The Female Body as Frontier: Belle, Christabel, and Laura before the Liminal Other

This essay brings Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s La Belle et la Bête (1740), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816), and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) into conversation in order to examine the female body as a frontier between the human and the liminal Other. Through the figures of Belle, Christabel, and Laura, the essay analyzes three distinct economies of liminal desire: conjugal transformation in Villeneuve, Gothic-courtly enchantment and unspeakability in Coleridge, and vampiric contagion, memory, and clinical classification in Le Fanu. Rather than establishing a linear genealogy among the Beast, Geraldine, and Carmilla, the essay argues that each monstrous or supernatural body becomes narratively meaningful only through contact with a female protagonist. Belle accepts the Beast’s monstrous body as a conjugal body before metamorphosis; Christabel receives Geraldine into domestic and bodily proximity, entering a relation structured by fascination and interdicted speech; Laura encounters Carmilla first as body, intimacy, and desire before masculine authority translates her into the clinical category of vampire. The essay combines Gothic studies, fairy-tale studies, feminist criticism, and queer theory to argue that desire is not merely an error, weakness, or symptom in these texts, but a real narrative force. It transforms, silences, contaminates, classifies, and remembers. The monster fully exists only when it crosses the threshold of the human body, and the female protagonist’s body becomes the place where that crossing turns into transformation, interdiction, contagion, and memory.