Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  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.4

  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.5

  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.6

  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.7

  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.”8

  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.”9

  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.10

  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.11

  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.”12

  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.13

  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.14

  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.15

  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.16

  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.”17

  Polidori’s tale (for a time attributed to Byron himself) portrayed a very Byronesque character named Lord Ruthven who becomes a vampire after his death. As in German versions of the vampire legend, Ruthven searches for a forbidden bride (a motif that appears in Bram Stoker’s masterwork). Theatrical versions of “The Vampyre” became common, and it eventually worked its influence over Stoker’s tale in the 1890s.18

  Vampires would take some time to make their way to the United States but the other monstrous creation of that Swiss holiday more quickly shambled ashore. While Polidori dreamed of bloodsucking (and sexy) freaks, young Mary Shelley had nightmares of “the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the Thing he had put together.” Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus would be first published in 1818 and would see quick, trans-Atlantic success.19

  “In less than a decade,” writes Susan Tyler Hitchcock, author of an important cultural history of Shelley’s tale, “Frankenstein had penetrated the public imagination and had become a story told, retold and reinterpreted.” Theatrical productions of Shelley’s monster story appeared in America as early as 1825. Her dark tale influenced a fascination in American pulp literature with dissection and dismemberment as well as the horrors of resuscitated life. Lurid American novels, such as John Hovey Robinson’s Marietta; or, The Two Students: a Tale of the Dissecting Room and “Body Snatchers” (1842), drew on the imagery of Frankenstein while also reflecting a debate in the emerging American medical profession over the ethics of dissection.20

  Although born of the same cultural moment, Frankenstein’s monster and the vampire are quite distinct horrors. The Creature is born in a lab and his creation is an industrial process; an assembling of parts. The vampire has clear supernatural origins in devil worship and black magic. He is not the creation of the Industrial Revolution but a memory of the times before it, a dark nostalgia. Differences aside, the fascination with both monsters grew out of the rapidly changing conditions of early capitalism. The Industrial Revolution seemed to suggest that technology had become Dr. Frankenstein, unleashing monsters to walk the earth. A society where technology had seemingly taken the place of the divine raised questions about the nature of the supernatural, questions that the vampire answered in terrifying fashion.21

  American readers took much more quickly to Frankenstein’s monster. The rapid changes brought by the market revolution created significant nervousness in the American public. This theme in Frankenstein, especially when combined with the obvious metaphors of enslavement and rebellion, touched a cord in American audiences. Literary scholar Elizabeth Young shows that the image of Frankenstein as rebellious slave not only appears in relation to white anxiety over the Nat Turner Rebellion but also becomes “the embodiment of racial uprising” in political rhetoric and imagery. The story of a “monster” that rebelled against its master offered a very explicit metaphor for nervous whites.22

  The vampire would, appropriately, only lurk in the American shadows through most of the nineteenth century. However, he made his influence felt in ways that point to what would become his rock star status in twentieth-century American pop culture. For example, a number of Poe’s tales feature a vampire that lives off the psychic energy, if not the blood, of its victims. At least one unpublished vampire novel of the 1870s drew on the same European influences that were later so important to Stoker in the 1890s.23

  The American turn toward the gothic, with its dark castles and shambling creatures, represents only one facet of the nation’s monster obsession. America remained a settler society throughout much of the nineteenth century, expanding its frontier and seeking to secure a profit on the seas. Monsters of the deep appeared both in frontier lakes and along its coasts, frightening and appalling but also delighting the new nation. Not surprisingly for a seaboard nation tied to the economic engine of the Atlantic world, monsters from the depths haunted the waters.

  Melville’s Monster

  One of America’s greatest horror writers would reflect on the terrors of the seas. Early twentieth-century pulp writer H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Dagon” tells the tale of a marooned sailor during the First World War who comes upon a strange megalith on a seemingly deserted island. Under “a fantastically gibbous moon” the sailor sees that the stone is covered in images of horrifying creatures who “were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy bulging eyes and other features less pleasant to recall.” Already unsettled by these images, the unnamed sailor is then driven insane when “a stupendous monster of nightmares” slides out of the sea and embraces the monolith.24

  Lovecraft became a master at creating inhuman horrors connected to the ocean. His famous short story “The Call of Cthluhu” imagines a gigantic, apocalyptic monster sleeping beneath the waves, waiting for the stars to align so that it can rise and destroy all human society. In other tales, creatures from other dimensions, called forth by equally monstrous humans, wreak havoc and threaten the existence of human life on earth. Terror in Lovecraft’s conception came from a philosophical sentiment in which human beings are expendable and unimportant rather than direct victims and prey. The vast heavens and the equally vast deeps contained monsters that will unthinkingly destroy us.

  The American sea serpent of the early nineteenth century was a much less frightening creature. In no way did it represent a beast that could upset the order of things. The serpent instead became the center of scientific debate, playing a role in discussions about the nature of geological change and evolutionary biology. By extension, “serpent sightings” and their meaning became the basis for an emerging war between amateur and professional conceptions of science and a debate over the nature of scientific evidence. The creature also came to occupy a central place in American popular culture in what would become a well-worn path for the monster. In the United States, every frightening apparition and ravening beast has had an afterlife as a media celebrity.

  Antebellum America remained fascinated with monsters of the deep long after the sightings of the sea serpent off Gloucester harbor. Between 1800 and 1850, American monster watchers reported over one hundred and sixty-six sightings of alleged sea serpents, both on the high seas and in American lakes. A market in fossils devel
oped as monster hunters claimed to locate the remains of sea serpents in all parts of the new nation.25

  Sea serpent mania generated a significant amount of scientific interest. Debates over the existence of the creature claimed the attention of important nineteenth-century scientists, including Charles Lyell. Best known for his work on geology that complemented Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lyell collected numerous eyewitness accounts of the creature and, at one particularly enthusiastic moment, claimed that these accounts had caused him to “believe in the sea serpent without ever having seen it.”26

  The Boston Linnean Society shared Lyell’s interest, and after the 1817 Massachusetts sightings, began a serious effort to compile accounts and work up a zoological profile of the sea serpent. In their zeal to find definitive evidence for the creature, members of the society became convinced that a three-foot snake with strange markings represented one of the sea serpent’s young. This alleged find encouraged the speculation that the Gloucester serpent had come close to shore to spawn. Early American newspapers widely reported the society’s claims, causing significant embarrassment when further investigations by Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz revealed the creature as a fairly common land snake with a disease that gave it strangely raised bumps. The debacle helped lead to the dissolution of the Boston society in 1822.27

  This embarrassment for the New England natural history community did nothing to dampen the broader American enthusiasm for sea monsters that reached fever pitch by midcentury. In 1852 the American whaling ship Monangahela allegedly sighted a sea serpent over one hundred feet in length in the South Pacific. The ship’s captain, whose reports from sea filtered in to American newspapers throughout the year, described an epic chase in which the giant creature, after being hit with multiple harpoons, pulled the ship for sixteen hours before dying. In his letters to major American magazines, the captain promised to sail into New York harbor with the remains of the sea beast. The excitement over the serpent resulted in multiple stories in the New York Times and the New York Tribune. Unfortunately, the Monongahela was reported lost in the arctic seas in 1853.28