Monstrosity is a relation before it is an attribute. Dominant culture determines what it cannot tolerate, situates that intolerance within a body, and reads its verdict as a description of the body condemned. Such displacement is what Beauvoir identifies in woman as the Other, a construction of the judging culture, not a property of the judged.

The instrument of that substitution is not dissimilar to a fun house mirror, which retains a mirror's authority while abandoning its accuracy, so distortion is mistaken for reflection. Cohen's Monster Theory proceeds from the same premise, holding that monsters "ask us why we have created them." Yet that question presupposes an identifiable creator.

Rhys locates the distorting mirror within the people who look at Antoinette Cosway, and grants each a voice, most notably through her intertextual debt to Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), where Bertha's account is dictated by her husband. Rhys's polyphonic structure restores Antoinette's narration while surrendering a third of the novel to the husband's voice.

Antoinette's monstrosity is thus positional rather than characterological, since a white Creole is claimed by neither the formerly enslaved nor the English who despise her birthplace. Her syntax converts that exclusion into accusation,

"I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all."

The polysyndeton withholds any terminal point, so the question of belonging remains unresolved, while the outward-directed interrogatives transform bewilderment into interrogation of the colonial order. More damaging is the embedded slur, since Antoinette's self-description survives only in the lexicon of those who reject her.

"Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that's obeah too."

The epistrophe of "name" identifies naming as the instrument of subjection, while Antoinette turns obeah, his own term for Caribbean superstition, back upon his act, producing what Bakhtin terms double-voiced discourse.

However, such a reply depends on a construction whereby Antoinette and Bertha remain separable, and Rochester exists to be accused. Rhys's tripartite structure holds both, surrendering Part Two to Rochester's direct voice while Parts One and Three remain Antoinette's. Cohen's question is thus answerable, since the monster discloses the man who "created" her.

Fargeat inherits this structure, yet withdraws both the speaker and the separability of woman from the imposed name. Writing amid AI-generated influencers and GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic sold direct to consumers, she dramatises a culture lacking the overt authority the earlier text retains.

The activator is marketed as a better version rather than a copy, so Sue is measured against a standard no identifiable party set. She materialises as a Baudrillardian simulacrum, and Elisabeth becomes the deficient original of a template which never existed. In a postmodern dislocation of singularity, Sue consequently becomes the text's monster.

Instruction reaches her only as voice-over and an unseen operator, so the promise that she may

"surpass her own genetic potential"

issues from no one, converting improvement into obligation as the modal disguises compulsion as permission. The number assigned in place of a name repeats Rochester's nomination without the nominator. What colonial classification performs upon Antoinette's race, the industry performs upon Elisabeth's age, discarding her at fifty as the criterion alters and the logic holds.

Wide-angle lenses and extreme close-up disarticulate Sue into thighs, hips and mouth across the aerobics sequence, so the spectator performs the fragmentation later made surgical.

Sue kills Elisabeth in the clinically bright bathroom that produced her, where the handheld camera abandons the Kubrickian symmetry that held her and the non-diegetic score gives way to the diegetic impact of fists, denying the audience the mediation music supplied.

Sue catches her reflection mid-beating, pauses, and continues, because no separable self remains to interrupt.

Monstro Elisasue is the result, woman and standard fused in one body, denied the separability Rhys's text preserves. Cohen asks why we "created" our monsters, and Fargeat answers that nobody did, indicting a culture whose demands no longer require an author.

Read alone, The Substance appears an account of self-destruction. Read against Rhys, its omission becomes apparent, since absence is perceptible only against presence. Antoinette burns Thornfield because Thornfield exists and a man built it, whereas Elisabeth possesses no equivalent structure, her violence instead turning inward.

Fargeat confirms this in the final scene, holding the camera upon the recoiling crowd rather than Monstro Elisasue, who satisfies Kristeva's abject as that which "disturbs identity, system, order." Horror is thereby relocated onto spectators the film has implicated, as the collective examines its own product without recognition.

Both composers return the culture's judgement to its author, Rhys through attribution and Fargeat through exposure of a process requiring none.

Ultimately, Cohen's question has outlived its addressee, and women are left to experience structural demand as personal failure.