Monstrous Textualities: Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance
Anya Heise-von der Lippe
Wales: University of Wales Press, 2021
329 pages
ISBN 978-1-78683-758-5

An engaging monograph, Monstrous Textualities: Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance by Anya Heise-von der Lippe aims to give a new insight into Gothic narratives revolving around monstrous figures. This complex, imaginative, and critically informed book offers a rich and new interpretation of the work of three well-known contemporary American, female authors, namely Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Shelley Jackson and one British contemporary author, Angela Carter. Structurally, the book consists of two introductory chapters and three larger parts, each divided into three chapters. Overall, the volume explores the representation of monstrous textuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the monstrous female ‘Other’ as Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Love (2003); moreover, reads freak and fat female embodiment as a feminist narrative resistance strategy in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) and explores Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-13) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) within the critical discourse of posthumanism and cyborg theory.

Anya Heise-von der Lippe’s argumentative focus in the first introductory chapter lies in the representations of the monstrous embodiment, which “draw attention to the margins of cultural conceptualization of the human and their destabilization of an exclusive humanist subject position” (2). Heise-von der Lippe focuses on Gothic corporeality, primarily the often abjected monstrous female body based on the observation that Gothic texts dealing with monstrous figures that incorporate monsters in their structure. According to Heise-von der Lippe, this might not be a coincidence but rather a specific writing strategy employed by a particular author. She considers Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an early example for the monstrous body and recognises similar structures in other textual examples, especially in the work of feminist writers. She also suggests that the reading of Gothic corporeality is no longer connected to the gendered body of the author (as Ellen Moers suggested in her definition of “female Gothic” in the 1970s) but rather that it is about the textual use of monstrous embodiment seen as a critical figure against various forms of oppression. Heise-von der Lippe thus understands monstrous textuality as an “open network of intertextual connections to various literary and critical sources, metanarrative commentary and non-linear or multi-layered structural effects that reflect and support the critical potential of a text” (5).

In the second chapter of the book, the same Heise-von der Lippe takes Frankenstein as a model of monstrous textuality—a text that can be read as a narrative of resistance to gendered and racial exclusionary practices. Frankenstein has a monstrous figure, a human-animal hybrid assembled from various body parts and brought to life by science. The author argues that Frankenstein can be understood as a proto-cyborg or proto-posthuman figure because cyborgs exist “outside traditional biological and historical frameworks of reproduction” (13). Moreover, this novel is like a monstrous body because of its multi-layered textuality mirroring the “patchwork corporeality of the creature created within” (15). The author of this chapter also says that this novel is a pivotal text which laid the foundation of a distinctive feminist tradition of monster texts and highlights the novel’s concern with the theme of creation and the question of authority both within its narrative framework alongside Mary Shelley’s own struggle to defend her authorial status while being disregarded by critics.

The subsequent three parts of the book draw on different cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts in discussing main texts interpreted as monster writings in the feminist tradition of Frankenstein and as narratives of resistance. These three main parts of the book follow Heise-von der Lippe’s model of reading of Shelley’s novel by focusing on absent or ghostly bodies in Beloved and Love, on the monstrous and freak female bodies in Nights at the Circus and Lady Oracle, and on the cyborg bodies and posthuman species in the MaddAddam trilogy, all with the aim to draw parallels with critical theories and discourses of posthumanism, the posthuman gothic, hauntology, disability, and fat studies.

The first part of this chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology – particularly Black feminist hauntologies and their usage within the contexts of Othering. Anya Heise-von der Lippe discusses here Toni Morrison’s engagement with literary strategies of hauntology in Beloved and Love in highlighting the experiences of African American women through different periods of American history and culture. Morrison’s Black feminist interpretations of history recreate a “counter-history of haunting, most prominently in doubly marginalised female characters whose existence alone draws attention to the inaccuracies of mainstream historical discourses” (61). Beloved, Morrison’s most well-known ghost narrative sheds lights on the haunting presence of slavery and the legacy of racism and cultural othering of African Americans in American history. Here hauntings often emphasize the corporeal reminders of violence, particularly the humiliating act of comparing Black women to animals. As in the previous parts, Heise-von der Lippe provides a detailed and insightful analysis as she explores narratives of resistance on various textual levels within the novel, such as singing as a non-verbal counterstrategy of Black females, the issue of re-memory, and the power of storytelling. In Love, Heise-von der Lippe draws attention to the exclusion of women, not just from white patriarchal structures but from African American ones as well.

