Vũ Đàm Linh
(Mazerlin)
New Member
From www.knowledgenews.net
Monsters!
The Top 10 Literary Monsters of All Time
Literature is full of monsters that threaten and warn, monsters that scare us and monsters that are us--monsters that, properly challenged, give rise to heroes that show the way through our fears. Here are the greatest of those literary monsters.
Medusa
"Snakes. Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?"
Everyone knows Medusa: shame about the hair. Medusa’s most famous moment was her death. The story goes that a hero, Perseus, was charged by his evil stepfather with the task of bringing home her serpent-haired head--not a particularly easy task, because anyone who looked into Medusa’s eyes turned to stone. With help from Athena (goddess of wisdom, practical reason, and the arts), Perseus hatched a plan. He snuck up on Medusa while she slept and, looking only at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head and stuffed it into a bag. He then had to flee from Medusa’s two vengeful, and immortal, sisters. He was able to escape only because of the winged sandals he had borrowed from Hermes, messenger of the gods. If you’re going to kill a monster, it pays to get the gods on your side--because sometimes the monsters are gods, too.
In death Medusa retained her power; anyone who looked at the head turned to stone. Athena eventually claimed the head and fixed it on her shield to frighten her enemies. In so doing, she established a fashion. The head of Medusa was everywhere in ancient Greece. It was carved into the sides of temples, painted on shields and decorative pots, and fashioned into masks. In all of these pictures, Medusa’s petrifying eyes stare out at the viewer; sometimes her tongue dangles from a fanged mouth. If you turn to run at such a sight, Medusa might still catch you. Many pictures show her with powerful, churning legs, perfect for chasing down and devouring her prey.
The Greeks, who developed a culture obsessed with manly courage, went to some trouble to develop a complementary theology of fear. They knew of panic, the fear that makes you bolt and run. Such fear came from the goat-god Pan--part man, part beast, all vigor and stampeding lust. And they knew of the fear that roots you to a spot and captures you like a deer in the headlights, unable to move as your doom descends upon you. In that fearful sphere, Medusa reigned supreme. It was not always so. The original idea of Medusa was probably far different. Her name means “queen” or “the wide-ruling one,” and some myths say she was so beautiful that the god Poseidon was consumed with desire for her. But by the time of recorded history, Medusa had become a wild thing, a dreadful, devouring creature that lurks in the dark spaces of the world, and hisses.
Fenrir
World-Destroying Wolf
Some monsters just happen, while others are deliberately crafted. Fenrir the wolf was the creation of the trickster Loki, who spent his life looking for ways to destroy the gods of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe--the Norsemen--and all their creations. Finally, he hit on a winning strategy: reproduction. With the female giant Angerboda, Loki had three children: Fenrir; Jormungand, a serpent so enormous that it stretched around the world; and Hel, the half-dead goddess of the underworld.
Fenrir grew so large and terrifying that the gods feared him immediately and sought a way to imprison him. Twice they brought a set of chains--with iron links larger than those of anchor chains--and challenged Fenrir to let them bind him, so he could prove that he could break the bonds. Twice Fenrir broke free easily. The third time the gods went to the dwarves--a race of superlative craftsmen--who fashioned a rope called Gleipnir from the beard of a woman, the sound of a cat’s footsteps, the breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, and the spittle of a bird. Fenrir agreed to let the gods bind him in Gleipnir, but only if the god Tyr would hold his hand inside Fenrir’s mouth as a sign of good faith. The wolf was bound and could not break the rope, but, realizing the gods’ trickery, he bit off Tyr’s hand.
Fenrir remained bound and beyond trouble until Ragnarok: doomsday. In the Norsemen’s world, the gods held evil and chaos at bay only with constant vigilance and heroism--and only for a time. At Ragnarok, it was fated that Fenrir would break free from his bonds and join his siblings. Jormungand would emerge from the sea, and Hel would lead an army of the dead from the underworld. With their father, Loki, and the race of giants, they would wage terrible war on the gods. The thunder god Thor would kill Jormungand, crushing the giant serpent’s head with his magical hammer Mjollnir, but would die from poison spit out by the snake. Fenrir, meanwhile, would battle Odin, the father of the gods, and swallow and kill him, but Odin’s son Vidar would avenge his father by tearing Fenrir’s jaws apart. The monsters die in Ragnarok, but the gods die with them, and the world-tree Yggdrasil burns to the ground. Yet a new world would rise from its ashes, protected by a new generation of gods.
