ETD

• abjection
• american literature
• contemporary gothic
• female gothic
• Julia Kristeva
• neurodivergence
• the monstrous-feminine.

Contemporary Gothic literature consistently frames the neurodivergent female as the ultimate embodiment of the Kristevian abject. Her non-normative mind and unruly body are framed as monstrous because they threaten the stability of the patriarchal neuronormative symbolic order. An exploration of this figure reveals a cultural imagination that imprisons her within the logic of abjection, able to perceive neurodivergent femininity only through the lens of horror. By forging a new, hybrid theoretical framework – that fuses Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection with the critical insights of neurodiversity studies – this analysis of six North American and British novels demonstrates how the neurodivergent female is systematically transformed into an abject object. This process of abjection will be investigated through an analysis of language, body, and the social self – to reveal the tragic endpoints of her struggle against a world that refuses to see her.
The first site of abjection is language. The chapter “A Crisis in Language” explores how the neurodivergent voice is textually abjected. This is revealed through the formally shattered texts of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, primarily through the haunting textual presence of Pelafina, and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching, through the porous consciousness of its protagonist, Miranda Silver, and the speaking voice of the haunting House. The analysis then turns to the repressed voice, contrasting the violent eruption of Carrie White in Stephen King's Carrie with the devastating psychological implosion of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. The chapter culminates with an analysis of the uncanny voice, where speech is a hollow performance, whether in the ambiguous, scripted horror of Marjorie and Merry Barrett in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, or the radical mask of Bride in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.
When language fails, the body becomes the last site of utterance. The chapter “Unruly Bodies” examines the body as a weaponized spectacle – from Carrie’s telekinetic rage to Marjorie’s theatrical horror, Bride’s self-inflicted regression, and Miranda’s parasitic predation. It also explores the borderless body, where the women of House of Leaves are textually fused, while Pecola’s body is invaded by communal sin. This dual abjection of voice and body culminates in the analysis of “The Social Corpse”, which documents the complete dissolution of the social self. This social death takes distinct forms: Miranda’s fate is a pre-written script; Carrie’s is a monstrous rebirth as an abject legend; Karen Green’s is an aestheticized erasure; Merry Barrett’s is a permanent, unknowable haunting; and Pecola Breedlove’s is a total psychological implosion. Uniquely, the social death of Bride is revealed to be a horrifying trap, the exchange of one abject identity for the equally imprisoning role of the sacrificial Mother.
In conclusion, this thesis shows that the horror in these novels is not rooted in the women themselves, but in a symbolic order so rigid and so fearful of difference that it can only interpret a non-normative mind by turning it into a monster. For further analysis, it suggests a comparative study of this Abject Monster of the Gothic with its apparent opposite: the Commodified Muse (commonly known as the manic pixie dream girl), an equally neurodivergent figure whose non-normativity is aestheticized as charming and non-threatening. In both the Gothic and its romantic counterpart, the authentic, complex, neurodivergent woman is erased, her representation still confined to what Gilbert and Gubar famously termed the archetypal roles of angel and monster.