DEVIANCE AND DESIRE: EMBODIMENTS OF FEMALE MONSTROSITY IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE GOTHIC
A Thesis
Presented to
The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
Maya Cope-Crisford
May, 2016 DEVIANCE AND DESIRE: EMBODIMENTS OF FEMALE MONSTROSITY IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE GOTHIC
Maya Cope-Crisford
Thesis
Accepted: Approved:
______Advisor Interim Dean of the College Dr. Heather Braun Dr. John Green
______Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Hillary Nunn Dr. Chand Midha
______Faculty Reader Date Dr. Joseph Ceccio
______Interim Department Chair Dr. Sheldon Wrice
ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wasn’t going to do an acknowledgements page. I was going to leave the profuse thanking for private interactions, followed by lots of flowers and copious amounts of wine. For those of you who have been at all involved in helping me over the last few months, you have this to look forward to. Then I realized the real importance of those who have helped me over the course of this process, and found an all-too-relevant connection between those most directly involved. THEY’RE ALL LADIES. I am surrounded by amazing, intelligent, strong women who continue to inspire me in all of my endeavors— this thesis included. I would not be the woman that I am without their constant support.
To my best ladies, Sarah, Marcy, and Holly— you are some of the best decisions
I’ve ever made. Each of you has been a sounding board throughout this process, and have helped me through the lows with grace and understanding, despite my frantic late-night calls and at times absentee friendship. I know you’re all just as invested as I am at this point, and that means so much— I’m honored to have you all in my life.
To my mother, Debi— thank you for always inspiring me to do more, to BE more, and to always keep pushing myself despite my doubts or misgivings. I love you more than words can say, and I have no doubt that your influence is what has made me the strong, independent, loving, and (mostly) competent woman that I am. Thank you, I will carry that with me always.
iii Finally, to my advisor, Dr. Heather Braun— thank you for having faith in me despite all of my shortcomings, and for helping me to get back on track any time I strayed. I appreciate your guidance and support more than you know, and could not have come this far without your knowledge and expertise on the subject as well as your interest in what I have to say. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being a part of this journey with me. I have learned so much not only about the time period, its literary merits, and its scholarship with your help— but also about myself as a writer and scholar.
While I have a long way to go to, I am better prepared for my academic future because of you, and I very much appreciate that.
See? Lady power. Powerhouse ladies. And hey, we might act like monsters according to nineteenth-century definitions, but at least we have fun doing it.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….…. 1
II. EMBODIED FEMALE MONSTROSITY: MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN AND CATHERINE SMITH’S CALEDONIAN BANDIT..……..………………..….. 17
The ‘Bride’ as Embodied Social Fear……..……………………….…21
The Audacity of the Monstrous Female…..………………….……… 28
III. THE SUBVERSIVE SUPERNATURAL: FEMALE MONSTERS IN ANNE BANNERMAN’S “THE DARK LADIE” AND “THE MERMAID”.………...... 45
Mermaid as Monster: Supernatural Female Agency…..…………..….55
The Embodied and Affective Spectre…….…………………….…… 60
IV. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….…….…… 70
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED…..………………………………….….…….78
v CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
British Gothic literature of the early nineteenth-century offers multitudes of representations of monstrous females, often depicted as subversive, transgressive, seductive, and even supernatural. Making use of Gothic tropes, monstrous forms and actions, doubling, fractured or fragmented imagination, and scenery of ruin and decay, as well as grotesque bodies, Gothic texts presented anxiety in ways that struck terror into readers’ hearts. These anxieties arguably came forward after larger traumatic social events such as the French Revolution, but the Gothic handled these anxieties in new and exciting ways. Of the central anxieties presented in these Gothic texts, monstrous females remain a lesser-examined figure. In an attempt to examine the importance of the commonly used trope of a monstrous female in nineteenth-century Gothic literary and cultural imagination, I will include examinations of central female figures in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as well as Catherine Smith’s novel The Caledonian
Bandit; or, the Heir of Duncaethal (1811), alongside ballads by Anne Bannerman from her Poems (1800) and Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) in order to trace gendered social anxieties across literary and cultural borders. By resurrecting these monstrous females, some perhaps for the first time, I hope to show the importance and value of this monstrous female as a marker of changing social bounds. Critics have noted 1 that “lacking adequate symbolization, women exist in a state of ‘dereliction’ or abandonment. They are ‘nowhere, touching everything, but never in touch with each other, lost in the air, like ghosts’”(Irigaray qtd. by Wallace, 37). Rather than allowing these females to become relegated to the fringes of their stories, or to be left in a state of dereliction or abandonment, I wish to put them in conversation with each other and grant them access to ongoing literary conversations.
In short, this thesis seeks to explore depictions of monstrous femininity, whether they be females in human or supernatural form. To be a monstrous female does not always require that the female actually be a ‘monster’ or creature, but rather denotes the female’s transgressive, deviant, even subversive nature as it appears through body or behavior, though usually a combination of both. I will examine these females according to several levels of understanding; some are simply monstrous in behavior, some are non- human or supernatural monsters, and others become monstrous as they change in status from human to something lesser or more animalistic, often through their socially deviant actions. To be considered monstrous, the female must refuse or be unable to conform to the prescribed social conventions of her given time and culture. This can be depicted as transgression against understandings of the ‘natural’ capabilities of the human body, sexual impropriety (both within and outside of marriage), and/or violent attitudes or actions that work in some fashion to subvert or complicate the patriarchal structures of the society of which she is a part. This often comes across as a combination of monstrous behavioral and physical traits, which together instigate feelings of anxiety and fear in those that encounter her.
2 All cultures have a conception of the monstrous female, whether in body or behavior, and each depiction represents an exploration of what it is about a woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrifying, or abject.1 In many ways, these adjectives can also be used to describe the atmospheric tendencies of Gothic writing, seeking to terrify and shock, and perhaps subvert. Because of this overlap, the Gothic offers the perfect mode through which to explore notions of the female monster, as both seek to explore the crossing of boundaries according to what is real/imagined, natural/unnatural, masculine/feminine, and even dead/undead. The monstrous female becomes a site of confusion within these false dichotomies as her body and behaviors often complicate what each of these polarized terms actually mean, just as the Gothic genre has done to complicate and explore notions of societal propriety. By moving outside of what is deemed normal or natural for the female, in body or behavior, the female monster (or monstrous female) brings into question the ideological and social concepts of what the female body and feminine behavior should be. Examining these texts, all written within
18 years of each other, will reveal the underlying social anxieties as they were according to British cultural ideals of the nineteenth-century and further illuminate the study of females within a Gothic context.
Due largely to the resurgence of Gothic imagery in literature, film, and popular culture of the last few decades, foundational Gothic texts such as Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho have been repeatedly re-examined using increasingly complex literary theory. Scholarship on the genre offers a
1 See Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) 3 good base from which to examine this thesis’ primary texts, as it tends to center around blurred distinctions between binaries and the confrontation of anxiety, especially when elements of the supernatural are introduced. According to Monica Germaná, Gothic literature retains a focus on “liminal borderlands and conditions: life/death, animate/inanimate, man/woman, kin/lover,” and it is the “interstitial spaces that [. . .] are designed to unsettle the reader” (13-14). The uncomfortable transgression or blurring of these liminal and interstitial spaces as performed by the female characters of this study highlights the expected gender roles of both male and female society as they existed in
British literature of the nineteenth-century, and subsequently examines the associated roles of social identity that are performed by both author and character.
Growing concern over femininity potentially infiltrating the public sphere was often externalized, or identified outside of England, in an attempt to relegate it to the fringes of society. By placing these anxieties and transgressions outside the bounds of centralized and proper society, English authors could effectively displace and project their fears onto an imagined, often marginalized, Other. More often than not, this Other was either of the weaker sex or of inferior race and nationality according to strict English ideals. In many cases, characters and settings became a combination of both, weaving gendered and nationalistic anxieties into the very center of the text. To place this in historical context for nineteenth-century Britain, one must acknowledge the turmoil of
Western Europe during and after the French Revolution. In an examination of some anxieties that were felt during the time of the French Revolution, Linda Colley comments on English attempts at distinction from the feminine as a sign of strength:
4 The British conceived of themselves as an essentially ‘masculine’ culture— bluff, forthright, rational, down-to-earth to the extent of being philistine— caught up in an eternal rivalry with an essentially ‘effeminate’ France— subtle, intellectually devious . . . [enabling] conservatives in Britain in particular to see in the outbreak of the French Revolution a grim demonstration of the dangers that ensued when women were allowed to stray outside their proper sphere. (252)
In the case of France, the country’s weakness and thus the cause for revolution was directly linked to its citizens’ more effeminate features, namely, their choice of dress, conduct, and sensitive feeling. Depending on the Gothic text being examined, the traditional role of the female could be either disputed or confirmed by the characters’ perceptions of her; essentially, the characters’ interactions with the female character define the female herself, just as France was defined according to English standards.
Tensions related to the changing roles of women in British society are key to understanding why Gothic literature became associated with the feminine in the first place. During the late eighteenth century, social ideology struggled to resolve exactly what the female role in society was to be, and often related the extent of a woman’s involvement in her nation to the boundaries of her home. This overlap of public and private, or domestic and national/social, complicated traditional notions of femininity and female agency. With the publication of Emile, or Education (1762), Jean-Jacques
Rousseau claimed that women existed as inferior to men in reason, strength, and cleverness, and while their duty to the nation was important, the greatest dignity was to remain unknown. Essentially, any contribution or involvement by women in society must remain in the private sphere alone; female participation in the public sphere was deemed
“irregular, even monstrous” (Colley 246). The widespread prevalence of Gothic literature
5 and the increasing number of female writers, heroines, and readers alike, complicated this notion. Gothic literature, especially as far as the female was concerned, was transgressive and dangerous to the stability of the nation in much the same way as political instability was.
As the Gothic came to be defined by critics as subversive or dangerous, so too did female monstrosity come to be defined according to others’ perceptions of her. The monstrous female may offer herself/be offered as a source of rebellion against patriarchal structures, particularly as they were present in English society— or she may only be representative of the dangers of such transgressions. During this period, as well as within the Gothic genre, female characters are generally represented as either impure and monstrous, or pure and chaste; they exist within the basic social dichotomies that patriarchal thinking has created, and movement outside of these defined realms becomes a source of tension. Gothic females are made monstrous by their anti-establishment behavior, often portrayed as mad, hysterical, even overtly tyrannical, and yet they remain central to the story as it is told— affecting varying levels of change among their social peers. This female deviancy found in the monstrous females “challenges fixed gender roles, [erases] the identification of woman as mother or wife, and question[s] the phallogocentric foundations of patriarchal gender discourse” (Germaná 67). The Gothic genre and the monstrous female bodies portrayed, then, defy unity at a number of cultural levels.
The genre of Female Gothic has been a significant field of study in recent years, and more directly applies to this thesis’ particular examination of gendered body politics
6 as they present or reflect social anxieties. This thesis will trace the role of the monstrous female within this particular subset of Gothic literature, and examine how it coincides with complex political and cultural accounts of history, perhaps as a means of helping to define the Female Gothic genre itself. Some definitions require that the author be a female, and while the primary texts of this thesis are indeed written by females, this is not the only definition of Female Gothic to be used. This thesis will incorporate aspects of femininity and feminized spaces as well as gendered bodies and gender expectations into the definition of Female Gothic. As a genre, the Gothic reflects elements of schizophrenia and conflict, and is arguably grounded in the social contexts that produce it. Aligning female experience (and readership) with the Gothic form then makes sense, as the Gothic has often been portrayed as dealing in triviality, emotion, and passionate excess, all considered traditionally feminine attributes. This should not be meant as an insult to either the genre or the sex, but rather a telling statement about the contexts that produce these assumptions.
Ellen Moers is generally considered the first literary critic to use the term “Female
Gothic,” as described in her foundational feminist theory text, Literary Women (1976).
By this original meaning, the Female Gothic came to be known as “the work that women have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the
Gothic” (90). Moers’ brief two chapters reference works by such writers as Radcliffe,
Joanna Bailie, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte as foundational authors of Female Gothic texts, inspiring above all, to produce fear in the reader by writing about “fantasy
[predominating] over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural
7 over the natural” (90). This initial discussion of female-authored texts may have been limited in scope, but it opened up a much larger discussion of the value and distinctions of both women’s writing as well as their work within the Gothic genre.
Later literary theory continues to debate the relevance of such a term as ‘Female
Gothic’ alongside/instead of (and as a subset of) terms like ‘women’s Gothic,’ ‘feminist
Gothic,’ ‘Gothic feminism,’ and more recently ‘Postfeminist Gothic.’2 Whether focusing on female writers or characters, however, the usefulness of explorations of the female in
Gothic literature is just that— to reevaluate the female role within a larger literary, political, socio-cultural movement or era. Gary Kelley’s general introduction to his 6- volume editions of Female Gothic texts explores the vast amount of scholarship that has come about since Moers’ introduction of the term, and comes to the conclusion that modern literary examinations are not driven so much by examining the Gothic as much as being captured by it. While the aim of this thesis is not necessarily to promote largely feminist theory, it should indeed capture the spirit of the Gothic female monster as much as she captures us. The monstrous female of the texts presented, then, will have been successfully adapted across text and social construction, perpetuating her motivations into the modern liberal state and global economy.