Grendel
The Bogeyman of Beowulf
Every child knows about Grendel--perhaps not by name, but certainly in spirit. Grendel is the monster that lives under your bed. It’s Grendel’s foot that makes the floorboards creak at night after you’ve put out the light. Grendel is the horrible thing that lurks in the darkness and waits for you to go to sleep. In Beowulf, an epic poem written in Old English in the first half of the 8th century, a Danish king named Hrothgar knew Grendel all too well. Hrothgar built himself a magnificent drinking hall, but when he and his men started feasting there, Grendel came and ruined the party. Grendel would sneak up on the men when they had fallen asleep and kill and devour them right there--thirty at a time. The walls and floor were spattered with blood and gore, and Hrothgar was at a loss. Not one of his warriors could match Grendel’s raw strength and ferocity.
But across the water in southern Sweden lived a people called the Geats, and when word reached them of Grendel’s killing spree, their greatest warrior immediately set sail to test his strength against the monster. His name was Beowulf, and he was so strong that he decided to sleep in Hrothgar’s halls without any weapons, saying that it would be too easy to slay Grendel with a sword since the monster fought bare-handed. And so Beowulf lay down with his men in the hall and pretended to sleep, and when Grendel crept up on him, Beowulf seized him by the arm. The monster tried to twist away and run, but Beowulf was too powerful. They wrestled there in the hall until Grendel, in an act of sheer desperation, tore his arm from the socket and fled, mortally wounded, back to his lair to wait for death.
But kill one monster and another steps forward to take its place. Grendel’s mother, in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, came looking for revenge, and she killed Hrothgar’s greatest warrior in the drinking hall. Yet Beowulf tracked her down to the watery place where she lived and swam to the bottom, where he battled and killed her, too. Beowulf the hero returned to the Geats and became a good and wise king, tempting his wyrd (fate) against the monsters that threatened until the end. Beowulf the poem became the greatest achievement of Old English literature, both a window on the culture of the Germanic peoples who came to England in 449 A.D. and a tale of the hero’s continual struggle against the raging terror that thrives in the surrounding darkness.
Shakespeare’s Iago
Monstrous Manipulation
Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) is a tragedy of mistaken motives and malicious manipulations, most of which are worked by the play’s diabolical villain, Iago. Unlike the monsters of ancient mythology and Old English epics, Iago is no obviously inhuman enemy. On the contrary, he is part of Othello’s inner circle, a trusted “friend” who proves more treacherous than anyone in the play can imagine till much too late. Attacking from within, he seems to know his victims better than they know themselves. He is, in short, both a master and a monster of manipulation.
In Othello, the title character--a dark-skinned Moor (“Moor” is technically a term for a North African people descended from Arabs and Berbers, but it seems to have been used in Shakespeare’s England to refer to all sorts of dark-skinned peoples)--elopes with Desdemona, the fair daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello is a trusted general in Venice, an imposing figure who has achieved considerable influence and respect in the city. Nevertheless, one of his underlings, Iago, succeeds in convincing Othello that his wife is having an affair with his trusted lieutenant, Cassio. Iago carefully manipulates Othello’s insecurities, turning him against his innocent wife and driving him to murder her in a jealous rage.
No character in any of Shakespeare’s other tragedies exerts the sort of control over events that Iago enjoys in Othello. His power is very nearly unopposed. Othello is noble and honest, but his very nobility and honesty help to blind him to Iago’s depravity and deceit. Desdemona is pure to a fault and, like Othello, seems incapable of fathoming the depths of Iago’s groundless hatred. Iago manipulates everyone, exploiting their racial prejudices, sexist ideologies, and personal insecurities throughout. He is repeatedly able--and more than willing--to draw out the ugliest tendencies in human nature (especially “that green-eyed monster,” jealousy) and turn them to his advantage.
Yet Iago's own motivations remain enigmatic, apparently even to him. He initially claims to hate Othello for passing him up for promotion. Later, he claims to have heard that Othello has slept with his wife. But in the context of the play, neither seems to explain the depth of his hatred. In the end, the mysteriousness of Iago’s motives may be his most frightening trait. He may manipulate others, but he cannot control himself. Nor can we hope to control him without discovering what makes him tick--and that, Shakespeare’s tragedy seems to suggest, is a secret hidden deep within.
Milton’s Satan
Sympathy for the Devil?
Satan is the supreme enemy, the monster of all monsters, the incarnation of absolute evil--but that doesn’t mean we can’t like him a little bit. Or so John Milton’s magisterial epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) seems to suggest. The most striking feature of Milton’s Satan is neither his deceitfulness nor his violence, but his sympathetic appeal. The Romantic poet William Blake even claimed that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” (For Blake, this amounted to a compliment. He thought all “true Poets” were “of the Devil’s party.”) But Milton was no simple-minded Satanist. On the contrary, he was a dedicated Christian who wanted to use his talents to, as he put it, “justify the ways of God to man.” He had spent much of his adult life preparing to write his epic by studying classical literature, Christian theology, and even contemporary science. He had also written widely on politics and had served for a decade in Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government following the English Civil War.
