a genre. The chapters interlock as previously discussed theorists reappear in later chapters, allowing Pulliam to compare ghosts, werewolves, and witches as models of adolescent female agency. Using a metric for independence that includes the ability to support oneself and freedom from the direct patriarchal dominance of a father or husband, she concludes that of these categories witches are the most agentic bodies. Based on the texts investigated here, witches are the most likely to grow into independent young women. The first chapter uses ghost stories to explore gender as a social construction. Pulliam describes novels in which the silencing of the protagonist acts as a part of normalized womanhood. In these “modern Gothic ghost stories,” ghosts who were silenced in their lifetimes help the protagonists access “repressed knowledge” to build autonomy in their own lives (49). The ghosts are silenced by death, often by murder (Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Jade Green, Paula Morris’s Ruined), but they regain their voices by helping the living protagonists who are silenced by oppressive fathers or patriarchal social structures. Pulliam echoes Butler’s call to “refuse what we are” and rebel against social definitions of gender, as do the protagonists in these texts (69; original emphasis). The second chapter discusses girlfighting and the Beauty Myth in reference to werewolves. Pulliam splits the texts into those that reaffirm the status quo and those that do more work toward deconstructing gender norms. The clear organization of the chapter is helpful, since the texts included represent the broadest range of both time and type, including Suzy Charnas’s short story “Boobs” (1989); the movies Ginger Snaps (2000) and Ginger Snaps 2:Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004); and two novels, Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate (1997) and Patricia Windsor’s The Blooding (1999). Since the onset of lycanthropy is dictated by menarche, the links between monstrosity and the gendered body are clear. Pulliam reads lycanthropy as a female bildungsroman in which the principal character either learns how to choose a romantic partner who will treat her as an equal, or learns individual autonomy without any romantic interest. The final chapter shows how constructivist epistemology and sisterhood, enacted through teen witches, can push back against biopower and the male gaze. Beginning with a detailed reading of the film The Craft (1996), Pulliam shows...