Analysis Of Susanne Beacker's Monster Culture

While examining nineteenth-century female monster, Susanne Beacker reveals that she remains a mere idea, a “voiceless textual object” in women’s gothic texts whose happy endings close to the retribution and exorcism of the monstrous woman and the entrapment of the heroine in the patriarchal system (72). In this context, DeLamotte contends that:

Like the Good Other Woman, the Evil Other Woman often spends much of her life hidden away in the castle, secret room, or whatever, a fact suggesting that even a virtuous woman’s lot is the same she would have merited had she been the worst of criminals. The heroine’s discovery of such Other Women is in the one case an encounter with women’s oppression-their confinement as wives, mothers, and daughters-and in the other with a related repression: the confinement of a Hidden Woman inside those genteel writers and readers who, in the idealization of the heroine’s virtues, displace their own rebellious

Dawning on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen who suggests that we can “rea[d] cultures from the monsters they engender,” I am interested in reading “the monster’s body” as a “cultural body” (Cohen 3-4). In his essay Monster Culture: Seven Theses, he continues to explain that the monster’s body incorporates “the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them”, becoming thus the physical embodiment of cultural preoccupations and concerns of the nineteenth century British mainstream (5). The fin-de-siècle female monster embodies the anxieties and fears of the culture that produces her tied to new technological progresses and scientific advances. She is the repository of “unpleasant social and existential realities,” to borrow Joseph Grixti’s own words (qtd. in Hock-soon Ng 1). They handle out the main embodiments of social discomforts and cultural anxieties. Accordingly, Hock-soon reveals