“’Little Girls are Even More Perfect When They Bleed”’: Monstrosity, Violence, and the Female Body in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Trilogy”

This article examines concepts of humanity, monstrosity, and female agency in Kristin Cashore’s recent Graceling trilogy of fantasy novels for young adults. In particular, the teenage protagonists of Graceling (2008), Fire (2009) and Bitterblue (2012) struggle to resist and to reconfigure their societies’ conservative systems of prejudice, fear, desire, difference, and violence regarding “natural” and “unnatural” female bodily experience. Cashore’s trilogy interrogates traditional concepts of normal and aberrant female embodiment and offers thought-provoking opportunities for personal and collective transformation.