2018 Foreword
In the
most recent Oscar awards there were two films, Get Out and The Shape of Water,
which garnered a lot of attention and scooped some of the big prizes, best
original screenplay for the former and best director and picture for the
latter. This brought me a lot of personal satisfaction as not only did I enjoy
both films a lot but as someone who has done academic work and research into that
sort of media content I was able to appreciate them and speak about them with
authority to other cinephiles. I was also kicking myself that having done the
masters degree ten years ago now I hadn’t pursued my studies any further, god
only knows that could have been my bake on TV talking about them and the
cultural conversation that was happening around them.
Honestly
though, I can’t beat myself up too much about that one. I found the process of
completing the MA completely brutal. I have never found myself under so much
intense pressure in my entire life and I cracked. I had to pay for an extension
by an extra term and it eventually came in months late because I couldn’t
handle it. At the time I passed it off as problems relating to my various
physical illnesses but really the problems I had were psychological, and of the
type that I now know are quite typical of people in that situation. I had only
a tenth of the word count out in first draft form when I moved back home from
campus and I couldn’t look at it for weeks. I did eventually knuckle down and
just grind it out in chunks of a couple of hundred words or so a night for
another couple of months and only achieved the flow state quite late in the
game, more or less after I had stopped caring about the quality and had merely
resolved to finish it. I had left writing the second and fourth chapter to the
end and managed to bang both those out over night and with minimal revision.
When it was eventually completed it looked for the most part like shite and
confirmed to me the imposter syndrome I’d been feeling since half way through
the course.
Looking
back at it now though I can’t believe how good the work is. There’s a few
things that maybe I’d do a little differently if I were doing it now however I
find it almost hard to believe that it came out of me. And yet it did.
Still,
aside from the physical and mental strain that working that way put on me there
are other reasons I didn’t pursue academia. I could tell that the lifestyle and
amount of work compared to the salary, the precariousness of that type of
labour and the fact that it would leave little room in my life for anything
else were all becoming apparent. The lack of funding is a bit of an issue as
well, I was able to sustain myself for a year on the small amount of money I
had saved from a call center job in the year between Queens and the
Masters, a bit of money that my folks had put aside for me in a savings account
since I was a baby, selling my car and having virtually no social life or
expensive habits at the time (I was a more or less straight edge hikikomori). I
knew that to do a PHD would require funding and that was something that was hit
hard and hit first by the economic crash that was just beginning at the time.
Funding it seemed would only be available in my field for specific types of
project. Fucking my head up over something I actually had a passion for seemed
somewhat reasonable, doing it again for a longer period of time over something
that wasn’t my choice to do seemed then as it does now like a recipe for
disaster.
At least
in the end I did manage to finish it, it stands now as a relic of a different
time for me when I was a completely different person and as a testament to what
I can be capable of if I put my mind to it. I may never write this way ever
again but I hope that one day I’ll be able to write this well. I present it now
for public consumption from a very late draft, now with the pictures that went
with it that I’ve come across recently while going through an old hard drive
(which is one of the reason’s I hadn’t put it up here before now).
I’ve also
included the two term papers from the modules that I did in the second
semester. I choose the topics for those modules specifically because it would
take me into researching time periods and topics related to the thesis, and
parts of them were indeed recycled into the main work. I’m posting them up now
for the sake of completion, here and here.
Very few
people seem to read this blog and fewer still the odd term papers from my
course that I’ve already posted. Still, I’m just happy that they are out there
in the world, finally. At the time I did the MA even at that point I was very
much primarily an activist before I was a writer or even an academic and I did
it for the cause as much as for any personal ambition. Since their completion
the crisis of capitalism has continued unabated and with increasing ferocity.
The Culture Wars I anticipated that would accompany the shifts are on our
doorstep and as I’ve said before, political art which weaponises the Gothic,
the Fantastic, Monsters and everything else I write about has planked itself
right into the mainstream. Good writing about culture from a Marxist
perspective, even one as esoteric as my own seems as timely now as it was when
I first wrote it, if not more so.
Introduction
The
historian Roger Chartier describes Cultural History as “the analysis of the
process of representation”. [1] Over the past decades the study of a certain
body of representations have come to the fore as an object of study and a means
of analysis for uncovering certain sections of social action, popular mentality
and wider societal truths that otherwise would remain obscure. This set of representations
that are that of Monsters and the Monstrous.[2]
Politically charged, mythic and emotionally resonant, the
image of the monster is not only a historical construct with recognisable
archaeology’s of historically constructed meaning, the study of Monsters
contains great potential as part of our conceptual tool box. Until relatively recently, and with the odd
exception, the monster has been largely passed over by historians and left to theorists
and practitioners of art and literature.[3] Currently however with the recent trend
towards the increasingly ambivalent boundaries between academic disciplines
historians have been getting involved in this field of investigation.[4] It is in this emerging interdisciplinary endeavour that I locate this research
project.
By concentrating this study on the last decades of the
Nineteenth Century, I will also be able to draw on a large body of literature
relating to the period from a variety of disciplines. Not only do we see a revival in gothic
literature[5]
and the beginnings of the modern science fictional genre, but we also see the
grand narratives of the 20th century taking shape. Each of these developments has a very varied
and established body of analytical literature, and some work has been done in
bringing the one into the other. There
still remains a lot of work to be done that this current project cannot but
begin to scratch the surface, though there is the possibility of making a start
on answering some important questions about that period. Specifically I want to look at the Monster
trope in relation to the development and heightening of class conflict within
the last decades of the nineteenth century.
In examining this particular body of memes in this way I
will be try to answer a number of questions.
Firstly, tracking the production and consumption of monster literature
by the mass market and the various ways in which they are received and utilised
will allow me to address certain epistemological issues, regarding the
communication and reception of ideas within and across social classes, which
are currently being asked by social historians.[6]
Furthermore, I’ll be able to look at the question of
rational and irrational behaviour. Is
the creation of Monsters altogether rational?
Why do human beings seem to possess a propensity for Monstrifying their
fears and anxieties? This also has
connotations with regards to the study of emotions in history, particularly the
indirect expressions of emotions not allowed direct articulation by the
emotionology of the times, such as anxieties about narratives of progress and
the superiority of the upper classes. I
will also be afforded the opportunity to look at a central question in the
study of mentalities in general, how the myths that inform our day to day
consciousness go from the personal projects of the authors to their
construction in social idea space into myths of great power and significance in
shaping the thoughts of individuals within society. Working in very different historical
disciplines, both Judith Walkowitz[7]
and Christopher Frayling[8],
emphasise the importance of the Jekyll and Hyde myth on the public
understanding of the real-life Ripper murders in that period. While this is useful in shedding some light
on the issue, I think that there is potential there to go a lot further in
addressing this question of how myths are created and propagated - and the role
of the media (and especially the metropolitan media) in the transmission of
myths and related behavior.
With regards to the secondary literature, the study of
Monsters being a field still in its formative stage, I will be drawing on a variety
of literature from across a number of fields.
As well as those texts outlined above, I will be looking at the
conference papers from the last three annual conferences of the “Monsters and the Monstrous” project
mentioned above. There is also a collection
of essays called “Monster Theory”[9]
that contains some very interesting theoretical work and in particular a very
useful essay by the editor outlining a theoretical frame work for the field[10]
(the only such attempt I have come across thus far). As useful as Cohen’s work undoubtedly is,
drawing on one particular theoretical approach to monsters, albeit and
inclusive and open ended one, will inevitably lead to the study being somewhat
limited. Therefore I will also be
drawing together some work on the horror genre in general to see what
teratological theories are implicit therein.
Further to this, for background to the cannon of Monster literature I
shall be looking at literary analysis, particularly from writers associated
with what is termed the “New Historicism” within literary studies.
It is also my intention to draw on the body of texts on the
history of labour and working class struggle in the period and its political
expression. By contextualising the work
with this body of research, I intend to bring the study into an understanding
of the role of monstrous imagery within the social history of politics. Another body of work that I will be drawing
on will be the literature surrounding the consumption of print culture in the
period, and particularly by the working classes. This will be important in trying to gauge the
extent of the spread of monster literature by direct means, and suggest the
various ways in which literature may have been received.
Part of this study will entail
analysing some of the more significant works gothic-horror literature from the
period. Some attention will be given to
the monstrous representations of social conflict in Bram Stoker’s Dracula R.L.
Stevenson’s The Strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and in Wells ‘Scientific
Romances’[11]
The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. I’ll also be looking at the use of these
images in the cartoons in the mainstream periodicals of the period.[12]
The purpose of looking at these
literary sources is to investigate the teratology of their monstrous content
and how that relates to the theory of monsters I shall be proposing,
specifically in how class anxieties are expressed therein. The signifigance of these stories is that as
well as having a distinct historio-literary pedigree, they contain the seeds of
the gothic and imaginative literature of the next century. Along with Frankenstein from the beginning of
the century these works will have a mythic resonance right into the present. While some of the themes and content of the
stories would become distorted as each generation gave them their own
expression in countless stage and (especially) film adaptations, their
endurance as tropes and touchstones of meaning within western popular culture[13]
is unmistakable. At the time they were
written they were significant works as well, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula were
both adapted for the stage to great success.
The Time Machine was Well’s first novel brought him straight into the
popular imagination, ensured a ready market for his next series of ‘Scientific
Romances’ (including The Island of Doctor Moreau) and would remain in print
from then until the present.
Among the other sources I will be drawing on are the
various collections of the radical left newspapers from the period. I will be looking at Justice the organ of the
Social Democratic Federation, which is housed at The British Library of
Political and Economic Science at the LSE, and many of the other pertinent
documents housed at the LSE such as the wide collection of pamphlet material
from that time. I’ll also be looking at
the wide variety of Socialist and Radical literature housed at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford . They keep a large selection of worker’s
periodicals[14]
and left-wing Journals[15]
along with other valuable sources and works of reference.
The importance of these sources is that they can be said to
represent a conscious section of Socialist and Working class opinion. Justice, as the organ of the Social
Democratic Federation, i.e. the British branch of the Second International, was
uniquely receptive to developments in the international working class
movement. Also, It was based in London Britain Britain
The purpose of looking at these
periodicals and the other sources from the radical and socialist press that I
have come across is to give voice to an alternative narrative within the
profoundly middle-class popular culture of the day. Although by the end of the nineteenth century
illiteracy was rare the majority of what was available for the British worker
to read was made by the middle classes, hence it is their discourses and
anxieties that dominate much of the monstrous imagery of the time. To look at the Socialist press is to look at
a body of work which, if not always of the workers is certainly for them in a
way that the mainstream press rarely was.
Even if the writers and cartoonists that worked for the Socialist press
occupied that same stratum of the petite-bourgeoisie as their colleagues on the
mainstream journals, were at least their professional practice required them to
tap into the sensibilities of the people they were writing for (as I’ll discuss
in the next chapter, artistic creation is partly a social activity, even if
it’s usually conducted alone). The
cartoonist Walter Crane may have been a late convert to Socialism from a
respectable middle class background, but the Cartoons he produced every May Day
for Justice would have represented something of the mentality of the movement
he was a part of.
As I am bringing together two different bodies of
scholarship, I believe that the most appropriate structure for the study is a
three-part dialectic. The first part,
(or thesis) will consist of a study of the various theoretical issues of
Teratology and specifically with regards to that period at the end of the
nineteenth century. As well as surveying
and analysing the various theories I will also attempt to establish a context
within the progression of monstrous discourses over the decades since the
enlightenment. The second part of the
study will be concerned with the material basis of the production, and distribution
of popular literature in the Fin De Siecle, the intellectual climate in which
the Monstrous images were formed and the social environment in which they were
given meaning. Particular attention will
be given in this section to the struggles of the Working classes and the social
anxieties they unleashed.
Finally I will bring these two parts to a synthesis in the
study of the monstrous imagery in the period.
Doing so will hopefully allow me to answer the questions alluded to
above, contribute some empirical validity to the theoretical concerns already
outlined, and some new theoretical questions into the history writing on the
period. In addition, this should point
towards potential studies that could be undertaken, on monstrous depictions of
gender and race for example, and into a more sophisticated theoretical approach
to monsters in general across all periods and cultures.
Chapter 1
Towards a Theory of Monsters
“Monsters
are our children… (They) ask us how we perceive the world… They ask us why we
have created them.”
J.J. Cohen[20]
In today’s society, Monsters are
everywhere. I have lost track of the
number of times an unusual or extraordinary event or coincidence related to
monsters occurred during the completion of this dissertation. When I began
thinking about monsters from a social-scientific perspective in the summer of
2005, after seeing China Miéville’s lecture at Marxism 2005, it seems I truly
underestimated the relevance of Monsters and the monstrous to our daily
lives. However, whether it was a group
of monsters winning the Eurovision Song Contest, running across an image of
Boris Karloff as ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ on the back of an otherwise unrelated
pamphlet while conducting research at the Working Class Movement Library in
Salford[21]
or the numerous Hollywood blockbusters over the summer,[22]
since beginning this project my consciousness feels like it has been inundated
with a slew of monstrous imagery from the broadcast media.
