Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Failing to acknowledge monsters is part of the act of creating them. The claim that America has always been the Puritans’ (and Ronald Reagan’s) “city on a hill” is like Dr. Frankenstein’s claim that the creature he would create would “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Refusing to acknowledge the terrors of American history does not make them go away. Instead they wait, emerging nightmare-like into the images of popular culture and into folktales, in fictional narratives and in narratives told around campfires. The monster lives at the heart of American identity, giving the lie to notions of American innocence and exceptionalism.57

  Monstrous narratives not only shape identities, they provide a place to hold conversations about our public anxieties. Our monsters register our national traumas. Eli Roth, the director of the violent film Hostel, oversimplifies somewhat when he makes the claim that horror films, especially of an extreme variety, are most popular during times of national turmoil. However, numerous moments in American social and cultural history suggest that the monster itself, as omen and portent full of cultural meaning, does exist in the middle of a matrix of history and reflection on the meaning of history. The fascination with fossils and the fantastic creatures they may have belonged to peaked during the final years of the American Revolution and the throes of state building that followed. Popular interest and scientific discourses related to the “freak” arose in the midst of discussion about race and its meaning in post-Emancipation society. Slasher films appeared at a moment when American society seemed to be committing suicide in a maelstrom of political violence and social unrest. The so-called torture porn genre, produced by Eli Roth and others, has become popular as the United States has debated its willingness to use torture against terrorist monsters.58

  These examples are not meant to suggest, as Roth seems to be suggesting that horror narratives primarily exist to offer American society catharsis or that monstrous fascination essentially acts as kind of national group therapy. This book argues instead that monsters in America are more than reference points for cultural obsessions. Monsters are “real” in the sense that they not only symbolize, but also help to configure, worldviews and play a role in those worldviews. They live outside of our psyches.

  If the history of the American monster could be reduced to the story of psychic wounds opened by national traumas, then this would be strangely comforting. But the monsters walk among us, leaving a trail of gore and ichor in their wake. We wish we could be F. Scott Fitzgerald, having our uncomfortable encounters and then vomiting up our response to them. It is not that simple. There are victims of our monsters. Not victims screaming on the screen or within the pages of paperback horror fiction but historical victims, sacrificed to the nation-state and its sometimes bloodthirsty folk culture.

  The American past, this book contends, is a haunted house. Ghosts rattle their chains throughout its corridors, under its furniture, and in its small attic places. The historian must resurrect monsters in order to pull history’s victims out of what Alice Walker calls “the mud of oblivion.” The historian’s task is necromancy, and it gives us nightmares. Or at least it should.59

  The link between the metaphor and the reality of horror, the moments when monstrous fascinations become monstrous acts, appears far too often in American historical experience. Not long before Cotton Mather wrote to the Royal Society describing the appearance of giant fossils, he described the destruction of the Pequot Native Americans of New England in the 1630s. Mather noted one episode in particular in which settlers attacked a native village on the Mystic River near Long Island Sound, killing, literally, everything that moved and then burning the village to the ground. William Bradford in his History of Plymouth Plantation described the aftermath of the same incident as “a fearful sight” with the helpless Pequot “frying in the fyre and the streams of blood quenching the same.” Bradford may have thought the sight fearful but also approved of what he saw, describing how “the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice and they gave the praise thereof to God.” Mather also expressed pleasure at this brutal massacre, crowing that “no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”60

  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.”61

  One

  MONSTROUS BEGINNINGS

  There are terrible creatures, ghosts, in the very air of America.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  The past is a wilderness of horrors.

  —Anthony Hopkins, The Wolfman (2010)

  Wes 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.1

  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.2

  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.”3

  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.4

  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.5

  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.6

  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.7

  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.8

  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.9

  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.10

  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.11

  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.12

  Such conceptions of the diabolism of native peoples led so
me 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.13

  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.14

  A sixteenth-century Dutch engraving in Hans Staden’s True History best illustrates this very common representation of the Americas. Struden’s work, a captivity narrative that allegedly describes his time among the natives of Brazil, tells a tale of cannibalism that rivals anything a modern master of horror could conjure. One of the more infamous images from that work shows a gory cannibal feast that zombie auteur George Romero might have filmed. A gaggle of cannibals roast human body parts over a fire. A dwarf gnaws on a human hand. Women, sketched according to the traditional European iconography of the witch, chomp on legs, arms, and unidentified bits of human detritus.