Hidden monstrosities: The transformation of woman and child victim(izer)s in nineteenth-century gothic fiction (Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James)

The intent of this study is to examine connections between women and children in gothic literature within the context of Victorian ideology. While blurred boundaries are a hallmark of nineteenth-century gothic fiction, largely unexplored is the dichotomy that exists between the gothic victim and victimizer, I suggest throughout this study that it is the plight of victimization that eventually allows the victim to achieve a degree of power—and that power is embodied in the form of a monstrosity. In the most successful manifestations of this victimizing, monstrous power, a transformation will take place that removes the character from this cyclical role and allows he or she to alter their reality through their own transfiguration.; This project, then, represents the empowerment of woman and child victim(izer)s who transform their monstrosity and find alternate ways of describing their realities. This necessitates a re-visioning of the gothic, which houses monsters both flesh-and-blood and spectral, and a consideration of domesticity, community, and transfiguration. By examining the historical nineteenth-century positioning of women and children, I develop the groundwork for the argument of my dissertation, which centers on the literary woman and child who stray from the prescribed roles of domesticity. To achieve full status as victimizer, women and children must transgress nineteenth-century boundaries and find their power in the terror of the unreal, the gothic landscape that houses unreality.; The corpus of primary sources used in this study feature victimized characters that take that boundary-crossing to the extreme—those that cross the line between the world of the flesh and the world of the spectre: the three nineteenth-century authors examined in this study are Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, and Henry James, all mainstream authors who employ gothic elements in their work, Furthermore, I suggest that the lineage of the gothic and the cultural fascination with wicked women and children has only become more prevalent over the last two centuries, thus my study ends with a reflection on contemporary gothic-horror that has grown from the Victorian gothic.