Resumen
In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as an initial methodology to analyze Grahame-Smith?s Elizabeth Bennet. I argue that the (white) women in this horror rewriting inadvertently become the oppressors alongside contextualized zombie theory. This article also explores Grahame-Smith?s Charlotte Lucas as a complex female monster, as she is bitten and turned into a zombie, which reflects in part Jane Austen?s Charlotte?s social status and (potential) spinsterdom. It is the mythos of the zombie that makes Grahame-Smith?s Elizabeth Bennet?s feminist subversion less remarkable. And it is Charlotte?s embodiment of both the rhetorical and the religio-mythic monster that merges two narratives: the Americanized appropriated zombie and the oppressed woman. Grahame-Smith?s characters try to embody the resistance of twenty-first feminist sensibilities but fail due to the racial undertones of the zombie tangentially present in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.