By: Maricia Marquez
A monster is defined according to Merriam-Webster as “a person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness, or cruelty,” but what has become of this monster? Since the prolusion of this term in critical conversations of humanity as well as in its simpler uses in stories of heroes and villains, the “monster” is often seen as a reflection of humanity itself. Monsters reflect the flaws of man, his connection to the wild beast humming under misunderstood loneliness. This reflective “flaw” of man is something I argue adheres to men and men only. What then becomes the role of the female monster? Where is her place in the discourse and what does she represent? The monstrous woman is not a symbolic vessel for flaws but instead exhibits the potency of feminine strength. Because women have come to embrace themselves as monsters, they use their discerned otherness to subvert the status quo to challenge the patriarchy and redefine monstrous femininity. Female monsters were created by male standards to create an antithetical being to the perfect woman, however, when a woman embraces the title, she regains the power and humanity the term has tried to strip her of. Women in positions of power are the “evil queens” of society, demonized and held to standards far beyond those that adhere to their male counterparts. When a man exhibits flaws, he is a king, when a woman does the same, she is a monster. This contradiction, though great in its ability to obscure generation after generation of boys and girls is simple to answer, women in power are called monsters because men fear strong women. This fear created the evil queen and so many other renditions of the otherness of femininity. In exploring the embracement of this otherness in early versions of the female monster in literature rewrites the story of the female monster and returns to her the agency she has lost to a pontifical society.
To define the “otherness” of the female monster, we must discern the model whom she deviated from. The “perfect woman” exists to offset the power of the monstrous woman. But how did she come to harbor this description? The truth is that she has been born from the confines of the male mind. Because she is from the male mind, a natural thing, she is considered part of the natural world, however, her existence is anything except natural. It is her perfection that makes her obsolete to the laws of nature, “for it is as much from literature as from “life” that literate women learn they are “to be dull/ Expected and dessigned” (Gilbert 11). The perfect woman has no flaws, she is as beautiful as she is kind, a dull shell to harbor what was once a being with dreams and aspirations. This perfect woman is the “normal” woman. In early forms of literature, man created her to be pure, and holy, a virgin who loses her purity only for the purpose of reproduction. A perfect example is from the early version of the fairy tale known as Snow White of the Brothers Grimm. In this tale, Snow White is nothing more than an uneducated homemaker becomes an appendage to the male existence, only real when she is approved by a man. This perfection becomes grotesque, entering into the uncanny valley of the blurred lines of what it means to design and to be designed. Snow White was indeed written by men, a tasteless character who exists to be perfect in form. She is youthful, with cherry-red lips and “white as snow,” all the qualifications needed to be a good little wife in the 19th century (Grimm).
Adverse to this perfection is the “abnormal woman.” She is created not by man but is of her own establishment. Because she holds this agency over her own person, she is not allowed to exist in the same space as the “normal” woman do to her perceived monstrosities. She is considered unnatural due to impurities as “the devil mocks nature, mocks sense” and she thus becomes a devil in her own right (Warner 247). This woman in early literature derives from the “evil queen” trope of stories like Snow White. The abnormal woman embraces sexuality, living not to simple be an instrument of reproduction, but to cultivate knowledge and a fulfilling life not only for others, but for herself. The evil queen is written to not be obligated to care for the child of another woman, demonizing women who choose to not have children of their own. The queen is old, she is broken from a society that had been run by men. She is physically incapable of being the lovely little Snow White, but she comes off as so much more relatable due to exhibiting very human emotions of anger and jealousy towards Snow White. This monstrous existence is in actuality the most natural existence of them all. There is beauty in what is broken, the most natural state is that of being not completely put together. It is true that “the grotesque and the monstrous are closely associated… [but] one belongs to the order of representation, the other to the order of nature” (Warner 251). I argue that the grotesque woman is perfect, on who is represented as being perfect, but whose veil is stripped when she is realized to be the product of men and the male gaze. The monstrous woman on the other hand is imperfect, however, she accepts herself as such a thing, knowing it is within her human nature to be wonderfully incomplete.