It is not in the modern state that these monstrous females exist, however, and so we must return to the historical contexts that produced them if we are to understand the
2 See Juliann Fleenor The Female Gothic, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith The Female Gothic: New Directions, Terry Castle The Female Thermometer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick The Coherence of Gothic Conventions for individual interpretations of the term “Female Gothic.” 8 social concerns presented. Under growing pressure and anxiety about war and revolution in Europe, Scottish rebellions, and subsequent social and economic transformations closer to home, “Britons seized upon the comparatively minor changes in women’s state as a symbol of all that seemed disturbing and subversive” (Colley 242). Depictions of these monstrous female characters can therefore be understood as representations of the larger social issues at hand:
. . . [illustrate] how such a cultural pathology requires the demonisation of an Other in order to maintain it. Women are shown to be doubly demonised— for their difference and their necessity— a situation rendered even more nefarious when national identity is figured into the equation and they also fall into the category of different-yet-necessary Scots. (Davison “Monstrous” 211-12)
The use of a foreign locale to set the scene explored notions of Otherness and national identity as it was established in England in much the same way that explorations of female monstrosity do. In Romantic and Gothic texts, this locale was often Scotland, portrayed as wildly sublime and full of superstitious lore, prone to the same arousal of passions and untamed nature as the monstrous females it as a nation was perceived as producing.
We must not forget that the primary focus remains on the female herself, and an awareness that the body and mind being expressed are deemed monstrous according to the world outside of her. Elisabeth Bronfen’s work with conceptualizing the body refers to this as the “body of knowledge,” and makes note that the body is always-already constructed according to cultural terms. This becomes most poignant when discussing the body as it becomes abject or shocking:
9
The distinction between what was considered to be normal and what to deviate from the norm— a difference so imperative for the formation of social codes and laws— continues to be negotiated on the body, namely whenever inadmissible sexual practices are labelled as being ‘perverse,’ when conventionally unacceptable forms of perception are labelled as signs of ‘madness,’ when actions undermining the social system are labelled as being ‘criminal,’ and when those who do not belong to the ethnic hegemony are labelled as ‘degenerate.’ (116)
The female body becomes a literal, corporeal site for the intersection of numerous cultural constructions of social code, sexual awareness, national identity, and xenophobic anxiety— all able to be translated onto the female form because of her already understood second-class status in the nineteenth century. While I use the term
‘monstrous’ rather freely to describe these female characters, they are indeed only labeled as such due to their deviance from social norm.
It can be seen, then, that overlapping anxieties of gender and nation take form in the work of the Female Gothic novels and ballads this study examines. I argue that political tensions between Scotland and England and the consistent portrayal of Scotland as a Gothic setting perhaps complicates these anxieties even more. As a manifestation of transgression and monstrosity, the choice of setting Scotland as either the source of female monstrosity or the place most associated with it, subverts not only male/female normative hierarchies, but also subverts natural/supernatural, political, and even geographical boundaries or borders. The Scottish female exists at once as outsider to
English nationality, as well as outsider to patriarchal structures of Western thought; the monstrous Scottish female even more so. According to binary structures of male/female and English/non-English, the Scottish female is an epitomized outsider, and is therefore a useful representation of national and gendered anxieties, or at the very least, an
10 unknowing participant in the larger associations between gender and nation. Scottish female Gothic, and portrayals of Scotland/Scottish women as monstrous feminine or supernatural in nature, reflects this perception of an Other according to nation, gender, and even genre.3 This portrayal of monstrous femininity was not new at the time, but reflected a long-standing association between monsters and Scottish females relating to
Mary Queen of Scots and the infamous Lady Macbeth. John Knox’s malicious tirade, The
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), was aimed primarily at undermining the authority of Mary Queen of Scots, and did much to establish the association between female monsters and Scotland. According to Knox’s portrayal, women who had access to the public sphere of authority were “repugnant to nature” and subverted “good order” (9). The fact that she was Scottish was then doubly offensive to
Knox’s English sensibilities.
According to the Marquis de Sade, himself a fan of Gothic texts by famous authors such as Radcliffe and Lewis, these ‘tales of terror’ came about as a response to violent events and social tensions of the late eighteenth century. In his essay “Reflections on the Novel” (1800), Sade states that Gothic literature is “the inevitable outcome of the revolutionary upheavals experienced throughout the whole of Europe” (109). The Gothic setting, then, must reflect the tensions and anxieties present in British society during the nineteenth century, and as this study will reveal, are often associated with the familiar-
3 Monica Germaná lists these three categories (nation, gender, genre) as a means of understanding the reason for Scottish female Gothic “Other” in her text Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (2010). 11 unfamiliar associations between England and Scotland, and the gendered depictions of both national identities.
To gain an understanding of where these national anxieties come from, it is necessary to trace the history of English and Scottish political interaction both before and after the Act of Union in 1707 which resulted in the incorporation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales into the British nation, as well as the cultural anxieties that surfaced abroad during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. With a long history of distrust and hatred that stemmed from mutual incursions between Scotland and England, it is unsurprising that the Act of Union was not received well by either the Scottish or the
English majority. The Act proved insufficient, and the last Jacobite rebellion was not put down until 1745.4 Linda Colley describes this event as a call-to-action for English authority, wherein Parliament “devised legislation to undermine the cultural, political, and economic distinctiveness of the Scottish Highlands” (119).
In an attempt to incorporate Scots under the banner of a united British nationality,
England faced an influx of Scots men and women into their military, universities, production, and society— a fact that was often faced with scorn from English citizens.
Indeed, Scotland’s economy “expanded after the 1750’s at a faster rate than ever before, in some respects at a faster rate than the English economy . . . there were senses in which
Scotland was not England’s peer but its superior,” (Colley 123) a notion that brought up the same feelings of distrust and anxiety among English society toward those of Scottish descent. As representative of a more ‘effeminate’ state, Scottish nationals were seen as
4 See Linda Colley’s Britons (1992) for a full history of these tensions. 12 imposing in a public sphere that they should not have been allowed access to. In opposition to the standard English view that Scotland was “either an alien province to be left gingerly alone or viewed with unrelenting suspicion,” officials insisted that Scotland was “no longer the old enemy” that it had been according to earlier English propaganda
(Colley 119). By making claims for unity and equality among national identities, the
English government succeeded in raising questions about the status of a non-English
Other in many forms.
Romanticism in literature did little to abolish the idea of Scotland as an enemy or wild Other, however. Travel journals, novels, plays, and poems often depicted Scotland as divided by internal struggle and dissidence between clans, with the Highlands of
Scotland, and indeed anything of ‘North Britain,’ “frequently represented therein as a divided, jingoistic nation unnaturally misguided by superstition and a monstrous regiment of passionate, treacherous, and domineering women” (Davison “Monstrous” 198). The monstrous females and female monsters of Smith, Shelley, and Bannerman all reflect similar portrayals of Scottish women from contemporary propaganda, namely figures such as the stereotypical Scottish witch, Lady Macbeth, and Mary Queen of Scots— all of whom asserted control over their own agency as well as over the male-dominated society in which they existed. The pejorative nature of portraying Scotland in this way expressed itself most clearly in John Wilkes North Briton publication, a form of
Scotophobic propaganda. John Wilkes was English arrogance personified; many Scots recognized that his works were an assertion and celebration of a distinctly English identity that did not necessarily include Scottish citizens. Scots, according to Wilkes’
13 argument, “were inherently, unchangeably alien, never ever to be confused or integrated with the English,” and Wilkite prints in magazines “invariably (and inauthentically) portrayed [Scots] as wearing tartan kilts, garments banned by Parliament after the ‘Forty-
Five’” (Colley 113-14). These tartan kilts were not only deemed subversive to English law, but also distinctly feminine, and it was often the case that anti-Scots propaganda would depict filthy, skirted men ruled by superstition and barbary, and surrounded by females of equal or greater barbary.
This depiction made Scottish men at once subversive to English rule as well as feminized, a notion that translated itself into depictions of a Gothic Scotland setting itself.
Romantic and Gothic texts’ focus on the mysterious, sublime, even dangerous landscapes of the Highlands reflected the same lack of social awareness that was mirrored in gendered relations at the time. Even Romantic texts that treated Scotland with reverence were arguably detrimental to English and Scottish interactions, as they promoted the romanticized or nostalgic view of Scottish Otherness. Well-known publications such as
Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly series rendered Scotland wholly separate from English identity. Scotland, as a separate entity from England or even Britain as a whole, must then be examined as a producer of nationalistic texts and ideology that results from this perceived national (and cultural) Otherness.
While only one of this thesis’ authors hailed from Scotland, Anne Bannerman, it becomes useful to examine monstrous female portrayals of Scottish and English authors alike as a way of interpreting the social anxieties of the time from varying points of view.
With nation at the forefront of contemporary thought, and with such an interwoven
14 depiction of gender and nation in the female form itself, the very term “monstrous” comes under question as a reflection of society rather than the female herself, and is defined according to such societal concerns as gender roles and expectations, notions of masculinity and motherhood, and the consequential effects of allowing female agency outside of the domestic or private sphere.
The first chapter traces the use of monstrous female form through Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein as well as Catherine Smith’s The Caledonian Bandit, or, The Heir of
Duncaethal, and explores how these representations define female monstrosity according to bodily deformity and behavioral abnormality within human social contexts. While each author presents the monstrous female differently, both associate her potential or enacted agency as inherently problematic, and highlight the effects of such agency in distinctly masculine or male-centric terms. Shelley’s monstrous female is denied intellectual agency and a fully completed bodily form after her creator weighs the potential outcomes of her creation. By refusing to allow this monstrous female bodily form, Shelley effectively explores what male society is capable of suppressing in regard to the female body as well as mind. Smith’s monstrous female, on the other hand, is allowed bodily and intellectual agency to disastrous effect. This central female character is defined as monstrous for her continued transgression against gender roles and bodily differentiation between male and female, thus subverting established notions of masculinity and femininity themselves. Through acts such as sexual impropriety, betrayal of marital expectation, cross-dressing, and violence, Smith’s villainous Lady Margaret comes to embody all that is monstrous about female agency. By comparing these two
15 representations, this thesis seeks to expand upon notions of monstrosity by highlighting various ways in which human females may be considered in transgressive, and therefore monstrous, terms.
The next chapter moves to explorations of supernatural or spectral female monsters, and work to decipher why these supernatural beings are granted so much more agency than their human counterparts. Using Anne Bannerman’s ballads “The Dark
Ladie” and “The Mermaid,” I will explore how both poetic form and content work against the defined social norms and expectations of the time for both gender and national identity alike. Bannerman being of Scottish descent rather than English, I propose that
Anne Bannerman’s supernatural females are allowed more agency as a means of highlighting not only gender issues, but trans-national anxieties between Scotland and
England as well. This will be noted in chapter one as a means of explaining why human female monstrosity is associated with Scotland in both Smith and Shelley’s works, but will be more fully explored as it applies to Bannerman’s Scottish descent and relation to the ballad form. The cyclical anonymity of ballad tradition, placed alongside the supernatural females’ uncanny ability to exist in timeless and unbounded social terms, makes for the perfect combination of subversive literary form and figure in which to explore questions of female agency and effect.
To conclude, I will sum up the various representations of monstrous females and female monsters as they are presented by each author, and will make note of the consequences and effects offered by each. By tracing the willingness and/or refusal to allow for monstrous femininity in the form of female agency via subversive or
16 transgressive means, I hope to highlight not only the historical contexts that produced such images, but also to place these female characters and authors within a more modern discussion of the role of the female. The same societal concerns and anxieties that are evidenced in the embodied female form of characters such as Lady Margaret, the mermaid, the Dark Ladie, and Victor’s bride of Frankenstein, are the issues being confronted by feminist theory and cultural critics of our postmodern age. By deciphering these females’ supposed monstrosity using language associated with studies of the
Female Gothic genre, as well as expectations of formal conventions of both ballad and novel, this study aims to give embodied presence to these perhaps forgotten or dismissed females in all of their monstrous glory.
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CHAPTER II
EMBODIED FEMALE MONSTROSITY: MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN AND
CATHERINE SMITH’S CALEDONIAN BANDIT
Drawing on a number of different contemporary social anxieties and fixations, authors Mary Shelley and Catherine Smith seek to examine the repercussions and possibilities associated with the embodiment of a monstrous female form. This examination includes both body and mind, seeking to question what a female of full agency and control of her body would actually look like as well as how she would behave. By translating these social anxieties onto the female bodies presented in the texts, both authors situate themselves within a larger social conversation, and consider factors ranging from class and reputation, political bias, gender and sexuality, and even nationalistic agendas. The monstrous females presented actively seek to bend and/or break the given ‘rules’ of society that regard women as physical property as well as linked to the domestic sphere of the home, and in doing so, effectively question social conventions and assumptions as well as the society that produced and consumed the texts themselves.
