Accordingly, they are used to draw boundaries between the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’. Monstrous bodies represent the strangeness of others and thus help to structure the self and the group the self belongs to. Oppositional: the self receives acknowledgement of its own ontological corporeality through ongoing tension with the Other as an entirely distinct subject, one that is dissimilar, strange, exotic and alien to its own sense of personal and social identity.Īppositional: the self also relies on the Other to constitute the essential and superficial characteristics of the self-image through a relationship of inner-difference, which in turn, validates the reality and existence of the self as a distinct entity. In this view, the phenomenological relationship of the modern subject or self to ‘the Other’ can be understood in two distinct ways: Halberstam details how this tradition of profound ‘Otherness’ has its origins in the Gothic monsters of the nineteenth century, where representations of monstrosity served to metaphorise “modern subjectivity as a balancing act between inside / outside, female / male, body / mind, native / foreign, proletarian/aristocrat” (1).
#DEFINE GOTHIC LITERATURE SKIN#
In the introduction to Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Jack Halberstam notes that the Gothic novel produces symbols for “interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster” (3), and specifically focuses on explorations of ‘Otherness’ by using “the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies” (6).
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