Scarred Women

A new M.A. thesis recently defended:

Scarred Women in the Works of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë

Natali Keramati, Georgetown University

June 2022

My intention for this thesis has been to examine the physical scarring of select Victorian female literary characters in order to understand how they portray the historical and cultural causes and effects of the damaged mid-nineteenth century woman. This exploration furthered my appreciation of scarring’s significant nuanced connections between scars marked by the literal (often, from smallpox) and metaphorical (often, behavioral and aesthetic aberrations from Victorian feminine ideals). While not initially surprised that Victorian society enabled the patriarchy to abhor and alienate literally and metaphysically deformed women, I uncovered some startling new understandings of the scarred woman as the freak. As a result, this thesis is a study of the scarred woman in Victorian novels as essentially both disgusting and desirable, so determined by the institutions through which the body was imaged and produced. It identifies this scarred woman as a freak show, emanating from her cultural objectification in Victorian Britain. By analyzing the literal and metaphorical scarring of these women in their specific historical context, my thesis argues that the scarred Victorian woman societally constructed as the other appears in the works of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë to both fascinate and repel the reader. Scarred women violate Victorian ideals of feminine morality and beauty aesthetics, as suggested by the fairy tale with its notion of masculine protection as well as the norms of purity demanded by the idealized “Angel in the House.” As the entrapped scarred woman weirdly transforms into an object of both desire and repulsion, she consequently becomes