Goth women are dangerous
Feminism, Desirability and the Monstrous Feminine…yes this one is a repurposed essay from university.
Within the world of the Gothic, women are deadly. Desirable but dangerous, they can ensnare a man into wicked deeds - regardless of if they are supernatural or not. Pre-feminist texts were more explicit about their intentions, and in the novel “Dracula” by Braham Stoker the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” women can be seen, while the waters had become muddied by the time of third wave feminist text “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”.
There are many women in Braham Stoker’s Dracula, but the two that matter in terms of narrative and theme are Mina and Lucy. Mina, the female lead of the story, is an archetype of the Victorian Era, independent and lacking frivolity. She exists as an ideal, strong enough to fight alongside the rest of the group, distinctly female but not overtly sexual or threatening, a trend seen in other works of Stoker’s fiction (Hughes, 2000). She is even empathetic enough to “pity any thing so hunted as the Count” (Dracula, Chapter 17, Page 7). This might be seen as mirroring values Queen Victoria herself would espouse upon her marriage (Longford, 2019). In contrast, frivolous, flirty and fun Lucy to her friend in distinctly unflattering ways, often sexual. Whereas Mina remains obviously chaste, Lucy wonders “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Dracula, Chapter 5, Page 5), suggesting a developed sense of self and desire that is unacceptable for the time the book was written in and set.
Pre-feminist texts were not unaware of the need for female characterisation beyond that of the wife and mother, and female led stories were important to many Victorian and post-Victorian texts, such as Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Little Women”. However, this does not mean that women in these texts are portrayed in a varied way or even well-developed. However, it is important that the language that led to the value of femininity be established in this era. ‘Good Women’ were proactive, independent, but still meekly feminine, while ‘Bad Women’ were flighty, useless and sexualised. These trends did not disappear with the arrival of feminism.
Buffy Summers, from the television show “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, was not made in the pre-feminist Victorian era that Mina from “Dracula” was. As a character, Buffy Summers is not only proactive and independent, like Mina, but complex, pulling between duty and individual desire. She refuses to take on her role initially, and it has been theorised that her character’s desire for individual freedoms while accepting her role is reflective of third wave feminist ideals (Karras, 2002).
Within the early episodes of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, the cast is largely female. That does not, however, prevent many of the late 1990s media issues concerning women from dominating the text. Buffy is introduced to the school not just as new, but a sex object, leered at by Xander, who later becomes her friend and ally. Her early friendship with Cordelia is predicated on her inherent value due to her looks.
This era of media, in the early days of third wave feminism, was dominated by an individualised mode of understanding the female experience. This has been criticised by feminists like Kathleen Iannello for leading women “to challenge each other rather than the patriarchy”. In essence, while individual choice was considered important, it led to disunity. Within media, this can be seen to translate into enmity between women. This was paired with the underlying anti-sex attitudes of second wave feminism lingering in the public consciousness (Henry, 2004), seen in Buffy’s comparison of two dresses before going to the club in episode one.
Furthermore, the sexualities of older women, and the general danger they represent, is an early repeated theme in the first season. In episodes three and four, the chief antagonist of the stories, cheerleader Amy’s mother Catherine (Season One, Episode Three) and the new substitute Ms. Natalie French (Season One, Episode Four), are both older women invading the spaces of young people. In particular, Ms. French uses the sexualities of young men to entrap them as then kill them, as she is a praying mantis.
The show itself deals with these issues by underpinning Buffy’s experience as a distinctly young, female and difficult. While the monsters themselves are problems, the villainy of women is also portrayed as human, rather than simply supernatural. Cordelia may not represent the physical danger of Ms. French, but she is an early malignant force that shows a trend in later Gothic texts to highlight the worst of humanity, as well as non-human evil.
This does not mean sex does not remain the chief influence in creating female-presenting villains in these Gothic texts. Lucy and Ms. French represent femininity as monstrous within their Gothic texts because they use the language and imagery of femininity to engage with their victims. While Cordelia in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is a mean girl, Ms. French is an actual monster, set out on seducing and consuming Xander. Lucy, in the same vein, attempts to seduce her former suitors and is described post transformation as going from “purity to voluptuous wantonness” (Dracula, Chapter 16, Page 3).
Barbara Creed writes in “The Monstrous Feminine” of monsters representing the “male fear of castration which ultimately produces and delineates the monstrous”, and while that can be understood as literal, she describes how that fear is often metaphorical (Creed, 1993). Desire is often defined in media as an action without agency, and since choice can be understood as the defining nature of man, to take that ability away is itself castrating. Both Lucy and Ms. French are conduits of this, utilizing their own sexualities to subjugate men.
However, it goes further than that. Returning to the initial descriptions of Victorian femininity and third wave feminist media archetypes, sex can be considered as monstrous in both ideologies. While third wave feminism sought to support the choices of women, it is obvious in the text of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” that the sexualities of the female characters is a problem, which leads the male characters into danger. Sex and desire are symbolically castrating to these male characters.
The perceived control of women over sexuality, paired with the lack of agency man is supposed to have in desire, these aspects of womanhood are, in media, monstrous. Whether it be Victorian Era conservatism or third wave feminist individualism, the result is the same. Women in Gothic texts are monstrous because, ultimately, they’re understood to be the gatekeepers of sex. This not only extends to the monsters themselves, but the human characters, and villainy is not isolated to the supernatural, or even the villains. Desirability is a power unto itself, one that the Gothic text, in these two examples, sees as ultimately dangerous. That is the monstrous feminine; women cannot be trusted to be desirable.
Bibliography
Creed, B. (1993). Introduction. In B. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine (pp. 1-7). New York: Routledge.
Henry, A. (2004). Not My Mother’s Sister. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hughes, W. (2000). Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context. Hampshire: MACMILLAN PRESS LTD.
Karras, I. (2002, March n/a). The Third Wave’s Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Retrieved from Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory & Culture: https://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/view/karras/50
Longford, E. (2019). Queen Victoria. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.