Looking back into history, it would
appear that monsters have been a part of the imaginative life of every human
society in recorded history. As such it
seems extremely unusual that very little work has been done on addressing
monsters as a category in order to understand their significance within
society. The study of Monsters is an
area of academia that is still very much in its infancy, indeed it has yet to
be established if as a field of study in its own right. The name ascribed to it, Teratology,[23]
doesn’t even appear to be used by everyone arguably working in the field. Presently, there has been one book of essays
published specifically on this topic in 1996[24]
and a small group who have been staging an annual conference on monster studies
under the auspices of the interdisciplinary research board since 2001.[25] The contributors to the book and the
conference speakers are from a variety of academic disciplines and some are
from outside of academia. Few of them
could be said to specialise in monsters, rather the monstrous is merely
something they have come across in their research.[26]
Whether the study of monsters ever extends beyond these tenuous beginnings isn’t, in the strictest sense, relevant to this study. The aim here is to come up with a theory of the monster and demonstrate how it can be useful in understanding certain phenomena in social and cultural history. What the study of monsters offers us is a way into the unconscious thoughts and feelings of a particular place or period and a way into the taboo and repressed strata of groups, classes and (when looking at the foibles of the ruling class) whole societies.
Within the social discourses by which a society (or grouping within society) seeks to understand itself, there is a discourse of the imaginative or irrational that both underlies and supports it. This discourse is formed from he detritus of the rational discourses that are at the forefront of how society conceives of itself. It is constituted from the unspoken assumptions, the repressed logical progressions and the inherent implications of the rational discourses and the bits of nonsense used to justify the unjustifiable. While what I would call ‘the rational discourse’ expresses itself as science, pseudo-science, social theory and in the news media, i.e. that which is meant to be the truth, the irrational discourse expresses itself in the self consciously fictive; within narratives in the popular entertainment media and inside the imagery used to illustrate the rational discourse.[27] Monsters[28] are both, by their nature, fictive and a rich source of rhetorical imagery, therefore they can be said to be almost at home within what I call ‘the irrational discourse’. To be precise, they embody a very specific rendering of, ‘the other’ i.e. that which society likes to represent itself in opposition to and apart from.
The practical implications for historians are that a better understanding of monsters and the monstrous can lead to a better understanding of previously discounted sources and other materials that would be considered as outside the purview of the profession, such as pulp horror fiction[29], sources that may seem too strange or specifically cultural to be of notice[30] and even perhaps the process wherebye a historical figure like Napoleon Bonaparte becomes transubstantiated into a sort of monster through the medium of popular culture. Also, as we are nudging up against the adjoining fields of Cultural Studies, Social Anthropology, Sociology and arts criticism there is an inherent potential in the study of monsters for interdisciplinary work and the cross cultivation of ideas from different disciplines.
By dealing with this particular aspect
of human culture, i.e. with images that are self consciously fictive we can get
into the process of creative thought and possibly the changes that this has
undergone in history, as well as the ways in which this doesn’t change, in
order to understand those people who have gone before us at an ontological
level. After all, one of the goals of
history in general is to make our ancestors intelligible to us. Too often it seems that our contemporaries
regard people in the past as alien, to the detriment to our understanding of
ourselves, while in reality they are more like foreigners, people with a
different language and set of cultural assumptions but people like ourselves
nonetheless.
Also, since by looking at monsters we
are looking at how people conceive of ‘the other’, we can extend this to
cultural phenomena wherein an understanding of the treatment of groups of
Others by a dominant group is crucial.
My previous work on the whole process of colonialism and the conquest
and treatment of colonial subjects is one example of how an understanding of
the role of the irrational discourse can yield insights into how things like
horror literature can work to support and sustain more conventional forms of
cultural power, while exposing the underlying taboo emotions of the
colonisers. Another, not unrelated, area
where an understanding of monsters could prove quite useful in this way would
be the history of Anti-Semitism. The use
of monstrous and ab-human imagery in Anti-Semitic propaganda would seem to
indicate that the racial construction of Jews in various societies in the early
20th century was also a monstrous construction, and certainly many
writers have indicated anti-Semitic threads in the construction of various
figures in popular horror, e.g. Dracula[31]
and Svengali.[32]
The sort of theory that could
elucidate these issues would be a theory of monsters that could explain
monsters in art-horror and within the wider culture and could explain these in
relation to each other and the wider social-cultural context. It could explain how (and perhaps why)
monsters are created, the sort of materials that go into their creation and why
certain monsters succeed over others, come in and out of fashion and fade
away. It would also explain the way in
which monsters act and interact within the media. To date there has not been a theory put
forwards in as many words that is quite like what has been outlined above. Several people have grappled with different
aspects of Monsters and the monstrous but usually in isolation and without
reference to anyone else’s work. To date
no one has tried to put these elements together to make a consistent
whole. What follows now is my own
attempt at this through examining the available works on monsters and related
genres for what basic insights they provide and putting them together with some
analysis of my own.
We begin with two works that relate to the subject of
Monsters that are from a consciously Marxist theoretical background In
Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth century Horror Writing
by Chris Baldick and José Monleón’s A Spectre Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical
Approach to The Fantastic. What both
these books have in common is an approach based on relating the trends within
the horror genre to the prevailing contemporary economic and social
circumstances, particularly with regards to the progress of industrial
capitalism. Both are quite excellent
works of literary analysis, the main difference between the two being that
while Baldick has a more Empiricist bent[33]
and bases a lot of his arguments on textual analysis, Monleon is more
consciously theoretical. Neither work
offers a specific theory of monsters or how monsters come into being, but
Baldick offers quite an interesting analysis of the etymology of the word
monster in the context of the Enlightenment, which I will return to later.
There is also another body of inquiry
into the Horror genre that locates itself within a religious tradition. This is not surprising as both the Horror
genre and religion share a common concern with the irrational. Victor Sage’s book Horror Fiction in the
Protestant Tradition is an exploration of the development of the gothic horror
genre in relation to wider developments, particularly those within
Anglo-Protestant theology. The book has much in common with the two Marxist
texts in that the basic methodology is to relate the development of the Horror
Genre to the development of capitalism.
The main difference is that the theory of social development
underpinning the text comes from Weber rather than Marx. Again, Sage doesn’t offer any theory of
Monsters, but he has a deep knowledge of the Anglo protestant tradition that
many of the leading horror authors of the period themselves were a part of and
as such provides certain insights into the philosophical concerns they would
have engaged with.
The 1990s also saw some very
interesting work being done on monsters and the horror genre from within
academia. The first of these to be
published was Noel Carroll’s The
Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart[35].
The focus of the book was more on the intricacies of the horror genre in
general than on monsters. The Author describes it as an attempt to do for
Horror what Aristotle had done for Tragedy in Poetics, i.e. to:
offer a comprehensive account…in terms of the effect it is
supposed to bring about… with respect to the elements, particularly plot
elements, that facilitate this effect.[36]
In the
terms of these plot elements, Carroll puts monsters at the heart of the
genre.
Carroll identifies two characteristic horror narratives
that, define the genre, variations of which account for the majority of
Art-Horror narratives within popular culture: the Complex Discovery Plot, and
the Over-reacher plot. In the former,
the action is broken down into all (or a combination) of the following four
elements; the onset of the supernatural menace, the discovery of the
supernatural nature of said menace by the protagonists, the confirmation of the
supernatural by the protagonists to a third party[37]
and finally the confrontation of the supernatural menace.[38] In the Over-reacher plot the action can also
be broken down into four plot movements, the preparation for the experiment,
the experiment, the accumulation of evidence that the experiment has gone awry,
and the confrontation with the result of the experiment.[39] Within these two structures we can clearly
see that in both cases the monster is the engine of the plot. The Complex Discovery is essentially the
discovery of the Monster and the Over-reacher’s experiment typically, via
design or misfortune, tends to result in the creation of a monster. According to Carroll, the essential
difference between the two types of plot is the way that information that would
be considered outside conventional knowledge is treated. To be precise, in the Complex Discovery Plot,
hidden knowledge is often necessary for the monster to be defeated while the
Over-reacher plot is usually a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to
access ‘that which man is not meant to know’.[40] This is related to Carroll’s notion of the
monster as something that violates standing categories. In other words, we could say that Carroll’s
theory of Teratology, the creation of the monster, hinges on the point at which
some problematic occult knowledge erupts into the real.
Jeffery Jerome Cohen takes up this point in the opening
essay of Monster Theory: Reading Culture,[41]
indeed “The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” is the third of the
titular, “Seven Thesis”.[42] Cohen doesn’t really add much to what Carroll
has already put forward on this subject, but the other six theses add layers of
analysis towards a more general theory of monsters that goes beyond Carroll’s
concern with horror and towards a wider analysis of monsters as they function
within society at large. Basically,
Cohen’s aim in the essay is to present, “a set of breakable postulates in
search of specific cultural moments…seven theses toward understanding cultures
through the monsters they engender”.[43]
Cohen’s theses are the only attempt of the sort that I’ve
come across and form the ‘jumping off’ point for my own discussion. As such it is worth going over each of his
theses in turn.
The first is that, “The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body”,[44]
which is to say that since a monster is wholly fictional it is purely
constructed of cultural elements. The
Second is “The monster Always Escapes”.[45] While this is obviously not literally true of
all the monsters in all the horror narratives ever recorded, what Cohen means
is that, the cultural form of the monster is an enduring form of cultural
signifier that has a life beyond whatever cultural form it takes. Dracula may have been destroyed at the end of
the novel, yet he rises again in each subsequent generation and in every new
medium since his inception to embody some cultural anxiety.
The fourth Thesis is that “The monster dwells at the gates
of difference”.[46] Cohen gives this notion some attention,
rightly emphasising the idea of the monster as, “the dialectical Other, …an
incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond-of all those loci that are
rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within”.[47] The Fifth Thesis is also related to this idea
of the monster as a sort of cultural arbiter of what is and isn’t considered
normal. This is the thesis, “The Monster
Polices the Borders of the Possible”.
What this means is that the monster is commonly associated with that
which is beyond the pale of human knowledge, and not just in he obvious way that
monsters tend to punish transgression.[48] Cohen also cites the original Werewolf legend
in western Mythology, the story of King Lycaon from Ovid’s Metamorphosis who is
turned into a werewolf for transgressing the bounds of hospitality, and the
Dragons and Leviathans painted into the blank spaces on trader’s maps of the
ancient world. He also emphasises the
association between this aspect of monstrosity and miscegenation, citing as
examples monsters from the Old Testament, The Tempest and Jane Eyre.[49] The Sixth Thesis is that the, “Fear of the
Monster is really a kind of desire”.[50] This is an attempt to articulate the
seemingly paradoxical nature of monsters and horror in general, what Carroll
calls in the sub-title of his monograph ‘the paradox of the heart’. This is the way in which the monstrous both
attracts and repels, the reason why we keep coming back to horror. The emphasis here is in relation to the last
two Theses concerning social and cultural barriers. The taboo and forbidden is
also exotic and attractive and monsters, being the embodiment of the Other are
therefore in the envious position of having the liberty to do what cannot be
done within our own society.
Finally, the seventh thesis is that, “The Monster stands at
the threshold of becoming”.[51] This isn’t so much a thesis as a summation of
the other six and confirmation of the potential of monsters to raise questions
about all aspects of the social order.
What Cohen means is basically that the monster, by having a cultural
body, by always escaping and by transgressing the social order and punishing
those who transgress, has the potential to raise questions about all these
things. “Monsters are our children”, he
says, “they ask us why we have created them”.[52]
Another book from around the same time
that also raises and attempts to deal with these issues in Judith Halberstam’s Skin
Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Although she doesn’t lay out any theory of
monsters with the range of Cohen’s essay, she does seem to put into practice
the sort of sophisticated and complex understanding of monsters within their
cultural and social context. What she
does do that Cohen doesn’t, is describe specifically how monsters work, the
titular technology of monstrosity.
Leading on from her analysis of how Dracula embodies several, even self
contradictory social anxieties about race, gender class and sexuality, she says
the following;
…the
monster’s body is a machine that…produces meaning and can represent any
horrible trait…The monster functions…when it is able to condense as many fear
producing traits as possible into one body[53].
I think that that is an extremely
important point, one that is central to my own understanding of what monsters
are and how they actually function.
The theory of monsters that I wish to
develop will be essentially an attempt to reconcile what I feel to be the best
aspects of the theory of monsters in the work done by Carroll, Cohen and
Halberstam in the 1990s with the contextual awareness of the earlier work done
by Monléon and Baldick. The whole Marxist
perspective on culture and cultural history seems to have been under-utilised
as a source for the conceptual toolbox, which isn’t surprising considering that
the idea of Monster Theory has arisen since Marxism was ousted from theoretical
orthodoxy by the post-modernism during the downturn. This is something I wish to rectify. As we have seen above, the study of Monsters
is the study of how society deals with those it wishes to ostracise and
dispossess, monstrification is a form of cultural oppression. These questions of cultural and political
power are questions that Marxists have always tried to grapple with, so I have
no doubt that this specific iteration of these issues is something that can be
enriched by drawing on the intellectual legacy of the
Marxist/Dialectic-Materialist approach, from Marx himself through Bakhtin’s
circle in Soviet Russia, The Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin and the
post-war British Marxists Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.
Teratology, as established so far, hinges
on an epistemological issue of the transmission of ideas through the culture of
a given society. Therefore, in the next
chapter I will be developing my theory of teratology through an analysis of the
material conditions from which monsters arise, i.e. the labour that is involved
in creating things for the mass media and the sort of processes this
engenders. I will also be looking at
these processes in relation to a specific period, the analysis of which I feel
best demonstrates how my theory works in practice, which is Britain
Chapter 2
The
Monstrous Mode of Production
“It is beginning,… for better or worse, the twentieth
century. I have delivered it.”
