 |
Monsters!
The Top 10 Literary Monsters of All Time, Part II
Literature is full of
monsters that threaten and warn, monsters that scare us and
monsters that are us--monsters that, properly challenged, give
rise to heroes that show the way through our fears. Here are
the greatest of those monsters, continued from last
week.
Frankenstein’s Monster
“My Hideous Progeny”
Despite its numerous film versions, Hollywood didn’t give birth to Frankenstein. A 19-year-old named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did. In the summer of 1816, she and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Bad weather forced them inside, where they and Byron’s other guests amused themselves by reading ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary’s harrowing story, inspired by a dream, became
Frankenstein (1818).
 The tale of Victor Frankenstein, a student who cobbles together a monster out of corpses gathered from cemeteries and dissecting labs, has come to symbolize the dangers of science gone out of control. On a cold and dreary night, he manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” by means of galvanism. Horrified at his own abominable creation, the scientist abandons the monster, who remains nameless (although Hollywood has, of course, named the monster “Frankenstein” after his creator). Craving sympathy and understanding, the monster finally turns to evil and takes dreadful revenge on the scientist.
The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, pinpoints the source of evil. Prometheus was chained to a stone, his
liver pecked out by an eagle, as a punishment for stealing what belonged to the gods and giving it to mortals: fire. Likewise, Frankenstein is punished for usurping
God’s power to create life. His fatal flaw is not madness.
In fact, he’s the exact opposite to the “mad scientist” stereotype presented in the movies. Rather, he commits the monstrous sin of pride.
More than just a novel about the dangers of scientific hubris,
Frankenstein is also a birth myth. By the time she began work on the book, Mary Shelley had endured several harrowing experiences with early motherhood. Pregnant at 16, and almost constantly pregnant through the following five years, she lost most of her infants soon after birth. It’s difficult to read without shuddering the 17-year-old Shelley’s diary entry for March 19, 1815, in which she records the loss of her first baby, a little girl who died before she could be given a name: “Dream that my little baby came to life again,” Mary wrote, “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.”
It requires no great leap to equate this sentiment with Victor Frankenstein’s desire: “I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
Mr. Hyde
The Evil Within
A spare yet complex tale whose popularity has endured for more than a century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has
become synonymous with the battle between good and evil waged
within ourselves. Jekyll, a good and generous London
physician, invents a drug that turns him into the demonic Mr.
Hyde. As Mr. Hyde, he explores a life of pure evil in which he
tramples children and commits other unspeakable acts. Although
Jekyll develops an antidote that returns him to his
respectable self, it gradually loses its power to quell the
monster within. Finally unable to obtain one of the
ingredients for the antidote mixture, and on the verge of
being discovered, he commits suicide.
Acknowledging the two sides of his own nature, Jekyll writes,
“If each, I told myself, could be housed in separable
identities, life would be relieved of all that was
intolerable.” The book’s power to frighten stems from the
elusiveness of this goal. It’s not just that Dr. Jekyll is
good and Mr. Hyde is evil, but that a seemingly respectable
London citizen can’t control the monster within. To focus on
drinking the potion (which Stevenson himself dismissed as “so
much hugger-mugger”) is to miss the deeper psychological
implications of the case.
The idea for the book sprang from the deepest recesses of Stevenson’s own mind--a nightmare from which his wife Fanny awakened him. He wrote the manuscript in a frenzied three days. His wife was so appalled when she read it that he burned the original manuscript and rewrote it from scratch in another three days. Just weeks later, in January 1886, Longmans published the
book. Its success was immediate, selling over 40,000 copies in six months. Just a year after its publication, it was adapted as a stage play starring the American Richard Masefield. Although Masefield thrilled audiences with his grotesque transformation into the monstrous Hyde, he soon had an all-too-real rival. In one of the most horrifying examples of life imitating art, the notorious rapist Jack the Ripper began,
in 1888, to terrorize London’s Whitechapel district. Because of the skill with which he cut up his victims, speculation grew that Jack the Ripper, like Jekyll, may have been a respectable physician by day. Indignant observers accused Masefield of being the Ripper, since he played the part so convincingly. The play eventually closed in deference to the public uproar.
Dracula
Sex, Monstrous Sex
Despite their reputation for strict propriety, the Victorians produced a surprising number of erotic texts. And none throbs with more lustful energy than Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel
Dracula. The world’s most famous vampire speaks directly to the era’s fascination with and anxiety about sex.
