Gothic grrrls

I really shouldn't be writing this post today. I have a crap load of work to do and of course, like any good Catholic, feeling majorly guilty about it. BUT I have neglected you a bit, dear blog, and as your mummy, I should be paying you attention as well.

I recently read Victo Kelleher's Born of the Sea. It's a bride of Frankentein's monster rewrite that follows on from her dumping into the sea by Dr Frankenstein in Shelley's original. It isn't strictly YA so I really shouldn't be wasting time reading it but it had that whole monstrous nature theme going (Miss Monster survives the dumping and is re-born from the sea, which I guess can be regarded as a monstrous womb. Geez, now I am thinking about the Alien movies!).

Anyways, the text provides quite a bit of fodder for us academic types. Firstly there's a lot of homosocial acitivity going on between Miss Monster (Madeleine) and her eventual rescuer (Kitty, a hump backed dwarf) as well as the great author herself, Mary Shelley, who Madeleine eventually seeks out.

Madeleine's face is beautiful but her body is stitched together from body parts collected from a variety of individuals, both male and female (I guess the story wouldn't work if Madeleine looked like Jennifer Beals, who also played the bride of Frankenstein's monster a few years back). So with a body made from man and woman, there's a lot of gender stuff going on too, not to mention material for the treatment of disability in fiction.

The book made me feel uncomfortable mainly because Madeleine gets raped, not once but several times. She also falls pregnant, by her rapist, but loses the baby. Kitty is also raped, by the same rapist, and also falls pregnant and eventually dies in childbirth (due to her deformity and inability to carry a oregnancy to term). It leaves you feeling yucky all over and I can't say that Kelleher's choice of tragic events successfully positions readers to view Madeleine as a woman with agency.

This of course got me thinking about Twilight, in particular Breaking Dawn. Why? Well, there are a few children's literature scholars (myself included) who interpret Bella's deflowering as a form of marital rape (or rather the condoning of violence in marriage). She does come out of it covered in bruises, albeit she has no memory of the discomfort as she was probably in the throws of ecstacy doing the wild thing with a vampire. Immediately after her deflowering, Bella falls pregnant with a monstrous feotus who is essentially tearing her apart in utero because it is growing at an abnormally fast rate. When monster baby is ready to come out of mum, she bites her way out of her vampiric sac, subsequently killing mum. Of course this doesn't happen in BD because Bella is given an emergency V-section by Eddy and Co.

It will be interesting to see how the film makers interpret these series of events for the last Twilight film. Will mums and dads allow their young daughters (or sons) to go and see the film? I have seen kids as young as 8 read the series. What did they think about all this violent deflowering and birthing? Did their parents even know that this kind of stuff was in the books?

I'm not trying to be Mrs Morality here but it is a bit of a worry. I hope the film makers give the film an approriate rating).

What is sad about all of this is that the treatment of women in contemporary Gothic has, I believe, taken a step back. The heroines of Radcliffe's fiction (called the travelling heroine by Ellen Moers) had agency; they were girls on the go, "the woman who moves, who acts, who copes with vicissitudes and adventure" as Moers notes. In fact they had so much bloody agency that they gave birth to a whole new genre, the female gothic.

Where are those girls now? What with all the grrrl power going on, surely they must be somewhere? Well I guess there is Buffy but who else? Not many I bet. It's a pity because it was Radcliffe's heroines that got me interested in the Gothic in the first place, way back when I was a teen. Maybe these girls on the go have moved into dystopian fiction. Catniss from the Hunger Games is pretty cool. Is there hope for the contemporary Goth chick heroine? Come on someone, conjure one up so I don't feel depressed every time I read Gothic fiction.