The first two parts of Paradise Lost focus primarily on Satan, and they depict him as a hero of literally epic proportions. Satan, we learn, was once an archangel named Lucifer (“light bringer”), but he and a number of formerly angelic followers have been thrown into hell for daring to revolt against God. Awakening in the utter misery, chaos, and darkness of damnation, Satan manages to rally his troops, comforts them in spite of everything, and ultimately volunteers to venture forth alone to investigate a rumor that the Lord has created a new sort of creature: human beings. Compared with his compatriots in hell, Satan--humanity’s great enemy (Satan is an English transliteration of an ancient Hebrew word for “adversary”)--is a clear standout, displaying classically heroic characteristics: leadership, courage, even a sort of nobility.
As the epic continues, however, and the familiar story of Adam and Eve unfolds, we discover that Satan’s apparent heroism belies a fundamental depravity and powerlessness. Filled with envy and spite, he sets out to destroy God’s new creation through deception. Though his attempt at temptation proves fruitful, his victory is largely hollow. Not only does God know all along what Satan is up to (and how Adam and Eve will respond), He also knows that Christ will one day redeem the fallen humans--and that, in the end, Satan will be roundly defeated again. The secret in Paradise Lost is that, for God at least, there is no secret. The end of the epic struggle is a foregone conclusion, known to God from the start. In hell, Satan looks heroic. In the Garden of Eden, he seems dangerous and demonic. But in relation to God, he appears as little more than a plot device, a complex figure through which to spin an epic tale.
Frankenstein’s Monster
“My Hideous Progeny”
Despite its numerous film versions, Hollywood didn’t give birth to Frankenstein. A 19-year-old named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did. In the summer of 1816, she and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Bad weather forced them inside, where they and Byron’s other guests amused themselves by reading ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary’s harrowing story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein (1818).
The tale of Victor Frankenstein, a student who cobbles together a monster out of corpses gathered from cemeteries and dissecting labs, has come to symbolize the dangers of science gone out of control. On a cold and dreary night, he manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” by means of galvanism. Horrified at his own abominable creation, the scientist abandons the monster, who remains nameless (although Hollywood has, of course, named the monster “Frankenstein” after his creator). Craving sympathy and understanding, the monster finally turns to evil and takes dreadful revenge on the scientist.
The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, pinpoints the source of evil. Prometheus was chained to a stone, his liver pecked out by an eagle, as a punishment for stealing what belonged to the gods and giving it to mortals: fire. Likewise, Frankenstein is punished for usurping God’s power to create life. His fatal flaw is not madness. In fact, he’s the exact opposite to the “mad scientist” stereotype presented in the movies. Rather, he commits the monstrous sin of pride.
More than just a novel about the dangers of scientific hubris, Frankenstein is also a birth myth. By the time she began work on the book, Mary Shelley had endured several harrowing experiences with early motherhood. Pregnant at 16, and almost constantly pregnant through the following five years, she lost most of her infants soon after birth. It’s difficult to read without shuddering the 17-year-old Shelley’s diary entry for March 19, 1815, in which she records the loss of her first baby, a little girl who died before she could be given a name: “Dream that my little baby came to life again,” Mary wrote, “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.” It requires no great leap to equate this sentiment with Victor Frankenstein’s desire: “I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
Mr. Hyde
The Evil Within
A spare yet complex tale whose popularity has endured for more than a century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has become synonymous with the battle between good and evil waged within ourselves. Jekyll, a good and generous London physician, invents a drug that turns him into the demonic Mr. Hyde. As Mr. Hyde, he explores a life of pure evil in which he tramples children and commits other unspeakable acts. Although Jekyll develops an antidote that returns him to his respectable self, it gradually loses its power to quell the monster within. Finally unable to obtain one of the ingredients for the antidote mixture, and on the verge of being discovered, he commits suicide.
Acknowledging the two sides of his own nature, Jekyll writes, “If each, I told myself, could be housed in separable identities, life would be relieved of all that was intolerable.” The book’s power to frighten stems from the elusiveness of this goal. It’s not just that Dr. Jekyll is good and Mr. Hyde is evil, but that a seemingly respectable London citizen can’t control the monster within. To focus on drinking the potion (which Stevenson himself dismissed as “so much hugger-mugger”) is to miss the deeper psychological implications of the case.
The idea for the book sprang from the deepest recesses of Stevenson’s own mind--a nightmare from which his wife Fanny awakened him. He wrote the manuscript in a frenzied three days. His wife was so appalled when she read it that he burned the original manuscript and rewrote it from scratch in another three days. Just weeks later, in January 1886, Longmans published the book. Its success was immediate, selling over 40,000 copies in six months. Just a year after its publication, it was adapted as a stage play starring the American Richard Masefield. Although Masefield thrilled audiences with his grotesque transformation into the monstrous Hyde, he soon had an all-too-real rival. In one of the most horrifying examples of life imitating art, the notorious rapist Jack the Ripper began, in 1888, to terrorize London’s Whitechapel district. Because of the skill with which he cut up his victims, speculation grew that Jack the Ripper, like Jekyll, may have been a respectable physician by day. Indignant observers accused Masefield of being the Ripper, since he played the part so convincingly. The play eventually closed in deference to the public uproar.
