Women have been identified primarily through the body which, throughout history, has been associated with monstrosity. This representation persists within the Gothic in various forms, from the gorgon to the vampire. For Aristotle, the female was a monster, an aberration from the normative male and, in the words of Luce Irigaray's book title, The Sex Which Is Not One (1977) (Battersby 1998: 49). As a departure from the male, the very notion of the female body has proved troublesome. The demonisation of woman as succubus, harpy, witch and any number of supernatural beings has located the female outside nature and beyond the natural order of things. In Western religious, philosophical and psychological traditions, the alignment of the female with the monstrous or animal body has helped demote the category of woman in social and political hierarchies. Within patriarchal ideology, monstrosity has been regarded as quintessential to the construction of femininity. Going back to the classical mythology of the Ancient Greeks, the snaky-haired Medusa, with her deadly paralysing gaze, allegorises the femme fatale, who encodes the perils of sexual autonomy and aberration. Originally the most beautiful of the three Gorgon sisters, she was turned into a monster by Athena for violating her temple, where she was either seduced or ravished by Poseidon. According to the Christian creation myth, the first woman originated from a male body part, Adam's rib, which aptly illustrates the ancillary nature of her role as help-mate or mere adjunct to the male. Through the fallen figure of Eve, woman has been represented as a temptress and the feminine identified with the serpent, a creature associated with evil, poison and lowliness as it slithers along the earth.

This representation continued into the theological misogyny of the Middle Ages, typified by Bishop Marbod of Rennes (c.1035–1123), who pronounced: ‘Woman [is] the unhappy source, evil root, and corrupt offshoot, who brings to birth every sort of outrage throughout the world … Woman subverts the world; woman the sweet evil, compound of honeycomb and poison’ (Gilmore 2001: 86). These sensual and deadly metaphors point to female flesh as a corrupting and poisonous influence. During the Renaissance, the sexual nihilism of Christian Europe equated reproduction with sin and demonised the pregnant female body as a fecund house of horrors and woman as a ‘two-legged she-beast’ (88), shunned by the church.