I will discuss works of literature in the horror genre, and the ways that they explore the concept of a 'monster'.
home Is what the haunts are
Homes, as explored by the horror genre, become twisted by some aspect. ‘Home’ should be a place of belonging and comfort, whereas in The Fall of the House of Usherbecomes a place where this idea is turned on its head. These authors address ‘home’ as a space where they can explore the fears of the characters, while still containing these anxieties into a defined area. In The Fall of the House of Usherby Edgar Allen Poe,the House of Usher reflects the breakdown of the family under the madness. When the narrator originally describes the house, he describes “a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction” (Poe, 45). The fissure is barely perceptible at the beginning, just as the underlying fears and anxieties of Madeline and Roderick are just barely perceptible at the beginning of the story. As Roderick and Madeline Usher self destruct, “this fissure rapidly widened- there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind - the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight” (Poe, 60). The Usher siblings’ illnesses, fears and anxieties absorb into the physical aspects of the house. Jefferey Cohen’s Seven Thesesdescribes how monsters are a reflection of a society’s inner anxieties and fears. The Fall of the House of Usherexplores this exact idea, where the house takes on the role of the monster, and reflects back to the Ushers their own fears or the downfall of their family. The Usher siblings reflect the fears of the society at the time as well, as they hint at incest, the downfall of the family and insanity. In the horror genre, ‘home’ becomes the physical manifestation of the characters’ fear and anxieties, trapping them into their own nightmare. (9-9-17, 12 am)
What's left unsaid
Often times, what we don't say is what needs most to be voiced. By leaving these messages unsaid, Herman Melville and Henry James plunge the readers into the depths of uncertainty. In both The Turn of the Screw and "Bartleby, the Scrivener", the true meanings of the endings are left up to the reader's interpretation. James allows the reader to project their own fears onto what is left unclear at the end of The Turn of the Screw. Miles's history at school and the things he said that are left to the imagination, a simple long dash is left for the reader to insert their own idea of what Miles is guilty of in the place of the long dash. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Bartleby used to work for the dead letter office. Dead letters are essentially a means of communication that was unable to serve its purpose, leaving an empty space where words once were. Bartleby’s phrase “I would prefer not to” itself is a blanket statement that allows for the reader to rebel along with him against what we feel we should not have to conform to. His unwillingness does not specifically say that he rejects consumerism and capitalist production, however his simple passive defiance says it in his silent inaction. In the same way as Miles’s silent confession that does not truly resolve the question of his guilt, the question of what Bartleby truly wants and where Bartleby is from. These unanswered questions creates a space for the reader to explore their fears within the context of the blank space that Bartleby and Miles’s unanswered backgrounds leave. (9-14-17, 2am)
Slavery's Baby
The concept of family is usually one of unity and love. Along with this comes the function of a family, to raise and protect children. Slavery through its basic functioning tore apart that concept of family, such a central part of humanity, ripping children from mothers and making it impossible for those enslaved to ever build a ‘family’. Beloved by Toni Morrison begins with the line “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom”. Already, the reader knows that this novel will turn the concept of children around and use it to create a horror story. It goes deeper, however. It is not the ‘baby’ ghost that repulses the reader, but rather the stories of slavery, and the memories of dehumanization that haunt the characters everyday. Morrison presents to us the concept of slavery stripping women of their functions as mothers. Sethe tells Paul D that before she escaped they took her milk, Halle’s mother had each of her children sold off except for Halle before they were more than young children, and Sethe’s mother threw away each of her children until Sethe because they had all been products of rape from her white overseers. This essential destruction of the maternal bond to their own children manifests itself in this destruction of the idea of a baby. The ‘baby’s venom’ is the venom of Sethe’s dead baby, the one that has also caused her to lose her two sons, leaving her only with Denver, and the ghost of her dead child. But the ghost represents more than just the spite that it feels toward Sethe and Denver. The haunting of them is a constant reminder that Sethe can never truly forget or heal from the trauma of her past. Sethe’s trauma moves to Denver as well because Denver’s childhood is shaped by the isolation that she is immersed into because no one wants to associate with them. The ghost and later, the physical manifestation of the baby in Beloved, refuses to allow Sethe to move past her memories, inflicting the pain of those years past onto her present. By giving memory a physical manifestation, Morrison tells the reader that we are never truly free from our pasts, and that though we may seem free from the monsters, whether real or psychological, will always find us again. (9-22-17, 7pm)