Dracula
Sex, Monstrous Sex
Despite their reputation for strict propriety, the Victorians produced a surprising number of erotic texts. And none throbs with more lustful energy than Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The world’s most famous vampire speaks directly to the era’s fascination with and anxiety about sex.
Featuring some of the most chilling horror scenes ever written in English, the novel begins as an upstanding young lawyer named Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania (then in Hungary, now in modern-day Romania) to complete a real-estate transaction. There he finds the mysterious Count Dracula as well as three vampire women who try to suck his blood and hold him captive in the castle. Although Harker eventually escapes, Dracula follows him back to England, where he stalks Harker’s fiancée Mina and her best friend Lucy. Harker and his friends finally conquer the Count, but only after he leaves his mark on British soil.
Harker’s simultaneous fear of the vampire women and “his wicked, burning desire that they would kiss with those red lips” suggests volumes about Victorian attitudes toward sexuality. Stoker unchains his most seductive prose for the passages in which Dracula bites and ritually penetrates Lucy, turning her vaunted purity into “voluptuous wantonness”--and overturning everything the Victorians publicly expected from a lady. Several critics have noted that in addition to the palpable sexual anxiety, the text seems to betray significant fears about a foreigner invading England and tainting British blood.
Of course, Stoker, an Irish author, didn’t invent vampires or even the name Dracula. The historical Dracula was a 15th-century Romanian prince better known as Vlad the Impaler. He also used the nickname “Dracula,” a reference to the fact that he was the son of Vlad Dracul. The prince enjoyed a reputation for sadistic exploits, which allegedly included not only impaling his enemies on sharp spikes, but also skinning and boiling them alive. Stoker apparently discovered the name in an obscure history book he checked out of the library while vacationing in Whitby (an English resort where much of the novel takes place) and fused it with Slavic folklore about the restless souls of heretics, criminals, and suicides, condemned neither to live or die.
“Big Brother”
Totalitarian Terrors
Along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) stands as the most famous and influential example of the 20th-century dystopian novel. Unlike utopian stories, which help us imagine and explore ideal worlds, dystopian novels depict nightmarish societies, worlds in which authors like Orwell fear we might someday live if we’re not careful. The great nightmare for Orwell was totalitarianism, especially the kind of totalitarianism made possible by technology. In 1984, “Big Brother” uses technology to peer into every corner of human life, controlling the behaviors, the language, and even the thoughts of the people subjected to it. The slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You” is everywhere.
Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Orwell’s “Big Brother” is a master manipulator. But unlike Iago, “Big Brother” is distinctly more than human. Indeed, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is never sure whether “Big Brother,” the seemingly all-powerful ruler of Oceania, is a real human being or not. As the story unfolds, Smith appears as a disgruntled worker in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, where, ironically, he alters historical documents to suit the needs of the nation’s ruling party. Everywhere he goes, “Big Brother” watches him through “telescreens,” hidden cameras that monitor everyone’s movements and behaviors even as they project a constant barrage of propaganda designed to portray the ruling party, and “Big Brother,” in the best possible light.
Eventually, Smith begins an illegal love affair with a woman named Julia, and the two confide their hatred for the party in a man named O’Brien. Yet O’Brien turns out to be a spy, and subsequently directs Smith’s torture at the Ministry of Love, where dissenters are sent for “reeducation.” Faced with the prospect of having his face eaten off by rats, Smith finally snaps, begging O’Brien to use the rats on Julia rather than on him. Torture drives him to accept the party line entirely, to such an extent that, in the end, he learns to love “Big Brother.” Our greatest literary nightmares, it would seem, no longer revolve around ghosts and goblins. The monsters we fear most are conspiratorial societies, invisible systems of control, and technologies run amok.
Us
Who Needs Literature for Monsters?
Writers of practically every era have understood that monsters scare us because they’re externalizations of the fears we carry around inside ourselves or, more ominously, because they’re stunt-doubles for our own “inhuman” behavior. Today, dystopian literature, science fiction, and Hollywood horror continue to give life to the fear within. Yet we’ve had very little need these past hundred or so years for literary monsters. History has supplied us with all we can handle. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and others have led totalitarian regimes that have slaughtered millions, and faceless “ethnic cleansing,” civil strife, and terror have murdered millions more. We have met the enemy, and it is us--fortunately, so are heroes, who work tirelessly to beat the monsters back.
