Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (4 page)

The grim realities of the witch hunts suggest that the tenets of the scientific revolution did not filter through all segments of early modern
European society. Moreover, this enduring belief in the supernatural during the scientific revolution did not represent a divide between university culture and peasant village culture. Learned treatises on diabolism, witchcraft, and the etiology of monsters poured forth from the pens of a number of illustrious university scholars. The scientific revolution created new terms for the discussion of the monstrous, but it did not end the discussion. Scholars assumed the existence of powerful nonhuman and inhuman creatures, sometimes giving both scientific and supernatural explanations for their existence in the same breath. The learned sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Pare in his treatise
On Monsters and Marvels
listed thirteen causes for the appearances of abnormality in human beings, some of them natural and some of them purely supernatural, including “the artifice of evil beggars” and the agency of “demons and devils.”
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The long history of humanity’s monstrous fascinations, and the mythologies and theologies that supported them, would seem to have little to do with the early American republic or its citizens. The American Revolution grew in part out of the Enlightenment goal of applying rationality to politics. While it is too simplistic to view the creation of the United States as merely the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project, many of America’s founders did imagine a new nation reared on the foundations of human reason. Patriots forged the United States, it has often been explained to us, out of a wedding of Enlightenment political ideology and a growing sense of national destiny. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson admired the political philosophy of John Locke, who favored the creation of rational republics where the superstitions of statecraft and “priestcraft” had no purchase. The new republic, seemingly, would live in a sunlit world without shadows, a place where no monster could hide.
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The Sleep of Reason

The connection between Enlightenment ideology and the birth of the United States is a complicated one. Many, perhaps most, of the so-called Founders held a combination of Enlightenment belief and what has been referred to as the notion of “country ideology”—the idea that the power of small coteries of elites corrupted and destroyed the liberties of the people. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, two of the most influential thinkers and propagandists in the making of the American Revolution, tied their critique of monarchy to a critique of Old World religion. In their minds, the destruction of political tyranny correlated naturally to the destruction of religious tyranny in both its Protestant and Catholic versions.
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These rational revolutionaries did not, however, speak for the broad constituency that helped to make the American Revolution and the American nation. As historian Sean Wilentz shows in his monumental
The Rise of American Democracy
, a significant split always existed between small urban elites in colonial America and the much larger population that lived in the rural settlements. Thomas Jefferson expected Americans to become deists by the time of his death. Instead, the so-called Second Great Awakening swept the country, proliferating religious worldviews and sectarian communities. The belief in the supernatural refused to die.
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In fact, the Enlightenment itself, most historians now agree, should be considered a complex phenomenon. The eighteenth-century rationalists did not easily relinquish mythical and fantastic beliefs, even as they attempted to wedge them into the new, naturalistic paradigm. French
philosophe
Voltaire often engaged in speculative reflection about the possibilities of monsters inhabiting the unknown corners of the earth. He suggested, for example, that satyrs might exist and wondered whether or not monsters could be produced in certain tropical regions of the world if human females mated with animals. The latter belief would have calamitous consequences, as we shall see, for the history of colonial-era racial attitudes.
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Voltaire, at least, tended to look for natural and scientific explanations for “wonders” in the natural word, for explanations that made these strange creatures parts of a rational framework. Other major thinkers connected with Europe’s scientific revolution and Enlightenment were not so careful. Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, combined the emerging scientific ideology of empirical investigation with a fairly traditional belief in the literal existence of demons. In the 1670s Boyle interviewed English miners to see if they had made contact with “any subterraneous demons” and “in what shape and manner they appear.”
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Even many early modern thinkers who had become wary of supernatural definitions of the monstrous continued to accept many of the fantastical beings of European folklore. Francis Bacon, whose propaganda text for the scientific revolution
The Advancement of Learning
all but created the notion of “science as progress,” believed in the reality of monsters even while arguing, much like Voltaire, that they could be understood in the light of rational empiricism. Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus asserted that he could explain what he called the “paradoxa” of nature in nature’s own terms. Linnaeus showed a special interest in the phenomenon of “wild children,” allegedly feral human beings raised beyond the parameters of civilization. Avoiding the term monster, he did classify these children as a “subgenre” of humanity.
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Linnaeus holds a place of honor in the history of science with his detailed and elegant system of classification of the natural world into genus and species. His emphasis on natural history’s need for an empirical system of categories marks his work as a clear departure from an earlier willingness to view the natural world as a mysterious place filled with unclassifiable wonders. His taxonomy of nature represented the first effort at creating what cultural historian Stephen Asma has called “a conceptual filing cabinet of the world.”
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This taxonomy, however, allowed for wonders and marvels. Linnaeus even left open the possibility that a category needed to be created for dragons, and his genera included a spot for troglodytes. Much like Voltaire, Linnaeus had little doubt that further exploration of the globe promised to yield a bounty of fantastic creatures with bizarre anatomies. Linnaeus perhaps represents the Enlightenment attitude toward the monster, the idea that the wondrous remained wonderful even as it became classifiable. Linneaus’ conceptual filing cabinet would contain more than a few X-files.
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American thinking about the meaning of the miraculous inherited this curious combination of the mysterious and the rational, the desire to understand the physical world while allowing at least a small aperture for the entrance of the supernatural. Deeply religious notions of the world jostled with skeptical rationalism for supremacy. The Puritans, English religious radicals who represented the bulk of the settlers of New England, viewed the natural world through the lens of their intricate Calvinist theology. Puritan clergy, America’s first intellectuals, saw a world full of signs and portents and remained certain of the work of malefic creatures, creatures who swirled around them in an invisible world so close to their own. Thomas Jefferson and Cotton Mather wrestled over the American mind.
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One of the earliest American scientific controversies illustrates this conflict. In 1705 a farmer discovered a giant tooth near Albany, New York. Puritan divine Cotton Mather, hunter of witches as well as monsters, wrote a series of letters about the discovery to the secretary of the Royal Society of London, the premier association of scientific thinking in the early eighteenth century. Mather had no difficulty explaining, to his own satisfaction, the origin and meaning of the fossil. The tooth, Mather declared, represented a “wonderful confirmation of Mosaic history,” empirical proof of the ancient Near Eastern legend of the Nephilim, found in Genesis chapter 6. This strange tale of giants walking the earth before Noah’s flood and mating with human women now had, Mather believed, empirical confirmation. The fossil discovery proved that these horny giants had once stamped around western New York.
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Even in the early eighteenth century, some American thinkers asserted that the tooth belonged to an animal rather than to an extinct race of giants. As contemporary historian Paul Semonin details so carefully in his book
American Monster
, the controversy over this and other fossils (belonging to what we now know to be the herbivorous mastodon) became one of the major cultural conversations of eighteenth-century America, drawing in Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, numerous theologians, and the museologists. As we will explore more fully in the next chapter, this discussion took place using the terms of debate set by Enlightenment empiricism but also drew on beliefs about fantastical creatures from the Bible and of folklore.
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The debate over the meaning of fossils in early America helped shape the development of a huge body of popular belief about other wondrous creatures of the New World, from Big Foot to sea serpents, lake monsters, and lizard men. These strange creatures, like the American mastodon, would terrify and delight the new inhabitants of the American continent, blurring the lines between the natural and the supernatural and incorporating beliefs about topics from religion to nationalism. The horrifying creatures could and would provoke much more than horror, becoming marvels and wonders, secret codes with multiple, complicated meanings.
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American monsters are omens, warnings, and portents. Like omens they cause wonder and horror and often refuse to make their meaning clear. Scholars have long understood this combination of fear and delight in the monster to be part of the attraction of everything from folklore about strange beasts to the modern slasher film. A significant genre of scholarly writing, much of it focused on American popular culture, seeks to explain this fascination, to describe the meaning of the monstrous and why it proves such a powerful lure for the human psyche. It is a literature that, while often highly theoretical, can provide much insight into America’s appetite for the monster.