What you'll never forget
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, Beloved stands for more than just herself. As seen before in other horror stories Beloved is simply a reflection of those she haunts, showing their deepest scars, and pulling them back to their dark pasts. Beloved is not only a character but the personification of the memory of slavery, and the voices that reach to us still from the past, begging to heard and not forgotten no matter how much we wish we could bury the atrocities in our nation’s past. The imagery that surrounds Beloved herself ties her all the way back to the slave trade: she comes from the water, she craves sweet things, and she has no true identity. When Beloved first appears in her human form, she appears from the water and no one knows where she came from. In this same way, the slaves were brought across the sea, and their origins did not matter to those they came to. The imagery of sweetness and sugar are also closely linked to slavery. Slaves were used notably to harvest sugar throughout the Caribbean islands, tying sugar and slavery together permanently. The fact that Beloved craves sugar endlessly is a nod to the fact that many black people imbue themselves with white values at the expense of their own culture. Just as Beloved is a nameless, black woman who appears from the water, the slaves were stripped of their identity. No one cared where they were from or what they were originally called, that did not matter because the slaves were not people under the white gaze. Beloved will not allow the characters to forget her, and forces them each to remember their most painful memories. She forces Paul D to sleep with her, and while he does his ‘tin can’ that he has stored all his terrible memories inside of opens and he must face his fear of whether or not he is truly a man. Beloved prods Sethe into sharing her memories about her past which she normally refuses to speak of, asking her about her earrings which were given to Sethe on her wedding and taken after Sethe killed her own child. The memory of slavery is not easy to forget, but as a society, we tend to fall into the trap of masking the racist past, and undermining the trauma that still exists for most African Americans. Morrison turns to the ghost to remind us that we will never be able to escape the past, and if we try to forget it as Sethe did or shove it out as Paul D did, it will come back stronger and erupt into a violent and spiteful ‘rememory’ that will make sure we never forget again. (9-29-17, 12:30pm)
OUR Nation's ghost
Toni Morrison’s Beloved creates a ghost that forces both the characters and the reader to face the realities of slavery. The character of Beloved herself is a manifestation of the collective memory and rememory of the trauma that former slaves experienced. However, from the reader’s perspective, Beloved begins also to encompass the trauma that black Americans experience in the society we live in today. In this way, Beloved seems to be a physical and psychological reminder of the trauma of slavery that our society has sought to repress and ignore. More than that, Beloved represents our society’s fears that we have repressed. For Sethe, Beloved forces her to confront her past and the pain of losing her children one by one, letting her hope that she could have a family with all her children again. But as Sethe begins to seek for this, her utter devotion to Beloved destroys her, telling the reader that as much as we submit to the hope of fixing the past, we cannot fix what is already broken. Beloved also creates a situation in which Denver is forced to leave her safe zone, the house, in order to survive. Denver seems to represent everyone who is afraid of the outside society and community. By forcing Denver out of her own bubble, Beloved’s presence helps Denver to become a functioning adult in the world rather than living immersed in the past and her mother’s trauma. However, Morrison tells the reader that we can never be truly free from our parents trauma by having Denver continue to return to her mother. Beloved cannot be defeated through each person, but rather she leaves when the community of women come together to help Sethe and Denver. By showing readers that the only way to defeat Beloved is to come together as a community, facing her and not being afraid, Morrison tells audiences that the only way to deal with the residual trauma of slavery that still exists today is to communicate with each other and be open about the existence of this ‘ghost’ that haunts us from our nation’s past. By facing the past and beginning to come to terms with the horrors of slavery and understanding that the trauma still lingers within the black community, we as a society may be able to begin to heal the wounds that are still bleeding. Just as all monsters reflect what society fears, Beloved reflects this nation’s traumatic past, forcing whites to try to understand that the black community still suffers from slavery and forcing blacks to confront the pain left over slave trade traditions that continue to scar each new generation. (10-6-17, 4pm)
The Curse of the body
