The Femme Grotesque
come in, come in. sorry about the stains.
4/28/2026 (it’s Leah’s dad’s birthday! Happy birthday, David/dad!)
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(This is part 4 in Leah’s Gothic Literature series)
It has been harder than I’d like to admit to let go of ideas about what I should be, as a woman, and in read throughs and edits I see the expectations unintentionally seeping into my writing.
Even after years of actively resisting them, I still find the old instructions tucked behind an ear or under an arm or between my legs.
Be agreeable. Be beautiful, but not vain. Be desirable, but do not reveal too much desire of your own. Please, be tasteful. Don’t swear. Don’t be so crass. Be emotional, but only in ways that remain convenient to others. Be complex, but please don’t get in the way. Be powerful, but never difficult.
And yet, when I look at the literature that has most moved me, I see women who hunger, women who reject those ideals, women who rage and rot and want more. Women who become difficult, embarrassing, ecstatic, filthy. Women who refuse to remain polished because, let’s be honest here, the messier truth just makes more sense.
Ultimately, I see the Gothic.
For all its haunted houses, locked rooms, doubles, shadows, and dread, Gothic literature has long offered something else as well: permission. It has made room for characters, especially women and others historically denied power, to become excessive, contradictory, bodily, strange, and therefore fully human. It has allowed them to step outside the narrow scripts handed to them and discover force within those confines.
What I found most exciting, though, was realizing that current did not end with the Gothic shelf. It has continued to branch outward, whether we still call it Gothic or not. I am especially interested in how it now surfaces in what has recently been deemed “weird girl lit,” a loose contemporary label for books invested in female interiority, appetite, absurdity, discomfort, and refusal.
At TPOW, Nina and I often talk about influence, taste, and where our literary homes might exist. Not because labels are law, but because they can help explain why certain books keep finding us, and what they might be revealing about us as writers in return. They can also be useful when the world insists we fit our own work into some marketable box.
What interests me far more than the label itself is the lineage beneath it. Many of these books draw from an older well. They take the ordinary pressures of identity, desire, domesticity, beauty, motherhood, loneliness, and shame, then push them just beyond the point of comfort. The body is allowed to speak, appetite embarrasses itself, repression curdles into behavior, and the self splits into however many versions it requires.
The Gothic has always known how to give form to what society asks us to hide.
The Femme Fatale, the Femme Fragile, and the Femme Grotesque
An understanding of a few familiar feminine archetypes may be useful here.
We are perhaps most culturally familiar with the femme fatale. She is seductive, dangerous, composed. Her power often moves through desirability. She understands the rules of the room and bends them in her favor. Yet the archetype is frequently shaped by the male gaze, presenting female power as spectacle: alluring, disruptive, but ultimately manageable. It is rarely about a woman owning her sexuality so much as having that sexuality framed for the consumption and anxiety of others.
The femme fragile is defined by delicacy, damage, vulnerability, and breakability (duh, fragile). She has historically been romanticized, protected, pitied, or consumed by narrative itself. Ophelia from Hamlet comes to mind, no? Dutiful, emotionally overwhelmed, driven toward madness, memorialized in death.
If the femme fatale weaponizes desirability, and the femme fragile is rewarded for embodying it, the femme grotesque weaponizes what desirability discards: age, grief, appetite, obsession, residue. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations stands in yellowed satin among the wreckage, while the governess of The Turn of the Screw becomes frightening through uncertainty itself.
So, clearly, the femme grotesque is after something else entirely.
She may be sensual or she may not. She may be beautiful or otherwise. She may be desired, ignored, feared, pitied, mocked, or misunderstood. None of that is the point. Her power does not come from pleasing the gaze. It comes from surviving it, refusing it, or rendering it irrelevant.
She is too much by someone else’s standards: too hungry, too loud, too old, too angry, too sexual, too withholding, too strange.
Which is to say, she is often simply human in ways society has historically punished.
Let me be plain: the grotesque is not a failure of femininity. It is femininity freed from performance. Humanity freed from politeness.
Gothic Foundations
Some of the Gothic’s most memorable figures are unsettling not because they are evil, but because they refuse neat containment.
In A Rose for Emily, Emily Grierson becomes a figure of decay, grief, control, and social refusal, tragic and impossible to simplify. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason remains one of literature’s most enduring examples of female rage pathologized and locked away. In The Turn of the Screw, the grotesquerie lives in the expectation of the Governess to be nurturing, modest, rational enough to care for children only to become increasingly invasive, fevered, and dangerous.
