Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (At the Interface Probing the Boundaries)

Monsters and the Monstrous Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Margaret Sönser Breen

Advisory Board Professor Margaret Chatterjee Professor Michael Goodman Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher Dr Owen Kelly Revd Stephen Morris

Professor John Parry Dr David Seth Preston Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Professor Bernie Warren Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 38 A volume in the At the Interface: project ‘Monsters and the Monstrous’

Probing the Boundaries

Monsters and the Monstrous Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Edited by

Niall Scott

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2253-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Introduction

1

Section One Monstrous Origins: Histories from the Deep and Transformed Humans (Where ever they come from, they keep coming) Chapter 1 “Monster Sewers”: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System Paul Dobraszczyk Chapter 2 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture Kevin Alexander Boon Chapter 3 The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety Peter Dendle

9

33

45

Section Two The Monster and the Political (Once they get into politics you can’t get rid of them) Chapter 4 Dracula as Ethnic Conflict: The Technologies of “Humanitarian Intervention” in the Balkans during the 1999 NATO Bombing of Serbia and Kosovo Neda Atanasoski Chapter 5 Kultur-Terror:The Composite Monster in Nazi Visual Propaganda Kristen Williams Backer Chapter 6 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe Elun Gabriel

61

81

103

Section Three Familial Monsters (Maybe some of them are regular folk like you and me) Chapter 7 Family, Race, and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch Emily Cheng Chapter 8 The Enemy Within: The Child as Terrorist in the Contemporary American Horror Film Colette Balmain Chapter 9 ‘Monstrous Mothers’ and the Media Nicola Goc

Chapter 10 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets: Autoerotic Desire, Sexual Exchange and the Cinematic Serial Killer Greg Tuck

123

133

149

167

Section Four Miscellaneous Monsters (They can be evil, male, female, but most importantly beware, they can be cute.) Chapter 11 Nobody’s Meat: Freedom through Monstrosity in Contemporary British Fiction Ben Barootes Chapter 12 God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil and the Diabolical Monstrous Human in Heavy Metal Niall Scott Chapter 13 Monstrous/Cute: Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska

187

201

213

Welcome to an At the Interface Project This is a volume emerging from the Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil project. This inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary project seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined. Indicative themes for research and development will include; •

The “monster” through history

•

Civilization, monsters and the monstrous

•

Children, childhood, stories and monsters

•

Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)

•

Making monsters; monstrous births

•

Mutants and mutations; technologies of the monstrous

•

Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?

•

human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers

•

Revolution and monsters; enemies (political/social/military) and monsters

•

Iconography of the monstrous; the monster in literature; the monster in media (television, cinema, radio) Dr Robert Fisher Inter-Disciplinary.Net http://www.inter-disciplinary.net

Introduction Niall Scott The monster is perhaps one of the most significant creations serving to reflect and critique human existence. Whether it has its etymological roots in a demonstration of something (monstrere) or a warning (monere), the monster as a metaphor continues to be a powerful expression of the imagination and the rational. Through the imagination monstrosities are brought into being while the rational seeks to control and explain such manifestations of literature, art, cinema and biology. The monster gives a space in which perspectives can be adopted and the permissible and impermissible can be played with. Although much can be found on the origins and descriptions of monsters in histories, cultural theory and bestiaries, the opening chapter of this volume gives us quite a special view on the evocation of the monster from the imagination and subterranean depths. This is followed by two contributions on one the most relentless of all monsters, the zombie, which by contrast emerges from the human rather than an other-worldly place. The monstrous that was illuminated in the caverns of the sewage systems of Victorian London, Paul Dobrazszcyk brings to our attention that there are different ways of looking at sewers. Providing an analysis of press accounts on the development of the drainage system and pumping stations, he focuses in on the metaphorical language used to describe this subterranean world. As an opening to this volume, Dobrazszcyk demonstrates how the metaphor of the monstrous can function linking the real and the imagined. He sees this as generating a ‘stream of monstrous oppositions’ in the dialectic of the visible and invisible, the real and imagined. However the monstrous accounts are conflated with the later presentation of the system’s spaces as rational and magical as well. Dobrazszcyk ‘s analysis shows how these varying conceptions sit together and questions whether the accounts serve in some way to manipulate the public’s response to a sewage system that carries with it the monstrous attachment to stench and disgust through to the architectural marvel and rational goals of sanitation and progress. In the movement between the imaginary and the real, Kevin A. Boon, in the Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh, explores the role that the Zombie plays in the origins of the monster and monstrous as a transgression of the boundary between being and non-being. Starting with some useful definitional insights into the monster, Boon like Dobrazszcyk, treats the relationship between the human and the monstrous as dialectical. Probably one of the most terrifying monsters, the zombie epitomises the other presenting a range of oppositions to the human, in giving animation to death, absence of the self and expressing the opposite of what defines the human as

2

Introduction ___________________________________________________________

living, self reflective and conscious, and sentient. Boon outlines the history of the zombie in Haitian folklore and the lower Congo through to its place in literature and cinema. In these fields, he gives the reader seven categories of zombies as they appear in these art forms and although changing in their characteristics being responsive to social changes, the essential quality of monstrosity in the zombie remains, which Boon states is antithetical to human identity. Where Kevin Boon has laid out the nature and origin of the zombie, Peter Dendle proceeds with the demonstrative aspect of the monster, the function of The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety. Taking a journey through cinematic history, Dendle illustrates the moments at which the zombie has reflected and measured the temperature of more than 75 years of American social, cultural political and economic history, most importantly tracking the anxieties that result from encounters with social change. Like the preceding pieces he shows the effect of the imagination on the interpretation of events, such as labour and race relations, the depression, war, and consumer capitalism to name but a few. A lengthy discussion of one of the masters of the Zombie cinema, George Romero, follows the updating of the zombie, becoming more monstrous and violent, re-emerging after a period of rest to critique the current fears concerning terrorism and possible apocalyptic futures. With this, Dendle notes that what is to be feared changes from the homogeneous equalising entity to a creature that is aimless, uncontrollable and always seems to return from the dead, relentlessly satisfying its consuming appetite. A strong current running through this collection is the relationship between the monster as metaphor and the political, which occupies the central sections of the book. We move from the directly political with critiques of the role of the monster in political histories and what can be learned from these critiques in section two, into the political and the media in section three. Neda Atanasoski takes the fairly recent Balkan conflict and draws parallels between the gothic narrative of Dracula and the discourse of balkanism in NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. Reading the vampire as an eternally existing figure that periodically emerges to ‘drink and spill blood’ as Atanasoski puts it, so the ethnic Balkan conflict is presented in western media as constantly re-emerging. Taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an imperial gothic narrative, Atanasoski argues that certain features of Western history have not died, such as slavery, imperialism and institutionalised racism. Indeed the figure of Dracula emerged in the violent conflict of a culture fearing decline, the novel containing strong overtones of blood, land and racial purity. The monster of Dracula threatens modernity, in that it originates in modernity, but reflects the limits of it. The technologies of documentation have their roles too, cementing ‘monstrous acts and horrific

Niall Scott 3 ___________________________________________________________ otherness as a central to the gothic and in the journalistic involvement in the Balkan war. The Monster as other, as a deviation from an idea of acceptability is the monster of Kultur-Terror, Kirsten W. Backer’s study of Nazi propaganda in posters that reject all that is not National Socialist. With examples of the propaganda posters provided, Backer provides us with a shift in emphasis; the monster becomes an icon and an accusatory figure, and identifier pointing out otherness. The complexity of these images presents a challenge in itself, which Backer likens to the composite monster creation of Dr Frankenstein. On the other hand the anti German propaganda is much more simple in its depiction and message as are the German anti Bolshevik images. The composite monster represents in the other, all that is opposed to national socialist ideals, especially diversity and pluralism-of for example the Klu Klux Klan, African Americanism and the Native American amongst some of the many conflations depicted in Leest Storm’s Poster/image. Above all, Backer concludes and probably most insightfully, the monster (of American diversity) and the production of monsters starkly opposes the eugenic ideals of removing difference from the human population in the creation of the master race. Proceeding on a similar theme of monstrous representation, Elun Gabriel’s target is damage done to anarchism in the depiction of the anarchist as monster at the end of the 1800’s in Europe. The image of the anarchist as monster is generated by the imagination at work, and interacting with, the newspaper media, fiction and the expert. These centre around views of the anarchist as criminal and views of Russian degeneration at the time. Gabriel pays special attention to the general fear of anarchism in Europe and the German case of how the metaphor of the monster was employed. The elements that Gabriel describes bear a similar relation to Boon and Dendle’s chapters on Zombies, where the anarchist is presented as being in total antagonism to humanity. Although the uncontrollable, prolific nature of anarchism and its persistence too, has much in common with the zombie, Gabriel rather, highlights the metaphorical use of the Hydra and this monsters multiplicity of heads with new ones emerging after one had been severed. The aim of this metaphor was to be able to encompass anarchism as part of the German socialist movement. On the one hand the liberal response to anarchism through academic and expert work laid the blame of the French and German philosophy of anarchism as having been infected by eastern violence. On the other hand, the German conservative response to such a monster, Gabriel points out is to slay it. Although themes of the political feature strongly in section three, two additional areas unite these series of chapters, that of the cinematic media and that of the family. With cinematic art being one of the main arenas where the monster is communicated to a broad public, Emily Cheng’s

4

Introduction ___________________________________________________________

analysis of Disney’s Lilo and Stich focuses on the alien as monster encompassing race, adoption and otherness. It gives a study and insight into narratives of nationhood and family on film. The Conservative Disney corporation’s output is tempered by the liberal agenda in this cartoon of inclusion and multiculturalism, but one where the threatening alien is domesticated. The source of the threat which is Asian and Asian pacific is balanced by Hawai’i conceived of as paradise and as a component of the multicultural U.S. that extends into the pacific. The children’s cartoon monster here transformed into a rather likable figure, a long way from the child as an agent of horror, the most innocent becoming a metaphorical terrorist. The notion of the other is juxtaposed with the threat coming from within in the post 9/11 terrorism era which, Colette Balmain demonstrates, is reflected in the reactionary interpretation of the family of recent horror films. The child as monster and agent of horror, has of course a longer history, a history condensed by Balmain in the opening pages of her work. Balmain argues that the child as terrorist can be interpreted as having several functions: it is a monstrous offspring of the Bush era’s attempt to return to family values: it functions as a reactionary it is a figure of progressive change signifying the demise of patriarchy or it is a figure of becoming. A wonderful complement to the monstrous child is the monstrous mother. According to Nicola Goc, mothers have been receiving a bad press. The media image of the celebrity mother treats maternity as a fashion accessory placed under a voyeurs gaze, whereas certain features of motherhood remains taboo. These include breastfeeding, or the experience of postnatal depression. The contradictions presented of the mother needing to, or showing it even possible to return to her pre pregnant figure against the real physical phenomenon of retaining fluid and having stretch marks leads Goc to criticise unattainable ideals presented in the media to the majority. Goc explores the monstrous mother- the mother as murderer, as crack addict to expose the media presentation of mothers at extremes- from the ideal to the monstrous, such that the regular mother is overlooked in the societal construction of what motherhood is. The consumerist market driven forces that exploit and pervert the image of the natural mother in Goc’s article receives further critique in the context of anxiety of the self pleasuring individual. The social solitude of the masturbating serial killer that is the subject of Greg Tuck’s contribution displays a monster in opposition to community and family. Tuck breaches a subject that he notes has taken much longer than other sexual behaviours to become established in cinema. The appearance of masturbation in modern cinema reflects according to Tuck, changes that have occurred in sexual attitudes and representing post-modern capitalist experiences of pleasure as a commodity. This sets the scene for an understanding of the cinematic serial killer as a masturbatory monstrous metaphor for an anxiety of modernity and

Niall Scott 5 ___________________________________________________________ the market economy. Unlike previous presentations of the monster as other, Tuck suggests that the monster is monstrous in its sameness, in this case very close to our contemporary experience of promoting autonomy in consumerism. In the final arrangement of monster metaphors chapters are brought together looking at the woman as monster in British fiction, the male as monster in Heavy Metal and monstrosity and a the surprise of the monster capable of dispensing a decent hug. Ben Barootes’ look at monstrosity being a route to freedom displays that rather than the free woman being demonised, the embracing of being a monster leads to liberation. This liberation through an analysis of British fiction is grounded in self acceptance of monstrosity. That is, the monstrous female is able to exist beyond the constraints of societal norms. The She-devil can live exiled from, yet within society, unaffected by male chauvinisms and pacification of women. The Monstrous male as the main protagonist in Heavy Metal culture seems to be rather different kind of monster. He is one trying make sense of being exposed to a world that represents the evil and the satanic, frequently encountered in Heavy Metal lyrics. Niall Scott explores the question of whether the pursuit of evil and the diabolical is possible at all by a reading of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of radical evil. The celebration of the monstrous in Heavy Metal Culture is a route to affirm identity, yet also appears to try and imitate ideas of identity in religious histories of evil. Where the songs of bands such as Slayer deal with some fairly unpleasant views of human behaviour, Scott’ concludes that it is more likely that the diabolical monster can only be aimed at. If it were possible it would likely present the same kind of threat feared in the zombie or autoerotic serial killer that Tuck writes about- a monster that is able act with the same self control and conviction as a purely moral being would, but through a complete and utter subversion of human morality. It is reassuring to know though that where Cheng’s work on Lilo and Stich hinted at the monster as a likable entity, the final word is given to the monster as a cute and cuddly. However this is not all- the association of the monstrous and the cute signifies a warning. The profound treatment of the monstrous cute presents a significant challenge- that cuteness can grow out of malformation in the exaggeration of desirable physical features, eliciting an aesthetic response. Yet it can also be a way of tempering things that are not so easy to accept, providing a sugar coating. Its meaning is ambivalent. Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska’s argument takes us back to the role of the monster as a warning- the possibility of associating the cute and the monstrous opens opportunities for to change and revolution. This collection of teratologous studies awakens the monster from being not only myth and metaphor but in a strong sense an accurate description of features of a world we are not altogether comfortable living in.

6

Introduction ___________________________________________________________

The Monster as Metaphor has transformative power and is ignored at the reader’s peril.

Niall Scott University of Central Lancashire & The Dog and Partridge, Preston

Section One

Monstrous Origins: Histories from the Deep and Transformed Humans (Wherever they come from, the keep coming)

“Monster Sewers”: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System Paul Dobraszczyk Abstract Writing in London in July 1861 - at the peak of activity in the construction of the city’s main drainage system - the journalist John Hollingshead (18271904), in All The Year Round, stated that “there are more ways than one of looking at sewers.”1 This small but significant observation forms the key to this paper, which considers press responses to the main drainage system, focusing on accounts describing the public ceremonies held at the Crossness (1862-1865) and Abbey Mills (1865-1868) pumping stations, which marked the opening of the system south and north of the river Thames respectively. Historians of the main drainage system have conventionally regarded these responses as uniformly homogenous and celebratory.2 By focusing on a wide variety of press accounts - illustrated and otherwise - documenting the same events, this paper will question such a sense of apparent uniformity. Rather, it will be shown that these accounts embody a complex variety of responses, characterised by the interplay of the rational, the magical and the monstrous. The structure of the paper will be as follows: first, I will briefly outline the function of the pumping stations and their role as important sites for public awareness of the main drainage system; second, I will examine the press accounts themselves, drawing out their commonalities and differences and discussing in turn aspects of the rational, magical and monstrous; finally, I will assess how the sense of the monstrous relates to the wider context of mid-Victorian ideas about sewers and interpretations of these ideas by contemporary scholars.

Keywords: Rational spaces, Magical spaces, Monstrous spaces, Drainage systems, Sewers, Victorian, Press accounts, History

1.

The Public Role of the Pumping Stations The Crossness and Abbey Mills pumping stations - the largest of the four connected with the main drainage system - performed important engineering functions within that system.3 London’s topography made the pumping of wastewater necessary at certain points in its new sewerage system, which consisted of 82 miles of large-scale intercepting sewers

10 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ running parallel to the river Thames. The architectural features of the pumping stations were tailored to accommodate the giant steam engines that made this pumping possible. However, the flamboyant decoration of Crossness and Abbey Mills points to another important function of these buildings: as central sites for the promotion and presentation of the new system to the public - places where the vast but largely invisible sewerage system could be “summed up” in a celebratory aesthetic statement. The ceremonies held in 1865 at Crossness and 1868 at Abbey Mills marked the operational starting of the main drainage system and both were intended to be lavish events: the Prince of Wales being invited to Crossness and the Duke of Edinburgh to Abbey Mills, as well as many Members of Parliament and other important dignitaries. In the event, Crossness was the more high profile event, due to the recess of Parliament and the unavailability of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868. Six hundred guests attended the ceremony at Crossness, which began at 11am on 4 April 1865 with special trains laid on from Charing Cross to the remote site on the Essex Marshes and a steamboat carrying the Royal party from Westminster. The events of the day included tours of the underground sewage reservoir, an explanatory lecture by Bazalgette, a ceremony in the lavishly decorated engine-house (where the Prince of Wales started the engines), and a banquet in one of the workshops. The ceremony at Abbey Mills, on 31 July 1868, took place on the same day as the opening of the Victoria Embankment, a project concurrent and connected to the main drainage system, and followed a similar, if strippeddown schedule to that at Crossness. Visits to Abbey Mills also continued after the main ceremony: during the following fortnight, representatives from London’s vestries visited the pumping station in a succession of organised tours. Both ceremonies followed the established precedent of holding public events to mark the completion of technological projects, especially in a subterranean context, where large parts were effectively invisible to the public. When the world’s first underwater excavation - the Thames Tunnel was temporarily opened in 1827, the engineer Marc Brunel (1769-1849) organised a banquet for the workers and distinguished guests inside the Tunnel itself;4 in December 1851, the Illustrated London News (ILN) reported on a ceremony held inside a vast underground water reservoir at Croydon;5 while on 17 January 1863, the same newspaper pictured a subterranean banquet at Farringdon Street Station to mark the opening of the Metropolitan Underground Railway.6 The ceremonies at Crossness and Abbey Mills were similar events, designed to highlight, to dignitaries, sponsors and the press, the importance of such subterranean technological development and to give it a visible and striking form. The notable presence of the press at these ceremonies represented an important interface between

Paul Dobraszczyk

11

___________________________________________________ those who conceived the project and those whom it impacted, whether in social, economic and psychological terms. 2.

London’s Press In the days following the ceremonies at Crossness and Abbey Mills, voluminous articles appeared in London's newspapers. In April 1865, most of the city’s thirty-or-so daily and weekly newspapers drew directly for their articles on four accounts: the Standard, the Morning Post, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph, with the Times forming the main source in 1868. Such obvious plagiarism was common practice in a highly competitive and burgeoning market for “news”. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, particularly after the repeal of Stamp Duty in 1855 and Paper Duty in 1861, London’s press, until then dominated by the Times, witnessed a dramatic increase in competition as new, cheaper newspapers broadened their audience to the wider middle-classes.7 By the mid-1860s, London’s press consisted of three distinct types of publication: established and new daily newspapers, such as the Times and the Daily Telegraph (founded in 1855); weekly newspapers, published on Saturday or Sunday, including illustrated weeklies like the ILN; and specialist journals, like the Builder, published weekly or monthly. The reduction in prices - many to one penny - after the tax repeals stimulated intense competition, especially amongst the daily newspapers, where the dominance of the Times, which maintained its price at three pence after 1861, began to be challenged.8 By the mid-1860s, four main “dailies” took the largest share of the market: the Times, with approximately 50,000 readers every day; the Standard with 60-70,000; and the Daily Telegraph and Daily News with upwards of 100,000 each.9 In terms of their ideological stance, both the Times and Standard were largely conservative and appealed to a more “respectable” middle-class audience, while the Daily Telegraph articulated a more radical agenda with “vigorous and versatile writing” that had a broader appeal, with the Daily News falling somewhere in between.10 In the context of responses to the ceremonies at Crossness and Abbey Mills, accounts in the Times and the Standard were the main sources for other press accounts, with the Morning Post representing a significant minority wanting a more “aristocratic” tone to their news;11 accounts in the Daily Telegraph, the other significant source, lived up to the newspaper’s reputation with their florid language and poetic embellishments, as will be seen below. In the following discussion of the content of the press responses to the ceremonies, it is important to stress at the outset the key role of these “source” accounts, which formed the basis not only for countless articles in other newspapers, but also for the text and engravings in the ILN, whose editors, writers and artists would have gleaned descriptive details from these source accounts. Consequently, that which most widely represents a “press” response is embodied in these key source articles.

12 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ 3.

Rational Spaces Large sections of the press articles describing both ceremonies were effectively technical accounts of the main drainage system and the pumping stations, drawn from descriptions by the engineer, Joseph Bazalgette (18191891). During the ceremony at Crossness in 1865, Bazalgette gave a lecture in one of the workshops, drawn from another talk he gave at the Institution of Civil Engineers in March 1865.12 On 4 April 1865, articles in the Times, Standard, and Morning Post included long extracts from this lecture, mostly in the form of a series of precise but impressive facts and figures, such as the 82 miles of new sewers, the 318 million bricks and 880,000 cubic yards of concrete used, or the three and a half million cubic yards of earth excavated.13 When the ILN published its own account of Crossness on 8 April 1865, it also included a long technical description of the site as well as three wood-engraved illustrations: a plan of the site (fig. 1); a general view (fig. 2); and a view of the interior of the subterranean reservoir (fig. 3).14 In its article, the ILN told its readers that it would be illustrating the ceremony in its next issue, the engravings still in the process of being prepared. The three engravings in this issue relate very closely to the technical clarity of the article, which corresponds with Bazalgette’s lecture and accounts published in the Standard, Times and Morning Post. Indeed, the ground plan of the site (fig. 1), embedded within the text of the article, is actually a modified version of one of Bazalgette’s contract drawings showing the precise functional arrangement of the site and its various components: the engine house, boiler house, the outfall sewers, and the giant sewage reservoir.15 In setting this precise engineering drawing within the text that describes it, the page layout suggests an immediate correspondence between text and image, enhancing the educative and technical role of both. The general view (fig. 2) is a threedimensional version of the plan with picturesque additions, such as the dramatic sky and figures in the foreground, presumably visitors being transported to the site. The image is rendered along the same axis as the plan so that the two images can be easily read together, in order to give the reader/viewer a more comprehensive educational picture. The engraving of the interior of the reservoir (fig. 3), although much darker than its counterparts, is nevertheless an image that brings out technical, rather than dramatic, aspects of its spaces, which, like fig. 2, also complements and expands upon the plan view: the image emphasises the precise forms of the brick arches and concrete piers and, prominent in the left foreground, one of the penstocks, or gates, that separated the four compartments of the reservoir. All three engravings relate closely both to the text and also to each other with figures 2 and 3 giving a comprehensible visual form to the technical details given in both the text and the plan view. After the ceremony at Abbey Mills in 1868, such technical details made up the bulk of the press accounts; these were drawn more directly from

Paul Dobraszczyk

13

___________________________________________________ a descriptive account of the building written by Bazalgette especially for the occasion and printed and distributed to all the visitors.16 Much of the long article published in the Times after the ceremony on 31 July 1868 was directly copied from Bazalgette’s account; this article formed the basis for most of the other press coverage of the event.17 Bazalgette’s description of Abbey Mills focused on the building’s qualities as an engineering achievement and, despite precisely describing its architectural details, gives no suggestion as to any symbolic meaning or aesthetic considerations. Rather, it reinforced, to those who visited its spaces, the notion of Abbey Mills as a rational, functional building, precisely tailored to fulfil its engineering duty. In relation to the accounts of the Crossness ceremony, which were only partly informed by Bazalgette’s own descriptions of the site, press responses to Abbey Mills were much more in line with the engineer’s viewpoint. Certainly, there seems to have been a more direct intention on the part of Bazalgette to inform the press as to the rationalistic principles underlying his system and, as a consequence, to direct attention away from the aesthetic impact of the building. When the ILN published its article describing the ceremony on 15 August 1868, its long description of Abbey Mills was drawn almost entirely from Bazalgette’s account.18 It also included two engravings of the building, arranged on one page - one showing a general view of the engine-house and the other, directly below, picturing the interior (fig. 4). Whilst these engravings highlight the extravagance of the design, both inside and out, their dramatic visual impact is offset by the technical and prosaic tone of the accompanying article on the adjacent page. Indeed, such exterior/interior image combinations were commonly employed by the ILN to comprehensively depict a particular scene or event in order to educate its readers/viewers. This “documentary” role of the images both reflected the ILN’s attitude towards wood engraving as a medium suitable for technical exposition and Bazalgette’s attitude towards Abbey Mills, expressed in his rationalistic description of the building. 4.

Magical Spaces However, such rational description cannot be considered in isolation. Alongside, and often because of, such facts and figures, some press accounts of the ceremonies related a sense of the magical quality of the main drainage system. The “extraordinary statistics”19 provided by Bazalgette led some journalists, especially in 1865, to compare the new sewers with the wonders of the ancient world.20 According to the Daily Telegraph, the main drainage system was a project alongside which even the Pyramids of Egypt and the sewers of Rome “paled into comparison.”21 In 1868, the Marylebone Mercury made similar comparisons: the main drainage system is described as the “representation of a mighty civilization” - a civilization nobler than

14 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ ancient Rome because it lacked its “despotic power.”22 Such comparisons transformed statistics into myth: the impressive facts and figures provoked wonder at what many saw as a monument to the future when London, especially compared with its main rival, Paris, would become the cleanest and most magnificent city the world had ever seen.23 In relation to the events at Crossness, there were two aspects that brought out this magical quality most insistently: the interior of the enginehouse and the subterranean sewage reservoir. If, according to the Standard, an “enchanter’s wand” had touched the whole site at Crossness, the interior of the engine-house - with its elaborate, brightly-painted decorative ironwork and giant steam engines - was described as a “perfect shrine of machinery.”24 According to the Daily News, the “beautiful octagon” in the centre of the engine-house resembled the interior of a Byzantine church, with the shafts of the steam engines acting as “church galleries - the pulpit being supplied by the cylinder.”25 Press accounts of the Abbey Mills engine-house lacked such direct religious associations, but some of the articles did refer to the “tremendous engines,”26 the “wonderful machinery,”27 and a sense of “deep wonder and admiration” at the sight of the lavish decorative ironwork.28 The sense in which, according to the Daily Telegraph, the “factory becomes poetical” and the “furnace, fairy-like” strongly relates to the perceived reconciliation of the artistic and the useful in these spaces; put another way, the imbuing of the purely functional with symbolism normally reserved for religious buildings made the prosaic seem magical. Religious associations were also made during the visit to Crossness’ vast underground sewage reservoir, where one of its four compartments had been kept free of sewage for the visitors. Compared to the gigantic crypt of a gothic cathedral,29 it was lit especially for the occasion with, according to the Daily Telegraph, “100,000 coloured lamps, which produced a fairy-like appearance.”30 Some compared the effect to that experienced at night in London’s pleasure gardens at Cremorne and Vauxhall;31 all were astonished and pleased by its striking appearance - the Daily Telegraph stating that it was “bewildering in its beauty” and comparing the effect, oddly enough, to that experienced in the “piazza of St Mark’s by night.”32 This was truly a “subterranean wonder” and was the object of greatest interest to the visitors. Press accounts of the ceremony at Abbey Mills, three years later, lacked such dramatic associations, perhaps because there was no comparable subterranean “wonder”; the tone of most of the articles was prosaic and explanatory, like Bazalgette’s account that formed their source. When the ILN published its second account of Crossness on 15 April 1865, it included a further five large-scale wood engravings depicting the ceremony in the engine-house (fig. 5), the interior ironwork, Bazalgette’s lecture, the banquet in one of the workshops, and the subterranean sewage reservoir (fig. 6).33 The text of the article on page 342 is largely borrowed

Paul Dobraszczyk

15

___________________________________________________ from the earlier account in the Morning Post and its tone is both celebratory and prosaic. However, the engravings, especially when compared to those published a week earlier by the ILN (figures 1-3), highlight, in visual terms, the magical quality perceived in some of the press accounts already discussed. Compared with the technical plan published on 8 April (fig. 1), the engraving showing the ceremony in the engine-house (fig. 5) pictures both architectural detail and a theatrical “event” acted out within its spaces: that is, the Prince of Wales - shown in the centre-right of the image and surrounded by a crowd of cheering figures - pulling a lever to start the engines. The cylinder of one of the engines, seen in the centre of the engraving with three figures standing on top of it, does indeed resemble a church “pulpit,” as the Daily News had remarked on 5 April, with the “church galleries” behind - in reality the supporting floors of the steam engines - also crowded with onlookers. Shown in the extreme right of the engraving is part of the “beautiful octagon,” described by the Daily News, with its foliated cast-iron capitals and entablatures, while on the left, in the arch above the window, is revealed some of the “handsome” brickwork praised in many of the press accounts. The engraving gives a visual form to what the non-illustrated press accounts had stressed: the synthesis of architecture and engineering (or the artistic and the useful) in the engine-house and its religious or magical associations. Furthermore, as a front-page image, this engraving functions as a dramatic visual introduction to this particular issue of the ILN. As such, it reflects not only the striking language of the non-illustrated accounts but also the versatility of wood engraving as a medium, a point consistently stressed by the editors of the ILN: on the one hand, wood engraving could represent the sewer system as a technical achievement with engravings copied directly from Bazalgette’s engineering drawings (fig. 1); on the other, it could picture the magical quality of the spaces inside the engine-house (fig. 5). In its 15 April issue, the ILN also included a full-page stand-alone engraving showing the interior of the sewage reservoir on the day of the ceremony, lit up by the “100,000 coloured lamps” described by the Daily Telegraph (fig. 6). Compared with the engraving a week earlier that depicted a similar view (fig. 3), this image, like that on the front page (fig. 5), also gives a striking visual form to the transformed perception of these spaces, described in the non-illustrated press accounts. This engraving is also much larger than its counterpart, filling an entire page and separated from the article that describes it by six pages, further accentuating its dramatic impact as a stand-alone image. Furthermore, the viewpoint, positioned in the very centre of the reservoir, stresses the dramatic recess - seemingly infinite - of the arches lit up by the myriad lamps, while the prominent figures in the foreground further accentuate the vast scale of the enclosed space. Unlike fig. 3, which concentrates on the technical aspects of the reservoir, such as the penstocks separating the compartments, this engraving stresses the dramatic

16 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ qualities of the space itself. In short, it gives a visual form to the sense of magical sublimity perceived by the press in the accounts discussed previously. 5.

Monstrous Spaces Alongside the perceived magical quality of the underground reservoir at Crossness was a more disturbing sense of the monstrous. The writer for the City Press, describing the descent from the “warm daylight” into “strange dimly defined vistas,” confessed to a “curious nervous shock (not disagreeable).”34 The appearance of the reservoir - brilliantly lit and empty of sewage - led the Morning Star to state that this was not what you would naturally expect in such a place - that is, the “foul, filthy and abominably nasty.”35 However, it was the writer for the Daily Telegraph, of the most “poetic turn of mind,” who played most strongly on this disassociation of imagination and reality. If the reservoir was so clean “you could have eaten your dinner off it” it concealed, in the parts already filled with sewage, “a repulsive flood.” If there was “no foul festona or feculent moisture” in this part of the reservoir, then “light would soon give way to darkness, dirt [and] rats” when the visitors left and the reservoir was filled this with sewage and “shut away from the public gaze forever.”36 Indeed, writer revelled in such a unique conjunction of the clean and the dirty: standing in the empty part of the reservoir, with its fairy lights and crypt-like space, the close proximity of the sewage in other unseen parts of the reservoir prompted the writer to feel “in the very jaws of peril, in the gorge of the valley of the shadow of death,” separated only by bolted iron gates from the “the filthiest mess in Europe,” “pent up and bridled in,” “panting and ready to leap out like a black panther at the turning of a wheel, at the loosening of a trap, at the drawing of a bolt.”37 Why was this writer, in particular, so affected by the space in the reservoir? Certainly, in general, the language of the Daily Telegraph tended to be more “vigorous” than its main “conservative” rivals, the Times and the Standard. Nevertheless, compared to other articles in the Daily Telegraph describing similar events, such as the opening of the Metropolitan Underground Railway in January 1863, this account of the Crossness reservoir is singularly extravagant in its poetic excesses.38 There seems to have be a unique quality of this space that stimulated an imaginative response on the part of the press, given strongest expression by this writer. The sense of the monstrous in the reservoir, for this writer, plays off both a reality (the proximity of sewage) and also something imagined (the imminent fate of this magical space - to be forever severed from the world above in a sea of sewage). It is this dialectic of the visible/invisible and real/imaginary that generates a stream of monstrous oppositions to the magical. It is a dialectic that is also confined to the verbal accounts. When the

Paul Dobraszczyk

17

___________________________________________________ ILN depicted the reservoir in visual form (fig. 6), any sense of the imaginative impact of the spaces not seen disappears: here, the visual can only represent what is seen - that is, the lamps and the arches - and not the invisible sea of sewage that generates monstrous counter associations in the language of the article in the Daily Telegraph. It is precisely the lack of visibility in this space that produced a monstrous counterpart to the magical. 6.

