I. forming masculine taste by negating femininity to stamp a moral authority
II. defining the idea of monstrosity: linking gender and race in Shaftesbury's
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
III. sexualized and racialized femininity in The Dumb Virgin and The Unfortunate
Bride: double deformity
IV. the female narrator aligns with gender and race. . . .
V. the boundaries of the human: Rosemarie Garland Thomson has demonstrated in
relation to American literature that "without the monstrous body to demarcate the
border to the generic, without the female body to distinguish the shape of the male,
and without the pathological to give form to the normal, the taxonomies of bodily
value that underlie political, social, and economic arrangements would collapse."
(paralleling Shaftesbury)