The monstrous female is unsettling or socially subversive for a number of reasons. First, she is capable of moving in circles outside of the home or domestic sphere with some degree of power and control. Second, the monstrous female is regarded as 17
transgressive in body, that is, she uses her body to enact her will either through sexual promiscuity or impropriety, her body has deformities that affect the ability to mother and reproduce, or she does not live up to standards of beauty and image as prescribed by contemporary society. Finally, the monstrous female maintains a level of distinct agency and willpower that rivals and even surpasses that of her male counterparts. Making use of this increased female agency, the monstrous female becomes a threat to (what is perceived to be) all of mankind. The fact that she often passes as an integrated part of society creates problems, primarily being that she has access to power and the ability to instigate or affect change at a societal level. The indication here is that her ability to appear obedient is in fact a ploy to affect subversive change within a given social order.
Unlike her more obedient female counterparts, the monstrous female is attributed with both physical and behavioral abnormalities that depict her as a threat to the natural order of proper society. Both Catherine Smith and Mary Shelley address issues of female agency as monstrous, though handled in very different ways. Shelley’s bride-to-be for
Victor’s existing monster is never allowed fully embodied form. She is an abject and objectified Other that has enormous potential for monstrosity, not only through her lack of beauty and monstrous form, but also through her potential agency and individuality.
While this female embodiment is not strictly human and is only composed of human parts, she is not a supernatural being either; she instead offers a link between the human and supernatural as she suggests the threats of each. For this reason she is most closely aligned with the monstrous human female as opposed to fairy, mermaid, ghost or witch, and this study will treat her as such.
18
Catherine Smith, on the other hand, introduces as a secondary character an extremely villainous human female, fully embodied and capable of monstrous deceit. In allowing this fully embodied character to become a central figure in the driving plot, Mrs.
Smith addresses concerns about the social expectations that surround the female body and mind, all the while contrasting our monstrous female with more socially-acceptable, demure protagonists— an act that works to highlight the actions of both. Each author addresses the female body as well as mind, and the potential venues of monstrosity in each category. It is not simply a devious mind or disfigured female body that comes to represent our monster, rather, it is the creation (or lack thereof) of characters that embody both monstrous body and mind that become subversive to society.
In Joseph Andriano’s introduction to his exploration of female daemonology, he grants the umbrella term “Ladies of Darkness” to all females who work against the hierarchy of femininity and masculinity. The very existence of this monstrous female being, or lady of darkness, “defies gender boundaries,” and exists “in spite of the man’s conscious will” that she be otherwise; she is “aggressive both sexually and intellectually,” infringing on and “invad[ing]” the social spheres associated with masculinity (6). This same fixation affects understandings of the Female Gothic itself by placing value and political importance on depictions of female subversiveness; the genre, as well as individual character depictions, open up discussions and articulations of gendered dissatisfactions with patriarchal structures. These monstrous females, and the
Female Gothic in which they reside, offer “coded expression of [women’s] fears of entrapment within the domestic and the female body” (Wallace and Smith, introduction
19 to “The Female Gothic,” 2). Both Catherine Smith and Mary Shelley work within this framework, translating gendered and nationalistic social concerns onto the very bodies of their monstrous females, and being about questions regarding the nature of gender and monstrosity themselves.
It is interesting, then, that both authors overlap in their apparent refusal to allow the monstrous female either a fully autonomous role in their given society, or continued embodiment beyond the scope of their relative tales. According to social understandings of the appropriate thoughts and actions of English cultural construction, both Smith’s and
Shelley’s females are deemed monstrous for their lack of decorum, willingness to forego polite society, and their inevitable potential for overcoming the agency and autonomy of male society. Each of the tales’ underlying concern with gender and social hierarchy seems reduced to thinly veiled conduct books, warning against the immoral and improper actions of these ‘ladies of darkness.’ However, this should not be the end of the discussion of the value and relevance of the monstrous female, however, for their very refusal to allow for such females reveals unsettling assumptions that exist at the core of social construction. By exploring the nuances of both tales for their similarities and differences in depicting female embodiment, it becomes possible to situate why this refusal for monstrous femininity actually takes place, and perhaps a greater understanding of the societies that necessitated them.
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The ‘Bride’ as Embodied Social Fear
“I am the spirit that denies! And justly so: for all things, from the void called forth,
deserve to be destroyed: ‘T were better, then, were naught created. Thus, all which you
as sin have rated,—destruction,— aught with evil blent,— that is my proper element.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Faust’ 1871
While both Smith and Shelley make attempts at describing the possible outcomes of an embodied monstrous female, Shelley directly associates the monstrous female body with male fears and anxieties. This explicit association creates one of the central tensions of the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) by briefly exploring the implications of embodying such a monstrous female with physical form; more specifically by highlighting the social concerns of creating a bride for his already transgressive male monster. Victor’s concerns are directly reflective of contemporary male anxieties centered around females who transgressed the prescribed gender roles of the time and complicated notions of masculinity and/or motherhood. It is the fear associated with the bride’s potential transgression of these roles, and therefore her independence from both creator and society, that instigates Victor’s destruction of the monstrous female form.
While critical explorations of gender in Shelley’s work tend mostly to focus on the lack of (human) female character development in the novel — or even on the author’s own life, works, and family — explorations of the (potential) monstrous female form are not common.
In Volume III of Shelley’s work, Victor Frankenstein has been asked by his monster to create a mate “as deformed and horrible” as the male counterpart, being “of
21 the same species,” with “the same defects,” and who would “not deny herself to [the monster]” (101). The male monster is already expressing desire for a female that fulfills the gendered expectations of his time; having spent time observing family life and reading some of society’s greatest works, the monster quickly adopts the expectation that his female counterpart will submit herself to him. From the start, both creator and male created have expectations of the female’s assigned behavior before she even begins to have bodily form, suggesting that Victor’s later disgust at the prospect of creating this female is not related to her deformities or appearance, but rather her potential behavioral transgressions. This initial proposition to create a second monster is met with rage and immediate refusal on the part of Victor, who believes that to create such a female would produce “joint wickedness” that would “desolate the world” (101). Victor’s concern here is intended to come across as goodwill toward society, in that a second creation may produce the same sort of destruction that the original has inflicted already by harming those whom Victor cares about and infringing on the well-established society that Victor is a part of.
This initial refusal leads to a heated debate between Victor and his monster related to the implications of solitude for the monster, versus the benefits of allowing him a companion. The creation of a female who is at once “an equal” to the monster as well as “a sensitive being,” would allow Victor’s original monster to retreat from society and live out his days in relative peace, and would potentially normalize the monster’s existence through the socially acceptable rite of marriage. Having access to voice and consciousness, the male creation gains Victor’s compassion by playing to what is
22
“reasonable and moderate” for him to ask (102). This play to emotion and sympathy is not enough to convince Victor of his task, however. The thought of creating a female counterpart to his monstrous creation—this “unhappy promise”—weighs heavily on his mind (107). Sensations of “repugnance” and fear permeate his thoughts thereafter, not only for his own wellbeing should he refuse the task, but at the thought that the monster may wreak havoc on his relations and society.
The creation of a mate would allow the monster to “become linked to the chain of existence and events” (104) from which he was formerly excluded. Victor considers his role as maker, and muses that perhaps “his tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did [Victor] not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that was in [his] power to bestow?” (102). The monster calls attention to the fact that he desires a female with whom to be “cut off from all the world,” choosing to “fly from the habitations of man” (102-3). Indeed, this reasoning on the monster’s part leads Victor to finally submit to his request. Victor is not wholly selfless here, though. While he does submit to the task after discerning that the creature(s) would live apart from man, it is fear and self-preservation that ultimately drive Victor’s agreement. The creature’s power and threats against Victor himself “were not omitted in
[Victor’s] calculations,” (104) and play a large part in his later reflections on this “solemn promise” that Victor “dared not break” (108).
As he begins the labors of creating this female monster, he is overcome by
“obscure forebodings of evil” (118) that are reflected in the landscape of the Orkney islands of Scotland, where Victor has retreated to complete the task at hand. Indeed, it is
23 the thought of allowing this female monster to have embodied form that most disturbs
Victor, as he begins to recognize her potential agency as a fully formed being:
. . . she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. [The monster] had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. (118-19)
By giving this monstrous female a physical form, Victor realizes the extent to which she could take control of not only her own situation, but her potential to affect change at various levels of society. This “thinking and reasoning” female threatens to take part in human society rather than as merely an outlier at the fringes like her mate might suggest.
At this moment of realization, what threatens Victor the most is not necessarily that the female may go along with her mate’s dastardly plans, but rather that the female may have destructive plans of her own, threatening both Victor’s life as well as broader society.
Victor also acknowledges that their mutual deformity may offer a source of disgust between the two, leading to one abandoning the other’s company. The transgressive or unnatural body then becomes a source of unease, as it threatens to promote instability within the normative bounds of societal expectation (that is, the marriage between the two monsters). Victor first acknowledges that “the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might . . . conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in female form” (119). While the two monsters may be equal in most aspects, including their initial deformity, it is the female’s bodily deformity that is relayed as the more abhorrent of the two. According to nineteenth-century notions of beauty, it is expected that the female form be the softer, gentler, fairer of the two
24 sexes. If deformities in the female body are presented, then they are inherently more grotesque than that of her male counterpart.
More disturbing to Victor’s sensibilities, however, is the prospect that the female may choose to leave the male for this very reason. Upon seeing such deformity in her mate, she “might also turn with disgust from [the monster] to the superior beauty of man,” (119) an action that is perceived as both unnatural and terrible in aspect, as it would mean the transgression of further natural boundaries between human and Other, mixing classes, as it were, between beautiful and deformed. This fear of female deformity can also be linked to female body’s ability to create and sustain life naturally— something that Victor (and indeed all male society) cannot be a part of or fully understand. By creating his original monster, Frankenstein participates in a birth of sorts, becoming surrogate to his creation; but this extreme and unnatural form of birth produces deformity and violence against all social norms, in contrast to the natural birth process.
This leads to what Victor finds to be the most disturbing thing about this female monster; her potential ability to propagate. According to Victor, one of the most basic desires for the newly mated couple would be the monsters’ mutual desire for children, and he notes that future generations would look to him as the source of their malcontent:
one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? (119)
In many ways this ability to create life via ‘natural’ birth could be considered a human attribute, and would perhaps mitigate some of the monster’s Otherness. Victor quickly
25 removes this link to humanity as he gazes down on her unfinished form, making note of the “filthy process” and “detestable occupation” of her creation (118). She is indeed too horrible to behold, let alone contemplate as one nearly human.
The creation of a female monster not only threatens Victor’s society, but society at a global scale should she be allowed a body that is capable of both natural and unnatural deeds; that is, birth and the creation of ‘devils.’ This dual capability, or at least the association between her body and deeds of both natures, is what positions the female monster in-between human and supernatural, offering the threats of each. The idea of allowing the perpetuation of such a lineage would prove catastrophic according to Victor, to the extent that it threatens perhaps the existence of the whole human race. Allowing the female to exist in deformity, as well as her potential for transgression into deformed or deprived procreation, become central factors in Victor’s reasoning that she must not be allowed life. This is not the primary driving force, however, for the destruction of the female form a few paragraphs later. What proves most upsetting to Victor is the fact that his own survival and reputation are what are immediately put on the line by creating this monstrous female. His instinct toward self-preservation outweighs the potential happiness of his creation as well as the potential agency of the female form in front of him. Fear, not goodwill, is what drives Victor to destroy the female body.
Considering the female’s potential agency, as well as her existence as a monster with the ability to procreate, Victor gives in to a growing “sensation of madness” and tears the female monster’s body apart (119). Her body becomes a site of societal anxiety and is imbued with speculative qualities before she is even allowed consciousness, which
26 takes away her potential for physical and mental agency, as they could exist after being given life. The mere thought of this potential agency is a driving factor for why Victor tears her body apart; the female monster’s body becomes a representative object wherein individual patriarchal anxieties collapse onto themselves. Victor ensures that he maintains control of the female’s potential agency by refusing her a completed corporeal
(and intellectual) form, depriving her of both free will as well as physical manifestation.
Indeed, as Victor describes the process of tearing her apart, the female is not even allowed a gender or acknowledgment as a being, but is reduced to “the thing on which
[Victor] was engaged” (119). To allow (or be complacent in) the creation of a female with transgressive capabilities proves too much of a risk for Victor; he would rather suffer the consequences laid out for him by his original creation than to give bodily form to a potentially dangerous female capable of threatening society as a whole.
One way of understanding the potential subversiveness of the monstrous female lies in her ability to inspire a feeling of abjection in those around her. According to Julia
Kristeva in her essay on the nature of abjection, the abject is that which we reject as
“Other,” or that which inspires repulsion. Within abjection abides “one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable”
(1). Victor’s potentially monstrous creation comes to represent a hybridized site of meaning, reflective of what concerns both the individual as well as society as a whole, and is thereby depicted as a combination of natural and unnatural elements, born out of human bodies, but made monstrous by her piecemeal embodied form as well as her
27 potential for subversive behavior. Her distinct Otherness inspires the same feeling in any who come across her; the culmination of fears and impossibilities made flesh.