Again and again, the Gothic asks a provocative question: what if the woman deemed excessive is responding quite rationally to the cage?
Modern Descendants
That same current runs through many contemporary works, even those not typically shelved as Gothic.
Take Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
In Eileen, there is no polite veil between reader and narrator. We are given the body in all its discomforts, its odors, compulsions, fantasies, humiliations, and hungers. Even the woman positioned as Eileen’s glamorous opposite, the ideal of femininity, quickly reveals herself to be unstable, performative, and cracked beneath her well-coated resin.
In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator attempts to disappear elegantly, but decay refuses elegance. We watch her wither inward through sedation, vanity, delusion, and self-erasure. What should read as privilege or beauty becomes eerie vacancy. The apartment becomes a kind of tomb, sleep a secular curse, and the self something both abandoned and obsessively curated.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang offers another branch of the same inheritance. There, refusal itself becomes grotesque. Through the body’s rejection of appetite, duty, marriage, and usefulness, femininity slips beyond the terms society has prepared for it. Silence becomes threatening. Withdrawal becomes transformation. What appears, at first, as passivity reveals itself as a radical and unsettling autonomy.
This, of course, includes short fiction as well. We recently read Fox by K-Ming Chang at Flash Club (watch the video replay here — free to join every Thursday night on Zoom!), and it applies beautifully here, transforming the humiliations and constraints of girlhood into something feral, mythic, and powerful. As I dug through the many other pieces she has written that move through this same realm of the femme grotesque, I was especially taken with Swallower, where feminine hunger becomes immense and uncanny, and the body is rendered not as ornament, but as vessel, appetite, inheritance, and force.
Much of Karen Russell’s work rejects the polished myth of girlhood altogether. I talk often about Swamplandia!, but for the femme grotesque, though it certainly applies there as well, I want to turn to one of her short stories found in Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Reeling for the Empire.
In this piece, femininity becomes labor-machine, body as commodity, girlhood spun into product. It is grotesque, political, bodily. But most importantly, spoiler, sorry, the women do not simply succumb to their imprisoners, their keeper, their givers-away. They resist. They mutate the terms of their captivity.
Russell’s female characters are awkward organisms in process, full of bodily anxieties, humiliations, desires, and wild becoming. They are not polished symbols of womanhood, but living things, strange and unfinished, refusing to remain where they were placed.
Why This Matters for Writers
A mentor once told me (I’m paraphrasing here) that we do not need only polished characters moving through polished plots. Most of life is mundane until pressure is applied, and story begins at the point of rupture: grief staining the wallpaper, hunger dropping its manners, the body confessing what the mind has tried to repress. (brings to mind the following note from Phoebe Thompson lol):
The grotesque, used well, is not spectacle. It may actually be our strongest means of connection. We want to read about ourselves, about our deepest truths, to feel seen in the words that stare back at us.
Often, the grotesque isn’t something that repels us because it’s unlike us. It reels us in because it’s so familiar.
Closing the Door Softly
I still catch myself trying to be easier to understand, easier to like, easier to hold, as though smoothness were a virtue and complexity a burden. Even in writing this, I find something pulling at me, telling me it’s too much, to quiet down, to let it go. Yet the books I return to most faithfully insist on something else entirely: that power often begins where polish ends, and that those long asked to make themselves smaller for the comfort of others are entitled to the full range of being. Contradictory, desirous, grieving, ecstatic, ugly, funny, furious, strange, unfinished.
Perhaps that is why the femme grotesque keeps returning, not as warning but as witness, asking for nothing more than to be seen clearly.
What are your thoughts?
Okay, the fun part…
Writing Prompt: Break the Archetype
Step One: Create a character shaped by a familiar social role or expectation: the caretaker, the charmer, the reliable one, the beauty, the difficult one, the shy one, the success story.
Step Two: Give them a truth that refuses the role: a ravenous hunger, a molding grief, an unkempt desire, an embarrassing obsession, a body that leaks, aches, swells, twitches, or speaks at the wrong time, etc. etc.
Step Three: Place them in an ordinary scene, like a dinner table or a grocery line, staff meeting, first date, funeral, etc. etc. and write until the hidden truth ruptures the performance and something human crawls out..
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Closing Reflection
And, on that note, I’ll just leave this here:
Love y’all,
Leah
Love that ending punctuation stain
Loved this!