Monstrous Girls and Popular Gothic Repetition

Abstract

This thesis examines the figure of the monstrous girl through a dialogic assemblage of historical, textual, and discursive analyses. Monstrous girls are categorically unclear, socially othered, emotionally and bodily excessive, and endlessly mutable. They are contemporary fictions, but developed over centuries in close association with an expansive gothic mode in popular culture. First, this thesis proposes that the monstrous girl emerges from two distinct historical formations. The first is the development of the modern idea of youth and the girl. As the modern idea of adolescence developed, the girl was symbolic of its perceived extremes. The second historical formation is the emergence of the gothic mode. This section argues that the girl is central to gothic terror, via heroines who lack authority or knowledge but mobilise curiosity and creativity to negotiate confinement in adult spaces.

The second part explores monstrous girlhoods in contemporary fiction. Each chapter deals with a different narrative mode and analyses a range of text types to examine the ways in which monstrous girls mutate to suit new narrative possibilities. First, in the contemporary popular gothic the girl protagonist lingers in girlhood as uncanny, and searches for knowledge, selfhood, and terror within haunted spaces. Next, this study finds a monstrous girl sensibility in the hybrid girl superhero. Finally, this part considers science fiction dystopian texts that present the future as novel and obscure. Monstrous girls face new terrors, but their difference presents opportunities for reimagining identity and community within grotesque speculative worlds. The monstrous girl formation represents some important continuities and connections between ideas about feminine youth and the gothic. She is, this thesis argues, central to contemporary repetitions and renovations of popular “gothicness”. This thesis contributes to studies of youth and girlhood, and of the gothic and popular culture.