The notion of an embodied female monster threatens natural human order by complicating traditional boundaries between the real and the imagined, male and female behavior, and even human and supernatural. In response, Victor reacts with extreme revulsion to the task at hand, despite the fact that he had originally agreed that this action might help both the male monster and Victor himself. Kristeva notes that even though there may be an attraction (to an idea or being) before recognizing the abject, the recognition of one as such leads to a desire to separate oneself from the object of these contradictory feelings through destruction. Victor, in his destruction of the female monster’s bodily form, has acknowledged the female’s potential as embodied abjection, and refuses to allow her existence. The monstrous female body comes to signify all that
Victor—and by proxy, society—fears most concerning increased female agency.
The Audacity of the Monstrous Female
“What if the fiend should come in women’s garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and
desolation, and lie down by our side?”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Haunted Mind,’ 1835
Though written seven years before Shelley’s work, Mrs. Smith’s novel The
Caledonian Bandit; or, the Heir of Duncaethal. A Romance of the Thirteenth Century
(1811) gives form to the same patriarchal fears expressed by Victor, namely that a human
28 embodiment of female agency would prove disastrous to male society, and the world presented within the text. Mrs. Catherine Smith is a relatively unknown English author and actress, present in London in the early 1800s. She published this novel as well as one other, Barozzi; or, The Venetian Sorceress. A Romance of the Sixteenth Century (1815).
These Gothic novels follow much of the same format and make use of many of the same literary tropes as similar works by Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, following the
‘Gothic boom’ of the 1790s into the 1800s.5 Examining canon literature alongside its perhaps unknown contemporaries may shed light on the larger social concerns and motivations that affected literary productions of the time. While some plot devices and characterizations could be considered simply as replication of former literary trends, the monstrous females of both Smith’s and Shelley’s works are in fact worthy of more depth and merit than they were originally granted, much like the unknown novel itself.
Smith’s novel tells the stories of two parallel sets of lovers, at odds not only according to their social standing, political agendas, and wealth, but also by their opposing portrayals of love, marriage, deceit, and manipulations. Donald, a handsome young peasant, meets and falls in love with the beautiful Matilda after saving her from drowning. He quickly becomes a favorite of her father, Lord Bosmora. While Donald’s parentage is unknown, he and Matilda quickly set out to make a life with each other.
These two youths are sharply contrasted by the unhappily married Phillip and Margaret
5 Carol Margaret Davison’s introduction to The Caledonian Bandit outlines the general history of the Gothic novel, and cites the coinciding ‘age of circulating libraries’ as part of the reason for the growth of the genre/form. Davison also highlights the novel’s production history with Minerva Press and the chapbook. 29
Duncaethal, usurpers to the lands of the Scottish castle of the same name. Phillip desires
Matilda, and without being able to have her with her or her father’s consent, captures and imprisons her. Margaret pursues Donald, and being spurned, vows to have revenge against both him and Phillip for their actions toward her. The ensuing plots (of both novel and character) see these various characters engaged in a series of mysterious and devious encounters, full of bandits, murderous plots, falsified deaths, cross-dressing and disguise, a Bleeding Nun, and an ultimately expected resolution wherein (spoilers!) Donald is named the rightful heir to Duncaethal. The central mystery of the novel, however, revolves around the character of the bandit Darthalgo, and deciphering where he came from and what his motivations may be.
Just as Shelley seeks to blur traditional social boundaries by exploring the notion of a potential monstrous female, so too does Mrs. (Catherine) Smith seek to explore the implications of female social transgression through the physically embodied character of the villainous Lady Margaret. While this monstrous female is not depicted as the primary antagonist of the tale, she is indeed more transgressive than any of her male counterparts, and is depicted as a villain primarily for this reason. Lady Margaret Monteith is portrayed as a power-hungry, nearly unstoppable force within the text capable of manipulation, sexual deviance, wild behavior, and extreme violence. Her husband is arguably the central villain—he is the “tyrant” Phillip, a usurper to the Scottish lands of Duncaethal— but he is entirely overshadowed by Lady Margaret purely because of her sex. It is
Margaret’s willingness to cross all societal boundaries that places her squarely in the camp of “monstrous”; she is ambitious beyond her social bounds, sexually deviant in
30 desiring men other than her husband, passionate in all of her endeavors, and eventually willing to kill her husband as part of her intended revenge. Though her husband is found guilty of many of the same improprieties, it is the transgressive female form that becomes most subversive to a stable society, and which is given the majority of the novel’s plot focus.
The exploration of female behavior as subversive is framed by an equal exploration of male transgression, as well as contrasted with traditionally “acceptable” female behavior. This constant reminder of Matilda’s purity and fairness stresses
Margaret’s monstrosity; she is all the more villainous because she is placed up against
Matilda, a demure victim of Margaret’s ire and manipulation. Early in the novel Matilda and her ladiesmaid discuss the trangressions of Lady Margaret, the maid Venella asking outright, “Why then, my lady, don’t she behave like you?” (19). This is quickly followed by a judgment of Margaret’s character, and the honest appraisal that this same behavior by a female is in fact more monstrous than that of a male; “therefore I think the lady
Margaret the more to blame . . . now if it had been a lord, or an earl, indeed, why it would not be half so shameful” (19). As a married woman of some stature, the fact that
Margaret seeks sexual affection from Donald (a lowly peasant who is definitely not her husband) marks her as subversive and uncontrollable. She transgresses not only the bounds of her marriage vow, but also that of class or social standing as well, and feeds into larger social anxieties of gender as well as class.
Matilda, on the other hand, is depicted as prone to fainting fits and exclamations of horror at her increasingly perilous situation, though often these moments are
31 succeeded by “recover[ies] from the insensibility into which she had fallen,” (51) wherein she exclaims about the helpful men around her, or the dastardly deeds of the bandits. The tyrant Duncaethal is similarly examined next to the honorable Donald, who valiantly tries to save Matilda from the villainous couple’s clutches, and is later found to be the true heir to the lands of Duncaethal. While both Donald and Matilda offer readers a glimpse at the success that comes as reward to good behavior, the effect of examining both male and female behavior in its many forms leads to the eventual condemnation of all that is subversive to order, namely, through the death of both Margaret and Phillip of
Duncaethal.
Lady Margaret is at her most monstrous when she begins to enact her desire for revenge upon both young lovers Donald and Matilda, as well as her husband Phillip.
Over the course of the novel, Margaret takes control in a number of ways and is depicted from the start as one who refuses to submit to the men around her, calling instead on her own fearsome command:
Thou shallow boy… dost thou foolishly think that Margaret ever acts by halves? . . . what, art thou afraid to approach, when thou seest no terror mark my cheek? He shall not wake till I command . . . and if I will it so, he shall sleep for ever!— Now, begone! And learn from this, that I have both the will and power to execute my threats! (16)
This refusal to bend to the will of any man, whether sleeping husband or intended lover, solidifies Margaret’s role as subversive and monstrous, willing not only to fling verbal assaults but to also potentially commit murder. She again calls upon her will and power when she fakes her own death. This is first done for her by her traitorous husband, who seeks her false death as a means of attaining her property and wealth. Upon discovering
32 this deed, Margaret goes about enacting her revenge through two distinctly different embodiments of self; one as Darthalgo, a male bandetti with a mysterious background, bent on rescuing as well as emotionally torturing young Matilda. The other is achieved by becoming a figure of a Bleeding Nun, bent on haunting her husband Phillip as he attempts to woo young Matilda.
Margaret’s affiliation with monstrosity is first made physically apparent with her choice to take on the image of the Bleeding Nun following her second false death. Upon entering the room, Margaret/the Nun calls out “Murderer, forbear!” to her husband, and the room is “instantly illuminated by a flaming lamp, that was borne in the hand of a tall spectral figure; a deep wound appeared in her breast, from which the sanguinary stream still seemed to flow” (71). As a spectral entity capable of bleeding, the nun figures as simultaneously dead and alive, somehow a part of both physical and spiritual realms. By resisting either end of these binaries, this ‘spectre’ exists in a middling state that elicits horror from the viewer, making her monstrous in both body and affect.
Alison Milbank describes this figure as distinctly grotesque and uses similar terms as Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque inverted bodies to describe the consequences of such physicality,6 stating that “although Bakhtin may ignore the specificity of the abjected and grotesque female body, his theory offers a drama of demystification, as the orthodox, the decorous and the authoritative is ‘uncrowned’ by the carnivalesque energies of the
6 Milbank’s article specifically explores the aesthetics of the sublime as they relate to female emancipation from physical, temporal, and mental “imprisonment” within legal bounds (marriage, the home). She uses the term “vertical” sublime to describe the dramatization of female disempowerment, and “horizontal” sublime to refer to the grotesque, which puts physical embodiment to question. 33 grotesque” (77). Indeed, the same could be said about Victor’s female creation as well.
Not only does the ‘grotesque’ female body become a source of monstrosity (according to those who view that body), but so too does the body become a site of ‘uncrowning’ of typical associations with decorum and polite patriarchy. Even the Gothic heroine
(Matilda and otherwise) herself participates in this ‘uncrowning’ whether she intends to or not, fleeing from “tyrannical imprisonment” and actively “[defying] patriarchal authority and...the power of the supernatural,” further linking young Matilda and monstrous Margaret in their female Otherness (Milbank 77).
A large part of the novel’s plot is attributed to Margaret’s desire for revenge against those whom she perceives as a threat to her desires or access to control. In a telling of Margaret’s backstory, it is revealed that Lady Margaret is both more financially solvent than her husband, as well as unwilling to relinquish the control that comes with such financial success. Indeed, the marriage of Margaret to Phillip (lord of Duncaethal) was not made from any source of affection, but rather “to gratify her ambition, in being united with one of the most powerful nobles in Scotland” (151). Margaret’s agency and superiority are asserted from the start, but are clearly highlighted in an examination of the financial and political power associated with her wealth.
Money is very much a source of power for the villainous Margaret both before and after her time as Darthalgo, and becomes a telling marker for her status as monstrous.
By maintaining control over her wealth and assets even after marriage, Margaret subverts and distorts both social convention as well as gender constraints. First, Margaret is “at liberty to bequeath it to whom she might think fit,” (152) which is unusual according to
34 traditional marriage arrangements wherein the man would take over control of his wife’s lands and wealth. Margaret’s manipulative prowess is also on display, as she does not give in to Phillip’s machinations, but instead maintains control over her marriage as well as her husband; “the discerning and political Margaret was fully aware, as she each day witnessed his wavering disposition, that by resigning to him unlimited sway over her fortune, she should lose the superiority which she possessed over himself” (152). In a sweeping statement of her assertive independence from a traditional marital role,
Margaret exclaims that no living mortal “shall ever possess the least command over [her] during [her] existence” (153). After Margaret’s transformation into the bandit Darthalgo, she again uses this element of financial control to buy the loyalty of Morven and his group of bandetti, ensuring that her persona of a nobleman in disguise is not questioned and allowing her into a position of power within the group itself. By refusing to relinquish control in any form, especially financially within her marriage, Margaret has defied normative bounds of femininity and instead asserted herself as a masculine figure, maintaining her own agency as well as imposing herself on traditionally male-governed aspects of society.
It is all the more telling then that Margaret spends a great deal of the novel disguised as Darthalgo, a persona that allows her access to even more power of manipulation than she experienced as simply a controlling bride. After her husband
Phillip deceives Margaret into signing a document that forfeits her money to him after her death, he proceeds to fake her death by poisoning her with a potion that mimics death.
After she awakes to find that most of her wealth and power are now in Phillip’s hands,
35 she proceeds to fake her own death and metamorphosizes herself into Darthalgo as a means of becoming second in command to Morven, the leader of a group of bandetti.
What Margaret has tapped into is a source of much confusion and concern regarding social propriety and expectation of both sexes.
This newfound access to power is achieved through manipulation of Morven, but most efficiently done through paying off the various other bandits. However, Margaret would not have had access to this male-dominated world of thievery, let alone allowed to control the bandetti, without first inhabiting male form. To successfully use her male form to enact her revenge and obtain agency once more, Margaret must necessarily undergo a physical transformation as well as prove financial solvency. The former could only be achieved after the falsified death of her female form, and the latter was stripped away at the same time. To gain access to power after this death, Margaret has to participate in both a rebirth as well as the theft of several large jewels that were ironically hers to begin with. By committing to a life after death, Margaret becomes one both dead and alive, married and a widower, male and female— confounding any socially acceptable boundaries between those distinctions. At this moment, Margaret encapsulates all that Victor Frankenstein feared would come true if he allowed his female to be ‘born’; she would confound the same boundaries that Margaret does, and potentially live to destroy both creator and male monster, stealing the power of both for her own subversive means. By subsuming male form, Margaret effectively steals male agency and embodies all that is monstrous about a socially subversive female.
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Despite her wild behavior, sexual indecency, and generally disagreeable nature, her act of cross-dressing most clearly marks Lady Margaret as monstrous. Cross-dressing becomes a distinct marker for the transgressive capability of a female granted too much social or public agency, and infringes on the prescribed gender boundaries of a male/female binary. By assuming male attire, the female is portrayed as attempting to overtake male access to larger public spheres such as commerce and government, as well as subsequently undermining definitions of masculinity itself by blurring the lines between male and female bodies as distinct. Difference according to bodily terms is what defines one’s access to masculine agency and power, and Lady Margaret’s assumption of the male form effectively transgresses this difference; her autonomy and agency as a female in male garb threatens male society at all levels. Under the guise of the male bandit Darthalgo, Margaret is able to reclaim her own agency as well as enact male control over a more public sphere, moving from the domestic control over her own household (and all the males therein), to a more broadly social level of power. She also subverts traditional separation of classes and class identities in doing so, desiring to be seen as a nobleman in disguise as a bandit. This multi-layered facade plays to a number of class and social concerns regarding the infiltration of lower classes into upper-class or noble society and the growing middle class.