-Jack The Ripper in From Hell by Alan Moore[54]
From our
study of the various theoretical approaches to the Monster in the previous
chapter it should now be apparent that monsters are connected to social
anxieties. In this chapter I will be
considering the epistemological issue of how monsters were formed within the
specific context of late nineteenth century Britain
To
understand how these monsters erupt onto the scene at the end of the nineteenth
century we need to look at the origins of horror and monster literature in the
Enlightenment. The importance of the
Enlightenment as a paradigmatic shift in western culture and its significance
to the subsequent development of monsters seems to be the only unifying feature
common to all the various threads of monster theory.[55] What the Enlightenment actually was and the
precise nature of its effects are quite a hotly debated topic and are certainly
too broad to be settled here. What we
can say in the context of the present debate is that it created a certain
cultural space, that hadn’t existed before, which allowed for the development
of the horror and science fictional genres and by extension the monsters which
they begat. Monleón describes the
process as the articulation of a discourse of ‘Reason’ by the emergent bourgeois
class as it overthrew the old feudal order.
This resulted in the rhetorical and literal marginalisation of
‘Unreason’,[56]
which would return through the gothic literature that developed at the same
time.[57] Katherine Haltunnuen adds that the
development of the genre of Murder literature within cheap popular literature
also coincided with the decline of the clerical monopoly over the discourse of
murder and the shift from a pre-Enlightenment notion of personal and general
evil into the concept of the objectified ‘evil’ Other.[58]
Also, as Chris Baldick points out, it is precisely at
this time that the word “Monster” takes on its modern connotations. Monster comes from the same Latin root as
demonstrate and (as Foucault mentions in Madness and Civilisation[59])
until this period is something or someone that is to be shown. This is how William Shakespeare uses the
word, though even in the early seventeenth century it is already picking up the
connotation of ingratitude, particularly the ingratitude of children towards
their parents[60] (which
would have carried obvious political connotations in a patriarchal state). In the context of the French Revolution, it
is these elements which are picked up on by conservative commentators in Britain
It is this imagery that is then transposed by Mary
Shelley (who was both the daughter of Enlightenment radicals and a significant
late Enlightenment thinker in her own right) into the nexus of allegories that
was to become her most famous novel, Frankenstein. This book is widely regarded as the beginning
of the modern Horror and Science Fictional genres and the foundation of one of
the great Myths of the modern age.[62] The reason why Frankenstein is a turning point for the Monster, and
for western art in general, is that it is the first example of a monster coming
together in a modern setting. It isn’t a
monster whose features are drawn together from out of the folklore of the
pre-industrial popular culture,[63]
but a consciously created thing that takes its moral and existential philosophy
directly from the radical background of the author.[64] In essence, we are no longer talking about
popular mythology originating in the organic morass of a folk tradition, where
stories are told, worked and re-worked in endless repetition across various
media. Rather, this is the beginning of
the modern mode of literary production where these stories originate from the
interaction of persona and social elements within a single identifiable
author. This was the first time someone
had brought together disparate elements, in this case; Enlightenment
philosophy, Gothic novel-writing, galvanism, anatomic investigation by medical
students (and the associated horrors of the resurrection men) and crafts a new
myth out of them. The first time indeed,
but this is how it will be done from now on.
Although
it would be a century before the term was invented[65],
Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. The defining feature of Science fiction,
which makes Frankenstein different to the popular fantastic fiction that was
available and widely distributed in the preceding three centuries or so[66],
was that it was speculative.[67] It’s themes were based around the
possibilities inherent in the present.
It is this thematic concern with possibility that continues through the
mid century writers, for example Hoffman and Edgar Allen Poe, into the period
under consideration.
In the
late Victorian period, there is a huge expansion in the writing of this
sort. This is related to a
perceptible shift in the production and distribution of literature in the 1880s
and 90s. The reading public, who had
been increasing incrementally over the previous two centuries, suddenly
expanded as the business of writing and selling books, magazines and other
forms of literary culture was revolutionised.[68]
This explosion in the consumption and production of
writing was facilitated by a number of factors.
Firstly there were technological advances in the mechanisation of
printing as well as more efficient paper making processes.[69] Also, the repeal of Stamp Tax in 1855 and
Paper Duty in 1860 had removed one non-material barrier to the mass production
of paper[70] and
encouraged a great expansion of the News Paper industry that had also been
gathering pace by degrees over the preceding centuries.
The main factor however, as perceived at the time, was
the education acts of the 1870-90s, which gradually introduced universal
primary education. Literacy had been
increasing by steadily
over the proceeding centuries[71],
but the acts expanded the reading public to an extent unheard of, creating for
the first time a literate reading public.[72]
Another factor that had revolutionised the consumption
of literature was the mass transit system. The rail networks provided short
intervals of time when the urban commuter could snatch a little reading
time. It was soon recognised that the
commuter was an important market for publishers, as near to a captive audience
as one could wish for, hence bookshops and stalls were opened in railway
stations (this is how the high street chain WH Smiths began[73]).
All this
had quite a profound effect on the way literature was produced and
consumed. The ‘Triple Decker’ format of
novel writing, in which novels would be published in three volumes each a book
in its own right, that had predominated in the publishing industry since the
mid-century gave way to shorter, single volume novels. Prior to the 1880s books were much too
expensive to be bought as consumer items by all but the wealthiest. People tended to join private lending
libraries for a subscription fee, but with the advent of the literary
revolutions of the Fin de-seicle book buying was suddenly a viable option, even
for people on a modest disposable income.
This also had a knock-on effect of revolutionising power relations
within the publishing industry. As
readers had had to borrow from whatever stock the circulating libraries had,
the people who controlled what was available for the majority of people in Britain
Both these
developments helped contribute to the explosion in monster literature. The ‘Triple Decker’, as a format is much more
suited to the naturalistic school of writing, for instance the family saga was
a common theme. The shorter
self-contained novel was much better suited to the genres driven by their ideas
rather than their precise prose, i.e. where the narrative content has priority
over the form.
Another
effect of the consumption of literature through magazines was the great
expansion of a literary format hitherto largely overlooked in Britain
Another
effect of these shifts in the productive relations in the publishing industry
was the professionalisation of writing as a form of labour. The writer, as a professional, was moving
away from his status as gentleman-scholar and was, to a degree,
proletarianised,[76]
although, as a form of labour, writing is actually closer to a Petty-Bourgeois
profession. What this amounted to was
the advent of the writer who was effectively a small producer, someone who
wrote to order and in recognised forms with the literary market in mind. This infuriated the existing generation of
writers who were very much influenced by Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
and based the validity of their profession on the ideal of literature as having
an improving mission. Essentially the
complaint, as voiced for example by George Gissing in his novel New Grub Street,
which chronicled many of these changes from within the profession, was that the
sort of writing typical of the late Victorian mode of literary production
didn’t contribute anything new. The character Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street
From five
to half past I read four news papers and two magazines, and from half past to
quarter to six I jotted down several ideas that had come to me while reading.[77]
This
critique comes from a concept of literary value as stemming from the writers’
creativity and originality, from accessing through their art the platonic realm
of forms. On the other hand, the writing
that the new generation of writers produces comes from other writers – the
shuffling together of pre-existing elements in the culture. As such it is completely ephemeral.
Leaving
the value judgements aside, the phenomenon observed here was very real. Although derided by some of their
contemporaries the way we might refer to certain writers today as ‘hacks’,
today’s post-modern age would seem to look more favourably on these writers. They are also useful for us as historians to
look at because their work represents a very specific form of social
epistemology. By merely skimming the
surface of their culture to sift the most readily available elements, i.e.
those that are ubiquitous enough to be readily recognisable to their target
audience, these writers tap directly into the milieu and the common assumptions
and neurosis that constitutes the mentality of their time and culture. What is written on the spur of the moment
will give us better idea of what was foremost in the collective consciousness
than something that some great artist has slaved over and may well just be
representative of his own idiosyncraticies.
This
reflection and re-constitution of other writing and the conscious marketing of
specific types of literature also led to the development and refinement of the
various genre as we know them today in this period. We can see a recurring pattern in how the
genres develop, beginning with the works of a few popular and successful
innovators, (e.g. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand or
Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of The Sands which began the Spy Thriller
genre). This is followed by the
imitation of the plot structures, imagery and other features of the works of
the originators of the genre. Harry
Blythe’s detective fiction for example, featured Sexton Blake, another
metropolitan Private detective who debuted in 1893 after Conan Doyle killed off
Holmes at the Reichenback Falls and later took on many of the tropes and
mannerisms of the Great Detective, such as an address on Baker Street, a
bumbling side-kick and an endearingly working class housekeeper.[78] Eventually the repeated tropes of the genre
becomes iconic, a set of fixed features around which further development and
innovation can take place that give the fiction a meta-identity and
pre-established audience that it can be marketed towards.
This is
the process that the science fiction and horror genres are going through in
late Victorian Britain. The idea space
inhabited by Science fiction is initially marked out between popular “Science
Romances” of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, who represent the originators of the
schools of ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ science fiction respectively.[79] Wells in particular was quite amazingly
innovative, creating within a few short years many of what we now recognise as
the typical science fiction themes; Time Travel, Alien Invasion, Invisibility,
to name but a few. Horror reappears from
the shadows of the Penny Dreadful, to which it had been consigned by the mid
century vogue for naturalism, through the re-emergence of gothic horror in the
work of John Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu’s
gothic horror stories are imitated by many, including Bram Stoker who reused
many of the features of vampire fiction established in Le Fanu’s Carmilla in
his novel Dracula[80]
which establishes many new features of the horror genre and is imitated in turn
by many others.
To
conclude this section we should understand that the correlation between this
shift in the mode of literary production, and the momentous events on the world
stage of the late Victorian period is no coincidence. The shift in the productive relations within
publishing didn’t just facilitate the re-emergence of the Gothic in the late Victorian
period, but were part of the same processes going on in the wider society that
led to the new imperialism, the return of the class struggle and the beginnings
of women’s liberation, all of which would provide inspiration for the thematic
content of the same fantastic literature.
In the next chapter we will be looking at how the monsters that arose
from these material conditions operated in the culture and how they reveal the
anxieties unleashed by the development of Victorian capitalist society into the
consumer society we have today.
Chapter 3
Monsters in Praxis
“Never-never, in any era,… has the Fantastic flourished so
sinister and so terrifying as in modern life!
We live in a world full of sorcery.
The Fantastic surrounds us, worse than that, it invades us, chokes us
and obsesses us – and one would have to be blind or very obstinate not to see
that… we live, even in the fullness of modernity, in the midst of the damned,
surrounded by the spectres of human heads and other horrors; that every day we
brush up against vampires and ghouls.”
Jean Lorrain (1891)[81]
Now, having looked at the conditions in which monsters were
formed in the last decades of the nineteenth Century, what is there to say
about the forms that these creatures actually took? We can review some of the recurring themes in
the primary sources covered in this survey and discuss their possible wider
significance.
As we begin this chapter it should be pointed out that the
intention is not to create some sort of mechanistic, “A ® B”,
relationship between social tensions and their monstrous representations. At least part of what this study is about is
using monstrous tropes as a way of interrogating the irrational and
unscientific aspect of the Victorian psyche.
If the irrational was removed by the Enlightenment from the mainstream
discourses, then what we are doing is reading the unspoken underlying
assumptions of the rational discourse back through their expression outside
those discourses. In doing so we can
uncover aspects of the hidden rationale that underlay the actions of people and
institutions in the fin de Siecle. This
is important because on their own the rational discourses rarely give a
sufficient explanation for human actions.
In this period, as probably for most of human history, the
rational and irrational discourses differed along class lines. As Jonathan Rose has observed, the books the
working class read tended to be a generation or so behind those of the middle
class[82]
and he convincingly attributes this to books generally only being available in
their saleability cycle between being desirable new consumer items and
antiquated collectibles.[83] The interests and concerns of the two classes
also differed a great deal, hence the range and content of their discourses
would differ accordingly. Therefore this
chapter will be divided along this axis of class and function. To begin with we will be looking at Monsters
within the mainstream of Fin De Seicle popular culture.
3.1 Monstrous constructions and
Ruling class anxieties.
“And what
is this attitude… of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of viscous
hatred (?) Look at any number of Punch
during the past thirty years. You will
find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a
figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too
prosperous whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon.”
George Orwell[84]
The rational discourses of the ruling
classes were taking a profound turn in the late nineteenth century. The notion of reason as the ideological
backbone of the Bourgeois status quo had taken a profound knock in the form of
the Paris France
Along with the creation of the social
sciences, the progress of the natural sciences, long allied to capitalism,
continued apace. Out of these,
particularly out of the increasingly sophisticated medical science, would
emerge a series’ of pseudo-scientific discourses around evolution and human
society. However, these developments
were not mere reactions to Darwinian, or any other scientific theory. In fact they were an arguably necessary stage
in the assumption of power and the final transition from an aristocratic to a
bourgeois-capitalist society.[89]
The working class had stood beside the emergent middle
classes in the heroic period of their revolutions against the land owning
classes as a means to their own emancipation.
