Domestic dangers : monstrous women in the 19th-century Gothic and contemporary horror film

From bloody scream queens to seductive femmes fatales and cold-blooded murderesses, images of complex and multifaceted women abound in contemporary horror and 19th-century literature alike. My objective in Domestic Dangers is to reconceptualize the significance of monstrous female characters in the mid-Victorian Gothic and 21st-century horror film by focusing critical attention on interpretations of monstrosity informed by the domestic experience of women and the transformative nature of femininity. This transtemporal, trans-medial conversation illuminates and animates both bodies of work, revealing that the domestic actively and insidiously monsterizes female characters for failing to uphold impossible domestic expectations or transgressing patriarchal social mores. I intend to take seriously both the Gothic and contemporary horror, activating the power these genres hold to critique and reflect on current understandings of violent female characters and the interpretive value of horror-based imagery in the domestic space. Using feminist film and literary theory, monster studies, psychoanalytic concepts of abjection, and gaze theory, I argue that works by Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Emma Tammi, Anna Biller, and Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer subvert expectations concerning the sanctity of the home and the viability of the family, revealing the domestic as prime breeding ground for the monstrous.Englis