To trace the underlying discomfort and (dare I say) horror at the prospect of wearing clothes belonging to another class (or sex), it becomes necessary to understand sumptuary laws of the early modern period. Marjorie B. Garber explores the importance of these laws as they determine later social understandings of status, wealth, and gender
37 roles in her work Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, noting that the term “sumptuary” is related to that of “consumption,” with the laws themselves being
designed in part to regulate commerce and support local industries, as well as to prevent— or at least hold to a minimum— what today would be known as ‘conspicuous consumption,’ the flaunting of wealth by those whose class or other social designation made such display seem transgressive. (21)
These dress codes are intended to maintain an element of control, or are at least suggestive of the potential for imposed discipline upon those who transgress a given social hierarchy. By submitting to these imposed codes or laws, one is willingly ‘buying into’ the social order as it stands, accepting one’s place, as it were. Women become a subset of these laws by becoming status symbols for their husbands and fathers, whose masculine social status is reflected on the body of the female.
On the other side of this seeming acceptance of social hierarchy comes inversion, or connection to the carnivalesque. By enacting male dress and calling it a persona,
Margaret destabilizes the given cultural hierarchies and questions whether the female (in body or mind) is actually the weaker or lesser sex. Margaret begins to truly subvert social order by refusing to abide by the given social hierarchy as it translates to her adorned physical body. Though these laws were repealed long before Catherine Smith’s time, the effects could still be felt regarding appropriate dress according to gender roles, social status, and national identity. By effectively passing as a male for much of the novel,
Margaret’s transgression brings into question what it means to be masculine, enforce male-centric societies, and to have a male body. If to be male/masculine is simply to put on male attire and cut one’s hair, does gender itself become a social (sartorial) construct?
38
Is the male truly stronger, more rational— more poised for control— than the female, or does this also extend to any who can pass as such?
Rather than allowing for a strict dichotomy between male and female, the cross- dressing Lady Margaret/Darthalgo offers the possibility of a third option, not so much understood as a third term for gender identity, or even as a third sex, but rather “a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility, of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (Garber 11). Margaret/Darthalgo becomes a hybridized site of meaning, forming an uncomfortable amalgamation of social consciousness and lack thereof. In this hybrid status, Margaret can be seen as impure, threatening, and destabilizing to a larger social order; a monster. By performing male identity via cross-dressing, Margaret’s character begins to unravel the male anxieties circulating within nineteenth-century
British society, and opens up the possibility of other more socially and individually aware identities outside of the given binary.
In her final acts as an embodied monstrous female, Lady Margaret reveals herself to be the ‘mysterious being’ Darthalgo, tears off her counterfeit beard and clothing, and expresses herself as female. By returning to her former, even her more natural female self, Margaret ensures that her later acts of viricide as well as suicide are understood as distinctly representative of her continued female agency. It is not Darthalgo that kills
Phillip and then Margaret, but the ‘monstrous’ female herself. This is not a moment of feminine (or feminist) triumph, however, for Margaret’s death is given half of a line of text, and then described as “a dreadful example of the bitter effects of an ungoverned temper and unrestrained passion” (167). Rather than allowing this moment to be taken as
39 a reclamation of female agency and autonomy, it is reduced to a moralistic warning about the dangers of monstrous females, unbound by social constraint and having access to physical or mental hybridity. Margaret is depicted throughout the novel as “fiendlike,”
(22) “wicked,” (94) “masculine,” (12) and a “concealed snake,” (23) all of which confirm her transgressive nature as one that breaches boundaries of human/animal, natural/supernatural, and good/evil. Her abuse at the hands of her villainous husband and later death are therefore not depicted with sympathy, but rather as an earned comeuppance against such a woman who has dared to transgress against all appropriate social bounds and binaries.
One of the most notable larger social grievances being addressed in a subtle manner by both Shelley and Smith is their decision to place Scotland as the site of these monstrous females. The tensions between English and Scottish national identities prove to be a major underlying factor in this depiction, as well as the wildness of the Highland landscapes themselves; “[w]ritten predominantly by English women, such works suggest that Scotland— with its entrenched superstitious worldview, bloody history, and innumerable ruined castles— serves as the natural and obvious choice for a Gothic locale” (xvii). This combination of sublime scenery and ‘foreign’ Gaelic speakers, compounded by depictions of effeminate men in kilts and English propaganda,7 all worked in tandem to create an image of an uncontrollable and feminized Scottish nation.
In a description of Phillip’s first meeting with Margaret, he is driven by “a dreadful
7 See Linda Colley’s Britons (chapter 3) for a full historical background of English propaganda aimed against the Scottish and other ‘peripheries’ to English rule. 40 tempest” to the isle of Orkney (112), the same remote Scottish island to which Victor
Frankenstein retreats to begin the business of creating his female monster. Margaret’s family home resides on this island and is associated with the land as a site of wild, untamed nature, full of folklore and superstitious peoples. In her introduction to The
Caledonian Bandit, Carol Margaret Davison notes that “the Orkneys function as a fittingly Gothic Highland locale of extremes, a wild site of lawlessness associated with the novel’s notorious outlaw duo of Duncaethal, and especially, Lady Margaret of
Monteith” (xx).
The wilderness of the Scottish Highlands is contrasted with the relative familiarity and domesticity of the lowlands that border England; writers such as Daniel Defoe categorized the Scottish Highlands as places of unruly nature (of man and environment), uninhabitable landscapes, and “frightful territory” (Defoe 661) compared to the “pleasant and agreeable country” (674) of the Lowlands. This aversion toward the Highlands and untamed, remote Scottish lands is also reflected in Smith’s choice of placing Donald and
Matilda’s situation at the Castle Bosmora in the Scottish borderlands, very close to
England, signifying their more upright standing according to law, propriety, and capability for improvement according to English standards. It then comes as no surprise that the more Anglicanized Donald is positioned as the rightful heir to the Scottish castle of Duncaethal later in the novel.
Both Smith and Shelley depict female monstrosity in terms of their willingness to overtake the social spheres of men. Victor’s fear of a fully realized, autonomous female cannot be allowed full agency, and he therefore prevents her potential free will by
41 destroying her physical body. Mrs. Smith’s Lady Margaret, on the other hand, is depicted as always-already feeding into the male social sphere. She has manipulated both her father and husband, taken control of the domestic sphere in hopes of gaining a larger social one, and overtakes the male body by cross-dressing as Darthalgo. Within the larger context of the Gothic genre, even the Female Gothic, this insistence on behalf of the authors in describing monstrous females works not just to upbraid or warn, but to undermine as well:
In a canny semiotic turning of the tables, these Female Gothic works strategically adopt and manipulate the idea of the female monster— [called] the Bride of Frankenstein motif— in order to engage with such loaded questions as the source and nature of ‘monstrosity,’ Scottish and otherwise, and to reflect on various complexities relating to Scottish national history and identity. (Davison “Monstrous” 200)
In order to even begin to depict these monstrous females, both authors choose to restrict her social bounds to remote locations in a Gothic Scotland locale, playing into the fraught history and tensions between English and Scottish national identities and effectively removing her from being a danger to English society. For these English authors, there is no possibility that these monstrous females could ever be allowed to survive their actions in the text, let alone actually be English. Monstrosity becomes a complex representation of submission, revolt, Otherness, and national identity, all figured onto the female form.
In a fateful turn of events, Lady Margaret is introduced to Phillip after a force of nature powerfully directs his ship to be “split upon the rock” (112) in the untamed and remote Orkneys. Only after this event do the novel’s other plots begin to unfold, and for that reason, this moment becomes important to understanding the use of place and setting as precursor to the themes of a text. The first ballad by Anne Bannerman explored in the
42 next chapter makes use of this same savage and untamed scenery, being bent to the will of a supernatural female monster; the mermaid. The circumstances surrounding Phillip’s shipwreck allude to the same vivid and unstable scenery that opens the scene in
Bannerman’s ballad, depicted as dark forces of nature that are under the control of a monstrous female. Just as the siren-song of the mermaid calls sailors to their doom, so too does Margaret of Monteith’s homeland (and domestic domain) ensnare Phillip and his crew, wherein only “himself and one mariner” escaped with their lives (112). Moments later, Phillip meets Margaret, and his fate is sealed as he becomes inexorably tied to a ruthless and wicked female that will eventually instigate his death.
If we are to examine this portrayal of Scottish female monstrosity from the
English perspective, then we must likewise work to examine the corresponding side, or
Scottish portrayals of these same types of females. Where our two English authors show an unwillingness to allow this monstrous female either form or fully successful agency,
Scottish poet Anne Bannerman grants them ability and embodied form. As a female author already existing outside of the social bounds of nineteenth-century England,
Bannerman seems more willing to entertain the possibilities of such female agency and power. These are not human females, however, but are conceived as hybrid beings with supernatural and otherwordly ability, and become representations of the folklore and superstitious history that English identity worked so hard to denigrate. English propaganda, literary tradition, and societal notions of national identity and image worked in tandem to distance English propriety from other nations’ associations with superstition and irrational thought. Where her English contemporaries seem to actively suppress
43 folkloric and superstitious histories by using the novel form instead of the older, more folkloric ballad, Bannerman celebrates this as Scottish national tradition and creates females that embrace their association to the supernatural through both form and content.
By depicting embodied females that have links not only to lore of the past, but that affect distinct change on the physical present, Bannerman effectively explores and questions both female and national agency.
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CHAPTER III
THE SUBVERSIVE SUPERNATURAL: FEMALE MONSTERS IN ANNE
BANNERMAN’S “THE DARK LADIE” AND “THE MERMAID”
In discussing the importance of the embodied monstrous female, we must also look to embodiments that are not strictly human in form as means of exploring transgressive or subversive female behavior (as defined by human societal expectation) outside of societal bounds. In many ways the tangible, embodied, or human monstrous females presented in works such as Shelley and Smith offer a limited understanding regarding the social anxieties about female agency, as they are always-already situated in relation to the language and actions deemed monstrous by human society itself. To create a monstrous female character within this context automatically situates her as dangerous, subversive, and even someone easily dismissed- without necessarily resolving the larger ambiguous questions that her character (re)presents. The use of the supernatural, however, effectively displaces and distances monstrous femininity from the accepted social norms of nineteenth-century England, and offers another way in which to discuss the role of the female according to transgressive, subversive, and transfigurative terms without implying that the female must also be punished for these transgressions. The supernatural female cannot be held to the same standards as human females, for she
45
exists outside of these social bounds, and is therefore perhaps a more effective representative for describing embodied female agency.
The last chapter explored tangible human embodiments of female agency and ultimately found that social anxieties consistently overtook whatever agency the monstrous female may have gained through life. The social solution to the increased agency of this monstrous female is essentially death; a refusal to allow the continued existence of such a human female. After all, “…it is the frisson of Gothic terror that is wanted and not the actual experience of bloody violence and horror” (Davison xvi).
Where monstrous female humans represent an all-too-familiar horror at a social level, the supernatural female becomes a metaphorical representation or frisson of Gothic excitement. This chapter explores the use of supernatural motifs and characterizations by
Anne Bannerman, and how these motifs ensure that female agency is allowed perpetuated existence, even after death or transfiguration. By displacing or distancing this female agency, or by removing these female monsters from acceptable social confines such as town or country, both Bannerman and her narrators open up the possibility of exploring female agency in terms that resist social ideologies. Alison Milbank posits that female bodies, specifically the grotesque or ‘unnatural,’ are defined in nineteenth-century rhetoric as “key heuristic tools among other phenomena,” that are either “spectral
(idealized) or abject (the real)” (88). Rather than ascribing to this dichotomy, however,
Bannerman’s female bodies traverse both the spectral and the abject, and offer an examination of both sides. The supernatural female monster, existing simultaneously outside of and within social structures, has a chance at survival as well as continued
46 access to power or control of both herself and the world around her in a way that a human monstrous female may not.
Anne Bannerman is a lesser-known Scottish female poet, whose work in the ballad form successfully pulls from Scottish folklore to portray gendered and nationalistic agendas through various depictions of supernatural female beings. Smith’s and Shelley’s implicit refusal to allow for the ultimate existence of an embodied female form reflects these same agendas, albeit through the lens of a traditionally English social perspective.
Bannerman’s female monsters complicate the notion of an embodied female monster; they are social constructions based in lore and superstition, with spectral or transfigured bodies and dubious motives. Unlike Bannerman’s English counterparts, however, her literary monstrous females are allowed continued existence beyond the pages of the text, onward and outward into perpetuity. Though their bodies are not always corporeal in form, they can indeed affect physical change in their surroundings— and for this reason must be considered as valid sites of social anxiety in much the same way as Lady
Margaret and Victor’s female monster.