Sewers and the Monstrous Press responses to the underground sewage reservoir at Crossness represent one instance of wider configurations of the monstrous and sewers in the mid-Victorian period. Contemporary scholars have taken great delight in highlighting such configurations: Michelle Allen sees some responses to the London sewers as voicing opposition to the sewer itself - its threat related to the way in which it invisibly and promiscuously connected the city’s wastes, suggesting a monstrous counter to middle-class yearnings for individual autonomy.39 In a recent essay on the Paris sewers, constructed at the same time as London’s main drainage system, Matthew Gandy configures “monstrous” perceptions in relation to Freud’s notion of the uncanny: the Paris sewers were imagined by the bourgeoisie with a sense of dread because they simultaneously represented all that humanity had “repressed” and the threat of this repressed material returning to the surface.40 David Pike, in articles on sewers as London theatre sets in the 1860s and ideas of the sewer in Paris and London in the nineteenth century, charts all manner of monstrous associations: criminality, poverty, hell, danger and revolution - all are literally and metaphorically identified in middle-class culture with the space of the sewer.41 What all of these admittedly rich and varied accounts lack is a convincing explanation for the peculiar conflation of the rational, magical and the monstrous in press responses to the ceremony at Crossness and particularly to the underground reservoir. The most striking characteristic of these responses is not that the main drainage system is conceived as monstrous, but that it is simultaneously configured as rational and magical. To assess this conflation, I want to return again to the press accounts themselves. In April 1865, anticipating the ceremony at Crossness, the leading daily newspapers - the Times, Standard and Daily News - published related articles on the 4th and 5th: the former detailing Bazalgette’s main drainage system and the old sewers and cesspools it superseded; the latter concentrating on the ceremony itself. Many of the articles on 4 April directly compared the new system with the old: if Bazalgette’s sewers were stupendous, marvellous and mythic in their importance, they replaced something starkly different: an ancient, dilapidated system of sewers overloaded with “pent-up refuse”42 and cesspools filled with “monstrous

18 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ impurities” and symbolised by the “disgusting occupation of the nightmen” (workers who emptied the cesspools at night).43 According to these accounts, the “monstrous evil” that was the old system was remedied by Bazalgette’s new sewers and pumping stations.44 Here it is old sewers and cesspools that are configured as monstrous, with the new system replacing such associations with something far more elevated. However, in the space of the reservoir at Crossness, some members of the press, especially the writer for the Daily Telegraph, experienced a temporary reversal of these conventional associations, when the magical “new” took on a monstrous aspect more characteristic of the “old”. Furthermore, it was paradoxically the magical quality of the space, provided by Bazalgette himself, that generated - in this writer - monstrous counter associations: here it seemed, for a moment at least, old and new were disturbingly confused. Such configurations of old and new, often in similar surprising reversals, are common in other accounts of London’s sewers published during the planning and construction of the main drainage system in the 1850s and 1860s. Throughout this period, engineers and other “experts” challenged the basic principles of Bazalgette’s scheme. Pamphlets by George Booth, George Rochfort Clarke and John Wiggins represent a sample of these voices of resistance, which continued even after Bazalgette began to construct his intercepting sewers in 1859. All of these pamphlets reasserted the importance of recycling London’s sewage - an imperative originally propagated by the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890) and engineers associated with him but subsequently underplayed by Bazalgette.45 In a dramatic reversal of press perceptions of the main drainage system, these accounts configure the old sewers and cesspools as “safer and sweeter” than Bazalgette’s new “monstrous” main drainage system.46 Clarke proposes that the old system of sewers be retained, castigating the Metropolitan Board of Works (the administrative body responsible for the main drainage system) for simultaneously throwing away a valuable resource and creating a “monster grievance” further downriver.47 Bazalgette’s intercepting sewers are variously cast as an unmanageable underground “labyrinth,”48 an “entangled net,”49 or “deformed and barren offspring of water-closets.”50 With equally invective language Wiggins and Booth argue along similar lines: Booth sees Bazalgette’s “monster sewers” as contributing to, rather than eradicating, the spread of disease; because of their enormous size the “pestilential vapours” inside could not be controlled.51 Wiggins echoes these concerns, calling Bazalgette’s plan “alarming” and “deranged.”52 Booth’s main fear is the concentration of dangerous gases in Bazalgette’s enormous sewers and “vast” reservoirs, like that visited at Crossness in 1865.53 He goes on to propose that:

Paul Dobraszczyk

19

___________________________________________________ Instead of building the Herculean works and stupendous erections proposed, it would appear that the sewers of London may, like the city itself, be so constructed in integral parts, small in their separate divisions … yet effective as a whole.54 Reversing the positive meaning of “stupendous” in the press accounts, Booth reasserts an older vision of London and its sewers that had been so effectively transformed by Bazalgette’s main drainage system. If this inflammatory language might be put down to rivalry within the narrow confines of London’s engineering community, other responses suggest a wider disruption of the old and the new in regard to the main drainage system. The celebrated journalist Henry Mayhew’s (1812-1887) encyclopaedic account of London’s underclass, London Labour and the London Poor, contained a description of the city’s sewers, both past and present that is remarkable for its rich attention to detail:55 it includes descriptions of all the different types of sewers in the city, their sizes, lengths and condition, as well as a long account of the exact constituents of the sewage itself. In a section dealing with the history of the administration of London’s sanitation, Mayhew directs his invective language against the old “wretched” system,56 describing, in straightforward condemnatory language, the terrible condition of the old sewers of the city and the pressing need for an entirely new system.57 However, according to Allen, when Mayhew gives a romanticised account of an evening spent with a gang of London nightmen, he “registers his resistance to a reforming process” that sought to obliterate the old system and its attendant workers.58 Equally ambivalent, according to Pike, is Mayhew’s description of other sewer “workers”, such as the sewer hunters (known as toshers) and the mud-larks, both of whom exploited London’s old drainage system by scavenging for discarded valuables in its spaces. In his descriptions of these marginal social characters, Mayhew “implies the eventual disappearance of these ‘outcast’ occupations” and displays a “Romantic nostalgia” for their marginal activities.59 What Allen and others fail to emphasise enough is the relationship between Mayhew’s descriptions and contemporaneous changes within London’s sanitary infrastructure. Significantly, Mayhew’s accounts had a long publication history: they were first collected in the late 1840s and published in the Morning Chronicle, then republished as three volumes from 1850-1852 and expanded into four in 1862. Throughout this period, London’s main drainage system was first planned and then implemented; the definitive 1862 edition of London Labour and the London Poor was published at the peak of activity in its construction. Yet Mayhew fails to mention Bazalgette’s scheme and its huge impact on the city’s sanitary infrastructure.60 Rather, his vivid cast of sewer dwellers and

20 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ workers - by then very much consigned to the past - remain in his volumes as real and tangible presences in the city’s substructure, emphasised by the wood-engraved illustrations of these workers included in the volumes and supposedly based on photographs.61 In short, Mayhew oscillates between seeing the old London sewers as monstrous but also as a romantic remnant of a fast-vanishing pre-industrial society. Ambivalence also characterises what is perhaps the most obsessive engagement with London’s sewers in the 1860s: John Hollingshead’s Underground London, published in 1862. Following Mayhew’s journalistic pretext, Hollingshead’s series of essays, originally published in Charles Dickens’s periodical All The Year Round in 1861,62 derived from his selfconfessed “appetite for the wonderful in connection with sewers.”63 Of the seventeen chapters that comprised Underground London, nine directly concern sewers, whether describing the old system,64 journeys within the sewers themselves,65 or Bazalgette’s main drainage system, then under construction.66 Whilst scholars, such as Lynda Nead, have tended to focus on the subversive qualities of the chapter titled “A Day Below,” which describes a journey through a sewer in the West End,67 Hollingshead’s collection of essays is perhaps more remarkable for the sheer variety of viewpoints represented. Indeed, he sums up these multiple conceptions of sewers in his introductory chapter: There are more ways than one of looking at sewers, especially old London sewers. There is a highly romantic points of view from which they are regarded as accessible, pleasant, and convivial hiding-places for criminals flying from justice, but black and dangerous labyrinths for the innocent stranger … [and] there is the scientific or halfscientific way, which is not always wanting in the imaginative element.68 The subsequent chapters of Underground London present London’s sewers, old and new, in simultaneously rational, magical and monstrous terms - terms that play off the supposed oppositions of old and new in more conventional discourse. In Chapter IV, Hollingshead presents the old sewers as a rational and therefore legible system, the author providing the reader with a “panorama” of their spaces;69 while Chapters V and VI, describing his journeys within these sewers, configure them as repositories of the monstrous (dead bodies and ferocious rats) and the domestic (genteel sewer workers).70 If, in Chapter V, Bazalgette’s main drainage system is cast as a “great accomplished fact”71 and a successful example of the “struggle of art against nature,”72 its vast intercepting sewers that “dwell in perpetual darkness”73 might also be seen by some as “volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity;

Paul Dobraszczyk

21

___________________________________________________ ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they fail to smother.”74 7.

Conclusion: Spatial Conflation The pervasiveness of configurations of old and new in relation to London’s sewers in the 1860s - in both press accounts of the ceremonies at Crossness and Abbey Mills and in wider discourse - is not surprising given the very tangible transformation of the city’s sanitary infrastructure that occurred in this period. Lynda Nead has convincingly argued that the modernising of London in the 1860s, of which the construction of the main drainage system played an important part, was both a rationalising process and also as a fertile stimulus for the imagination.75 If the pumping stations were, according to Bazalgette, rational “icons of the new” they were equally, for some, possible sites for older “dreams, memories and fantasies.”76 The press accounts examined in this chapter demonstrate the extent to which the old is perpetually engaged with the new: in this case in a shifting dialogue between the rational, the magical and the monstrous.77 The main drainage pumping stations were intended by their creators to be visible symbols of a vast new underground system of sewers - a system built at great cost in order to transform the old and “monstrous” sanitation of the city. In line with this symbolic status, the pumping stations were embellished with lavish architectural decoration, elevating their value above mere utility and imbuing their spaces with a sense of sublime nobility. This was, in effect, an entirely new vision of sewers, where the magical was overlaid onto the rational, in order to make the prosaic pleasing. However, in the particular space of the subterranean reservoir, where even if the sewage was not visible it was however present in the imagination, older associations emerged, or perhaps resurfaced - not unconsciously as might be suggested by the psychological model - but with the writers fully alert to the contradictory aspects of this experience and the pull of both fascination and fear. It was the unique character of this space that prompted a conflation of the rational, magical and monstrous - a point emphasised by the writers themselves, who knew this was an experience never to be repeated. Indeed, for the writer for the Daily Telegraph, the new vision paradoxically stimulated these older associations: in short, old and new were inseparably linked. As if to exemplify the unique character of this experience, three years later, in the ceremony at Abbey Mills, visitors also wondered at the lavish decoration and vast machinery but, guided by Bazalgette’s fully rationalised account, did not refer to any monstrous associations. Indeed, even when presented with the opportunity of inspecting the sewage pumps below ground, most of the visitors declined;78 even the Daily Telegraph, whose correspondent had, three years earlier, been so rampant in his imaginative prose, gave little attention to these “noisome chambers far below” the building’s lavish interior.79

22 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ Were these visitors in 1868 now completely won over to the new vision of sewers? Or did the engineer more effectively control their responses? Certainly, the Daily Telegraph’s response to the Crossness reservoir, three years earlier, with its conflation of the new (the rational and the magical) and the old (the monstrous) demonstrates that at particular times and in particular places (and perhaps for particular people), rationality and imagination, and old and new might be configured in unexpected hybrid forms.

Notes 1

John Hollingshead, 1861, 390. Stephen Halliday, 1999, 91-99 and Owen, 1982, 58 and 60. 3 The two other main drainage pumping stations were constructed at Deptford (1859-1862) and Pimlico (1870-1874). Both were situated in built-up areas of London, were architecturally more restrained than Crossness and Abbey Mills, and neither were used for public ceremonies. 4 .Richard Trench & Ellis Hillman, 1984, 111. 5 .ILN, 20 December 1851, pp. 725-726, “Opening of the Croydon water works.” 6 ILN, 17 January 1863, pp. 73-74, “Opening of the Metropolitan Railway.” 7 Richard D. Altick, 1998, 348-355. 8 Altick, 1998, 19. 9 Altick, 1998, 34. 10 H.R.F. Bourne, 1998, 243, 261-262 and 270-271. 11 Bourne, 1998, 243. 12 Joseph William Bazalgette, 1865, 280-314. 13 Times, 4 April 1865, p. 14, “The main drainage of the metropolis”; Standard, 4 April 1865, p. 6, “The southern outfall”; and Morning Post, 5 April 1865, p. 5, “The main drainage system.” 14 ILN, 8 April 1865, p. 335, “The metropolitan main drainage southern outfall at Crossness.” 15 London Metropolitan Archives, MBW/2511: Southern outfall works, buildings, 1862, contract drawing no. 1, general llan. 16 Bazalgette, 1868. 17 Times, 31 July 1868, p. 12, “The Thames Embankment.” 18 ILN, 15 August 1868, p. 162, “The metropolitan main drainage.” 19 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, p. 2, “Opening of the main drainage by the Prince of Wales.” 2

Paul Dobraszczyk

23

___________________________________________________ 20

Morning Post, 5 April 1865, p. 5; Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, p. 2; Standard, 4 April 1865, p. 5; and City Press, 8 April 1865, p. 9 “Completion and opening of the main drainage works at Crossness.” 21 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, p. 2. 22 Marylebone Mercury, 8 August 1868, p. 2, “The Abbey Mills pumping station.” 23 Times, 4 April 1865, p. 14 and 31 July 1868, p. 12; Observer, 9 April 1865, p. 5, “Opening of the southern outfall of the main drainage works”; Standard, 31 July 1868, p. 3, “Opening of the Thames Embankment footway”; and City Press, 8 August 1868, p. 3, “The Abbey Mills pumping station of the main drainage works: visit of the Corporation.” 24 Times, 5 April 1865, p. 5, “Opening of the main drainage.” 25 Daily News, 5 April 1865, p. 5, “Opening of the metropolitan main drainage works by the Prince of Wales.” 26 Times, 31 July 1868, 12. 27 Observer, 2 August 1868, p. 3, “Thames Embankment and Abbey Mills pumping station.” 28 Standard, 31 July 1868, p. 3. 29 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2; Daily News, 5 April 1865, 5; and Times, 5 April 1865, 5. 30 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2. 31 Standard, 5 April 1865, 3; and Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2. 32 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2. 33 ILN, 15 April 1865, pp. 341-348, “The Prince of Wales at the metropolitan drainage works.” 34 City Press, 8 April 1865, 9. 35 Morning Star, 5 April 1865, p. 5, “Opening of the main drainage works by the Prince of Wales.” 36 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2. 37 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 1865, 2. 38 On the opening of the Metropolitan Underground Railway see Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1863, p. 3, “Opening of the Metropolitan Railway.” 39 Michelle Allen, 2002, 383-402. 40 Matthew Gandy, 1998, 34-35. 41 David Pike, 1999, 102-138 and 2005, 51-77. 42 Times, 4 April 1865, 14. 43 Morning Post, 5 April 1865, p. 5. 44 Times, 4 April 1865, 14. 45 G.R. Booth , c.1853, 17-18; J. Wiggins, 1858, 11; and George Rochfort Clarke, 1860, 24-26. 46 George Rochfort Clarke, 1860, 18.

24 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ 47

Clarke, 1860, 22-24. Clarke, 1860, 27. 49 Clarke, 1860, 28. 50 Clarke, 1860, 32. 51 Booth, c.1853, 6. 52 Wiggins, 1858, 23-24. 53 Booth, c.1853, 7-8. 54 Booth, c.1853, 20. 55 Henry Mayhew, 1862, 388-425. 56 Mayhew, 1862, 415. 57 Mayhew, 1862, 424. 58 Allen, 2002, 387. For the account of the nightmen see Mayhew, 1862, 451452. 59 Pike, 2005, 57-58. For Mayhew’s descriptions of the sewer hunters and mud-larks see Mayhew, 1862, 150-158. 60 Mayhew, 1862, 411-414, “Of the new plan of sewerage”. Mayhew describes what would eventually become Bazalgette’s scheme, but states that it is not known whether the plan will be put into action (414). 61 Mayhew, 1862, plate between pp. 334-335, “London nightmen”; plate between pp. 370-371, “The rat-catchers of the sewers”; and plate between pp. 388-389, “The sewer-hunter”. All the plates are supposedly based on daguerreotypes. 62 Hollingshead’s series of essays appeared in All the Year Round as follows: 26 January 1861, no. 92, pp. 453-456, “Underground London. Chapter III”; 20 July 1861, no. 117, pp. 390-394, “Underground London. Chapter I”; 27 July 1861, no. 118, pp. 413-417, “Underground London. Chapter II”; 10 August 1861, no. 120, pp. 470-473, “Underground London. Chapter IV”; and 17 August 1861, no. 121, pp. 486-489, “Underground London. Chapter the Last.” 63 Hollingshead, 1862, 2. 64. Hollingshead, 1862, 43-56, “Chapter IV. Old Channels.” 65 Hollingshead, 1862, 57-72, “Chapter V. A Day Below” and 73-83, “Chapter VI. A Bunch of Legends.” 66 Hollingshead, 1862, 84-99, “Chapter VII. New Channels.” 67 Lynda Nead, 2000, 24-26. 68 Hollingshead, 1862, 1 and 4. 69 Hollingshead, 1862, 50-56. 70 Hollingshead, 1862, 57-72 and 73-83. 71 Hollingshead, 1862, 88. 72 Hollingshead, 1862, 98. 73 Hollingshead, 1862, 87. 48

Paul Dobraszczyk

25

___________________________________________________ 74

Hollingshead, 1862, 99. Nead, 2000, 6-8. 76 Nead, 2000, 6. 77 Nead, 2000, 7 and 8. 78 East London Observer, 8 August 1868, p. 5, “Visitation of Abbey Mills pumping station.” 79 Daily Telegraph, 31 July 1868, p. 2, “Opening of the Thames Embankment footway.” 75

References Allen, Michelle (2002). “From cesspool to sewer: sanitary reform and the rhetoric of resistance, 1848-1880,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30: 383402. Altick, Richard D. (1998). The English common reader: a social history of the mass reading public, 1800-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bazalgette, Joseph William (1865). “On the main drainage of London and the interception of the sewage from the River Thames,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 24: 280-314. Bazalgette, Joseph William (1868). A short descriptive account of the Thames Embankment and of the Abbey Mills pumping station. London: Metropolitan Board of Works. Booth, G. R. (c.1853). The London sewerage question. Some serious objections and suggestions upon the defective plan of sewerage proposed by the Metropolitan Board of Works, together with a method for remedying the evil. London: William Edward Painter. Bourne, H. R. F. (1998). English newspapers: chapters in the history of journalism, vol. II. Chippenham: Routledge/Thoemmes Press. Clarke, George Rochfort (1860). The reform of sewers. Where shall we bathe? What shall we drink? or, manure wasted and land starved. London: J. H. and J. Parker. Gandy, Matthew. (1998). “The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space.” [article on line] (London: Department of Geography, 1998, accessed 15 March 2004); available from http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/Geography/pdf/Gandy.pdf.

26 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ Halliday, Stephen. (1999). The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the cleansing of the Victorian metropolis. Stroud: Sutton. Hollingshead, John (1861). “Underground London. Chapter I,” All The Year Round 117: 390. Hollingshead, John (1862). Underground London. London: Groomsbridge and Sons. Mayhew, Henry (1862). London labour and the London poor (vol. II). London: Griffin Bohn. Nead, Lynda (2000). Victorian Babylon - people, streets and images of nineteenth-century London. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Owen, David (1982). The government of Victorian London, 1855-1889: the Metropolitan Board of Works, the vestries, and the City Corporation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Pike, David (1999). “Underground theater: subterranean spaces on the London stage,” Nineteenth Century Studies 13: 102-138. Pike, David (2005). “Sewage treatments: vertical space and waste in nineteenth-century Paris and London.” in Filth: dirt, disgust and modern life. W. A. Cohen, and Ryan Johnson, eds. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press: 51-77. Trench, Richard, and Ellis Hillman (1984). London under London: a subterranean guide. London: John Murray. Wiggins, J. (1858). The Polluted Thames: the most speedy, effectual, and economical mode of cleansing its waters, and getting rid of the sewage of London. London: J. Newman.

Paul Dobraszczyk

27

___________________________________________________ Fig. 1: Page layout, ILN, 8 April 1865, p. 335, “The metropolitan main drainage southern outfall at Crossness” and “Metropolitan main drainage: plan of the southern outfall works at Crossness,” wood-engraved print.

28 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ Fig. 2: Page layout, ILN, 8 April 1865, p. 325, “The metropolitan main drainage: general view of the southern outfall works at Crossness,” woodengraved print

.

Paul Dobraszczyk

29

___________________________________________________ Fig. 3: Page layout, ILN, 8 April 1865, p. 328, “Metropolitan main-drainage works at Crossness: view in the reservoir,” wood-engraved print.

30 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ Fig. 4: Page layout, ILN, 15 August 1868, “General view of the Abbey Mills pumping station’ and ‘Interior of the Abbey Mills pumping station,” woodengraved prints.

Paul Dobraszczyk

31

___________________________________________________ Fig. 5: Page layout, ILN, 15 April 1865, frontispiece, “Opening the metropolitan main-drainage works at Crossness: the Prince of Wales starting the engines,” wood-engraved print.

32 Monster Sewers: Experiencing London’s Main Drainage System ______________________________________________________________ Fig. 6: Page layout, ILN, 15 April 1865, p. 348, “The Prince of Wales opening the metropolitan main-drainage works at Crossness: the underground reservoir illuminated,” wood-engraved print.

Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture Kevin Alexander Boon

Abstract The etymological roots of the monstrous imply a boundary space between human and non-human (originally, human and animal)—the imaginary space that lies between being and non-being, presence and absence. The zombie transgresses this boundary, giving corporeal shape to all that is not spirit—the remains of our humanity after the loss of any unique soul. Thus the zombie is the antithesis of our human identity (therefore, monstrous). This paper seeks to formulate the characteristics of the zombie myth as it is found in literature, film and culture, tracing its collision with the ghoul (originating in literature with H.P. Lovecraft and in film with George Romero), and examine the role identity plays in shaping the reception of the zombie in popular culture. Keywords: Zombie, anxiety, film, George Romero, culture, folklore The term “monstrous” is grounded in notions of human privilege. Its Old and Middle French (mostre and monstre, respectively), and AngloNorman derivations articulate disfiguration of the human form, and the term’s evolution from classical Latin (mnstrum) through Italian (mostro), Spanish (mostro), and Portuguese (monstro) imply a warning (from base monre - to warn) embodied in the monstrous form. Thus, the etymological roots of the monstrous imply a boundary space between human and nonhuman (originally, human and animal) - the imaginary region that lies between being and non-being, presence and absence. Several presumptions underlie the articulation of the monstrous: one, that distinctions exist between the natural and the unnatural; two, that these distinctions are clear and perceivable; three, that the natural is a standard established by some dominate design; four, that the human form is the privileged form within all that is natural; and five, that the human form includes elements not found in lower forms (thus, the use of the term “monstrous” to define the presence of animal characteristics in the human form, as in mythological beings such as the centaur, the minotaur, the griffin, and so on, as well as more contemporary human/animal conglomerations

34 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh ______________________________________________________________ such as Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein, George Langelaan’s creature in “The Fly,” and the werewolf of medieval legend.1 That which is defined as “monstrous” (and the definition of “monstrous” is an exclusively human enterprise) was not supposed to happen; that is, it is “unnatural” and as such a malformation of some universal design. Furthermore, that which is defined as “monstrous” threatens the purity of the human form as that form was intended by whomever or whatever is presumably responsible for that universal design. To articulate the bias another way—human beings are, by divine mandate, supreme in the universe and anything that threatens human form or status is monstrous. Examinations of the term’s etymological evolution and its application within literature, culture, and film uphold this interpretation. It must further be noted that the divide between the human and the monstrous is inextricably bound to mortality—life and death, being and nonbeing, presence and absence: in the subjective - self and other. Paul de Man2, in a discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry, points out that “the self never exists in isolation, but always in relation to entities, since it is not a thing but the common centre of a system of relationships or intents, an authentic understanding of a self means first of all a description of the entities toward which it relates, and of the order of priority that exists among these entities.”3 Thus it is that in the dialectic of self and other, both are defined, and in the dialectic of self and the monstrous, the human self is glorified. This is why demons are monstrous and ghosts (unless they are ghosts of something monstrous) are not. Ghosts imply a continuation of human privilege beyond death while demons imply a decay of privilege in the corruption of the human soul. The zombie, as found in literature, film, and culture, is the most fully realized articulation of this dynamic interdependency between the human self and the monstrous other. The zombie myth embodies the monstrous, inhuman other and rightly locates the human instinct for the survival of self in issues of mortality. In the zombie, death is given agency. Fear of death is a primary human impulse, because death opposes the human instinct for survival, thus it is part of the survival instinct, not only because avoiding that which is deadly perpetuates survival, but also because of the biological payoff people receive for engaging in survival-related behaviours. As the ongoing research of Gregory A. Goodwin and Jamie Levison (Skidmore College) is examining, when animals engage in behaviours related to survival, their brains secrete opioids. This implies a strong biological base for the survival instinct. If the same is true for people, then a psychochemical reward for survival behaviours exists, which would offer possible explanations for the lure of horror in general and zombies in particular. Zombies are in direct opposition to the living. They embody physical corruption, thus reminding us of our own mortality. Because they

Kevin Alexander Boon 35 ______________________________________________________________ are the animated dead, they represent an even greater danger to survival than a mere corpse by abbreviating the threat of death. Like physical death, zombies show no favouritism and exercise no judgment. Because they are the personification of corruption, zombies cannot themselves be corrupted. The army of the undead does not vanquish the enemy, it recruits them. To succumb is to become, and once you have become a zombie, self is lost irrevocably to the other. The zombie myth enters western consciousness primarily as a result of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Toward the end of the occupation, zombies infiltrated American culture, through the publication of works such as William Seabrook’s 1929 piece The Magic Island and John Huston Craig’s 1933 Black Bagdad , which recounts trips to Haiti as early as 1912; through film with the 1932 production of White Zombi; and through fiction with works such as Theodore Roscoe’s A Grave Must Be Deep, serialized in Argosy between 1934 and 1935 (published in book form in 1947); Richard E. Goddard’s 1936 piece The Whistling Ancestors; and Roscoe’s Z is for Zombie, which was serialized in Argosy in 1937. The zombie has undergone transformations during the past ninety years, most notably the fusion of the zombie of Haitian folklore with the ghoul, which introduced flesh-eating into the zombie myth. But flesh-eating is older than the zombie myth and discussions of cannibalism in Haiti predate discussions of the Haitian zombie. Nineteenth century writers spoke of ritualistic cannibalism in Haiti. Sir Spencer St. John writes in 1884 of “rites at which dozens of human victims were sacrificed at a time” (Hayti or the Black Republic vii), but St. John’s work was highly controversial and marred by racial bias, as were many works of the period. Others, such as J.N. Léger in Son histoire et ses détracteurs, which was published in 1907, attempted to disabuse readers of their belief that Haitians were addicted to cannibalism. But the myth associating primitive cultures with cannibalism—a cultural taboo among westerners—had already been established by the time Seabrook’s accounts of labouring Haitian zombies lumbered into American literature. In the twentieth century, the Zombie of Haitian legend, the dead risen to work the sugar plantations and serve the needs of the Nganga (Haitian medicine men) and farmers, was fused with the ghoul of middleeastern origin. The ghoul, which in Arabic is a general term used to refer to any monstrous creature, equivalent to the English “Monster,” which is applied equally to Frankenstein’s creation, werewolves, vampires, bestial humans and human beasts, evolved into a term denoting a grave-robber into a term implying the cannibalistic eating of flesh. It is significant to note that the ghoul was a living creature eating the flesh of the dead. When zombies evolved into ghouls, they inverted this relationship – they became the dead

36 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh ______________________________________________________________ eating the flesh of the living. This further characterizes the zombie as counterpoint to self, the opposite of us, always other. Like the term “Zombi,” which originated in central Africa’s lower Congo area as Nzambi Mpungu4 with the Bantu and Bakongo tribes, “ghoul’ originally referred to a disembodied spirit. Both terms were in use as early as the late eighteenth century: “ghoul” appeared in William Beckford’s Vathek (written in French in 1782 and published in English in 1786) and “zombie,” as Peter Dendle points out, can be found as early as 1789 in the writing of M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry.5 Beckford’s novel includes several references to ghouls and from these references we can determine that the notion of the ghoul feeding on the flesh of corpses was already in currency in 1782. At one point, Carathis describes a cemetery at night as “So beautiful . . . [it] must be haunted by Gouls!” Her guides have died and she plans to “invite them [the ghouls] to regale on these fresh corpses.”6 By the twentieth century, the term “zombie” had ceased to represent spirit and came to represent an absence of spirit. This change is partially a result of mythology passed down from the Bakongo tribe. In the lower Congo River area, Nzambi was a term denoting the “sovereign Master”, the deity that placed man on Earth and takes him away at the moment of death. Men were expected to live under the nkondo mi Nzambi, or “God’s prohibitions”7. To violate these laws was a sin against Nzambi, or suma ku Nzambi, for which Nzambi might impose lufwa lumbi, the “bad death”. What is absent from the zombie as reshaped during the twentieth century by western culture, is its essential self—its human soul, those qualities that make a person unique among others - the very source of human privilege. A zombie lacks conscious experiences separate from physical processes, those events that brain researchers refer to as qualia. Zombies cannot retain a sense of self - a unique, human consciousness. This defining characteristic is often muddled in literature and film, but it is more central to the zombie myth than death, as you can have a zombie who is not actually dead, but you cannot have a zombie that retains its sense of identity. Zombie literature contains many stories presenting as zombies creatures with little or no conscious and volitional impairment. Stephen Jones’ 1993 anthology, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, for example, contains stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which hypnosis traps Valdemar’s soul inside his inanimate corpse, and Clive Barker’s “Sex, Death and Starshine,” in which deceased thespians return to their decaying bodies in order to perform Shakespeare on the stage. These stories tell of the living dead or the walking dead, but they are not properly zombie stories. Valdemar is dead, as are the characters in Barker’s story, but consciousness and volition continue after their physical death, thus they are more properly defined as ghosts. The reanimated dead are not proper zombies unless they lose some essential quality of self. If this were not the case, we might rightly refer to the

Kevin Alexander Boon 37 ______________________________________________________________ stories of Lazarus and Jesus as zombie tales, a point that makes me titter every time I pass a church with a sign out front that reads “He is Risen.” To claim consciousness in zombies is to eliminate any useful distinction between zombies and ghosts (spirits that remain ensconced in their human flesh). Zombies in literature, film and culture fall into seven distinct categories or types, though all seven categories do not summon the ontological anxiety associated with the human survival instinct and the life/death, self/other binary, and thus not all are properly zombies. Nevertheless, they are labelled zombies and encountered in literature, film, and culture, and therefore it is necessary to consider them (even if only to dismiss their relevance to zombie studies). Among these is the “zombie ghost,” which I have just mentioned—a ghost or revenant that has returned (or in some cases, such as Poe’s Valdemar, never left) with either its whole self intact, or with enough self left to retain functional volition. There are few novel-length works that revolve around this type of zombie, Piers Anthony’s 1998 Zombie Lover, Christopher Moore’s recent 2004 work The Stupidest Angel, and Candace Caponegro’s 1988 The Breeze Horror. The pirates in John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog and Gore Verbinski’s 2003 release Pirates of the Caribbean, the lovers in the segment “Something to Tide You Over” from the 1982 piece Creepshow, and the decaying victims in the 1981 horror American Werewolf in London are all examples of zombie ghosts. Less frequent in film, but often found in literature, particularly young adult and children’s literature, is the “zombie ruse.” A surprising number of young adult and children’s titles contain the word zombie, works such as the 1993 work Gorgonzola Zombies in the Park. It is common to discover by the end of many of these works that the zombies were not actually zombies at all but the result of misunderstanding or deliberate misleading. The zombies in Roscoe’s 1937 work Z is for Zombie are a zombie ruse, and Harry Harrison’s 1991 Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Zombie Vampires doesn’t actually have any zombies in it. The remaining five types of zombies posit the potential loss of self and volition, thus more properly qualify as zombies. First among these is the “zombie drone,” a reanimated corpse brought back for the purposes of aiding production. These are worker zombies. Lumbering hulks, they bear no immediate physical threat to people they encounter, but they are a reminder that the self can be lost while the body continues to labour. Seabrook offers an early western definition of the zombie drone: The zombie . . . is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life - it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up

38 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh ______________________________________________________________ the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement and then make it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.8 (Dead Men 22) The earliest zombies of zombie literature and those in stories and films directly inspired by Haitian mythology are primarily zombie drones. The earliest film zombies, in films such as the 1932 White Zombie, the 1936 Revolt of the Zombies, the 1941 King of the Zombies, the 1943 Revenge of the Zombies, and the same year’s release I Walked with a Zombie, and others, are also drones who have been reanimated by voodoo to serve the will of their masters. However, if we remove the necessity to refer to the zombie as a “zombie,” and include films that have creatures that qualify as zombies in character, though not in name, we can date the start of zombie film back to 1919 in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,9 in which Cesare has been emptied of self and subjugated to the will of Caligari. The film zombie irrevocably changed with the 1968 release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in which Romero fuses the mythology of the zombie and the ghoul into the “zombie ghoul.” Romero’s Night gave zombies agency, a hunger for human flesh. The significance of Romero’s Night on all the zombie films that follow cannot be overestimated. Pre-Romero, you cannot find the zombie ghoul in film; post-Romero, you find very few zombie films that do not contain zombie ghouls. Like film, the earliest zombie fiction also deals with zombie drones, in works such as the 1936 book The Whistling Ancestors. Unlike film, zombie drones are frequent in literary works into the 1980s, with works such as Curt Selby’s 1982 I, Zombie and Peter Tremayne’s 1981 Zombie!. But under the influence of George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead and the third film of the Romero quartet, Day of the Dead in 1985, the popularity of the zombie ghoul took centre stage in literary works, and zombie novels and stories written in the past fifteen years are primarily about zombie ghouls. Many of these works take the form of self-published fan fiction, works such as Vince Churchill’s The Dead Shall Inherit the Earth, Mark E. Rogers The Dead, Len Barnhart’s Reign of the Dead and Apocalypse End, and Gary Wedlund’s Zombies in my Hometown are a few of the more popular selfpublished novels. All of these are reflections of Romero’s vision.10 Zombie novels by mainstream presses are less prevalent. Most are published by obscure or mass-market imprints, works such as Walter Greatshell’s Zombies, Briane Keene’s The Rising, Philip Nutman’s Wet Work, and Carlton Mellick III’s edgy The Baby Jesus Butt Plug.