Our Monsters, Ourselves

Does the nausea of F. Scott Fitzgerald have much of anything to do with the wonder of Cotton Mather at discovering the tooth of an antediluvian giant? Do we know what the monster is and how human beings respond to it? What is the attraction of these beings that horrify, and why do they manifest to us as horrors?

Although a number of scholars from diverse disciplines have sought to answer these questions, few have examined the monsters produced by a specific national history. Much of the best work on the history of the
monstrous has come from scholars of medieval Europe and the early modern period, while the analysis of the monstrous as part of American society has focused almost entirely on pop culture and more specifically on film. This analysis tends to focus on the meaning, often the psychological meaning, of the response of theater audiences both to the monster and to horror narratives more generally.
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Efforts to define the nature of the monster are perhaps simpler than they first appear. The critical and popular response to
Freaks
suggests that the monster is that which inspires disgust, anxiety, and even nausea. The marginalized are the monstrous and the monstrous is marginalized. The monster, more than our fears, also represents our hatreds. Whatever makes us lose our lunch, whether natural or supernatural, can be defined as a monster. The monster is the sickening Other.
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This would work as a definition of the monster if F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nausea represented the most common response to the appearance of the despised and damned thing. But this is problematized by the fact that American history provides examples of society reveling in the alien, in the horrifying, and in that which allegedly disgusts. Describing the monster as a trigger for nausea does not explain why Puritans found witches entertaining, why Frankenstein’s monster became a major
nineteenth-century celebrity, or why contemporary fans flock to horror conventions and subscribe to magazines such as
Rue Morgue
and
Fangoria
.

Image of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein

The difficulties in defining the monster have led many theorists to instead focus on the feeling of terror the monster elicits. Many interpreters of the terrified cultural response to the other suggest that our hatreds of difference grow out of the fear that our own identities, our very selves, are unstable and could yield to the threat of difference. The monster terrifies because “it” represents the terrifying fate of our own bodies.
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