By the end of century, the middle class system had seized power and the
old aristocracy had either emulated them or fallen by the wayside, they had
accommodated themselves to the system and vice versa, the workers services in
the vanguard of the liberal revolution was no longer required, all that was
required of them was that they work. The
British workers had retained their allegiance to the radical liberal ideology,
and the great working class movement of the mid-century, Chartism, had been
essentially reformist in its demands, but as the conflict in interests between
the two classes became apparent this allegiance faltered and failed.[90] Furthermore, while the developing capitalist
economy was bringing more income to the workers in absolute terms, education
and a greater degree of social mobility than hitherto known, it also increased social
inequality and the nature of work became increasingly invasive into the privacy
of the workers, both by demanding more working hours[91]
and increasing regulation of the working day.[92]
From 1875 popular socialist parties flourished across Europe, and while Britain
For the ruling classes the threat was readily
apparent. The workers had already
overthrown one social order, and in the Paris
In this
context, what we have discussed in the previous chapter as the rational
discourse constituted a social-scientific/medical discourse around the working
class, as well as more obviously classist discourse of pseudo-scientific
taxonomical classifications. A
significant function of the rational discourse was to create a necessary psychological
condition of distance between the powerful and those over whom power was
exercised. It seems that in order to
exercise power it was necessary to overcome the natural affinity we as human
beings feel towards other members of our species, particularly for a class that
had come to power partly through articulating a rhetoric of egalitarianism and
liberation. In practice this meant it
was necessary to conceive of the subjects of power as an inert mass - the term,
“The Masses” passed into popular usage among intellectuals at about this time.[93] Thus rendered the masses could be
reconstructed. In times of conflict they
could be recreated as sufficiently different to the norm that the rules of
society that restrict what one human being could do to another did not
apply. Also, they could be reconstructed
in such a way as to manage this fear by diminishing the threat posed by the
masses and within this they could be constructed as mentally diminished to the
extent that they required leadership. In
the context of the post-darwinian science of the rational discourse this
expressed itself in the irrational formulation that “The Masses” were somehow a
different species.
The teratology of the masses in the
irrational discourse of late Victorian Gothic reflects this. Within the rational discourse there existed
in the late nineteenth century a series of recurring arguments around the
notion of “Degeneration”. In the late
nineteenth century the difference in dietary and living conditions of working
class life meant that often there was a perceivable physical difference between
members of different classes, and usually the industrial workers suffered by
the comparison. From this grain of truth
emerged a socio-biological theory that the effects of town life on the
inhabitants of the expanding industrial centers of Britain - and London in
particular – was pushing the evolution of the species backwards, at least for
those classes so affected.[94] That this simple case of mass malnourishment
metamorphisised into a gothic construction of the working class shows almost
better than anything, the pervasiveness of the irrational within public
discourse.
So now, turning to the gothic
literature, the first great ur-text of this fiction of degeneration to be
published in the period under consideration was Robert Louis Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.[95] The novella was written in October of 1885 as
a quick chiller to satisfy the Christmas market, just as another story had been
the previous year.[96]
Despite these inauspicious origins, the book was an immediate success, giving
Stevenson financial independence for the first time in his life.[97] Indeed this is a good example of the
phenomenon explained in the last chapter of a quickly composed commercial story
being able to pick up on the cultural climate better than something that a lot
of thought had been put into, the success of the story being an indication of
the chord it struck with the public.
The basic story behind Jekyll and Hyde is ubiquitous so it
hardly seems worth going over the plot, but there are some pertinent points in
the original book[98]
that haven’t survived the transfiguration of the story from a text into a
legend. The story is framed as a
mystery, an investigation by the protagonist, Utterson and some of his circle,
into the strange association between his friend Henry Jekyll and another man
Edward Hyde. In the first chapters part
of the novella we already have the introduction of the class nature of Hyde’s
origins, the first possible explanation for the association between the two men
put forward in the text is that Hyde has blackmailed his way into Jekylls
beneficence;
Blackmail I suppose, an honest man paying through the nose
for some of the capers of his youth...[99]
So much connoted in those few words. The obvious implication to a Victorian reader
would have been homosexuality. In his
introduction to the current Penguin Classics edition, Robert Mighall points out
that for a middle aged bachelor to be paying the way for a younger man (who
isn’t a relative, and is unknown to his oldest friends) against the background
of the recent criminalisation of homosexuality the year before (in the
so-called “blackmailer’s charter”) an erotic connection was the obvious
explanation.[100] The class implications are more subtle
because we can follow this line of connotation into the practice of Victorian
Gentlemen in traversing the boundaries of acceptable sexuality, and quite
literally the spatial boundaries between the classes in search of rough
trade. Even before his fantastic origins
are revealed, Hyde is already a specifically “classed”[101]
species of monster – the proletarian blackmailer seeking to upset the
boundaries of human decency and the web of secrets that holds society together.
The physical characteristics of Hyde also suggest the inner-city
degenerated prole. As the critic John
Sutherland points out, the description of Hyde’s physical appearance is
deliberately obscure[102]
as, like Frankenstein’s Monster,[103]
Hyde’s monstrosity is self evident but indefinable. The features that are given however do carry
class connotations. The most consistent
feature across the novella is Hyde’s height; ‘“particularly small and
particularly wicked looking” is what the maid calls him’ according to a police
investigator of the case.[104] Height was, according to degeneration
theorists, one of the signs of physical deterioration of the Urban poor[105]
“a stunted growth is characteristic of the race”.[106] The diminished height and aspect of the
urbanite was taken by the degenerationists as indicative of the diminishment of
that section of the species as a whole.
We should also note that one particular characteristic of Hyde’s height
seems to speak particularly of the fear of a resurgent working class, namely
that he was getting bigger, and that ‘the balance of (Jekyll’s) nature would be
permanently overthrown’.[107]
Similarly, the only other features of Hyde given with any specificity,
his hands, are also implicitly framed in terms of class. Hyde describes his own hands as,
“professional
in shape and size…and comley”[108],
in comparison with Hyde’s, which is “lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor
and thickly shaded with a thwart growth of hair”.[109] This description becomes more elaborate in
the various revisions made by Stevenson as the novel is printed and
re-printed. In the original the
comparison with Hyde’s hand isn’t given.[110] This is perhaps indicative of the interactive
relationship between texts and the reading public whereby the mythic resonance
in the collective imagination feeds back into the text itself, changing it.[111]
The more intangible aspects of Hyde’s various descriptions
also display a particular reverberation of class-degeneration discourses. In some senses these impressionistic features
are more important because they are trying to convey feeling and emotion, and
hence engage the deeper, sub-conscious sites of reception where irrational
prejudices situated. The apeishness of
Hyde is something that is continuously emphasised through the text. In the ‘ape-like fury’ of his assault on
Danvers Carew is noted by the maid who witnessed the attack,[112]
Jekyll’s man-servant Poole describes him as moving like “a monkey” as he
happened upon him in Jekyll’s chambers.[113] The inference here isn’t hard to
decipher. Concerns about and theories on
man’s relationship with the simian were quite common in zoological discourses
in the nineteenth century, pre-dating Darwin’s publication of The Origin of the
Species.[114] To the degenerationists it followed logically
that if the Ape was the closest relative of Homo Sapiens then that was the
direction the degenerates and other less evolved sections of humanity were
heading. Furthermore, there was a
convergence between this scientific discourse and representations of the
criminal, particularly political violence (and usually Irish nationalists of
various stripes[115]). Within this politicised context any political
action of the organised sections of the Irish workers and peasants, from the
extremely moderate agitation of O’Connell’s movement through the
confrontational, thought not violent, political action of the Parnell-era
agitation around the Home-Rule bill and into the terrorism of the IRB[116]
could all be characterised in biological terms as originating from some
hereditary propensity towards violence.
Ironically this did as much of a disservice to the Gorillas as it did to
the Irish. Gorillas are actually an
extremely placid species who spend most of their time feeding or sleeping, but
this misrepresentation of the Gorilla within the rational discourse of Zoology
is quite explicable in this context of justifying an irrational social myth of
racial monstrosity.
That this simian trope emerges in Jekyll and Hyde, which in
no other way appears to allude to an Irish (or indeed any other) colonial
discourse, at that point in history, is significant because what it suggests is
that the working class movement in Britain had inherited some of the same
anxieties generated by the Irish nationalists.
Since the defeat of the first general strike in 1842 and the end of the
chartist movement in the later part of the 1840s, the class struggle in Britain British State hegemony had been in Ireland
Part of that linguistic construction of the class conflict
would also have drawn on - and indeed been shaped by - some of the older deep
myths of western culture. One of these
that is evident in Stevenson’s novella is the story of Esau and Jacob from the
Old Testament.[121] This story of the “hairy” twin dispossessed
of his birthright also has resonance, ironically considering the secularism of
the author, in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Again this is tied into a monstrous and animalistic construction of
class conflict albeit expressed in much a more direct form.
 |
| Title Page of the 1st edition |
In Wells’s vision of the future, civilisation has fallen
and mankind has literally degenerated into two species, a gracile sub-species
of “little people”, called ‘Eloi’, that live on the surface and the monstrous
‘Morlocks’ that live and toil beneath the ground, looking after the material
needs of the Eloi. As China Miéville
points out,[122]
Wells doesn’t require much deep analysis to decipher the imagery in his novels
because quite often he tells us what they mean quite explicitly within the
text. The way in which the relationship
between classes under industrial capitalism develops into the Eloi and Morlocks
is spelt out quite explicitly on pages 48-49 of the current (2006) Penguin
Classics edition. Furthermore, he is
quite explicit in the teratology of the Morlocks, how they become bleached
white because of their habit of living subterranean:
…[E]ven now there are existing circumstances to point that
way…does not and East End worker live in such conditions as practically to be
cut off from the natural surface of the Earth?[123]
It emerges later in the novel that contrary to his earlier
belief, the Eloi aren’t in charge of the situation and in fact the vents
apparent all over the surface aren’t just there to provide air to the
underground kingdom of the Morlocks, but are also access points from which they
emerge at night to drag the Eloi down to be butchered and eaten.
Within this binary the Morlocks are on top, in other words
this isn’t the fear of the, ‘mutual ruination of the contending classes’, but a
nightmarish vision of a sort of proletarian victory. Wells was a Fabian, i.e. he believed in an
evolutionary vision of socialism to be imposed onto society from the top down
by a cadre of intellectual supermen, ‘Samurai’ as he termed it, for the benefit
of all. As much as he was a socialist,
the idea of class conflict and an independent working class movement trying to
impose its own interests on society was as horrific to him as it was to Mrs
Gaskell writing half a century earlier.
Moreover, out of these two sub-species the sympathy of the reader is
firmly with the Eloi. There isn’t any
particular sense of the tragedy of Morlocks as fallen humanity. Also, considering the incidence of
capitalist-as-pig metaphors in the culture of the time and the Elois role in the
plot as food animals, there is little to nothing made of this potentially
fruitful source of imagery.[124] To the extent that the reader’s sympathy is
with anyone in the novel it is firstly with the Time-Traveller, (who if the
Morlocks and Eloi represent the workers and capitalists certainly represents
the intellectual) then the Eloi, with the Morlocks on the bottom.[125]
Even though Wells explicitly sets out the meaning of his
parable, we can still read the teratology of the Morlocks within a wider
inter-textual nexus of social anxieties.
The cannibalistic nature of the Morlocks draws on centuries’ worth of
anxieties about colonialism dating back to the first age of capitalist
expansion in the Early Modern period.[126] Moreover both of the degenerated sub-species
in the novel are physically smaller than modern man. As with Edward Hyde, we can see this idea of
physical height and its relation to the degeneration of the species being
played out in the construction of the Morlocks.
In Well’s second novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, the
theme of the working class as another species is less overt, but the imagery is
much sharper. The story is fairly simple
– a traveller, through ill fortune ends up stranded on an island where a
surgeon/vivisectionist, Dr. Moreau, has been trying to create rational man-like
beings by cutting up animals and suturing them back together again. Moreau is killed by one of his experiments
and the island descends into chaos without him and the traveller eventually
escapes back to civilisation.
The class element in this parable is
in the details. Dr. Moreau hasn’t just
re-constructed animal matter into the humanoid form, but animal behaviour into
an approximation of human society.
Moreau and his assistant, Montgomery, constitute a ruling class, over
the beast people. The protagonist, again
a rational man of science – much like the author – is an intellectual whose
place in this mini-society is somewhere in between the humans and the Beast
Folk. Like the ruling class, Moreau
controls the beast folk through a series of laws that are held almost as a
religion and enforced by the religious awe that the Beast folk have of
him. Moreau also monopolises the
ownership of the firearms on the island for use against any Beast-man
transgressing against the rule of law, thus maintaining his position as the
sole a force with the licence to inflict pain and even death onto other people
in the same way that the state reserves the right to punish and even kill
anyone transgressing against its code of laws.
The proletarian nature of the beast people is evident in
their description. John
Carey sees
a continuity between the repellent nature of the beast folk and the repulsion
felt by the Victorian intellectual for the masses.[127] There is a lot of textual evidence to support
this assertion. The space on the island
the beast folk inhabit is couched in terms reminiscent of the gothicised
Victorian slum, particularly in the section of the novel after Moreau dies and
the beast-folk start reverting to their animal nature – literally
degenerating. Their faces are almost
uniformly prognathous,[128]
a feature they have in common with the Victorian stereotype of the Irish male.[129]
As Prendick lives on the island the
lines between Beast-man and human begin to blur as he sees the human aspect
that has been trained into them.
Interestingly, in both the examples given by the text the human
characteristics he sees allude to the lower classes;
I would see one of the bovine creatures…treading heavily
through the undergrowth, and find myself trying hard to recall how he differed
from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I
would meet the Fox-Bear Woman’s vulpine shifty face, strangely human in its
speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.[130]
This seems
to implicitly support the idea that workers retain more of the animal-in-man
than their social and intellectual superiors.