--Maggie Debelius and Steve Sampson
Monsters!
The Top 10 Literary Monsters of All Time
Literature is full of monsters that threaten and warn, monsters that scare us and monsters that are us--monsters that, properly challenged, give rise to heroes that show the way through our fears. Here are the greatest of those literary monsters.
Medusa
"Snakes. Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?"
Everyone knows Medusa: shame about the hair. Medusa’s most famous moment was her death. The story goes that a hero, Perseus, was charged by his evil stepfather with the task of bringing home her serpent-haired head--not a particularly easy task, because anyone who looked into Medusa’s eyes turned to stone. With help from Athena (goddess of wisdom, practical reason, and the arts), Perseus hatched a plan. He snuck up on Medusa while she slept and, looking only at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head and stuffed it into a bag. He then had to flee from Medusa’s two vengeful, and immortal, sisters. He was able to escape only because of the winged sandals he had borrowed from Hermes, messenger of the gods. If you’re going to kill a monster, it pays to get the gods on your side--because sometimes the monsters are gods, too.
In death Medusa retained her power; anyone who looked at the head turned to stone. Athena eventually claimed the head and fixed it on her shield to frighten her enemies. In so doing, she established a fashion. The head of Medusa was everywhere in ancient Greece. It was carved into the sides of temples, painted on shields and decorative pots, and fashioned into masks. In all of these pictures, Medusa’s petrifying eyes stare out at the viewer; sometimes her tongue dangles from a fanged mouth. If you turn to run at such a sight, Medusa might still catch you. Many pictures show her with powerful, churning legs, perfect for chasing down and devouring her prey.
The Greeks, who developed a culture obsessed with manly courage, went to some trouble to develop a complementary theology of fear. They knew of panic, the fear that makes you bolt and run. Such fear came from the goat-god Pan--part man, part beast, all vigor and stampeding lust. And they knew of the fear that roots you to a spot and captures you like a deer in the headlights, unable to move as your doom descends upon you. In that fearful sphere, Medusa reigned supreme. It was not always so. The original idea of Medusa was probably far different. Her name means “queen” or “the wide-ruling one,” and some myths say she was so beautiful that the god Poseidon was consumed with desire for her. But by the time of recorded history, Medusa had become a wild thing, a dreadful, devouring creature that lurks in the dark spaces of the world, and hisses.
Fenrir
World-Destroying Wolf
Some monsters just happen, while others are deliberately crafted. Fenrir the wolf was the creation of the trickster Loki, who spent his life looking for ways to destroy the gods of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe--the Norsemen--and all their creations. Finally, he hit on a winning strategy: reproduction. With the female giant Angerboda, Loki had three children: Fenrir; Jormungand, a serpent so enormous that it stretched around the world; and Hel, the half-dead goddess of the underworld.
Fenrir grew so large and terrifying that the gods feared him immediately and sought a way to imprison him. Twice they brought a set of chains--with iron links larger than those of anchor chains--and challenged Fenrir to let them bind him, so he could prove that he could break the bonds. Twice Fenrir broke free easily. The third time the gods went to the dwarves--a race of superlative craftsmen--who fashioned a rope called Gleipnir from the beard of a woman, the sound of a cat’s footsteps, the breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, and the spittle of a bird. Fenrir agreed to let the gods bind him in Gleipnir, but only if the god Tyr would hold his hand inside Fenrir’s mouth as a sign of good faith. The wolf was bound and could not break the rope, but, realizing the gods’ trickery, he bit off Tyr’s hand.
Fenrir remained bound and beyond trouble until Ragnarok: doomsday. In the Norsemen’s world, the gods held evil and chaos at bay only with constant vigilance and heroism--and only for a time. At Ragnarok, it was fated that Fenrir would break free from his bonds and join his siblings. Jormungand would emerge from the sea, and Hel would lead an army of the dead from the underworld. With their father, Loki, and the race of giants, they would wage terrible war on the gods. The thunder god Thor would kill Jormungand, crushing the giant serpent’s head with his magical hammer Mjollnir, but would die from poison spit out by the snake. Fenrir, meanwhile, would battle Odin, the father of the gods, and swallow and kill him, but Odin’s son Vidar would avenge his father by tearing Fenrir’s jaws apart. The monsters die in Ragnarok, but the gods die with them, and the world-tree Yggdrasil burns to the ground. Yet a new world would rise from its ashes, protected by a new generation of gods.
Grendel
The Bogeyman of Beowulf
Every child knows about Grendel--perhaps not by name, but certainly in spirit. Grendel is the monster that lives under your bed. It’s Grendel’s foot that makes the floorboards creak at night after you’ve put out the light. Grendel is the horrible thing that lurks in the darkness and waits for you to go to sleep. In Beowulf, an epic poem written in Old English in the first half of the 8th century, a Danish king named Hrothgar knew Grendel all too well. Hrothgar built himself a magnificent drinking hall, but when he and his men started feasting there, Grendel came and ruined the party. Grendel would sneak up on the men when they had fallen asleep and kill and devour them right there--thirty at a time. The walls and floor were spattered with blood and gore, and Hrothgar was at a loss. Not one of his warriors could match Grendel’s raw strength and ferocity.