Kevin Alexander Boon 39 ______________________________________________________________ Anthologies of zombie-themed stories began appearing in the second half of the 1980s, beginning with Zombie! in 1985 (edited by Peter Haining), which was followed by Book of the Dead in 1989 (edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector, who published a sequel collection in 1992 under the title Still Dead), The Mammoth Book of Zombies (edited by Stephen Jones) and The Ultimate Zombie (edited by Byron Preiss and John Betancourt) both published in 1993, and James Lowder’s edited trilogy of zombie stories, The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, which were published one per year from 2001-2003. The zombie ghoul in literature predates the zombie ghoul in film, its first appearance occurring as early as H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 tale “Herbert West – Reanimator.” Though the ghoulish tendencies of the reanimated dead are subtle, they are unquestionably present, as the following excerpt shows. There was also that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years.11 (231) Lovecraft’s zombie ghoul appears forty-six years before Night of the Living Dead. But this early fusion of flesh-eating with the zombie is less global that the type we find in Romero’s films. Romero’s tales imply a danger to civilization. His protagonists struggle against zombie infestation in what has come to be known as “survival horror.” Emerging out of the zombie ghoul stories written since 1985 is a new type of zombie—the “zombie channel.” The zombie channel is a result of the need to breathe new life into what fast became mere rehash of Romero. Writers, who were unable to leave the survival horror genre without alienating zombie literature’s primary fan base, began to explore the point of view of the zombie. One of the best of these stories is “The Other Side of Theory” by Daniel Ksenych , in which zombies eat the flesh of others in order to “download”12 wisdom, to help them metamorphose into enlightened beings. In Brian Keene’s The Rising, the flesh-eating zombies are infested with a foreign consciousness to replace the self that has been lost to death. The dead are possessed by entities that have been “waiting eons”13 (30) for the opportunity to live through the dead flesh of others. Keene’s zombies are intelligent, coordinated, and purpose driven, but they are not zombie ghosts, as the entity that infests the dead bodies is not the self original inhabiting those bodies. A foreign consciousness channels through the corpse. Thus, Keene’s zombies represent the same loss of self as a zombie ghoul. Lucius Shepard’s 1984 work Green Eyes is particularly unique in that the spirits occupying the reanimated dead are other identities shaped by Jungian archetypes.

40 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh ______________________________________________________________ The sixth type of zombie is the “tech zombie,” a zombie under the control of others, like the zombie drone, only controlled by means of some technological device or advancement. This category includes the wives in Ira Levin’s 1972 Stepford Wives, the Martian army in Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. Vonnegut describes the process: Their memories were cleaned out by mentalhealth experts, and Martian surgeons installed radio antennas in their skulls in order that the recruits might be radio-controlled. And then the recruits were given new names in the most haphazard fashion, and were assigned to the factories, the construction gangs, the administrative staff, or to the Army of Mars.14 (53) The final category of zombies is “cultural zombies.” Cultural zombies are characters that embody the definition of a zombie, characters who have lost self-identity or the capacity for volition, yet they are not literally the resurrected dead or the technologically-altered living. They are characters such as the zombie that Quentin P. in Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 Zombie tries to manufacture - zombies manufactured by culture. Oates’s novel draws from mainstream American culture rather than the Haitian mysticism or Romero’s ghoulish vision. Her cultural inspiration is people such as Jeffrey Dahmer, who poured acid into holes he drilled in his victims’ heads in an attempt to create a zombie he could command as a sex slave. One of the most literate works dealing with cultural zombies is Brad Gooch’s 2000 novel Zombie00, narrated by a gay man who considers himself a zombie, and defines for readers the qualities of submission and selfless obedience that zombies possess. The man is a drone, subjugated to the will of others, a product of cultural voodoo. The zombie drone, zombie channel, tech zombie, zombie ghoul, and the cultural zombie are all antithetical to human identity, therefore monstrous. They challenge our most sacrosanct ideas of the self by transgressing the boundary between self and other. This journey, no matter how it is framed - in literature, film, or cultural folklore - reminds us of our ephemeral mortality and throws our cherished notions of human privilege into question.

Kevin Alexander Boon 41 ______________________________________________________________

Notes 1

The term originates around 1,000 C.E. (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “werewolf.”) 2 Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics (Winter 1987): 16. 3 Paul De Man, 16. 4 Where it was the name of a spirit, a high God. 5 Peter Dendle, “The Zombie in Haitian and Southern U.S. Folklore.” (unpublished manuscript) 6 William Beckford, The History of the Caliph Vathek, Project Gutenberg ebook, transcribed by David Price from Cassell & Company’s 1887 edition, n.p. 7 R.P. Van Wing, Études ba-kongo (1921), trans and edited by Edwin W. Smith in Smith, African Ideas of God: A Symposium (1950), p. 159. 8 William Seabrook. (1985), “Dead men working in the cane fields,” in: P. Haining (ed.) Zombie.(Great Britain: Target., 1985) 22 9 I intentionally exclude Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener’s earlier Der Golem (1915), because the golem, unlike the zombie, is not formerly human. 10 And often in need of a good copy-editor. 11 Howard Philips Lovecraft, “Herbert West – reanimator,” in: Stephen. Jones (ed.) The mammoth book of zombies. (New York: Barroll and Graf 1993). 231 12 Daniel Ksenych, “The other side of theory,” in: J. Lowder (ed.) The book of all flesh. (Los Angeles: Eden Studios, 2001), 171. 13 Brian Keene, (2004), The rising. New York: Leisure. 30 14 Kurt Vonnegut, (1967), Sirens of Titan. London: Coronet 53

References Beckford, William. The history of the caliph Vathek. London: Cassell and Company, 1887. Craig, John Huston, Black Bagdad. New York: Minton Balch,1933 De Man, Paul, “Time and history in Wordsworth,” Diacritics. 4-17(1987) Dendle, Peter. “The Zombie in Haitian and southern U.S. folklore.” Unpublished manuscript. 2005.

42 Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh ______________________________________________________________ Goddard, Richard. E. The whistling ancestors. London: Stanly Smit, 1936. Gooch, Brad. Zombie00. New York: Overlook, 2000 Haining, Peter. ed. Zombie! Great Britain: Target, 1985 Jones, Stephen. ed., The mammoth book of zombies. New York: Barroll and Graf, 1993. Keene, Brian . The rising. New York: Leisure, 2004. Ksenych, Daniel. “The other side of theory,” in: J. Lowder (ed.) The book of all flesh. Los Angeles: Eden Studios, 2001 Langelaan, G. “The fly,” Playboy (July, 1957). Léger, J.N. Son histoire et ses détracteurs. New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1907. Lovecraft, Howard Philips, “Herbert West – reanimator,” in: S. Jones (ed.) The mammoth book of zombies. 207-234. New York: Barroll and Graf, 1993.. Oates, Joyce Carol. Zombie. New York: Plume, 1995. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989 (ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner), Additions 1993-7 (ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner; Michael Proffitt), and 3rd ed. (in progress) Mar. 2000-(ed. John Simpson). OED Online. Oxford University Press. http:// dictionary.oed.com Roscoe, Theodore. A grave must be deep. Starmont House, 1989. Roscoe, Theodore. Z is for zombie. Starmont House, 1989 Seabrook, William. “Dead men working in the cane fields,” in: P. Haining (ed.) Zombie. Great Britain: Target, 1985. Seabrook, William. The magic island. New York: Harcourt Brace,1929 Smith, Edwin W., (ed.) African ideas of God. London, 1973. St. John, Sir Spencer. Hayti or the black republic, London, 1889.

Kevin Alexander Boon 43 ______________________________________________________________ Van Wing, R.P., Études ba-Kongo, 1921, in: E.W. Smith (trans and ed.) Smith, African ideas of God: A symposium, 1950. Vonnegut, Kurt. Sirens of Titan. London: Coronet, 1967.

The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety Peter Dendle Abstract Although it has usually enjoyed cult rather than mainstream attention, the zombie has nonetheless proven a resilient staple of the twentieth-century American pantheon of cinematic monsters. Through almost seventy-five years of evolution on the big screen, the zombie can be read as tracking a wide range of cultural, political, and economic anxieties of American society. Born of Haitian folklore and linked from its earliest periods to oppression, the zombie began as a parable of the exploited worker in modern industrial economies and of the exploited native in colonial nations. Through decades marked by concerns over environmental deterioration, political conflict, the growth of consumer-capitalism, and the commoditization of the body implicit in contemporary biomedical science, the creature has served to articulate these and other anxieties in ways that are sometimes light-hearted and witty, sometimes dark and cynical. Keywords: Zombie, folklore, anxiety, America, movies Zombie movie fans have been pleased to witness the recent resurgence in the popularity of zombie movies either as major studio productions or as movies enjoying first-run theatre distribution (28 Days Later, 2002; Dawn of the Dead, 2004; Shaun of the Dead, 2004; Land of the Dead, 2005). This resurgence has merely rekindled mainstream attention once again to a unique and layered creature that, in fan websites and cult circles, has never lost popularity. Comprehensive lists of zombie movies can run to well over three hundred titles (depending on how a “zombie” is defined) - with something like a third of these appearing since 2000 or so. Most of the more recent titles are amateur, direct-to-DVD productions. But the vibrant fan culture surrounding zombie fiction, videogames, and movies attests to the enduring power and relevance of a mythological creature that has proven itself consistently resonant with shifting cultural anxieties for over seven decades. Despite the efforts of some folklorists such as Elsie Parsons to conduct legitimate research into native Haitian beliefs, the zombie first became known to the broader American public through a handful of sensationalistic accounts of native superstitions used to pad popular travel literature - William Seabrook’s The Magic Island being among the most

46 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ notorious.1 America was engaged in a prolonged occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, an occupation marked by increasingly vocal and sometimes violent resistance from the native population. Many of the marines stationed in Haiti, upon returning to the States, freely levelled charges of cannibalism and reported native superstitions such as the “zombie.” The creature was quickly adopted by the entertainment industry following a Broadway play and the subsequent Bela Lugosi 1932 movie White Zombie. Circumventing the usual literary channels that gave the Frankenstein Monster and Dracula critical legitimacy, the zombie nonetheless emerged in the 1930s as a cinematic monster uniquely suited to address many of the social tensions of Depression-era America. Ghosts and revenants are known world-wide, but few are as consistently associated with economy and labour as the shambling corpse of Haitian vodun, brought back from the dead to toil in the fields and factories by miserly land-owners or by spiteful houngan or bokor priests.2 In West African religions, the original zombi was not a single concept: the term covered a wide range of spirits and demi-god like beings, both good and evil. This diversity survived into Haitian vodun and even into the lore of the American South.3 The slaves who had been long supplanted from their homelands and who eventually overthrew French colonial oppression in Saint Domingue did so, in part, by recourse to the shared African identity evoked by vodun. The zombie, a soul-less hulk mindlessly working at the bidding of another, thus records a residual communal memory of slavery: of living a life without dignity and meaning, of going through the motions.4 This image may also have struck a chord in Depression-era America. Since its earliest periods, America had forged individual and social values around a perpetual shortage of available labour and the valorization of hard work, initiative, and industry; now for the first time it was suddenly faced with a catastrophic surplus of labour, of hands without work to do. The burned-out souls standing in lines at soup kitchens or fruitlessly waiting in employment lines are zombies of a sort, shells of human beings. The 1932 film White Zombie deploys the zombie compellingly in portraying alienation of the worker from spiritual connection with labour and from the ability to reap reward from the product of labour. Such mechanization of the worker in an industrialized economy fuelled the labourmanagement tensions of the early decades of the twentieth century. Ongoing struggles and rapidly expanding union membership eventually resulted in such legislation as the 1935 National Labour Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labour Standards Act, following massive strikes in 1933 and 1934. It was in this environment that zombies were introduced to the wider American public. In White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays Murder Legendre, a Haitian factory owner and sorcerer who raises the dead to slave silently in his sugar cane factory. The scene in which Beaumont (Robert Frazer) first visits the unholy

Peter Dendle 47 ______________________________________________________________ factory is among the most memorable of the film. The gaunt, sinewy workers with sunken eyes shuffle in production assembly lines and around the large, central milling vat. They are reifications of despair and hopelessness, no more than cogs in the mighty machine themselves. A number of them drive the central axle of the milling vat by turning the spokes of a large wheel, plodding in perpetual circles, while all around them machine parts move slowly and creak malevolently. For several minutes the camera lingers on this Sisyphus-like vision of hell and futility. When confronted with the unnaturalness of this production plant, Legendre coldly and sardonically replies to Beaumont, “They work faithfully…and they do not worry about long hours.” The film paints him as a Baron of Industry, a god-like master of life and death who views all human relations, at the fundamental level, as transactions to be conducted in an economy of power relations.5 At a time when trade unions, mine and factory conditions, and fair employment issues were central to the evolving ethic of the worker and the American workplace, the character of Legendre must have seemed haunting indeed. Power dynamics between owners and labourers also resurface in other first-generation zombie movies such as the 1935 feature Ouanga (a “ouanga” or “wanga” is a vodun charm). In this fascinating but virtually forgotten movie - one of the few zombie movies ever to be shot in Haiti, in fact - white plantation owner Adam (Philip Brandon), looking for his abducted fiancée, looms over two black Haitian zombies in a scene charged with racial and historical tension. Cracking a whip after them, he orders the helpless revenants to do his bidding, in order to consolidate his nuptials and continue amassing his dominions. He is a foreign national come to the island to own, to appropriate, to civilize, to command. Even native mulatto Clelie (Fredi Washington), lighter skinned than the unfortunate revenants, orders them around in a servile, demeaning tone. The primary plot tension results from her inability to understand that even though her skin appears fully white, she still has black blood in her veins and so does not merit the same social and economic rewards as the white colonial characters. Her black foreman, who loves her but whom she considers beneath her because of his own native blood, tries to talk her into the sort of the sense apparently reflective of the movie’s underlying ethos of miscegenation anxiety and possession: “Clelie, forget this madness. Your white skin doesn’t change what’s inside you. You’re black, do you hear me, you’re black. You belong to us…to me…” The script itself does not seem very self-conscious of the ideologies it lays bare with such refreshing and disturbing innocence, yet in the midst of it all the zombie stands out clearly as symbol of the disempowered, the abject, the truly “native.” The essence of the “zombie” at the most abstract level is supplanted, stolen, or effaced consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation of one person’s will by that of another. It is no coincidence that the creature

48 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ flourished in the twentieth century, a century whose broad intellectual trends were preoccupied with alienation. Existentialism vividly brought out problems of solitude, of the possibility of true connections betweens individuals, and of the very nature of the self. Zombies, as Jane Caputi puts it, “bespeak a monstrosity of consciousness.”6 Zombification is the logical conclusion of human reductionism: it is to reduce a person to body, to reduce behaviour to basic motor functions, and to reduce social utility to raw labour. Whether zombies are created by a vodun master or by a mad scientist, the process represents a psychic imperialism: the displacement of one person’s right to experience life, spirit, passion, autonomy, and creativity for another person’s exploitative gain. In this sense, the zombie has served variously as a tool of empowerment and social change, as well as one of complacent reinforcement of the status quo, in its 75-year history as a cinematic icon. In Depression-era and wartime zombie movies, for instance, the zombie arguably served as a cinematic mechanism for raising awareness of gender issues and empowering women. Zombie movies of this period consistently depict “zombified” women ostensibly subservient to a domineering male, yet not fully conquered.7 Madeline (Madge Bellamy), the “white zombie” of the movie by that name, stands out from all the other zombified natives because her will is not fully conquerable by Legendre or by Beaumont. Beaumont has stolen her from the grave and keeps her in his mansion, where she must go through the listless motions of an unwilling wife. However, her soul is still connected with that of her fiancé Neil (John Harron), as revealed in a scene when two native servants observe her pining away at the balcony. One maid comments to the other: “Perhaps she remembers something,” characterizing this behaviour as unusual for a zombie. Certainly the other zombies in the movie - all natives and all men do not display such resilience of spirit. The follow-up to White Zombie, the 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies, pursues the motif of an inviolable core at the centre of female autonomy. With regard to a similar love triangle, a knowing character informs zombie lord Armand Louque (Dean Jagger), “You fool yourself with the delusion that you can make this woman love you. You can’t do it.” Though the theme of a zombie woman under the control of a male love interest appears in a number of early movies such as the 1943 I Walked with a Zombie and Voodoo Man dating from 1944, it is pushed to its furthest in Revenge of the Zombies released in 1943. John Carradine plays Dr. Von Altermann, a Nazi spy conducting zombie-raising experiments in the Louisiana bayou on behalf of the Third Reich. He hopes to raise an army of invulnerable living-dead soldiers to carry Germany to victory, but so far has only practiced the technique on a handful of sorry locals and - much to the surprise of a visiting Nazi emissary - on his own wife. Lila (Veda Ann Borg) is now a mindless automaton, who wanders around the surrounding swamp

Peter Dendle 49 ______________________________________________________________ aimlessly in a mesmeric stupor. He announces imperiously, “What greater destiny could my wife have than to serve me - and through me, our country.” He is surprised, however, to find that she nonetheless utters some faint words of resistance (“No…no…”), and he unabashedly responds, “What’s this? Your brain works independently of mine?” Von Altermann’s shock was perhaps shared, at a certain level, by many thousands of American soldiers who, even before returning from the war, no doubt sensed that their wives were becoming accustomed to autonomy and (through their participation in factories, offices, and other mobilization efforts) financial independence. At the movie’s climax, Lila leads the native zombies in a domestic revolt against Von Altermann, and when he proclaims with patriarchal distain, “You dare to set your will against mine?” she responds, in a mocking caricature of her wedding vows, “I do…you can’t control me.” These movies as a whole deny the possibility of complete containment; the repressed anima of the zombie woman surpasses its prescribed boundaries, just as women in society were surpassing traditional gender roles. Wartime zombie movies (ca. 1941-45) largely defused the potential for horror by casting the zombie as window dressing in horror-comedies. Hollywood had coped with the Depression by making movies of the rich and glamorous singing and dancing, and it coped with the war by making upbeat movies of unequivocal tactical victories brought about through plucky American savvy and grit. The zombie had little place other than atmospheric backdrop in the wartime horror-comedies such as 1940s The Ghost Breakers, 1941s King of the Zombies or 1945s Zombies on Broadway. Here they become the butt of jokes - such as the endless stream of quips by talented African-American actor Mantan Moreland in King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies - and thus they serve essentially the same scapegoat function that African-Americans do in Hollywood movies of the same period and that the Japanese do in wartime cartoons: to show how incompetent and self-defeating non-white, non-Americans are. A notable exception is RKO’s 1943 piece I Walked with a Zombie, a sensitive and poetic vision of a European colonial aristocracy atrophying amidst its own corruption on a small Caribbean island. By the 1950s, the zombie was well poised to embody America’s worst fear: invasion from within. Invaders from Mars-1953 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers-1956 portray middle-class American households suddenly turned on themselves, as intruders from other worlds have occupied the human bodies, annihilated their personalities, and modelled their outward behaviours on alien ideologies of homogeny (ideologies that are, not coincidentally, reminiscent of popular caricatures of communism). Likewise, the corpses raised and animated in Creature with the Atom Brain-1955, Plan Nine from Outer Space-1958, and Invisible Invader -1959 are frightening for the very reason that they do not look like enemies at all, from the outside:

50 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ they look disturbingly like our co-workers, neighbours, friends, and families. The script tells us that radiation, aliens from outer space, or some other cause is to blame, but what we actually see on the screen as the monsters throughout most of the film are middle-class Americans, dressed in suits and ties, with unthinking unity of purpose and identity. Fear of the authentic Haitian zombie, as Maya Deren explains it, here enjoys one of its last gasps: “While the Haitian does not welcome any encounter with a zombie, his real dread is that of being made into one himself.”8 After the 1960s, the zombie (progressively monstrous in appearance and behaviour) deviated increasingly, in certain respects, from the conceptual foundation that made this existential symbol such a provocative icon in the first place. It had other places to go, however. George A. Romero’s 1968 offering Night of the Living Dead, a chilling parable of society in civil collapse and of the nuclear family in a state of intestinal warfare, almost single-handedly re-defined the zombie. Along with Romero’s follow-up Dawn of the Dead, Night has continued to enjoy critical and academic attention unparalleled by any other zombie movies. Night has been commonly read, for instance, as encoding such issues as racial tension, Vietnam-era military critique, and nuclear age anxiety.9 Even beyond the broader social perspectives, however, what stands out about Night is its aesthetic of the domestic space and its ethos of individual human relations. Ben (Duane Jones) struggles to barricade a rural farmhouse against the escalating zombie apocalypse by breaking furniture down, foraging through closets and drawers, and boarding up all the doors and windows. Much of the narrative attention is thus devoted not to attacks or human-zombie conflicts, but to re-examining the middle-class household of heartland America. Every household object is scrutinized functionally, its old significance forgotten and a new, purely instrumental, one inscribed based on the drear re-envisioning of the house as a besieged shelter. Following the suburbanization of America in the 50s and 60s, houses have become defensive: they keep the neighbours out, they conceal, they separate. (In his fourth zombie film, Land of the Dead [2005], Romero pushes this theme further when he takes a swipe at affluent “gated” communities.) Here the domestic space has no more cultural significance than a cave does to a troglodyte or a shell to a barnacle. In the desperate microcosm of the farmhouse in Night, people are viewed as objects, to be evaluated on the basis of immediate utility rather than on sentimental traditions of family attachment or the value of social interconnections. It is this stark Nietzschean allegory in which people are reduced to functionality, and in which individuals are exposed as monads of self-interest in perpetual, feverish struggle with one another, that remains among the strongest running threads of zombie movies throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Peter Dendle 51 ______________________________________________________________ Romero reinvigorated the genre again with Dawn of the Dead in 1979, a movie whose social commentary has been lost on few critics.10 The shopping mall setting proves fertile ground for the aimless milling about of hundreds of zombies, now recast as mindless consumers, window shoppers, and trend remoras. It is not the domestic household that is under fire here, but American consumer-capitalism itself. The seer concrete mall edifice, filled with the lavish bounty of a hundred unguarded stores all for the plundering, proves solid enough against zombies for a time, but is ultimately barren of meaning or broader context. The small band of refugees hole up in the mall and enjoy its rich variety of department stores and boutiques: they ice skate, try on clothes, stage formal dinners, ransack the cash registers, and even propose marriage to each other, but it becomes apparent how vacuous all such gestures are in the absence of a genuine audience: there is no dynamic network of friends, family, or society. Their pageant of affluent abundance and stability is a farce. In a capitalist economy fuelled by the pathological need for continual growth - as periodically brought to popular attention through the reporting of holiday-season sales figures, for instance - stability comes across rather as stagnation, and it becomes clear that the characters will only survive the “rat race” they are inadvertently mimicking by staying on the move. The closing shot of the movie shows them leaving the mall in a helicopter, commenting bleakly that they are low on fuel. Like many highly mobile professionals of the late 1970s, theirs is a state of being perpetually uprooted, encouraged to leave one place and move to another as soon as they feel half-way comfortable and settled (an anxiety compounded, in both the movie and in 1970s America, by concerns over fuel availability and the increasingly evident trap of dependence on a non-renewable resource). The third instalment of Romero’s 1985 series, Day of the Dead, even ends with the heroes fishing and relaxing on a pristine beach, as though finally reaping the reward that travel agencies peddle and that investment firm commercials promise to hard-working Americans for their golden years. Dawn instantly sparked a torrent of delectably slow-paced zombie apocalypses, especially in France, Spain, and Italy. Audience expectations of horror in America, however, were rapidly changing: by the mid 1980s, movie goers wanted flashy special effects, intense violence and gore, lively scoring, witty one-liners, and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Michael Jackson’s 1983 Thriller video helped usher in this period, whose most notable successes are Return of the Living Dead-1985 and Re-Animator-1985. Countless campy spoofs appeared with tedious frequency, also, sporting outlandish titles such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown-1989 and The Gore-Met Zombie Chef from Hell-1986. In these narratives, the zombies are (as in the 1940s) often relegated to secondary roles, serving as the butt of jokes and playing comic relief. This may suggest that much of the zombie’s cultural “work” has diminished in significance during this period. However, the fact that mid-80s

52 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ splatter horror focused specifically on gore - on fragmenting bodies into their component tissues and organs - meant that the zombie leant itself particularly well to some of the most enduring and memorable cinematic themes of the decade. If Romero established the principle that zombies can only be deanimated by destroying the head, Return of the Living Dead and ReAnimator problematized that notion. In those movies, all the separate fragments and tissues are independently animated, and by shooting, hacking, pummelling, gouging, slicing, and puncturing a zombie, all one really accomplishes is to increase the number - and the total surface area - of the enemy. Much of the fun in zombie movies by this point is, after all, to come up with creative new ways of offing them in the messiest way possible. There is notable relish, in fact, in directing violence against the human body in its clinical aspect (many of these movies are set in sanitized, institutional settings like hospitals rather than misty graveyards). Since the audience knows that the zombies are usually not sentient and in most cases do not feel pain, it is free to enjoy the spectacle of wanton destruction of human bodies rather than human beings. The Weekend at Bernie’s franchise (the second of which stars a zombie) capitalized on this source of entertainment; the comedy derives from watching a corpse placed in unlikely situations and then seeing it abused creatively. It is a curious spectacle implying a curious sort of audience enjoyment. By the 80s, it was becoming clear that medical advances were creating new challenges for society: such technologies as prosthetic limbs, artificial hearts, and organ transplants were increasingly raising questions of what it is to be human. The fear of being kept artificially alive beyond health, happiness, or social utility became more and more vivid in a population with a stable retirement age but ever-increasing life expectancy. What Linda Badley notes of Romero’s films becomes a fortiori relevant for zombie movies of the late 80s and the 90s: Romero’s metonymy in part responds to anxieties about a health care system of seemingly reversed priorities when the old and the wealthy (the dead) cannibalize the young and powerless (the living) for healthy organs or fetal tissue.11 These anxieties resonate throughout zombie movies such as The Chilling (1989), in which a cryogenics lab intended to keep the terminally frozen alive until such future time as they can be resuscitated turns into a veritable zombie factory. In the midst of a materialistic decade whose profit-seeking, individualistic values are evident in Michael Fox’s ambitious character Alex from the 1982-89 series Family Ties, in the pimping-for-Junior Achievement plot of Risky Business-1983, and in the popular bumper sticker “Live Fast,

Peter Dendle 53 ______________________________________________________________ Die Young, and Leave a Beautiful Corpse,” the zombie perhaps summed up everything that was unacceptable about the human body to DINKs, yuppies, and other 80s overachievers: aging, skin issues, unwanted body fluids, limited mobility, a failing mind. It is not death that people are afraid of any longer, it is impoverished appearance, old age, and ugliness. Following the 80s, the zombie rapidly dropped out of mainstream cinema. The details of zombie lore were by now well known and thus fair game for parody in The Simpsons and South Park, but major studio offerings centering on zombies or on a zombie invasion virtually ceased. The zombie had established too strong a cult following to suffer much from this hiatus, however: it was kept alive by new media, most notably through online communities and through video games such as Resident Evil. Furthermore, the wide-scale availability of affordable filmmaking (e.g., home videography equipment and desktop video editing software) and the possibilities afforded by the internet for marketing DVDs created an opportunity for the proliferation of low-budget, backyard movies. This is testament to the enduring folkloric importance of these narratives to a community of fans and filmmakers who appreciate the austere apocalypticism and the minimalist aesthetic of mindless, nameless hordes assaulting a few sane individuals in the middle of a world gone horrible. It is in this context that survivalists and gun fetishists have found a protective “narrative” cover amidst the zombie fan community. Gun enthusiasts proudly post jpegs of their arsenals to other interested parties on online message boards, and discuss strategies for defence and fortification in an imagined post-apocalyptic countryside. The line between reality and fiction often seems blurred in some of these individualistic communities, which (drawing inspiration from Max Brooks’ successful and imaginative 2003 book The Zombie Survival Guide) argue about ranged vs. close-quarter weapons, fuel types, and defensible terrains. The “Zombie Squad,” for instance, hosts online forums, survivalist workshops, and even an annual outdoor retreat to sharpen skills and share techniques. Many of these enthusiasts scour headlines for possible reports of potential zombie outbreaks, such as “suspicious” media accounts that mention unusual bite marks or other unexplained wounds, that can be read as implying government or media cover-ups, or that refer to toxic or biochemical material leakages. While most of these zombie fans state explicitly that zombies do not really exist at the current time, they admit that zombie outbreaks are a possibility or at the very least represent a useful model for general emergency preparedness. As one member posted online, “I don’t believe in supernatural ‘zombies’ but I think plague mutants are a definite possibility.” Under the rubric of zombie preparedness, members discuss the relative virtues of Glock 19’s vs. SIG 2009’s, the utility of pole arms or trench spike knives (in arm’s length vs. locked melee situations), and useful items for a complete first aid

54 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ kit (including dental pulling and filling gear, body stapling/suturing equipment, and laryngoscope with endo-tracheal tubes). It is clear that the zombie holocausts vividly painted in movies and video games have tapped into a deep-seated anxiety about society, government, individual protection, and our increasing disconnectedness from subsistence skills. In twenty-first century America - where the bold wilderness frontier that informed American mythic consciousness for four centuries has given way to increasingly centralized government amidst a suburban landscape now quilted with strip malls and Walmarts - there is ample room to romanticize a fresh world purged of ornament and vanity, in which the strong survive, and in which society must be rebuilt anew. Post-apocalyptic zombie worlds are fantasies of liberation: the intrepid pioneers of a new world trek through the shattered remnants of the old, trudging through the shells of building and the husks of people. It is not without some justice, then, that the resurgence of zombie movie popularity in the early 2000s has been linked with the events of September 11, 2001. The world may have breathed a collective sigh of relief following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but apocalypticism has always been engrained into the archetypal psyche of any society defining itself - as all mortal endeavours must - in the context of history and time. The possibility of wide-scale destruction and devastation which 9-11 brought once again into the communal consciousness found a ready narrative expression in the zombie apocalypses which over thirty years had honed images of desperation subsistence and amoral survivalism to a fine edge. By this point, though, the zombie has come a long way from the robotic automaton of early cinema. No longer deadpan, stolid, and unfeeling, the zombie is not an image of humanity stripped of passion, soul, or spirit. The zombie has become enraged, feral, frantic, and insatiable: it is a gutted, animalistic core of hunger and fury.12 It is not homogeneity - not the levelling of individuality - that scares us anymore, then, if this image is read symptomatically: it is rather the lack of control, dignity, direction that scares us. The contemporary zombie embodies a wanton, unfettered pursuit of immediate physical cravings, a fear of raw power. There has always been a strong existential component to the zombie figure, but it has become, in recent years, increasingly nihilistic. It is the sign of an over-leisurely society lacking in broader spiritual or communal purpose, left to the impulses of its unchecked power and its desires for consumption.

