The Monstrous Woman: Art, Sin, and the Women Who Refused to Break

When a woman in the nineteenth century stepped outside the role her society assigned her, the culture had a ready vocabulary for her: she was monstrous, perverse, a whore. Two novels written within thirty years of each other take that vocabulary as their subject. Charlotte Gordon, reading Frankenstein for Rebind Classics, traces it through the life of Mary Shelley; Megan Marshall, reading The Scarlet Letter, finds it stamped onto Hester Prynne. Together their commentaries expose a single machinery of punishment, and the women who survived it by refusing to apologize.