Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (45 page)

6
  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that “the monstrous body is pure culture” or, in other words, is born of a very specific cultural moment. He notes, for example, that in the nineteenth century, “Native Americans were presented as unredeemable savages so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could push westward with disregard.” Much of my own view of the monstrous depends on Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” as well as other essays in
Monster Theory: Reading Culture
, ed. Jeffrey Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See esp. Cohen’s essay, 3–25.

7
  See Richard Kearney,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters
(New York: Routledge, 2003). Kearney argues that monsters are the face of historical and cultural ambiguity, a challenge thrown down in the face of “neat divisions and borders.” See esp. 115–21.

8
  James Twitchell,
Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5–7.

9
  See Jonathan Kirsch,
God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism
(New York: Viking Compass, 2004), 28–32.

10
Timothy Beal,
Religion and Its Monsters
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 30–31.

11
Stephen Asma,
On Monsters
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–67; Beal,
Religion and Its Monsters
, 55. Both are drawing on the work of German scholar Rudolph Otto, who, in his 1917
Idea of the Holy
,
described what he called “mysterium tremendum” as the typical human response to true religious experience, the sense of horror that comes with an encounter with the “Wholly Other.”

12
Elaine Pagels provides the best guidance through this complex story in
The Origins of Satan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995). See esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

13
Jeffrey J. Cohen,
Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 10, 11.

14
Jeffrey Burton Russell,
Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 63, 73–74.

15
Asma,
On Monsters
, 81–82.

16
One of the more interesting discussions of the folklore, and the possible medical roots of the folklore, of the vampire can be found in Paul Barber’s
Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

17
Brian P. Levack,
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe,
2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1995).

18
Peter Burke, “Frontiers of the Monstrous: Perceiving National Character in Early Modern Europe,” in
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe
, ed.
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 128–29.

19
Behind my interpretation that follows is the awareness that French theorist Michel Foucault’s work shows how Enlightenment modernity created a regime of knowledge that defined the human in relation to how discourses of power circulated through the culture of the prison and the asylum, and constructed the deviant and the abnormal. Science is no neutral arbiter and/or observer that studies the human subject and the physical world. The Enlightenment itself is a construction of a “normal” human ontology that celebrates the “enlightened” subject. See Michel Foucault,
The Origin of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 328–35, and Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 141–49, 195–228.

20
Eric Foner,
Tom Paine and Revolutionary America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 246–48.

21
Sean Wilentz,
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 18–20.

22
A full discussion of Voltaire and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s view of monstrosity appears in Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille, “The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity,”
Eighteenth-Century Life
21, no. 2 (1997): 1–15.

23
Darren Oldridge,
Strange Histories
(London: Routledge, 2007), 9.

24
Julia V. Douthwaite,
The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 12–13, 15–17.

25
Stephen Asma,
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of the Natural History Museum
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 84.

26
Douthwaite,
Wild Girl
, 12–17.

27
David D. Hall has explored this idea in
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

28
Jan Bondeson,
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 83, 84.

29
Paul Semonin,
American Monster
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), 4, 7–12.

30
Semonin,
American Monster
, 7–12.

31
The work of Robin Wood opened up this scholarly field. His “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” represents a touchstone in cultural studies for reflections on monsters and their meaning. First appearing in 1979, it is reprinted in Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett’s
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 107–41.

32
French theorist Pierre Bordieu, for example, argues that “disgust is the paradoxical experience of enjoyment extorted by violence, an enjoyment which arouses horror.” Bourdieu also argues that monstrosity inspires a kind of “value-added disgust” in which those who experience it are often disturbed by their own enjoyment. See Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 488–89.

33
An excellent exposition of this view appears in Richard Kearny,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness
(New York: Routledge, 2003). Kearny sees a societal tendency to reject the “experience of strangeness” and to transform the other into the enemy. See 3–8 and 39–41.

34
Sigmund Freud,
The Uncanny
(New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 123–62. For a different reading of the monstrous and castration, see Slavoj Žižek, “Grimaces of the Real, Or When the Phallus Appears,”
October
58 (1991): 44–68. Žižek views monsters as screens on which sexualized meanings can be represented. Halberstam contends that Žižek does not leave behind psychoanalysis of the Lacanian variety as his primary analytical tool. See Judith Halberstam,
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 9, 10.