Peter Dendle 55 ______________________________________________________________

Notes 1

William Seabrook; for folklore see Parsons. As Maximilien Laroche writes, “The figure of the zombi represents the African view of death as it was transformed within the Haitian context. He is the symbol of the slave, the alienated man robbed of his will, reduced to slavery, forced to work for a master. This explains his double economic and religious significance” (55). 3 . For West Africa and Haiti, see Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier. 4. Mimi Sheller meditates on the evolving exploitation of the zombie image from folklore to film and back again: “from a dread memory of slavery into a new idiom of forced labour, and then from a ghoulish monster in Hollywood movies they slip back into Haitian understandings of the US occupation” (146). For American imperialism and White Zombie see also Williams. 5 Edward Lowry and Richard deCordova observe, “The zombie film enacts quite literally what in other films is represented only by implication: the link between character alliances and property relations” (351). 6 Jane Caputi, “Films of the Nuclear Age.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16 (1988): 100-107. 103. 7 See Ellen Draper. “Zombie Women when the Gaze is Male.” Wide Angle 10 (1988): 52-62. 8 Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953). (New York: Chelsea House, 1970), 42. Wade Davis states the point more bluntly: “the fear in Haiti is not of zombies, but rather of becoming a zombie” (9, and cf. 191). 9 For zombie movies and late-60s social tensions such as race and war protest, see Hoberman and Rosenbaum, ch. 5; for race in particular see Lightning; for Vietnam, see Higashi; and for nuclear anxiety see Caputi. 10 For a sustained reading of Night as well as Dawn, see Gregory Waller. 11 Badley, 75. 12 For a more detailed overview of the cinematic zombie’s evolution in appearance and behaviour, see the Introduction to Peter Dendle’s chapter in this volume. 2

References Ackermann, Hans-W. and Jeanine Gauthier. “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi.” Journal of American Folklore 104, 1991.

56 The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety ______________________________________________________________ Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Caputi, Jane. “Films of the Nuclear Age.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16, 1988. Davis, Wade. Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Dendle, Peter. The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953). New York: Chelsea House, 1970. Draper, Ellen. “Zombie Women when the Gaze is Male.” Wide Angle 10 (1988): 52-62. Higashi, Sumiko. “Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film about the Horrors of the Vietnam Era.” In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, ed. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, 175-188. Rutgers University Press, 1990. Hoberman, J. and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Laroche, Maximilien. “The Myth of the Zombi.” In Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith, 44-61. New York: Africana Publishing Co./Dalhousie University Press, 1976. Lightning, Robert. “Interracial Tensions in Night of the Living Dead.” Cineaction! 53 (2000): 22-29. Lowry, Edward and Richard deCordova. “Enunciation and the Production of Horror in White Zombie.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 346-389. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Parsons, Elsie. Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English, 3 vols. New York: G.E. Stechert & Co., 1933-43. Seabrook, William. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1929.

Peter Dendle 57 ______________________________________________________________ Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Waller, Gregory. The Living and the Undead: From Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Williams, Tony. “White Zombie: Haitian Horror.” Jump Cut 28 (1983): 1820.

Section Two

The Monster and the Political (Once they get into politics you can’t get rid of them)

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict: The Technologies of “Humanitarian Intervention” in the Balkans during the 1999 NATO Bombing of Serbia and Kosovo Neda Atanasoski Abstract This article considers the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 and suggests that the gothic novel provides the narrative within which the U.S. role in Eastern European affairs is represented. U.S. political and media discourses surrounding NATO’s “Operation Allied Force” recast the Dracula narrative to locate the threat to Western military and media technologies in the primordial ethnic conflicts of the Balkans, while inscribing the U.S. as a space of human rights. Highlighting political and media representations of ethnic conflict in the “Balkans,” the article connects the U.S. self-understanding of having overcome its past of racial inequality and of being a democracy rooted in diversity to its foreign policy that establishes its right to intervene in regions troubled by ethnic intolerance thereby displacing domestic racial anxieties through its “humanitarian” projects around the globe.

Keywords: War and the Monstrous, Technologies of the Monstrous, Media and Monstrosity, Dracula, Imperialism, Balkanism, Humanitarianism, Ethnic conflict, Ethnic cleansing, Multiculturalism

We are pledged to set the world free. Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength. It would be at once his sheath and his armour, and his weapons to destroy us, his enemies, who are willing to peril even our own souls for the safety of the one we love - for the good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God. - Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 279 This article will pursue the uncanny associations between the Western racializing discourse of “balkanism” and the deployment of gothic imagery in the U.S. figuration of the Balkans as a space of perpetual “ethnic conflict” during NATO’s March 24-June 10 1999 bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, dubbed “Operation Allied Force.” I argue that U.S. political and

62

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ media discourses recast the gothic narrative exemplified by Bram Stoker’s 19th century British novel Dracula to locate the threat to Western rationality and progress in the “undead” ethnic conflicts of the Balkans, while inscribing the U.S. and the West as spaces of universal human rights that have overcome the problem of racial strife with modernity. My analysis of contemporary U.S. political and media discourses on “humanitarian intervention” in Serbia and Kosovo highlights the parallels between these discourses and Dracula’s privileging of new technologies and documentation as the narrative modes of imperial modernity. NATO’s “Operation Allied Force” was a war based in the extreme technological disparity between NATO airpower and Yugoslav ground forces.1 Because NATO’s campaign was exclusively aerial, in spite of flying over 31,000 missions, there was not a single Western alliance casualty. While NATO pilots undertook minimal risk by maintaining a “safe distance” at 15,000 feet and deploying smart bombs and missiles, about 10,000 Yugoslav soldiers and 1,500 civilians were killed.2 Additionally, NATO bombings so exacerbated the dire situation of the ethnic Albanian refugees in Kosovo that by May of 1999 over half a million people were displaced.3 NATO made use of the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Concept Technology, relying on remotely piloted unmanned surveillance aircraft such as the Predator, systems designed to detect camouflaged enemy targets through “Precision Targeting Identification,” and Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that guide missiles to designated enemy targets.4 The daily televised spectacle of “primordial” ethnic violence in the Balkans not only depicted the region as monstrous, but it called upon Western spectators to save the Balkans from further bloodshed by availing themselves of the superior technologies available to them. I suggest that “humanitarianism” in this sense enacts the imperial gothic narrative in that it generates monstrous otherness (“ethnic conflict”) through its own cultural discourses even as it proclaims the desire to vanquish it.5 During NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the contradictions inherent in Western attempts to seamlessly merge humanitarianism and imperial violence exploded, recalling the unhallowed dead that haunt Western modernity. The vampire, who refuses to die for good and periodically re-emerges from the dead in order to drink and spill blood, is a figure around which I develop my reading of dominant Western political and media discourses that narrated the 1990s civil wars in the Balkans as the ancient and “unfinished” ethnic violence that has always troubled this region. Furthermore, the concept of the “undead” centrally informs my understanding of contemporary justifications for the emergent formation of U.S. imperial sovereignty, for which “Operation Allied Force” set a precedent; the contemporary manifestation of U.S. imperialism makes evident that the Western desire to violently civilize the “pre-modern” world also has not died.

Neda Atanasoski

63

___________________________________________________ In his article “Vampires Like Us,” Tomislav Longinoviü has pointed out that “as a creature of history, the unfortunate count [Dracula] is formed by the colonial gaze of the West, which senses its own bloodthirsty past.”6 He argues that in the contemporary context “the gothic imaginary functions as a time-delayed reflection of past traumas of European collectivities, and this image is then projected onto ‘the serbs’ through the narratives of global news networks as they recount their Balkan histories in real time.”7 Longinoviü concludes that the emergence of “the serbs” is a sign of the new “racism without race,” a racism that is “couched in the progressive language of human rights,” but one that nevertheless perpetuates the enemy within an “Other” Europe.8 Maria Todorova has shown that Western popular and political discourses have over time relegated the Balkans to the status of the “other” in Europe as a region that represents the “incomplete self” that has yet to be enlightened.9 In the Western imaginary, the Balkans have come to permanently embody the im/possibility of transition from East to West, from primitive to enlightened, and from barbaric to benevolent. Western depictions of “the Balkans” during the transitional post-Cold War period thus reveal more about shifts in the Euro-American self-perception than they do about the human landscape in the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Drawing on Longinoviü’s insights into the gothic re-figuration of the Balkans in the 1990s Western imaginary, as well as on Todorova’s work on “balkanism,” I argue that the U.S. justified its imperial sovereignty during “Operation Allied Force” by displacing its own racist history in its racializing discourse about the Balkans. In the 1990s, U.S. politicians and the media promoted a post-Cold War vision of race as a sign of cultural diversity that functioned in tandem with the discourse of “ethnic conflict” and Western humanitarianism in the Balkans to underwrite U.S. global interventionism as a moral force that spreads freedom and democracy. The emergence of multiculturalism as the predominant mode through which to envision a pluralist democracy during the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S. differed from the earlier European concept of the ethnic nation state. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when citizens in the U.S. were granted equality under the law, the racial narrative in the U.S. became one of progress in which the nation had supposedly overcome its past of illiberal racial prejudice and in which racial difference was re-written as cultural diversity. The development of the U.S. selfunderstanding as a multicultural democracy in the 1990s also depended on contrasting U.S. “diversity,” a symbol of civilization, modernity, and freedom, with the so-called primordial ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, a symbol of pre-modern, tribal, and violent formations based in “blood and belonging.”10 In this context, the monstrosity of ethnic conflict that reminded the U.S. of its own past of Native American genocide, slavery, and nativist violence could be overcome by deploying the “civilizing technologies” of the

64

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ U.S.-led Western “humanitarian” imperialism to stop the bloodshed in the Balkans. The focus on ethnic conflict as the foremost sign of non-Western violence in the 1990s exemplified the displacement of anxieties about unresolved racial tensions at home that continued to visibly erupt, as they did during the L.A. riots in 1992. Tim Allen has argued that the popularity of “ethnicity” as a concept that could explain the motivating factors of postCold War conflicts in the non-Western world followed the trends of official multiculturalism in the West, which promoted the idea of cultural difference based in geographic descent while eschewing the concept “race,” which implied biological hierarchy.11 While the language of ethnicity and culture clash used to explain ethnic conflict in the Balkans certainly borrowed the terms of Western multiculturalism, there was nevertheless an important difference in their connotation. As John Bowen suggests, the “cauldron image” of “bubbling … ethnonationalist sentiments that were sure to boil over unless suppressed by strong states” contrasted with the image of the American melting pot.12 At the same time that ethnic difference was naturalized and essentialized in the context of non-Western conflicts, in which difference amongst peoples was seen to be rooted in blood and the wild landscape, “ethnic” or “racial” diversity in the context of the multicultural West was seen as a sign of cultural progress and of civilization. What distinguished NATO’s “Operation Allied Force” from earlier humanitarian interventions to end “ethnic conflict” such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda is that, for the first time since the Third World independence struggles, the use of Western military force was explicitly understood to have imperialist objectives. In his recent book Empire Lite, Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard Professor of Human Rights and a prominent North American public intellectual, described empire as the necessary precondition for democracy in the contemporary global order.13 Relying on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan as his case studies, Ignatieff argues that present-day empire is justified in taking a humanitarian guise. In his view, modern U.S. imperialism embodies the moral and spiritual force that brings about reconciliation amongst former enemies.14 Ignatieff’s enthusiastic interpretation of war technologies, which, in his words, allowed “for the first time military means [to be] used to create a humanitarian space,” validates Western violence as enlightened.15 In my reading of imperial gothic narrative based on Stoker’s Dracula that framed the Balkans as pre-modern I suggest that Western civilization continues to be troubled by its own histories of slavery, imperialism, and institutionalized racism whose legacies have not died. Indeed, these histories are constitutive of modern Western epistemes through which the West apprehends the rest of the world. As Avery Gordon has observed, “the post-modern, late-capitalist, postcolonial world represses and

Neda Atanasoski

65

___________________________________________________ projects its ghosts or phantoms in similar intensities, if not entirely in the same forms, as the older world did.”16 Haunted by legacies of their racist “past,” the U.S. and its Western European allies displaced ongoing racial anxieties by opposing their humanitarian presence in the Balkans to the premodern barbarism of “ethnic cleansing” by which the region came to be known. Yet even as Western politicians and the media “repressed” and “projected” their own past of racism, violence, and even the Holocaust onto the Balkans through their rationalizing political, media, and military technologies, the failure of these mechanisms to completely bury the memories of Western racial violence demonstrated that, to cite Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”17 1.

Gothic Technologies of Race and Empire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is the foremost gothic narrative that imagines the Balkans as a dangerous space of racial mixture and impurity that threatens the British imperial metropole. Stoker’s novelistic representation of the Transylvanian Count who encroaches on European modernity dramatizes the imperative to use science and technology, the cornerstones of the Western idea of civilization, in order to enlighten, develop, and command pre-modern spaces represented in the Balkans. While Stoker’s Dracula can be read as contributing to British imperial discourses that justified British expansion into Asia and Africa as benevolent, his novel also portrayed the ambiguity inherent in modernizing imperatives. In Dracula the ideal of Western civilization is disrupted by the vampire, the figure for Eastern European tradition and pre-modernity. The “undead” vampire refuses to remain dead and constantly re-emerges at the very heart of the modern, civilized West. This unhallowed interference is both spatial, since Dracula passes unnoticed into London, and temporal, since ancient superstitions and non-modern forms of knowledge have the power to interrupt scientific and technological progress. Ultimately Stoker’s tale does affirm Western progress through Dracula’s destruction at the hands of Jonathan Harker and the alliance of British, Dutch, and American vampire hunters. The Western alliance prepared for their eventual victory by deploying modern scientific methods to forever bury the pre-modern horrors represented in the figure of Dracula. However, as numerous Dracula scholars have pointed out, the adaptability of the Dracula narrative, which has been made into countless literary, stage, and filmic adaptations, is a testament to modernity’s unfinished project that has kept the West ever-vigilant of “others” that might re-emerge from the dead to strike at the heart of civilization.18 In Stoker’s Dracula, the Count’s vampirism originates in the violence of imperial conquest and the clash of civilizations in which the

66

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ peoples and races of the Balkans have become hopelessly mixed. The Count’s “story of his race,” which he recounts to Jonathan Harker, tells of a people who have unsuccessfully attempted to defend their frontiers against multiple invaders and who have ultimately fallen under the “Islamic yolk.” Stephen Arata situates Stoker’s Dracula in the context of British politics of 1880s and 1890s; at this time, the “Eastern Question” became prominent in the British imaginary through extensive newspaper coverage of the Turkish genocide of Armenians and the gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire. Arata argues that the historical context in which Stoker imagined the Transylvanian Count Dracula suggests that in the novel, “vampires are intimately linked to military conquest and to the rise and fall of empires.”19 He points out that since Dracula’s very existence as the monstrous undead follows “‘in [the] wake of imperial decay,’” Stoker makes the vampire myth “bear the weight of the culture’s fears over its declining status.”20 Since the rise of the modern British Empire coincided with Ottoman decline, the British fear of racial intermixture was projected onto the Ottoman space and understood as the cause of Eastern troubles. Arata further explains that in Dracula, racial intermixture, which was symbolized in the vampire’s need to drink and exchange blood, follows in the wake of imperial conquest. This is confirmed by the Count himself who proclaims that “[in] his homeland … ‘there is hardly a foot of soil … that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.’”21 In this connection, the strength of the British Empire hinges on maintaining racial purity. Stoker’s Dracula can be read dramatizing the merging of technology and documentation as the narrative modes in the Western imperial methodology for comprehending, apprehending and producing modernity’s monstrous others. Stoker’s Dracula takes the form of multiple narrative voices that gradually reveal the full horror of the undead Count’s threat to the British Empire and, in particular, to British womanhood upon which he preys. The novel assembles a collage of journal entries originally written in shorthand, newspaper accounts, telegrams, and phonograph dictations, all of which are transcribed by the competent “new woman” Mina Harker on her typewriter. Without the new technologies of the Victorian era, such an extensive collection of textual evidence would have been impossible; for instance, shorthand notation used by both Mina and Jonathan Harker was a new efficient method of notation, the Dictaphone into which Dr. Seward dictated his journal entries represented the technological capability to record voices, and the typewriter allowed Mina, even when on the road, to speedily collate evidence of Dracula’s existence and evidence that legitimized his ultimate destruction. In addition to these technologies of documentation, the technologies of communication, such as the telegraph, and transportation, such as the efficient British rail system, represented the possibility of instantaneously transmitting knowledge and information as well as of the

Neda Atanasoski

67

___________________________________________________ Western ability to master great distances. The vampire hunters’ use of these modern technologies enabled them to gain insight into ancient superstitions and to pre-empt the Count in their race back to Transylvania. Their defeat of Dracula therefore enacts the technological vanquishing of the centuries-old, undead, and inhuman Count. Dracula’s narrative is structured as a set of documents that provide evidence of the Transylvanian Count’s undead existence and of the horrors he commits. The collected texts derived from the vampire hunters’ method of keeping detailed journals and transcripts of their experiences serve as a weapon by which modern knowledge banishes the supernatural, or that which it cannot explain away. Thomas Richards has noted that textual archives were central for building and imagining empire in Britain.22 He argues that because “in a very real sense, theirs was a paper empire,” turn of the century British fiction both (re)presented and (re)produced the unprecedented “alliance between power and knowledge.”23 The assembled papers in Stoker’s novel need to first document the vampire hunters’ knowledge of Dracula in order to justify his destruction in the name of protecting Western modernity against the horrors of the past. The documents thus exonerate the vampire hunters and legitimize their vigilantism. The technological advances and textual documentation dramatized in Dracula provide an interpretive frame through which the modern Western subject apprehended the monstrous other. By producing and reproducing the monstrous, however, the Western subject could see the horrors of its self reflected in the other. The vampire hunters’ ultimate recourse to superstition and tradition, which Van Helsing declares is the only way to defeat the Count, reflects the limits of their new technologies. Furthermore, their triplicate copies of textual evidence documenting Dracula’s attack on Western civilization end up reproducing the monster they sought to eradicate. In other words, Dracula is a threat to the modern imperial order because his monstrosity is a product of modernity itself; both fundamentally modern and horrifically pre-modern, Dracula is a reflection of the limits of European power, knowledge, and authority. 2.

Multicultural Humanitarianism: The Politics of Enlightened War Addressing the nation on his last night as president, Bill Clinton asked U.S. citizens to remember the successes of NATO’s air strikes against Serbia and Kosovo. He said: “We achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom and peace … We must remember that America cannot lead the world unless here at home we weave the threads of our coat of many colours into the fabric of one America.”24 Clinton’s reminiscences about the U.S. leadership of “Operation Allied Force” not only interpreted U.S. national interests to stand for universal values such as

68

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ freedom and peace, but his thoughts on Kosovo reaffirmed that over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. still held its rightful position as leader of the world. Using a common metaphor for multiculturalism, the image of the interwoven threads of many colours, Clinton’s justification of U.S. global interventionism defined and upheld a contrast between U.S. domestic race relations and ethnic conflict abroad. In this way, U.S. multiculturalism re-wrote U.S. militarism as a benevolent force that spreads diversity and tolerance around the globe. Affirming the U.S. as a space of racial harmony that had earned the right to lead the free world by overcoming its own racist foundations through capitalist development meant, first and foremost, locating the Balkans as a space of conflict that represented the antithesis of contemporary U.S. multicultural ideals. In a series of speeches and commentaries designed to raise U.S. public support for “Operation Allied Force,” Bill Clinton stressed that ethnic conflict in the Balkans had its roots in the topography of the region. At the start of the bombing campaign, Clinton took it upon himself to educate the U.S. public about the geographic location of Kosovo, explaining that it was fertile ground for festering ethnic hatreds. Like Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s Dracula, who pores over the map of “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” in order to locate Dracula’s castle, during his press conference Clinton instructed the camera to zoom in on a map of the Balkans so that U.S. audiences might take a closer look at U.S. strategic interests in this obscure but volatile region.25 In Clinton’s interpretation of the map, “Kosovo is a small place, but it sits on a major fault line between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, at the meeting place of Islam and both the western and orthodox branches of Christianity … All the ingredients for a major war are there: Ancient grievances, struggling democracies, and at the centre of it all, a dictator in Serbia who has done nothing since the cold war ended but start new wars and pour gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division.”26 According to Clinton, ethnic and religious division in the Balkans is geographically determined and spatially fixed, erupting, as Samuel Huntington famously elaborated in the “Clash of Civilizations?”, at the great “fault-line” between Christianity and Islam.27 Clinton’s interpretive frame implies that while a rogue dictator such as Milosevic can aggravate the flames of ethnic hatred, he certainly didn’t start the fire. Yet, like a modern day vampire hunter who wants to end the pre-modern bloodshed, Clinton argues that it is within the West’s technological power and moral know-how to put down the fire of primordial hatreds and spread democratic and multicultural ideology. Clinton’s deployment of geographical and geological metaphors to depict the Balkans as an originary space of racial, cultural, and civilizational clashes relied on and reproduced the discourse of balkanism and gothic

Neda Atanasoski

69

___________________________________________________ imagery. In Stoker’s Dracula, vampirism emerges in the fault lines of the Balkan Peninsula. Dr. Van Helsing explains to the vampire hunters that, The very place, where [Dracula has] been alive, Un-dead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world. There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify. Doubtless, there is some magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way.28 Stoker’s geological explanation for the origins of vampirism in the Balkans has hauntingly reverberated in the contemporary discourses that explain “balkanization” as the fragmentation of political units along the lines dictated by wild landscapes and ethnic blood lines. The overlapping discourses of land and blood point to the ways in which contemporary explanations of ethnic conflict implicitly made recourse to the essentializing biological explanations of racial differences. Furthermore, these explanations recall that European imperialism was justified through racial narratives of Western superiority. Paralleling the European imperial narratives that legitimized Western expansionism, Clinton’s op-ed piece in the New York Times referred to the Balkans as a region that need not remain “the heart of European darkness” if the U.S. and its allies continue to pursue the “just and necessary war.”29 Vesna Goldsworthy has made the case that “Western ‘horror’ at what is going on in the Balkans contains, like Gothic horror, a frisson of pleasure that is difficult to own up to - an opportunity to re-enact the imperialist fantasy of drawing frontiers and ‘sorting the troublesome natives out’ without being accused of racism (because all the people involved are white).”30 Clinton’s allusion to Conrad’s critique of European imperialism (a critique that ultimately upholds the work of empire) demonstrates the paradoxical desire to symbolically distance Balkan barbarity from Europe-proper by mapping it onto the original “heart of darkness,” Africa, and to save the region precisely because it will always remain at the edge of Europe, threatening the rest of the continent through its pre-modern violence. The Balkans’ European location also provided the context for numerous comparisons of NATO’s air strikes with the Western Alliance of WWII. Throughout the 1999 NATO campaign, numerous articles addressed the fact that for an American generation who had grown up opposing the Vietnam War, including Bill Clinton, Kosovo was the first chance in which a clear moral choice between right and wrong presented itself - it was the babyboomer’s turn to be heroes and to save the embattled Albanian minority in

70

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ Kosovo. The NATO air strikes were therefore presented as the first moral war since WWII. Clinton made the sweeping statement that “Sarajevo, the capital of neighbouring Bosnia, is where World War I began. World War II and the Holocaust engulfed this region.” Indeed, according to Clinton, the U.S. and NATO were moved to action by remembering the history of the Holocaust in Europe. Recalling the horrors of the civil war in Bosnia, Clinton elided historical complexity, arguing in his presidential address that “this was genocide in the heart of Europe, not in 1945 but in 1995, not in some grainy newsreel from our parents’ and grandparents’ time, but in our own time, testing out humanity and our resolve.” Though numerous historians criticized Clinton’s use of the Holocaust to justify the NATO campaign in Serbia and Kosovo, this particular historical comparison invoked the imperative to intervene militarily more clearly than any other could have.31 Re-enacting “saving the Jews” by “saving the Albanians,” a unified West demonstrated to itself that it had, once in for all, overcome its own histories of prejudices and violence, which have in the second half of the 20th century been epitomized in the Western imaginary by the Holocaust. Like Count Dracula, the Serbian people could ultimately not escape the “humanizing” forces of Western technology. In Stoker’s Dracula, Van Helsing tells his fellow vampire hunters that the major advantage they hold over the count is their “power of combination,” which is “denied to the vampire kind.”32 According to the learned doctor, in the Western alliance “we have resources of science; we are free to act and think; and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally ... We have self-devotion in a cause, and an end to achieve which is not selfish.”33 The powerful force of the alliance between Western technology and humanitarianism against primitive forces was echoed in the contemporary representations of NATO’s attacks on Serbia and Kosovo. For instance, it was reported Belgrade “authorities, while deciding now that it is safer to keep Belgrade’s street lights on, still insist that curtains be drawn after 6 P.M., as if NATO’s modern weapons still depended on illuminated living rooms to find their targets.”34 Though Milosevic could use what medieval tactics he had to “oppress his own people,” these tactics ultimately could not help him to hide from the enlightenment of Western technology. Ironically, the technologies of Western humanitarianism in the end mirrored Milosevic’s own drive to “destroy,” especially when it became evident that NATO bombings severely increased the number of refugees in Kosovo. The day after the air strikes began, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, the American General Wesley Clark, declared that The military mission is to attack Yugoslav military and security forces and associated facilities with sufficient effect to degrade its capacity to continue repression of the

Neda Atanasoski

71

___________________________________________________ civilian population and to deter its further military actions against his own people. We aim to put its military and security forces at risk. We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately destroy these forces and their facilities and support, unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community. In that respect the operation will be as long and difficult as President Milosevic requires it to be.35 In Clark’s assessment, it is humanitarianism that motivates NATO to “attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and … destroy.” Not unlike Van Helsing’s conclusion that, in the end, science must give way to superstition in order to destroy the undead, so NATO’s “humanitarianism” seemed to need to give in to violence in order to force Milosevic to comply. Furthermore, like Ignatieff’s flawed conclusion that without imperialism the West cannot spread democracy, NATO understood its mission to “degrade,” “devastate,” and “destroy” Serbia and Kosovo’s social and economic infrastructure as an integral part of bringing the Balkans into Europe and spreading the values of tolerance and democracy to the peninsula. 3.

