Thursday, May 9, 2013

Nature of Monstrosity


Nature of Monstrosity

Throughout many of the works we’ve covered this semester, the theme of monstrosity has been peeked at, glanced, and later fully discussed.  It is the nature of monstrosity that we try, over and over and throughout multiple stories and poems, to define.  The nature of monstrosity is in the juxtaposition of the supernatural, the sublime, with everyday life.  This fascination with the monstrous emphasizes the interest people have held about the definition, and antithesis, of humanity.  In feeling this curiosity, many authors have explored the thin line dividing humanity in general from the non-human, from the other.  According to http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/6/post/2012/10/bloodlines-ii-the-rise-of-modern-horror.html, horror and monstrosity can “Through superior allegory,…help the audience understand their world, and what’s happening to it; indeed, what’s happening to them!”

Let’s start with one of the more obvious examples of monstrosity: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  In this piece, the nameless creature is a concrete example of this “other”, of monstrosity itself.  The creature’s appearance, as noted in http://suite101.com/article/the-monster-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein-a215222, is supposed to be a “hybrid” of different races, partly Caucasian but also possibly “Mongolian”.  It is this hybridization, and gigantic size, that casts the creature as “other”, different, monstrous.  Size does also have a role to play, however: as Canguilhem states in his article “Monstrosity and the Monstrous,” “The relationship between the enormous and the monstrous has yet to be clarified.  Both are well beyond the norm.” Even in creatures that resemble us, mere size and coloring variations are enough to cast the shade of “other”.  The contrast of the creature’s original willingness to please and later avowal that he is the master, the very way in which he appears to Victor after so long, show monstrosity.




In Fuseli’s painting, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, the witch reminded me very much of Frankenstein’s creation, from the grayish pallor of the skin to the sheer size of the witch.  In but another moment, the witch will have done something terrible to the child she is semi-holding on the sacrificial slab in front of her.  I also noticed the disembodied hands in the front, center of the piece that are threatening the witch with what appears to be a shard of glass of some sort.  In this painting, even the “heroes,” those there to defeat the witch, are not quite human, thrusting into sharp relief the idea of heroes being monstrous.

In Blake’s “The Tyger,” he wonders if the God was happy with the creations He had made: in lines 19-20, “Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who made the lamb make thee?” leads me to ponder if Victor Frankenstein had ever read any of Blake’s poetry.  I see many parallels between Victor and the narrator of Blake’s poem.  The second half of the first and last stanzas, asking who made such a fearful creature, cannot but put me in mind of Frankenstein. 

Monstrosity is not only about physical strangeness, however.  According to Thanem, “One can therefore argue that monsters, monstrosities and the monstrous disrupt the boundaries of the normal, whether a matter of size, shape or morality.”  Appearances aside, monstrosity can be caused by actions as well as looks.  In William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” the narrator begins by describing in great detail a very beautiful mound of moss and flowers, “All lovely colors there you see” (38).  Wordsworth spends two entire stanzas describing how vibrantly radiant this is, before moving on to the weeping woman who is frequently near.  This is the first juxtaposition of the work, but so far it’s okay, nothing overtly monstrous waiting to jump out and say “Boo!”  In stanza twelve, Wordsworth again makes the juxtaposition, contrasting how joyful Martha was with “A cruel, cruel fire, they say,/Into her bones was sent:/It dried her body like a cinder,” (127-131). So Martha has now gone from the radiant bride-to-be to something consumed by an inner fire.  The transition from stanzas fourteen to fifteen is the last and most damning concurrence: in line 154, Martha goes from having finally “looks [that] were calm, her senses clear,” to the narrator having no concrete facts to give the reader, merely that the child she was carrying was never seen by another person.  It is the juxtaposition of the beautiful hillside’s appearance with what is buried beneath that smacks of monstrosity.  Two full stanzas to describe the beauty of an infant’s resting place.  The implication that Martha murdered and then buried her child, whilst never fully proven, is monstrous.

In Coleridge’s “Christabel,” too, is a monstrosity caused by the intersection of two contradictory senses: a beautiful woman in desperate need of help, the quintessential archetype of damsel in distress, who is later revealed as the evil monster.  Not only is the lamia described as “Nay, fairer yet! And yet more fair!” in line 374, Geraldine is also described as having “A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy;” in line 585.  It is this juxtaposition of beauteous woman and conniving snake that shows the monstrosity of Coleridge’s piece.  Even more so, though, is the lamia’s perversion made evident in subverting Christabel’s father away from her; in turning the man who should protect his innocent daughter into the enemy she needs protection from, Geraldine has truly become monstrous. 

In “Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers” by Henry Fuseli, the monstrosity of Lady Macbeth, already in our minds as we know she is shortly to commit murder, is made the more apparent by the dog-faced man in the back ground of the picture, holding his companion steady as they observe Lady Macbeth rush off to do foul deeds.



Throughout this semester, we have studied the horrific, the terrifying, the sublime, and the monstrous.  I propose that it is really only a few of the many facets of humanity we have studied.   Humanity itself is monstrous, at times, and beautiful at times, and occasionally both at the same time.  It is our fears that cause us to create these works, in order to put a face to our fears so that we may name them.  Monstrosity is always changing and will probably continue to always change; human perceptions are constantly evolving and putting new bogeymen in our minds. 

 


 

Citations

Organization 2006 13: 163

Torkild Thanem.

Living on the Edge: Towards a Monstrous Organization Theory

DOI: 10.1177/1350508406061677


 

Georges Canguilhem and Therese Jaeger.

Monstrosity and the Monstrous Diogenes December 1962 10: 27-42, doi:10.1177/039219216201004002vv


 

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