notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, screen capture from Sei donne per l'assassino, directed by Mario Bava, 1964. Via. Bottom, photograph by Aidan Zamiri, from Lily McMenamy’s performance A Hole Is a Hole, 2024. Via.

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Monsters figure conspicuously in Gothic literature. The product of a sensibility that glorifies the self in isolation from society, the Gothic explores the darker side of the Romantic vision. In the Gothic mirror, the self is reflected in the extreme poses of rebel, outcast, obsessive seeker of forbidden knowledge, monster. Monsters are particularly prominent in the work of women writers, because for women the roles of rebel, outcast, seeker of truth, are monstrous in themselves. For a man to rebel, to leave a comfortable home and to search for truth are noble acts. Thus, this pattern of behavior is expressed in the heroic epic. For women, however, such assertions of questing self-hood have been deemed bizarre and crazy; consequently the Gothic mode – and in particular the concept of self as monster – is associated with narratives of female experience.

In their Gothic narratives women reveal deep-seated conflicts between a socially acceptable passive, congenial, “feminine” self and a suppressed, monstrous hidden self. The monster remains an apt symbol for turbulent inner compulsions, particularly in poetry. However, the madwoman serves a similar symbolic function, and this figure appears more frequently in prose fiction. While the monster is a physical emblem of inescapable stigma, madness is a more subjective aberration which may be overcome when the character or society ceases to regard certain types of behavior as monstrous or crazy. In earlier versions of this genre no escape from social denigration and self-hatred is conceivable; in these closed-end works monsters are more prevalent and madwomen are unredeemable. Some recent writers, challenging traditional, stereotyped attitudes, are creating characters who transcend self-hatred. {124} These heroines experience madness as a stage on the journey toward self-knowledge. In these inner journeys – the female equivalent of the male adventure – the heroines learn to identify with their hidden selves and to reaffirm the values which had previously been denied. By this means they reintegrate split selves, restore their fragmented identities and return to sanity and social acceptance with open-ended possibilities before them.

Karen F. Stein, from Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic, in The Female Gothic, ed. Julian E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden, 1983), pp. 123-37.