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Life of Oscar Wao creates bodies caught in a postcolonial world which objectifies them, making them monstrous and deformed. Both Oscar and his mother Beli become objects in the eyes of their culture, and they each possess the characteristics that make them victims to the expectations of their surroundings. Oscar’s obesity and ‘geekery’ is described in excess. His appearance creates his status as an outcast as he goes in direct contrast with the image of Dominican male. The hypersexuality of the typical Dominican male is lacking in Oscar, who pines after girl after girl, never exerting his masculinity to attract women. Not only can he not approach women, but he also physically repulses them. Oscar’s appearance is his curse, destroying his happiness and his self image. By being continuously compared to what he should be in New Jersey as a Dominican male, he transforms into a monster in the communities eyes. By going back to the Dominican Republic he is able to find peace in a place that expects nothing of him. He finds his identity there with La Inca, who allows him to be who he wishes. Beli, in contrast, is cursed with overwhelming, excessive beauty. Beli becomes objectified by the men who surround her. Her beauty becoming the reason that she is endangered, as that is what attracts the Gangster to her. Just as with her son, she lusts after love, but her tragedy is not that she cannot find someone who will love her, as it is with Oscar, it is rather the ease with which she falls into relationships with men who promise her the world, and give her only heartbreak. The Gangster uses her to heal his wounded soul from the loss of Cuba. To him, she becomes something to conquer, to dominate, the actions he failed to do with the nation of Cuba. Even further than that, the Gangster’s views of Beli represents the hypersexualization of Afro-Caribbean women that objectifies Beli as well as the colonized nation. The domination of Beli is in a sense a colonization of her by the Gangster, a tool of the dictatorial ruler Trujillo. Oscar and Beli are both cursed with the appearance of their bodies, one with his monstrous form driving him into exile and the other with her beauty that causes her to be objectified by the very men she hopes will love her.
THe curse of Desire
Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ties gender and sexuality with colonization and the idea of fuku, the curse. This mix begs the question: how does sexuality factor into the novel’s characters’ ultimate downfall? Female bodies become hypersexualized in this novel, their bodies described as apocalyptic and destructive. But the men in this novel are drawn irresistibly to these dangerously attractive women. However, with the exception of Oscar, none of the men meet their downfall from the attainment of these women. It is the women who are sexualized that meet the worst pain. Beli’s body, the Gangster’s object of desire, transforms from a weapon she can use to attract men and attain what she wants into an island. As Yunior, the narrator, explains the Gangster’s attraction to her, she becomes an island to be metaphorically raped by the colonizing force of a male’s body. Her original world shattering, powerful beauty, while originally an asset, shrinks into an exploitable object for men to use and abuse. Ybon’s beauty is equally described, but she is constantly the subject of men’s tyranny. Her entire life is defined by the men who have her. As with Abelard’s daughter Jackie who becomes a stunning beauty, her entire family, if you believe that particular theory, meets it’s downfall because of Trujillo’s lust after her. This hypersexualized, world ending beauty that they each have draws men to them, but these men are not the victim’s of these women’s beauty, the women are. Their own fuku seems to be that they are cursed with the appearance that they possess. In the same way that Oscar is cursed with his monstrous fatness and geekery, the females in this novel are cursed with other worldly beauty, equally as monstrous, just on the other end of the spectrum from Oscar. While Oscar desires women but cannot achieve sex, these women seem to have no end of men who want them, and when they succumb to the desires of the men who want them, they reach their ultimate desire. Just as the European colonizers both birthed fuku and were the victims of fuku as they were drawn to the island of the Dominican Republic, so do the women of these stories represent the desires of the men, while also meeting their downfall through their eventual act of sex or refusal of sex. The desire for their beauty from men parallels the desire for the resources of the island by the colonizers, and both colonize the object of their desire through utter domination. But when a women and a man are able to engage in sex without dominating the other, the fuku seems to transfer to the man. When Oscar and Ybon have sex, the intimacy with which they interact is unlike any other moment between men and women in this novel. But it is Oscar who meets his downfall through this. It seems that the curse is to succumb to the desire, without taking something essential from it. Loving genuinely, without holding back, is what destroys these characters, as they are unable to live up to the hypersexualized dominance of what their culture has been morphed into. Fuku, therefore, lies in the inability to conform to the colonizing forces views of their culture.
