These Monstrous, Decadent New Women. Exploring the Death of Dangerous Femininities in the Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Engagement with the Gothic often brings readers into the realms of the unknown and that which is difficult to represent. In this thesis, I intend to convey to you the fin de siècle’s fascination with representing powerful women as monstrous, something that was analogous with the representations of the New Woman. Whilst there has been much research and discussions around the subject of gender in late Victorian Gothic literature, not much has been said for the reasoning behind the killing of powerful women in such literature. The body of this work will thus engage with various of the dominant themes present in the literature of the late nineteenth century, including the changing faces of feminism, themes of decadence and abjection, the Gothic uncanny and exoticism. In this thesis, I will outline the systems that denounced such powerful women as H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha in She, and Arthur Machen’s Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, as evil and brought them to their deaths. By exploring these unstable gender representations on an individual and collective level, we will be able to draw connections between such fears of woman represented in Gothic literature with the very real fears of invasion, and by extension, identity crisis that the turn of the century heralded in Britain.