Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women with Eleanor Johnson (Princeton UP, 2026)

Hmm.

Well, um, by training, I'm a medievalist, so the first books that I wrote were in my field in medieval literary, cultural, and theological studies.

Um, and I spent a lot of time doing that, and I still teach medieval literature very frequently.

But about five or six years ago, um, I got asked by a colleague if I wanted to team teach a course on the history of horror, and I said, "Yeah, that sounds great." Actually, at first I said no, but then when we agreed that we would do 700 years of horror and make it really ambitious and start with Dante, I got excited about it, and so then I said yes, and we started teaching the history of horror together.

Um, and then in 2022, we were teaching that class, and I taught the film Rosemary's Baby, uh, which I taught as a film that is really a parable about the horrific consequences that come when women are denied reproductive autonomy and reproductive self-determination.

So for those who haven't seen it, Rosemary's Baby has a fairly straightforward plot line.

The idea is that this woman is boughted out by her husband to a coven of witches who worship Satan, and she becomes raped and impregnated against her will with Satan's child.

So that film is like a sustained supernatural meditation on what's at stake when women are forced to maintain pregnancies they don't want.

Um, and so I read the film in those terms.

I read it as a really marked commentary on what was going on in 1968 in New York State in particular, which is where the film is set, but also in the United States more broadly, which was that women were just starting to really, really agitate for reproductive freedom.

And so I gave this lecture about the film and how it talked to American popular culture in 1968, the year of its release, and the next day, the United States Supreme Court leaked its decision to reverse Roe versus Wade, which was our abortion protection law that had been on the books since 1973.

And when that happened, my students got really upset.

We had extra meetings.

We talked about Rosemary's Baby.

We talked about the power of horror to do real political work, and I thought to myself, "You know what? My home country is in a feminist emergency, and I'm not just gonna sit here quietly and let that happen and keep kind of piously plowing the furrow of the Middle Ages forever.

I'm gonna, for as long as it takes, I'm gonna sit here and scream my head off," which is why I called the book Scream With Me.

[laughs] "I'm gonna scream my head off about feminism and about horror and about how and why horror is a useful aperture for thinking about the role and status of women in popular culture." And so then I wrote my last book, Scream With Me.

Um, and when I had finished that book, I got interested in the question of when Western patriarchal culture had really first begun demonizing women.

And so I started digging into that, and I had this idea that it started in ancient Greece, because I, I knew a good bit about Greek literary culture from teaching I'd been doing for a long time at Columbia University.

And, um, I basically thought that I would start my story with Euripides, with plays like the Bacchae.

And I was working on it, and I was thinking about female monstrosity and how it showed up in Greek culture, and I became aware that female monsters in Greek culture have a set of pretty consistently conserved traits.

So they tend to be loud-mouthed, they tend to be sexually hungry, they tend to be, uh, reproductively abnormal or interventionist in some way.

So, like, they cause miscarriages, or they attack babies, or sometimes they kill their own children.

So loud-mouthed, hypersexual, and kind of infanticidal.

And they tend to be associated with dogs.