Women Writers and Women’s Rights: The Denunciation of Women’s Conditions in the Texts of Mary Leman Grimstone and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Through the analysis of the prose of two nineteenth-century women writers: the English Mary Leman Grimstone and the Cuban-Spanish Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the present dissertation aims at unveiling the relationship between women’s writings and the struggle for the recognition of women’s rights in two different geopolitical locations. To do so, it weaves a Feminist Planetary Web between each writer and her context, as well as among both writers, finding points of connection and disconnection. It shows how women appropriated the pen in different geographical locations, exposing a particular female voice that denounced not only the oppression suffered by women, but also by other marginalized subjects. For each writer this dissertation exposes several macro-arguments present transversally in their work, like their critiques to the institution of marriage, the importance of proper education for women, the advocacy for religious tolerance, and the narrative construction of different male and female paradigms. The critiques to the institution of marriage is a point of connection between both authors. They also coincided in highlighting the importance of women’s right to access a proper education. Aside from these commonalities, this dissertation also analyses how Grimstone and Gómez de Avellaneda negotiated their position in the literary public realm, showing how it was precisely in this point that readers and critics can find noteworthy differences between them.

The Legacy of Frankenstein’s Creature: Monstrosity and Female Grotesque in Mary Shelley, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson

This English Literature thesis (European PhD EDGES – Women’s and Gender Studies – 34th cycle) is an investigation into the representation of the monstrous body according to the British writers Mary Shelley, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. The main objective is to observe how the representation of the categories of monstrous, abject and grotesque in Western cultural imagination have been influenced across time and literary genres. In the novels of Shelley, Carter and Winterson, the monstrous subject is configured as an alternative to the anthropocentric ideal embodied by the normative subject, of which Victor Frankenstein is the paradigmatic exponent. Plus, there are places considered anti-topoi within which the monster acquires a situatedness and claims a voice, generating an opposed counter-narrative to the imaginary conveyed by the normative subject. Monstrosity outlined by Shelley in the novels Frankenstein and The Last Man constitutes the starting point of my research, aiming to observe how the discourse of the normative body vs. the anti-normative body intersects with the discourse of the spaces of the centre vs. the spaces of the margin. In Carter's novels The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus, the monstrous female constitutes the embodiment of wills, desires and claims challenging the heteronormative system. The space of otherness in which Carter's monster-woman is confined becomes a possibility of reshaping identity for the Subject, deconstructing the logic of power that moulded her within society. Finally, Winterson creates two monstrous women in Sexing the Cherry and The Passion who move through urban spaces, going from the centre to the margins and testifying to the arbitrariness of the system and its weaknesses. Similarly, in Frankissstein, Winterson recovers Shelley's original novel and transforms it into a parodic and intertextual speculation on the fluidity of identity and the limits of transhumanism.