Though the ballad is generally considered a more archaic, chivalric form of poetry, Bannerman adapts it in such a way so as to question the motives of the form itself, and bring discussions of the female role into her contemporary context. Ballads and the ballad form originated through oral folk culture and were intended to show (rather than tell) the details of a dramatic series of events. In Britain, the ballad came about “as a reactionary attempt to recapture the sacred status of the bard, the value of nativism, primitivism, and an oral-based culture” (Hoeveler “Gendering” 97). Dealing with
47 elements such as love, tragedy, political propaganda, and religious social ideals, the ballads ultimately built up to a final dramatic resolution or conclusion within the text.
Bannerman works within this context, making use of many of the same themes and process of building textual drama, but she does not offer a final resolution or explanation.
Instead, as Adrian Craciun notes:
Relying on labyrinthine narrative structures and enigmatic veiled figures, Bannerman’s poems resisted the attempts of readers and critics to unveil their meaning. In thus resisting a will to truth, a desire for absolute truth and vision, Bannerman’s veiled femmes fatales resisted the emergent Romantic poetics of the ideal as unveiled truth, and of the ideal woman. (159)
By refusing to resolve or answer any of the anxieties or social conceptions presented in the ballads, Bannerman effectively perpetuates conversation about female agency and empowerment beyond that of a traditional ballad form. As a participant in the ballad revival in Scotland as well as what critics call the female Gothic mode, Bannerman combines traditional form and content with unexpected inversions and irresolutions, effectively questioning the future of the ballad form and Gothic mode themselves.
In Peter Murphy’s examination of Romantic poetry, he repeatedly stresses the importance of the ballad form (and its contemporary revival) for its ability to cross boundaries and borders of all forms, leading from one discussion or border into another, until “the larger discussion inevitably becomes a discussion of the most central concerns of the period” (1). By this argument any and all metaphorical imagery presented in the ballads must lead into a discussion of larger social concerns, and as will be shown,
Bannerman’s figured primarily around the boundaries inflicted upon females, their bodies, their agency, and even the nature of female authorship itself. It becomes
48 necessary to acknowledge Bannerman’s own status within these social bounds at this point, for her existence as a Scottish national as well as a female author places her on the fringes of monstrosity herself, according to normative English society and expectation.
What comes from these ballad female monsters, then, is not simply a regurgitation of former ballad tradition; it is a revival and perpetuation of large and ambiguous social concerns via the lens of folkloric supernatural images, meant not to resolve but to reiterate. The cyclical nature of ballads and ballad tradition lends itself to this same refusal to answer or concede to a solution that Bannerman enacts: focusing on present concerns as they bleed into the past and future rather than musings of future solutions or past mistakes, and placing focus not on a specific speaker or author, but instead on the larger concerns being voiced.
It is all the more fitting, then, that the ballad makes use of the supernatural as a means of conveying social concerns via a conduit that is anonymous and inscrutable according to human social understanding. Critics have noted the connection between the ballad form and the use of supernatural imagery, and the importance of one to the other, stating:
by very virtue of its interest in acts of transgression and its concern with affect— especially in engendering horror and terror . . . [the ballad] became a particularly appropriate medium for many different modes of philosophical and theological investigation, pushing all the time at the limits of its own generic construction. (Milbank 94)
The seamless combination of supernatural elements into ballad form works not only to express the folkloric tradition of the ballad itself, but also to interweave confounding contemporary concerns in perhaps more familiar, traditional ways.
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As is found in many Scottish national texts, Bannerman’s works show an inherent focus on place, as well as the history of folklore as it is considered within her known geographic context. Two of her ballads, “The Mermaid,” published in Poems (1800) and
“The Dark Ladie” published in Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), depict female monsters that work to disturb and even subvert traditional gender roles and expectations of the time, all the while having a transformative effect on the male bodies around them.
This is not to say that Bannerman’s work was by any means intended for feminist or subversive means, but rather to show that her works reflect increasing social tensions according to gender lines as well as national identity. By depicting these women as supernatural rather than strictly human, Bannerman enables readers to place corporeal, perhaps even geographic, distance between the events of the text and that of everyday life, but also succeeds in freeing the monstrous female from embodied boundaries. As a site of social anxiety, the female body becomes a symbol of feminine agency and status, a symbol that instigates feelings of fear and disgust from those around her. Bannerman’s insistence on allowing her female monsters continued existence—even after death, as is the case when discussing spectral or timeless supernatural females—perpetuates the notion that monstrous femininity will not and cannot go away, despite what patriarchal social structures may do to suggest otherwise.
Because of their association as a more archaic form of poetry, ballads often incorporate folklore of their representative geographic and cultural location, translating and perpetuating oral tradition into literary text. Lowry Wimberly’s examination of folklore in English and Scottish ballads makes a point of addressing key supernatural
50 figures of the ballad genre; namely, the ballad witch, fairy, and ghost. Each of these folkloric figures is associated with manipulation, of both the natural and supernatural worlds. According to Wimberly, it is unsurprising to find that “practitioners of malefic art(s) are women, almost without exception” (204), as most European countries define witchcraft and magic in female terms. These supernatural beings found in Bannerman’s
Gothic ballads are reminiscent of these same folkloric magical practitioners, combining aspects of the ballad witch’s control over others, the fairy’s connection to nature, and the ghost’s refusal to die or cease to exist in all forms. These supernatural beings are described as females “acquainted with magical procedure, but who, so far as the ballad story goes, [have] recourse to the black art merely as a means of gaining [their] own private ends” (204). The supernatural beings presented by Bannerman work beyond this narrow scope, however, and are seen in both “The Mermaid” and “The Dark Ladie” to be manipulating the form and content of the folkloric ballad tradition. Instead, Bannerman’s works present mermaids and spectres who combine various elements of the ballad witch, ghost, and fairy as a way of complicating, even subverting, the genre and folklore themselves.
In Diane Long Hoeveler’s work “Gendering the Scottish Ballad; The Case of
Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry,” the ballads are examined according to their heavily gendered nationalistic agendas. For Hoeveler, “[t]he ballads express the melancholia, loneliness, disappointment, betrayal, and homelessness, that pervaded Scotland after it had merged with England in the Acts of Union” (97). It is unsurprising, then, that so many of her contemporaries critiqued Bannerman’s work
51 based on their seemingly fragmented form and style. Not only do the females of
Bannerman’s work exist as subversive to the natural order of society, but so too do the author’s own structural and formal choices work to affect instability in the traditional understandings of the genre itself. As a Scottish author presenting an altered English form of poetry, Bannerman succeeds in transgressing national, formal, and gendered bounds.
This spectral Ladie and supernatural mermaid become figures of subversion in their refusal to be killed off, and become reminiscent of the same stubbornness found in
Scottish national identity, wherein “Scotland assumes the role of England’s benighted past that, forever straining against England’s border, continues to haunt her progress”
(Davison xiv). Bannerman’s poems represent, in both form and content, the same subversiveness as her very country of origin has come to represent for English national identity. Much like Catherine Smith’s and Mary Shelley’s focus on Scotland as a source of monstrous females, Bannerman’s inherent connection to place and the national folklore of her nation, the females presented in her ballads represent various layers of transgression against society.
Ballad treatment of the supernatural is primarily associated with death and/or transformation, with focus not on the unreality or elusive characteristics of those already/nearly dead, but rather presentations of beings that are embodied, have substantial form, and are in fact capable of instigating physical change in those around them. Bannerman’s ballads do not disappoint: both supernatural females produce physical transformation in others referenced (which happen to be male). Critics recognize
52 that this inherent belief in the supernatural beings is made easier by the ballad form, noting:
[the ballads] illustrate implicit belief in the existence of such beings, of mermen and mermaids, elves and fairies, witches and ghosts. [And] this belief is so complete that the ballads seems to take the supernatural quality for granted and to feel under no obligation to make [her] story seem probable by some special means of telling it. It is altogether by accident that the ballad art is peculiarly fitted for the representation of the supernatural. The brevity of the ballad, its tendency to proceed by allusion and suggestion, its omission of essentials, its love of the unmotivated and unexplained, combine to give a special charm and effectiveness to its stories of fairies or ghosts. (Hart, qtd. in Wimberly 227)8
By focusing these ballads around explorations of supernatural females, and the effects that have on their surroundings, “Bannerman’s ballads introduce a new perspective into the traditional construction of the female representation in the ballad genre” (Hoeveler
97). Namely, she depicts women who “cannot be exterminated, who keep coming back from the dead to avenge themselves on their oppressors” (Hoeveler 98); mermaids who were transfigured by dark forces and who now cause transfigurative effect on environment and body, and spectral Ladies who can alter the mind and body of those she encounters. Bannerman’s monstrous females are interlopers to human society both in the present and in the future, existing outside of understood reality and yet very much attached to the social traditions that create and perpetuate them. These females are therefore depicted as “vampiric, powerful, angry, vengeful force[s] of nature” (Hoeveler
98) that maneuver outside of traditional political, social, or even religious bounds, and take male agency away for their own purposes.
8 See Hart, English Popular Ballads, 26. 53
The first ballad to address is “The Mermaid,” a tale told from the perspective of the female herself, complete with Gothic perils and seductions, frustrations and desires, and natural imagery that reflects Romantic notions of the sublime. Unlike previous depictions of monstrous femininity as seen in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Smith’s
Caledonian Bandit, this female monster has full control over the story being expressed on her behalf. The increased agency on the part of the female is reflected not only in imagery relating to her body and mind—she is in fact speaking her story to readers— she also affects change or transfiguration in the environment as well as the male body. This ability to take control not only of her own body, mind, and story, but that of the external world around her, figures her as a dangerous and uncontrolled force of nature. This is not the case in Bannerman’s more widely known work, “The Dark Ladie,” the second ballad discussed. In this particular story, the spectral Dark Ladie (and indeed our only female character) is denied the power of language and instead ‘speaks’ only in “tones” that “no human voice / Could ever reach” (73-4). The lady herself has no voice, and her tale is told through secondhand (and third) accounts of male characters. We are given very little, and very ambiguous, information regarding the initial death of this once-human female; though this is not as important to her story as her potential to continue haunting male society despite her spectral form. Just as Victor feared his female monster would instigate subversive social change in the form of procreation and malignant thought, so too do the males in the presence of the Dark Ladie fear her continued presence and affect.
In both cases, Bannerman allows for a continuation of female monstrosity into perpetuity, refusing to concede to a social structure of male-enforced obedience. The
54 supernatural becomes a conduit through which female subversion can be achieved beyond the scope of one human life, and allows for the discussion of larger social anxieties in such a way so as not to overstep the bounds on human society. According to nineteenth-century ideologies and preoccupations, both of these female monsters become transgressive and subversive in both their ability to cross acceptable boundaries between natural/supernatural as well as realms of defined masculine/feminine ideologies, and yet both are allowed continued existence because of their embodiment as an Other-than- human.
Mermaid as Monster: Supernatural Female Agency
“A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down, Forgot in cruel happiness, That even lovers drown.”
-W.B. Yeats, ‘A Man Young and Old’ 1933
Mermaids are considered to be some of the most perplexing of supernatural figures, for they are not only understood as dangerous, seductive, and sublime, but also primally comforting and hypnotic, even motherly in their siren-song. The allure of such an endearing voice leads to a reversal of betrayal of the assumed natural course of human fate, and the mermaid succeeds in transfixing male sailors to the point that they go unwittingly to their deaths. According to mythology and popular depictions, the mermaid is herself a hybrid body, composed of a woman’s upper body and face as well as a fish- tail lower body. Much like this hybridity of body, Bannerman uses a hybrid ballad form
55 that incorporates folkloric tradition with Gothic and Romantic ballad revival as it was occurring in contemporary Edinburgh. This boundary-crossing comes through in content as the mermaid narrator offers a unique perspective as a being both natural and supernatural as well as masculine and feminine in her nature. This particular poem offers for readers an embodied and empowered female narrator, connected to both natural and supernatural elements, and capable of the destruction of the realms of man. In essence, both the mermaid’s body as well as her narration within the ballad reveal anxieties surrounding the female body, as well as the potential power of females regarding the usurpation of male agency.
Various cultures pull from the myth of the mermaid, but Bannerman’s text is unique in that it centers around one mermaid’s powerful description of both nature and herself, granting rhetorical agency to the narrator from the start. Vivid images of a sea coast show a sublime and terrifying winter’s night, wherein chaotic “death fraught whirlwinds” (1) and “troubled waves” (4) outline the scene. Calling on images of death, destruction, demonic disturbance, and dark depths, the mermaid establishes a Gothic sublime setting in order to elicit fear from both reader and other potential characters. It must be noted, however, that she herself does not fear this chaotic landscape, but instead maintains some element of control over it. From the first line of “The Mermaid,” we are introduced to a narrative voice that has connections to the environment or natural world, able to not only commune with natural elements such as the “the turbid deep” that
“groans to the raging tempest,” (8-9) but also to command natural elements to her bidding, demanding:
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Blow on, ye death fraught whirlwinds! blow, Around the rocks, and rifted caves; Ye demons of the gulf below! I hear you, in the troubled waves (1-4)
This command over and communion with nature, as well as the “demons” below, indicates that the speaker is supernatural rather than human, associated with witchcraft and daemonology like typical ballad witches and fairies of old. Another more unique association lies in the mermaid’s connection to what are often considered more masculine elements of nature, that is, powerful or destructive forces, capable of cataclysmic effect and change rather than soft waves or peaceful harmony. Not only is she aligned with supernatural forces, but she is also identifying with, and defining herself according to, the more masculine elements of nature— here depicted as perhaps monstrous aspects of nature itself. In doing so, the mermaid begins to articulate her own monstrosity from the outset, owning and defining it without the use of male narration or interference.