When Prendick returns to society, he
finds the lines between man and animal permanently obscured.[131] Not only has he picked up some of the
wildness of his companions but, as he puts it;
I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met
were not also… beast-people… and that they would presently begin to revert… I
feel as though the animal was surging up through them and the degradation of
the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale.[132]
Again Wells helpfully decodes the
imagery of the novel for us. This is the
most explicit articulation of the trope of degeneration in the fantastic
literature of the period I have yet come across. Curiously, Well’s novels are conspicuously
absent from the current literature on Degeneration Theory and it isn’t that
they don’t utilise literary sources either.
In fact, the majority of studies on Degeneration Theory that examine
popular notions of degeneration through the lens of contemporaneous literature
tend to be about Bram Stokers novel Dracula.
This is particularly interesting when you consider that while Wells’s
scientific romances were genuinely popular[133]
in the 1890s compared to Dracula. Though it sold well enough[134]
in it’s day, Dracula only became really popular in the twentieth century with
the advent of cinema and the early cinematic adaptations,[135]
which don’t feature any of the degenerative aspects of the novel. It is perhaps partly for this reason, i.e.
that it is so well known as to be omnipresent in our culture, recreated and
adapted at some point in every generation, while it’s original meaning isn’t
remembered, that Dracula receives the attention that Wells doesn’t.
Of course another reason why there is
a particular emphasis on Dracula is that the author explicitly characterises
the eponymous Count Dracula in pseudo-scientific terms and name-checks the
fathers of degeneration theory. The
Count is described as “criminal and of criminal type”,[136]
and we are assured that “Nordau and Lombroso would classify him so”.[137]
Dracula is an extremely complex novel
and can be read in a number of ways, but at its heart is the synergy between the
vampyric imagery from the older gothic tradition and the particularly late
Victorian crisis and its psychological fall-out in the discourses around
degeneration. The ‘literary sleuth[138]’
Elizabeth Millar, commenting on the tendency of modern critics like Salli Kline
to see Dracula’s physical features as originating with Lombroso, seems to
half-dismiss the idea, pointing out that while Stoker’s description of Dracula
does correspond to Lombroso’s criminal man we have a direct source for
Dracula’s features in the work of the Victorian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould.[139] Actually, one could synthesise these two
points to say that it is no coincidence that Lombroso’s Criminal Type
corresponds to a folkloric/pre-Enlightenment notion of monstrosity (doubtless
Stoker would not have seen it as such) or that this convergence manifests
itself in Gothic literature.
Dracula, more so that Well’s novels or Stevenson’s Strange
Case follows the pattern of the classic gothic in that it is a story of the
clash between the old pre-Enlightenment world of peasant superstition (often
associated with Catholicism) and the new world of protestant reason (and its
offspring, science). It takes after the
long tradition of Vampire stories within the gothic that began with Polidori’s The
Vampyre.[140] In the earlier stories the class antagonism
between the aristocracy and bourgeoisie is evident. As the bourgeoisie and aristocracy syncretise
into a new capitalist ruling class over the course of the nineteenth Century,
the later vampire gothic appears to be predicated on the fear of the
peasantry. In the British context this
took on a particularly Irish flavour.
It’s no coincidence that the two greatest Vampire authors of the later
nineteenth century, John Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, were both
Anglo-Irish.[141] The early chapters in Dracula, where the
Urban Anglican high-churchman finds himself in the un-nerving company of a
superstitious peasantry, might well be read as reflecting the author’s
experience of being Urban Anglo-Irishman amidst the superstitious peasantry of Ireland
Into this lap of the
old world, seemingly un-touched by the reformation, not withstanding the
Enlightenment or industrial revolution, comes Harker and with him the modern
world of phonographs, short hand and the up to the minute science of
physiognomy. At the heart of Dracula,
underneath the details, is a fear that despite all our technology and science
there are things older and stranger than us in this world that mere ephemera
like firearms, phonographs and the steam engine cannot overcome. Yet in the end these are the things that
defeat Dracula, giving the novel a particular reading as a way of containing
and managing this anxiety. This echoes
the positivist context of the society in which the book was written. For writers after the shocks of the early
twentieth century (American Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft being the most
prominent example) this subtext comes to the fore and becomes the source of the
horror, and modernity is utterly impotent.[142]
The teratology of Dracula himself has
been described, notably by Stephen Arata,[143]
as representing a panorama of Victorian anxieties about a variety of
contemporaneous issues. Even bearing in
mind Robert Mighalls quite reasonable criticism of many critics of Dracula as
engaged in a gothicising project themselves,[144]
we can clearly see how Dracula touches on these various issues of gender and
femininity[145]
and anxieties over Empire.[146] In the context of the monstrous construction
of the working class, what we see in Dracula is not so much the working class
as another species, though it does draw on tropes from the degeneration
discourse,[147]
but the monstrous foreigner. At the time
Dracula was written there had been a large movement of eastern Europeans into Britain
To close this section on the use of the monstrous in the
class struggle by the bourgeoisie, one recurring motif that has not been
covered but certainly deserves some consideration is the violation of bourgeois
space by proletarian bodies. Recent
social historians have noted that one of the key points of the development of
bourgeois identity was the creation of the home, i.e. the demarcation of
private space within the familial homestead.
This also relates to Bryan Turner’s theory of the social order, which is
that the social order functions in a very specific manner, i.e. as the
restriction of the human body.[149] One facet of the social order in Turner’s conception
is the restriction of the body in space – where you can or can’t go in general
life and the restriction of certain deviant bodies to institutions like prisons
or lunatic asylums, which will themselves each contain a highly codified system
of restriction.
Taking a dialectic approach to Turner’s theory of the
social order, one can see that this idealistic creation of boundaries and
immaterial borders also contains within itself its own negation, the
transgression of those boundaries. So,
with this creation of the safe space of the bourgeois household came the
anxiety of the fear of the violation of that space. In some sense this fear of the interloper in
the safe space of the homestead has always existed in monster literature, in
Beowulf from the Tenth century for example, the moment of panic is when Grendel
invades Heorot, the hall of king Hrothgar.
At the end of the Nineteenth century, as these nightmares of violated
space are located with great specificity within the bourgeois household, these
themes emerge not just in the horror literature of the day but also (though a
few decades later) within the rational discourse, at the beginning of the
pseudo-science of psychology.[150]
Two of the best-known examples of the type, The Horla by
Guy De Maupassant[151]
and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw[152],
are stories of incorporeal and indefinable horrors in bourgeois country
retreats. Monleon points out that these
settings are away from the terrors of the inner cities that had been created by
capital but somewhere that was also very much an extension of city life.[153]
The way in which these stories relate to the monstrous
construction of the working class is through the invasion of and usurpation of
the space. This is most obvious in The
Turn of The Screw, where the monsters are the shades of servants that are
trying to possess the children of the household,[154]
though no less evident in The Horla for that.
The Horla itself is an invisible vampiric force that slowly usurps and
drains the life from the unnamed narrator.
In his diary entries he fears that one day creatures superior to man
will cross the void of space to conquer mankind, “just as the Norsemen formerly
crossed the sea to subjugate nations more feeble than themselves”.[155] Norsemen, or indeed his contemporaries in his
own Third Republic
and their counterparts in the rest of Europe
who were crossing their own seas to subjugate nations more feeble than
themselves. This puts The Horla in the
same tradition of anxieties of reverse-colonialism as Dracula and The War of
the Worlds, of which its author would say “they (the martian invaders) did to
us what we did to the Tasmanians”.[156] He also fears that the Horla would “Make of
man what we have made of the Horse and the Ox: his chattel, his slave and his
food”.[157] In other words he will re-order the economic
relations to put himself in an exploitative relationship with man. This is a classic example of what Freud
called Projection, the act of attributing your own taboo thoughts and emotions
onto others.
Throughout the nineteenth century the European bourgeoisie
conquered and enslaved most of the rest of the world and created an industrial
system of exploitation in their own countries.
I would argue that we can tell a little of what they felt about that
through the monsters they created who were eternally on the verge of doing
exactly the same thing to them. Possibly
the only thing they did to those they exploited that they did not fanaticise
about someone or some thing doing to them was to construct their subjects in as
monstrous/inhuman. Perhaps this was
because they did not have to fanaticise about it because the working classes
were perfectly well up to the task themselves, which is what we are going to be
looking at in the next section.
3.2 Bloodsuckers, Dark Gods and
Capitalist Pigs.
“It raises the question… for socialists, ‘do we want to be
the monster or do we want to destroy the monster?’ And the answer of course is ‘Yes’”.
In looking at the literature of the
working class we are moving now from the relative certainties of literary and
intellectual history into the obscure netherworld of the largely unrecorded and
unknown. The working class, or more
properly the working classes, of late Victorian Britain were an extremely heterodox
with a large range of attitudes and experiences including a not insubstantial
proportion who would have fully assimilated the attitudes of the hegemonic
discourse, as discussed in the last section.[158] This section therefore cannot claim to
encompass the fears of the working class as a whole, but we can perhaps make a
start on sections of the British working class that were conscious of
themselves and their interests as a class and some of the pre-Labour party
working class movement through examining the cultural artefacts produced by and
for that movement and in opposition to the prevailing cultural hegemony of the
time.
One of the problems we face here is that there isn’t a
comparable tradition of monster literature within the literature produced by
the working class novelists of the time and nor would there be until the
twentieth century. The working class
novelists of the fin de seicle tended to write naturalist semi-autobiographical
novels about the working-class experience, trying to rescue themselves from the
enormous condescension of history. Such
fantastic literature as we have from the socialist movement of the period tends
to come from middle and upper class socialists that have got into the movement through
a moral or aesthetic critique of capitalism rather than those from the working
class movement. To find the irrational
discourse within the culture of the British workers we shall have to look at
alternative sources. As I’ve already
indicated in the introduction, the sources I will be looking at are drawn from
the radical press of the 1880s and 1890s, and most of that from the pages of Justice
and The Clarion.
Another problem in compiling a study of the irrational
discourse of the working class movement is that, within the scarce material
that remains of any working class discourse, there is so little of it. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the
practical constraints the two papers had upon them. The arguments put forwards had to be clear
and concise to be convincing. Most of
the typed content of Justice and The Clarion was news reportage and engagement
with contemporary issues with the practical restrictions of a small press and
in the pared-down journalistic idiom.
Compounding this is that the sort of place within these newspapers where
we might find some imaginative content, i.e. cartoons/illustrations are also
harder to produce on the smaller budget these papers had to work from. Justice, like some of its modern day
counterparts[159]
was not run as a business but rather for party propaganda and (some would argue
more importantly) as an organisational activity for the party. The Clarion did run at a profit, but a modest
one by the standards of the day. Much of
such fiction or poetry as did appear in the two newspapers was generally similar
to the naturalistic semi-autobiographical working class fiction I’ve mentioned
above.
That said, within the odd articles, cartoons, bits of
fiction, songs and poetry that can be found, there was an interesting
reoccurrence of certain tropes that may give us a window into the hidden world
of the irrational discourse of the working class movement.
A part of the rational discourse of
the Working class movement was Marxism.
Although the influence of Marxism on the labour movement was limited in Britain
So many of these images from Kapital recur through the
monstrous imagery of the working class movement in Britain that it is tempting
to regard it as an ur-text for this aspect of the creative output of the
movement. Certainly the Marxist SDF’s
newspaper Justice uses a lot of Marx’s gothic imagery in its editorials and
news reports.
One particular image that seems to have had a lot of
mileage out of is that of the Vampire.
It was Engels who first talked about the “vampire property holding
class”[162]
but Marx develops this into a consistent element of his characterisation of the
bourgeoisie’s condition and as an extension of his conception of the rule of,
“dead labour” over, “living labour”.[163] As well as representing the aristocratic
upper classes in the mainstream gothic literature since the late Enlightenment,
the vampire in it’s act of parasitism - a dead creature feeding off the living
- could connote in very simple and emotive language the exploitative
relationship between the employer and employee.
This connection is made quite specifically in Justice in an article on
shareholders in capitalist corporations, entitled “The Vampires of To-Day”.[164] The article doesn’t give any particularly
ghoulish details of misdeeds shareholders, its just a comment on figures that
had been released showing that returns were up for 1887 on the year before.
The Vampire theme is also presented in Walter Crane’s The
Capitalist Vampire,[165]
which was a special commission for Justice.
The symbolism is quite straightforward, the angel of socialism swooping
down to protect the stricken worker from the huge bat-dog creature of
capitalism, which has “Religious Hypocrisy” and “Party Politics” down each
wing. The content of the imagery is
rendered quite explicitly in the notice on the front page of the issue carrying
the cartoon:
The glutinous, evil, loathsome, appearance which the artist
has given to the vampire “Capitalism” is worthy of the very creature which is
preying upon the very vitals of the people of England
That said, the use of this Marxist-Gothic isn’t exclusive
to the press of an explicitly Marxist persuasion. Another of Marx’s most famous images from the
first paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, the spectre of Communism,[167]
occurs in the Clarion in a cartoon from 1898.[168] That this would appear in The Clarion
suggests that Kapital wasn’t so much an Ur-Text for the movement (except
arguably within the metropolitan SDF) but drew on the same wider current of
imagery that was thrown up by the interaction of the new modes of production
with the earlier folk-culture from which the authors were removed by only a
generation or so removed.