 Featuring some of the most chilling horror scenes ever written in English, the novel begins as an upstanding young lawyer named Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania (then in Hungary, now in modern-day Romania) to complete a real-estate transaction. There he finds the mysterious Count Dracula as well as three vampire women who try to suck
his blood and hold him captive. Although Harker eventually escapes, Dracula follows him back to England, where
he stalks Harker’s fiancée Mina and her best friend Lucy. Harker and his friends finally conquer the Count, but only after he
leaves his mark on British soil.
Harker’s simultaneous fear of the vampire women and “his wicked, burning desire that they would kiss with those red lips” suggests volumes about Victorian attitudes toward sexuality. Stoker unchains his most seductive prose for the passages in which Dracula bites and ritually penetrates Lucy, turning her vaunted purity into “voluptuous wantonness”--and overturning everything the Victorians expected from a lady. Several critics have noted that in addition to the palpable sexual anxiety, the text seems to betray significant fears about a foreigner invading England and tainting British blood.
Of course, Stoker, an Irish author, didn’t invent vampires or even the name Dracula. The historical Dracula was a 15th-century Romanian prince better known as Vlad the Impaler. He also used the nickname “Dracula,” a reference to the fact that he was the son of Vlad Dracul. The prince enjoyed a reputation for sadistic exploits, which allegedly included not only impaling his enemies on sharp spikes, but also skinning and boiling them alive. Stoker apparently discovered the name in an obscure history book he checked out of the library while vacationing in Whitby
(an English resort where much of the novel takes place) and
fused it with Slavic folklore about the restless souls of
heretics, criminals, and suicides, condemned neither to live
or die.
“Big Brother”
Totalitarian Terrors
Along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) stands as the most famous and influential example of the 20th-century dystopian novel. Unlike utopian stories, which help us imagine and explore ideal worlds, dystopian novels depict nightmarish societies, worlds in which authors like Orwell fear we might someday live if we’re not careful. The great nightmare for Orwell
was totalitarianism, especially the kind of totalitarianism
made possible by technology. In
1984, “Big Brother” uses technology to peer into every corner of human life, controlling the behaviors, the language, and even the thoughts of the people subjected to it.
The slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You” is everywhere.
Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Orwell’s “Big Brother” is a master manipulator. But unlike Iago, “Big Brother” is distinctly more than human.
In fact, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is never sure whether “Big Brother,” the seemingly all-powerful ruler of Oceania, is a real human being or not. As the story unfolds, Smith appears as a disgruntled worker in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, where, ironically, he alters historical documents to suit the needs of the nation’s ruling party. Everywhere he goes, “Big Brother” watches him through “telescreens,” hidden cameras that monitor everyone’s behaviors even as they project a constant barrage of propaganda designed to portray the ruling party, and “Big Brother,” in the best possible light.
Eventually, Smith begins an illegal love affair with a woman named Julia, and the two confide their hatred for the party in a man named O’Brien. Yet O’Brien turns out to be a spy, and subsequently directs Smith’s torture at the Ministry of Love, where dissenters are sent for “reeducation.” Faced with the prospect of having his face eaten off by rats, Smith finally snaps, begging O’Brien to use the rats on Julia rather than
on him. Torture drives him to accept the party line entirely, to such an extent that, in the end, he learns to love “Big Brother.” Our greatest literary nightmares, it would seem, no longer revolve around ghosts and goblins. The monsters we fear most are conspiratorial societies, invisible systems of control, and technologies run
amok.
Us
Who Needs Literature for Monsters?
Writers of practically every era have understood that monsters scare us because they’re externalizations of the fears we carry around inside ourselves or, more ominously, because they’re stunt-doubles for our own “inhuman” behavior. Today, dystopian literature, science fiction, and Hollywood horror continue to give life to the fear within. Yet we’ve had very little need these past hundred or so years for literary monsters. History has supplied us with all we can handle. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and others have led totalitarian regimes that have slaughtered millions, and faceless “ethnic cleansing,” civil strife, and terror have murdered millions more. We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Fortunately, so are heroes, who work tirelessly to beat the monsters back.
--Maggie
Debelius
and Steve Sampson
Click here to
read part I of
"The Top 10 Literary Monsters of All Time"
|
|
