Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (12 page)

Helen’s research takes a deadly twist that the ingénue folklorist does not expect. Two African American women at her University, with connections to Chicago’s infamously violent Cabrini Green housing project, connect all the bloody motifs of the urban legend to a recent brutal murder.

Cabrini Green, another scholar tells Helen, is “Candyman country.” This monster’s folklore comes complete with a historical origin story rooted in America’s cruel racial past. Candyman, though the son of a slave, had become a noted artist in the Midwest. A wealthy landowner asked him to paint a portrait of his “virginal young daughter.” The two fell in love and the young white woman became pregnant, the ultimate terror in the white supremacist nightmare. This flagrant violation of American racial mores resulted in a brutal lynching. The enraged mob cut off Candyman’s hand, covered him with honey so that bees would feast on him, and burned him alive. He haunts the Chicago housing project and soon he would haunt Helen herself.
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The story of Candyman is the story of an American monster, born out of the terrors of the past. The film borrowed heavily from nineteenth-century gothic motifs, as well as from American anxieties over race, violence, and sexuality. It reflects the ironies and cross-grained tensions of a republic of liberty founded, and then torn apart, over the enslavement of human beings. The influence of the gothic tradition on American literature became a way to deal with the memory of a violent American past and a violent American present.

Nineteenth-century American elites constructed their society out of a number of explosive materials, ready to detonate at any moment. White Americans, though they dominated most of the country’s economic and cultural institutions, perceived themselves as under siege. Slaves made up a majority of the population of some American states. Immigrants who shared neither Anglo-Saxon heritage nor Anglo-Saxon values began entering northeastern American port cities in the 1840s and 1850s. Immigrants and slaves provided workers for agrarian and industrial capitalists throughout the century and yet their presence appeared to native whites as an omen and a threat. The atmosphere was rich with the irony of a nation whose founding documents trumpeted liberty and democracy but whose prosperity rested on slavery and the labor of immigrants hated and feared by the dominant class.
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Slavery proved to be the most combustible element in the young nation. The sectional conflict that led to the Civil War dismembered the nation and transformed the way Americans thought about death. The killing of six hundred thousand men, most between the ages of 18 and 30, caused an enormous shift in social institutions and cultural sensibilities. The failure of Reconstruction unleashed a violent assault against the African American community in the South. African Americans would face similar horrors in the urban North by the time of the First World War.
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Meanwhile, the postbellum era witnessed a new kind of internecine struggle, an emerging clash over social and ideological values that has remained a part of the American cultural conversation into the present. By the 1870s the struggle for gender equality begun in the antebellum era increasingly turned toward efforts by women to assert their autonomy over their bodies and their sexuality. This struggle inevitably raised questions about the nature of the American family, considered by many a sacrosanct institution protected by religious sanction.

Nineteenth-century stories of the American monster attempted to make sense of unavoidable American social conflicts. American writers, meanwhile, borrowed from the European gothic tradition in an effort to explore the nature of American identity. This identity took on a monstrous shape. Slavery became the greatest monster of all, a horror tale told by both its defenders and its opponents. The American Civil War resulted from this war of monstrous imagery. In the aftermath of the conflict, the United States continued to summon new monsters from the depths as warring cultural visions each had its frightening tale to tell.

Original Goths

During the early 1980s, post-punk music and cultural styles created a new subculture known simply as “goth.” Goths embraced the imagery of the macabre in their appearance, effecting an androgynous style that featured black eyeliner and clothing along with a creative blending of the symbols of medieval Catholicism, punk styles, and a horror film aesthetic. Influenced by the music of Bauhaus and the Damned, goth subculture branched off into numerous alternative subcultures, ranging from steampunk to vampire lifestyles.
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Those who embrace the goth lifestyle are drawing on a tradition hundreds of years old. In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment celebration of reason caused a significant cultural backlash. The rise of romanticism exulted in the power of primal feeling over what some regarded as a cold and sterile cerebralism. The “graveyard poets” represent one rivulet of this tradition, as do the canonical works of Romantic poets such as Coleridge.
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In 1764 the British writer Horace Walpole published
The Castle of Otranto
, a story of ruined castles, underground passageways, mysterious deaths, and tainted romance. These elements played a significant role in what became known as the gothic literary tradition. In European cultural life, Gothic Revival architecture accompanied this new literary genre, with Walpole himself turning his country estate into a reproduction of a medieval castle.
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Gothic fictions elicited a thrill from eager readers with a newfound appreciation for all things old, dreary, ghostly, and built near graveyards. Literary critic Valdine Clemens notes that this aesthetic form appeared at a moment when “enlightenment contempt for the barbarity of the Middle Ages was giving way to a sense of nostalgia.” This nostalgia could take a number of forms, including a willingness to revisit the horrors of the medieval period. British gothic novels frequently used the lurid tales of the Inquisition, sexually perverse and possibly supernatural monks, and other anti-Catholic motifs in order to frighten and thrill their audiences.
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In the United States, the work of John Filson, discussed in the previous chapter, became one of the early conduits of the gothic imagination. His Kentucky travelogue filled the American frontier with unquiet spirits and ancient monsters. Washington Irving built on this tradition with the 1820 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Drawing on the folklore of the Hudson River Valley, Irving describes Sleepy Hollow as a “sequestered glen,” paradisiacally rural in its isolation. But the village’s agrarian fecundity and preternatural quiet masked horrors. Irving writes of “the drowsy, dreamy influence” that hangs over the land, an atmosphere that local inhabitants attributed to the sorceries practiced by an early German settler or to the influence of local native tribes. Here, Irving drew on Mather, seeing the “devilish” influence of Native American magic over the American landscape as the primary cause for what he describes as “the witching influence of the air.”
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Irving uses this setting to create an American horror story that attempts, if somewhat whimsically, to give the American continent a gothic past. The chief monster of the tale owes his existence to the Revolutionary War, concluded in 1783. The famous harrowing of Ichabod Crane took place in 1790. Though only thirty years have passed by 1820, Irving refers to these events as occurring during “a remote period of American history.”
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The publication of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” coincided with a period of significant economic shifts and the emergence of the American commercial revolution. In the previous twenty years, seaboard cities had grown in size and in the import and export of commercial tonnage. A significant faction of American congressional leaders began to see the funding of internal improvements (railroads, canals, roads) as crucial for commercial activity and national identity. Most of America remained rural, although most agrarian enterprises interlinked with urban markets, and by extension, to global markets.
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Events in 1819 seemed to call into question this commercial expansion and the entrepreneurial spirit that animated it. An economic
downturn, known as the “Panic of 1819,” grew from a collapse in commodity prices. In 1820s Philadelphia, three-quarters of the workforce would be reported as unemployed. The panic devastated rural America as well, with millions of unemployed farm laborers.
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Irving’s Ichabod Crane was a representative character of this economic morass. In twentieth-century versions of Irving’s tale, Crane has often appeared as the hero, wrongly persecuted by Brom Bones, his rival for the affection of one of the local gentry’s daughters. This reading of Irving’s characterizations owes far more to the 1958 Disney animated version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” than to the 1820 short story. In the original tale, Crane appears as the very epitome of the money-hungry New England Yankee, indeed as a kind of embodiment of the new entrepreneurial spirit of the commercial revolution. Crane comes to the small, Dutch community and does his best to extract money from this small township and marry one of the prettiest, and wealthiest, of its daughters.