Chris Baldick points out that Marx’s use of Gothic and
monstrous imagery is “no mere stylistic flourish, but a consistent ironic
reversal of the Bourgeoisie’s own myth”.[169] Part of how Das Kapital works is the way it
constructs and personifies the capitalist system, not as the Old Testament
god-like world-balancer of Malthus or with the benevolent “hidden hand” of Adam
Smith, but as a monster.
Although we can’t make a case for the direct influence of Das
Kapital, this idea of the capitalist system as something unfathomably huge
recurs in various guises throughout the socialist and working class press of
the time. In an untitled cartoon in The
Clarion on the subject of the Trades Federation for example, Capital is clearly
depicted as a gigantic dragon-like monster menacing the much smaller figure of
the Worker.[170] While the picture referred to above is one of
defiance in the face of adversity, the Worker being armed like a mythic hero
with artefacts imbued with special properties, (the Shield marked Trades
Federation and protective armour marked Labour) himself towering over the
landscape at nearly the same scale as the monster, its more common to find the
system portrayed as a dark and malevolent godlike being.
The name Moloch is often used to signify the creature. In traditional medieval superstition (and Milton America
The Moloch archetype also seems to
have been part of the international socialist movement outside Britain
…huddled
in its lair like some evil beast, Le Voreaux crouched ever lower and its breath
came in longer and deeper gasps as though it were struggling to digest its meal
of human flesh.[172]
The motif is also evident through the
period under discussion and into the early twentieth century. The Russian Marxist-Feminist pioneer,
Alexandra Kollontai uses the phrase, ‘the modern Moloch of capital’ in her
speech to the first International Women’s Socialist Conference at Stuttgart in
1907[173]
and Fritz Liang’s impressionist Science Fiction masterpiece Metropolis also
contains a scene where the protagonist has a vision wherein the factory the
workers toil to maintain becomes Moloch – identified as such by a rather
striking intertitle with the letters M O L O C H splayed across the screen in
the Modernist style.
What all this represents for the
workers’ movement is the expression within the irrational discourse of a
particular strain of the radical critique of capitalism. This critique is the idea that capitalism is
not just a form of economic activity, but constitutes a religion. Earlier elements of this idea appear in the
works of some pre-Marxist thinkers, but Marx first iterates it with rigour in
his theory of commodity fetishism. Marx
borrows the term ‘fetishism’[174]
from the early sociology of religion to describe the way in which capitalism
imbues objects with certain transcendental characteristics to turn them into
commodities and the humans that produce them into objects of labour. The German Marxist Walter Benjamin would
later broadly examine the idea of capitalism as a religion from a sociological
perspective, equating the department store with the Cathedral and consumerism
with an abstracted form of piety.
The implications for the mentality of
those engaged in the movement are more complicated. For Christian socialists this would have
further grist to their theological mills, identifying capitalism and capitalist
practice as another faith in an antagonistic relationship with their own. For secular socialists, to expose and
reinforce the idea that capital is a religion is to strengthen the notion of
capitalism as a set of rules and ideas, something that is essentially man-made
and can be overcome by alternative ideas (which is itself the root of another
idea that originates with Marx, Historical Materialism). The status quo likes to present itself as
natural and inevitable, and these notions are undermined by conceptualising capitalism
as a religion. In other words these
early socialists are inching towards the intellectual currents of the
mid-to-late twentieth century.
Conversely, one aspect of these images is the size of the
creatures in relation to the workers and the implicit capacity of a god to reek
havoc and destruction. We have to
remember that although the socialist movement is growing they are still small
as a proportion of the population, and also that while the power of the
institutions of the working classes is growing they still remain in a vulnerable
position. This god-like rendering of the
capitalist state might just as well reflect anxieties about the scale of what
they are facing and the immensities of the tasks set for them.
One article in Justice entitled “The Modern
Minotaur”[175]
made extensive and telling use of both the Vampiric and Molochian imagery at
the same time;
Well might the fable of the Cretan Minotaur, the monster
who could only be appeased by a sacrifice of young virgins, have been the
foreshadowing of the horrors engendered by the Capitalist system. Country after country and race after race
have been sacrificed to the insatiable and beastly greed of the
capitalists. Only by blood can the
system be kept alive. Once more we are
in a period of industrial depression ; all the markets of the “civilised” world
are glutted, and it is necessary that the maidenhead of a fresh market be
taken. China
There are three things that are
interesting about the above quotation.
Firstly the fluidity between the use of the quasi-religious and vampiric
imagery suggests that in the construction of the capitalist system these were
not discreet categories, rather they fed into and supported each other. Secondly, the imagery is overtly sexual and
penetration of the market into new areas is not merely sexual but rapacious. This I feel is related to the third point,
the context shown in the article, i.e. the opening up of China
Generally speaking, one could read
this as an extension of and reaction two the sexual nature of imperialism
within the irrational discourse, for example in the presentation of Africa in the novels of Rider Haggard.[177] Furthermore, in the various articles in Justice
I’ve come across the most common topic for those that contain a use of
monstrous imagery is imperialism and empire.
It is hard to say why this is, but I would hypothesise one reason is
that when discussing domestic issues such flourishes would be unnecessary as
the target audience, the metropolitan working classes, would have their own
experiences to draw on, in presenting news about the empire it becomes necessary
to imaginatively recreate the world, just as imperialists imaginatively
recreate the empire themselves in order to colonise it. On the one hand the colonial discourse gives
us the good coloniser; - the Christian Soldier, the Missionary or the Rhodes figure. To
combat this one needed to present the other side, the “Ghouls” who desecrated
the grave of the Mahdi after the re-taking of the Sudan
Another way to engage with the monstrifying tropes of the
dominant cultural hegemony is to agree with them while subverting their
implications to the ends of the working class movement. Getting back for a
moment to the discourse around the notion of degeneration, again we can see the
rhetorical tactic of inversion in the way that the polemicists of the workers
movement appropriated this discourse and turned it around to their own
ends. For example, Daniel Pick has
pointed out that the social reality of degeneration was even in evidence in the
great socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, though it was
articulated to demonstrate the necessity of socialist revolution[180]. This can also be seen in a story that
appeared in Justice, ‘A Fairy Tale for Tired Socialists’[181]. The story itself is a fairly straightforward
didactic allegory of the workers place in society, it begins with a man in a
land of plenty who could take advantage of the riches and wonders around him
because of the various ‘enchantments’ laid on him, e.g. Custom, Fear etc. Of particular relevance is the section on how
the ‘enchantment’, effected his physical appearance;
And through enchantment the man became ugly and evil
visaged. His hands became course and
hard, his back bent and his brows lowering and beetled, for, because of the
enchantment, he had to toil long and labouriously.[182]
While there are similarities here between the description
of the man in the story and gothic depictions of the urban worker[183],
by putting the emphasis on the labour as the cause of the deformity it removes
the taint of the hereditary explanation.
The discourse of degeneration was partly rooted in the social reality of
a real disparity in the physical condition of the classes, a reality and a potential
grievance which socialists could exploit.
Similarly, the socialist press could
also take the monstrous characterisation of themselves by the upper classes and
ironically represent it in such a way as to highlight the absurdity of it. In 1892 the Clarion published a cartoon in
response to a letter from the Duchess of Portland to the Primrose League in
1892.[184] The part of the letter quoted was an attack
on;
Those mischievous and dishonest men
who attempt, for their own selfish glorification and advantage, to set class
against class and stir up ill feeling.[185]
The cartoon above the excerpt depicts the socialist
agitator in full demonic form with horns, cats-eyes and a spiked tail
protruding from under his greatcoat. By
responding to this attempt to demonise socialists in such a direct manner the
cartoonist was able to highlight in a comical manner the ridiculousness of the
statement. Bakhtin said of the
subversive nature of laughter that it purifies the consciousness of men from
what is false[186]
and bring those at all levels of society to the same standing.[187] This spirit is very much in evidence in this
cartoon as well most of the humorous depictions of members of capitalists and
landlords in The Clarion e.g. the depictions of the wealthy as grotesque
animal-men in ‘Piggy’s Property’[188]
and ‘The Crocodile MP’.[189] There is certainly a strong contrast between
this playful use of man-animal imagery in these cartoons and the animalistic
construction of the working class in the contemporary popular literature.
The depiction of the ‘Socialist Agitator as Monster’ also
raises another issue, that of identification with the Monster. We have already come across this apparently
contradictory desire to reconstruct yourself as a monster, in Marx’s assertion
in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that they, the movement that he was a
part of, are the spectre Haunting Europe.
Obviously a large part of this is the desire to be a threat and
therefore to be feared by the enemies of the movement. Going back to the theories around Monsters in
art and literature we find the idea of the monster as existing always at the
point of immanence, on the edge of becoming.
This too could be said to be related to the movement and it’s sense of
itself and the new world it was going to bring into reality, at the point of
immanence forcing its way out of the idea-space of socialist and labour
discourse and into the real world.
At this point in this section on monstrous imagery in the
working class press I feel that it is important to raise the issue of
Anti-Semitism in fin de seicle working class culture. This aspect of the working class culture and
specifically socialist culture has drawn a lot of attention from both academia
and the media, particularly in the United States
While these claims are not without some validity and
textual support, it is fair to point out that this particular argument is
historically locatable within a wider public discourse of an attack on
socialism and the contemporary left, wherein an Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,
most commonly associated with the European far-in the inter-war period, is
identified as one of the dominant themes within the discourses of the Socialist
movement, retroactively read into the writings of Marx and projected forwards
through the late nineteenth-century socialist movement, fascism and the
Holocaust into the post war left and new left.
It constructs Marx as, at best, a self hating Jew and at worst, a rabid
anti-Semite[190]
and Adolph Hitler as a closet Marxist.
As such it can be considered as a monstrous construction of the left by
the mainstream discourse, one that is on occasion utilised by factional
elements within the far-left against other leftist groupings.[191] As well as basically reconstructing Socialism
and Marxism as being responsible for (and equivalent to) Nazism,[192]
this argument of ‘Left’, anti-Semitism or, “The New Anti-Semitism”, serves the
more immediate purpose of stifling debate about Zionism, criticism of Israel
with regards to the human rights of the Palestinians and the actions of the US
in the middle east.[193]
That said, we cannot afford to excuse or whitewash the
Victorian socialists and labour men for there was undoubtedly some anti-Semitic
sentiment within the writings of some Victorian socialists. However this fact has to be appreciated in a
context where the association between Judaism and capital had become part of
what Gramsci refers to as “common-sense” the disjointed body of uncritically
absorbed thought common to a particular period.[194] For example Robert Blatchford’s use of the
term ‘Jew’ and reference to Jewish bankers in some of his illustrative examples
in Merrie England
That said, within these socialist discourses there is an
absence of the sort of extreme racialist discourse that one tends to associate
with fascist anti-Semitism. There
doesn’t appear to be any harking back to old Myths, such as the blood libel and
killing of Christian babies for use in sorcery.
While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is certainly a
good indication. If anti-Semetism was as
ubiquitous as it has been suggested[195]
one would have expected to have found some evidence of it in the pictorial
representations of capitalism in the socialist press. In theory, one could make a case for a
connection between the Moloch imagery and anti-Semitic imagery, but that would
have to hinge on the use of child sacrifice as an emotive in each, though child
sacrifice is a common recurring motif in monstrous imagery in western culture
that predates both capitalism and anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, in Justice at least, such anti-semetic
sentiment as did exist did not go unchallenged.
After reference to “Jew-Jingo backers” of the mainstream newspapers in a
piece on pro-war jingoism during what we now know was the prelude to the Boer
war[196],
a Jewish Social Democrat began a correspondence within the letters pages of the
paper[197]
in which an extremely complex and nuanced debate on the paper’s own use of
anti-Semitic imagery emerged.
Essentially the editors argued that they were not anti-Semitic, having a
great sympathy for working class Jews and pointing out that many of their
leading comrades were of Jewish extraction, including the recently deceased
Frederick Engles and Eleanor Marx, while at the same time they felt justified
in their hatred of wealthy capitalists, many of whom happened to be
Jewish. On the other hand, Jewish Social
Democrats and their supporters wrote that they did not feel that it was
appropriate to single out Jewish capitalists and warned of the dangers of using
that sort of imagery, i.e. Alienating Eastern European Jewish immigrants
against the working class movement who could then be used as scab labour to
break strikes, or losing SDF supporters to other metropolitan left groups such
as the Anarchists, or even the early Zionist movement.[198]
What emerges from the historical record is that this was a
period of the history of the socialist movement when many of the complex
discourses around race and class (and for that matter gender) where still in
their early stages and had yet to achieve the level of sophistication that we
in the present have only come to through a long period of struggle and the
experiences of the twentieth century.
Nationalism, Anarchism, socialism and undigested cultural, economic and
social scientific theories from earlier periods of struggle sat together in
ways we would find quite strange today.
Anti-Semetism within the early socialist discourse is undeniable, but to
expect otherwise from a society so steeped in racialism would be anachronistic
and to use this as a stick to beat contemporary socialists seems perverse.
