Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (7 page)

Something wicked this way comes when we look into the historical narrative. This example suggests that Mather himself embodies something of the monstrous. In figures like Mather and many others whom we will meet as we survey the American historical experience, the monster ceases to be a metaphor and becomes something horribly real,
something that’s visage flickers in the fire that burned 600 native men, women, and children alive. Belief and ideology, the social realities produced and reproduced by the images of the monster, turn into historical actions and events. It is not enough to call these beliefs metaphors when they shape actual historical behavior or act as anxious reminders of inhuman historical acts, a cultural memory of slaughter. How limp and pallid to use the term metaphor for cultural structures that can burn the innocent to death, lynch them, imprison them, or bomb them. The monster has helped make all these things possible in American history.

Mather’s justification for the wanton slaughter at the Mystic River echoes throughout the narrative of the American experience. During Mather’s own lifetime, the Puritans of New England slaughtered native peoples with abandon. In the savage conflict known to the English as “King Philip’s War,” numerous raids of villages became wholesale massacres. In May of 1676, for example, a raid by New England militia in the Connecticut River Valley led to the deaths of hundreds of natives. The New Englanders who attacked the village, all local men, felt that besieging and demanding the village’s surrender would take too long. Instead they opted for a surprise attack and took no prisoners, even though the village had not put up any resistance. Increase Mather, Cotton Mather’s father, praised the work of Puritan troops in the beheading of an influential female advisor to Metacomet (the Wampanoag leader known as “King Philip” to the English). Mather celebrated the news that Puritan forces had killed so many women, children, and elderly that “nobody could tell how many.”
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W
es Craven’s 1991
The People Under the Stairs
offers a parable of the power relationships of colonial America. Set in an American inner city, the film centers on the story of an African American teenager nicknamed Fool and his struggle with a pair of modern-day colonial overlords, white masters who exude an aura of supernatural evil and control over the economic fortune of their black neighbors.

“Daddy and Mommy,” as the white slumlords call themselves, live in a strangely agrarian part of the ’hood, a kind of urban plantation house guarded by a vicious dog and locked behind steel mesh windows. The “people under the stairs,” who we expect to be the monstrous villains of the tale, are actually kidnapped white children zombified by the incestuous couple. Fool can only defeat Daddy and Mommy by joining forces with the much-abused white kids living in the nooks, crannies, and secret passages of the old plantation house. The divide of race proves less compelling than the divisions of class, and the master’s haunted house, and hegemony, is overthrown.
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An alliance of oppressed white
and black people never came to fruition in the American colonial period as race became as great, arguably a greater, determiner of status as class. The latter variable created the monsters in
The People Under the Stairs
. Monsters in Craven’s tale are the products of socioeconomic conditions. The sadistic and perverse Mommy and Daddy are described by Fool’s Grandpa Booker as being twisted by their desire for money: “as they got greedier, they got crazier.” The house not only hides its secret of kidnapped children but mountains of ill-gotten gain. “No wonder there’s no money in the ghetto,” Fool says when he finds the twisted couple’s treasure trove. Like white elites since their first coming to the new world, Mommy and Daddy had built their mastery on fear, violence, and economic exploitation.
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As in Craven’s tale, the repressive power structure of colonial America became a forge of monsters. The white European master class exerted power over native peoples and Africans that sometimes seemed supernatural. European settlers, meanwhile, found the monster living in their own settlements and meetinghouses, beings animated by the power of the devil. These beliefs played a crucial role in shaping the American way of violence, the unremitting savagery toward enemies that became characteristic of the American historical experience.