35
Sigmund Freud,
Uncanny
, 132.

36
See Sue Short’s discussion of this idea in
Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Initiation
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 10–21.

37
Julie Kristeva,
Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1.

38
Judith Halberstam shows that sexuality, emerging in the nineteenth century as a cultural identity, proved crucial to the creation of the monster. The contemporary monster, she writes, represents “an amalgam of sex and gender.” See
Skin Shows
, 6.

39
Kristeva,
Powers of Horror
, 1.

40
On Ramirez, see William Hart,
Evil: A Primer
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 76.

41
Jeffrey Cohen sees the monster as embodying both “repulsion and attraction,” though not necessarily an erotic attraction. Working off Kristeva, Cohen argues that “the monster is the abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds of identities,” a desire “always at the verge of eruption.” See Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 19–20. I would argue that the erotic is present in all sorts of attractions to the monster, a desire inspired by the simultaneous experience of wonder and discussion, the thrill of the different and the strange.

42
Dolf Zillman and James B. Weaver III, “Gender Socialization Theory of Reactions to Horror,” in
Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions
, ed. James B. Weaver III and Ron Tamborini (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 81–102.

43
James Twitchell,
Dreadful Pleasures
, 127–31.

44
Twitchell’s arguments regarding monster tales and their warnings about human sexuality cannot, however, be entirely dismissed. Tales of monsters cannot be divorced from family dynamics, cultural conversations about gender, domestic life, and the politics of reproduction and sexuality. But even these topics, often evoked and addressed by our fascination with the world of the monster, have a clear political dimension and are more than simply the unraveling and rebuilding of the adolescent psyche. The politics of the family and of sexuality are not outworkings of the inward psyche. In the United States, and in human societies more generally, family and sexuality are highly politicized with public meaning that go far beyond psychological dynamics.

45
Douglas E. Cowan,
Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 263.

46
Jonathan Lake Crane,
Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994).

47
Slavoj Žižek shows the role played by fantasy in the structuring of ritual acts and ideological systems in “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” in
The Žižek Reader
, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 86–101. This essay informs my own understanding of how monsters are historicized and how history becomes monstrous.

48
“A Monstrous Sea Serpent, Boston” (printed and sold by Henry Bowen, Devonshire Street, 1817).

49
Neptune, “The Great Sea Serpent, upon the Coast of New England,” Early American Imprints, Series II, no. 43432, 15–16.

50
Neptune, “The Great Sea Serpent,” 16, 18.

51
Neptune, “The Great Sea Serpent,” 16, 18.

52
Richard Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 13, 14.

53
Cohen has also described the monster as “the harbinger of category crisis.” He notes that monsters are always “disturbing hybrids” and thus threaten to “smash distinctions.” See Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 6.

54
Michael Bimbaum, “Historians Speak Out Against Proposed Texas Textbook Changes,”
Washington Post
, March 18, 2010.

55
Lauri Lebo, “Don McLeroy’s Texas Textbooks Would Replace Historical Characters with Fictional Ones,”
Religion Dispatches
, May 26, 2010 (
http://www.religiondispatches.org/ dispatches/laurilebo/2687/don_mcleroy’s_ texas_textbooks_would_replace_historical_ characters_with_fictional_ones
), and “Conservatives Put Stamp on Texas Textbooks,”
msnbc.com
(
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35839979/
).

56
A good discussion of the problem of American exceptionalism appears in Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence,
Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism
(Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003).

57
Quote from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 52. Perhaps the best discussion of American exceptionalism can be found in Andrew Bacevich,
American Empire: The Reality and Consequences of American Diplomacy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). I explore the relationship between American religion, folklore, pop culture, and the notion of exceptionalism in
Satan in America: The Devil We Know
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). See esp. xviii–xxiii, 120–21. Paul Starobin calls exceptionalism America’s “presiding myth” in
After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age
(New York: Viking, 2009), 35.

58
The term “torture porn” first appeared in David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multi-Plex: Torture Porn,”
New York Magazine
, February 6, 2006. The term is primarily used by critics of the genre.

59
Alice Walker,
Her Blue Body Everything We Know, 1965–1990
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 374.

60
Quoted in Howard Zinn, A
People’s History of the United States
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 15.

61
Increase Mather, “ A Brief History of the War With the Indians of New England,” Early American Imprints, Series I. no. 220, 45–46.