Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (44 page)

M
onsters are hiding in the traditional raw materials of American history. Many of the primary sources for this book are evidence of this, revealing how traditional sources contain a substratum of gothic beliefs about the borderlands between the monstrous and the human. This book is an archaeological effort to examine what lies beneath these tectonic layers.

One archival resource worth special comment is the Robert H. Brisendine collection at Emory University Library Special Collections. This large collection of materials related to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century traveling circuses, carnivals, and “monster shows” proved especially useful for filling out my discussion of the American freak show with a large number of regional examples. At the Library of Congress, the American Memory Project offered a vast treasure trove of both primary documents and images. Two secondary works, Teresa Goddu’s
Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Elizabeth Young’s
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
(New York: New York University Press, 2008) provided both guidance and interpretation of a number of nineteenth-century sources, especially newspapers.

There are several necessary guides for the traveler searching for monsters in the dark forests of American pop culture. David J. Skal, the acknowledged dean of monster culture, provides a wonderful guide to monsters on film and in literature in a number of works, most especially his magnum opus,
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992). Skal’s work has been a great inspiration for my own in his exploration of the relationship between pop culture of the fantastic and its social and political context. His work almost always avoids the errors of simple, reductive psychological interpretation of monstrous imagery.

A general guide to monsters on film, crucial material for my argument in the latter chapters of this book, is John Stanley’s
Creature Features: The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Guide
(New York: Berkley Boulevard Books, 1997). Stanley was the “horror host” for the longtime San Francisco area TV series
Creature Features
, and his book is the Baedekers of horror movies.

Several works on the relationship between American culture and history helped me to describe the relationship between pop images, folklore, and the historical process. These include Richard Slotkin’s
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America
(New York: Macmillan, 1992), Michael Kammen’s
American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), Lawrence W. Levine’s
Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
and Orlando Patterson’s,
Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
(New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998).

The work of several historians has been especially influential in shaping how I understand the narrative of American history. Sean Wilentz’s work, both in
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and the
Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008
(New York: Harper, 2008), has informed my reading of nineteenth-century America and the late twentieth century. Two other historians, Lynn Dumenil and Andreas Killen, have written works that provide skeleton keys to crucial moments in twentieth-century American culture. Dumenil’s
The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) and Killen’s
1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2007) use a close reading of a specific era to draw larger, brilliant conclusions about the American historical/cultural process.

Exploring and explaining the convoluted history of race and racism is crucial to this book’s task. The discussion of the origins of American racial attitudes in the colonial period depended on my late teacher Winthrop Jordan’s classic work
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). I was lucky in that Nell Irvin Painter’s monumental
The History of White People
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), which details the history not only of racism in the Western world but the concept of race itself, appeared while I was in the midst of this project. My discussion in chapter 4 benefited greatly from her work. Books that helped me explore how attitudes about interracial sex informed conceptions of the other include Catherine Clinton and Michelle Gillespie’s collection
The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Scholarship on gender and sexuality has informed this project throughout, especially my analysis of the imagery of the vampire and certain aspects of American folklore and urban legends. Scholars will certainly detect the influence of Judith Butler’s paradigm-changing
Gender Trouble
(New York: Routledge, 1999). Her reading, interpretation, and problematizing of the work of Kristeva and Foucault have deeply influenced my own understanding of them. Also influential for me has been Anne McClintock’s
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
(New York: Routledge, 1995) and Anne Stoler’s
Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Order of Things
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). Both works look primarily at structures of power and sexuality in a colonial/postcolonial context. However, their expositions of raced notions of gender and their interpretations of the construction of sexualities within the politics of the body and culture have been very determinative for my own analysis of the American society’s constructions of deviance and normalcy.

Two works on the relationship between gender and the horror genre are acknowledged throughout the book, but both deserve some mention here. Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995) and Carol J. Clover’s
Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Halberstam’s
Skin Shows
illuminates the nature of gender in relation to gothic fictions and includes a compelling reading of both the novel
Frankenstein
and the 1991 film
The Silence of the Lambs
. Her definition of the monster as a meaning machine, productive of a variety of gendered cultural dynamics, can be seen on almost every page of my study. Her more recent work is some of the most articulate and revolutionary expositions of transgender theory, including
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
(New York: New York University Press, 2005).