But across the water in southern Sweden lived a people called the Geats, and when word reached them of Grendel’s killing spree, their greatest warrior immediately set sail to test his strength against the monster. His name was Beowulf, and he was so strong that he decided to sleep in Hrothgar’s halls without any weapons, saying that it would be too easy to slay Grendel with a sword since the monster fought bare-handed. And so Beowulf lay down with his men in the hall and pretended to sleep, and when Grendel crept up on him, Beowulf seized him by the arm. The monster tried to twist away and run, but Beowulf was too powerful. They wrestled there in the hall until Grendel, in an act of sheer desperation, tore his arm from the socket and fled, mortally wounded, back to his lair to wait for death.
But kill one monster and another steps forward to take its place. Grendel’s mother, in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, came looking for revenge, and she killed Hrothgar’s greatest warrior in the drinking hall. Yet Beowulf tracked her down to the watery place where she lived and swam to the bottom, where he battled and killed her, too. Beowulf the hero returned to the Geats and became a good and wise king, tempting his wyrd (fate) against the monsters that threatened until the end. Beowulf the poem became the greatest achievement of Old English literature, both a window on the culture of the Germanic peoples who came to England in 449 A.D. and a tale of the hero’s continual struggle against the raging terror that thrives in the surrounding darkness.
Shakespeare’s Iago
Monstrous Manipulation
Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) is a tragedy of mistaken motives and malicious manipulations, most of which are worked by the play’s diabolical villain, Iago. Unlike the monsters of ancient mythology and Old English epics, Iago is no obviously inhuman enemy. On the contrary, he is part of Othello’s inner circle, a trusted “friend” who proves more treacherous than anyone in the play can imagine till much too late. Attacking from within, he seems to know his victims better than they know themselves. He is, in short, both a master and a monster of manipulation.
In Othello, the title character--a dark-skinned Moor (“Moor” is technically a term for a North African people descended from Arabs and Berbers, but it seems to have been used in Shakespeare’s England to refer to all sorts of dark-skinned peoples)--elopes with Desdemona, the fair daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello is a trusted general in Venice, an imposing figure who has achieved considerable influence and respect in the city. Nevertheless, one of his underlings, Iago, succeeds in convincing Othello that his wife is having an affair with his trusted lieutenant, Cassio. Iago carefully manipulates Othello’s insecurities, turning him against his innocent wife and driving him to murder her in a jealous rage.
No character in any of Shakespeare’s other tragedies exerts the sort of control over events that Iago enjoys in Othello. His power is very nearly unopposed. Othello is noble and honest, but his very nobility and honesty help to blind him to Iago’s depravity and deceit. Desdemona is pure to a fault and, like Othello, seems incapable of fathoming the depths of Iago’s groundless hatred. Iago manipulates everyone, exploiting their racial prejudices, sexist ideologies, and personal insecurities throughout. He is repeatedly able--and more than willing--to draw out the ugliest tendencies in human nature (especially “that green-eyed monster,” jealousy) and turn them to his advantage.
Yet Iago's own motivations remain enigmatic, apparently even to him. He initially claims to hate Othello for passing him up for promotion. Later, he claims to have heard that Othello has slept with his wife. But in the context of the play, neither seems to explain the depth of his hatred. In the end, the mysteriousness of Iago’s motives may be his most frightening trait. He may manipulate others, but he cannot control himself. Nor can we hope to control him without discovering what makes him tick--and that, Shakespeare’s tragedy seems to suggest, is a secret hidden deep within.
Milton’s Satan
Sympathy for the Devil?
Satan is the supreme enemy, the monster of all monsters, the incarnation of absolute evil--but that doesn’t mean we can’t like him a little bit. Or so John Milton’s magisterial epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) seems to suggest. The most striking feature of Milton’s Satan is neither his deceitfulness nor his violence, but his sympathetic appeal. The Romantic poet William Blake even claimed that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” (For Blake, this amounted to a compliment. He thought all “true Poets” were “of the Devil’s party.”) But Milton was no simple-minded Satanist. On the contrary, he was a dedicated Christian who wanted to use his talents to, as he put it, “justify the ways of God to man.” He had spent much of his adult life preparing to write his epic by studying classical literature, Christian theology, and even contemporary science. He had also written widely on politics and had served for a decade in Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government following the English Civil War.
