Neo-Victorian Contaminations: The Hybrid and Virulent Nature of Female Gothic in Penny Dreadful Women Characters

Abstract

Penny Dreadful is a popular horror television drama whose title clearly refers to a genre of nineteenth century popular fiction characterized by sensational and terrifying plots. The series stages an inventory of characters mainly drawn from Gothic and Victorian literature: Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and the werewolf form a league against evil forces bent on infecting the world with a deathly plague.

Among them, the two leading female characters, Vanessa Ives, a sensual, devil-possessed young woman, and Lily, Frankenstein’s female creature, epitomize the Gothic subversive heroine whose “monstrous” status and behaviour are perceived as a threat to the stability of traditional culture and society. They appear in a narration infested with images of contagion and in a “Female Gothic” literary mode which is adaptive, mutant and resistant to categorizations, thus in many ways resembling infective agents like viruses and bacteria. Significantly, the hybrid, virulent nature of these characters mirrors the traits of (Female) Gothic fiction and is analysed in the light of Discourse and Gender Studies.

An example of contemporary fiction disguised under the mask of Neo-Victorianism, Penny Dreadful interprets female transgression as a vehicle of infective disruption, portraying two “pestiferous” women whose nonconformist attitude is treated medically by isolation and sanitization in order to prevent the spread of infection in a fictional world that is a frightful metaphor of our present world.