Summer 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 3

Although Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth evolves the traditional depictions of queer female characters from their roots in science fiction and gothic horror literature, her portrayal of Dulcinea Septimus—while viscerally powerful—derives from a long and sordid history of disabled antagonists that permeates not only gothic horror, but English literature as a whole. The depiction of villainous disabled characters often serves to marginalize or “other” the nonnormative human body. Dulcinea’s active role subverts the traditional expectations of a chronically ill heroine, who is often not afforded any power until after her untimely death in gothic horror narratives. However, in doing so, she also plays into pervasive tropes which negatively color the treatment of chronically ill persons in the nonfictional world by propagating ideas of symptom exaggeration and the disabled body as a vessel to paradoxically conceal and magnify villainy.

The revelation of Dulcinea’s murderous intentions toward the inhabitants of Canaan House and her true identity as the Lyctor Cytherea evolves the usual treatment of chronically ill women in gothic horror fiction, who are often doomed to die and are only able to wield power postmortem. This limited role of disabled women is exemplified in Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, wherein the dying Madeline is contrasted with her brother, Roderick, who takes on an active role in the narrative despite also suffering from a progressive illness inflicting him with “a morbid acuteness of the senses” (Poe 9). When Madeline first enters the narrative, she evokes imagery of a living ghost as she wanders through the apartment while Roderick laments her coming “decease” and the narrator feels an intense “dread” when he sees her (Poe 10). Madeline’s living death is further established when the narrator reveals that her illness “had long baffled the physicians” and that she is physically “wasting away” (Poe 11), evoking a sense that she is decaying even while she lives, and that her death is inevitable. Similarly, the crushing weight of Dulcinea’s sickness invades the atmosphere of Gideon the Ninth from her first entrance when she collapses into Gideon’s arms. One of Dulcinea’s first described features is her “horribly transparent” skin (Muir 74), imbuing the narrative with a sense that Dulcinea herself is similarly transient due to the havoc her illness wreaks on her body—and, in the context of the ending of Gideon the Ninth, because the Dulcinea that Gideon encounters was never really existed. Dulcinea’s ghostly quality pervades the novel, and is emphasized when she talks about how, in the context of a necromantic world, her “condition is an asset” because a body in active decay means that she is “a walking thanergy generator” (Muir 294). In Gideon the Ninth, Dulcinea’s sickness is therefore characterized as state of death inflicted on a living person, and although she plays a more active role in her narrative than Madeline, both women are objectified because of their illnesses—transformed from people into corpses—and, in the case of Dulcinea, actively encouraged to reproduce by the Seventh House (Muir 293) as she becomes sicker so that more powerful necromancers can be born out of this wasting disease that has afflicted her.

While both Madeline and Dulcinea are placed in a liminal state by their illnesses, where they are neither truly dead nor alive, Dulcinea’s more central presence in Gideon the Ninth allows her to communicate her frustration with being trapped between these two states of being. In her first entrance, Dulcinea expresses her excitement at being “rescued by a shadow cultist” (Muir 75), a sentiment that is repeated later when she tells Gideon that she used to fantasize about going to the Ninth House to “expire very beautifully” (Muir 105). Dulcinea’s idealized view of the Ninth House is intrinsically connected to her romanticization of death, which she is unable to access as an immortal Lyctor, although her illness is still eating away at her (Muir 402-403). She laments that her house, the Seventh, is obsessed with “the body” and attempting to “try to stop [the clock] from ticking to the last second” while the Ninth embraces death (Muir 106). In this instance, the Seventh House and the Ninth Houses serve as allegories for Dulcinea’s interior state, representing life and death respectively, and where Dulcinea’s wavering between the two may be emblematic of suicidal ideation. The Seventh House, or life, is connected to her own suffering, and Dulcinea reveals that it is because of her necromantic abilities, stating that “if they could figure out some way to stop you when you’re mostly cancer and just a little bit woman, they would” (Muir 294). Dulcinea expresses the intense dehumanization that she feels as a result of her illness and fantasizes about escaping to the Ninth House where she can die, but is warded off because she must conform to the Ninth’s standards, which contrast with her ideal death (Muir 105). Dulcinea’s vocal ponderance of death is contrasted with Poe’s meager depiction of Madeline, whose implicitly demonstrates a desire to live through her actions. When Roderick and the narrator believe that Madeline has died from her sickness, they shut her away “within the main walls of the building” (Poe 16), which may be representative of Roderick’s desire to avoid his own mortality. However, it soon becomes clear that Madeline is not dead, and instead, she struggles against “the iron hinges of her prison” (Poe 24). Upon escaping, Madeline appears in the doorway, but rather than clinging onto life, she “fell heavily inward” and, in her fall, “bore [her brother] to the floor a corpse” (Poe 25), the effects of her illness and suffering seemingly transferred to him and the rest of the house as it, similarly, falls. Madeline’s desperate struggle to get out of the tomb that her brother has sealed her in is the inverse of Dulcinea’s plight, as Madeline desperately strives for the world of the living despite awakening inside of a coffin. It is also intriguing that both women turn to inflicting death upon others as a result of their suffering, as Dulcinea begins to murder the other people in Canaan House to “[ruin the Emperor’s] Lyctor plans” (Muir 401)—perhaps as a manner of actualizing death when she herself cannot achieve it—while Madeline drags Roderick to the death that he is so terrified of (Poe 9-10)  after he pushes her toward it like a sacrifice.

