Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  44 Jan Harold Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 1998), 270–72.

  45 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 37–57.

  46 Paul Semonin, American Monster (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 6, 176.

  47 See Robert Annan, “Account of a Skeleton of a Large Animal, found near Hudson’s River,” in Memoirs of the Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1793), 160–68.

  48 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 37–43.

  49 Quoted in Semonin, American Monster, 178.

  50 John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (New York: printed and sold by Samuel Campbell, no. 37, 1793), Early American Imprints. Series I, no. 25648, 32.

  51 Filson, Discovery, 36.

  52 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 278–312.

  53 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 133.

  54 Semonin, American Monster, 219–20.

  55 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 84–102, 124–40.

  56 A layperson’s history of the trade can be found in Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

  57 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 299.

  58 Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography, abridged ed., Paul Edwards (London: Heineman Press, 1967), 25–26.

  59 A full account of these beliefs and a sampling of the mountain of evidence for them appears in William D. Pierson, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs,” The Journal of Negro History 62, no. 2 (1977): 147–49.

  60 John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 2 (2003): 273–94.

  61 Josiah C. Nott, “Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Race” in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew G. Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1981), 206–38.

  62 For a discussion of Hammond and of paternalism more generally, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), esp. 72–73.

  63 “Charlestown,” South Carolina Gazette, February 25, 1737, special collections, Charleston County Library.

  64 A number of scholars have discussed the paradox of the slave as monster and faithful servant. On the varieties of slave resistance, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 155–68. On paternalism and its contradictions, see Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), see esp. 89–93.

  65 Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 19–20.

  66 William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2007), 15.

  67 The story about a South Carolina planter who disguised himself in a devil costume is described in a religious tract from the early nineteenth century entitled “The Devil Let Loose” (author unknown) (New York: n.p., 1805).

  68 See Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–10. For a different view of the same process, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 254–55, 365–69.

  69 A discussion of Douglass’ 1860 speech appears in Young, Black Frankenstein, 45–46.

  Chapter 2

  1 A good overview of Candyman and its relation to notions of place and space can be found in Avivia Breifel and Sianna Naigal, “How much did you pay for this place?: Fear, Entitlement and Urban Space in Bernard Roses’ Candyman,” Camera Obscura 37 (1997): 70–91.

  2 One of the best studies of the antebellum era, and one that emphasizes the unbelievable tensions in American society is William H. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  3 On the end of Reconstruction and its effects, see some examples in Joel Williamson, After Slavery (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990).

  4 See Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style and Sub-culture (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002) and Gavin Baddely, Goth Chic: A Connoisseur’s Guide (Medford, N.J.: Plexus Publishing, 2002).

  5 Anne Williams has argued that mythoi of gothic, their basic structure despite differing motifs, all relate in one way or another to the “terrors” of the patriarchal family. See her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  6 A voluminous literary scholarship exists on the nature and definition of the gothic, and it is beyond my purpose to explore that scholarship here. I find especially useful Mark Edmundson’s formulation in his brilliant meditation Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Edmundson writes that “Gothic is the art of haunting, the art of possession.” He argues that, in contemporary America, “not all our gothic modes are fictive” and that the art of haunting has found its way into the very real occurrences of cultural, social, and political history. See pp. xi–xviii.

  7 Valdine Clemens, Return of the Repressed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 15–16. See also Clive Bloom’s Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2010), esp. 4, 5.

  8 Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle (Mahwah, N.J.; Watermill Press, 1980), 3.

  9 Irving, Legend, 5.

  10 A good discussion of the 1819 Panic and its causes and effects appears in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 206–17.

  11 Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 207–8.

  12 Irving, Legend, 12–13.

  13 See Kent L. Steckmesser, “The Frontier Hero in History and Legend,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 46, no. 3 (1963): 168–79. Steckmesser gives numerous examples from the nineteenth-century accounts of the exploits of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, and less well-known figures.

  14 Irving, Legend, 36.

  15 On the origins of vampire folklore, see Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

  16 James Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 112.

  17 David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 82.

  18 Skal, Monster Show, 82.

  19 Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 93; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: New American Library, 1978), x–xi.

  20 See Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 213–17.

  21 On how quickly the creature in Shelley’s work became associated with industrial change and mechanical processes, see Hitchcock, Frankenstein, 101–6. See also Laurence A. Rickels’ discussion of Frankenstein and the birth of the “dark twins” in The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 277–86.

  22 Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 5.

  23 On Poe’s vampires, see Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures, 121. The unpublished novel is entitled “The Last of the Vampires: A Tale of Baltimore City,” John Hill Hewitt Papers, Box 5, Emory University Special Collections.

  24 H. P. Lovecraft, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House Publishers, 1965), 14–19.

  25 Sherrie Lynne Lyon
s, Species, Serpents, Spirits and Skulls (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 34.

  26 Lyons, Species, 30.

  27 Lyons, Species, 40.

  28 “The Sea Serpent Caught at Last!” New York Tribune, February 1852; reprinting of Captain Seabury’s account in Antoon Cornelis Oudemans and Loren Coleman, The Great Sea Serpent (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 45–51.

  29 Lyons, Species, 47.

  30 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 498.

  31 “Hydrarchos or Great Sea Serpent,” September 19, 1845; American Memory Project, Library of Congress.

  32 M. Strakosch, “Sea Serpent Polka” (Boston: G. P. Reed), Rare Book, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

  33 Robert H. Brisendine Papers, box 11, file folder 22, Emory University Special Collections.

  34 Brisendine Papers, box 24, file folder 82.

  35 For an introduction to this vast critical commentary see Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, intro. and ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2007). Melville quote taken from Moby-Dick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 498.

  36 Andrew Delbanco, “Introduction,” in Moby-Dick, xiii.

  37 Melville, Moby-Dick, 13, 14.

  38 Melville, Moby-Dick, 13–15.

  39 Melville, Moby-Dick, 624.

  40 Melville, Moby-Dick, 259.

  41 See Bruce Levine, Half-Slave and Half-Free: Roots of the Civil War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992). Sean Wilentz describes the context of Moby-Dick, which he sees as a “prophecy of America’s destruction,” in Rise of American Democracy, 653–55.

  42 Gross quoted in Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 133; Morrison quoted in Bettye J. Parker, “Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women—An Interview Essay,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (New York: Anchor Books, 1979).

  43 Goddu, Gothic America, 133ff.

  44 See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 97–102, 119–20.

  45 Quoted in Young, Black Frankenstein, 49–50.

  46 Goddu, Gothic America, 133.

  47 Goddu, Gothic America, 133–36.

  48 W. Scott Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005), 23.

  49 See Annalee Newitz’s brilliant examination of Crane in Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 16–19.

  50 R. B. Rosenburg, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14.

  51 Anthony Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  52 Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 78.

  53 See Michael Griffin, “The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 135–39. See also an excellent survey of the Brady photographs in Jarret Ruminski, “A Terrible Fascination: Civil War Photography and the Advent of Photographic Realism” (M.A. thesis, Youngstown State University, 2007), esp. 4, 6, 63–80.

  54 Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead, 19–20.

  55 Described in Laderman, Sacred Remains, 100.

  56 Laderman, Sacred Remains, 168–69.

  57 This turn in theology is explored fully in Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 177–189.

  58 Ambrose Bierce, Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Toronto: Dover Publications, 1964).

  59 Quoted in David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 44.

  60 Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 46.

  61 The best known account of Holmes is Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). See also Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 49–65.

  62 Mary P. Ryan examines the social and economic origins of “the cult of true womanhood” ideology in Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 191–229. See also Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. 197–206.

  63 Literary criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work in relation to the gothic is truly voluminous. One good place to begin is an excellent essay by Robert K. Martin entitled “Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in the National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 129–42. Martin sees in Hawthorne a return of the “national repressed.”

  64 This reading of ”Young Goodman Brown” draws on the work of James C. Keil, “Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown: Early Nineteenth Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender,” New England Quarterly 69, no. 1 (1996): 33–55.

  65 See Scott Peeples, The After-Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004), 108–15. Peeples argues that “addressing gender in Poe involves acknowledging his benighted thinking on the subject while also recognizing the ways he exposes the dangers of the dominant (sexist) ideology in his work.”

  66 Goddu, Gothic America, 78.

  67 In Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996), Tony Williams makes the argument that what he calls “family horror” has been central to both gothic literature and later film conventions in America. See esp. 26–30.

  68 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 181–82.

  69 Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 190–91.

  70 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) describe the common nineteenth-century trope of “The monster-woman threatening to replace her angelic sister [who], embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author’s ability to allay his anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained ‘place.’” See p. 28. This describes most of Poe’s female characters and their narratives.

  71 The most detailed study of Woodhull’s construction in the press is Amanda Frisken’s Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Frisken looks into how men’s “sporting papers” often feature attacks and cartoons on Woodhull. See esp. 16, 17, 140–45.

  72 Anthony Comstock “Vampire Literature,” North American Review 417 (1891): 161–62; Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1998), 185.

  73 Frisken, Victoria’s Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution, 46–47.

  74 Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 14, 15.

  75 Carole Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 226–28.

  76 The most detailed history of interracial sex, combined with the racial anxieties and obsessions that went with it, can be found in Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

  Chapter 3

  1 A full exploration of Frankenstein as a cultural symbol appears in Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

  2 Christa Knellwolf and
Jane Goodall, “Introduction,” in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 2.

  3 Melinda Cooper, “Monstrous Progeny: The Teratological Tradition in Science and Literature,” in Knellwolf and Goddall, Frankenstein’s Science, 87–89. Michael J. Hyde in Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010) shows that Shelley also revolted against her father’s fascination with famed chemist Humphry Davy who regarded nature as a “she” whose mysteries had to be uncovered. See 98–104.

  4 Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 216.

  5 Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 352–54. Malcomson suggests that emancipation terrified whites, by calling the meaning of whiteness into question. Only in this way can we make sense of the “pathological” fears that created the horrifying spectacles of lynching.

  6 Gregory quoted in Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 212.

  7 Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2010), 171.

  8 David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On the “purpose-built cinema,” see 89–98.

  9 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 119, 137.

  10 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 121–22.

  11 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 278.

  12 Quoted in Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 277.

  13 Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 279.

  14 A general description of post-Civil War violence against African Americans appears in Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 276–80. See also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 426–27.