Description
This critical examination, serving as a sort of zombie pre-history, explores the role Female Gothic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played in contributing to the twenty-first century zombie phenomenon. The zombie subgenre has often been regarded as male-oriented. This essay suggests that the contemporary zombie trope is a result of feminism’s escape from patriarchal language toward the development of women’s discourse. What follows will reposition the Americanized zombie subgenre’s supposed masculine roots by examining the representation of popular female narrative characters unique to the first period of the feminist movement. Whether or not feminist references to zombies are explicit or implicit, there has been no study of the specific ways in which womanhood has been socially constructed as zombie; a task I address here. As the following sections will show, early feminist gothic literature of this kind is not only important in the development of the Americanized zombie tradition but has also helped to establish the zombie as a powerful psychological symbol for social and cultural anxieties and tensions. This paper explores how the blending of feminist writing with zombification has taken place.