While the portrayal of Dulcinea in Gideon the Ninth advances the portrayal of women in gothic horror stories, the aspect of her illness derives from pervasive traditions in literature that “other” disabled characters. The gothic horror genre is rife with illness because the destruction of the physical body mirrors the sublimity of death. This associates the characters afflicted with chronic illness with the fear of losing control over one’s body and life, as demonstrated in the portrayal of Roderick in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. Chronically ill characters are often seen as conduits of death, and often pose a threat that is hidden by their weakened state. An example of this is in Coleridge’s Christabel, in which Geraldine experiences an attack of pain as she reaches “the threshold of the gate” (Coleridge 4). Coleridge’s portrayal of Geraldine is connected to that of Dulcinea because her dramatic collapse is used as a manipulation tactic to gain entry to the house and with it, Christabel’s life. In Geraldine’s collapse, the narrator states that she “sank, belike through pain” but that once she is across the threshold—once she has gotten what she wants—she “moved, as she were not in pain” (Coleridge 4). This weaponization of pain and physical symptoms is reflected in the portrayal of Dulcinea. From Dulcinea’s first entrance, she projects an air of weakness when she collapses into Gideon’s arms (Muir 74), only to reveal herself as the Lyctor Cytherea, who is not only able to stand on her own, but also fight the healthy cavaliers and necromancers (Muir 406-427)—and even Ianthe as “a baby Lyctor” (Muir 416). While her illness is confirmed by Palamedes to be real (Muir 403), Dulcinea is implied to have exaggerated her physical symptoms to divert attention and suspicion away from her to infiltrate Canaan House and hurt its inhabitants and thus, feeds into this malicious depiction of disabled characters as inherently deceitful. The portrayal of Dulcinea as a chronically ill character falls short because she is trapped within conventions of ableist rhetoric that haunt literature, whereas Dulcinea as a female character in a gothic horror story is revolutionary due to the agency she exerts within the narrative as opposed to her predecessors.

Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth places the experiences of sapphic women—who were often victimized and marginalized in past works within the gothic horror genre—in the forefront of her story. While works like Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher deprive female characters of their agencies until it is too late, Muir’s depictions of women centralize them and allow them to embody active and dynamic roles historically reserved for male characters. This treatment of female characters, however, is contrasted with the long tradition of placing chronically ill individuals in antagonistic roles. While this is most noticeable in the portrayal of Dulcinea because of her resemblance to chronically ill gothic heroines like Poe’s Madeline, the villainization of disabled characters is also glimpsed in the portrayal of Ianthe, who from her first appearance is compared with her vibrant sister and described as being “taken to pieces and put back together without any genius” (Muir 99). This physicality of Ianthe is put in the context of disability both when it is revealed that she nearly died during birth because her sister “removed [her] source of oxygen” (Muir 174) and, at the end, when Cytherea cuts off her arm and drains the power from her to continue fighting (Muir 422-423). Like Dulcinea’s deceit and exaggeration of her symptoms, Ianthe’s unattractive physical appearance and later disability, when combined with her manipulative and antagonistic nature, play into stereotypes rife in literature meant to comment on the unreliability and untrustworthy nature of disabled individuals.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” Poetry Foundation, 2023, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/christabel.

Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth. New York, Tor.com, 2019.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839.