You don’t tend to encounter much body horror in historical fiction. We have our bold innovators, to be sure, but for many the archaic and the genteel remain oddly synonymous. The good news, if that’s you, is that there’s almost no swearing in Heather Parry’s new novel. The bad news is that it’s vile and unspeakable in almost every other way. But don’t let that put you off. Carrion Crow may be set in a fetid late Victorian London and couched in lightly brocaded prose, but what lurks within is unmistakably red in tooth and claw, a creature nearer in kinship to Kathy Acker than to Sarah Waters.

The body undergoing the horrors belongs, in this instance, to Marguerite Périgord, the daughter of a French noblewoman in reduced circumstances. When the wayward Marguerite attracts a suitor, a strenuously unromantic solicitor named Mr Lewis, Cécile Périgord isn’t taking any chances. In a show of aristocratic mettle, she imprisons Marguerite in the attic, there to acquire the complexion and manners her wifely vocation will require.

It’s at this point that we begin to see what Parry is up to. In The Madwoman in the Attic, scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar distilled the whole of the 19th-century novel into a singularly potent archetype. This literary ideal of womanhood was embodied not in the sprightly piety of Jane Eyre but in the dark cipher of the former Mrs Rochester.

This feminine ideal functions like negative space, demarcating the bounds of the permissible. As in the transgressive fictions of Acker, it is a domineering mother who provides the oppressive impetus, having long ago reached her own bitter accommodation with the patriarchy. Cécile shuts her daughter in with a copy of one of Mrs Beeton’s guides, and Marguerite – having little else to occupy her – is soon reciting entire passages from memory.

Mrs Beeton proves an unexpectedly radicalising influence. Marguerite, you see, is a creature of robust appetites, and in Mrs Beeton’s more eye-watering recipes – for jellied calf brains, say – she senses the proximity of a kindred spirit. One can’t but form the impression, dipping into Mrs Beeton, that the civilising project is a curiously offal-centric business. And for the perpetually ravenous Marguerite, it’s a cause she can really get behind. Mrs Beeton has much to say, too, about nutritional requirements. When an animal is kept on a low diet, the guide warns, “the stomach soon becomes deranged”. This is no abstract point. Marguerite finds that her appetite has indeed diminished, since her lackadaisical jailer is often remiss about mealtimes. She grows emaciated, and soon enough even her bountiful monthly bleeds falter and abate. The loss is mournfully noted then briskly dismissed. After all, she will be free to gorge herself after the wedding.

Marguerite is eager to marry because it will provide cover for an illicit liaison; the true object of her affections is a splendidly debauched demi-mondaine named Alouette. It is enough to win our sympathy, certainly, but Parry is soon hemmed in again by her own allusive schema. Marguerite may pine for her Alouette, but that is not her undoing. What drives her to madness, rather, is grasping exactly what is required of her. Far from being appalled at her own physical decline, Marguerite exults in the transformation: she had lost almost all of herself, “ready to fill her body up again in the shape of a married woman”. This is crazy talk, plainly, but it serves its programmatic purpose. The madwoman in the attic is a creature not of fiction but of literary theory. And if her madness is entirely the construct of her milieu, it cannot also be attributed to mere narrative pretext.

This dissonance muddies Marguerite’s human motives, which seem to mingle with archetypal forces, but we are carried past this and other cavils by the sheer antic energy of Parry’s project. Deprived of any other agency, Marguerite tests the limits of her body’s mutability. Finding that her hairpins prick her as she sleeps, she eats and later expels them, “each one bringing a satisfied smile to Marguerite’s face as it tinged off the chamber pot”. By way of a wretched dirty protest, she then hammers the pins into the ceiling.

There is much worse to come as Marguerite sets about her self-destructive rampage. Shorn of all dignity, she brings about a martyrdom of debasement and self-harm. If it oozes, flakes or erupts from the human frame, it is almost certainly described here, and in glistening detail. Parry can write with an easy grace, but for the most part she denies herself the luxury. All Marguerite wants is “to feel adult and fecund”, but all she hears is that she is “not quite delicate enough”. Carrion Crow isn’t anyone’s idea of delicate, either, but it is richly fecund and adult in every sense of the word.

• Carrion Crow by Heather Parry is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.