The Female Gothic Body

Abstract

This chapter begins by demonstrating that the property and inheritance rights of the early ‘transgressive’ Gothic heroine could be seized by controlling her body through marriage, domestic violence or imprisonment. The Bluebeard legend was then rewritten by women writers, including Ann Radcliffe and Elizabeth Gaskell, so as to embrace female empowerment, while Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon appear to have been influenced by the wrongful confinement within an asylum of Rosina Bulwer Lytton by her husband, Gothic novelist Edward. Throughout history women’s bodies have frequently been regarded as sites of monstrosity and the chapter argues that this cultural abjection is represented within the Gothic in various ways, from the gorgon to the vampire. Fear of the feminine continues to be articulated through the female body and its constituent parts. While the threat of miscegenation through the female body’s reproductive capacity is fragmented in Frankenstein, adaptations of Shelley’s novel by feminist writers, including Shelley Jackson and Elizabeth Hand, celebrate the autonomous patchwork self and scarred female body as representations of a painfully achieved female subjectivity. Other misogynist myths, such as the vagina dentata and the Medusa’s castrating gaze, are similarly deconstructed in other feminist fiction.