Strands of Seduction: Fatal Hair, Gender Anxiety, and Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle British Literature

Flowing curls, serpentine tresses, and golden or darkened locks haunt fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, where feminine hair emerges as both an object of aesthetic fascination and a mythic site of seduction, monstrosity, and feminine excess. This thesis examines the representation of feminine hair in fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, focusing on how hair functions as a site of cultural anxieties surrounding sexuality, degeneration, femininity, and aesthetic excess. Through close readings of selected passages from Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and Vernon Lee’s Hauntings (1890), the study explores how feminine hair operates within Gothic representations of the femme fatale. Drawing upon Gothic feminist criticism, Victorian hair culture, fin-de-siècle cultural history, mythological archetypes and theories of aestheticism and degeneration, the thesis analyzes hair through colour symbolism, sensations, monstrosity, aestheticized beauty, and Medusan entrapment. The thesis argues that feminine
hair evolves from a decorative marker of beauty into an autonomous Gothic force capable of seducing, haunting, psychologically entrapping, and resisting patriarchal containment. Hair increasingly detaches from the female body itself, functioning as a persistent and unsettling symbol of female autonomy, fatal beauty, and monstrous femininity within fin-de-siècle Gothic literature.