Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female monster figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. InMonstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discoursesandmaterial conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into wild and monstrous (re)presentations.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Social Behavior and Domesticated Women
Chapter Two: Forbidden Desire, Mental Degradation, and Nature: Repression of Gothic Madwomen
Chapter Three: Neglect, Rage, and Reaction: Female Criminality and the Victorian Gothic
Chapter Four: Monstrous Transformations and Victorian She-Wolves
Conclusion
Appendix: For Further Reading
References
About the Author
