Bloody Petticoats
Performative Monstrosity of the Female Slayer in Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20248271 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michelle L Rushefsky (Independent Researcher, Pompano Beach, FL 33065, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 52 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/h13020052 |
| OpenAlex | W4392817001 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as an initial methodology to analyze Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet. I argue that the (white) women in this horror rewriting inadvertently become the oppressors alongside contextualized zombie theory. This article also explores Grahame-Smith’s Charlotte Lucas as a complex female monster, as she is bitten and turned into a zombie, which reflects in part Jane Austen’s Charlotte’s social status and (potential) spinsterdom. It is the mythos of the zombie that makes Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet’s feminist subversion less remarkable. And it is Charlotte’s embodiment of both the rhetorical and the religio-mythic monster that merges two narratives: the Americanized appropriated zombie and the oppressed woman. Grahame-Smith’s characters try to embody the resistance of twenty-first feminist sensibilities but fail due to the racial undertones of the zombie tangentially present in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Aesthetics · Art · Bloody · Literature · Performative utterance · Pride · Theology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |