Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (3 page)

The story of American monsters, and how they obsess American culture, allows us a look at the underground history of the United States. While a number of works have examined the horror story as a function of American popular culture, reading them as Rorschach tests for inner pathologies and metaphors for everything from adolescent sexuality to patriarchal violence, almost none have made connections with the larger story of American history. None have looked at the broader story of the monster in America, analyzing the monster as a historical problem.
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Americans have an undeniable taste for the monstrous in all its forms, a taste in evidence from the time of the earliest colonial settlements. The narrative of American history can be read as a tale of monsters slain and monsters beloved. Witches and other night creatures infested the New England woods, and the devil inspired savage servants to combat the Puritans. Demonic rites and horrible shapes from beyond the grave lived in the shadows of the Southern plantation household. Sea serpents trawled the waters of the oceans where whalers and slave ships knit the new country into a world of commerce. Wild men and savage beasts prowled the virgin woodlands where America cut its railroads and canals, built its settlements, and created a market revolution. After the Civil War, the American obsessions with race and violence became the bloody chords of memory that held the Union together, a Union that in the twentieth century combined an idealistic rhetoric of democracy with the crassest of imperial endeavors. After World War II, terrifying visitors from other worlds came to tell this new imperium of its doom, while murderous maniacs hunted its citizens relentlessly on the highways, in the forests, and even at summer camp.

Monsters in America are everywhere and come in every genus and species. American pop culture has had its nauseating monsters, its sexy monsters, its religious monsters, and even its elegant monsters. They have menaced us in our fiction and frightened us in our films. Some of their images, from Dracula to Frankenstein to Freddy Krueger, are icons of modern cultural history. This book argues that the origins of all of America’s monster obsessions lie in something more substantial than media-driven cultural ephemera. American monsters are born out of American history. They emerge out of the central anxieties and obsessions that have been a part of the United States from colonial times to the present and from the structures and processes where those obsessions found historical expression.
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While almost all the shambling horrors that walk across our theater screens and live under our beds have older, transnational roots, the American context has shaped them in definitive ways. Vampires and werewolves came out of the folkloric traditions of early modern Europe. But when they appear in our local cineplex, in the pages of comic books and prose fiction, and even in our folklore and urban legends, they are true American monsters. They are living representations of our darkness, simultaneously metaphors and progenitors of the American way of fear and violence. They are creatures of American history, their many permutations in folklore and pop culture impossible to explain without that complex history. American history can best be understood through America’s monsters.

A Little History of Horror

The Latin word
monstrum
provides us with our English term
monster
.
Monstrum
is “that which appears” or reveals itself (the English word “demonstrate” is rooted in
monstrum
).
Monstrum
also has a relationship to the Latin word
monere
, meaning “to warn” and relates to the concept of an omen or a portent. But in world mythology and religious experience, the monster has done more than represent the hideous and abnormal. Monsters have been, from ancient times, invested with meanings divine and demonic, theological or fearfully natural. In every society they appear as multifaceted beings composed of a complicated tangle of symbolic synapses, living messages to those unlucky souls to whom they appear.
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Like Dracula leaving his Transylvanian homeland to seek new conquests in the teeming metropolis of London, monsters made their journey to the New World from a European context. Indeed, almost all of the monstrous forms that delight and terrify modern America have a longer, intercultural genealogy, sometimes reaching back to the origins of human society.

Humanity emerged from the Stone Age dreaming of monsters. The caves of southern France and northern Spain are covered with figures in red ocher, iconographies of the hunt, of blood and death. Human beings represented themselves not only as hunters, but also as prey and victims to the great beasts of the Neolithic world. At least one image, found at Trois Freres in the Pyrenees, presents a human figure, often referred to by historians as a “sorcerer.” He is a shapeshifter, imagined by these early artists as a being part wolf and part bear. In other words, a monster.
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In the Bronze Age, religious epic and theological speculation about the cosmos helped shape the concept of the monstrous. Monsters, while certainly transgressive and terrifying, play an ironic role in most religious systems’ notions of order. Many Near Eastern and ancient Indian cosmologies imagine the slaying of a monster as central to the construction of the universe. In many of these mythologies, the body and bones of the slain monster are transformed into the architecture of the cosmos.

Monsters even figure into the biblical epic. The Hebrew experience of God drew heavily on its polytheistic antecedents and from the mythic material of its context. Monotheism, and its connection to the idea of the Covenant (“One God has chosen one people”), represented a living experience of God’s action in history rather than a philosophical sentiment about the nature of reality. Only much later did it become a theological problem for the ancient Hebrews that monsters shared the same conceptual turf as Yahweh.
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Monsters, angels, ghosts, witches, and giants all appear in the Hebrew scripture. The meaning of these beings tends to be obscure and, in fact, contradictory. Both the land creature, Behemoth, and the giant sea monster, Leviathan, make an appearance in the Book of Job and in the Psalms, beings at once monstrous and miraculous. Religious studies scholar Timothy Beal notes that both beasts appear in Hebrew scripture “in a variety of mutually exclusive ways.” The Leviathan of the Hebrew Bible appears as both the enemy of Yahweh and Yahweh’s playmate. In both Psalm 74 and in the third chapter of Job, Leviathan acts as the enemy of God, a terrible serpent that must be destroyed so that both creation and the people of God’s covenant can be preserved. On the other hand, Leviathan in Psalm 104 and Job 40 appears as God’s own creation, a being with a strangely close relationship to the Deity.
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Stephen Asma, author of a recent meditation on the nature of the monster, suggests that these competing biblical images reflect a complex conception of God emerging in Hebrew thought. Leviathan represents, in Asma’s mind, the effort to reconcile the seemingly contradictory nature of God, a being who elicits both wonder and horror. Timothy Beal, in a close and brilliant reading of the Book of Job, argues that God describes Leviathan in detail to his unlucky servant because this creature provides not a “spectacle” of “God’s well-ordered world ecology” but instead an image of the “awful chaos that churns just beneath the surface.” Both Beal and Asma see religious experience as a kind of horror movie, embodiments of the divine that evoke feelings of terror. The monsters of the Bible are symbols of that horror.
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Clashing images of God’s monsters reveal both the slow development of ancient concepts of monotheism and the tendency of every human society to hold a deep fascination with the marginalized monstrous, the being that does not exactly fit in the cosmological order and yet is in some sense crucial to it. The horror of the monster goes hand in hand with its attraction. It has always embodied terror, raising questions about its own existence even as it terrifies.

The emergence of Christianity in the first and second centuries of the Common Era played a crucial role in the shaping of the monster in western Europe. By the second century, the concept of the devil as the enemy of God and the human race coalesced with Hebrew imagery of “the serpent in the garden.” This tightly packed symbolic construction gave the Christian church a head full of serpents, a monstrous brood that provided a wealth of demonic symbols. The description, for example, of the great dragon of Revelation chapter 12, identified with the devil, became paradigm for the West’s imagining of everything from sea
monsters to the king of the vampires (Dracula means, after all, “son of the Dragon”).
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The medieval world born out of the ruins of Rome became a world of monsters that shared some of the same contradictory impulses of earlier mythologies. Medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen describes, in Anglo-Saxon England, legends told of monsters building great houses of stone. In this context of legendary belief, mysterious ruins or rock formations came to be described as “the work of giants.” In Anglo-Saxon England, the monster appears as Grendel in the
Beowulf
saga, a loathsome creature that tears down the doors of the house and cannibalizes everyone inside. In the medieval mind, the monster appeared as both creator of order and threat to order, a bundle of contradictions that borrowed from Christian images of Satan (both Angel of Light and Prince of Darkness) and from the old Norse cosmogonies in which the original great giant Ymir provided his own body for the foundation of the world, his bones becoming the hills, his flesh becoming dirt, and his skull transformed into the sky. The monster terrified, and yet human beings actually lived within his remains.
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Increasingly, the many monsters of the Latin Christian West represented composites of images of Satan, biblical monsters, and the creatures from the folklore of pre-Christian Europe. Folklore about the nature of the devil and his work in the world naturally gave rise to stories of other terrible beings opposed to God and humanity. As historian Jeffrey Burton Russell describes this process in his multi-volume history of the devil in the western world, “the folkloric Devil shades off into other concepts such as the Antichrist, giants, dragons, ghosts, monsters, wereanimals and ‘the little people.’” The process could work the other way as well, with the devil absorbing the myths and legends of pre-Christian monsters. In some parts of Europe, Satan took over the attributes of giants, and unusual geological formations became a house of the devil. Russell points out that this idea persists even into American cultural history with the tendency to name irregular rock formations or mountains “the Devil’s Tower” or “Devil Mountain.”
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Medieval speculation about the nature of monsters ran the gamut from a simple identification of them as accomplices of Satan to somewhat more sophisticated speculation about their place in relation to humanity and the larger divine design. Medieval scholars’ mental maps of the world featured monstrous races of giants, wild apes, and dog-headed men. Christian scholars sometimes speculated that these creatures represented the progeny of Cain, cursed by God for slaying his brother (Grendel, Beowulf’s monstrous opponent in the Anglo-Saxon epic, is said to be
of the lineage of Cain). Occasionally, glimpses of a more nuanced view of monstrosity can be seen. One minor tradition in the middle ages portrayed St. Christopher as a Cynocephalus or “dog-headed man.” Scholars in the medieval world debated whether or not monsters had souls, and thus whether, hypothetically, they could receive baptism.
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Most of the monsters that rose from the grave in modern America have their distant origins in this context of medieval folklore, legend, and literature. Europeans had portrayed the witch, the vampire, and the werewolf, unlike many of the fantastical creatures located in other climes, as accomplices of Satan. The witch had a clear relationship with the devil, drawing her power from a pact she had made with him. The vampire in eastern Europe and parts of Germany had some relationship with Satan but also drew on beliefs about revenants and the consequences of a “bad death.” Werewolves, and shapeshifters of all kinds, have a more complicated history, at times being portrayed as guiltless figures who labor under a curse (much like Larry Talbot in Universal Pictures’ 1941
The Wolf Man
). Other versions of the werewolf mythos represent them as satanic creatures whose power, like that of the witch, comes from hell. Belief in these creatures assumed that no strict separation of “nature” and “supernature” existed, and that a world of shadows periodically and terrifyingly haunted humanity.
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The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the birth of a new worldview. The “scientific revolution” introduced the notion of the universe as a mechanism rather than a playground for divine and demonic spirits. Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo challenged the domination of Aristotelian cosmology that placed the earth at the center of the known universe. A new mechanical conception of nature began to shape thinking about the world, suggesting that observable, repeatable laws governed everything from the behavior of heavenly bodies to the phenomenon of human bodies. Neither miracles nor monsters would seem to have much of a foothold in this reimagined cosmos.

Ironically, the dawning age of science also became an age obsessed with the work of Satan on earth, specifically his use of witches and other evil accomplices. Witchcraft trials during the early modern period took the lives of perhaps as many as sixty thousand people. Trials of people suspected of being “loupe garou,” or werewolves, became common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Seldom imagined as forlorn beings traveling under a curse, the werewolf was instead described by magistrates and churchmen as a human being who willfully transformed into a monster with the help of the devil.
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