The first two parts of Paradise Lost focus primarily on Satan, and they depict him as a hero of literally epic proportions. Satan, we learn, was once an archangel named Lucifer (“light bringer”), but he and a number of formerly angelic followers have been thrown into hell for daring to revolt against God. Awakening in the utter misery, chaos, and darkness of damnation, Satan manages to rally his troops, comforts them in spite of everything, and ultimately volunteers to venture forth alone to investigate a rumor that the Lord has created a new sort of creature: human beings. Compared with his compatriots in hell, Satan--humanity’s great enemy (Satan is an English transliteration of an ancient Hebrew word for “adversary”)--is a clear standout, displaying classically heroic characteristics: leadership, courage, even a sort of nobility.
As the epic continues, however, and the familiar story of Adam and Eve unfolds, we discover that Satan’s apparent heroism belies a fundamental depravity and powerlessness. Filled with envy and spite, he sets out to destroy God’s new creation through deception. Though his attempt at temptation proves fruitful, his victory is largely hollow. Not only does God know all along what Satan is up to (and how Adam and Eve will respond), He also knows that Christ will one day redeem the fallen humans--and that, in the end, Satan will be roundly defeated again. The secret in Paradise Lost is that, for God at least, there is no secret. The end of the epic struggle is a foregone conclusion, known to God from the start. In hell, Satan looks heroic. In the Garden of Eden, he seems dangerous and demonic. But in relation to God, he appears as little more than a plot device, a complex figure through which to spin an epic tale.
Frankenstein’s Monster
“My Hideous Progeny”
Despite its numerous film versions, Hollywood didn’t give birth to Frankenstein. A 19-year-old named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did. In the summer of 1816, she and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Bad weather forced them inside, where they and Byron’s other guests amused themselves by reading ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary’s harrowing story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein (1818).
The tale of Victor Frankenstein, a student who cobbles together a monster out of corpses gathered from cemeteries and dissecting labs, has come to symbolize the dangers of science gone out of control. On a cold and dreary night, he manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” by means of galvanism. Horrified at his own abominable creation, the scientist abandons the monster, who remains nameless (although Hollywood has, of course, named the monster “Frankenstein” after his creator). Craving sympathy and understanding, the monster finally turns to evil and takes dreadful revenge on the scientist.
The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, pinpoints the source of evil. Prometheus was chained to a stone, his liver pecked out by an eagle, as a punishment for stealing what belonged to the gods and giving it to mortals: fire. Likewise, Frankenstein is punished for usurping God’s power to create life. His fatal flaw is not madness. In fact, he’s the exact opposite to the “mad scientist” stereotype presented in the movies. Rather, he commits the monstrous sin of pride.
More than just a novel about the dangers of scientific hubris, Frankenstein is also a birth myth. By the time she began work on the book, Mary Shelley had endured several harrowing experiences with early motherhood. Pregnant at 16, and almost constantly pregnant through the following five years, she lost most of her infants soon after birth. It’s difficult to read without shuddering the 17-year-old Shelley’s diary entry for March 19, 1815, in which she records the loss of her first baby, a little girl who died before she could be given a name: “Dream that my little baby came to life again,” Mary wrote, “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.” It requires no great leap to equate this sentiment with Victor Frankenstein’s desire: “I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
Mr. Hyde
The Evil Within
A spare yet complex tale whose popularity has endured for more than a century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has become synonymous with the battle between good and evil waged within ourselves. Jekyll, a good and generous London physician, invents a drug that turns him into the demonic Mr. Hyde. As Mr. Hyde, he explores a life of pure evil in which he tramples children and commits other unspeakable acts. Although Jekyll develops an antidote that returns him to his respectable self, it gradually loses its power to quell the monster within. Finally unable to obtain one of the ingredients for the antidote mixture, and on the verge of being discovered, he commits suicide.
Acknowledging the two sides of his own nature, Jekyll writes, “If each, I told myself, could be housed in separable identities, life would be relieved of all that was intolerable.” The book’s power to frighten stems from the elusiveness of this goal. It’s not just that Dr. Jekyll is good and Mr. Hyde is evil, but that a seemingly respectable London citizen can’t control the monster within. To focus on drinking the potion (which Stevenson himself dismissed as “so much hugger-mugger”) is to miss the deeper psychological implications of the case.
The idea for the book sprang from the deepest recesses of Stevenson’s own mind--a nightmare from which his wife Fanny awakened him. He wrote the manuscript in a frenzied three days. His wife was so appalled when she read it that he burned the original manuscript and rewrote it from scratch in another three days. Just weeks later, in January 1886, Longmans published the book. Its success was immediate, selling over 40,000 copies in six months. Just a year after its publication, it was adapted as a stage play starring the American Richard Masefield. Although Masefield thrilled audiences with his grotesque transformation into the monstrous Hyde, he soon had an all-too-real rival. In one of the most horrifying examples of life imitating art, the notorious rapist Jack the Ripper began, in 1888, to terrorize London’s Whitechapel district. Because of the skill with which he cut up his victims, speculation grew that Jack the Ripper, like Jekyll, may have been a respectable physician by day. Indignant observers accused Masefield of being the Ripper, since he played the part so convincingly. The play eventually closed in deference to the public uproar.
