Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871

Offering an ecofeminist approach to the interdisciplinary readings of the early-to-mid Victorian Gothic of both canonical narratives and ephemeral penny bloods and dreadfuls, Dittmer identifies assumed “monstrous” women as monistic mind-body figurations, who reject social confines and reclaim nature.

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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-siècle 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.