Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic figure of female "monsters" in early-to-mid-Victorian literature, from 1837 to 1871. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, the pre-fin-de-siecle gothic figurations has often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as a result of Cartesian dualism. This Western thought fragments women into mind and body segments while creating a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, the author uses monism to delineate from and contest this dualism, unifying the material and immaterial aspects of fictional women and blurring the distinction between nature and culture. Blending intertextual disciplines as neurology, ecofeminism, psychology, biology, and literature, this monograph exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. As monsters, women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, most notably the reduction of female behavior to biological reproductivity, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic female figure reacts to and disrupts the processes of ontology, transforming women into "wild" and "monstrous" (re)presentations.
Nicole C. Dittmer is lecturer at The College of New Jersey and proofreader/editorial board member at Studies in Gothic Fiction.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Social Behavior and ‘Domesticated’ Women
Chapter Two: Forbidden Desire, Mental Degradation, and Nature: Repression of Gothic Madwomen
Chapter Three: Neglect, Rage, and Reaction: Female Criminality and the Victorian Gothic
Chapter Four: Monstrous Transformations and Victorian She-Wolves
Conclusion
Appendix: For Further Reading
References
About the Author
"Dittmer persuasively argues for a Spinozian unification of the mind-body-nature connection within the monstrous woman figure by conducting textual analysis of early-to-mid-Victorian Gothic literature and ephemeral penny publications alongside readings of contemporaneous medical, legal, and theological texts. She engages an ecofeminist lens to demonstrate how these monstrous women, from madwomen to she-wolves, use nature and the natural elements to their advantage. Dittmer reveals their acts of reclamation that undo misogynistic notions of proper female domestication, morality, and sexuality. Given the current sociopolitical climate, this work feels more necessary and relevant than ever." — Heather O. Petrocelli, author of Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator
"In this thorough and thoughtful examination of the material and semiotic qualities of she-monsters, Nicole C. Dittmer puts little-known texts by writers such as Reynolds, MacDonald, and Rymer in conversation with the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Brontës in order to explore how women act as natures partners in reclaiming their agency and instincts from Victorian patriarchal oppression. Adopting a Spinozan, monistic, eco-Gothic framework in its analysis of the role and representation of psychosomatic agency, Dittmers book charts productive and provocative new territory for literary and cultural study of the Gothic." — Harriet Hustis, The College of New Jersey
