Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting
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Popular responses to America’s monsters illustrate Kristeva’s point. A devoted female following for Bela Lugosi in the 1930s is perhaps explicable by the fact that the audience separated the suave, handsome Hungarian actor from the monster. But monsters on the silver screen are not the only creatures of the night surrounded with an aura of desirability. A real-world case in point is Richard Ramirez, the so-called “Night Stalker,” who, in the summer of 1985, went on trial for the murder of thirteen people. His victims had ranged from elderly women to children. The few who survived his attacks described him as dressed in black with long hair, poor teeth, and a bad smell. When finally brought to trial, Ramirez flashed the sign of the pentagram tattooed in his hand at the judge and jury, apparently intimidating both.40
Ramirez would seem a highly unlikely candidate as a sex symbol and yet this is exactly what he became. According to one account of the days following his trial, a “line of female admirers formed at the prison” in an attempt to visit him. Ramirez transfixed one female juror, who sent him a valentine during the trial (later voting to convict him anyway). Men also feel this attraction to the serial killer. Author Jason Moss developed an intense obsession with John Wayne Gacy (even reading gay erotica in an effort to find tantalizing images to include in letters that would pique Gacy’s interest). “The victims of the abject” Kristeva writes “are its fascinated victims.” The monster always has its groupies. The power of what Kristeva calls the abject is the power of the monster. It incites, excites, and horrifies all at once.41
Interpreters of monsters who have not closely followed Freud have still often relied on psychological theories. A number of scholars, many of them seeking to explain the appeal of the monstrous in pop culture, have seen the monster primarily as part of an inner horror show, the personal nightmares of the ego torn between a reptilian id and the moralistic superego. This interpretation understands the monster as a metaphor of human development, the demons that guard the gates of adulthood and emotional maturity. Monsters, according to this view, are primarily inner monsters. Our desire for them emerges from our desire to embrace our own darkness.
This approach often makes the self, especially the adolescent self, the locus of understanding the horrific. Walter Evans, in a 1984 essay entitled “Horror Films: A Sexual Theory,” claims that the appeal of the monster comes from adolescent fear and anxiety over alienation. Monsters, for Evans, embody all the dangers of puberty including threat, bodily changes, and an increased awareness of mortality. Other studies have reached similar dubious conclusions. An article by communications scholars Dolf Zillman and James B. Weaver asserted that horror acts on adolescents to shore up societal gender expectations. Basing their argument on a single experiment in which male and female pairs watched Friday the 13th, Part 3 and recorded their responses, Zillman and Weaver conclude that horror films teach boys “fearlessness and protective competence,” while girls learn “fearfulness and protective need.”42
Larger, more serious, and more influential studies have come to at least similar conclusions. Cultural historian James Twitchell’s massive study of horror over several centuries concludes that the horror tale provides “formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by an adolescent audience.” Like all myths and fairy tales, Twitchell believes, tales of monsters both “preserve culture and protect the individual.” Horror tales, he claims, act specifically on adolescents to excite sexual longings while at the same time explaining the dangers inherent in these longings. In particular, Twitchell insists, tales of monsters contain warnings about the violation of the incest taboo. Even classic tales where such a motif is not readily apparent, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, yield to Twitchell’s rather ingenious interpretation. Dracula, in his reading, becomes a kind of retelling of the Freudian “primal horde” myth in which “a band of boys” seeks to destroy the “evil patriarch” so they can have sexual access to his “wives.”43
These examples, when looked at through the broad history of fascination with the monster, fail to cover the full range of possible meanings. Twitchell’s description of the “audience” who consumes horror, which he claims is primarily adolescent, neglects to take into account everything from genre to time period. Even more damning of this approach is his concept of audience, which is significantly limited. Twitchell fails to explore a much larger cultural attraction to monstrosity by restricting the discussion entirely to the productions of popular culture. The history of the American monster is far more complex than this, and audiences who thrill to the monster are far more diverse and sophisticated than Twitchell allows.44
The failure of much of the literature of horror to consider the larger social context has been challenged, especially by scholars of religion. Douglas E. Cowan’s tour de force Sacred Terror argues that every cinematic image of terror comes with its own “social history.” Cowan describes the American horror film as working in terms of “sociophobics,” a symbolic machinery that structures a social order and teaches us to fear through the production of intense cultural images (like horror films themselves). Cowan goes beyond scholars who have sought to locate the sources of pop entertainment terror in the individual self. He suggests that these films register profound fears that are the warp and woof of cultural order, the societal sense of anxiety that Cowan calls the direct collision between “what we hope to be true about the world and what we fear may be the reality.”45
Cowan is not alone in his insistence that the monster must be understood as reflection of society rather than simply the shadows of the individual psyche. Jonathan Lake Crane, in his powerful criticism of much of the writing about horror, has argued that too many critics have seen images of the monstrous as “archetypes or psychic blackholes” rather than social experiences. Specifically writing about the enjoyment of modern horror films, Crane insists that this is not a solitary experience with one’s own psychological terrors but rather “joining millions of others on a roller coaster.”46
This book will build on the work of Crane, Cowan, and others who have located the monster outside of the human psyche. Monsters of all kinds are far more than malefic explosions of the id, more than a return of the repressed. Monsters occupy a central place in American social and cultural history. They sit like spiders in the center of a web of political identities, economic forces, racial fantasy, and gender dynamics. They are more than the dark side of the human personality or the dark side of popular culture. They are part of the genetic code of the American experience, ciphers that reveal disturbing truths about everything from colonial settlement to the institution of slavery, from anti-immigrant movements to the rise of religious fundamentalism in recent American politics. They are more than fantastical metaphors because they have a history coincident with a national history.47
The interpretation of the monstrous as the working out of psychic trauma is deeply flawed in its reductive and overdeterminative implications. Scholars who focus primarily on the psychological symbols that appear in modern monster narratives explain some aspects of pop culture; they tell us something about the unconscious dynamics at work in modern horror films; they help to describe how and why an audience might find a specific horror icon both dreadful and tantalizing. In relation to the event that opens this chapter, they might even be able to explain F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nausea—but they do not tell us anything about sea serpents.
The Abyss
In August of 1817 a small group of fisherman sighted a sea monster off the coast of Massachusetts. At that time, wrote the Boston Daily Advertiser, the sighting had been assumed to be “a creature of the imagination.” But within ten to twelve days, reported the same source, the giant creature entered Gloucester harbor, one of the most prosperous fishing ports in New England, and had been seen by “hundreds of people.”48
A broadside distributed in Boston on August 22nd claimed that witnesses who had come within “10 to 15 yards” of the creature had described it as between fifty and seventy feet in length with �
��the width of barrel.” The creature’s head, characterized as being the size of horse or a large dog, periodically raised itself out of the water. The sea serpent moved with great speed and could whip itself round to move in reverse motion “almost instantaneously.” The Salem Register reported that the sea beast left a wake a mile and a half in length as it moved through the water at prodigious speeds.49
The whaling community of Gloucester contained plenty of men who considered themselves experts in seeking out sea monsters. The second day of the sightings, four boats of “adventurous sailors and experienced gunners” went after the creature with guns, harpoons, and all the accoutrements of whaling. The gunners claimed to have discharged three musket balls into the head of the sea beast, with no effect other than causing it to dive beneath the waters only to briefly resurface, head for the outer harbor, and disappear. The creature came back a few days later and this time observers said that the beast was even bigger than first reported. Some insisted that the creature, seeming to gambol and play just offshore, appeared to be at least 150 feet in length.
Speculation abounded in New England about both the nature and the intent of the sea serpent. One report described how the creature had been the cause of a “variety of conjectures” among both “politicians and philosophers.” Some claimed, or rather worried, that the beast that had come into their harbor, had been a female of its species, and had come to spawn. An 1819 semi-satirical account of the sightings by “Neptune” mockingly noted that the major concern of New Englanders seemed to be over the fate of commerce should their shores become a “serpent fishery.” If the beast spawned its young in Gloucester harbor, then soon, they worried, “the whole ocean within the American coast would be desolated.”50
The discussions that surrounded the appearance of the sea serpent show the complex messages and omens that American monsters conveyed. Taken together, these accounts give us a much broader sense of the meaning of the monster in American social and cultural history than scholars of the horrific have noted. While the sea serpent became a repository of fear and anxiety, it also elicited fiercer emotions. The monster awakened a desire to destroy, while also eliciting a sense of wonder. On a more pedestrian level, it served the purposes of political discourse, both in printed material and in daily conversation. As with all of America’s monsters, part of the monster’s monstrousness grew from its many meanings, its profusion of meaning. The Gloucester sea serpent was a highly public experience, impossible to reduce into a psychological symbol.
Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, made its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807. This playful moniker reflected the very real uncertainties of the fishing industry, anxieties dating back to New England’s opposition to Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Acts, which had threatened their continued commercial expansion. The Salem Gazette, in commenting on the popular nickname sailors had given to the serpent, thought a monstrous invasion preferable to a new round of commercial embargoes. “Let our coast then be surrounded,” its editor opined, “by multitudes of these sea snakes rather than Jefferson’s embargoes.”51
The fascination with the serpent, fascination that included both a sense of anxiety and wonder, cannot be explained simply in terms of psychological projection and response. As with many of America’s monsters, the Gloucester sea serpent can only be described as a social experience of the monster, with numerous printed accounts and a very public conversation about its meaning. This was not a monster living inside of individual nightmares. If it was in some sense a “return of the repressed,” it had a very public return rather than a secret eruption into individual psyches.
The monster of Gloucester harbor, like most American monsters, rose out of the boiling abyss of American violence. Richard Slotkin, the cultural historian of American violence, argues that while the United States may not be more violent than other “settler societies” in world history, the country is unique in “the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced.” The narrative we tell about ourselves and about our heroes is a narrative of what Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” In this typical American myth, the hero experiences the depths of frontier savagery (through both knowledge of the wild environment and its wild inhabitants) and becomes a mediator “who can teach civilized men how to defeat savagery on its native grounds.” American heroes know the wilderness and can tame it, though only and always through violence.52
The whalers whose response to the sea monster was to kill it, performed this mythic narrative, a narrative that in the previous century had centered on Daniel Boone killing bears and Native Americans and would soon center on Andrew Jackson and his Native American-killing prowess. The same impulse would reappear in the twentieth century when even American foreign policy would be imagined in terms of slaying monsters, first by Theodore Roosevelt and later by the post-World War II architects of the national security state. American heroes are monster slayers, and the monsters are the enemies of America.
The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, “a number of our sharp-shooters” were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed. As Slotkin’s work suggests, there can be no simple border wars in America’s conflicts. Every battle is a mythic battle, a struggle against savagery, whether it be a Native American war, the search for a sea monster, or a war on terror.
It would be too simplistic to view monster tales as simply narratives in service of American violence. The monster is a many-headed creature, and narratives about it in American history are highly complex. Richard Kearney describes the appearance of a monster, in a narrative, in a dream, or in sensory experience, “as a signal of borderline experiences and unobtainable excess.” Rather than simply representing personal trauma, he argues, they raise questions about our “neat divisions and borders.” The monsters of American history challenge all simple narratives and raise specters of ambiguity. They raise questions about the narratives we trust, even about what we mean by the phrase “American history.” Monster tales have at times provided inspiration for massacres and at other times served as haunting reminders of the ghosts of massacres past, the very stuff of American history that is repressed in the American historical consciousness. They are a “return of the repressed” but not simply the return of the repressed personal id. Like the serpent of Gloucester harbor, they rise out of the abyss to create wonder, consternation, and violence. They are meaning machines that embody the historical structures and trajectory of the American nation.53
Metaphors of a Monstrous History: When Symbols Attack
The American past reads like something of a horror movie, maybe even a low-budget slasher. American history comes at us dripping with gore, victims lying scattered on the ground, eldritch moonlight revealing creeping horrors you never learned from your eighth grade history textbook. The history of the United States offers a chamber of horrors, with clergy transforming the Native American other into demonic beings, mad scientists turning state-funded laboratories into torture chambers, and the photographic revolution of the Victorian era turning toward a morbid fascination with the bodies of the dead and the creation of the category of “gore.” History is horror.
A recent debate in Texas over history textbook standards explains why it is important to open up the American chamber of horrors for all to see. In 20
09, during several highly contentious sessions, a committee called by the Texas State Board of Education argued over revisions to the public schools’ history standards for the 4.7 million students in the Texas system. In May of 2010 these changes passed and became part of the state’s history standards. These modifications in social studies standards will not only affect how teachers plan their daily lessons but also the kind of information included in textbooks. The controversy will likely reverberate through the American educational system, as Texas is the second largest purchaser of high school history texts.54
Conservative members of the Texas Board, backed by powerful state legislators, proposed some shocking changes to the way central events in American history would be remembered. In the new proposed standards, the legacy of the civil rights movement would include the creation of “unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes.” Joseph McCarthy would be described, not as the progenitor of a twentieth-century witch hunt, but as an American hero. Students would not learn about Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey because, as one Republican board member noted, “he was from Jamaica and was deported.”55
At the heart of the conservative effort on the Texas Board is the requirement that textbooks, and of course the teachers who use them, teach students the concept of “American exceptionalism.” This notion, that the United States has a special place and role in the world, itself has a history. It has often appeared clothed in religious garb, borrowing biblical concepts of the biblical covenant. At other times, it has taken on slightly more secular shading and emphasized America’s unique role in world history, the last best hope of earth and an instrument for the betterment of humanity. This vision of America’s role in the world, the very concept of exceptionalism itself, trades on the idea of American innocence, that the United States, unlike the rest of the world, is in some sense free from the terrors of history. In this view, the United States is Forrest Gump, wandering innocently through a world of conflict and, more or less by accident, making it a better place.56