The horror of society
Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster seems to laugh at the reader. It mocks our society by poking holes in the commonly held beliefs, rolling its eyes at core values and assuming the reader’s knowledge of a world that has been invented for the sole purpose of the novel. But what makes this so horrific? Why does reading a novel that tears down all that we know and creates a new reality make us uncomfortable, and even a little bit scared? The two parallel worlds that this novel resides in give us opposite pictures of the same struggle, sacrificial offering of one’s well being for the survival of the society that we live in. Zenzontli’s world requires the human heart to continue, and he admits he would give his own heart for that, continuously throwing himself into the heart of danger in order to protect their way of life. Zenzon, on the other hand, seems to lay down his safety for his job and for the ability to continue the capitalist society he lives in. By allowing the reader to see a blue collar worker in direct comparison to a warrior, we begin to see how futile it all is. Both men, or the two sides of the same man, are fighting for their society’s values without truly making a choice to do that. They both simply accept that this is the way of the world, and they continue to allow those in charge of them to put them in danger in order for the higher ups gains. So what makes this a horror story? Why do we read this with the visceral reaction of disgust? Foster forces us, the readers, to see that it is not only the characters in this novel who are struggling in the ever futile battle to gain some kind of recognition for their sacrifice to maintain the ways of the world, it’s all of us. This novel forces us to confront many problems within our culture, but it especially forces us to question why we continuously conform to what we are expected to be. Foster wipes out the argument that this is the best type of society to live in by showing us the conformity that we submit to in a completely different universe, picking apart what we believe is right and true about our society, until the essential question remains: Is any of it real? Or are we simply conforming to social constructions of what the majority says society ought to be? Zenzon and Zenzontli are both willing to sacrifice themselves for a place in their own societies. But are we?
Humanity's self destruction
Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex explores the hypocrisy of criticizing other forms of societies for their shortcomings without looking at their own. Zenzon and Zenzontli both live in worlds that figuratively and literally take the hearts of it’s inhabitants in order to continue the functioning of their world. The imagery of taking hearts in order to fuel Zenzontli’s world is deliberate. It brings to mind the thinking of Karl Marx. Marx argued that under industrial societies workers are the isolated from their work product and because of this isolation they lose part of their humanity. We see this with Zenzon, who loses part of his humanity, slowly killing himself through his job. He is literally being poisoned by the chemicals that his job involve. Zenzon’s capitalist society uses him and those he works with in order to make money. In this same way, Zenzontli’s society is literally sacrificing human hearts in order to continue their society. The ‘heart’ represents humanity, and by taking away the heart from these people, this essentially socialist society of the Aztex also strips the humanity from their people. Zenzon and his co workers lose their humanity to their jobs, whereas Zenzontli offers his humanity to his job, and his position in society. By putting these two storylines next to each other, Foster criticizes the ways in which socialism and capitalism contradict each other. He reveals the essential tendency of societies to establish a hierarchy in which those who are at the bottom must sacrifice their humanity in order to continue the function of their worlds. In this, there lies the true horrifying fact: no society is better than the other, humanity will continue to destroy itself in order to succeed.
why we fear what we fear
As we reach the end of this course, I have been thinking about what the horror genre is truly trying to tell the reader. Whether you are reading about haunted houses, ghosts or bodily transformations, the ‘monster’ always forces the readers to confront a deep seeded fear in the culture we live in. What struck me the most was the potent fear in most of our readings of sexuality, especially the demonizing of female sexuality. We see this is in pop culture still, an example of which is Stranger Things. Early on in the series, this theme is introduced. After drinking, Nancy and Steve go upstairs in his home to sleep together. As this intimate moment unfolds between them, Nancy’s friend Barb sits outside, the farther that Nancy and Steve go, the more danger that Barb seems to be in. Later in the series, Nancy is steeped in guilt, yelling at Steve that they killed Barb, despite her death resulting from a monster killing her. Once again, the horror genre reflects what we fear as a society. Nancy’s sexuality becomes equated with the monstrosity of her friend being taken by the ‘demogorgon’, transforming the moment from a romantic moment into a monstrous destruction of her ‘purity’. These two moments happening simultaneously equates her sexuality with something dangerous, destructive. Just as we see in this series the society’s fear of sexuality, among countless other cultural fears, we also see the fears of society in other works. In Beloved, the fear of the past and facing the trauma of past events becomes represented through a ghost who forces those in the novel to face their trauma. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz plays with the idea of human sexuality becoming a metaphor for colonization, sexuality becoming monstrous and destructive. As mentioned in previous posts, Cohen posited that the ‘monster’ often forces the reader to confront their fears as well as their culture’s fears. Underlying all monsters is the anxiety of the times, Nancy’s loss of innocence, hypersexuality and impotence, and facing the horrors of slavery are all presented to us as monstrous, destructive and yet somehow unavoidable. In this unavoidable aspect of these ‘horrors’ lies the true reason that these themes cause us to feel uncomfortable, because these works force us to see that what our society fears most is in fact inevitable, and that is why we fear it.