Monster's Ink (ENG 2710)

In Victorian cultural myth, as Nina Auerbach has argued brilliantly in Woman and the Demon, woman is insistently imagined as a source of powerful and threatening metamorphic energies. Auerbach contrasts these heroic female demons with diminished male counterparts such as Robert Louis Stevenson's dwarfish Mr. Hyde: "Demonic man does not include divinity in his nature, and is thus a poor stunted counterpart to grandly demonic womanhood."

During the late-Victorian age the aggressive enactment of heteronormative laws forced the systematic silencing of many homosexuals. In the cultural and historical context of the late nineteenth century, the discourses about homosexuality were formulated by both the medico-scientific establishment of the period and the homosexual apologists opposing it. Fin-de-siècle Gothic narratives such as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray could be read as offering the alternative and silent speech of homosexuality.

In this article, I aim to show how a societal desire for the irrational at the fin-de-siècle, embedded in popular occult movements like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was also explored in contemporary literature of the Gothic and the supernatural. I study the fictional occult explorer in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan," and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence stories. Each of these works deals with the struggle of an intellectual or man of science who attempts to use science to normalize or to "straighten" a queer, monstrously abnormal occult. The success of the attempt to come to terms with the queer or abnormal, as well as the explorer's survival, depends upon his ability to "queer" himself and/or his subject in preparation for the encounter with the occult Other.

This article brings Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde under the lens of disability studies by exploring the role disability plays in the creation of Mr. Hyde as a villain. Utilizing both historical and current understandings of disability, this article discusses how Mr. Hyde's social and cultural disconformities are reliant upon the understanding of Hyde as "deformed." "What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary" contends that what makes Mr. Hyde so frightening to other characters, and perhaps to readers as well, is not inherent evil, but disability itself.

In Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, when hunchbacked Igor invites Frankenstein to “walk this way,” and the latter obliges with an awkward stooping imitation, the movie signals the dependence of Frankenstein movies on simulations of impaired or non-normative motion. This paper reads the atypical walk of screen Frankenstein monsters as both a stereotyped disability simulation that appeals to nondisabled viewers and a mode through which disabled people have expressed experiences of medicalization, pathologization, and ableist oppression. The paper traces the spread of the monster-walk into popular song and dance and on into contemporary zombie performances, including those of disabled protestors who both channel and resist the living-dead status thrust on them by health and economic deprivations. The Frankenstein walk, reborn as the zombie protest, thus emerges from ableist scripts for disenfranchised bodies but is reinvented as an invitation to variant embodiment in public and political spaces.

Part of the book's artistry lies in the way R. J. Palacio rings changes on three competing models of disability: the social model, the individual or medical model, and what I am calling the monster model. Take, for example, the ten chapter books that have won in the middle school category of the American Library Association's Schneider Family Book Award. [...]August is a wonder in the sense his mother means it: a kid loved and appreciated for being himself.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is essential reading in the literature of disability. Rejected and abandoned by a creator who manufactured him to be beautiful, the Creature’s plotline suggests a parent’s abandonment of a child with unexpected disabilities and later denial of the disabled adult’s sexual and reproductive agency. The Creature’s first-person narrative of rejection, exclusion, and stigma suggests an experience of learning to inhabit a strictly limited, socially constructed disability identity. Often read as a story about the bioethics of medical and scientific research, Frankenstein has even greater value as a text about the social construction of disability.

This essay considers the use of the modern term ‘monstrous races’ to describe the wondrous beings found in Herodotus, Pliny, The Wonders of the East , world maps and elsewhere. Considering the etymology and history of the word ‘race,’ a series of modern definitions are tested out on figures found in the images and texts of the British Library MS Harley 3954 Book of John Mandeville , the BL MS Tiberius B.v Marvels of the East, The King of Tars, Cursor Mundi and other medieval sources. The essay questions whether the term, often rooted in modern notions about the fixity of divisions of peoples, is helpful for describing medieval concepts. The essay further explores how the term ‘monstrous races’ reifies the culture of the medieval authors and illuminators – often in practice ‘white’ European Christians – as a ‘race,’ and implicitly, if unintentionally, elevates this group as normative.

It is argued that Mary Shelley's portrayal of her Frankenstein monster drew upon contemporary attitudes towards non-whites, in particular on fears and hopes of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. Ways in which her fictional character parallels the racial stereotypes of her age are discussed.

The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that the zonbi is at once part of the mystical arts that developed there since the colonial period, and comprises a form of mythmaking that represents, responds to, and mystifies the fear of slavery, collusion with it, and rebellion against it.

Octavia Butler's final science fiction novel, Fledgling (2005), explores ways her liminar protagonist, Shori, undergoes ritualized transformations while in exile from her home community. During this process, she engages in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as carnivalesque identities and communities. Shori, the lost child of an ancient species of near immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humans, produces subversive and grotesque sites of home and family in this process. In a state of separation and amnesia, Shori awakens outside her gated community and moves back and forth over metaphoric thresholds. She reverses hierarchical race and gender positions as she creates a world that opposes traditional vampire lore and the American family.

Hurd examines how "Star Trek," whose original intent was to explore and disprove the encoded prejudices of contemporary society by displacing this debate into a future and presumably utopian society, still tends to reify a particularly loaded image from 19th century psychology and anthropology in the US: the Tragic Mulatto.