Dracula
Sex, Monstrous Sex
Despite their reputation for strict propriety, the Victorians produced a surprising number of erotic texts. And none throbs with more lustful energy than Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The world’s most famous vampire speaks directly to the era’s fascination with and anxiety about sex.
Featuring some of the most chilling horror scenes ever written in English, the novel begins as an upstanding young lawyer named Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania (then in Hungary, now in modern-day Romania) to complete a real-estate transaction. There he finds the mysterious Count Dracula as well as three vampire women who try to suck his blood and hold him captive in the castle. Although Harker eventually escapes, Dracula follows him back to England, where he stalks Harker’s fiancée Mina and her best friend Lucy. Harker and his friends finally conquer the Count, but only after he leaves his mark on British soil.
Harker’s simultaneous fear of the vampire women and “his wicked, burning desire that they would kiss with those red lips” suggests volumes about Victorian attitudes toward sexuality. Stoker unchains his most seductive prose for the passages in which Dracula bites and ritually penetrates Lucy, turning her vaunted purity into “voluptuous wantonness”--and overturning everything the Victorians publicly expected from a lady. Several critics have noted that in addition to the palpable sexual anxiety, the text seems to betray significant fears about a foreigner invading England and tainting British blood.
Of course, Stoker, an Irish author, didn’t invent vampires or even the name Dracula. The historical Dracula was a 15th-century Romanian prince better known as Vlad the Impaler. He also used the nickname “Dracula,” a reference to the fact that he was the son of Vlad Dracul. The prince enjoyed a reputation for sadistic exploits, which allegedly included not only impaling his enemies on sharp spikes, but also skinning and boiling them alive. Stoker apparently discovered the name in an obscure history book he checked out of the library while vacationing in Whitby (an English resort where much of the novel takes place) and fused it with Slavic folklore about the restless souls of heretics, criminals, and suicides, condemned neither to live or die.
“Big Brother”
Totalitarian Terrors
Along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) stands as the most famous and influential example of the 20th-century dystopian novel. Unlike utopian stories, which help us imagine and explore ideal worlds, dystopian novels depict nightmarish societies, worlds in which authors like Orwell fear we might someday live if we’re not careful. The great nightmare for Orwell was totalitarianism, especially the kind of totalitarianism made possible by technology. In 1984, “Big Brother” uses technology to peer into every corner of human life, controlling the behaviors, the language, and even the thoughts of the people subjected to it. The slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You” is everywhere.
Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Orwell’s “Big Brother” is a master manipulator. But unlike Iago, “Big Brother” is distinctly more than human. Indeed, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is never sure whether “Big Brother,” the seemingly all-powerful ruler of Oceania, is a real human being or not. As the story unfolds, Smith appears as a disgruntled worker in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, where, ironically, he alters historical documents to suit the needs of the nation’s ruling party. Everywhere he goes, “Big Brother” watches him through “telescreens,” hidden cameras that monitor everyone’s movements and behaviors even as they project a constant barrage of propaganda designed to portray the ruling party, and “Big Brother,” in the best possible light.
Eventually, Smith begins an illegal love affair with a woman named Julia, and the two confide their hatred for the party in a man named O’Brien. Yet O’Brien turns out to be a spy, and subsequently directs Smith’s torture at the Ministry of Love, where dissenters are sent for “reeducation.” Faced with the prospect of having his face eaten off by rats, Smith finally snaps, begging O’Brien to use the rats on Julia rather than on him. Torture drives him to accept the party line entirely, to such an extent that, in the end, he learns to love “Big Brother.” Our greatest literary nightmares, it would seem, no longer revolve around ghosts and goblins. The monsters we fear most are conspiratorial societies, invisible systems of control, and technologies run amok.
Us
Who Needs Literature for Monsters?
Writers of practically every era have understood that monsters scare us because they’re externalizations of the fears we carry around inside ourselves or, more ominously, because they’re stunt-doubles for our own “inhuman” behavior. Today, dystopian literature, science fiction, and Hollywood horror continue to give life to the fear within. Yet we’ve had very little need these past hundred or so years for literary monsters. History has supplied us with all we can handle. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and others have led totalitarian regimes that have slaughtered millions, and faceless “ethnic cleansing,” civil strife, and terror have murdered millions more. We have met the enemy, and it is us--fortunately, so are heroes, who work tirelessly to beat the monsters back.
--Maggie Debelius and Steve Sampson
Chỉnh sửa lần cuối: