Monstrosity and monster studies

Therefore, another field of scholarly endeavour touched upon by the subject matter of this thesis is the developing field of ‘monster studies’.

Ashgate has recently published two bulgy volumes charting that area, a Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012) and an Ency-clopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014).²⁷⁷ In his introduction to the former, Asa Simon Mittman finds a “tremendous breadth of glo-bal cultural interest” in monsters: “in the space of a few years, the study of monsters has moved from the absolute periphery – perhaps its logical starting point – to a much more central position in academics.”²⁷⁸ Five years ago, the German scholar Beate Ochsner wrote a monograph on teratology, the science of monstrosity, elaborating on the enduring popu-larity of the monster not only on page and screen, but “[i]n seinen unter-schiedlichen Funktionalisierungen als wissenschaftlicher Forschungsge-genstand [...] oder auch religiöses Zeichen.”²⁷⁹ Ochsner’s title implies that, etymologically, monsters are something put on display as a warn-ing (lat. monere=to warn; monstrare=to show). As creatures of the Gothic, monsters are threatening because they destabilize lines that have been perceived as uncrossable before.²⁸⁰ Of course, the insight that monsters function as mirror images and evolve along socio-historical lines, is not novel. Already in 1949, writing in the wake of the Second World War, the Jewish film critic Rudolf Arnheim found that “the monster has be-come a portrait of ourselves and of the kind of life we have chosen to

277 Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed., The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (Farnham: Ashgate, August 2014).

278 Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,”

Mittman and Dendle 2012: 1-14: 3, 1.

279 Beate Ochsner, DeMONSTRAtion: Zur Repräsentation des Monsters und des Mons-trösen in Literatur, Fotografie und Film (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2010) 12.

280 Cf. Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson, “From Hideous to Hedonist: The Changing Face of the Nineteenth-Century Monster,” Mittman and Dendle 2012:

237-56: 238.

lead.”²⁸¹ Obviously, however, there is an ever increasing interest in monsters and their representation in contemporary culture. Apart from worthwhile endeavours to historicise notions of monstrosity, the Berlin scholar Rasmus Overthun cautions against attempts at establishing a theoretical framework for the monstrous:

Das Monströse im Sinne eines identifizierbaren Wesenskerns oder auch einer allgemeinen, z.B. ästhetischen Logik gibt es nicht. Ein spezifisches Prinzip des Monströsen als Form der Alterität und Differenz ist es hingegen, seine theoreti-sierende Klassifikation gerade zu verhindern.²⁸²

In his 2009 monograph Monströse Ordnungen, Rolf Parr defines the

“monstrous” as a phenomenon of difference, which transgresses a norm or some concept of normality and thus represents a positively Gothic mode. Parr refers to monsters as “Zwitterwesen.”²⁸³ In their study on the history of the horror film, Georg Seeßlen and Fernand Jung make hybridity the constitutive feature of the monster, too.²⁸⁴ The concep-tualization of the monstrous as a transgressive hybrid not only between human and animal, living and dead, beautiful and ugly, but between the known and the unknown, too, has been its integral feature since the Middle Ages, claims Foucault: the monster transgresses “die natürlichen Grenzen, die Klassifikationen, die Kategorientafeln und das Gesetz als

281 Rudolf Arnheim, “A Note on Monsters,” Toward a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972) 257 qtd. in Gregory A. Waller, “Introduction,” American Horrors:

Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana and Chi-cago: U of Illinois P, 1987) 1-13: 8f.

282 Rasmus Overthun, “Das Monströse und das Normale: Konstellationen einer Ästhe-tik des Monströsen,” Monströse Ordnungen: Zur Typologie und ÄstheÄsthe-tik des Anormalen, eds. Achim Geisenhanslüke and Georg Mein (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009) 43-79: 75.

283 Rolf Parr, “Monströse Körper und Schwellenfiguren als Faszinations- und Narra-tionstypen ästhetischen Differenzgewinns,” Geisenhanslüke and Mein 2009: 19-42:

19. In the same volume, Michael Niehaus defines “das Monstrum” as “eine irregu-läre Missgeburt mit Auswüchsen und Verdoppelungen, ein Mixtum.” (Michael Nie-haus, “Das verantwortliche Monster,” Geisenhanslüke and Mein 2009: 81-101: 82).

284 Seeßlen and Jung 2006: 22-30.

Tafel: Genau darum geht es in der Monstrosität.”²⁸⁵ In this respect, the monster is kin to ‘the queer’, as conceptualized by critics like Sue-Ellen Case:

[T]he queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the dis-course of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically proscribed position of same-sex desire. [...] The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny.²⁸⁶

Another constitutive feature of monsters according to many is their ex-cessiveness. For Paul Goetsch monsters are “extreme version of the other.”²⁸⁷ Hans Christian Brittnacher finds monsters sharing an “exzes-sive Abweichung von der Norm physischer Integrität.”²⁸⁸ Traditionally, these conceptualizations feature a physiological manifestation of the monstrous:

Wenngleich sich das negative Prinzip des Monströsen nicht auf den Körper reduzieren lässt, fungiert der monströse Körper aber doch als dessen sichtbare Inkorporation. Am hybriden, unförmig-kolossalischen und dysfunktionalen Körper wird das Monströse ‘lesbar’.²⁸⁹

The monsters at hand here are problematic in this respect, because they are not always/immediately recognizable as owners of monstrous bodies. Dorian’s immaculate body does not show any form of deform-ation and the outward appearance of Hyde – the incorpordeform-ation of evil according to Jekyll – might be so unspeakably repulsive because it does

285 Michel Foucault, Die Anormalen: Vorlesungen am Collège de France, 1974-5 (Les Anourmaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974-5), trans. Michaela Ott and Konrad Honsel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007) 86f qtd. in Overthun 2009: 51. Foucault’s fellow poststructuralists claim that, since Plato and Aristotle, discourses on monstro-sity have incorporated binary oppositions within aesthetics (beautiful-ugly), natural history and medicine (natural - unnatural), morality (moral - immoral) and law (lawful - unlawful). Cf. Parr 2009: 20.

286 Sue-Ellen Case. “Tracking the Vampire,” Differences 3.2. (1991): 1-20: 3. For a dis-cussion of “the monster queer” and its manifestation in vampire films like The Hunger (1983, dir. Tony Scott) and Interview with the Vampire (1994, dir. Neil Jordan) see Harry M. Benshoff, “Introduction: The Monster and the Homosexual,” Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: MUP, 1997) 1-18.

287 Paul Goetsch, Monsters in English Literature: From the Romantic Age to the First World War (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2002) n. pag.

288 Hans Richard Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors: Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994) 183.

289 Overthun 2009: 51.

not contain any traits of the normal or proper, and therefore is not a hybrid in the same sense as Frankenstein’s creature, who is described by its maker as a compound of the beautiful and the terrifying.²⁹⁰ In con-trast to Stevenson’s Hyde, “Shelleys Monster ist nicht phänotypisch hässlich sondern offenbart Gesichtszüge, in denen sich Einnehmendes mit Abstoßendem verbindet.”²⁹¹ In line with Burke’s concept of the sub-lime, Frankenstein’s creature thus evokes ambivalent feelings of both terror and empathy,²⁹² while the affective reactions to Hyde and Dorian remain one-sided. This is different with Dracula, to whose outward ap-pearance characters seem to react both with rejection and attraction.²⁹³

Halberstam emphasizes that the monstrosity of Gothic villains has always been closely connected to a lack of self-discipline.²⁹⁴ Interestingly, among the recurrent transgressions labelled as monstrous that Parr gives as examples is “Unersättlichkeit.”²⁹⁵ This characteristic is taken up by Stevenson, Wilde and Stoker, whose monsters enter into specifically bodily pursuits,²⁹⁶ which will be more closely assessed in ch. 3.1.

A diligent, but conceptually and theoretically unambitious history of monsters has recently been written by Stephen T. Asma. Concen-trating on manifestations of monstrosity throughout history and culture rather than conceptualizing the term, Asma lists and contextualizes An-cient and Medieval monsters, before discussing nineteenth-century

290 “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beauti-ful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly white-ness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein;

Or, The Modern Prometheus (1831), ed. J. Paul Hunter, 2nd ed. (New York and Lon-don: Norton, 2012) 35)

291 Alt 2010: 315.

292 Cf. ibid.: 315f.

293 Cf. ibid.: 323.

294 Cf. Halberstam 1995: 72.

295 Parr 2009: 19.

296 “Mr Hyde is a monster and a threat to society because he acts outside human laws, both written (the legal code) and unwritten (good taste, ‘proper’ behaviour’). He is nevertheless dangerously attractive for the same reason – he pursues these desires free of inhibition and social obligation or constraint.” (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock,

“Introduction: Monsters are the Most Interesting People,” Weinstock 2014: 1-7: 3f)

monsters before the background of medical science and Darwinism.

After having touched upon the media representation of serial killers and criminals like the Columbine shooters Harris and Klebold, torturing regimes like the Khmer Rogue and tortured terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Asma ends his compilation with posthuman “future monsters,” mu-tants, robots and cyborgs. Asma does not seem concerned with either of the three figures discussed here: Dorian is not mentioned at all, Jekyll &

Hyde and Dracula only in passing.²⁹⁷ According to Monica Germana, who reviewed Asma’s study for the University of Stirling’s Gothic Imagi-nation blog, Asma’s central hypothesis is most clearly verified in science fiction texts and films focusing on creatures posing as human(s). Dis-cussing Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

(1968) and Ridley Scott’s filming Blade Runner (1982), Asma discusses the potential of the Voight-Kampf test to reveal replicants through their lack of empathy, a distinctively human response. “Does having less em-pathy mean being less human?” Asma asks, “Is compassion for other beings a defining feature of what it means to be human? Does the inabil-ity to feel someone else’s suffering make one less of a person and more like a machine or a monster?”²⁹⁸ Consciously or not, Asma here refers to the eighteenth-century concept of empathy, which was negotiated in Gothic Novels and is highly influential for the design of the figures under discussion here, too. In many conceptions of the monstrous, monstrosity is the absence of what is distinctively human: “[m]onsters have to be everything the human is not[.]”²⁹⁹ Similarly, the recent Ash-gate publications focus on the moral monstrosity of Hyde, Dracula and Dorian: “unlike the fin-de-siècle’s fatal women, whose inner character remains masked by physical attractiveness, moral monstrosity in Steven-son and Wilde is given a visible form.”³⁰⁰ However, as stated above, Hyde’s, Dracula’s and especially Dorian’s “moral monstrosity” cannot be labelled down so easily. They belong to those monsters that Halberstam claims “are always in motion and they resist the interpretive strategies

297 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford:

OUP, 2009); indeed, vampires are not discussed at all by Asma.

298 Asma 2009: 222f qtd. in Germana 2010.

299 Halberstam 1995: 22.

300 Six and Thompson 2012: 252.

that attempt to put them in place.”³⁰¹ In the bestiary of monstrous crea-tures, one seems to connect well to the fugacity of these figures: on the next few pages, the ‘shapeshifter’ will be discussed in its potential to cover the monstrous abilities of Dracula, Dorian and Jekyll & Hyde.

2.7.1 Shapeshifters

In a broad sense, the three figures under discussion here can be said to share the monstrous abilities of the shapeshifter. Paul T. Beattie de-scribes the shapeshifter as “an entity with the power to change its shape, size, species, or even sex,” claiming that “true shapeshifters are those beings able to control their form to some extent.”³⁰² While the ability to control their physical shape is specifically at stake for Dorian and Jekyll, the vampire Dracula seems to fit best into definitions of the shapeshift-er, which generally tend to be rather normative: In a recent study on Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture, Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver discuss creatures that possess

“[t]he ability to shift or morph shape [...] triggered by heredity, magic, virus, or some combination of the three.” While they concentrate on the transformation of man into wolf or other beasts, they acknowledge vamp-ires as shapeshifters, too, because they can “turn [ ] into bats, wolves, or the undead.” For McMahon-Coleman and Weaver, shapeshifters appear

“in a variety of metaphorical ways [in order] to explore multi-faceted issues of identity.”³⁰³ However, McMahon-Coleman and Weaver merely discuss recent representations of shapeshifters in literature, film and TV, but do not conceptualize shapeshifting as an ability to transcend medial shapes, too. Other cultural historians have established that vam-pires, like werewolves, belong to a specific variety of shapeshifters, those able of theriantropy or theriomorphosis, the transformation from

hu-

301 Halberstam 1995: 85.

302 Paul T. Beattie, “Shapeshifter,” Weinstock 2014: 508-14: 508. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Andrew Lang’s introduction to Margaret Hunt’s 1884 translation of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) as the first instance mentioning a fairy-tale figure’s “magical gift of shape-shifting”.

303 McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 2012: 10, 14.

man into animal form.³⁰⁴ “Vampires have always been shape-shifters,”

claims James C. Holte, referring to vampire lore in Greece and India, Malaysia and China.³⁰⁵ The term theriomorphosis shares its etymology with another term widely used in mythology and by those writing about folk lore: metamorphosis.

Referring back to Ovid, the Romance scholar Peter Kuon defines metamorphosis as “die passiv erlittene und unumkehrbare Verwand-lung eines Menschen in ein anderes Naturwesen, wobei bei zu einem gewissen Grad das alte Bewußtsein in der neuen Gestalt weiterlebt.”³⁰⁶ While the term metamorphosis denominates a bodily change that is per-manent and unique,³⁰⁷ shapeshifters can transform back and forth. In a 2006 contribution to the volume Fantastic Body Transformations in Eng-lish Literature, Pascal Nicklas states that the Gothic often negotiates or re-presents the “instability of the physical shape” of characters.³⁰⁸ Using the terms metamorphosis and shapeshifting synonymously with body transformation, Nicklas claims that the medium of film lends itself well to the representation of Gothic monsters:

The body transformation is a technical challenge for film because the movies can show this metamorphosis as though it was really happening. The power of the moving image lies in its capacity to show change with a degree of verisimili-tude and intensity unreached by any other art from.³⁰⁹

Nicklas, too, states, that Dracula is so threatening because he does not only defy attempts of signification by transforming back and forth, but

304 For a literary example recently represented in film see Tolkien’s character Beorn, a

“skin-changer” who can take the form of a bear. Cf. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937) (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012) 102 and The Hob-bit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013, dir. Peter Jackson).

305 James Craig Holte, Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations (Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, I997) xiii.

306 Peter Kuon, “Metamorphose als geisteswissenschaftlicher Begriff,” Konzepte der Metamorphose in den Geisteswissenschaften, eds. Herwig Gottwald and Holger Klein (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005) 1-16: 4.

307 Cf. John Clute, “Shapeshifters, Shapeshifting,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, eds. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbit, 1997) 858f: 858. The agony of the irreversibi-lity of that process is best represented in modern writing in Franz Kafka’s tale “Die Verwandlung” (1912/15), which translates into English as “The Metamorphosis”.

308 Pascal Nicklas, “Shape-Shifting as Gothic Trope,” Fantastic Body Transformations in English Literature, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006) 227-37: 227.

309 Ibid.: 234.

because he has the power to transform others.³¹⁰ This characteristic is al-ready emphasized by the folklorist Katharine Briggs in her seminal dis-cussion of fairy-lore and legend, the Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976). Briggs defines shape-shifting as a supernatural power especially of wizards, who “are the true shape-shifters, able to change the form of other people as well as to shift from one shape to another.”³¹¹ In that respect, Dracula the shapeshifter threatens others by effecting an irreversible transfor-mation onto them – the metamorphosis into the Undead. In the same way, what has started out as shapeshifting in Stevenson’s tale ends up in a final metamorphosis: with Hyde grown stronger, Jekyll’s “full state-ment” ends with the fear that “[t]his, then, is the last time […] that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face.” (61)

So far, these characteristics, which make all three especially prone for shifting from literary to film monster, have not yet been systematic-cally assessed, not even in the most recent, above mentioned Ashgate Encyclopedia on the topic of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014). In the course of this thesis, and especially in ch. 3.3, I will therefore discuss Dracula’s, Hyde’s and Dorian’s ability to transform both themselves and others as distinctly modern powers that endow them with a specific kind of monstrosity which they share with the medium of film: as shapeshift-ers of a special kind, they transform their own bodies as well as othshapeshift-ers’.

They thus meet the fear of earlier film viewers that film transforms the body, makes it monstrous, unreadable.³¹²

310 Cf. ibid.: 234.

311 Briggs 1976: 361.

312 Cf. Arnold-de Simine 2008: 241.