Media Warfare: Documenting the Horrors of an Humanitarian Crisis I have suggested in my reading of Stoker’s Dracula that the drive to document monstrous acts and horrific otherness is one of the central technologies of the gothic. Journalistic documentation, as a genre of Western modernity, has been seen as having the unique challenge of maintaining objectivity and independence from state control in the face of war-time horrors.36 According to the Society of Professional Journalists: It is the journalists who are in the unique position of being able to combine reports from combatants and civilians, nongovernmental organizations and government officials into a coherent and compelling account and to disseminate that account to a large audience. It is each journalist's responsibility to make that account as complete and as accurate as possible.37 Attempts to redefine the U.S. media’s role in the 1990s as an unbiased witness to humanitarian crises elided the collusion between media technologies that enable instant transmission of news and images and new military technologies in the construction of modern wars. This was especially the case in “Operation Allied Force” in which the Western media took on the

72

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ role of documenting war crimes for use by the International Criminal Tribunal. By presenting NATO’s military perspective of a benevolent intervention from the sky, the U.S. media confirmed President Clinton’s rhetoric that this was a war of human values fighting the vestiges of Balkans barbarity and covered over U.S. interest in “developing” Eastern Europe and pursuing its own economic interests there. In the 1990s, academic considerations of the Western media’s interaction with the state centred on the extent to which media documentation of humanitarian disasters influenced their governments to intervene in troubled regions. For instance, Piers Robinson’s work on the “CNN effect” relies on Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda as case studies for examining the extent to which the print and televised media’s “attention to the human consequences of ‘distant’ civil wars” led to intervention.38 While Robinson’s media-state model only considers the effects of the media on state intervention, his study ultimately reduces the state-media relationship to that of unidirectional influence. Instead, the contradictions inherent in the concept of militaristic humanitarianism underscore the complexities of the ways in which media technologies of documentation and political and military technologies of warfare are co-constitutive. The Western media’s empathy-framed coverage - which raises the question of who becomes the object of Western empathy - not only contributes to Western intervention, but it also justifies Western military presence in non-Western regions. Marjana Skoco and William Woodger have shown that since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military has strategically shifted its policy towards the media and has begun to share its operations’ details with journalists in order to satiate the demands of twenty-four hour news coverage. The military now provides the media with “good stories” but continues to exclude “sensitive” information from the public domain.39 Relying on military publications and military academies’ course descriptions, Skoco and Woodger conclude that since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on the media to sell its policy to the public through “‘compelling stories of human values.’”40 Media coverage of the 1990s humanitarian crises cannot simply be seen as the objective documentation of horrors that worked to generate public empathy and urge governmental intervention, but the crises themselves must also be understood as media events that were produced in conjunction with Western militaristic interests. During “Operation Allied Force,” the ideal of an independent Western media that objectively documented the horrors of ethnic cleansing was central to justifying NATO’s military aggression as a “humanitarian intervention” based in universal human values. Conversely, NATO demonized the Serbian media, arguing that it was a tool used by Milosevic to

Neda Atanasoski

73

___________________________________________________ indoctrinate his own people. One of NATO’s “humanitarian” aims, therefore, became installing a free and independent press in Serbia. Jamie Shea, NATO’s primary spokesperson during “Operation Allied Force,” argued that Radio-Television Serbia was “spreading hatred and creating this political environment of repression.”41 NATO’s depiction of Serbian media as illiberal and repressive legitimized its targeting of RTS in the middle of its campaign. On April 23, NATO bombed the RTS building in downtown Belgrade while there were at least 120 civilians working inside.42 Even though 16 civilians were killed in the attack, NATO officials insisted that RTS was part of the “national command network” and that “our forces struck at the regime leadership’s ability to transmit their version of the news” by taking out the “source of propaganda.”43 By destroying RTS, the alliance affirmed that it recognized the media as a weapon during times of war - though, paradoxically, they only acknowledged it to be a weapon in the enemy’s hands. In NATO’s perspective, the Serbian media was turned into a legitimate military target because it was biased and therefore a tool of Milosevic’s regime. Rather than expressing concern over NATO’s destruction of a media network, as they had over being expelled from Yugoslavia at the start of the war, U.S. journalists echoed NATO’s rhetoric that the destruction of RTS had hit the “heart of the propaganda machine.”44 By distinguishing propaganda from journalism, the U.S. media affirmed its own supposed role as an independent and unbiased source of news that documented global horrors for the Western public. In “Operation Allied Force” the Western media tended to represent the war from the point of view of the new military technologies. Cable and network news sources broadcast cockpit scenes from fighter jets’ that deployed night vision technology and computerized target demolition, a common practice since the 1991 Gulf War. The aerial campaign provided a “war fit for Western eyes,” in which NATO’s mistakes and “collateral damage” were justified by footage of the Albanian refugees.45 The media interpreted the scenes of burning villages and streaming refugees as evidence of the medieval methods of warfare used by the Serbs. These scenes provided a contrast to NATO’s technological warfare, which appeared to be enlightened and humanitarian. Although after the campaign it became evident that the majority of Kosovar refugees were displaced due to NATO air strikes, during the war the images that mostly focused on displaced women, children and the elderly, provided “the visual alibi for U.S. and NATO intervention by establishing a national narrative about U.S. power and political good.”46 NATO’s ambitions in Serbia and Kosovo were never simply, or even primarily, to stop Serbian violence against Kosovar Albanians. My emphasis here on the U.S. media’s adoption of NATO’s military perspective juxtaposed with scenes of the refugees highlights the way that the media contributed to erasure of NATO’s role as one of the

74

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ warring parties with its own interests in securing economic and political control over the last “rogue” nation in Europe. The U.S. media represented military technology not just as a technology of war, but as a technology of human rights that could gather evidence of ethnic cleansing. Just as Stoker’s novel depicted new technologies of the Victorian era through which the vampire hunters documented Dracula’s vampirism, so the Western media replayed images from satellite and reconnaissance photographs that revealed mass graves as evidence of Serbian war crimes. In her analysis of the satellite view of mass graves in Srebrenica photographed during the civil war in Bosnia, Lisa Parks argues that U.S. officials interpreted the images as objective and omniscient, claiming that they had “acquired evidence of genocide.”47 In the context of the international community’s passivity during the war in Bosnia, Parks reads the satellite images as indicators of “distant technologised monitoring,” passive voyeurism, and the “refusal to acknowledge (put into discourse) the complex political, socio-historical, economic and cultural conditions that have given rise to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.”48 Though in “Operation Allied Force” the satellite technologies continued to function reductively, they no longer proved Western passivity, but instead the photographs of unconfirmed (and in many instances never confirmed) graves were used as evidence to fuel support for NATO’s civilized humanitarianism against Serbian barbarity. Indeed, claiming that it is more difficult to argue with satellite images than with eyewitnesses, the U.S. media explicitly recalled the Bosnia images to construct a timeline of Serbian atrocities and to uphold the imperative for Western intervention.49 As one reporter put it, “along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milosevic, Kosovo is merely the hideous Now.”50 The emergent paradigm of humanitarian intervention and imperialism establishes Western capitalism as a system that provides for its citizens through “democracy,” liberalism, and tolerance, and opposes its system to the “horror” and barbarity of ethnic conflict in non-Western and underdeveloped regions. The prominent journalist Roger Cohen, who has written on the former Yugoslavia, described this disparity in his assessment that “modern American life is untethered to place, unlimited by distance, mostly untouched by horror. Not so in the Balkans, where real or imagined past Serbian suffering was the stuff of Mr. Milosevic’s invective.”51 According to Cohen, U.S. military aggression offers the Serbs democracy: “communism promised equality. Hitler promised the 1,000-year Reich. Milosevic promised glory. All the West offers, alongside the prosperity of this boardwalk, is the rule of law.”52

Neda Atanasoski

75

___________________________________________________ Notes 1

In 1999, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted of Serbia and its two provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, and the republic of Montenegro. 2 “Hit Smarter, Not Harder?”, CNN.com, 18 February 2001, (30 June 2005), . 3 Michael Mandel, in Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, SelfDetermination, Intervention, ed. Raju G.C. Thomas (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 287-316, 293. 4 Joseph J. Eash III “Harnessing Technology for Coalition Warfare” in the NATO Review (Web Edition) 48.2 (2004): 32-3, (25 October 2005), . 5 I wish to be more than clear that I am not proposing to exonerate Milosevic as a chief player in the destruction of Yugoslavia; nor am I suggesting that the world should have passively observed the conflict in the region escalate. Instead, I am attempting to assess the media and military technologies and the political and legal narratives through which the U.S.-led West of the postCold War order has been able to establish its often violent imperial interests as universal, benevolent and humanitarian. 6 Tomislav Longinovic “Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and ‘the serbs,’” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, eds. Dušan Bjeliü and Obrad Saviü (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 45. 7 Ibid., 51. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 Maria Todorova Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18. 10 I cite the term “blood and belonging” from the title of Michael Ignatieff’s book on the “new” nationalisms of the 1990s, which exemplifies the essentializing logic in dominant explanations of ethnicity and conflict. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). 11 Tim Allen “Perceiving Contemporary Wars,” in The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Racial Violence, ed. Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (New York: Zed Books, 1999), 11-42. 12 John Bowen “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict” in Journal of Democracy 7.4 (1996): 3-14, 3. 13 Michael Ignatieff Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (London: Vintage 2003), 24. 14 Ibid., 24. 15 Ibid., 59.

76

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ 16

Avery F. Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12. 17 Bram Stoker Dracula, The Norton Critical Edition, eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997), 41. 18 Auerbach and Skal, xii. 19 Stephen Arata “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization” in Auerbach and Skal, 463. 20 Ibid., 465. 21 Ibid., 463. 22 Thomas Richards The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993). 23 Ibid., 4-5. 24 “Speech: ‘I’ll Leave the Presidency More Idealistic’” in the New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 19 January 2001, A.24. 25 Stoker, 10. 26 “In the President’s Words: ‘We Act to Prevent a Wider War,’” in the New York Times (Late Edition) 25 March 1999, A.15. 27 Samuel P. Huntington “The Clash of Civilizations?”, in The Globalization Reader, eds. Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 27-33. 28 Stoker, 278. 29 William Jefferson Clinton “A Just and Necessary War” in the New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 23 My 1999, 4.17. 30 Vesna Goldsworthy “Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization,” in Bjelic and Savic, 25-38, 29. 31 Ethan Bronner “Historians Note Flaws in President’s Speech” in the New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 26 March 1999 A.12. 32 Stoker, 210. 33 Ibid., 210. 34 “Belgrade ‘Targets’ Find Unity ‘From Heaven,’” in The New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 30 March 1999 A.1. 35 NATO Press Conference, 25 March 1999, (25 October 2005), . 36 See Stuart Allen and Barbie Zelizer’s “Rules of Engagement: Journalism and War” in Reporting War: Journalism in War Time, eds. Allen and Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3-21. Allen and Zelizer’s introductory remarks demonstrate that while recent reporting of the U.S. war in Iraq, in which the practice of “embedding” journalists with combat troops provided an explicit and visual instance of the necessary cooperation between national medias and the military to raise public support for the war, media images

Neda Atanasoski

77

___________________________________________________ have always been crucial for raising public support for military actions and intervention. 37 Society of Professional Journalists “Reference Guide to the Geneva Conventions,” (25 October 2005), . 38 Piers Robinson The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy, and Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1. 39 Marjana Skoco and William Woodger “The Military and the Media” in Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, ed. Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000), 79-87. 40 Ibid., 81. 41 NATO Press Conference with Jamie Shea on 23 April 1999 (25 October 2005), . 42 Amnesty International “‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killings?: Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force” (New York: Amnesty International USA, June 2000), 41. 43 Cited in Amnesty International, 42. 44 CBS Evening News 21 April 1999. 45 Tony Weymouth “The Media: Information and Deformation” in The Kosovo Crisis: The Last American War in Europe, ed. Tony Wymouth and Stanley Henig (London: Pearson Education, 2001) 143-162, 153. 46 Wendy Kozol “Domesticating NATO’s War in Kosovo/a: (In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism,” Meridians 4(2) 2004: 1-38, 14. 47 Lisa Parks “Satellite Views of Srebrenica: Tele-visuality and the Politics of Witnessing,” Social Identities 7.4 (2001): 585-611, 589. 48 Ibid., 589. 49 ABC Nightly News, 10 April 1999. 50 Blaine Harden “What It Would Take to Cleanse Serbia” in the New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 9 May 1999, 4.1. 51 Roger Cohen “From Bosnia to Berlin to the Hague, On a Road Toward a Continent’s Future” in the New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast) 15 July 2001, 4.7. 52 Ibid.

78

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict

___________________________________________________ References Allen, Stuart and Barbie Zelizer. “Rules of Engagement: Journalism and War.” In Reporting War: Journalism in War Time, edited by Allen and Zelizer, 3-21. New York: Routledge, 2004. Allen, Tim. “Perceiving Contemporary Wars.” In The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Racial Violence, edited by Tim Allen and Jean Seaton, 11-42. New York: Zed Books, 1999. Amnesty International. “‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killings?: Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force.” New York: Amnesty International USA, June 2000. Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” 462-469. In Auerbach and Skal. Auerbach, Nina and David J. Skal, editors. The Norton Critical Edition of Dracula. New York: Norton, 1997. Bjeliü, Dušan and Obrad Saviü, editors. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Bowen, John. “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict.” Journal of Democracy 7.4 (1996): 3-14. Eash, Joseph J. III. “Harnessing Technology for Coalition Warfare.” NATO Review 48.2 (2004): 32-3. (25 October 2005). Goldsworthy, Vesna. “Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization,” 25-38. In Bjelic and Savic. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?”. In The Globalization Reader, edited by Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, 27-33. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Neda Atanasoski

79

___________________________________________________ Ignatieff, Michael. Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. London: Vintage 2003. Kozol, Wendy. “Domesticating NATO’s War in Kosovo/a: (In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism.” Meridians 4(2) 2004: 1-38. Longinovic, Tomislav. “Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and ‘the serbs.’” In Bjelic and Savic. Mandel, Michael. “Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and International Criminal Law.” In Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention, edited by Raju G.C. Thomas, 287-316. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. Parks, Lisa. “Satellite Views of Srebrenica: Tele-visuality and the Politics of Witnessing.” Social Identities 7.4 (2001): 585-611. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. New York: Verso, 1993. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy, and Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2002. Skoco, Marjana and William Woodger. “The Military and the Media.” In Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, edited by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, 79-87. Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000. Society of Professional Journalists. “Reference Guide to the Geneva Conventions.” (25 October 2005). Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Norton Critical Edition, edited by Auerbach and Skal. New York: Norton, 1997. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Weymouth, Tony. “The Media: Information and Deformation.” In The Kosovo Crisis: The Last American War in Europe, edited by Tony Wymouth and Stanley Henig, 143-162. London: Pearson Education, 2001.

Kultur-Terror: The Composite Monster in Nazi Visual Propaganda Kristen Williams Backer Abstract Nazi propaganda posters frequently used the image of a monster to represent nationalities, ideologies, or ethnicities that were considered outside the narrow bounds of acceptability in the totalitarian regime. National Socialism attributed monstrous qualities to groups that were despised, denied, feared, or repressed; this often translated visually to the artistic depiction of Jews, Eastern Europeans, Bolsheviks, or Allied nationalities as giants, unearthly spectres, or subhuman beasts. One of the most over-reaching characteristics of these depictions is the propagandists’ tendency to conflate unrelated or only scarcely related groups into a single form; composite monsters were often used to represent and vilify multiple groups. Leest Storm’s 1944 poster, Kultur-Terror, represented the threat of encroaching American culture as a composite monster, a giant creature whose body and appendages represented various aspects of American life. Though the creature’s overall conception and visual form were undeniably rooted in the existing tradition of monster propaganda that predominately sought to obfuscate the boundaries between Jews and Bolsheviks and simultaneously condemn both, Kultur-Terror reflects specific critiques of American culture rather than ascribing nebulous, negative qualities. This essay argues that Storm’s poster can be seen as the fullest realization of the composite monster tradition, as American culture so accurately fits with the characterization. The United States defines itself through variety, and examination of Kultur-Terror’s iconography demonstrates that this aspect of American culture was especially threatening to National Socialism. The inclusiveness of American culture made it the perfect foil for the singularity of Nazi totalitarianism, and it was particularly suited to portrayal as a composite monster. Keywords: Germany, Nazi, Bolshevik, communism, African American, poster, propaganda, stereotype “The U.S.A. would rescue Europe’s culture from doom” with a “KulturTerror,” a beast both absurd and terrific, a gigantic monster who brings the American way of life to the European continent and leaves only destruction in his path. This is the message of a 1944 poster by Leest Storm, designed for audiences in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.1 In the image, the great creature

82 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ is composed of wildly incongruous body parts, each of which represents some facet of American culture that was anathema to the ideals of National Socialism. From the waving Old Glory, to the Indian chief headdress, to the figure of the Statue of Liberty in the background and the textual label in the foreground, the monster is unmistakeably a visual amalgamation of all things American. Ostensibly, the poster warns viewers against the dangers of listening to Allied radio broadcasts. The small foreground figure with exaggerated ears was a frequent component of posters in that particular propaganda campaign, and in this case he suggests that the American “salvation” of those in occupied territory might be more akin to cultural infection.2 The artist could easily have described the virulent danger of American culture with a far less complex image; instead he chose to picture Americanness as a composite terror, a monster made up of spare parts in Frankensteinesque fashion. While analysis of each of the constituent parts reveals that the monster was intended to connote both general notions of the ills of American culture and point to specific persons, events, or ideas, examination of the context (both historically and within the totality of Nazi visual propaganda) of the poster points to a long and deeply-rooted tradition of monster imagery. Previously, the monster had been reserved for depictions of communism in National Socialist propaganda. Bolshevism was seen as posing a significant threat to ideologies worldwide, and as such it was often given the most vilifying of treatments in visual propaganda. In posters and other ephemera, the Bolshevik monster, snarling and lumbering, armed with weapons both crude and modern, left only misery in his wake. He was both a simian giant, devastating cities with a single footfall or swing of his hammer, and a skulking, skeletal fiend guilty of more personal, insidious crimes, but in each case he was identifiable as the communist menace by his red cloak or shaggy red pelt, or, in some cases, by hands, arms, and torso bathed in blood. In a 1956 interview, infamous F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover called communism “a many-faced monster, endeavouring to gain the allegiance of [American] citizens.”3 Indeed, the figuring of Communism and the communist world as a hideous, venomous creature, capable of “injecting poison into the bloodstream” of nations on both sides of the Atlantic was commonplace in both the textual and visual rhetoric of the first half of the twentieth century.4 Nowhere is the image of the Bolshevik monster more fully exploited than in German propaganda of World War I, the Interwar Period, and the Second World War. Visual media that promoted National Socialism throughout occupied Europe portrayed Bolshevism as a frightening beast that threatened not only the ideals and livelihood, but also the very life of the viewer.

Kristen Williams Backer 83 ______________________________________________________________ The origins of the monstrous form can be traced to multiple sources. Socialism had been depicted in European caricature as a skeleton since the nineteenth century, and the Orthodox Church used a furry red (and comparatively rather benevolent-looking) beast to represent the destruction of religious tradition by the revolutionary forces in Russia.5 Even today, the Internet is rife with the work of conspiracy theorists, armchair eschatologists, and hate group mouthpieces who trace the roots of both the “Global Zionist Conspiracy” and the Bolshevik movement to the Biblical Esau, who was characterized by his ruddy, hairy body and lack of refinement.6 Perhaps the most directly influential antecedents to the Bolshevik monster were derogatory personifications of Germany created by Allied propagandists in World War I. Following the German invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality, previously guaranteed in the Treaty of London of 1831 and 1839, was dismissed as a “Scrap of Paper,” Germany was increasingly portrayed as “the Hun.”7 Public opinion snowballed from outrage among intellectuals over a broken treaty, to the notion that Belgium was a virgin territory symbolically raped by Germany, to the belief that German soldiers were the perpetrators of atrocities and that no civilian was safe.8 Writers like William Le Queux, who compared the German army to “one vast gang of Jack-the-Rippers,” published sensationalized tales of German troops’ ravaging both the landscape and the women and children of Belgium.9 As these accounts of horrific acts of unchecked violence and sexual depravity were circulated among the British and American public, anti-German visual propaganda increasingly centred on the barbarism of the Hun. In iconic images such as Ellsworth Young’s 1918 Remember Belgium, and to a greater degree, H.R. Hopps' Destroy This Mad Brute, also of 1918, the only codified markers of German-ness are the helmet and moustache.10 The cudgelwielding gorilla, whose stooped posture is echoed even in the most “human” portrayals of the Hun, threatens to bludgeon America with “Kultur” as he carries an innocent (yet titillatingly bare-breasted) victim off to her unspeakable fate. While such images encouraged enlistment among young men who saw military service as a means of defending American womanhood, a contemporary poster by Norman Lindsay reminded Australians that the Hun’s bloody stronghold of Western Europe could easily spread to their insular nation.11 In Lindsay’s poster, the iconography was further reduced, leaving only the helmet to distinguish the beast as German. The looming threat of his dripping claws, however, would have left little confusion as to who was the enemy. In almost no time, German propaganda artists appropriated the figure of the beast for their own means. Perhaps the most iconic of all images depicting the Bolshevik monster is Julius Ussy Engelhard’s 1918 drooling, fanged primate accompanied by the text, “Bolshevism brings war, unemployment, and famine.”12 The poster’s subject matter is clearly

84 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ modelled on the earlier images by Hopps and Lindsey, given the generally ape-like figure with slumped shoulders, a full pelt, and elongated arms and fingers. Its style, however, represents a distinct departure from that of the previous two images. Unlike the painterly style of Hopps and Lindsey, so rooted in illustration tradition, Engelhard effectively utilizes the flat planes of colour, negative space, and bold text of graphic design. For Germany, a country whose official self-identity rested squarely on nostalgia and tradition, use of a technique so tied to commercialism and modernism may have been an additional critique of the future-driven ideology of communism. That the monster carries not only a knife, but also a smoking bomb, reinforces the critique of modernization, especially when contrasted with the message conveyed by the rude club in Hopps’ work. Though Engelhard’s poster is unmistakably related to (and possibly even a direct reaction to) the atrocities propaganda that depicted Germany as a terrifying beast, it is important to note that German propaganda artists did not simply turn the characterization onto their own enemies. The monster embodied the potentially destructive powers of Bolshevism; it was not a hideous visual form representing actual monstrous acts committed by soldiers. The rise of communism across Eastern and Central Europe following the war added a new dimension to the visual language of the Bolshevik monster. Not simply a fiendish skeleton or a subhuman ape, particularly in Hungarian propaganda surrounding the establishment of Belá Kun’s Soviet Republic, posters increasingly depicted the Bolshevik as a giant. Possibly taking its initial cue from favourable Soviet propaganda that depicted the noble worker as superhuman, the “red giant” motif was used by all sides. In works commissioned by the Social Democrats, for whom a coalition with the far left was a government power play, he was the sympathetic, even heroized giant, triumphing as he “painted the parliament red.” For counter-revolutionary forces, he was the oversized red oaf, unaware of his own strength until he had crushed the nation.13 Perhaps the most damning characterization of the red giant in Hungary appeared in a 1919 poster, along with the message, “They Wash Themselves.”14 In the background, blood streams from the windows of the Parliament building and gushes into the Danube below. In the foreground, the giant bends over to bathe himself in the sticky pool, and as he turns his head to gaze at something beyond the picture plane, the audience is given a glimpse of the still-wet knife clenched in his teeth and understands that the bloody river is of his own making. If the vision of the giant revelling in his own destructive powers was not sufficiently horrifying to viewers, then perhaps his sheer size was. Significant scale discrepancy between huge aggressors and their tiny victims became a hallmark of Bolshevik monster iconography. By far, the most impressive quality of Leest Storm’s compositional scheme in Kultur-Terror is this same manipulation of scale. The giant

Kristen Williams Backer 85 ______________________________________________________________ monster, both tall and wide (owing to his multiple, spread arms and wingspan), occupies nearly nine-tenths of the picture plane. Diminutive buildings crumble underneath his feet, and antlike humans flee the scene in the lower right hand corner of the poster. The size of the Statue of Liberty and skyscraper dotted cityscape in the lower left hand corner and the body of water directly beneath them suggest distance; perhaps the figure has just emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and stepped onto land to begin his carnage and destruction. Kultur-Terror could even have borrowed this symbolic narrative from H.R. Hopps’ work.15 In Destroy this Mad Brute, the apelike Hun stands on a slab of ground labelled “America,” having left ripples in the reflective water behind him. Across the “pond” lies the burned out carcass of the European landscape. A giant monster devastating a tiny civilization was also the central theme of Bolschewismus ohne Maske, (“Bolshevism Unmasked”) a 1937 poster by Herbert Agricola advertising a didactic exhibit of the same name.16 Like the earlier “Eternal Jew” and subsequent “Degenerate Art” exhibitions, “Bolshevism Unmasked” was meant to provide Germans with the visual and ideological tools to recognize the monster from the east.17 The monster depicted in Bolschewismus ohne Maske is so large that he dominates the composition, and a small skeleton of a city burns behind him, the flames creating an eerie, lurid glow that dramatizes the image’s oppressive palette. At his feet, his victims lie in a grotesque heap. The leftmost figure, the grey pallor of whose skin suggests he may already be dead, is the very embodiment of abjection. He lies with his face turned upward to reveal a gaping mouth and empty, bloody eye sockets. The other prone figure cowers and tries vainly to shield his head from the next blow, which, given the perpetrator’s dynamic pose and bloodied whip, will no doubt be fierce. This is atrocities propaganda at its most horrific, and it has been reserved for this later incarnation of the Bolshevik monster. Compared to earlier images, for example Engelhard’s bomb-toting ape, the communist identification is more clear-cut than ever. Instead of relying solely on text or colour iconography, Agricola has clothed the monster in a long dark coat and belt reminiscent of Soviet military garb, and to remove all doubt has given him a red hat with an easily visible star. Given that Storm’s Kultur-Terror makes no reference, either explicit or veiled, to communism as a facet of the marauding American beast, comparison to the corpus of Bolshevik monster images may at first glance seem inappropriate; however, in both its total conception, the composite monster that links seemingly unrelated elements into a unified whole, and in the use of specific visual tropes to describe the enemy and Other, KulturTerror draws heavily on the tradition of the Bolshevik monster. Indeed, it is a direct offspring of the Bolshevik monster, a form that conflated Nazi fears of the “Red Menace,” the global Jewish conspiracy, and various Slavic

86 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ “Untermenschen” into the single form of “Bolschewismus,” sometimes seemingly indiscriminately (a trend that paralleled other forms of Nazi propaganda). The conflated beast that brings cultural terror to Europe warns viewers to be wary of an ungainly culture characterized by paradox and hypocrisy. The monster’s head is that of a hooded Klansman. The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1865 as a social club for southern men disenfranchised after the American Civil War, but it soon became more known for its penchant for vigilante justice.18 The group all but disbanded less than a decade later, but it regained strength in the early twentieth century, and by the 1920’s was more than two million strong.19 This new incarnation of the Klan was primarily focused on keeping African Americans out of the positions of power in the government and workforce to which they were beginning to gain access following the First World War. Its tactics included mob violence and lynching, a fact alluded to by the presence of the noose looped around and hanging from one of the monster’s arms. Storm’s inclusion of the pointed hood was a visual element designed to frighten; it suggested to the viewer that the intrusion of Americanism into European culture was akin to the approach of an angry, out of control lynch mob. The hood, whether worn by American Klansmen or by the monster in Kultur-Terror, is a device primarily intended to instil fear in those who encounter it. Because the hood, effectively a mask, hides the face and identity of the perpetrator, the victim is left to wonder about and fear the unknown enemy. This tactic appears in Agricola’s Bolschewismus ohne Maske as well. Instead of choosing a face from among those already codified in the visual record (a skull, a red man, a stereotyped Jew or Slav, or a fanged ape, among others), he chose a face that was utterly non-specific. If the terrifying figure represents Bolshevism unmasked, then beneath its mask, Bolshevism is something unnameable and inhuman. With its sunken eyes and snarling mouth, the monster’s face unquestionably intends to inspire only negative identification, but since it fails to allude specifically to any one person or group, it can effectively encompass any or all persons or ideas execrated by the Nazis. The Klan hood allows the same blanket identification with American culture. Leest Storm might also have intended the hooded head to stand in stark contrast with the monster’s body. Though the creature is led by what might be considered the face of American racism, its torso, its very heart, is a cage that contains two grossly stereotyped African American figures. Their enclosure is labelled “Jitterbug - Triumph of Civilization,” but the figure’s movements barely resemble the popular partner dance. Instead they are exaggerated steps that combine with the figures’ elongated arms and partially nude bodies to approximate the racist caricatures that had been appearing since the early nineteenth century and were rampant in Jim Crow America.

Kristen Williams Backer 87 ______________________________________________________________ By juxtaposing signifiers of both African American culture and the Ku Klux Klan, the poster creates a paradox. The United States is a country defined both by its intolerance for minorities and by its co-opting and celebration of minority culture. This paradox, in the context of a persuasive image, speaks of just one facet of the cultural hypocrisy that purports to deliver Europe while clearly annihilating it. The centrality of the jitterbugging figures, as well as their position in the monster’s body (inside the “ribcage,” serving as the heart), arguably suggests that African American culture is foremost among the monstrous aspects of Americanism.20 Additionally, though the creature is almost wholly characterized by slapdash, comical asymmetry, some of its parts are paired. Significantly, there are two muscular black arms and two bomber wings. These limbs spring from the monster’s trunk in the most anatomically correct places; they can be read as the truest parts of its body and thus the most pregnant carriers of symbolic meaning. The black arms are clearly the most menacingly positioned of all the limbs, and when combined with the cage torso, they assert that African American culture is the most fearsome characteristic of American “civilization.” Individuals of African heritage living in Germany and in occupied Europe were subject to many of the same systematic eradication policies perpetrated by the Nazis against other minorities, and blackness was an integrated part of the visual scheme of that which was denied, despised, feared, or targeted in National Socialist propaganda.21 Visitors to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition were urged to “judge for themselves” the depravity of Modernism in a show that jumbled primarily Expressionist and cubist art with seemingly innocuous art chosen because its artists were Jewish or Eastern European, and art by so-called primitives and the clinically insane. Pieces were grouped so as to obliterate their original contexts and for maximum ideologically instructive effect, including wall texts that either used Nazi rhetoric to critique the art or that mocked the manifestoes and statements of the artists themselves.22 An exhibit of Emil Nolde’s work, which was heavily influenced by arts of Africa and the South Pacific, as well as by his desire to paint Old Testament scenes with authentically Jewish models, was accompanied by wall text that decried the Verniggerung or “niggerization” of music, theatre, and the visual arts. The paintings were arranged with no heed to chronology but rather traced a supposed evolution from whiteness to blackness in Nolde’s expressionist paintings. 23 The next year, Hans Ziegler, master architect of the Degenerate Art show, also staged an exhibition of Degenerate Music and designed the guide’s cover. Though pieces by composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were among those condemned, visually, Degenerate Music is reduced to a single iconic figure, a caricatured man who, though clearly wearing a Star of David on his lapel, is unmistakably black. And although the

88 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ white hoop ring in his ear might be meant to allude to an iconography of tribal Africa, his dapper suit and top hat make clear that he is the African American performer: the blackface Minstrel showman, or, more likely, a jazz musician.24 Both American and German racist propaganda and caricature had used similar features and iconography to derogate those of African descent for decades prior to World War II. While the jitterbugging figures in KulturTerror conform to this established tradition of visual slur, the powerful black arms connote a more specific recent history. With its right hand, the monster waves a record album over its head; the arm seems poised to hurl the record like a discus into the small city. The musical allusion serves as both a visual parallel to the caged dancing figures, unifying the composition, and to connote the presence of African Americans in the music industry. Degenerate jazz culture is but one of the weapons with which the U.S. batters Europe. The monster’s left hand is sheathed in a boxing glove and grasps a bulging moneybag. In the United States, boxing had begun as an underground sport, but by the Jazz Age it had not only achieved mainstream recognition, but had become extremely popular. It was glamorous and exciting, and spectators from the full spectrum of race and class in America enjoyed the sport. In the mid-1930’s, boxing became a forum for political bouts as well. In 1936, German boxer Max Schmeling had beaten the seemingly unstoppable “Brown Bomber,” African American Joe Louis, in New York to gain the title of world heavyweight champion. He was given a hero’s welcome; he returned to Germany on the Hindenburg and a film of the fight, pointedly titled Max Schmelings Sieg- Ein Deutscher Sieg (Max Schmeling’s Victory- a German Victory) was shown throughout Germany and seen by more than three million fans in the first four weeks after release alone.25 Two years later, on June 22, 1938, the two met again to settle the score, as both held the world heavyweight champion title on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but had not faced off due to increasingly hostile political relations between the U.S. and Germany. The fight was hyped in the press as a bout not only between the two nations, but between black and white, and more specifically between the Nazis and all the minorities they sought to eradicate. In contrast to the first fight, wherein Schmeling had studiously and carefully knocked Louis out in the twelfth round, in the politically charged rematch, Louis practically pulverized Schmeling with an unrelenting onslaught and after only two minutes and four seconds, the match was called.26 Louis’s furore in the ring was characterized in the press as so terrifyingly violent that it was “half human, half animal,” and even Schmeling himself contested Louis’s blows to his kidney as illegal.27 The 1938 Louis-Schmeling fight served as fodder for visual representations of America like Kultur-Terror in two distinct ways. Firstly,

Kristen Williams Backer 89 ______________________________________________________________ the fight itself was a national embarrassment. Unquestionably, German politicians, boxing fans, and sporting insiders all expected Schmeling, whose physique fit perfectly with a Germanic body aesthetic of the ideal and whose career (marked by several dramatic comebacks) had “come to embody the Nazi vision of a renascent Reich,” to win.28 The ferocity with which Louis had pummelled Schmeling allowed a convenient excuse for the loss, and it added fuel to inflammatory Nazi rhetoric that associated blackness with brutality and inhumanity. The American composite monster that incorporates black boxer’s arms would, like Joe Louis, show absolutely no mercy.29 Secondly, the moneybag that the monster holds like a bomb, ready to drop, relates to Germany’s sour grapes attitude toward American boxing.30 While the prominence and easy identification of the dollar sign surely points to a critique of American capitalism, a system equally as reprehensible as Bolshevism to National Socialism, it is in the combination of the boxing glove, the moneybag, and the small figure that clings to and peeks around the bag that the full message is expressed. The clinging figure has an oversized and exaggerated down-turned nose, perhaps the most recognizable marker of Jewishness in the visual vocabulary of anti-Semitic propaganda, and his large glasses and striped pants suggest that he is a businessman.31 Nazi propaganda played on fears of Jewish financial success with “sociology;” posters in Vichy France announced that 98 percent of American bankers were Jewish and that 97 percent of the U.S. press was owned by Jews.32 While such numbers were no doubt inflated for sensational effect, boxing was an industry that was, in New York at least, dominated by Jews. Managers and promoters, trainers and doctors, and a large part of the constituency of boxing fans were Jewish. Schmeling, himself, even employed a Jewish trainer when fighting outside Germany. When Schmeling’s Nazi association became undeniable in the public eye, Jews in New York decided to boycott his fights.33 Boxing provided Nazi propagandists with a convenient means of logically tying multiple enemies into a single homogenous form; warnings against African Americans, Jews, capitalism, and American violence are all encoded into the monster’s single muscular appendage. The Kultur-Terror monster’s second set of arms, just beneath the main, muscular arms, does not match. On his left, an arm inside a dark suit and white cuff holds a mallet and strikes the drum that forms the creature’s abdomen and hips. On his right, the arm, clothed in chain gang stripes and with a manacle dangling from its wrist, aims a Thompson submachine gun (the “Tommy Gun”) at the city below. This iconography links deadly violence and criminality, and it ascribes a criminal character to the United States. The Tommy gun had a reputation as a favourite weapon among those involved in organized crime (a reputation gained primarily through films), and anti-American propaganda in the Second World War frequently connected American soldiers with gangster culture. Both German and Italian

90 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ propaganda characterized American pilots as “gangster pilots” who indiscriminately bombed civilians. In a poster from Italy, a sneering, cigar smoking thug, dressed not in military fatigues but in the double-breasted suit and derby hat of a mafia hoodlum, points a Tommy gun at a dead child while an American bomber flies overhead.34 This “gangster pilot” identification may even be the motivating impetus behind the inclusion of the airplane wings and blood-spattered bomb leg on the Kultur-Terror monster. Race and gangsterism intersected in the Nazi media’s coverage of riots that broke out in Detroit, Michigan in June 1943. Racial tensions had boiled over in cities across the U.S. in the preceding months, but the breakdown of law and order in Detroit was particularly severe. After several days of mob violence, 34 people were dead and costs of property damage totalled over two million dollars. German-controlled radio broadcasts in Vichy France reported “that the riot revealed ‘the internal disorganization of a country torn by social injustice, race hatreds, regional disputes, the violence of an irritated proletariat, and the gangsterism of a capitalistic police.’”35 The monster in Leest Storm’s poster seems to embody this characterization of America. The Kultur-Terror creature’s left leg, with its enormous bomb that dwarfs the city over which it hangs, supports the image’s critique of “gangster pilots;” indeed it hovers just above a city square, not a military installation. The right leg conveys an entirely different message. It is the “World’s Most Beautiful Leg,” complete with measuring tape to prove that it conforms to the perfect feminine proportions. The leg, along with the two flag-waving and trumpet blasting figures that ride on the monster’s shoulders connote “All-American” womanhood. The woman riding on the beast’s right shoulder wears the headdress of a Plains Indian and the one on its left, the tall hat and boots of a marching band drum major. Both costumes are distinctly American and yet distinctly non-specific (the Plains headdress, for example, is notoriously misused in images of Native Americans). The women themselves have the curvy physiques and scant attire of pinup girls. The two women and the perfect leg imply that the feminine side of the “Cultural Terror,” the face of American womanhood that takes part in the cultural redemption of Europe, is American femininity as filtered through American G.I.s. The monster brings not only the American way of life, with violence, militarism, and business, but also its own brand of genuinely American sex. The monster in Storm’s poster is marked by the absurd combinations of its ludicrous anatomy. Despite the beast’s utter incongruity, the poster is formally unified by visual and connoted rhythm. Repeated elements (stripes, bars, feathers, etc.) give the image a cadence, a visual rhythm that, since it recurs throughout the monster’s body, links unrelated elements into a whole. The regularity of repeated elements might also remind viewers of the unrelenting rhythm of approaching ground troops. While the

Kristen Williams Backer 91 ______________________________________________________________ visible rhythm created by the repetition of formal elements may have been designed to scare the viewer (probably on a subconscious level), the monster’s unseen rhythm is more frightening, more dangerous to National Socialist ideology. The sound connoted by the beaten drum, the jitterbugging African Americans, and the trumpet and record is the “primitive” beat of American popular music. Jazz, noted for its flexibility and openness to improvisation, was foremost among musical styles designated by the Nazis as “degenerate.” Its African and African American roots no doubt made jazz an easy Nazi target, but the very structure (or seeming lack thereof) of the music was a cultural threat. Jazz is an expressionist art form; it lends itself to outpouring of emotion and is not governed by the rational mind. This quality, perhaps the most defining and most celebrated characteristic of the medium, was abhorrent to the cold intellect championed by Nazism.36 In Kultur-Terror, jazz can be thought of as a metaphor for the United States itself. Just as jazz borrowed from multiple sources to create a hybrid musical form and allows for multiplicity of styles and injection of musicians’ own idiosyncrasies, the American official ideology is one of inclusion, of “melting pots” and “salad bowls,” and of personal freedoms outside the bounds of government control. The Kultur-Terror monster furthers this metaphor. Like America, a powerful whole made up of multiple different states, ethnicities, and (ostensibly) points of view, the monster comprises unrelated parts to create a terrifying complete anatomy. This inclusiveness stands in opposition to the exclusivity of Nazi ideology. Whereas Nazis rejected otherness with a paranoiac vehemence, the United States claims an origin that celebrated otherness and equality. The opposition of exclusive and inclusive, of singularity and multiplicity, is arguably at the root of all Nazi monster propaganda. Because National Socialism excluded so many, indeed defining itself through exclusion and homogeneity, its best visual definition of otherness was inclusion and heterogeneity. Thus, groups as different as Jews and Bolsheviks became indistinguishable from one another, America’s diversity became an unwieldy conflation, and all were lumped together into the feared Other. The monster was the perfect form for this composite Other, as teratogeny essentially opposes eugenics; the making of monsters exploits difference, whereas the Nazi-championed quest for a master race depends on eliminating it. As the frequent monster combination of Bolshevik and Jew makes clear, the composite terror was a fundamental strategy of defining otherness in Nazi propaganda; however, Kultur-Terror reveals its Frankenstein quality like never before. As the inclusiveness of American culture was perfectly anathema to the eugenic ideal of National Socialism, so the composite freakery of Kultur-Terror was perhaps the Nazi’s perfect Other.

92 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Figure 1. Peter Paret, et al., Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 173. 3 J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (New York: Random House, 1969), 64. 4 Ibid, 153 and Cyndy Hendershot, Anti-Communism and Popular Culture in Mid-Century America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003), 1. 5 Paret et al., 122 and Vladimir Neviarovich, “Revolutions and Diabolism,” PRAVOSLAVIA.RU, 9 February 2004, (4 April 2005). . 6 See, for example, “Esau / Edom in Russia,” The End Times, 27 January 2002, (19 April 2005). ; this is but one of many websites dedicated to the subject. An abundance of websites, even some with scholarly writing, can be easily found using any search engine. 7 In an August 4, 1914 interview with British ambassador to Germany Sir Edward Goschen, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg said, “We are at war today…just for a word – ‘neutrality’ – a word which in war-time has so often been disregarded – just for a scrap of paper.” A. Pearce Higgins, The Law of Nations and the War (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), 13, quoted in Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honour: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 3 (1997): 720. 8 Gullace, 714-747 traces this progression of public opinion in detail. 9 William Le Queux, German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds (London: G. Newnes, 1915), 45-121, quoted in Gullace, 714. 10 Figure 2. For a reproduction of Young’s poster, see Paret et al., 21. 11 For a reproduction of Lindsay’s poster, see Peter Stanley, What did You do in the War Daddy? A Visual History of Propaganda Posters (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983), 37. 12 Figure 3. 13 Paret et al., 110. 14 Figure 4. 15 Figure 2. 16 Figure 5. 17 Paret et al., 131. 2

Kristen Williams Backer 93 ______________________________________________________________ 18

The Indiana Historical Research Foundation, “A Brief History of the Original Ku Klux Klan: 1865-1869,” An Educational, Historical Study of the Ku Klux Klan, 30 August 2005, (24 October 2005). . 19 “A Brief History of the Ku Klux Klan,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 14 (1996): 32. The Indiana Historical Research Foundation website (op. cit.) puts the membership number at over eight million. 20 A parallel can be found in an Italian poster series from circa 1941-45. The American soldier is figured as a looter who would rob Europe of its centuries-old treasures; in one example, he fills his lap with riches while guarding a stockpile of religious art and liturgical instruments, and in another, he drunkenly gropes the Venus de Milo, who has been sarcastically marked with a price tag of only two dollars. Significantly, in each of the posters that portray Americans as thieves, the soldier depicted is a stereotyped African American. For reproductions see Zbynek Zeman, Selling the War: Art and Propaganda in World War II (London: Orbis Publishing, 1978), 115, and Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 113. 21 Particularly brutally targeted were the so-called “Rhineland Bastards” (Rheinlanbastarde), biracial children of relationships between white German women and French colonial troops that occupied the Rhineland after the First World War. For more on the situation of the African diaspora during the Nazi era, see Robert W. Kestling, “Blacks Under the Swastika: A Research Note,” The Journal of Negro History Vol. 83, no. 1 (1998): 84-99. 22 Neil Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’”- The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (1998): 41. 23 This wall text is clearly legible in photographs of Reich officials visiting the exhibition following its 1937 opening in Munich. 24 See Hans Severus Ziegler, Entartete Musik: Eine Abrechnung (Düsseldorf: Völkischer Verlag, 1937) for reproduction. 25 David Margolick, “War of the Worlds,” Vanity Fair 541, September 2005, 375. 26 Ibid, 378. 27 Peter Wilson, British boxing commentator, quoted in ibid, 377. 28 Ibid, 374. 29 Schmeling’s manager, Max Machon tried repeatedly to end the one-sided match by symbolically “throwing in the towel,” but this gesture of surrender was not observed in New York, so Louis continued to batter Schmeling even though his side was attempting to concede the fight. Ibid, 378. 30 Compare to Figure 3.

94 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ 31

Nazi visual propaganda obsessively repeated the oversized, misshapen nose as a feature of the Jewish, Bolshevik, or Slavic face; such examples are too numerous to mention. It even appears on images that make no other reference to Jewishness, for example Figure 4, wherein the red giant’s face has been turned to the side to provide an unobstructed view of the stereotyped nose, and his neck and shoulder have been awkwardly manipulated to accommodate the turned head. 32 Zeman,102-103. The monster in Kultur-Terror wears a banner decorated with the Star of David as a loincloth; this might be a similar suggestion of the pervasiveness of Jewish power in America. 33 Margolick, 374. 34 See Zeman, 114. 35 “People and Events: Detroit Race Riots 1943,” The American Experience, Eleanor Roosevelt, 1999 (2 May 2005). . 36 For more on the situation of jazz under the Third Reich, see Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

References “A Brief History of the Ku Klux Klan.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 14 (1996): 32. Clark, Toby. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. “Esau/ Edom in Russia.” The End Times. 27 January 2002. (19 April 2005). Gullace, Nicoletta F. “Sexual Violence and Family Honour: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War.” The American Historical Review Vol. 102, No. 3 (1997): 714-747. Hendershot, Cyndy. Anti-Communism and Popular Culture in Mid-Century America. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003.

Kristen Williams Backer 95 ______________________________________________________________ Higgins, A. Pearce. The Law of Nations and the War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1914. Hoover, J. Edgar. J. Edgar Hoover on Communism. New York: Random House, 1969. The Indiana Historical Research Foundation. “A Brief History of the Original Ku Klux Klan: 1865-1869.” An Educational, Historical Study of the Ku Klux Klan. 30 August 2005. . (24 October 2005). Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kestling, Robert W. “Blacks Under the Swastika: A Research Note.” The Journal of Negro History Vol. 83, no. 1 (1998): 84-99. Le Queux, William. German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds. London: G. Newnes, Limited, 1915. Levi, Neil. “‘Judge for Yourselves!’”- The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle.” October 85 (1998): 41-64. Margolick, David. “War of the Worlds.” Vanity Fair 541, September 2005, 366-378. Neviarovich, Vladimir. “Revolutions and Diabolism.” PRAVOSLAVIA.RU. 9 February 2004. (4 April 2005). Paret, Peter, Beth Irwin Lewis and Paul Paret. Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. “People and Events: Detroit Race Riots 1943.” The American Experience, Eleanor Roosevelt. 1999. (2 May 2005). Stanley, Peter. What did You do in the War Daddy? A Visual History of Propaganda Posters. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983.

96 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________ Zeman, Zbynek. Selling the War: Art and Propaganda in World War II. London: Orbis Publishing, 1978. Ziegler, Hans Severus. Entartete Musik: Eine Abrechnung. Düsseldorf: Völkischer Verlag, 1937.

Kristen Williams Backer is a Ph.D. student of art history in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A. She specializes in Twentieth Century Art.

Kristen Williams Backer 97 ______________________________________________________________

Figure 1. Leest Storm, Kultur-Terror. NE224, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

98 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________

Figure 2. H. R. Hopps, Destroy This Mad Brute. US2003A, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

Kristen Williams Backer 99 ______________________________________________________________

Figure 3. Julius Ussy Engelhard, Bolschewismus Bringt Krieg, Arbeitslosigkeit, und Hungersnot. GE1858A, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

100 Kultur-Terror ______________________________________________________________

Figure 4. Mosakodnak! HU384, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

Kristen Williams Backer 101 ______________________________________________________________

Figure 5. Herbert Agricola, Bolschewismus ohne Maske. GE975, Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe Elun Gabriel Abstract In an 1894 pamphlet titled Anarchism and Its Cure, the pseudonymous author Emanuel described “rabid beasts and poisonous reptiles in the shapes of men, who call themselves ‘anarchists,’ seeking by means of violence to bend the world to their personal desires.” Five years later, a professor of criminal law in Bonn described anarchists as “rapacious beasts in the shape of men.” The figure of the monstrous anarchist, common at the end of the nineteenth century, distilled Europeans’ fears of political radicalism, biological degeneration, and common criminality. In this paper, I will describe the production of this image in the popular imagination—through newspapers, popular fiction, and “expert” accounts—and examine the social and political work that it performed in explaining political radicalism for late-nineteenthcentury audiences. Two interconnected narratives about the anarchist monster’s origins articulated Europeans’ fears about the dangers menacing their society. One perspective presented the anarchist as biologically defective. In the words of Cesare Lombroso, the pioneer of criminal anthropology, "the most active advocates of this anarchist idea are. . . for the most part either criminals or insane, or sometimes both together." By reading the physiognomies of famous anarchists, Lombroso descried an unusually high rate of men he classified as “born criminals.” The other interpretive framework linked anarchist monstrousness to a specifically Russian form of degeneration. In this telling, anarchism, a philosophical doctrine invented by French and German thinkers, had been infected by an Eastern thirst for blood: the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, wrote one author, “pressed the dagger and the dynamite bomb into the hand of anarchism, inspiring it with the sinister fanatical lust for destruction and murder which continues to burn today and which has made anarchism into a nightmare abhorred by the entire world.” Like the fictional monster Dracula, the anarchist embodied fears that an eastern European corruption had come to haunt the West. The construction of the anarchist as monster obliterated the option of understanding anarchist acts as rational or political, substituting dread of the alien and unknown for an analysis of the social context that gave rise to anarchism. Keywords: Anarchism, Germany, Conservatism, Liberalism, Dracula, degeneration, Hydra

104 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ In an 1894 pamphlet titled Anarchism and Its Cure, the pseudonymous German author Emanuel described “rabid beasts and poisonous reptiles in the shapes of men, who call themselves ‘anarchists,’ seeking by means of violence to bend the world to their personal desires.”1 Five years later, a professor of criminal law in Bonn referred to anarchists as “rapacious beasts in the shape of men.”2 After the stabbing death of Austrian empress Elisabeth II in September 1898, a German newspaper inveighed, “The anarchists . . . do not deserve to be dealt with as human beings [Menschen], they may in no way lay claim to the name of ‘human’ [Mensch].”3 By using metaphors of monstrousness, anarchism’s opponents obscured the movement’s political claims, instead placing anarchists beyond the pale of the human community as manifestations of ominous evil. Though denying anarchism’s political character, these authors offered distinctly political answers to the question of the monster’s origins and the means to its elimination. The immediate context of this anti-anarchist narrative outpouring was the rise of anarchist terrorism known as “propaganda of the deed” in the two decades before the turn of the century. Anarchist assassins claimed the lives of the president of France in 1894, the prime minister of Spain in 1897, the empress of Austria in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900, and the president of the United States in 1901. The terrorism of Russian populists (commonly referred to as “nihilists”), who felled Tsar Alexander II in 1881, was also popularly associated with anarchism. In addition to the spectacular killings of crowned heads and political leaders, the era saw dozens of failed attentats (political assassination attempts), as well as frequent bombings in cafés, train stations, and other public venues. Though anarchist terrorism took few lives, its ubiquity and unpredictability provoked public alarm and demanded interpretation. Politicians, journalists, social scientists, and novelists all sought to explain anarchism in such a way as to make its threat coherent to the public. This essay will contextualize the image of the anarchist as monster within late nineteenth-century European fears of degeneration, and then focus on the particular ways this discourse was mobilized for political purposes in the German Empire. While Europeans shared a generalized fear of the anarchist menace, its manifestations entered the political sphere in distinct ways within each national context. The German case offers simply one illustration of how metaphors of monstrousness were put to political use in this era. The popular discourse of the anarchist as monster was rooted in the late nineteenth-century idea of degeneration, the belief that humans were prone to the atavistic resurgence of “savage” or animalistic qualities, as well as to biological decline through moral corruption and the over breeding of unfit human specimens.4 For instance, the field of criminal anthropology, pioneered by the Italian Cesare Lombroso, set out to develop a scientific

105 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ understanding of criminality’s biological roots, in hopes of being able to discover the degenerate “born criminals” among the populace and so eliminate them. Lombroso’s magnum opus, L'Uomo delinquente, originally published in 1878 but revised multiple times, laid out the theory that crime was caused by biological deficiencies of a hereditary nature that could be detected through close observation. “In the skulls and brains of criminals, but also in other parts of the skeleton, in the muscles, and in the viscera,” Lombroso’s German follower Hans Kurella explained, “we find anatomical peculiarities, which in some cases resemble the characters of the few authentic remnants of the earliest prehistoric beings.”5 For Lombroso, the task of unmasking the criminal types that walked among the populace depended heavily on reading their physiognomy, as well as discovering other tell-tale biological signs of degeneracy. The “enormous jaws, frontal sinuses and zygomata, thin upper lip, huge incisors, [and] unusually large head” of one criminal suspect led Lombroso to characterize him as “in fact the most perfect type of the born criminal.”6 The physical markers of degeneracy he saw in his subject painted a portrait of the monstrous. Lombroso believed that most anarchists could be clearly categorized as degenerates of this type. In his 1894 study devoted entirely to anarchists, he asserted that “the most active advocates of this anarchist idea are . . . for the most part either criminals or insane, or sometimes both together.”7 The anarchists Ravachol and Pini, he wrote, “present the most complete type of born criminal, and not only in their faces, but in their attitudes toward crime, in their delight in evil, in the complete lack of an ethical sense, in the hatred which they show for family, in their indifference toward human life.”8 The degenerate’s physical grotesquery, which the trained observer could easily descry, was matched by a moral wickedness. What made the anarchist truly monstrous was a total rejection of the institutions and values of human society, a repudiation of the essential qualities of humanity. The depiction of the anarchist found in Lombroso was also evident in a variety of other texts from the period. A London Times correspondent’s 1894 description of Ravachol as a “brute, resembling a hyaena rather than a man,”9 suggests the physiognomic interest in the anarchist as degenerate. In his twovolume study of anarchism from 1894, Italian police inspector Ettore Sernicoli described political criminals as “what modern science calls disharmonious, or degenerate.”10 As such, “anarchism is not,” Sernicoli posited, “anything other than a very new manifestation of a pathological state as old as the world.”11 The idea of the anarchist’s implacable hostility to humanity was captured by a character in E. Douglas Fawcett’s 1893 novel, Hartmann the Anarchist, who refers to anarchists as “the Frankenstein’s monsters of civilization which are born to hate their father.”12 In these sources, the anarchist appears as both physical degenerate and embodiment of a cosmic destructive fury. Both physical degeneracy and the renunciation

106 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ of social institutions and values set anarchists apart from the human community. This view of the anarchist as monster found expression in two of the most well-known novelistic depictions of anarchists from the era. Émile Zola’s 1886 novel about a miners’ strike, Germinal, offers a portrait of the Russian anarchist Souvarine as feminized and wild, possessing both a magnetic seductive power and a capacity for savage violence. Though lacking obvious physical signs of deformity, Zola’s anarchist thirsts for violence and shuns human sympathy. This depiction of the anarchist fit within Lombroso’s taxonomy as well, as the “criminal by passion,” whose criminality stemmed from hypersensitivity and lack of self-control, suggested in Zola’s first lengthy description of Souvarine. In addition to his “slim, blond” build and “delicate features,” the anarchist’s “white, pointed teeth, his small mouth and thin nose, and his rosy complexion all gave him the appearance of a determinedly sweet girl, while the steely glint in his eye gave periodic glimpses of a more savage side.”13 The novel’s protagonist Étienne finds himself “unnerved by his fair complexion and those dreamy eyes that would occasionally turn red and assume a look of wild savagery. In some curious way they seemed to sap his will . . . . Étienne felt as though he were gradually being absorbed by him.”14 Étienne’s curiosity to know more about the “cult of destruction that Souvarine only rarely and darkly referred to,” leads him to ask the anarchist about his political goal. “To destroy everything,” responds Souvarine. “By fire, sword and poison . . . . What we need is a whole succession of horrific attacks that will terrify those in power and rouse the people from their slumber.” Zola’s description of the enraptured Souvarine emphasizes his inhuman, supernatural aspect: “While he spoke, Souvarine presented an awesome sight. As though in the grip of an ecstatic vision, he almost levitated from his chair; a mystic flame shone from his pale eyes, and his delicate hands clenched the edge of the table as though they would crush it. Étienne watched him, afraid.” Though the anarchist’s hypnotic power nearly seduces Étienne, the hero ultimately rejects Souvarine’s project of total destruction as “monstrous and unjust,”15 and instead adopts social democracy. At the end of the novel, when the miners’ strike has failed, Souvarine finally turns his monstrous pronunciations into acts. To punish the miners’ capitulation, Souvarine sets in motion the mine’s destruction by weakening the supports that hold back an underground river. Working inside the “bottomless chasm of blackness” of the mine, “he was seized with fury. He was exhilarated to feel the breath of the invisible on his skin, and the black horror of this rain swept abyss drove him to a frenzy of destruction. He attacked the tubbing at random . . . . with the ferocity of a man plunging a knife into the living flesh of a person he loathed.”16 Having ensured that the mine will collapse on the miners who have chosen to return to work,

107 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ Souvarine coolly watches them pass by, “counting them as a butcher might count his animals as they enter the abattoir.”17 After waiting to make sure the flooding has begun, Souvarine disappears into the night: He threw away his last cigarette, and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie’s final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.18 In this passage, Zola completes the description of Souvarine as an avatar of destruction rather than a man with a political creed. Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, published twenty-one years later, offers a remarkably similar description of a German anarchist, known only as the Professor, who builds bombs for anarchist terrorists. At the novel’s end, most of the central characters have perished, but the Professor remains, eternal as Souvarine. The last lines of the novel are devoted to his final description: And the incorruptible Professor walked . . . averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.19 As in the case of Souvarine, the Professor is a malignant figure with no trace of human sympathy, a being totally bent on society’s obliteration. No less than novelists, journalists depicted anarchists in monstrous terms. In his account of President William McKinley’s assassination, Murat Halstead referred to McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, as a “ghastly little fiend,” “an infernal expert in killing” who “kept a hungry, fiendish watch” for the president, exhibiting a “bloodhound keenness.”20 Halstead labelled anarchism a “litany of the Devil” which “feeds on . . . the rankling poisons that envenom reptiles,” and wrote of Czolgosz having visited, before his

108 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ murder of the president, “the lurking places of his fellow-serpents where they coil in infernal communion.” Halstead cautioned that Czolgosz should not be allowed to “come into contact with those of his kind that they may be sympathetic and hatch more snakes’ eggs.”21 Halstead saw anarchists as vicious creatures that threatened to spread their contagion throughout the human world. Though the accounts discussed above differ somewhat in their characterizations, all of them share the notion of anarchists as a danger to humanity. Gustavo Tosti expressed this general fear of anarchism concisely: “If the suggestions of this theory were to be carried out by a great number of men, the unchecked spread of murder and crime would soon bring the body social to an end. Hence, the theory is poisonous and must not be left to exert its tremendous power of contamination.”22 In all of these authors’ works, the depiction of the anarchist entirely effaces anarchism’s political content, instead placing the anarchist in total antagonism to humanity. The anarchist monster represented not only a response to fears of the reemergence of the atavistic within the body politic, but especially fears of the foreign invader common in Western narratives in the age of imperialism. Stephen Arata’s analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a tale of “the anxiety of reverse colonization” offers a useful perspective for understanding popular fears of anarchism as well.23 In Dracula, Arata argues, Stoker questions the boundaries “between civilized and primitive, colonizer and colonized, victimizer . . . and victim. By problematizing those boundaries, Stoker probes the heart of the culture’s sense of itself, its ways of defining and distinguishing itself from other peoples, other cultures.”24 Works about anarchism, wrestling with the same fear of darkness in the heart of the west, and the consequent blurring of the lines between savage and civilized, sought to reinscribe these boundaries rather than interrogating them. Fin-de-siècle works that figured anarchism as monstrous not only removed the ideology from the realm of the human, but also projected a foreignness into it that further distanced it from “civilized” lands. Although Leon Czolgosz was born and raised in Michigan, Murat Halstead’s contemplation of his name denied his American identity: “Czolgosz . . . offers a lingual problem to nine-tenths of those who attempt to pronounce it. . . . It is one of those names . . . which the average English-speaking person stumbles over in trying to express after hearing it spoken by a Russian.” Though Czolgosz was of Polish descent, Halstead linked the name to Russia, understood in the West to be irrevocably “Eastern,” the site of “oriental despotism” and savage brutality. Again eliding Czolgosz’s US citizenship, Halstead insisted, “It is time to classify the anarchist as an outsider, an invader . . . . he is the product of the worst of foreignism.”25 In the same fashion, Zola made his anarchist a Russian, while Conrad’s anarchists were Russian or German. Though Lombroso’s anarchist

109 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ subjects were frequently Italians, they were understood to be a product of Southern Italy’s foreignness and backwardness.26 The portrayal of anarchists as degenerate, foreign monsters reveals something about European cultural anxieties at the end of the nineteenth century, but it also had implications for politics. Those who wrote about the anarchist threat believed that it could only be contained if it could be revealed and combated in the proper manner. The ultimate goal of Lombroso’s enterprise, according to Daniel Pick, was “to produce a science of social defence against atavism and anarchy. It was deemed pointless to pontificate on the moral responsibility of atavistic individuals, but crucial to separate them out from the rest of society.”27 Criminal anthropology promised through studies of physiognomy and other physical traits, to discover the face of the anarchist who might pass unnoticed among the masses. Writers on political matters offered political rather than scientific solutions to the problem of the anarchist monster. Though Europeans shared a broadly defined image of the anarchist, its import differed depending on national context. Here I will consider in more depth how the generic figure of the monstrous anarchist was mobilized in German political culture. In late nineteenth-century Germany, the attempt to explain anarchism’s significance intersected with a debate about whether the nation should preserve the political system which granted the Kaiser extraordinary power to govern in a semi-authoritarian manner, or whether it should more fully embrace parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. I will focus on two contrasting political discourses about anarchism in fin-desiècle Germany, one issuing from the monarchy’s conservative backers, the other from the proponents of liberal democratic reform in the empire. In the conservatives’ eyes, the toxic influence of the increasingly bold socialist movement had given birth to the anarchist monster, which liberal governments (Britain in particular) further nurtured through their aversion to the use of political force. Liberals, on the other hand, depicted anarchism as a monster that naturally thrived in the Eastern soil of autocracy and Slavic barbarism, but had stolen into Western Europe thanks to the illiberal policies of governments that failed to live up to the standards of “civilization.” These contrasting discourses clearly illustrate some of the ways the narrative of the monstrous anarchist could be mobilized for different political ends. For conservatives, the metaphor of the hydra (the multi-headed serpent of Greek mythology) proved particularly compelling for describing anarchism. No sooner had the head of one anarchist been severed than another seemed to appear in its place. This picture had some basis in reality: for example, both the French anarchist Emile Henry, who exploded a bomb in a Paris train station café, and the Italian Sante Caserio, who slew France’s president Sadi Carnot in 1894, acted to avenge the recent execution of the anarchist Auguste Vaillant. After Luigi Luccheni’s assassination of Austrian

110 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ Empress Elisabeth in 1898, a German government report endorsed a Russian newspaper’s description the assassin as “a member of the anarchist party, this blot on our time, this noxious [schaudlichen] hydra” that had now shed “the holy blood of an innocent, suffering woman.”28 The image of the hydra rhetorically connected all anarchist attacks to each other, while also rejecting any political logic in the anarchists’ acts. Though all of the anarchist terrorists of this era acted alone, and most had no connection to the organized anarchist social movement, the metaphor of the hydra evoked the image of collaboration among the anarchist heads of the hydra, while also intimating that these heads were attached to a larger body. Ultimately, the target of the hydra metaphor was the powerful and growing German socialist movement. Conservatives sought to conflate democratic, parliamentary Social Democracy with violent anarchism, seeking to tar the former with the crimes of the latter. Portraying anarchist attentats as facets of a larger, horrifying danger promoted a rhetorical intertwining of socialism and anarchism, by suggesting socialism as the body of the metaphorical hydra. During the successful battle to renew German antisocialist legislation in 1886, Prussian Interior Minister Robert von Puttkamer resorted to the hydra image when he spoke to the Reichstag: “Behind every large labour movement, which . . . calculates by means of force and agitation . . . to bring about an increase in wages . . . lurks the Hydra of violence and anarchy.”29 Though the labour movement might appear harmless, the insidious menace of anarchy lurked within. A year later, a police inspector promising to reveal The Secret Organization of the Social Democratic Party, wrote of the arduous “struggle to subdue the hydra of socialism.”30 Representing the entire swathe of the Left (never mind the many anarchists who acted without any intellectual imprimatur at all) as part of a single multiheaded monster justified the persecution of Social Democrats, regardless of their disciplined and peaceful behaviour and their repeated repudiations of anarchism. If the image of the hydra suggested something about the nature of anarchism and its relation to socialism, it also directed the listener or reader toward a particular solution to the problem, namely slaying the beast. After two would-be assassins attacked the German Kaiser within three weeks of each other in 1878, conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke urged sweeping governmental measures to crush the German socialist movement. In a pamphlet on Socialism and Assassination, he claimed that after the first attack, he had “believed that the hour had arrived for an open struggle against anarchy,” but the liberals in the Reichstag had refused anti-socialist measures proposed by Bismarck on the grounds that they violated the principle of the rule of law. Treitschke argued that the Reichstag’s rejection of this package of laws had emboldened the socialist revolutionaries, asserting, “The nation, and particularly the anarchists, remained under the impression that the parties

111 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ of order had not opposed the storming waves of social revolution with a firm decision or unanimous will.” Treitschke insisted that only a decisive use of state power would stop “anarchic movements” since “they understand only the language of violence.”31 Two decades later, after the Austrian empress’s murder, the conservative Deutsche Tageszeitung was still drawing on the image of the anarchist monster to demand strong action, writing, “Such ghastly, bloody deeds shall continue to occur until we pull ourselves together and cut off the head of this poisonous serpent.”32 At this same time, a petition to the Reichstag demanding the reintroduction of the lash explained that “bestial crimes against women and children” must be met with “the only form of punishment that the degenerate fiends [Unmenschen, literally un-humans] still fear.”33 The Berliner Politische Nachrichten commented that “only with a feeling of horror” could one “look into the abyss of bestialization [Verthiertheit] from which anarchism of the deed conjures up such devils in the shapes of men as Luccheni to its service.” The paper insisted that “a misconceived humanism, a mawkish conception of good and evil, right and wrong, the entirely arbitrary demand that the ‘human dignity’ of even the most corrupt perpetrator of outrages be respected” imperilled society, which could not survive without “strong means of force against the surreptitious [heimlich] deeds of revolution.”34 Shortly after anarchist Gaetano Bresci slew Italian King Umberto in 1900, the National-Zeitung urged that “every means which might produce a beneficial effect must be seized,” since the fight against anarchism was “not a political struggle, but a struggle between civilization under the state [staatlichen Civilisation] and its murderous enemies,” who were akin to “wild beasts.”35 By portraying anarchists as monstrous and inhuman, conservatives could advance a draconian war on anarchist terrorism as the only appropriate response to the danger. Liberals’ concerns about the rule of law and democracy were cast as misplaced and foolish in the fight against “poisonous serpents,” “degenerate fiends,” “devils in the shapes of men,” and “wild beasts.” The complaint that liberals were too soft on anarchist criminality is captured in an illustration from the satirical conservative magazine Kladderadatsch indicting Britain for its asylum laws [figure 1]. Utilizing the standard reptilian metaphor for anarchism, the illustration and accompanying poem show anarchist “crocodiles” sheltering

112 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________

Image 1. “English Right of Asylum.” From Kladderadatsch 47, no. 34, 2nd supplement (26 August 1894). This illustration shows England as a hen (with the face of liberal prime minister William Gladstone) whose nest shelters the anarchist crocodiles. The poem reads: The dear little crocodiles— Have at their disposal a secure nest Where they can live splendidly And where they are free from discomforts. And when the little creatures become bigger They are filled with thankfulness To have known “merry old England.”

In Britain’s warm nest, where they can multiply and eventually return to terrorize the continent. Even moderate conservatives unwilling to support an all-out war on socialism saw anti-socialist measures as having a useful moderating effect by driving the lurking anarchists from the socialist party. In 1898 the National

113 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ Liberal leader Ludwig Bamberger argued that government’s anti-socialist measures had had an ameliorative effect on Social Democrats, as evidenced by the current genial behaviour of their parliamentary representatives. He compared this era favourably with the Reichstag two decades earlier (before the laws) “when such beasts as [socialists turned anarchists] Hasselmann, Most and their consorts were raging in its chambers.”36 Conservative politicians, academics, and newspaper editors insisted that the Kaiser and his ministers had the right and the duty to use the full force of the government’s institutions to stop an insidious menace that threatened civilization itself. Only by slaying the anarchist beasts could the social order be protected. German liberals saw the situation rather differently, drawing on a different trope of the monstrous to explain anarchism’s origins and the appropriate remedy for it. During the height of anarchist terrorism in the 1890s, a spate of scholarly works appeared in Germany, purporting to offer expert knowledge of the phenomenon. Many of these works included prefaces recounting how the author was inspired to write his book after delivering a public lecture to a packed audience of ignorant citizens eager for someone to make sense of the anarchist threat.37 Leaving aside the function of establishing the authors’ authority and the works’ interest for readers, these prefaces suggest the real level of citizens’ desire for an explanation of anarchist terrorism’s meaning. The interpretive framework offered by these liberal academics (mostly professors of law and jurisprudence) linked anarchist monstrousness to the fin-de-siècle anxiety about the dangers of Eastern degeneration invading Western Europe discussed earlier. In this liberal telling, anarchism, a philosophical doctrine invented by French and German thinkers, had been infected by an Eastern thirst for blood. Instead of British liberalism nourishing the monster of anarchism, the blame lay with Eastern savagery. Ernst Viktor Zenker, a German “expert” who wrote a tome on anarchism in 1895, began his history of anarchism with the philosophical writings of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the German Max Stirner in the midnineteenth century. According to Zenker, it was the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (and his discipline Sergei Nechaev, author of a well-known call to violence, the Revolutionary Catechism) who perverted this benign philosophy of individual freedom into a creed of murder. By the 1860s, “times and men had changed,” he commented. “The philosophic period was passed, Stirner was dead, and Proudhon near his end; Russian godfathers stood round the cradle of modern Anarchism.” The men who gave anarchism “the sanction of the dagger, the revolver, petroleum, and dynamite . . . were neither Frenchmen nor Germans, but the half-civilised barbarians of the East.” Modern anarchism, thus “branded by the semi-civilized culture of Russia,” had adopted the tactic of terrorism—an idea, he insisted, that “does not spring from the logical development of Proudhon’s and Stirner’s ideas.”38 In this

114 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ way, Zenker explained anarchist violence in Western Europe as the product of a Slavic contagion. Others conformed to the same pattern, arguing that Russian savagery alone accounted for the anarchist turn to violence. Writing in the popular German family magazine Die Gartenlaube (“The Arbour”), C. Falkenhorst claimed that Proudhon’s contemporaries had considered him merely “a philosopher, a brooder, and a thinker, whose clever points only the educated could understand.” No one took him seriously, and after his death, his ideas appeared to fade away. But “today the world thinks differently about the consequences of Proudhon’s ideas,” Falkenhorst continued, “for the news of criminal attentats pours in from all sides—attentats that scoff at all humanity and must no longer be interpreted as signs of a political struggle, but as the excrescences of a dark destroying fury.” Falkenhorst cited Sergei Nechaev’s alleged declaration, “Our work is terrible, total, unrelenting destruction,” as evidence of the murderous attitude Russians had introduced into anarchism. Like Zenker, he attributed the tactic of assassination entirely to this Russian influence: “Not until the Frenchman’s cleverness was mated with the Russian’s brutal violence was the world surprised with the monstrous creation of today’s anarchism.”39 Another scholar of anarchism, Hermann Tobias, observed that Proudhon and Stirner never “gave the slightest thought to pursuing agitation for their ideas with the violent criminal means which today’s terrorists use. Despite all obstacles, they had faith in the victorious conquering power of the idea.”40 In contrast, their degenerate Russian descendants, Bakunin and Nechaev “pressed the dagger and the dynamite bomb into the hand of anarchism, inspiring it with the sinister fanatical lust for destruction and murder which continues to burn today and which has made anarchism into a nightmare abhorred by the entire world.”41 This concern with anarchist terrorism’s Eastern origins reveals an anxiety about the West’s inability to keep itself free of dangers from the periphery in a world ever more interconnected. Just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula takes advantage of the bustling shipping trade to penetrate the heart of British civilization, so Russian anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin easily made their way West, where they could spread their infection to the weak-minded and ravage the innocent. For these Germans, there was also a particular concern with drawing the line between East and West to their east. It is not insignificant that these authors placed France and Germany together in representing Western civilization. Though Germans traditionally saw themselves as Western, in opposition to the inferior Slavs of the East, the French and British did not always see them the same way. By stressing anarchism’s Russianness, they defended their own status as fully civilized. German liberals’ attempts to understand the significance of the anarchist scourge did not stop with their expressions of fear about the spread of Eastern degeneration. As in the case of conservatives, the question of what exactly

115 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ brought the monstrous anarchist into European society was inevitably political. Liberals attributed the spread of the anarchist “nightmare” to the brutality of repressive governments in the West, which had in a sense invited the anarchists in. For instance, Emanuel, whose description of anarchists as “rabid beasts and poisonous reptiles in the shapes of men” I cited at the opening of this essay, went on to rail against “ignorance clothed in the robes of state authority wielding force [Gewalt] instead of knowledge in an attempt to cure murder through murder.”42 Zenker likewise complained that Germany’s harsh anti-socialist laws passed in 1878 had ensured the spread of anarchism, which “suddenly raised its Gorgon head aloft in places where it had never previously existed.”43 Like the Gorgon Medusa, something once beautiful had become a terror, in this case transformed by the German government’s brutality. Liberals not infrequently complained that the presence of anarchism in Germany resulted from the Kaiser’s government fostering a political atmosphere of Eastern barbarism. Ultimately, all of these scholars, along with liberal politicians and publicists, urged that social order could be secured only on a foundation of legal equality and political democracy. Myriad cultural and political perspectives on the anarchist danger flowed from the starting point of depicting anarchists as monsters, and therefore enemies of civilization and humanity. The examples outlined here suggest some of the ways in which the idea of the monster could take on a profound political meaning. The construction of the anarchist as monster in fin-desiècle writings resisted the possibility of understanding anarchist acts as rational and political, substituting dread of the alien and unknown for an analysis of the social context that gave rise to anarchism. Attributing monstrous qualities to the perpetrators of political violence helped to explain, and therefore manage, the threat they posed. Yet addressing the menace of anarchist violence in this way also allowed, and even necessitated, the kind of further interpretive acts that both German conservatives and liberals undertook to pinpoint the origins of the anarchist danger, and to suggest remedies to it.

Notes 1

Emanuel, Anarchismus und seine Heilung (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, 1894), 7-8. 2 Hermann Seuffert, Anarchismus und Strafrecht (Berlin: Verlag von Otto Liebmann, 1899), 2.

116 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ 3

Cited in “Die Ermordung der Kaiserin von Oesterreich,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 13 September 1898, 2. 4 Two of the most important scholarly works on the idea of degeneration are Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the use of Lombroso by German criminologists, see Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 5 Cited in Randy Martin, Robert J. Mutchnick, and W. Timothy Austin, Crimonological Thought: Pioneers Past and Present (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 29. 6 Cited in Pick, 145. 7 Cesare Lombroso, Gli Anarchici (1894; reprint, Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1983), 21. 8 Lombroso, 25. 9 Cited in Auberon Herbert, “The Ethics of Dynamite,” Contemporary Review (May 1894), reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and other Essays, ed. Eric Mack (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1978). 10 Ettore Sernicoli, L’Anarchia e gli Anarchici: Studio Storico e Politico, vol. 2: Fisiologia degli Anarchici (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1894), 28. 11 Sernicoli, vol. 2, 199-200. 12 E. Douglas Fawcett, Hartmann the Anarchist: or, The Doom of The Great City (1893; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), 82, cited in Noel Patrick Peacock, “Constructions of Anarchism in British Fiction, 1885-1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1994), 43. 13 Émile Zola, Germinal, trans. Roger Pearson (1886; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2004), 141-142. 14 Zola, 244. 15 Zola, 245. 16 Zola, 462-463. 17 Zola, 466. 18 Zola, 483. 19 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907; reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1983), 237. 20 Murat Halstead, The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President (N.p, 1901), 25, 67, 68. 21 Halstead, 26, 27. For more on Halstead’s depiction of anarchists, see Peacock, 42.

117 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ 22

Gustavo Tosti, “Anarchistic Crimes,” Political Science Quarterly 14, no. 3 (September 1899), 416. 23 Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist”: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (Summer 1990). Arata, 623, notes that in this fear Dracula resembles the “innumerable ‘invasion scare’ and ‘dynamite’ novels of the 1880s and ’90s,” many of the latter featuring anarchists. 24 Arata, 626-627. 25 Halstead, 70, 26. 26 The “Southern Question” was the occasion of considerable anxiety and political tension in newly-unified Italy. Northerners regarded the South as a primitive, savage land some were unsure could ever be made truly Italian. 27 Pick, 126. 28 Petersburgtija Wiedomojti, 11 September 1898, cited in Dieter Johannes, Maßnahmen gegen die Anarchisten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (1871-1918), Materialsammlung 2 (Frankfurt: Archiv für libertäre-historische Hermeneutik, 1999), 8. 29 Cited in Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 274. 30 W. Krieter, Die geheime Organisation der sozialdemokratischen Partei, 3rd ed. (Magdeburg: Verlag von Albert Rathke, 1887), 3. 31 Heinrich von Treitschke, Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer, 1878), 6. 32 Cited in “Die Ermordung der Kaiserin von Oesterreich,” 2. 33 Cited in “Frankfurt, 20. September,” in Franfurter Zeitung, 20 September 1898, Abendblatt, 1. 34 Berliner Politische Nachrichten, 12 September 1898; 13 September 1898. 35 National-Zeitung, 11 August 1900, Morgen-Ausgabe, 1. 36 Ludwig Bamberger, Wandlungen und Wanderungen in der Sozialpolitik (Berlin: Rosenbaum & Hart, 1898), cited in Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J.: The Bedminster Press, 1963), 93-94. 37 Rudolf Stammler, Die Theorie des Anarchismus (Berlin: Verlag von O. Häring, 1894), “Foreword”; Naum Reichesberg, Sozialismus und Anarchismus (Leipzig: Verlag von August Siebert, 1895), “Foreword”; E. V. Zenker, Der Anarchismus: Kritik und Geschichte der anarchistischen Theorie (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1895), v. 38 E. V. Zenker, Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 144, 145. 39 C. Falkenhorst, “Die Anarchisten,” Die Gartenlaube, 1892, no. 10, 311, 309-310.

118 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ 40

Hermann Tobias, Der Anarchismus und die anarchistische Bewegung, Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen: Vorträge und Abhandlungen herausgegeben von der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesellschaft in Berlin, vol. 163 (Berlin: Verlag von Leonhard Simion, 1899), 36. 41 Tobias, 12. 42 Emanuel, 7-8. 43 Zenker, 279-280.

References Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist”: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 621-645. Bamberger, Ludwig. Wandlungen und Wanderungen in der Sozialpolitik. Berlin: Rosenbaum & Hart, 1898. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. 1907; reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1983. Emanuel. Anarchismus und seine Heilung. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, 1894. Falkenhorst, C. “Die Anarchisten.” Die Gartenlaube, 1892, no. 10: 309-311. Fawcett, E. Douglas. Hartmann the Anarchist: or, The Doom of The Great City. 1893; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975. Halstead, Murat. The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President. N.p, 1901. Herbert, Auberon. “The Ethics of Dynamite.” 1894; reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and other Essays, ed. Eric Mack. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1978. Johannes, Dieter. Maßnahmen gegen die Anarchisten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (1871-1918), Materialsammlung 2. Frankfurt: Archiv für libertäre-historische Hermeneutik, 1999. Krieter, W. Die geheime Organisation der sozialdemokratischen Partei, 3rd ed. Magdeburg: Verlag von Albert Rathke, 1887.

119 Elun Gabriel ______________________________________________________________ Lidtke, Vernon L. The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878-1890. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Lombroso, Cesare. Gli Anarchici. 1894; reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1983. Martin, Randy, Robert J. Mutchnick, and W. Timothy Austin. Crimonological Thought: Pioneers Past and Present. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Nye, Robert A. Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Peacock, Noel Patrick. “Constructions of Anarchism in British Fiction, 18851914.” Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1994. Reichesberg, Naum. Sozialismus und Anarchismus. Leipzig: Verlag von August Siebert, 1895. Roth, Guenther. The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration. Totowa, N.J.: The Bedminster Press, 1963. Sernicoli, Ettore. L'Anarchia e Gli Anarchici, vol. 2: Fisiologia degli anarchici, le nuove leggi e i rimedi. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1894. Seuffert, Hermann. Anarchismus und Strafrecht. Berlin: Verlag von Otto Liebmann, 1899. Stammler, Rudolf. Die Theorie des Anarchismus. Berlin: Verlag von O. Häring, 1894. Tobias, Hermann. Der Anarchismus und die anarchistische Bewegung. Volkswirtschaftliche Zeitfragen: Vorträge und Abhandlungen herausgegeben von der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesellschaft in Berlin, vol. 163. Berlin: Verlag von Leonhard Simion, 1899. Tosti, Gustavo. “Anarchistic Crimes.” Political Science Quarterly 14, no. 3 (September 1899): 404-417.

120 The Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siècle Europe ______________________________________________________________ Treitschke, Heinrich von. Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord. Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer, 1878. Wetzell, Richard F. Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Zenker, E. V. Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897. Originally published as Der Anarchismus: Kritik und Geschichte der anarchistischen Theorie. Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1895.

Section Three

Familial Monsters (Maybe some of them are regular folk like you & me)

Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch Emily Cheng Abstract My paper addresses the themes of family, adoption (of the alien monster), and multiculturalism in Disney’s 2002 animated film, Lilo and Stitch. I argue that the film portrays the setting of Hawai’i as a multicultural paradise through both the visual representation and the narrative of domesticating the monstrous alien, Stitch, by assimilation into a native Hawai’ian family and the cultural pluralism of the nation. While the alien monster poses a threat to the American family and civilization, in his incorporation into the family, and allegorically, into the U.S. nation, he goes through a process of becoming a “model citizen” and a proper subject of the law. I connect this narrative of inclusion into the liberal contract to the film’s embeddedness in the neoliberal tourism industry that produces Hawai’i as an exotic other available for mainland consumption.

Keywords: Monsters in Animation, Family and Monsters, Alien Monsters, Disney, Tourism, Hawai’i This paper looks at Disney’s 2002 film, Lilo and Stitch as a site of visual culture that engages with narratives of the family and adoption (of the alien) in relation to the U.S. nation. One starting point of this discussion is to situate it in the context of the recent history of Disney films, such as Mulan (1998), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) that have been criticized for their participation in imperialist narratives, and racism and sexism. According to Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan, the release of The Little Mermaid in 1989 was a turning point for Disney films, both stylistically and thematically. They posit a relationship between Disney’s productions and their “left” critics in which the text offers an overt reading that the audience can easily identify and make an obvious critique that allows Disney to then defend and construct its “conservative” ideological messages, for these “denunciations of Disney… are precisely what keeps Disney going.”1 Along these lines, in Lilo and Stitch, Disney has stylistically responded to recent critiques of the anglicized features of the women of colour of by returning to their earlier styles, for instance, flattening the noses of the indigenous characters while increasing the women’s physical brawn. While discussions of Disney have often focused on the relationship between the corporation and the critic, in this paper my method is to address the multiple and often contradictory meanings produced by the film by

124 Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch ______________________________________________________________ considering its reception found in print and online reviews, production, and the text itself. My reading of the film is situated in these material contexts of production and reception, particularly through a consideration of its form as animation and its marketing as family entertainment. I focus particularly on how in both its production and filmic narrative the film upholds U.S. claims to being a multicultural nation that are projected onto Hawai’i as an imagined racial paradise, a process which is embedded in the neo-liberalist tourist economy. More specifically, this idealization of the nation takes place through a double narrative of domesticating the alien in both the family and the nation that also raises and resolves the contradictions of Asian immigration and fears of the Asiatic alien threat to the nation, particularly represented as a threat to the Pacific Coasts of the geographic U.S. This is a movie about aliens, but also one in which the alien can be assimilated, through its inclusion into a family (composed of himself and two orphaned native Hawai’ian sisters). The movie opens on the alien planet of Turo, governed by the futuristic society of the Galactic Federation, where an “evil genius” scientist, Jumba Jookiba, has secretly created Experiment 626, a “monstrosity” that is programmed to destroy, in particular to seek out cities to attack. When his existence is revealed, the Galactic Federation orders Experiment 626 to be destroyed and his creator to be imprisoned for life. However, 626 escapes and flees to Earth, where he lands in Hawai’i, and his creator is sent to retrieve him. This representation of Stitch as a monstrous alien whose only purpose in life is to wreak havoc is figured as an alien threat to the U.S. nation-state staged in the Pacific and as a threat to civilization itself. Along with this narrative of the alien threat to the planet and nation is the story of the family that is formed when 626 is mistakenly adopted as a dog by two indigenous orphaned sisters. Having escaped imprisonment on Turo, 626 is taken in by an animal shelter, as a stray dog, in Hawai’i. Now named “Stitch,” the alien is adopted by Lilo, and her older sister, Nani, who have been recently orphaned by the death of their parents in an accident. While Nani originally gets Stitch for Lilo to have a companion, he turns out to be a threat to the family as his destructive ways keep her from getting a job, and he destroys the house itself. Before they get Stitch, the social worker known as Mr. Bubbles, whom “they call when things go wrong,” already has threatened to remove Lilo and put her under state care, and Stitch exacerbates the situation.2 The figure of Mr. Bubbles who represents the state not only as a social worker, but also as a former CIA agent specializing in alien encounters, ties family to the state explicitly. Indeed, his command that the two conditions for Nani and Lilo to stay together as a family are that Nani get a job and that Stitch become a “model citizen” links the proper form of family to citizenship and participation in the nation.

125 Emily Cheng ____________________________________________________________ Reviews of the film help to illuminate the dominant understanding of this film and help to situate the film in popular culture and dominant ideologies. One common way of evaluating the film in reviews was in terms of its suitability for both parents and children, in that it teaches important lessons about family and love, while also being witty and sophisticated enough for adults. This double billing seems to delineate two overt levels on which the meaning of the text may be read. On the one hand, what makes the film suitable for children is its overriding theme of “ohana,” or family, which as Calvin Trager notes, this trope is “too expository” to be missed.3 On the other hand, it is the multiple ways in which the film references other popular culture sites that appears to be an important component of what makes the film interesting for adults. Many of these reviews also provide a way to understand the film as a popular cultural text that is a corollary to the national project of building a multicultural citizenry. As several reviewers have pointed out, the film references many popular culture sites, for instance, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and Elvis’s music as well as the King’s legacy of impersonations, however, the list of references extends much further, to include The Ugly Duckling, Frankenstein, Godzilla, Men In Black, Star Wars, and Gremlins. These references and the thematic content of the film also draw on other dominant narratives of the nation, especially regarding the figure of the Asian other and the Asia-Pacific as frontier. Specifically, the setting, content, and production of the film serve to reaffirm Hawai’i as a part of the U.S. as a multicultural nation. I read the setting of the film in the liminal U.S. space of Hawai’i as pointing to the contested boundaries of the nation in the Pacific as well as referencing lost-standing fears of the alien other of the Asia Pacific that is resolved through a national projection of multiracial paradise. While Stitch is mandated to become a model citizen, in a way, the movie also portrays Hawai’i as a “model” national space. This construction of Hawai’i as a racial paradise relies specifically on its form that allows for the animation of the physical space. Interviews with co-writers and co-directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois on the DVD bonus material explicitly state their desire to properly portray the native Hawai’ian culture, in order to show their respect as well as accurately represent it in cartoon form. This insistence on the realism of the animated form is interesting in its masking of the film’s alliance with dominant cultural values and narratives; while animation might have the potential to defamiliarize such narratives by disrupting the reality effect of the film, the intent at least of this film is to use animation to produce a hyper-real Hawai’i. While of course the intention of the filmmakers is not prescriptive of the film’s meaning, this goal of realism was taken up and circulated in discourses about the film in the context of tourism. A link found on the website of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau (HVCB) to a review

126 Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch ______________________________________________________________ found in about.com’s Hawai’i/South Pacific for Visitor’s travel section suggests the film’s relationship to the tourism industry. While in some overt ways the film’s content, production, and reception may seem to serve as media for a transnational tourist industry, it also sets up a discussion of the entwinement of the tourism industry with representations of exoticized culture as well as universal family values. The rhetoric of a “real Hawai’i” in the review posits the work of the film as a text complicit in tourism that is directed at and constructs a mainland audience. The review suggests that the animation form and attention to the film’s production are two important locations to consider in this function: “it will come as a shock to many that the film that best captures the true spirit of Hawai’i and the meaning of 'ohana is an animated motion picture,” thus linking the desire to know Hawai’ian culture as multicultural difference to both the theme of family and the animation form. Indeed, the review cites Disney’s return to the 1940s watercolour, which hadn’t been used since Bambi in 1942, as the “best way to re-create the island visually.”2 Going further, the review explicitly connects watching the film and physical travel in its discussion of the production of the film in establishing the producers’ dedication to properly portraying Hawai’i for the audience, so that the film performs a tourist experience of exploration and getting to know the native. To establish the great lengths to which the film goes in representing Hawai’i for the tourist, the review points out the director’s research efforts in discovering Hawai’i: The production team spent weeks in Hawai’i studying the geography, buildings, vegetation, and even the way the light falls from the sky at different times of the day. They painted and photographed houses, businesses, mountains, bridges and sea coasts, and incorporated many actual locations into the film.4 This empirical research thus seems to ensure that the team has done the work of exploring for the viewer and packaging the “real Hawai’i” for consumption. I suggest that this kind of verisimilitude signals a kind of epistemological conquest of the other in the Pacific. In his book Reimagining the American Pacific, Rob Wilson discusses the processes of producing an image of Hawai’i as an authentic and indigenous Pacific space in the transnational tourist economy. As he notes, the Hawaii Visitors Bureau is the organization that was responsible for packaging “aloha spirit” as a multicultural self-image of Hawai’i designed to ensure an authentic Pacific experience for the tourist. While he situates Hawai’i within a transnational tourist apparatus within the Pacific Rim, I am particularly interested in Hawai’i in relation to a larger U.S. imaginary. What

127 Emily Cheng ____________________________________________________________ I find especially interesting for my paper is his articulation of Hawai’i’s appeal as not only indigenous, but as gendered: he identifies the “renewed focus on ‘the island lifestyle’ and the push globally to market Hawai‘i’s special appeal as a beautiful, multiculturally appealing, and world-class Pacific woman” (italics in original) are copresent.5 At the same time as Hawai’i is gendered, it is the idea of native spaces that are protected from, or at least resistant to, capitalism that is packaged for appeal to the tourist. In this film this gendered construction morphs into an infantilization of Hawai’i and a narrative of woman-centred family formation. Perhaps we can understand the function of this film in relation to tourism as both what Joseph Roach calls “vicarious tourism” as well as an enticement for real travel following a viewing of the film that rests on the exoticization but also the containment of difference as well as historical memory.6 Significantly, the article notes that “not only did the HVCB sign a $1.7 million deal with Disney to promote Hawai’i in conjunction with the movie,” but notes the importance of this deal to “attract children (and their parents)” in the wake of the losses in tourism dollars after September 11. Here, the film’s management of memory and history in the service of neoliberalist business practices is made clear in its management of national mourning for profit. Further, if we take the figure of the dog, and U.S. pet culture in general, as a sign of an emergent neoliberal structure of feeling, in which the ownership of a dog performs a normalizing function across difference, then Stitch’s adoption by the sisters as a dog significantly locates the film’s narrative and its construction of a national multicultural citizenry. Within the narrative of the film, visual images serve an instructional function that models the modes of viewing the film discussed above. Indeed, Stitch’s education about national belonging takes place through his comprehension of visual culture. For instance, Lilo instructs Stitch about being a model citizen through the example of Elvis. Holding up a photograph of Elvis, Lilo tells Stitch: “Elvis Presley was a model citizen. I’ve compiled a list of his traits for you to practice. Number one is dancing.”7 Here, citizenship is performed through culture, such that national belonging seems to be defined primarily through culture as well. She sequentially holds up pictures of Elvis when enumerating each point about Elvis. Certainly, Elvis is an apt figure for a consideration of “model citizenship” and historical memory and popular cultural representations of Hawai’i, given his affiliations with Hawai’i through tourism, mass media, and entertainment. A frequent visitor to the islands between the 1950s and 70s, Elvis made three movies there, Blue Hawai’i, Girls Girls Girls, and Paradise, Hawai’ian Style, in addition to performing several times, including the first live concert televised world-wide, Elvis, Aloha from Hawai’i. Elvis famously served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960 as a regularly drafted solider and was heralded by the media and public for his patriotism in serving like other men

128 Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch ______________________________________________________________ and refusing to allow his celebrity to garner him special treatment. Elvis’s love of a state whose iconography in the popular imagination relies heavily upon exotic images of a tropical paradise and upon the military (signified in Pearl Harbour) is suggestive of the implications of Lilo’s idealization of Elvis as a “model citizen” in his dual relationship of experiencing and producing Hawai’i for popular consumption and his performance of a masculinized, military patriotism. In 1961 these two aspects came together when Elvis held a fundraising concert for the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbour that was crucial to enabling the construction of the memorial. Though the Navy had been attempting to raise funds for 20 years, they had only reached half of their goal of $500,000, and the proceeds of the concert allowed them to actually surpass their goal.8 Through this appropriation of the figure of Elvis, the film suggests the relationships between official state historical memory, citizenship, and the cultural production of Hawai’i as a consumable product. How does the film make use of visual images to portray its message about travel, family, and memory? Stitch’s understanding of family and national belonging based on his education through visual images parallels the promotional article’s suggestion that watching the movie can encourage families to actually travel to Hawai’i. Further, throughout the film, Lilo takes pictures of tourists (whose overly tropical dress, clueless expressions, and white bodies comically code them as mainland tourists) and puts them on her bedroom wall. While these pictures, which often catch the tourists in typical poses - on the beach, eating ice cream, etc. - appear to be overtly humorous, they also serve to make a relationship of tourism and fascination with other cultures visible, for while tourists go to Hawai’i to experience “aloha spirit,” the locals find the white mainlanders equally exotic. In positing this relationship of equal exchange, the film seems to elide the unequal political and economic power, and histories of settler colonialism and violence that mark Hawai’i as a U.S. state. However, by the end of the movie, Lilo’s wall collection of photographs of tourists give way to pictures of her family, now made up of Nani, Stitch, and herself, along with the other characters in the film. So, if the double domestic narratives of family and nation are intertwined, this replacement can be read to indicate that both the larger mediation of Hawai’i as a U.S. multicultural space and the family are about ways of managing personal and collective memories. As the family mantra of ‘ohana suggests, family is defined through memory: “‘ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind… or forgotten.”9 The series of photographs at the end of the film seem to document the future of the family, by providing new memories in a photo album. The content of these photos is also significant, showing the family celebrating U.S. national holidays such as Thanksgiving and travelling to Graceland, former home of the model citizen himself. That they have become tourists to the mainland seems to suggest that flows

129 Emily Cheng ____________________________________________________________ between Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland are commensurate. The final image suggests that a new history of family is being made, in that Lilo’s picture of her biological family at which she has stared nostalgically throughout the film has been reconstituted so that a picture of “Stitch” is attached to the corner. Stitch, who previously has “no memories,” according to Jookiba and therefore was all alone, now has family as demonstrated through the documents of their memories. Further, the final sequence in which the aliens have captured Stitch makes most explicit the entanglement of law, family, and nation. When Stitch interrupts the Grand Councilwoman’s speech to ask if he is allowed to say goodbye, he identifies himself as “Stitch,” signalling his transformation from being the generic experiment 626 to having a name, as part of a family, in contrast to the opening scene in the planet Turo when he is given a chance to speak on his behalf before being sentenced to prison and instead verbally insults his audience. It is the subjectivity expressed in this act that shows the alien leader that Stitch can no longer be destroyed as a prisoner who transgresses his rights, for he is not longer a monstrous other to the citizen subject. Stitch’s identification as a member of a family represents his newfound affective bonds that not only redeem him and render him suitable for life on earth, in Hawai’i, but this formation of the family is also what transforms the two sisters into a viable family under the law. The non-nuclear family here then suggests the film’s message of validating other family forms through the figure of the alien, though what exceeds the director’s appeal to family is also the appeal the unity of the homogeneous nation through the narrative of domesticity. The legality of the family is again tied to a national narrative that categorizes normative subjects under the law, specifically through the competing legality of the alien Galactic Federation and the U.S. state that frames the alien law as overly rigid, and human (U.S.) law as morally right. Mr. Bubbles points out this inflexibility when he says that aliens “are all about the law,” and Grand Councilwoman laments that their laws are “absolute” and do not allow deviation even when the will of the law would allow for change. In the end it is the Euro-American rule of law grounded in the market that takes primacy. Mr. Bubbles, again representing the state, instructs Lilo to show her title to Stitch she received when she adopted him at the shelter. Her adoption and her claims to him are framed, then, in terms of property rights, such that taking him away is an act of theft. The rules of the market sanctioned by the U.S. state become a justification for the Galactic Federation to submit to the sovereignty of the U.S. so that the liberal contract accords with what is morally right, which in this context is leaving the family intact. Stitch’s earlier transgression of the alien rules by escaping confinement then can be figured as an act of freedom from authoritarian law,

130 Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch ______________________________________________________________ as a flight from government grounded not in the liberalism and universal humanism, but in rigid non-human rules. Supporting a teleological narrative of the assimilation of the alien then, the film upholds the U.S. as a space of freedom, in which the alien can go from destroying civilization to become civilized as a member of a family and of the nation. What I have suggested in my reading of the film is that it seems to be embedded in a neo-liberal structure of feeling in representing Hawai’i’s relationship to the larger U.S. nation in terms of tourism and a celebration of indigenous culture, as well as through calling attention to the liberal market as upholding the family and nation, in a sense. However, as in the film as a whole, this ending scene also carries an ambiguity that re-articulates the kind of earlier histories that I argue that the film mediates through its attention to personal and collective memory. So, for instance, when Mr. Bubbles and the Grand Councilwoman recognize each other from the 1973 Roswell event, which Bubbles had investigated for the CIA, they note the ongoing relationship of alien threats to the globe that the U.S. must hide, and manage; the Grand Councilwoman warns, “we’ll be checking in now and then,” to which Bubbles responds, “I was afraid of that.”10 The continued presence of the alien articulated here can be connected to the alien threat performed by Stitch in his earlier destruction of the model of San Francisco. By portraying Hawai’i as a site of cultural difference, which is equally as available to the mainland, as vice versa, the film further locates Hawai’i within a national discourse of difference under multiculturalism. At the same time however, the setting of the islands, which almost become a character as the reviews imply, also invite consideration of the kinds of narratives and memories that the film asks us to forget, for instance, the alien threat figured historically in the Asiatic threat to the American Pacific and the U.S. nation’s need to constantly re-inscribe the Pacific as a U.S. site. This forgetting is ambivalent, however, as we can see in the instability of the closure of the domestic narrative of family formation that is so intertwined with the narrative of the nation in the film. Though in the end Stitch does learn to dance the hula, the primary sign of the indigenous in the film, and would thus appear to have achieved model citizenship, the superficiality of this definition of inclusion into the nation looms in the background as Stitch remains alien to the family. His transition in the context of family from object/dog to productive family member (the images during the credits show Stitch doing the family’s household chores, such as cooking and laundry) signifies the trace of the other in both family and nation, as his role now resonates with histories of labouring alien bodies central to Hawai’i’s development as a state.