Crane is also representative of the American Puritan, eager for stories of monsters and ready to believe in the devilish nature of the American frontier. Irving describes him as the “perfect master” of Cotton Mather’s works on witchcraft, with an “appetite for the marvelous” sated only by the old Puritan’s “direful tales.” In Crane, and in some sense the community he comes to, we have a compendium of all the monster tales that both delighted and terrified colonial America. Irving tells us that one of Crane’s favorite pastimes is to sit by the fire with “old Dutch wives” and “listen to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields and haunted brooks.” He, in turn, regaled them with tales of witchcraft and of “direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut.”
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Crane’s fascination with such legends prepares him to be deceived by Bones, portrayed by Irving as a prototypical frontier hero along the lines of Boone, Crockett, and Leatherstocking. Indeed, his defeat of Crane by subterfuge (we are led to believe that Bones likely disguised himself as the headless horseman in order to terrify away the schoolmaster) is one of the typical clever tricks played by the rough and ready men of the frontier who were often tricksters as well as fighters.
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Irving shaped a monster story that sought to give America a usable past. The feeling that American nationalism had little strong soil to root itself in, no historic past or ancient traditions, was a common one in the early nineteenth century. The commercial revolution, which seemed in the process of turning over what thin soil existed for the creation of settled communities with a definable past, only added to this feeling. Irving notes that in America,

there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhoods; so when they turn out at night to walk their rounds they have no acquaintance left to call upon.
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Irving sought to remedy this by creating an American past filled with as many monsters as Europe could boast. Irving believed that this past should be one with monsters, that American identity needed its headless Hessians and haunted places.

While American writers like Irving sought to shape a monstrous past, European romantic writers drew on the folklore of their continent to create new creatures of the night. Many of these would play a central role in America’s horrific future. The gothic novel provided the setting for such monsters’ graveyards, ruins, and castles haunted with secrets. Major authors in the romantic tradition filled these scenes with shambling monsters.

Romanticism gave life to the undead, specifically to the vampire. Vampiric creatures have roots deep in numerous world mythologies but first popped out of their coffins in modern literature through several eighteenth-century German works, including Goethe’s 1797
The Bride of Corinth
. The folklore of Eastern Europe and China viewed the vampire as a bestial creature, barely if at all human. In the shadowy light of German romanticism, the vampire became a dark lover, returning from the grave to reclaim a forbidden bride.
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The vampire met the world of English romanticism through the work of Robert Southey. Southey’s 1801
Thalaba the Destroyer
introduced the seductive female vampire. It also included an appendix that translated the work of a French Benedictine who collected and compiled much of the mythology surrounding undead revenants. This translation, much beloved by notables like Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Poe, gave the blood-sucking vampire his invitation to make his way fully into the English and the American consciousnesses.
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On a summer holiday in Switzerland in 1816, two bohemian writers created what horror historian David Skal has called the “dark twins” of modern monster mania. The gathering included the poet Lord Byron, seventeen-year-old Mary Godwin (better known as Mary Shelley), the English poet Percy Shelley, and Byron’s personal physician, Dr. John Polidori. One of these early nineteenth-century rock stars (local villagers apparently viewed their holiday as a drug-fueled, sex-frenzied debauch) suggested that they hold an impromptu contest to see who could produce the best ghost story. Polidori’s contribution, based on
some rough notes of Byron’s, would be published several years later as “The Vampyre.”
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