Next, part two introduces some critical frameworks such as that of the feminist theory (chiefly Mary Russo’s Female Grotesque and Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa), fat and disability studies and corporeal discourses of monstrosity and freakishness, which draw attention to the representation of non-normative female bodies seen in many cases as freaks. Considering these critical discourses, Heise-von der Lippe investigates in Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Atwood’s Lady Oracle the monstrous female body or monstrous femininity with special regard to body size, shape, and sexuality. These novels represent the discourse of monstrosity and freakishness, presented as metaphors of women’s grotesqueness and abnormality but which can also be read as powerful monstrous narratives of collective resistance against being marked as “non-normatively embodied female Other” (253). Heise-von der Lippe highlights that Carter’s and Atwood’s works were written during a notable period in the history of feminist criticism (the 1970s and 1980s) when critics established new cultural positions for women that included also the “critical framing of women as sign producers instead of circulating them as objects or signs to be looked at” (178). Thus, in this context, Nights at the Circus and Lady Oracle can be understood as counter-narratives against any contemporary view on “narrow standards of feminine beauty” (254). In Nights at the Circus, Heise-von der Lippe analyzes the main character Fevver’s ambiguous hybrid embodiment of half-woman, half-bird and draws on how Carter’s narrative resists the “framing of its protagonist as an object of the male gaze” (6). Furthermore, Lady Oracle explores Joan Foster’s adulthood as a successful female author, who must come to terms with her formerly fat teenage body and highlights the narrative circumstances in which “fat bodies challenge cultural notions of what female bodies should look like while discussing the ambiguous ways in which fatness is linked to visibility” (153).

Part three of the book focuses on critical posthumanism and the questioning of the humanist subject position. Critical posthumanism can be understood as the troubling of the ‘human’ category, a “stable subject position based on the premise that both technology and the non-human play a role in these processes” (4). Heise-von der Lippe highlights that the term ‘human’ has been undergoing radical historical and cultural changes and stresses that the posthuman is often compared to the monstrous because the figure of the monster undermines stable hierarchies. The posthumanist approach thus raises methodological questions in the realms of the posthumanist reading and writing practices and in the ways in which to approach a text from a posthumanist point of view. Heise-von der Lippe’s example for posthuman reading practices comes from Shelley Jackson’s work, with the example for posthuman writing practice taken from Margaret Atwood’s works. Heise-von der Lipp argues that these two authors’ works can be read as posthuman Gothic narratives that shape reader’s understanding of what it means to be human and rdefines the binary categories which are associated with the concept, such as the organism-machine or the human-animal.

Later on in the book, Heise-von der Lippe discusses Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, Patchwork Girl, which is a metanarrative adaptation of Frankenstein. The hypertext here is defined as a “form of non-linear, interactive screen-based textuality in which the reader chooses the structure and unfolding of the text in her reading actions – clicking on certain areas of the screen to activate and follow hyperlinks to other screens and segments” (190). Adhering to this definition, Patchwork Girl offers many narrative choices for the reader and, as such, involves multiple plotlines. Jackson’s hypertext also foregrounds questions about creation, authority, and humanity also raised by Frankenstein. Chapter eight analyzes Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam). This trilogy poses the question of what it means to be a human and draws attention to the human as Other, as a “genetically improved, posthuman species whose non-violent and sustainable way of life seems much less threatening to the planet” (223). All three novels are set in a post-apocalyptic present, where the narrator ponders upon isolation as the last realm of the human race in a world which is populated by genetically modified posthumans who are a half-human half-pig species. The novels also stress Atwood’s dystopian criticism of the “loss of humanist values in contemporary culture and the selling out of the humanities to an open-market capitalism that is fuelled by humanity’s fear of ageing and death” (226).

Overall, Monstrous Textualities: Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance Anya Heise-von der Lippe is an interesting book of good use for academics and students of English and American studies interested in feminism, narratives, Gothic studies, gender, identity and posthuman studies. This monograph is also an excellent contribution to the areas of the posthuman gothic, hauntology, disability, and fat studies.

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