(Re)Making the Body Beautiful: Postfeminist Cinderellas and Gothic Tales of Transformation

Abstract

When Victor Frankenstein’s creation emerged from his workshop in Ingolstadt to embark on his journey of knowledge and murder, the image of the Gothic monster was born. With his “black lips,” “yellow skin,” “watery eyes” and “shrivelled complexion,” Frankenstein’s hideous progeny was not only an aesthetic disappointment to his creator but also a reminder and embodiment of his unlawful and unnatural scientific pursuits (39). A deformed, physical “mess,” the Gothic monster has come to represent a figure marked for his strangeness and excess, his difference from the norm-ality of social, cultural, moral, physical, psychological and human mores. He is undoubtedly other, unable ever to “fit in” and doomed to be repudiated and end his life “lost in darkness and distance” (191). The monstrous other has become a staple device of many Gothic novels and films, taking the shape of, for example, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Wells’s Beast People and Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922). His very being, appearance and behaviour establish him as a reverse image of how normal people should be, look and act, a negative that turns light into dark, good into bad, self into other. These binaries have come under attack in recent Gothic criticism and writing that highlight the link, rather than the division, within the monstrous dichotomy.