Monstrous Disorders: The Dysmorphic Gothic in Frankenstein and The Substance

Abstract

Although centuries separate Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831), both texts conceptualize self-representation through scenes of reproduction. The Substance, less concerned with men ‘playing God,’ provides a feminist critique of the ways female bodies are often violently objectified by technologically reproduced images. In so doing, the film elucidates the ways that Shelley’s novel likewise stages problems of self-representation through the gothic disjunction between the body and its image. Read together, Fargeat’s film and Shelley’s novel surface the dysmorphia that underwrites processes of self-representation and technological reproduction. The Substance turns the leitmotif of gothic doubling and the dysmorphia it entails in Frankenstein into a critique of bodily norms for women. When Elisabeth Sparkle attempts to revivify her aging body by taking a drug that promises rejuvenation, the eponymous substance leads to a monstrous birth where the hypnotically sexualized Sue bursts from Sparkle’s back. This scene inverts the processes of abjection at work in Frankenstein: the ‘perfect’ woman is the monster produced by Sparkle’s dysmorphic relationship to her aging body. Sparkle’s desire and hate for the ‘perfect’ monster manifest through intense fits of rage she directs at herself, locating her own body as the abject maternal. By interpreting the ways The Substance reimagines Frankenstein’s concern with self-representation and reproduction, the essay reveals how body dysmorphia produces a disjuncture between the body and its image that begets abject monsters who elicit hate. Ironically, both Victor and Elisabeth turn their hate on the body in an effort to destroy the monstrous image their bodies beget.