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Session 4: Women and Monstrosity
Chair: Lois Drawmer

Seven Legs My True Love Has: Fantasies Of Female Monstrosity in American Horror Fiction
Dara Downey
English Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man, was written at the peak of post-war, GI bill-funded suburbanisation.  As Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrates in The Hearts of Men: American Men & the Flight from Commitment, neither the pressures of holding down a full-time, often monotonous job to support one’s dependent wife and children, nor the conformity demanded by the suburban milieu, went unchallenged by the American men who found themselves swallowed whole by the phenomenon.  Matheson’s novel fits neatly into this subculture of twentieth-century male rebellion, charting as it does one man’s sense of emasculation but also, paradoxically, of exhilaration when he finds himself trapped within his own cellar and growing progressively smaller.  My paper will situate Matheson’s text within a tradition of masculine rebellion which seeks to reconfigure the home as “outdoors”, a tradition which culminates in Mark Z. Danielewski’s aggressively postmodern novel, House of Leaves (2000).  What these two texts have in common is an association (whether overt or covert) between a monstrous presence within the house against which the male central character must wage war, and femininity.  By doing so, these texts succeed in giving visible and repulsive shape to the late-twentieth white bourgeois male’s sense of having been “unmanned” at the hands of what they perceived to be a dangerously feminised society.  At the same time, however, these monstrous figures provide the male characters with the perfect excuse for indulging in violent, homosocial adventure, even if it is only within the walls of their own homes.  What I shall explore in this paper is the extent to which this project of positing the home as a wilderness in which a monstrous version of femininity can be battled on equal terms, by offering physical solutions to emotional or psychological problems, manages both to give voice to the domestic discontent under which late twentieth-century manhood was labouring, and to occlude it, by displacing the threat posed by women onto monstrous figures who can be fought and killed without repercussions in the wider social world.

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Monstrous Genealogies: Reconstru(ct)ing Teratical Females in A.S. Byatt’s Fiction
Carmen-Veronica Bobérly
Catedra de limba si Literatura Engleza,Facultatea de Litere, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

This paper looks at A. S. Byatt’s genealogical interrogation of the “monstrous-feminine,” a cultural construct resulting from a persistent association between unruly female corporeality and sites of abject liminality. If it is true that cultural epochs are intent on defining their essentially human characteristics by ousting pollution phenomena identified as impure, monstrous or abject, I intend to examine how the theme of female monstrification resonates in Byatt’s works. I am also interested in assessing the extent to which such fictional narratives can provide a revisionary frame for analysing monstrosity, traditionally highlighted by teratological taxonomies as the “deviant” abnormality which assists in the reinforcement of the anthropomorphic norm. Essentially hybrid, liminal creatures, straddling the boundaries between the human and the non-human, Byatt’s female monsters (Lamias, “English worms,” Melusines) pertain to the scopic regime, opening up, in terms of Ricoeur’s ontological hermeneutics, the possibility of pairing “selfhood” and “otherness.” Works like Possession. A Romance (1990), The Matisse Stories (1993), Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), A Whistling Woman (2002) and The Little Black Book of Stories (2003) envisage alternative historiographies of monstrosity, highlighting the ruptures and distensions that have contributed to the discursive formation of the “monstrous-feminine.” In effect, these novels interrogate the “metaphorics of uncontrollability” that conflates monstrosity and femininity, and are intent on re-valorising the “cavernous,” “visceral,” “secreting” and “protruding” female body as a fluid site of potentiality, as a transformative liminal anti-structure.

Gorgeously Repulsive, Exquisitely Fun, Dangerously Beautiful: Dog Women, Monstrous Births, and Contemporary Women’s Art
Maria Luisa Coelho
Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Several cultural discourses have always been eager to emphasise female’s fleshiness, perceived as that which binds women to abjection and the monstrous and a mark of women’s inherent sinful nature. Psychoanalysis has also contributed to this grand narrative by stressing the danger to a distinct self of returning to the maternal female body.
Such socio-cultural positions have limited women’s participation in different spheres of action, from the political to the spiritual and to artistic creation and expression, and have frequently been a source of anxiety to women. They have thus become a central issue in both feminist discourse and women’s praxis.
This paper takes as its starting point the traditional connection of women to abjection and the monstrous and seeks to find in contemporary women artists, both visual artists and writers, the reworking of such themes.
From Helen Chadwick and Michèle Roberts’ monstrous births to Jeanette Winterson and Paula Rego’s ‘Dog Women’, a connection should be established between these artists, who often create visual or literary objects populated with grotesque women, animalesque mothers and hideous births and who embrace the female abject as a source of radical power and an image of transgressive resistance.

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