Communion with both these demons as well as boundless natural elements make the speaker timeless, subversive, and dangerous by association— already existing outside of human conceptions of time and natural order. These connections to timelessness and unbridled existence continue throughout, as the speaker references the “[e]ternal world of waters” (11), “the wild untrodden coast” (15), “this unbounded waste of seas” (17), and
“Time’s long ages [through which she] shall wait” (67). She is, like nature, unaffected by the passage of human constructs of time— an outsider in “solitary watch”— able to affect change in both the physical world as well as “[t]o lure the sailor to his doom” (26).
The mermaid is defined quickly within the ballad as a being that exists outside of the realms of man, able to traverse the bounds between natural and supernatural as they apply
57 to human understandings of time and expected cycles of nature. The use of spatial description and place-making within this poem functions not only to associate the mermaid with the sublime and uncontrollable, but also to emphasize what underlying monstrosity the female narrator already possesses.
While control and communion with the natural world (and perhaps other forces that control it) affects reader understanding of her place outside of human society, it is not enough to make her truly monstrous. The apex of her monstrosity comes in her dealings with representatives of male society itself— the mariners and sailors whom she sends to their deaths with her “syren-song of woe” (28). This intent behind this action is left ambiguous throughout the text, but is perhaps most closely understood in terms of the
“Vengeance” and “Avenging ministers of Wrath” that she calls upon in lines 41 and 52.
If we are to believe that she was formerly human, a part of society abiding by social understandings of obedient and pure females, then we must determine if this change came from within her or was forced upon her. Despite the lack of explicit background given, she does admit “Yes! I am chang’d - My heart, my soul, / Retain no more their former glow” (21-2). If vengeance and wrath are indeed her motives, then the indication is that this change occurred without her permission. This suggests sorrow at the loss of “glow” associated with a former self, but is so freely and forcefully admitted so as to cast doubt onto the true nature of her background. If we are to believe that this transformation of body, or the ability to cross all natural boundaries into becoming a supernatural being, was done of her own volition, then we are faced with a very powerful female monster capable of stripping agency away from male society for her own benefit.
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At the beginning, the mermaid makes claims of her own agency and autonomy by stating, “Mine was the choice, in this terrific form, / To brave the icy surge, to shiver in the storm” (19-20). As a reflection of “her fearful destiny,” (66) this desire for control should be expected of her, for she also admits to having an “unpitying” and “callous heart” that seeks only “to destroy” (69-70). If indeed she is a subversive being able to wrest control away from those around her, then the “wizard” called upon in line 44 may be her claiming embodiment of masculine power and agency— transfiguring herself once again in order to meet her own needs:
Vengeance bears along the wave The spell, which heav’n and earth appeals; Alone, by night, in darksome cave, On me the gifted wizard calls. (41-44)
While this could be understood as a separate male entity with physical form, it is more likely a conjuration of agency and the dark arts mentioned by Lowry Wimberly. By claiming ownership of her choice to enact transfiguration over herself, she can by extension participate in control over land and sea, and all men who come into her view.
The mermaid’s ability not only to affect change within her own body through the choice to take up this transfigured form— but also to affect changes in the environment and the spiritual world—make her a monster according to both human society as well as the natural world. Being in league with ‘devils’ of ‘the dark and angry deep,’ the mermaid is here closely associated with the ballad witch of English and Scottish lore. As a practitioner of magic, she represents Scottish folkloric tradition, but surpasses these expectations as she expresses both her timelessness as well as her ability to control the fate of life itself. In luring sailors to their death, as mermaids are known to do, she asserts
59 control over male agency yet again, this time with a goal not only of enacting magical purpose, but of dispersing the agency itself back into the world around her. This reclamation takes place in lines 59-60, wherein “On the sad earth, and in the stormy sea, /
All, all shall shudd’ring own your potent agency.” This redistribution of male agency to all, females especially, threatens the very structures of society that she already exists outside of, and shows the full extent to which her subversiveness can affect not only her body and the natural environment, but the world of men as well.
The Embodied and Affective Spectre
“[Poetry’s] business is to affect rather by sympathy than by imitation; to display rather
the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea
of the things themselves.”
-Edmund Burke, 1757
Bannerman continues to draw connections between the affective nature of female monsters and the surrounding male society on which they impose their will in her ballad
“The Dark Ladie.” This ballad was first published in March 1800 in Edinburgh
Magazine, as a ‘sister tale’ to Coleridge’s “Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie,” published in the same magazine a month earlier.9 Including a footnote to Coleridge’s
9 Coleridge’s “The Ballad of the Dark Ladie” (apparently written in 1798) was not published until 1834. This is not the same piece as the “Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie” referenced above. The “Introduction” was later revised and included in Lyrical Ballads as “Love” (1800 onward). 60 piece, Bannerman effectively responds to his depiction of a female-made-pawn to male sexual society, and instead depicts a female capable of traumatic revenge over her male counterparts. Adriana Craciun discusses this fundamental difference, noting:
Coleridge’s balladeer tells his tale of women’s cruelty in order to seduce the listener (his idealized beloved) and the reader, in fact producing another potential Dark Ladie in his beloved, Bannerman’s multiple male narrators compulsively tell the tale of the Dark Ladie’s seduction because, like the Ancient Mariner, they are cursed to do so. (“Romantic” 210)
As a participant in the ballad revival occurring at both a Scottish and British level,
Bannerman makes use of traditional forms and contents in ways that both respond to and critique those that came before her. The supernatural female monster becomes not simply a tool for storytelling, but a textually embodied representation of social anxieties and concerns regarding the female role.
At surface level, the ballad seems to tell a tale of a spectral woman that haunts Sir
Guyon and his knights as they enjoy their victory dinner after coming home from the
Crusades. This spectre seems to lack any motivation or explanation of purpose for her haunting presence, and for this reason alone could be considered as subversive to male society. What have these men done to incur the wrath of such a spectral female? Upon closer inspection, however, we begin to see just how nuanced this depiction of a female monster really is. Bannerman raises questions regarding the situation that brought upon the Ladie’s death (i.e., was it Sir Guyon that killed her?), complicates reader understanding of whether she is actually spectral or in fact human, and uses her embodied monstrosity to implicate male-dominated society in the refusal to allow for female voice, all of which inherently question whether it is the female who is monstrous or the male
61 society from which they are raised. While the ballad may initially seem to call for the censure of this ghostly woman, it ends up drawing sympathy from the reader toward this female deemed monster by male society.
Despite her assumed lack of physical embodiment, this active female monster enacts lasting effects on the minds and bodies of Sir Guyon and his knights, and for this reason can be considered monstrous. Her human body may be long gone, or transformed into supernatural form, but her persistence even after death precipitates feelings of unnatural dread and disgust in those who encounter her. According to traditional ballad form and content, the ballad ghost is typically discussed in such a manner that “there is, in a sense, nothing ‘supernatural’ about the ballad revenant, for it conducts itself in every way— in voice, movements, and actions— exactly like a human being” (Wimberly 233).
Like the speaker of “The Mermaid,” Bannerman’s Ladie surpasses this expectation and is instead at once interacting with as well as affecting the human world around her. She is considered both natural (human) and supernatural, able to exist according to the rules of both. Bannerman here offers readers a ballad ghost that draws upon folkloric tradition by remaining active in the human world throughout: she is seen taking a seat at dinner and imbibing from “the cup which she had fill’d with wine” (71). This earthly behavior cannot continue, however, and eventually she calls out in a tone “that stopt / Thro’ all their limbs, the rushing blood” (69-70), disrupting the night’s festivities and instead immobilizing the men with a “glare / [That] kept them mute with awe!” (41-2). Her ability to interact with the natural world and hold a place at the court table suggest her natural affiliation, but this is quickly reversed by her supernatural ability to affect the
62 hearts and limbs of men using only a tone that “no human voice / Could ever reach” (73-
4).
In many ways, the Dark Ladie’s ability to affect unnatural change on the natural bodies of the men is directly related to human fears about mortality and the fallibility of the body itself. In a study of the ways in which the body’s “discontents” affect human understanding, Elisabeth Bronfen notes that “because we link notions of an intact, integrated and stable self-identity to images of a consistent, invulnerable and omnipotent body, narratives and representations that revolve around the fallibility and fragility of the body often produce anxiety” (111). In the case of the Dark Ladie, it is not simply her spectral association with the death of the body that instigates fear in those who encounter her, but also her ability to cause bodily effect on the male knights. This association between female monsters’ monstrosity and their fallible, deformed, or transformative bodies links strongly to Lady Margaret’s depiction as a Bleeding Nun, the mermaid’s ability to lure men to their deaths, as well as to Victor’s fears about the consequences of a deformed female body. Each of the females presented is also able to affect the human
(male) body through violence, ensuring that fear and anxiety is produced not only through an examination of the female body itself, but also through their association with control over the physical existence of bodies around them.
Despite this control over the knights’ bodies, the Dark Ladie seems to lack autonomy within the ballad’s narrative as it is only males who gaze upon her or interact with her in any way, and who speak the experience on behalf of the female. This kind of erasure of female agency and autonomy has been discussed in recent feminist theory as
63 linked to the erasure of female genealogies and femininity in male social systems,10 which results in representations of females that seek “the burial of the madness in women-- and the burial of women in madness” (Irigaray, qtd. by Wallace 37). Where our mermaid speaker was granted full agency over the telling of her own story, this Dark
Ladie is subject to the word of men and is in many ways seemingly (and literally) buried under a shroud of madness and monstrosity. Diana Wallace’s discussion of Irigaray’s work comes to find that this “haunting idea” of Female Gothic metaphors and feminist theory actually has the same goals; to unearth the female voice and body, and to allow for the expression of female agency. The spectral Ladie of Bannerman’s ballad does exactly this; she is both haunted and haunter, perpetuating her monstrous vengeance against male society, long after her bodily death.
We first meet the Ladie as Sir Guyon leads his knights home from the Holy Land.
Sir Guyon is clearly perturbed and is repeatedly referred to as having a “clouded face”
(7,10) that is “pale as death” (18), and that “often to the banner’d door / his straining eyes, unbidden, turn’d; / above, around, they glanced wild” (13-5). We come to find out that he dreads the coming of a spectral presence:
A Ladie, clad in ghastly white, and veiled to the feet:
She spoke not when she enter’d there; She spoke not when the feast was done; And every knight in chill amaze, Survey’d her one by one (25-30)
10 Irigaray, Luce. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 34-46. 64
This female presence almost immediately produces bodily effect on the male knights.
The men are not only rendered dumbstruck, but also technically brought to death upon the Ladie’s supernatural command— the Ladie “pledg’d them all around, / That in their hearts, and thro’ their limbs, / No pulses could be found” (54-6) by using not a command of words, but rather supernatural control through mere presence alone.
This same focus on physicality bleeds into the ballad structure itself. While the rest of her tale is told in quatrain stanzas, the stanza that introduces the Dark Ladie is a sestet. As the only marked difference in poetic structure, the introduction of the Ladie disrupts poetic flow and jars the reader out of the usual comfort associated with traditional ballad form. Bannerman is breaking from traditional ballad structure as a means of asserting not only her own will onto the ballad form, but also the will of the
Dark Ladie herself. As the ballad is told from the multiple perspectives of men,
Bannerman’s refusal to let the ballad structure be completely un-tampered with is notable; she is at once wresting control and tradition out of the hands of men as well as playing into their pre-formed assumptions about what the ballad can, and should, be.
Returning to the content of the ballad, it is made clear that the command of the Ladie is not done through verbal communication— in fact, Bannerman insists that the Ladie does not speak at all. She is described as having “no breath” and “no voice,” and communicates only through “a tone, so deadly deep” so as to be associated with the supernatural or otherwordly (52-3).11 It is this supernatural, monstrous capability that
11 This is an interesting contrast to figures such as the gipsy in Lewis’ The Monk, a potentially supernatural figure who “speaks” ballad. 65 makes her powerful in this moment, capable of immobilizing the speech, limbs, and blood of the knights. By depriving the only female character of her voice not only through narrative style but also in bodily capability, and then allowing that female to inflict the same on the men who suppress her, Bannerman successfully depicts nineteenth-century female social experience and complicates the social ideology that a female must be demure, polite, obedient . . . silent.