This human nature exists in comparison of the divine nature of impossible expectations of women in literature. Since the early days of literature and oral storytelling, female angels and monsters have erroneously acted as placeholders for the status quo. I bring up angels because of their prevalence and permeation across female narratives and of continuous terminology. Their often inherently feminine characteristics reproduce womanhood as something that should reach the status of divinity. Who are these angels? None other than the perfect princesses in the stories told across history- the snow whites of their respective stories. These angel-women are described as beings with unreal beauty, flowing robes and hair, those who are used as comparisons for someone who is loved above all else. This is achieved only while remaining wholly pure and untouched by inadequacies while remaining alive. We take the character of Snow White from the a tale of a saint of a girl who is supposedly the marker of what a good woman should be. The problem with becoming a saint is that saints are only saints when they die. In the Catholic Church for example, one can only be canonized a saint after their death. Saints and angels are whole and perfect, and in this state of purity, they are no longer alive “but if the angel-woman in some curious way simultaneously inhabits both this world and the next, then there is a sense in which, besides ministering to the dying, she is herself already dead” (Gilbert et. al 24). Snow White herself dies! She is put in a box and only returns to the land of the living when a man decided she needed to be taken out for marriage and to make a family. She gives her mind, body, and soul to a man she just met. Women nurture, we give birth and raise, but when giving ourselves for others becomes our only purpose in living, we are as good as dead. Angels are only beautiful when we accept, they do not exist in our physical reality. There is no story to a woman who is seen as only a vessel for others, “for to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no story, like the life of Goethe’s Makarie, is really a life of death, a death-in-life. The ideal of “contemplative purity” evokes, finally, both heaven and the grave” (Gilbert 25). The closest a woman can get to perfection is to die by existing without her own ambition.
The female monster is then inverse to this angel, she instead placates the human condition at the expense of the divine. This is because the female monster has the desire to live with her sins instead of dying as a saint. When male storytellers create the perfect woman, they invariably destroy the multi-faceted woman, “thus, while male writers traditionally praise the simplicity of the dove, they invariably castigate the cunning of the serpent at least when that cunning is exercised in her own behalf” (Gilbert et. al 28). To choose to adore the dove is to choose the dead. This obsession with pure and innocent women such as the Snow White character undoubtedly attempts to overshadow the intelligence of her monstrous counterpart, that being the evil queen. The queen is thus demonized physically, with her maturation reeling against the youth of her stepdaughter. There is a fear men have of grown women, this is why they pursue young girls even in literary discourse, “At each stage of a woman’s sexual maturation, from the innocence of childhood to her (hetero)sexual initiation and culminating in motherhood (for some), there is a restrictive hegemonic discourse that defines “normal” and “abnormal” female behavior.” (Santos 152). These narratives are frightened of grown women who are only to be desired when one retains her youth; beyond her youth she becomes a monster. This monster may not be an angel, but blood runs through her veins where an angel has none.
Why then, does this monstrous distinction matter? My answer is that if the tales as old as time denote the value of a woman as being based on purity culture and half-dead angels, these tales still exist in the modern era. With the embracement of the monster, women can rewrite the entire social narrative that femininity is inherently weak. This fear of monstrous women offers a degree of power over themselves that were supposedly written out of stories by the prevalence of perfect female characters, “that is, woman becomes dangerous, monstrous, when the patriarchal desire to harness her sexuality and reproductive powers is denied… threatening to the status quo” (Santos 114). The small feminine victories of retaining women’s reproductive freedoms, choosing to be the head of household, or even existing in a workplace are all instruments of monstrous liberation. Where the angel is doomed to die, the monster is reprieved to live.
Works Cited
Gilbert Sandra M., et al. “The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 2020, pp. 3–44. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxkn74x.5. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Sneewittchen, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, (Children’s and Household Tales — Grimms’ Fairy Tales), final edition (Berlin, 1857), no. 53.
Levy, Michael. “Warner, Marina. Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 18, no. 2, spring 2007, pp. 251+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A218817886/AONE?u=loym48904&sid=bookmark- AONE&xid=5a8aff0d. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.
Santos, Cristina. Unbecoming Female Monsters : Witches, Vampires, and Virgins, Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