So, what then can we say in conclusion of the teratology of
the Working class movement in Victorian Britain? One consistent motif that can be seen in the
cartoon images in the socialist press, in the imagery of the socialist news
reportage and in Marx’s use of the gothic, is the process of inversion and
reversal. Rituals of reversal have a
long history in pre-industrial traditional culture across the world. In some sense we can see this inverting trend
in the radical culture as a continuation of this tradition, probably not handed
down directly but more indicative of the same subversive thought process at
work transported to a different age and type of media culture. As we have seen before, the monstrous
construction of the British working class has its origins in the simian racial
construction of the Irish in the decades previous to the fin-de seicle. It is here too that we can see this sort of
subversion of monstrifying tropes in Cartoons that parody the Simian Irish of
the British popular press.[199] In a tradition within the Irish press that
would continue into the next century, these Irish cartoonists turned Tenniel’s
images of the Irish on their head by, for example, depicting grotesque English
bodies[200]
and the figure of Punch introducing the monstrously constructed Irishman from
his own pages to “The Jarvey”, the figurehead of an Irish Journal by the same
name.[201] And so too it was with The Clarion cartoons
depicting workers as heroes out of legend while the upper classes are treated
if not as monsters then at least as absurd.
In the context, the use of inversion seems highly
appropriate. The word “Revolution” comes
from mechanics and refers to turning a wheel through 360 degrees. By inverting, by turning the images they were
presented with on their heads, the propagandists were turning their culture
towards something better and trying to turn the world upside down and into
something better.
Chapter 4
Conclusions
To
conclude this study I would like to reflect on the analytical technique used in
and developed over the previous chapter and the strengths and limitations of
the various elements of theory discussed in the first chapter.
From our
analysis of the various theoretical approaches to the Monster in Chapter 3 it
is apparent that monsters are objectified representations that are supposed to
cause unease or anxiety in the reader.
The question then becomes one of how these representations produce this
anxiety. While a lot of the anxieties articulated
by monsters are rooted in near-universal existential concerns with our
mortality and physical integrity,[202]
clearly the root of many of these anxieties are in the socio-cultural context,
that is the anxiety is drawn from the environment of the monster. Throughout
this project it has been my premise that Monsters, because of their function
within the narratives they inhabit, are the detritus of their cultural context,
a collection of all the negative, fearful things that provoke a crisis for that
culture. Whether it is through the upsetting
effect of violating established schema,[203]
unreason intruding into bourgeois space[204]
or the guilty conscience of those of us who knowingly violate the social order,
the monster can embody any of these things and is most successful when it can
embody many anxieties simultaneously.[205] Therefore the monster is a textual record in which social anxieties
can be read, and as I hope I established in the last chapter, there is much
that can be read in them that can enlighten and challenge pre-conceived notions
of how people thought and felt.
The theory
of monsters as I have developed it over the course of this project has, I feel,
the potential to open up topics to new understandings of the irrational
discourses that underlie and sustain their corresponding rational discourses. One could easily imagine, for example, a
project very much like this one, with the same format and analytical approach,
which took the discourses around the women’s movement or the issue of sexuality
as its subject. Also, while the
importance of the notion of a rational and irrational discourse would seem to
limit the applicability of the theory to the late modern period I would argue
that this need not be the case as long as we understand that prior
to the Enlightenment the two discourses shared a common space in the intellectual
life of the period. The great thinkers
of the previous centuries often had interests across the range of science and
mysticism.[206] In Adornian terms, one might say that as
pre-enlightenment societies were structured around naked authority,
particularly when that had a legitimacy based on metaphysics, of course the
irrational and symbolic would have been more prevalent in the discourses of the
time. The marginalising of the
irrational discourse by the revolutionaries of the Enlightenment can then be
contextualised as the de-legitimising of the old order. Considering this, one could envision medieval
culture as a particularly fecund resource for projects of this type and
involving the same theoretical approach.
Some
limitations of the approach that we should be aware of are general to any
analysis that involves psychological analysis as a means of inquiry. If E.M. Jones’s Monsters From The Id showed
us anything its that it is very easy to impute your own prejudices into the
material. However these issues are not
insurmountable. One of the problems with
Jones’s book was that while the author had clearly read around the subject it
appears that he had only read far enough to confirm his own bias. As such he recycles some of the myths from
areas of scholarship that lack academic rigour, such as most of the material
around Dracula. For example he repeats
the idea that Bram Stoker suffered from syphilis and that this had a major
impact on the development of the moral themes within the novel. However, while the vampirism-syphilis
connection is extremely pervasive[207],
it has also been discredited and traced to one of Stoker’s relatives attempting
to cash in on the family legacy with spurious gossip.[208] So, while there are issues we have to
consider when undergoing this type of research, mindfulness, rigour and good
historical practice can help us balance our own natural tendency to impute our
own partiality into the sources.
Of the
topics that I proposed to examine over the course of the project I believe I
managed to cover the majority of them to some degree and I am satisfied with
how I was able to engage with the main issues.
There is one issue however I don’t feel was adequately covered in the
previous pages. This is the notion of
“Audiences”, i.e. how audiences engaged with fiction and in this case how they
responded to monsters within their culture. Like monster theory the study of
audiences is a relatively recent phenomenon with many intriguing possibilities
and they share common concerns. While
some of this was touched on in the section on the epistemological function of
monstrous imagery, there is a lot more to be said. Noel Carroll devotes a lengthy section of his
book to the paradox of why we can be scared by things we know not to be real,
and concludes that while we are aware of things as fictional we can think
ourselves into a state of genuine horror.[209] On the other hand, Jonathan Rose has some
empirical evidence that some audiences engaged with the fictive by embracing it
as reality.[210] Unfortunately the way the project developed I
wasn’t able to engage with this apparent contradiction, simply because I didn’t
come across any sources relevant to the question, but this is something that
could be engaged with in the future, and there is even some potential to bring
a specifically Marxist perspective to the subject.[211]
Finally,
in terms of developing a Marxist approach to monsters I feel that I shown the
relevance of the Marxist tradition to the study of cultural history even in
this supposedly post-theory, post-Marxist and post-modern age. The retreat from Marxism towards the
post-modern condition of fragmentation and unease with any consistent theory
can be traced to the historical circumstances of the last decades, i.e. the
general assault on the gains made by the generation who came out of the 1960s
throughout all of western society[212]
and the stultification of Marxism by its relationship to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union
is no more and we appear to be entering a period of crisis both like and unlike
that faced by the last generation who brought Marxism to the level of orthodoxy
within academic discourse before the counter-revolution of the
nineteen-eighties and nineties. As my
generation faces its own struggles and we seek to understand the world and the
situations we are presented with we will have this inheritance to draw on,
informed and strengthened by the critiques made over these last decades.
China
Miéville raised a very interesting point at his lecture.[213] If monsters are the product of social
anxieties then come-the-revolution, after we have purged the world of all evil
violence and oppression to enjoy it to the full and throttled the last
capitalist with the guts of the last priest, will there still be monsters? It’s hard to say. While capitalism in its current form will
certainly end at some point in the future, and what it is replaced with may be
qualitatively better, I find it hard to envision a complete end to human misery
and struggle. Who could possibly know
what monsters will be born from the next stage of human society, but monsters
have always been there to terrify us and help us engage with our fears. In other words, we are the monster, we will
slay the monster and some day we will continue to create monsters of our own.
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[1] R.
Chartier, Cultural History p.13
[2] This is
sometimes referred to as Teratology, a term borrowed from medical science in
which it refer’s to the study of birth deformities.
[3] With the
odd exceptions, such as the title piece in R.F. Foster’s Paddy and Mr Punch, which sparked off a debate amongst historians
of Irish – British relations that runs to this day.
[4] Indeed,
several history professors have contributed papers to the conferences of the
Monsters and the monstrous conferences that have been held annually since 2003
(http://www.wickedness.net/Monsters/monsters.htm)
under the auspices of the inter-disciplinary.net project (http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/).
[5] R.
Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’ in Late Victorian Gothic Tales p.xvi
[6] P.
Burke, History and Social Theory
pp101-4.
[7] J.
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight.
[8] C.
Frayling, Nightmare: the Birth of Horror.
[9] J.J.
Cohen (ed.) Monster Theory.
[10] J.J.
Cohen ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in J.J. Cohen (ed.) Monster Theory.
[11] The
term ‘Science Fiction’ wouldn’t be coined until the Pulp magazine boom in 1920s
America
[12] Mainly
in Punch.
[13] And by
extension, global culture.
[14] e.g. The Clarion, The Workman’s Times and The
Yorkshire Factory Times.
[15] E.g. To-Day, Our Corner and Commonwealth.
[16] D.
Mulch, English Socialist Periodicals, 1880-1900, p.xxii.
[17] D.
Mulch. p.xviii.
[18] Which
itself published Clarion Cyclist’s
Journal.
[19] Tom
Mann or exanple.
[20] JJ
Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture
p.20
[21] B.
Denny, The Services Directive – A Race To
The Bottom! (London
[22] And
indeed every summer since the first blockbuster (Jaws) in 1975.
[23] C.
Meiville, Marxism and Monsters
[24] J.J.
Cohen (ed.) Monster Theory: Reading
Culture (1996)
[26] E.g.
One of the academics I contacted in connection to this project, Elun Gabriel,
is primarily a specialist in German political history and the paper on the
Anarchist as Monster he delivered to the conference in 2005 was an off-shoot of
the main research on German Anarchism that he was engaged in.
[27] N.B.
For this idea of the irrational discourse I am largely drawing on my own
work. For a fuller explanation of this
concept see my previous essay, C. McVarnock “The Left Hand of Empire: the
Fantastic and the Irrational in the Culture of Colonialism” (Essex ,
2006) which explores this concept in the context of imperialism. Briefly, this explores the relationship between
rational, scientific literature on the world outside the homelands of European
civilisation (what Edward Siad refers to as Orientalism) and European art and
literature (and particularly fantastic literature) that constructs the Orient
in its own way, within the context of Euro-centric cultural hegemony. (Part of) the argument put forwards was that
the two exist in a Derridian binary, and it is possible to explore one through
the other and entirely necessary to be aware of both to understand the cultural
processes behind imperialism.
[28] Along
with the hero, which in most respects is surely their diametric opposite.
[29] Such as
the work China Miéville has been doing on contextualising the work of H.P.
Lovecraft within its historical context.
[30] For
example, recently the role of Dragon symbolism in medieval western culture has
recently been re-examined in the context of the emerging theory of monsters.
[31] H.
Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain pp.149-165
[32] Also
covered in Malchow, but more recently Daniel Pick has written a monograph on
the subject, Svengali’s Web.
[33]
Naturally enough, considering he’s from the British Marxist tradition of E.P.
Thompson, which favours a more Empiricist approach than continental Marxists
(See Thompson’s The Poverty of Philosophy).
[34] Which
isn’t defined but considering the anti-feminist and homophobic bias evident in
the book we can safely assume is a religious patriarchal society.
[35]
Routledge, 1990
[36] N.
Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, p.7
[37] Usually
an authority figure.
[38] Ibid.,
pp99-108
[39] Ibid.,
pp118-125
[40] Ibid.,
pp125-128
[41] J.J.
Cohen. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’
in J.J. Cohen (ed.) Monster
Theory: Reading Culture pp.3-25
[42] Ibid.,
pp.7-8
[43] Ibid.,
p.4
[44] Ibid.,
p.4
[45] Ibid.
P.4
[46] Ibid.,
p.7
[47] Ibid.
P.7
[48] Like in
the countless teen slasher films where the monster / killer tends to go after
anyone who has promiscuous sex, takes drugs of in some other way sins against
the social order – the sort of thing lovingly parodied in Wes Craven’s Scream
trilogy.
[49] Ibid.,
p15 He could also have used D.W.
Griffith’s Birth of a nation, Dracula or any of the numerous H. P. Lovecraft
stories (including The Call of Cthulhu, Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Dunich
Horror) wherein miscegenation is key to the teratology of the text.
[50] Ibid.,
p.16
[51] Ibid.,
P.20
[52] Ibid.,
p20
[53] J.
Halberstam, Skin Shows; Gothic
Horror and the Technology of Monsters p22
[54] A. Moore and E. Campbell From Hell Chapter Ten: The best of all tailors p.33.
[55] Even E.
Michele Jones Monsters From The Id, strange
though it is, certainly highlights the importance of the Enlightenment.
[56] J.
Monleón, A Spectre Is Hauntuing Europe
pp24-30.
[57] Ibid.,
pp.31-35.
[58] K.
Haltunnen, ‘The Birth of Horror’ pp.78-84.
[59] M.
Foucault, Madness and Civilisation
pp.68-70.
[60] C. Baldick,
In Frankenstein’s Shadow pp11-12. Eg.
Anthony and Cleopatra (IV. xii. 36):
“Of all thy sex. Most monster-like be
shown.”
[61] ibid.
pp13-14.
[62] This is
actually the main argument of Chris Baldick’s book, In Frankenstein’s Shadow.
[63] Or even
classical mythology, though there are parallels to some of the creation myths
of pre-Christian civilisation, hence the novel’s alternative title “The Modern
Prometheus”.
[64] The
background of the writing of Frankenstein and its bibliogenisis are near
legends in their own right and certainly too long and well documented to be
done justice to here. The current
Penguin Classics edition carries a good introduction with an extensive
bibliography (Maurice Hindle, 2003).
Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow
devotes a significant proportion of its length to the novel and is probably the
best I’ve come across on the subject.
[65] During
the “Golden age” of Science fiction in the 1920s (J. Brosnan Future Tense, p.12)
[66] What
was known as “Cheap Print” or chap books.
This was a popular literature that was around from the first Information
Technology Revolution in the Early modern period.
[67] Indeed
the term ‘Speculative Fiction’ is increasingly being used as a catch-all term
for referring to the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Genre together (See
N.E. lilly, ‘What is Speculative Fiction’
http://www.greententacles.com/articles/5/26/).
