Lady of Darkness: The “romantic horrible beauty” and the image of female monstruosity in Emily of Corpse Bride

Abstract

Is this paper we considerate the image of the character Emily, from Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride” from the motif of the Lady of Darkness, a female character, a muse, a “beloved dead”, who manifests herself in the amalgamation between the grotesque and the sensible connected to the figures of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction, focusing on the model of morbid female characters from his unheimlich tales, within the perspective of gender and gothic studies. The characters are close to each other, whose images are archetypal and reverberate an imaginary that goes beyond the limits of time and space. This discussion provides the understanding of the imaginary composition of the gothic character through Emily, whose perspectives find roots in a traditional manner of representing the feminine. This model of representation provides the interpretive key, benefiting the discussion about the ways of projecting the image of the inanimate woman in her verbal and visual representation.