A woman sits still at the end of another woman’s bed. The former, Carmilla, is alluringly cold and has an unearthly beauty to her. She is magical — seductive, strange and borderline horrifying to the family that takes her in. The latter, Laura, is sweeter, rosy-cheeked and more waif-like than anything else. Carmilla sits at the foot of Laura’s bed, floating through Laura’s nightmares while forging a homoerotic friendship with her during her waking hours. This friendship starts as tame stares and interest, and ends in affection bordering on ownership. Laura wakes up in a blood-stained bed with a dreamy but monstrous Carmilla waiting by her feet, soaked in blood. This an erotic scene — Carmilla states earlier that “Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.” Written in 1871, the novel “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu fully embodies the timeless trend of painting female sexuality as an erotic nightmare, but has nonetheless become a beloved piece in the genre in spite of his original intentions.
Monstrosity, since the dawn of storytelling, has been prescribed to the female psyche at any tease or taunt of autonomous sexuality. The author of “Carmilla,” Sheridan Le Fanu, wrote his horror novel within a culture that warned against female eroticism — the very subject it is now loved for. Within the novel, Carmilla is a paragon of the “monster-in-the-closet” and “death by sex” literary tropes — the former Queercodes the monster and the latter kills an openly sexual female character. Despite the clear misogyny of this work, “Carmilla” has had a renaissance among female and Queer horror fans. Le Fanu, entirely unintentionally, created a double-edged sword: Through a different lens, his novel is intensely Queer and erotic, and shows women indulging in their desire. The exhibition of female sexuality in “Carmilla” breaks apart hegemonic womanhood; specifically, it’s a deviance from the submissiveness and purity women are expected to embody in both the real world and in media. While it’s clear that an autonomous woman is a patriarchal nightmare, female authors have long clamored for a feminist reframing of sex and monstrosity. So while monstrous indulgence in desire can be called a flaw by male critics, for the contemporary female authors who have perfected this sexy and grotesque genre of literature, it is nothing less than a riveting reclamation of personhood.
While earlier authors — including, ironically, Sheridan Le Fanu — helped to forge the feminist retelling of haunted women, contemporary literature has allowed for this genre to fully explode into the mainstream. Within the past decade, authors like Carmen Maria Machado, Mona Awad and Chelsea G. Summers have all dedicated their creative work to exploring the intersection of eroticism and woman-centered horrors. Their novels are rooted in different formal genres — from memoir to science fiction to short stories — but all share a common truth: Women are in complete control of their desires. These authors explore their female characters’ autonomy through nightmarish metaphors or allegories.
As the most popular example and likely (in my opinion) the best, Carmen Maria Machado has mastered writing surreal horror with candidly erotic sex scenes. In her debut short story collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” nearly every fictional plot centers around a woman in a precariously unnerving reality, and there is always at least one twinge of eroticism in her plot. Erotic horror is the ultimate vessel for desires and has, historically, served as a vessel for women and Queer individuals. Machado knows this and has stated that she “wanted to show a woman enjoying sex, like really enjoying sex” in her writing. To show a woman completely unrepressed by purity culture, it is almost necessary to establish the eroticism within a context where fantasy and horror can simultaneously make the reader’s skin crawl. While it’s exceedingly difficult to pull only one example from Machado’s deeply sexy and scary catalog, her short stories “Inventory” and “The Husband Stitch” are gems of the genre. In the former, the story of a zombie-like plague slowly consuming humanity is told entirely through the narrator recounting her various hookups. In the latter, a sexually autonomous woman discusses her marriage through sex and pleasure, but it spirals into female body horror. Despite both horrors, the perpetual motif of surreal nightmares in Machado’s stories only elevates the erotic exploration of Queer and female pleasure.
Similarly, Mona Awad uses heightened aesthetics of hyper-femininity and violence as an erotic tool in her novel “Bunny.” The book follows an elite group known as the “Bunnies” who have an unnerving, near-supernatural closeness to them, which is later found to have been forged through ritualistic magic. These rituals are completed during secret writer’s workshops they host, known collectively as the “Smut Salon.” Here, they dress in lace, frills and other sexualized markers of femininity and dedicate themselves fully to exploring their own artistically erotic desires. But there is monstrosity embedded in this: Their desire is often bloody, bruised and violent. The strong juxtaposition of the unhinged, violent actions of the college-aged girls and their commitment to romantic, sensual beauties sets an immediate tone of monstrous sexuality. Sexual devotion, bodily harm and death are not off the table for the Bunnies, and it is all fuel for their literary passions and deeply romanticized lives. To emphasize their commitment to appearing almost doll-like in contrast to natural gore, they take on highly curated fashion, makeup and lifestyle choices that affirm an almost surreally feminine aesthetic. The sexy-grotesque dichotomy highlights how deeply pain and pleasure are intertwined in the sexual mainstream. When tearing into each other’s blood and guts, they’re unapologetically tearing into each other’s most monstrous desires.
Though less rooted in the supernatural, Chelsea G. Summers creates a horror-filled tale of female desire, indulgence and cannibalism in her novel “A Certain Hunger.” The main character, Dorothy, is a successful food critic and a fine chef in her own right. Throughout the novel, we see her array of lovers — high society types, working-class men and Italian butchers among others — and we see her perpetual ploys to seduce, destroy and consume them. Though not monstrous in a supernatural way, her real-world vampiric desires resemble the literary tradition of the man-eating succubus. There is a very fine line between her sexual desires and her hunger, and they often go hand-in-hand. In the midst of sex scenes and erotic fantasies, Dorothy often envisions what meal the man’s flavor palette would fit into. On the other side of this, the ritualized cooking and the final act of consummation is written as if it is an erotic scene, as if the final bite is the orgasm she’s been looking for since targeting her male-ingredient. She is rarely motivated by spite and anger, and instead follows her passions to fill her appetite. Dorothy, then, deviates from the standard man-eater; rather than being vengeful, she cannibalizes men purely based on their proximity, taste and attractiveness. Hunger and desire have always gone hand in hand for monstrous women; after all, the first Biblical sin was a woman eating.
Monstrous women have taken up space throughout the literary canon, and for good reason. The fantastical nightmares they both create and indulge in provide abstract worlds within which female readers can daydream and offer a uniquely nightmarish take on women’s desire. In this realm of fiction, women can carve out their own desires and monstrosities.
Daily Arts Writer Ava Burzycki can be reached at burzycki@umich.edu.