Clover’s
Men, Women and Chainsaws
provided a breakthrough in feminist readings of the horror genre, especially with regard to the gendered politics of the slasher film. Her interpretation of the importance of the final girl is key to my own reading of this genre’s significance in late twentieth-century American history. Also worth examining is an excellent essay collection edited by Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord entitled
Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence
(Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006). Especially useful in this collection is the essay by Steven Jay Schneider entitled “The Madwomen in Our Movies: Female Psycho-Killers in American Horror Cinema.”

The work of scholars of religious studies and especially religion in American history is key to a number of aspects of this book. Douglas E. Cowan’s
Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008) provides all of us working in this field with a learned discussion of how cultural fears are represented in our collective dream-life of film and literature. I am a great admirer of George Marsden. His work, especially
Religion and American Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990) and
Fundamentalism in American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) informed all of my writing about American religious history. Gary Ladderman’s studies of the American “way of death” are essential to my interpretation in chapter 2 of the late Victorian period, especially
The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death: 1799–1883
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Finally, many of my source materials for my discussions of the twentieth century are drawn from my own collection of comics, fan magazines, memorabilia, and films. I hope that it is clear how much I am immersed in the material I write about; all my criticisms of the various tropes and metaphors of pop culture are best seen in this light.
Twilight
may well be the only work discussed that I consider so ideologically and aesthetically repugnant that I see no value in it. If I have a quarrel with
King
Kong
or
The Bride of Frankenstein
it is most assuredly a lover’s quarrel.

1
  Halberstam writes, “The Monster’s body is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative.” I am here elaborating on Halberstam’s meaning and suggesting that American monsters, in the gothic mode, are productive and representative of meanings granted them by a particular epoch and its historical discourses. I also find useful Halberstam’s argument that the meanings of the monster are connected to “a particular history of sexuality” in which the other, the monster, becomes a sexualized foreigner. According to her reading, this begins in nineteenth-century gothic literature and continues through the modern slasher film. See Judith Halberstam,
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 7–9, 21–27.

2
  In the discussion that follows, it is important for the reader to remember the distinction between horror narratives and their most common subject, the monster. The monster, while most commonly showing up in the context of a horror aesthetic, is a being that moves in and out of these narratives and can find real-world incarnations. Part of this book’s argument is that the monster can become “materialization of ideology” (Slavoj Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” in
The Žižek Reader
, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999]).

3
  Greil Marcus,
The Dustbin of History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 24.

4
  See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 91.

5
  Ironically, Žižek uses the phrase “the truth is out there” to explain Lacan’s notion that “the unconscious is outside.” This book assumes something similar in its interpretation of cultural images of the monster. They assume a “corporeal form” in the events of American history and how that history shapes American culture. In this way, their “external materiality renders visible inherent antagonisms.” They become for American historical consciousness what Žižek labels “the imp of perversity.” See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 89.

6
  The historians among my readers will, I hope, recall the foundational social historian E. P. Thompson’s effort to free his subjects from “the enormous condescension of the past.” See E. P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12. This is the most basic goal of every historian and every work of history.

1
  Account taken from Dwight Taylor,
Joy Ride
(New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1959), 240–48.

2
  Taylor,
Joy Ride
, 240–48.

3
  A brief description of the film’s reception appears in Melvin E. Matthews, Jr.,
Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2009), 53–58.

4
  This argument follows Nancy Bombaci, who suggests that films of this era, especially by Mayer, tried to create the ideal middle-class experience with an emphasis on idealized white female beauty. She notes the irony that the villain/victim in
Freaks
replicates the statuesque blonde heroine of most of Mayer’s films. See Nancy Bombaci,
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture
(New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 81–83, 100–101.

5
  A few have come close. Kendall R. Phillips in
Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005) looks at how the historical context of certain horror films affected and reflected their subject matter. Most of these are, however, post-1960. His excellent analysis does not deal with the larger story of the monster in America. My reading of late twentieth-century horror film is deeply influenced by Linnie Blake’s
The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historic Trauma and National Identity
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008). It is outside of Blake’s purpose to examine the phenomenon of the monster in American history.