[68] For a
good Survey of the current literature on the subject see J. Rose, ‘Was
Capitalism Good For Victorian Literature?’ in Victorian Studies: an interdisciplinary
journal of social, political, and cultural studies University
of Indiana , Bloomington
[69] R.
Williams, The Long Revolution p.190
[70] Ibid.
p.217
[71] ibid,
pp.177-189
[72] J.
Carey, The Intellectuals and The Masses p5
[73] R. Williams,
p190
[74] J.
Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good For
Victorian Literature?’ p.496.
[75] See P.V. Allingham ‘The Victorian
Short Story: A Brief History’.
[76] R.
Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola
p.90.
[77] ibid.,
p181.
[78] J.
Neveins ‘Heroes & Monsters’ pp.126-7.
[79] J.
Brosnan, pp.10-11.
[80] R.
Tracy, ‘Introduction to In A Glass Darkly’ p.xxi.
[81] J.
Lorrain ‘The Magic Lantern’ in R. Luckhurst (ed.) Late Victorian Gothic Stories pp.172-3.
[82] J.
Rose, The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes, pp.116-9.
[83] Ibid,
pp.120-1.
[84] G.
Orwell The Road To Wigan Peir ch.8 ()
[85] J.
Monleón, A Spectre in haunting Europe , p.94.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Who of
course would lead the struggle against the autocracy itself.
[88] E.J.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914
p.170.
[89]
Hobsbawn points out that an important watershed was reached in Britian in
1895. Prior to that, in almost every
single British cabinet the majority of ministers would be from the aristocracy,
after 1895 they never were again. Ibid,
p.171.
[90] Ibid.
pp.116-7.
[91] See
E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ Past and Present 38 (1967)
[92] E.J.
Hobsbawm, pp44-5
[93] See J.
Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses:
Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 pp3-22.
[94] For a
full, discussion of the Theory of Degeneration, the best book to look at is
Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration,
but see also Chapters 6, 13 and 16 of Gareth Stedman Jones’ Outcast London, Chapter 1 of Victorian Demons by Andrew Smith, which
looks at Degeneration Theory in the context of masculinity and The first
chapter of Steven Arata’s Fictions of
Loss in the Fin de Seicle.
[95] First
published January 1886.
[96] R.
Mighall, ‘Introduction’ in The Strange
Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p.x.
[97] Ibid. p.x
[98] And I’d
imagine the famous stage adaptation that had to be closed at the time of the
Ripper Murders in 1888. I can’t really
say because the script is not commercially available and I’ve yet to turn up a
copy, or account of the play by a viewer.
[99] R.L.
Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde and Other Tales Of Terror p.9
[100]
Ibid, p.xix
[101]
And I use this term in the same sense as “Gendered”.
[102]
J. Sutherland Is Heathcliff a Murderer?
Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction p.184
[103]
At least as depicted by Mary Shelly, as opposed to the traditional image of the
monster that comes from the numerous film adaptations, particularly the James
Whale version staring Boris Karloff.
[104]
R. L. Stevenson, p.23
[105]
For example, see Dr Freeman-Williams The
Effect of Townlife on General Health quoted in G.S. Jones, Outcast London p.127
[106] 23rd Annual report of the London
Poor Board, 1871, Ibid, p.129.
[107]
R. L. Stevenson, p.62
[108]
Quoted in J. Sutherland p.187
[109]
Ibid. p.187
[110]
See the incident as given on page 66 of the Penguin classics edition, which is
based on the first published edition.
[111]
As indeed had happened in with Frankenstein,
see Baldick pp58-62 and 199-204 on the differences between the 1818 and 1831
editions.
[112]
R. L. Stevenson, p.22
[113]
Ibid, p.42
[114]
L. Curtis, Angels and Apes, pp.102-3.
[115]
Ibid.
[116]
Variously the Irish Republican or Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood.
[117]
P.G. Gurney, Labour’s Arch, p
[118]
For a full discussion on the simianisation of the Irish and its development see
L. Perry Curtis, Angels and Apes, especially
Chapter IV, pp 29-57.
[119]
C. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow
pp.84-91.
[120] E Hobsbawm , p.121.
[121]
Victor Sage, Horror in the Protestant
Tradition p.78.
[122]
C. Miéville, Marxism and Monsters.
[123]
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine p.48.
[124]
Which is something Norman Spinrad would address with greater aplomb in his
novel “The Men In The Jungle”.
[125]
This is also interesting for what it says about Well’s political ideas. Here, at the beginning of Wells’ writing
career, we can see some of the intellectual elitism that would evolve into a
fetish for authoritarian regimes controlled by an intellectual elite that would
find him championing Stalin’s Soviet Union and even Nazi Germany much later in
his career.
[126]
See, H, Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in
Nineteenth-Century Britain, chapter 2
[127]
J. Carey, p.139
[128]
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
[129]
L. Curtis, pp.89-93
[130]
H. G, Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau,
p.84.
[131]
Ibid., p.130-1.
[132]
Ibid., p.130.
[133]
The time machine sold 6,000 copies in it’s first year.
[134] Dracula was a modest success, it’s first
edition ran to 3,000 copies and was reprinted several times in Stoker’s
lifetime, but he never saw the fame of Stevenson or Wells. E. Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense pp78-9.
[135]
Including, for example, F.W. Murneau’s Nosferatu,
though this was by no means the only nor even the earliest screen adaptation of
the story. Ibid. p.79.
[136]
B. Stoker, Dracula, p.362.
[137]
Ibid.
[138]
According to the blurb on the back cover of Sense
and Nonsense.
[139]
ibid, pp37-38.
[140] The Vampyre was the first important
Vampire novel, the first vampire story in the Gothic tradition was actually
Byron’s story of the same name, penned for the same story writing competition
where Mary Shelly wrote the story she would later develop into Frankenstein.
[141]
R. Tracy ‘Introduction’ in In A Glass Darkly, p.xxi.
[142]
See. C. Méiville ‘Introduction’ in H.P. Lovecraft At The Mountains of Madness (ed.) pp.xi-xxv
[143] S.D. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle.
[144]
R. Mighall A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:
Mapping History’s Nightmares, pp.276-287
[145]
Lucy Westerna in her Vampiric incarnation harks back to a long tradition in
western culture of the Mother as monster (see the section on infanticides in M
Warner, Managing Monsters, pp. 6-12).
[146]
Pick and Arata have both noted that the Dracula follow in the wake of declining
Empires.
[147]
For a full and concise explanation of Dracula’s and location within
degenerative discourse and the writing around it see M. Tomaszewska, Vampirism
and the Degeneration of the Imperial Race - Dracula as the Degenerative
Imperial Other.
[148]
A lot has been written on the latent Anti-Semitism in Dracula, (See M.
Tomaszewska, S. Kline and J. Halberstam), but the most comprehensive is in H.L.
Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain pp153-164.
[149]
Bryan Turner,
[150]
Sigmund Freud’s notion of The Uncanny which Freud called in his own language,
“Das Unheimlich” – literally “The Un-Homely”.
[151]
G. De Maupassant, The Horla
(http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/ubooks/horl.shtml)
[152]
H. James, The Turn of the Screw
(http://www.yeoldelibrary.com/text/jamesh/screw)
[153]
J. Monleon, p.88
[154]
Which also carries implications of the fear of the next generation of mankind
usurping the social order.
[155]
G. De Maupassant, p.16.
[156]
Wells in a letter to his brother Frank, quoted in C. Meiville, Marxism and
Monsters.
[157]
G. De Maupassant, p.18.
[158]
Indeed, as we shall see, Degeneration Theory, for example, had reached the
stage of penetration that Gramsci referred to as, “common sense” Arata, p16.
[159]
E.g. Socialist Worker, The Militant, Worker’s Hammer and The
Socialist. to name but a few.
[160]
For some suggestions as to why this might have been see McKibbon, R. ‘Why Was There No Marxism In Great
Britain?’ in The English Historical
Review, Vol. 99, No.391 (April, 1984) pp297-331.
[161]
See F. Wheen Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biograph.
[162]
F. Engles, The Conditions of the working
class in England
[163]
C. Baldick, pp128-9.
[164]
Anon., ‘The Vampires of To-day’ 28 January 1888 p.1.
[165]
W. Crane, ‘The Capitalist Vampire’ Justice,
22 August 1885.
[166]
Anon, “A Special Announcement” Justice
22 August 1885 p.1.
[167]
Apparantly Kobold in the original German, which would be more like a Pixie or
Leprechaun than a spectre. See C.
Mieville ‘Marxism and Monsters’
[168]
B. “Imperial Puppets”, 2 July 1898 p.1
[169]
C. Baldick, p.125
[170] The Clarion ‘untitled’ 30th July 1898.
[171]
Anon. Yorkshire Factory Times, 30 September 1892 p.6.
[172]
E. Zola Germinal p.28.
[173]
A. Kollontai, Selected Speeches and
Writings
[174]
At that time generally taken to mean the imbuing of objects - “fetishes” – such
as idols or saintly relics, with an inherent value and/or powers. The word only gained its sexual connotation
much later.
[175]
Anon, ‘The Modern Minotaur’ Justice 30 October 1884 p.1.
[176]
Ibid.
[177]
see. R. Stott, ‘The Dark Continent, Africa as
Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction’.
[178]
Anon, Justice 8 October 1898.
[179]
Anon, Justice 14 October 1899.
[180]
D. Pick, p.3.
[181]
C.S.J. ‘A Fairy tale For Tired Socialists’ Justice,
20 August 1898 p.6.
[182]
Ibid.
[183]
See for example J. Sutherland, ‘What did Mr. Hyde really look like ?’ in Is Heathcliff a
Murderer?: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction pp.186.
[184]
Anon, ‘The Agitator’ The Clarion, 7 May 1892 p.1.
[185]
Ibid.
[186]
M. Bahktin, Rabelais and his world, p.141.
[187]
Ibid., p.142.
[188]
Anon, ‘Piggy’s Property’ The Clarion, 17 November 1892 p.1.
[189]
Anon, ‘The Crocodile M.P.’ The Clarion, 23 April 1892 p.1.
[190]
The best answer to this specious criticism of Marx was provided in the 1940s by
the American Marxist Hal Draper. (see.
H. Draper, ‘Marx and the Economic Jew Stereotype’
http://www.marxists.de/religion/draper/marxjewq.htm ) Whilst the charge of
anti-Semitism is leveled at Marx by each succeding generation of reactionaries,
few have engaged with Draper’s response or any of the other counter arguments put
by Marxists over the years.
[191]
Traditionally, by various shades of Trotskyism against the Communist parties
and the Soviet Union, (with some justification), more recently in Britain by
the Alliance for Workers Liberty against every one else on the far left,
especially the Socialist Workers Party (with much less justification) and the
Euston Manifesto signatories (a grouping of the pro-war “Left”, mainly
journalists and intellectuals) against the popular movement against the war in
Iraq.
[192]
Of course to the Neo-Liberal Hegemony, which within it’s own discourse
fetishises the Market and what it calls, “Free-Trade”, any government or
ideology that places a restriction on its economy for whatever reason is
abhorrent.
[193]
A recent EU investigation into incidents of Anti-Semitism in Europe
listed “Flying or displaying a Palestinain flag” as an anti-Semitic action.
[194]
A. Gramsci, ‘Notes for an introduction and an approach to the study of
Philosophy of the history Of Culture’ p.343.
[195]
For example by Steve Cohen in his pamphlet Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semetic
(http://www.engageonline.org.uk/ressources/funny/).
[196]
Anon. ‘Gold Greedy Ghouls Thirsty for Blood’ Justice, 14 November 1899.
[197]
T.W. Rothstein, in ‘Letters to The editor’ Justice, 21 October 1899.
[198]
Which Rothstein characterised as ‘reactionary’.
[199]
See L.P. Curtis pp.68-88.
[200]
“Reciprocity” by John F. O’Hea from Pat
(Ibid. p.70).
[201]
“Mr Punch Introduces Tenniel’s Irishman to The Jarvey” by Richard C. Orpen from
The Jarvey (Ibid. p.74).
[202]
Certainly the capacity of the monster to kill, maim and destroy is an important
element of the monster and certainly shouldn’t be overlooked.
[203]
N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror
p.125.
[204]
J. Monleon, A Spectre is Haunting Europe,
A Sociohistorical approach to the Fantastic, p.35.
[205]
J. Halberstam, Skin Shows; Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monsters p22.
[206] One need only think of recent
discoveries about Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical investigations, or John Dee,
the Magus at the Elizabethan court during the renaissance who was a noted
authority on a number of subjects and saw no contradiction between expertise in
cartography, mathematics and scrying.
[207]
Indeed I believe that a new adaptation of Dracula due to be screened this
christmas takes Syphilis as one of it’s key themes.
[208]
E. Miller, Dracula Sense and Nonsense
pp.81-2.
[209]
N. Carroll, pp.60-88.
[210]
J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the
British Working class pp.92-115.
[211]
Bakhtin’s legacy in particular seems to contain much that is applicable to
developing a Marxist perspective on audiences, see. D. Shepherd, ‘Bakhtin and
the Reader’ in Bakhtin and Cultural
Theory pp.91-108.
[212]
Whether that be in academia, the real wages of the working class which have
been in decline since the 1970s or the institutions of the working class that
have been under a sustained assault since the same period.
[213]
C. Miéville, Marxism and Monsters.
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