Monsters of the New World

Christopher Columbus came to the “New World” seeking gold, slaves, and monsters. Columbus reported both in his personal diary and correspondence that the native peoples he encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 and 1493 told him of “one-eyed men and other men with dog heads” who decapitated their victims and drank their blood.” Michael Palencia-Roth notes that the Genoese explorer’s private diary of the first voyage shows that finding the monsters of the New World “became an obsession for Columbus.”
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A long tradition of legend and theological speculation about monstrous creatures informed Columbus’ beliefs about what he might find in the new world. Medieval mental maps of a world inhabited by monstrous races prepared Spanish and Portuguese explorers to encounter giants, dog-men, ape-men, and various creatures out of the medieval bestiary. Christian theological speculation about the work of the devil, combined with the ongoing geopolitical conflict with the Islamic powers of the Mediterranean world, encouraged European explorers to see these monstrous races as allied with the evil one, the enemies of God and of the church.
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Some scholars argue that the first European conquerors in the New World did not think of the native people themselves as monsters.
Contemporary historian Peter Burke, for example, contends that Europeans always saw the native peoples of Africa and the Americas as part of the human family, even as they categorized them as an uncivilized or even degraded branch of that family. Burke notes that, throughout the era of European expansion, a debate took place among churchly scholars over the ethnic origins of “the savages of America.” The very fact that such a debate was held meant that Europeans assumed the humanity, if not the equality, of the native peoples. A monster has no ethnic origin. If Burke is correct, European explorers saw the people of the New World as vastly inferior cousins but not as monsters.
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Contrary evidence, however, suggests that such an ambivalent view of the natives had very little traction among most early modern Europeans. The conquerors of the New World saw, not simply a savage version of humanity, but the monstrous races of their mythology. Even significant Enlightenment thinkers such as the French naturalist Buffon in his
Natural History
connected the creation of monstrosities with the etiology of the “darker races.” Monsters represented the progeny of these supposedly savage peoples, a concept that reappeared again and again throughout American history, with a lineage that stretches from Puritan minister Cotton Mather to the twentieth-century horror maestro H. P. Lovecraft.
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New kinds of technology in the period of exploration contributed to European monster mania. The print revolution of the fifteenth century, though normally seen as an important moment in the expansion of modernity, provided a way to spread the concept of the monster, locating it in the enemy other. Numerous Reformation tracts portrayed either Martin Luther or the Pope as monstrous beings empowered by the devil. In 1727 a popular Portuguese tract,
Emblema Vivente
, described a Turkish monster “fifteen palms high” with an eerie light emanating from its chest every time it breathed. Historians of early modern Europe Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes argue that this tract “blurs the boundaries of science and religion,” in its description of the monster both as an oddity of nature and malformed beast. The monster incarnated fears of the religious other whose land it inhabitated, the Ottoman Turk.
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Emblema Vivente
’s blurring of conceptual boundaries is representative of the emerging Enlightenment view of the monster. While many eighteenth-century thinkers dismissed theological explanations for the birth of monsters, they did not reject the reality of monsters themselves. The natural scientist Buffon suggested a number of purely natural explanations for the monstrous peoples and creatures that walked the earth. In 1796 the Enlightenment Encyclopedist Diderot speculated about the possible natural origins of monsters. The New World, with its
strange creatures and peoples, offered new opportunities for sightings of such creatures.
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Europeans found the monsters they searched for. Not only did explorers and settlers readily believe wonder tales, they tended to ascribe morally monstrous qualities to the peoples they encountered. This process began with the early explorations of Africa and provided some of the earliest materials for the racist imagination of the modern West. Early European accounts of oranutans imagined a similarity between them and the native peoples of West Africa, the region that soon became the primary target for slave traders. Fabulous accounts written by European travelers dwelt on the monstrous appearance of the ape and on the monster’s sexual proclivities. According to one account, the apes of India were “so venerous that they will ravish their women,” while an African baboon brought before a French monarch allegedly had a sexual organ “greater than might match the quantity of his other parts.” These ideas had a calamitous effect on how the white mind encountered native African peoples.
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Such imaginings became a familiar part of the racist folklore of the United States concerning African American men. An English naturalist, Edward Topsell, would write in 1607 of African men with “low and flat nostrils” who are “as libidinous as apes that attempt women and having thicke lips the upper hanging over the neather, they are deemed fools.” Winthrop Jordan notes that these associations also drew on European folklore about the connection between apes and the devil. Contemporary demonological texts often made this connection explicit, seeing apes as incarnations of Satan or as the familiars of witches. Europeans encountering Africans in the context of the slave trade held in their minds these bizarre associations between monstrous apes, Satan, libidinous sexuality, and enormous sexual organs. They readily applied these folkloric images to the human beings they stuffed into the holds of their ships for a life of enslavement. Such poisonous associations would be reborn again and again in twentieth-century popular culture, most notably in
The Birth of a Nation
(1915) and
King Kong
(1933). They even played a role in the folklore that supported lynching, some of the most pathological violence ever to take place on American soil.
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Europeans found monsters in the Americas as quickly as in Africa. Some of the earliest Spanish explorers of what would become the southeastern coast of the United States readily accepted Native American tales of monstrous peoples and saw the natives themselves as embodiments of the marvelously monstrous. In the 1520s Spanish explorer Lucas Allyón hungrily devoured the stories of a local Native American Chicora who
spoke of all the lands north of Florida as being populated by “a race of men with tails for which they dug holes in the ground when they sat down.” Chicora regaled Allyón, and later the Spanish court, with other stories of Native American tribes that stretched their children so that they became enormous giants.
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Belief in the monsters of the New World influenced discussions about the moral justification for the enslavement and oppression of native peoples. These debates, with very few exceptions, assumed theological and cultural justifications for the economic exploitation of the New World. European explorers who willingly granted that the natives came from human stock often believed them to be a type of monstrous human, depraved beings whose moral leprosy had its source in the world of the demonic. Even the sixteenth-century friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, a strong proponent of the rights of Native Americans under Spanish law, saw the New World as firmly under Satan’s domain. Friar Bartolomé saw the very air of the New World teeming with evil spirits who tempted and destroyed the unbaptized.
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Such conceptions of the diabolism of native peoples led some Europeans to imagine the New World as a landscape of horror. Charges of perverse sexuality and inhuman appetites represent some of the most common descriptions of native peoples. Friar Tomas Ortiz described the natives of Terra Firme, colonial Panama, as flesh-eating monsters who had “no sense of love or shame … they are bestial and they pride themselves in having abominable vices.” Viewing them as “steeped in vices and bestialities,” Friar Ortiz saw no reason their personal autonomy should be recognized. Monsters could be enslaved.
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The New World itself often seemed a kind of monster to the early modern European imagination. One of the earliest allegorizations of America is Philippe Galle’s 1580 “America,” in which we see a giantess with spear and bow that has cannibalized a man and triumphantly carries his severed head. Galle’s own description of the image refers to America as an “ogress who devours men, who is rich in gold and who is skilled in the use of the spear and the bow.” In 1595 Paolo Farinati painted an allegorical representation of the New World as a monstrous cannibal to decorate a villa in Verona, Italy. In Farinati’s “America,” the artist imagines the New World as a giant roasting a human arm. A crucifix is shown on his right, illustrating the hope that conversion to Christianity could tame the beast.
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