Abstract
In her lecture ‘Professions for Women’, first delivered in 1931, Virginia Woolf remarked that ‘it is far more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality’. She refers here to the concept of ‘The Angel in the House’, the Victorian construction of ideal femininity which dictated that women should be ‘sympathetic’, ‘charming’ and self-sacrificing, and which Woolf imagines as having to ‘kill’ before she is able to take up her ‘occupation of a woman writer’. Woolf’s statement on the difficulty of killing such a phantom appears as the epigraph to Naomi Wolf’s postfeminist text, The Beauty Myth (1990). This book offers a searing critique of the ways in which patriarchal constructions of feminine beauty have come to dominate women’s lives in the late twentieth century. Although Wolf does not comment explicitly upon the significance of this epigraph for her study, it offers a framing metaphor for thinking about the ways in which ideals of femininity—aligned with physical perfection—continue to haunt the lives of women. This synthesis between gendered ideals of physical appearance and the supernatural becomes particularly apt when considering Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009). The occupants of Hundreds Hall fall prey to the manifestation of a malevolent spirit, and yet the text is also haunted by the spectre of physical disfigurement: Roderick has been burned in combat during the Second World War; Gillian is mauled by the Ayres’s family dog; Mrs Ayres’s body is ravaged by scratches, bruises and bites from the entity in the house; and Caroline must endure having ‘mismatched masculine features’, from the narrative perspective shaped by a male, medicalised gaze. Gina Wisker’s chapter in this volume also notes the range of physical imperfections and maladies to which the characters in The Little Stranger are subjected, and she interprets this as demonstrating the novel’s evocation of a lineage of the female Gothic. This chapter focuses on the novel’s continuum between physical disfigurement and failure to meet the ideals of feminine beauty from the perspective of feminist disability studies.
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Notes
- 1.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, 2013) http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/ (accessed 25 April 2013) (chapter 27, para. 3 of 7). Web.
- 2.
Woolf, chapter 27, para. 3 of 7. The concept of ‘the Angel in the House’ is taken from a poem by Coventry Patmore of the same name, written in tribute to his wife, Emily. It was first published in 1854.
- 3.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Vintage Books, 1991).
- 4.
There are brief moments in The Beauty Myth where Wolf does deploy the vocabulary of haunting, remarking how the women in magazine advertising awaken with perfect hair courtesy of a ‘kindly phantom’ (Wolf, p. 52) and also how the prospect of women becoming surgically-enhanced ‘robots’ is ‘the spectre of the future’ (Wolf, p. 224).
- 5.
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (London: Virago, 2009), p. 65. Further references appear after quotations in the text and, unless otherwise stated, emphases appear in the original.
- 6.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 28.
- 7.
Lennard J. Davis, ‘Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality’, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) pp. 51–70 (p. 53).
- 8.
See Martin S. Pernick, ‘Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America’, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) pp. 89–110 for a discussion of disability in relation to degeneration and eugenics.
- 9.
For an extended analysis of the power and authority of the ‘medical gaze’, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
- 10.
See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1992) pp. 127–43 for a feminist analysis of the patriarchal inflections of discourses of anatomy, particularly in the nineteenth century.
- 11.
In their introduction to their edited collection, Gender and Equestrian Sport: Riding Around the World, Miriam Adelman and Jorge Knijnik note a pervasive cultural connection between women and horses, some of which ‘evoke women’s daring, strength, and courage, while others repeat tropes of sensualisation, mystification, and sexualization’ (2013, New York: Springer Publishing), p. 1. However, they do not comment upon the more pernicious popular cultural association between “ugly” women and horses. See, for example, the Facebook group ‘Girls That Look Like Horses’ https://www.facebook.com/pages/Girls-that-look-like-horses/229014520984 (accessed 20 September 2013). Web.
- 12.
See guidance from Equality and Human Rights Commission, http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-rights/disability/, (accessed 24 April 2013). Web.
- 13.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’, Feminist Disability Studies, ed. by Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 13–47 (pp. 17–18).
- 14.
See, for example, Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
- 15.
Garland-Thomson, ‘Integrating Disability’, p. 20.
- 16.
Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 182.
- 17.
Ann Heilmann, ‘Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger and Its Intertexts’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 6.1 (2012), 38–55 (p. 44). It should be noted here that Heilmann’s comments on Faraday refer to his potential connections with the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892).
- 18.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!” Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Journal of Gender Studies, 13:3 (2004), 203–14 (pp. 210–11). For a further discussion of the resonance of the term ‘queer’ in The Little Stranger, see Lucie Armitt’s review of the novel ‘Garden Paths and Blind Spots’ in New Welsh Review, 85 (Autumn 2009), 28–35, in which she suggests that the specifically lesbian connotations of the word ‘queer’ in Waters’ earlier work have ‘dissolved into a less specific sense of “queerness”’ (p. 34).
- 19.
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 23.
- 20.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny [1919], trans. by David Mclintock (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 123.
- 21.
Freud, The Uncanny, pp. 139–40.
- 22.
Freud, The Uncanny, p. 150.
- 23.
Davis, ‘Nude Venuses’, p. 62.
- 24.
Jane Marie Todd, ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”’, Signs, 2:3 (1986), 519–28; Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 9.
- 25.
Freud, The Uncanny, p. 151.
- 26.
See Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 19, on the long-established association between female bodies and disability. As O’Callaghan has pointed out elsewhere in her discussion of female genitalia in Waters’s work, there is, of course, an established history of feminist critique of cultural disgust towards the vagina, including Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Flamingo, 1999), pp. 44–52; Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues (London: Virago, 2001); and Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman (London: Random House, 2012), pp. 46–55. See Claire O’Callaghan, ‘“Lesbo Victorian Romp”: Celebrating Sexuality in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, in Sexuality and Contemporary Literature, ed. Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), pp. 71–2 (p. 76).
- 27.
Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 1.
- 28.
See Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 110, on the discourse of ‘maternal impression’ in nineteenth-century freak shows and Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 196, on the patriarchal and misogynistic implications of such theories.
- 29.
Freud, The Uncanny, p. 147.
- 30.
Kim Q. Hall, ‘Reimagining Disability and Gender through Feminist Studies: An Introduction’, Feminist Disability Studies, ed. by Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 1–10 (pp. 3–4).
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Davies, H. (2016). Written on the Body: Wounded Men and Ugly Women in The Little Stranger . In: Jones, A., O'Callaghan, C. (eds) Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50608-5_9
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