Toward the end of the ballad, Bannerman reveals a bit of information surrounding the Ladie’s demise. While we are not allowed any insight into the female’s interiority or motivations, we understand her capture through Bannerman’s description of the Ladie’s physical reaction:
And how her sinking heart recoil’d And how her throbbing bosom beat, And how sensation almost left Her cold convulsed feet:
And how she clasp’d her little son, Before she tore herself away; And how she turn’d again to bless The cradle where he lay. (145-152)
Critics vary on their reading of this moment, some deeming it a tragic kidnapping of a faithful wife and mother, others depicting this as a faithless woman abandoning her child and husband in favor of becoming a lover of Sir Guyon.12 The first reading is stronger, as this moment of physical description is depicted in such a way as to be tragic to the reader,
12 See Ashley Miller’s “Obscurity and Affect in Anne Bannerman’s ‘The Dark Ladie’” for a sympathetic view of the Ladie’s tragic history; conversely, Diane Long Hoeveler’s “Gendering the Scottish Ballad” depicts the Ladie as an avenging spirit or scorned lover bent on haunting her ‘demon lover’ Sir Guyon, whom she blames for losing her motherly identity. 66 making both reader and narrators (the knights) sympathetic to the Ladie’s plight, despite the fact that she has already inflicted physical change upon the men of the tale. This moment effectively complicates the human/monster binary in similar ways as Shelley’s exploration of the monstrous female/female monster figure, wherein the female monster becomes humanized, and begins to lose her monstrous edge. Like Shelley’s female monster, the Dark Ladie fails to fit into either of these distinct categories convincingly, and instead becomes a unique hybrid of each. A stanza later, however, the ballad reverts to the uncomfortable assumption that “none could ever hear or know” (154) the Ladie’s motivation for inflicting harm on men. To allow this monstrous spectre to be humanized proves too much for the ballad’s narrators, and they instead insist that her actions are without motivation or purpose, thus making her effectively monstrous once again. The female creature of Shelley’s Frankenstein is similarly granted no voice, no chance to defend herself or her actions, and is spoken for only by men who decide her right to live and die. Whether the Dark Ladie willingly left her husband and son, or was taken by force, becomes less relevant than the fact that the entirety of her life’s story is spoken not by her, but by the men relaying her tale.
The supernatural female monster, though lacking a physical body and seeming to have had her human capability of agency taken from her, is still able to enact her will upon the outside world. Ashley Miller notes the Ladie’s perpetuated presence in the bodies of the men, wherein both tone and gaze “have printed themselves upon the bodies of the knights, thus enforcing not only a physical correspondence but a virtual replication of her presence” (par. 6). The cyclical nature of her story is thus perpetuated after her
67 death in both the physical bodies of the knights as well as the ballad form itself. What was deprived her in life, she takes back in death at both the textual and societal level. It is perhaps for this reason that she inflicts the same lack of voice or agency upon Sir
Guyon’s knights, though we are not given a clear answer at any point in the poem.
Indeed, the last few lines of the ballad speak to the narrators’ collective discomfort at never being able to know the spectre’s motivations, again referenced in purely physical terms:
Or, whence those deep unearthly tones, That human bosom never own’d; Or why, it cannot be remov’d, That folded veil that sweeps the ground? (157-160)
The ballad does not answer these questions for us, but instead questions whether it is the spectre’s lack of voice that is most alarming and unnatural, or the fact that she is capable of subversive ends despite this lack of voice or physical presence. Interiority becomes irrelevant, and the focus returns to physical embodiment in search of markers of explanation.
The ability to manipulate and affect the world (male society) is what makes this supernatural female most effectively monstrous within this tale, as seen through the repeated use of physical description as a means of understanding. Unlike the relatively unsuccessful human manipulations seen in Lady Margaret’s character, this Ladie is no longer bound by restrictions of human interaction, either social or physical. Where Lady
Margaret gained agency by assuming a male appearance, this Ladie need not even show her body in order to retake social control. In death Lady Margaret’s scheming comes to a close, but death is only the start for this spectral presence. The use of the supernatural
68 here reflects a perpetuation of female control rather than merely an exploration of folkloric or superstitious story-telling, making use of the same cyclical anonymity as the ballad form itself. Both of Bannerman’s female monsters refuse to be defined in strictly monstrous terms, and are therefore largely associated with the physical (human) effects of their existence as well as their timeless, intangible existence. By inflicting physical change upon the knights, the Dark Ladie remains sensorily attached to those she encounters, ensuring that her effect will continue outward from her presence alone. By influencing the body as well as mind through supernatural means, the Dark Ladie and the
Mermaid pose potential threats not only in supernatural terms (outside of the human realms), but also to the larger ideologies of human society as they extend through time.
The ballad becomes a representative form for the female monsters themselves, circulating female agency across time and nation into perpetuity, and ensuring that the effects of their increased agency can be felt long after their death/human existence.
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CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of
flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of
perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
- Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
One of the primary goals of this argument is to resurrect the monstrous female form of Gothic literature, ensuring that her body continues to question social constructions of gender expectation long after her demise within the text. In a poignant analysis of the study of the body as it appears in literary representation, Elisabeth
Bronfen notes that:
The process of culturation . . . involves not only a substitution of the human body by mechanical tools but also, if only implicitly, points to its potential absence, for the technologies of culture can preserve aspects of the body long after its disappearance or its demise, precisely as the articulation of absence. (109)
This study acts in much the same way as Bronfen’s described substitution of the body by mechanical tools or processes. By pointing out the absence of scholarship on the monstrous female form of not only the texts examined here, but of all texts that relegate
70
her to the sidelines, it is my hope that I ensure the preservation of the social concerns registered by these monstrous women. Text, and textual analysis, may serve as a substitution for the human/female body in this case, but this is only effective if considered in terms that give equal validity to both.
This study I has continually referred to the fact that these monstrous females are defined as such according to the society in which they exist according to the text, as well as the society in which the text itself was produced. Clearly the authors themselves were affected by ongoing political, cultural, and even geographic tensions, all of which combine to form a distinct type of representation of gendered anxiety. The monstrous females presented in each text are unique in their embodied experiences, whether they are living, not allowed physical life, or existing in spectral or supernatural form, and for this reason offer several different perspectives from which to examine social anxieties.
Chapter two assesses Catherine Smith and Mary Shelley’s portrayals of female monstrosity according to human social constructs such as gender roles, associations with public and private spheres, as well as false dichotomies of masculine/feminine. The females depicted in these tales were subversive because of their ability to transgress established social bounds; namely, the males who encountered them feared their transgression from private and domestic spheres to that of the larger male-centric public.
Frankenstein’s female monster had the potential not only to rival her male counterpart in wickedness and destructive nature, but also had the potential to quit the company of both creator and created alike, choosing instead to live among mankind. By surpassing the domestic boundaries established for her long before her creation, the
71 female creature threatened to destabilize social constructions themselves. This monstrous female is unique due to her position as both unnatural and natural in form; she is disfigured and considered unnatural due to her composition from a number of different human parts— yet she remains distinctly made of only humans. She therefore comes from the mind of, and is considered partly as, human. The strength and destructive ability that comes with this creation, as well as her unnatural birth and ability to generate other unnatural births, place her as distinctly non-human, however. By transgressing across this human/non-human divide, the female creation becomes wholly monstrous to Victor and the rest of nineteenth-century society, and for this reason is destroyed before she can enact any of the assumed subversive behaviors assigned to her already transgressive body.
Catherine Smith approaches female monstrosity from the opposite angle, allowing her monstrous female fully embodied form throughout much of the text. In doing so,
Smith both questions as well as critiques gendered expectation of masculine and feminine figures. Lady Margaret of Monteith is depicted as manipulative and deceitful to the point of violent capability, transgressions which are translated onto her body through cross- dressing and assumption of the Bleeding Nun form. By assuming these extraordinary roles, Lady Margaret complicates and threatens notions of the assumed binary between male and female forms, as well as the access to power that comes with/from the male body. In becoming the bandit Darthalgo, Margaret becomes an embodiment of all that
Victor Frankenstein feared would occur should a female be granted agency as well as access to male society. In usual fashion according to nineteenth-century Gothic texts,
72 however, this monstrous female cannot be allowed continued existence beyond the pages of the text, and Lady Margaret subsequently dies at the end of the book. Whatever agency and access to control she acquired during her machinations and transgressions are forfeit to proper societal spheres and the males that control them. Indeed, Margaret hints at maintaining female agency even in this final act of death, though, as it is her choice to commit suicide after returning to her female form. Though she may not be allowed to continue beyond the pages of the text, she does reflect changing perceptions of female agency and autonomy by ensuring that she is remembered for her own choices, even in death.
Chapter three focuses on monstrosity according to supernatural reference as found in Anne Bannerman’s ballads “The Mermaid” and “The Dark Ladie.” Both of these figures are distinctly supernatural or non-human in form, and therefore represent a different angle from which to examine female agency and autonomy. By distancing these monstrous females from human society, Bannerman allows herself more room to entertain possibilities of successful female power without having to face the consequences for such transgression according to human cultural constructions. The fact that Bannerman chooses the ballad form as opposed to the novel also highlights this willingness to work outside of normative social bounds, as the ballad form is representative of cyclical anonymity and the perpetuation of older, folkloric tales. By tapping into this sense of timelessness and omnipotence, the female monsters of
Bannerman’s ballads are ensured a source of agency and control over their own relative stories across forms, nation, and time itself.
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The first of these ballads was “The Mermaid,” which offered the most explicitly embodied female monster of any of the texts presented. The tale is told directly by the mermaid herself, and she takes full responsibility for all of the actions that occur to her, or because of her, over the course of the poem. Where each of the other females’ stories is dictated by either the men of the tale or the authors themselves, the mermaid retains full autonomy in both form as well as content. This female is also unique in her association with both natural and unnatural elements, having communion with as well as dominion over the natural world as well as that of the underworld/otherwordly realms. As is reflected in her hybrid body itself, this female is also made monstrous according to the understanding that she is always-already transgressive in body as well as action.
The second ballad examined was “The Dark Ladie,” which presents the tale of a spectral female with distinct ability to affect the external world. This particular portrayal of a female monster complicates understandings of what female agency is capable of according to notions of human lifetime, instead offering a female whose will continues to be enacted long after her death. The resulting anxiety created by this spectral woman can be seen in both the male knights described within the ballad, as well as the fact that it is males that voice the tale for her. In fact, the Ladie is denied a literal voice within the ballad and is representative of females’ lower, restricted status within larger social contexts of the time. Though the female’s body is described in supernatural terms, she is still able to enact physical change on the bodies of men and is therefore able to transgress from the realm of the supernatural into that of human existence, transgressing boundaries just as her other Gothic monstrous females did. It is not the fact that she is a spectre that
74 makes her monstrous, but rather her actions as they threaten male society and the male body.
The chosen texts also collectively highlight the gendered national tensions present between Scotland and England in the early nineteenth-century. As a hold-over from historical preconceptions of English superiority, assumptions of Scottish barbarism and mysterious folklore, and perpetuated images of Scotland as under the control of rampaging monstrous women such as Lady Macbeth and Mary Queen of Scots, these texts all explore national identity as it is associated with gendered terms. Both Smith and
Shelley choose to situate their explorations of female monstrosity on Scottish soil, with
Lady Margaret hailing from the same Orkney isles that Victor Frankenstein retreats to in order to create his female. Smith also sets the entirety of her novel in the Scottish
Highlands, stressing the villainous characters’ association with wild and unruly behavior as contrasted to the more docile and appropriate behaviors of Donald and Matilda, who live on the border of England. Being English in descent themselves, Smith and Shelley seem reluctant to allow for such a monstrous— and Scottish— female form to exist. By ensuring the demise of both monstrous females, these two English authors perpetuate associations of Scotland’s lesser status according to English national identity of the time.
Anne Bannerman, on the other hand, portrays gendered and national anxieties in much more celebratory terms. By choosing to work in ballad form, Bannerman aligns herself with the ballad revival as it occurred in Scotland corresponding to a resurgence in
Scottish national pride and identity. The form relates back to folkloric oral tradition celebrated in Scottish identity, and the use of supernatural females works in much the
75 same way. Using both the ballad and the supernatural also reflects an appreciation of timelessness and continuation, ensuring that Scottish tradition as well as the confrontation of societal values continues long after the text itself. In much that same way that ballad forms represent cyclical retellings of ancient tales, so too do the supernatural females presented become associated with continual power and agency across time and space.
Though the females presented in these pages are perhaps not appreciated as the central characters of their tales or celebrated by their contemporaries as groundbreaking proto-feminist figures, they are indeed helpful in discovering the gendered and national anxieties of nineteenth-century Britain. By studying the various embodiments of monstrous female form, it becomes possible not only to situate contemporary attitudes and anxieties regarding females, but also to examine the same attitudes as they extend into our own cultural views and understanding. Existing as transgressive and subversive to their individual cultures, these monstrous females pull both reader and character into an imagined world that is distinctly theirs, wherein female agency and autonomy are subject to the female alone. In much the same way as Bannerman’s females refuse to be resisted or destroyed, so too does this argument hope to resurrect and perpetuate the questions being asked by the monstrous females themselves. How do we define monstrosity, and does that in fact make the monstrous into a monster? Does female agency still elicit the same chilling response from male society as it did in the nineteenth century? Can an understanding of these historical contexts help us to understand our own contemporary world-views? Having survived the society that created her, these female monsters become telling figures of the powerful nature of the feminine, and become
76 celebrations of the power of female transfiguration across time and across the world. This ultimate resiliency against a society that deems her as Other makes the monstrous female a key figure in understanding the female across genres, forms, and times.
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