From a Female Gothic Heroine to a Postfeminist Gothic Villainess: The Ambivalent Characterization of the Young Female Protagonist in Ti West’s Pearl

Abstract

American filmmaker Ti West has recently released a horror trilogy in which actress Mia Goth simultaneously plays the roles of Maxine, in the first and third parts of the trilogy, and of Pearl, in the first and second parts. After the release of the first film in the series, X (2022), and as a prequel to it, West’s second film Pearl (2022) focuses on the youth of its protagonist. Initially, the plot presents many of the conventions pertaining to the tradition of the female gothic, and particularly, to its first stage of development, in analogy with narratives that depict a young heroine who is threatened with confinement and struggles to escape labyrinthic passages and menacing landscapes in order to marry the man she loves and find her lost parent. Conversely, West’s film Pearl also displays illustrative traits of the postfeminist gothic, inasmuch as it involves a rupture with the tradition of the female gothic, since postfeminist gothic narratives encompass popular evocations of girl power, postmodern discussions of feminism, and political discourses of neoliberal individualism. This article aims to analyse the ambivalent character of Pearl in a contemporary cinematic narrative that blends features from the female gothic tradition and the postfeminist gothic, thus portraying Pearl as gender-compliant, but also, gender-subversive.