131 Emily Cheng ____________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 3. 2 Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch (Burbank, Calif.: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2002), videorecording. 3 Calvin Trager, “Lilo and Stitch review,” Box Office Prophets, 24 June 2002, (10 July 2005). . 4 John Fischer, “Lilo and Stitch and the Spirit of Hawai’i,” Hawai’i/SouthPacific for Visitors, 25 May 2003, (May 25, 2003). . 5 Rob Wilson. Reimagining the American Pacific (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000), xvi. 6 Joseph Roach. “The Enchanted Island: Vicarious Tourism in Restoration Adaptations of The Tempest,” in The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 62. 7 Sanders and DeBlois, 2002. 8 Burl Burllingame. “Elvis Shook It Up 40 Years Ago for the Arizona Memorial,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin Online, 23 March 2001, (1 October 2005). . 9 Sanders and DeBlois, 2002. 10 Ibid.

References Burl Burllingame. “Elvis Shook It Up 40 Years Ago for the Arizona Memorial.” Honolulu Star-Bulletin Online. 23 March 2001. (1 October 2005). Byrne, Eleanor and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Fischer, John. “Lilo and Stitch and the Spirit of Hawai’i.” Hawai’i/ South Pacific for Visitors. 25 May 2003. (25 May 2003). Roach, Joseph. “The Enchanted Island: Vicarious Tourism in Restoration Adaptations of The Tempest.” In The Tempest and Its Travels, edited by Peter

132 Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch ______________________________________________________________ Hulme and William Sherman, 62. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Sanders, Chris and Dean DeBlois. Lilo & Stitch. Burbank, Calif.: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2002. Videorecording. Trager, Calvin. “Lilo and Stitch Review.” Box Office Prophets. 24 June 2002. (10 July 2005). Wilson, Rob. Reimagining the American Pacific. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000.

The Enemy Within: The Child as Terrorist in the Contemporary American Horror Film Colette Balmain Abstract In this chapter, I consider the re-emergence of the monstrous-child sub-genre, in the contemporary American horror film and its relationship to the traumatic events of 9/11. In particular, I focus on the manner in which the representation of the monstrous child can be understood as a metaphorical terrorist in that it, threatens the bourgeois, patriarchal family–the family as symbolic of the nation as a whole–from within. I suggest that child as monster can be interpreted as signalling fears around the loss of boundariespolitical, economic and cultural-as inscribed within the demonic figure of the child (the ‘other’/not-America/outside), which turns against the parent (the ‘self’/America/Inside). The child is not only abject - signalling in Freudian terms the return of the repressed - but is a place of becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, which places the hegemonic ideology of patriarchal capitalism under threat: articulated through the threat to the bourgeois family as the embodiment of its values. In these terms, the child as metaphorical terrorist highlights the fragility of the symbolic order in the face of the threat of the “other”: a fragility, which was only too obvious in the light of the horrific events of 9/11. Keywords: Terrorist; Deleuze; Guattari; Horror Film; National cinema; 9/11; 7/7; The Ring Two; The Amityville Horror; monstrous-child; urbaniod horror film; cloning; reproductive technologies. 1. Introduction Drawing on Stephen Heath’s argument that, ‘nationhood is not a given, it is always something to be gained,’1 in his article, “The Concept of National Cinema”, Andrew Higson contends that national cinema functions as one form of ‘internal cultural colonialism’, which works to: [P]ull together diverse and contradictory discourses, to articulate a contradictory unity, to play a part in the hegemonic processes of achieving consensus, and containing difference and contradiction.2

134 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ It is no coincidence that post World War II, it was seen that the new bludgeoning and dominant form of cultural representation, the film, had an important part to play in the [re]construction of bourgeois cultural imperialism at a time when national, economic and geographical boundaries had been placed under threat, and therefore as a mechanism for reestablishing those boundaries. As the editor of Film Daily, noted, in his comments on the American Film Industry: Whether one calls is propaganda or information, it is evident that as a result of World War II, the motion picture from this day must be regarded as an instrument of public policy as well as a great popular medium of entertainment.3 And writing about questions of national identity and cultural representation[s] of that identity, James Donald contends that questions of boundaries are at the centre of the formation of the national self: Manifest in racism, its violent misogyny, and its phobias about alien culture, alien ideologies and ‘enemies within’ is the terror that without known boundaries, everything will collapse into undifferentiated, miasmic chaos, that identity will disintegrate.’4 As the “horror” in the horror film comes about through the breaching of boundaries, it is pertinent to consider how the American horror film, as ideological apparatus of the state, has reconfigured itself in the light of the shocking events of 9/11 in which the colonial invader became the invaded, as the impenetrable boundaries of America as nation-state were breached by the ‘Other’. In his new preface to his 1978 seminal text, Orientalism, Edward Said talks about the proliferation of media texts on the ‘war against terror’: [A]ll of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up “America” against the foreign devil”, from ‘experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of those strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in “our” flesh.5 In the aftermath of 9/11, and subsequently in the weeks after 7/7, this was expressed in terms of them and us: the “Us” [the Other/The East/The racially inscribed “Object”] as a potential threat to the Western democratic way of life [the Self; The West; The White subject]. In the UK, as in the US, this was simplified into political and media hysteria around “the evil ideology” of

135 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ the “Other”. Binary distinctions were solidified and re-established between the “Good” West and the “Evil” East, and the threat within was expressed utilising the language of apocalypsism. In “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, Christopher Sharrat argues that the development of apocalypticism in horror is distinct to the tradition of catastrophe and utopia in science fiction.6 He cites Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, US: 1974), made at a time of crisis in American politics-the Watergate era and the Vietnam war-as one of the forerunners of the apocalyptic tradition in the horror film: a tradition which as Robin Wood points out in “An Introduction to The American Horror Film”, suggests that ‘annihilation is inevitable, humanity is now completely powerless, there is nothing anyone can to do to arrest the process.’7 Wood contends that the negation of the apocalyptic horror film–the idea of the end of the world –can be seen in positive rather than negative terms: the end of the world as the end of patriarchal capitalism within the recognition of the very instability of dominant ideology. However more recently, but before the events of 9/11, in his preface to Freud’s Worst Nightmares8, Robin Wood mourns the loss of the progressive features of the 1970 horror film, asking whether there are any horror films which could be championed as making some sort of radical statement about contemporary life, in the manner in which he saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, US/Italy: 1978) as doing9. In light of the events of 9/11, it is no surprise that the apocalyptic horror film has emerged as the dominant trend in American horror cinema within two distinct strands: the post-modern “urbanoid horror film10: Dead End (Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, France/USA: 2003), Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, USA: 2002), Wrong Turn (Robert Schmidt, USA/Germany: 2003) and the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, USA: 2004) and or the monstrous-child horror film: such as Godsend (Nick Hamm, US: 2004) Blessed (Simon Fellows, Romania/UK: 2004) Hide and Seek (John Polson, US: 2005), Exorcist: The Beginning (Renny Harlin, USA, 2004)11, The Amityville Horror (Andrew Douglas, US: 2004) and The Ring Two (Hideo Nakata, Japan/USA: 2004). Whilst both types of familial horror originally emerge within what Robin Wood contends is the progressive trends the 1970s, their reconfiguration and reinterpretation in the light of the events of 9/11 seems to offer a more reactionary interpretation of the family: one that needs to be understood as articulating cultural anxieties and fears over the “Enemy Within”: the repositioning of the “Other” as inherently threatening to the American way of life and its sense of a ‘divinely-ordained mission.’ In this chapter, I concentrate on the second of these familial horror genres, the monstrous-child film, focussing in particular on the positioning of the child as metaphorical terrorist-as a direct response to the traumatic events

136 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ of 9/11-and examine the mechanisms through which it allows the restoration of national and political boundaries in face of the threat from the “Other”. 2.

The Enemy Within [T]he father is dead, it’s my fault, who killed him? it’s your fault, it’s the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese, all the sources of racism and segregation12

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari contend that ‘The familial determinations become the application of the social axiomatic.’13 And since Psycho (Hitchcock, USA: 1960) according to Robin Wood, American cinema has ‘implicitly recognized Horror as both American and familial’14 The monstrous-child sub-genre, emerged, in the late 1960s, with Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, USA: 1968) quickly followed by films such as Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, USA: 1968), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, USA: 1973) and It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, USA: 1974). These pre-oedipal children would subsequently grow up, as mapped out in films such as, Carrie (Brian de Palma, USA: 1976) and The Fury (Brian de Palma, USA: 1978), before finally being punished repeatedly for their transgressions in the slasher film, by their mirror image, Michael Myers: a sub-genre which refuses to die out, just as the central male antagonists in Halloween (John Carpenter, USA: 1978) and Friday 13th (Sean Cunningham, USA: 1980), even after being repeatedly stabbed, beheaded, electrocuted, and blown into pieces, return for the next instalment. From the early to mid-1970s and coincident with bourgeois society’s negative response to the youth movements and drug culture of the late 1960 and early 1970s, generic emphasis was on the child not as terrorized victim, but as cannibalistic, monstrous, murderous, selfish, sexual.15 In “An introduction to The American Horror Film,” Wood contends that the child as monster in the horror film – or the Terrible Child – is a ‘product of the family, whether the family itself is regarded as guilty (the “psychotic family films”), such as in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or innocent as in The Omen (Richard Donner, UK: 1976)16. It is relevant that in the contemporary monstrous-child horror film, the family unit itself is figured as innocent rather than psychotic, and that more often that not the child is a product of another irreducibly different world whether historically, or geographically-the old world in Exorcist: New Beginnings and The Amityville Horror and the Far East in The Ring Two. An alternative method of

137 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ producing and or re/producing the monstrous-child is through the use of new scientific technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and cloning as in Godsend and The Blessed. At the same time, the father figure is either missing as in The Ring Two, ineffectual and/or murderous in Exorcist: New Beginnings, and The Amityville Horror. The death of the father figure, or its monstrous reinvention, is contemporaneous with the birth of the child as terrorist who disrupts the familial structure, as articulation of the wider nation-state, from within. Indeed in Hide and Seek, the monstrous father gives metaphorical birth to the monstrous-child, as implied by the end sequences in which we see Emily Calloway (Dakota Fanning) drawing a picture of herself in her new home. As she exits the door with her new surrogate mother, Elizabeth (Elisabeth Shue), the camera pans back into the room and onto the drawing, which Emily has left on the table: in the picture, Emily has painted herself as a Janus figure with two heads17. Earlier examples are the primal father in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series18 and stepfather in The Stepfather series19 of films in the 1980s. There are few examples of the monstrous or archaic mother in the American horror film, although these are much more common in European horror.20 The traditional function of the child within bourgeois mythology is the perpetuation of the past into the future, the propagation of the same rather than the embodiment of difference, and a promise of the continuation of the dominant ideological order. In Sobchack’s words: ‘The infant and the child as sign invoke nostalgia.’21: a nostalgia perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (USA: 1969) with the birth of the star child. In opposition to this is the figuration of the monstrous-child, which is: [F]igured as uncivilized, hostile, and powerful Others who – like their extra-cinematic counterparts – refuse parental love and authority and mock the established values of dominant institutions. They are “changelings” – the horrifically familiar embodiment of difference.’22 The events of 9/11 dented America’s fantasy of itself as narcissistic egoideal, propagator of democracy and freedom [and/or colonial invader]: an imaginary fantasy shared by the Western world as repeatedly performed through the propaganda of its systematic ideological cultural representations that have come to dominate Western culture. These monstrous-children, figurations of the terrorist threat, function as signifiers of instability and uncertainty from within, collapsing boundaries between self and other, exercising in Sobhack’s words ‘a powerful deconstructive force dangerous to patriarchal bourgeois culture.’23 Their ‘apocalyptic destruction’ is ‘generated by familial incoherence and paternal weakness.’24 In The Ring Two, the father figure is absent, leaving the hysterical mother, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts)

138 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ as a sole parent of the young boy-child, Aidan (David Dorfman), whilst in The Amityville Horror, the biological father is dead and the stepfather, George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) is incapable of protecting his stepchildren, Bill (Jesse James); Michael (Jimmy Bennett) and Chelsea (Chloe Mortez), from the dangerous forces that lurk in the basement of the house. 3. “It was You: You Let the Dead Get in!” The horror in these films is generated through the fact that these children threaten the family from within: though demonic and possessed, they are part of rather than apart from the familial unit and thus much more frightening than the ‘alien’ invader as envisaged by science fiction cinema, or the monstrous male killer of the slasher film, who has come to function as patriarchal avenger of capitalist bourgeois ideology.25 In Godsend and Blessed, the monstrous-child is the product of new scientific and reproductive technologies. In Godsend, after losing their son in a terrible accident, Paul (Greg Kinnear) and Jessie Duncan (Rebecca RomijnStamos) take up the offer by maverick scientist, Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro), to replace [clone] Adam (Cameron Bright), only to discover that this new Adam is a “changeling”, containing DNA material from both the Adam and Zachary, the dead son of Dr Wells. Zachary, as we discover from flashbacks, killed his mother and subsequently died in the fire that he set in order to destroy the evidence of his crime. Similarly in Blessed, IVF technologies give birth to a “monstrous” child. Unable to naturally reproduce, struggling writer, Craig Howard (James Purefoy) and his schoolteacher wife, Samantha (Heather Graham), are offered the opportunity for free IVF by the mysterious “Spiritus Research Clinic”. Samantha becomes pregnant at the first attempt, only to discover to her horror-along the lines of Rosemary’s Baby- that her husband, Craig, has literally sold his soul, and that of their children (Samantha gives birth to twins) to the “Devil” in order for material success. In a twist, Samantha gives birth to two angelic blond girls, whose outer mask of beauty, hides their inner demonic selves, as they are literally the spawn of Satan himself.26 The production of ‘cyborg’ babies through IVF and cloning technologies itself brings into question the whole concept of the bourgeois nuclear family and traditional relationships between parents and child. In “Cyborg Babies and Cybergods: The Baby Makers' New Origin Stories,” Mette Bryld explores the two contradictory discourses that have emerged alongside these new reproductive technologies. The liberal view in which questions of the normal family adapt in relationship to its surroundings-as expressed in Remaking Eden (1998) by Lee M. Silver-and the more conservative, reactionary wing through which sees these technologies as against nature. As Mette Bryld writes:

139 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ [F]ear of techno-monsters, whether concealed or not, is outspoken both in the discourses of some IVF parents3 and in the Danish legislation on assisted reproduction. In both cases, the practice of in vitro fertilisation is perceived of as so contrary to "nature", to normality in the sense of heterosexual essentialism, that the cyborg child is more or less expected to reflect the monstrosity of its origins in one way or other.27 This doubling between the monstrosity of origins and the monstrosity of the child can also be seen in figure of ghostly and deadly Samara in The Ring (Gore Verbenski, Japan/USA: 2002). In The Ring the narrative implies that Samara is brought to America from abroad, and more specially originates from the East. 28 In The Ring, based upon the cult Japanese film Ringu (Hideo Nakata: 1998), a mysterious videotape is discovered by a group of young adolescents, whose unexplained deaths, forms the central narrative enigma of the film. Upon watching the video, the viewer is left with just seven days to live before he/she is literally scared to death. At the centre of the narrative is Rachel, a newspaper reporter, and her young son, Aidan. Aidan becomes exposed to the video-virus leaving Rachel just seven days to solve the mystery of the video and save her child’s life. Articulating media hysteria over the links between violence and the visual image, patriarchal fears around the demise of the nuclear family and the working within the traditions of conventions that demonise woman and single mothers in particular in horror cinema, The Ring places at least some of the blame for the deaths that ensue as a consequence of the absence of the father figure and the failure of the maternal: Rachel fails to prevent [protect] her child from the videotape by leaving it lying around the house. Crucially in The Ring, the origin of the horror is emerges from outside of America as embodied within the figure of Samara, whose presence in the urban backwater to which she is brought leads to mayhem and murder. Here monstrosity is both racial and sexual difference. And it is in order to suppress this racial threat Samara is murdered by her [adoptive?] mother, Anna (Shannon Cochran): her body disposed of down a well. The cursed video is thus Samara’s revenge - an unholy alliance that conflates the oriental other with alien technologies – and a curse, which can only be avoided by its transmission to another. The sequel, The Ring Two, clearly foregrounds the manner in which ‘the child as terrorist’ embodies contemporary American fears around the invasion of borders: the national as mapped onto the personal. Significantly, The Ring Two, rather than continuing Samara’s [Sadako’s] story as the Japanese sequel to Ringu does29, transforms the cursed video theme into a ‘changeling’ narrative, in which the young-boy child of the first film, Aidan

140 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ (David Dorfmann), becomes possessed by the vengeful spirit of Samara (Kelly Stables). In this sense, the threat moves from outside to the inside, from the external to the internal, and projection becomes introjection30. Moving to Oregon in an attempt to flee from Samara’s vengeful ghost, Rachel discovers to her horror that Samara has followed her, and is intent in inhabiting the body of her son, Aidan. In a number of places in the film, the responsibility for Aidan’s possession is blamed on his mother, Rachel: “It was You: You Let the Dead Get In!” says Samara’s biological mother (Sissy Spacek) to Rachel [The Ring Two contradicts the narrative of the first here], apportioning fault to a lack of female parental authority and simultaneously mourning the loss of the authority as embodied within the missing father figure. In order to free Aidan, Rachel is repeatedly told to listen to the ‘child’. Here the good child Aidan is situated in direct opposition to the bad child Samara, in effect reinforcing the hierarchy of traditional binaries: male/female, outside/inside, self/other, innocence/corruption and West/East. Disturbingly Rachel has to become monstrous herself in order to defeat Samara, condemning Samara to eternal darkness and solitude by trapping her in the well. Here the foreign threat is contained and diffused and the white male American subject privileged over the racially coded female other. Further, national boundaries become projected onto gender boundaries, racial difference is sexual difference: female identity and the racial other are both situated as monstrous in their otherness. In “Trying to Survive on The Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror”, Tony Williams writes that the ‘authoritarian bourgeois family’ is an ‘organization attempting to repress its subjects into being conformist products.’31 And it is the failure of the family leads to the designation of its products – or children – as monstrous. The conformation of children as patriarchal products necessitates a stable gender identity: ‘An authoritarian patriarchal structure, the family attempts to produce a convenient gendered product within capitalist society.’32 When this fails, as it does in The Ring Two and the boundaries between genders are transgressed: ‘the horror of difference results.’33 This is also the case in Hide and Seek with Emily possessed by the monstrous father figure in the final sequences as discussed earlier. In the remake of The Amityville Horror, as in the original version, the previous family of the cursed house are murdered brutally by the oldest son, who is being controlled by the spirit of an authoritarian Preacher who experimented on and murdered native American Indians in the basement of the house in the distant past. However it is the ghost of the youngest girl-child, Jodie, who appears periodically to the Chelsea Lutz in the present time in which the narrative is set. In key sequences, the girls are visually framed as doubles of each other, one such example is a long shot of the girls from the outside, framed by the

141 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ attic windows, highlighting both the similarities and differences between them. The function of the doppelganger here, as elsewhere in horror, is to foreground the conflict between the civilized and the uncivilized, the rational and the irrational: Chelsea, the blond ‘good’ child as opposed to Jodie, the dark ‘bad’ child. Further with their long dark hair, and pallid features, Samara in The Ring Two, Emily in Hide and Seek and Chelsea in The Amityville Horror signal the collapse of racial onto sexual difference. In addition to this, the cinematic techniques utilised to frame Jodie’s appearances, and indeed as emphasized through the use of costume and make-up, in The Amityville Horror are very similar to those associated with the Japanese Horror Film, in particular Ringu as already mentioned, but also are techniques utilised to great effect in Ju-On The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, Japan: 2003). Evil in these films, even if it originates from the past primal father figure, is both feminine and feminised as encapsulated in the figuration of the monstrous female child. The monstrous “Other” coded as either “foreign” and/or “primitive”, undermines the stability of the family through threatening the gendered status of the child–multiplicity replaces/displaces unitydemonising the “Other” with its connotations of racial and sexual difference. And in the monstrous-child sub-genre, the narratives conclude either with the reassertion of the good child over the bad; Whiteness over Darkness, codifying conventions around sexual and racial difference as monstrous. 4.

Conclusion: You Have to Send it Back In the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom the label “terrorist” serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post 9/11 period has produced.34

Tony Williams contends the more repressive the society, the more monstrous the repressed.’35 In the light of this, the monstrous-children of The Ring Two and Hide and Seek can be seen as the monstrous progeny of “The return to family values” as articulated by Bush – which repeats that of the earlier Reagan-Bush era of American politics – in the aftermath of 9/11. On one hand, the figure of the child as terrorist within the family can be seen as progressive as it functions in its apocalyptical capacity as signifier of the demise of a repressive, patriarchal capitalism in Wood’s terms. Or in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms articulates a notion of becoming which undermines fixed categories and boundaries, constituting what Conley sees in

142 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ ‘Becoming-Woman Now’, ‘the possibility of transition towards a nonphallocentric and non-capitalist space outside of a deadly and reappropriating dialectic.’36 However, the allusion in The Ring Two to ‘letting the dead in’ and the need ‘to send them back’ functions as a barely veiled metaphor for the reassertion of boundaries against incoming immigrants. This gives credence to the monstrous-child as a reactionary figure. The reassertion of the patriarchal family unit at the end of The Ring Two and The Amityville Horror can be read as an attempt to reconcile America’s internal fantasy with her outward projection of reality. The fact that sequels for both The Ring Two and The Amityville Horror are in production suggests that the monstrouschild sub-genre will be around for some time.

Notes 1

Stephen Heath cited in Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London and New York, Routledge: 2002), 139 2 Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London and New York, Routledge: 2002), 139 3 Jill Forbes and Sarah Street, eds, European Cinema: An Introduction, (London: Palgrave, 2000), 17 4 James Donald, “How English Is It? Popular Literature and National Culture,” New Formations 6 (1988), 32 5 Edward Said, Orientalism, Western Conceptions of the Orient, (London: Penguin Modern Classics: 2004), xv 6 Christopher Sharrat, “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, in. Planks of Reason. Essays on the horror film, ed Barry Keith Grant (London: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 255 7 Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”, in Planks of Reason. Essays on the horror film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (London: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 187 8 Steven Jay Schneider, ed., Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 9 Robin Wood, “What Lies Beneath”, Senses of Cinema, 2001: (17th September 2005)

143 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ 10

Carol Clover, Men, Woman and Chainsaws: Gender in the Contemporary Horror Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1992 11 Since writing this paper, another version of this prequel to The Exorcist has been made released (2005) on DVD and Video. Renamed Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, this is the original version as directed by Paul Schrader, which the studios deemed as “unmarketable” and brought Renny Harlin in to shoot an alternative version, which was released cinematically in 2004. Originally Schrader’s version was to have been part of the DVD features on the release of Exorcist The Beginning, however the box-office failure of Harlin’s film has meant that Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist did receive a limited theatrical release as well as being released on a separate DVD to Exorcist The Beginning. However for the purposes of this paper, I am discussing Exorcist: The Beginning 12 Carl Clover, Men, Woman and Chainsaws, 269 13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Scziophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (London: Athlone, 1984), 264 14 Robin Wood, “An Introduction the American Horror Film”, 185 15 Vivian Sobchack, “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Modern Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 150 16 Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”,181 17 This is one of the four possible endings to Hide and Seek, including one in which Emily is locked up in a mental institution. Audience reactions to previews of the film, led to this ending being substituted for the less overtly “horrific” drawing scene. However, all four endings make it clear that Emily’s status as monstrous-child. 18 Audiences were first introduced to the monstrous figure of Freddy Kruger, as primal father, in Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (US: 1984) which so far has run to 6 sequels, ending with Craven’s return to the franchise, and postmodern parody, with New Nightmare in 1994. It may be of some significance, that Robert Englund has returned to the role of Freddy Kruger, even if it is only as presenter, for the television series A Nightmare on Elm Street: Real Nightmares. Directed by Rick Ringbakk, the series is presently in postproduction. 19 The series began in 1985 with Joseph Ruben’s seminal critique of the American dream, The Stepfather, with Terry O’Quinn as Jerry Blake, the eponymous and psychotic stepfather of the title. Two sequels followed quickly. Stepfather 2 (directed by Jeff Burr), in 1987, in which Terry O’Quinn once again reprised the role of the murderous stepfather, still

144 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ searching fruitlessly for the ‘perfect’ family, with the made for video Stepfather 111 (Stepfather 3: Father’s Day, Guy Magar) followed in 1992: this time with Robert Wightman instead of Terry O’Neill in the lead role. 20 One of the few monstrous-mother as psychotic killer films is Mother’s Boys, directed by Yves Simoneau in 1994, with Jamie Lee Curtis playing against type as the murderous Judith Madigan. The archaic mother may be alluded in iconography and mise-en-scene, as in the Alien series of films, but she is rarely the visible psychotic killer. The failure of Casey Becker to correctly identify the mother rather than the son as the identity of the killer in the “original” Friday 13th at the beginning of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) functions merely to stress that the murderous mother as killer is the exception that proves the rule. This of course is not the case in many European horror films, for example, in the giallo of Dario Argento, woman are almost always the killer. For a discussion of problematic status of woman-as-killer in European Horror, see Donato Totaro’s article “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror”, Offscreen (January 31, 2002), (17th September 2005) 21 Vivian Sobhack, “Bringing it all back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange”, 149 22 ibid,.150 23 ibid, 151 24 ibid, 151 25 see Robin Wood’s discussion of Michael Myers in Halloween in “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” 26 Blood from Satan injected during the fertilization process. 27 See Mette Bryld, “Cyborg Babies and Cybergods: The Baby Markers’ New Origin Stories” (2000) < http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/bryld.html> (17th September 2005) 28 As I have argued elsewhere, the Japanese characters than can be seen on the margins of Samara’s birth certificate imply that she comes from the “Orient”. See Colette Balmain, “Lost in Translation: Otherness and Orientalism in The Ring. Diagesis: The Journal of the Association for Research into Popular Fictions, Special Horror Edition, 7 (Summer 2004): 69-77 29 This is true of both the sequels. Rasen (The Spiral, Jôji Iida, Japan: 1998), which opened as part of a double bill with Ringu on its premiere in Japan, and Nakata’s own sequel Ringu 2 in 1999. Although closer to Japanese writer Kôji Suzuki’s second book in the trilogy (Ringu, Rasen, Loop), also named Rasen, the film Rasen was not successful at the box-office. The prequel to Ringu, Ringu 0: Bâsudei (Ring 0: Birthday, Norio Tsuruta, Japan: 2000)

145 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________ constructs Sadako as a sympathetic figure, and narrates the events leading up to her demise. 30 Explain introjection 31 Tony Williams, “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Modern Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 169 32 ibid, 169 33 ibid, 169 34 Edward Said, Orientalism, xx 35 Tony Williams, “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror”, 170 36 Constance Conley, “Becoming-Woman Now” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000), 25

References Balmain, Colette. “Lost in Translation: Otherness and Orientalism in The Ring. Diagesis: The Journal of the Association for Research into Popular Fictions, Special Horror Edition, 7 (Summer 2004): 69-77 Bryld, Mette. “Cyborg Babies and Cybergods: The Baby Markers’ New Origin Stories” (2000) < http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/bryld.html> (17th September 2005) Clover, Carol. Men, Woman and Chainsaws: Gender in the Contemporary Horror Film, London: Routledge, 1992. Conley, Constance. “Becoming-Woman Now” In Deleuze and Feminist Theory. eds. Ian Buchanan, and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: EUP, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Scziophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Athlone, 1984. Donald, James. “How English Is It? Popular Literature and National Culture”. New Formations 6 (1988), p. 32

146 The Enemy Within ______________________________________________________________ Forbes, Jill and Street, Sarah Street, eds. European Cinema: An Introduction. London: Palgrave, 2000. Higson, Andrew. “The Concept of National Cinema” In The European Cinema Reader. ed. Catherine Fowler. Routledge: London and New York, 2000. Said, Edward. Orientalism, Western Conceptions of the Orient. 3rd Edition. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2003. Sharrat, Christopher. “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. In Planks of Reason. Essays on the horror film. ed. Barry Keith Grant. London: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Schneider, Steven Jay, ed., Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Totaro, Donato. “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror”, Offscreen (January 31, 2002), (17th September 2005) Sobchack, Vivan. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange”. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Modern Horror Film. ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Williams, Tony. “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror”. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Modern Horror Film. ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press), 1996. Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”. Planks of Reason. Essays on the horror film. ed. Barry Keith Grant. London: Scarecrow Press, 1996. ___. ”What Lies Beneath”. Senses of Cinema. 2001. (17th September 2005)

147 Colette Balmain ______________________________________________________________

Filmography The Amityville Horror, directed by Andrew Douglas, US: 2004 Dawn of the Dead, directed by George Romero, US/Italy: 1978 Dead End, directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, France/USA: 2003 Cabin Fever, directed by Eli Roth, USA, 2002 Wrong Turn, directed by Robert Schmidt, USA/Germany, 2003 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Marcus Nispel, USA, 2004 Godsend, directed by Nick Hamm, US: 2004 Blessed, directed by Simon Fellows, Romania/UK, 2004 Hide and Seek, directed by John Polson, US: 2005 Exorcist: The Beginning, directed by Renny Harlin, USA, 2004 Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, directed by Paul Schrader, USA: 2005 The Amityville Horror, directed by Andrew Douglas, US: 2004. Ringu, directed by Hideo Nakata, Japan: 1998 The Ring Two, directed by Hideo Nakata, US/Japan: 2005 Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchock, US: 1960 Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, USA: 1968 Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A Romero, USA, 1968 The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, USA,1973 It’s Alive, directed by Larry Cohen, USA, 1974 Carrie, directed by Brian de Palma, USA, 1976 The Fury, directed by Brian de Palma, USA, 1978 Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, USA, 1978 Friday the 13th, directed by Sean Cunningham, USA, 1980 The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, UK, 1976 Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven, USA: 1984 New Nightmare, directed by Wes Craven, USA, 1994 The Stepfather, directed by Joseph Ruben, USA: 1985 Stepfather 2, directed by Jeff Burr, USA: 1987 Stepfather 111 (Stepfather 3: Father’s Day), directed by Guy Magar (tv) (USA: 1992) Mother’s Boys, directed by Yves Simoneau, USA:1994 The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, USA/Japan, 2002 Rasen (The Spiral), directed by Jôji Iida, Japan: 1998

‘Monstrous Mothers’ and the Media Nicola Goc Abstract Both the idealising and the demonising of mothers has reached an apex in media discourses of recent years positioning mothers as either Madonnas or Medeas. Contemporary media discourse places the ideal mother within celebrity news construct where she regains her svelte figure within weeks and seamlessly returns to her career; at the other end of the spectrum the deviant mother is portrayed within news texts as wicked and cruel, the antithesis of motherhood. Mothers have been receiving bad press since that mythological ‘monstrous mother’ Medea, killed her children. The Cruel Mother motif has been a recurrent representation in plays, ballads, poems and novels for centuries and continues to survive in the ‘monstrous mother’ motif of contemporary media infanticide and child abuse discourses. Through the individualising of deviance within the ‘monstrous mother’ paradigm the media audience, and society, is absolved of responsibility through the actions of the individual. Using contemporary media texts I will examine the role the media plays in creating the social space in which motherhood continues to be constrained within a patriarchal ideology where women as mothers continue to be categorised, idealised and demonised, and where deviant mothers are understood as ‘monstrous.’ Keywords: Infanticide, celebrity culture, motherhood, media discourses, master narrative, public opinion, dominant ideology, representation. 1.

Celebrity Mothers In the 21st century, newspaper column space is increasingly being devoted to manufactured celebrity news, displacing political and social news. As Julieanne Schultz says, celebrity news is no longer the obsession of trashy magazines and tabloids; all print media has been “sucked into the celebrity vortex and its profitable promise.”1 James Autry has observed in America what he calls “celebrity journalism” increasing in all forms of media, including news. 2 Hand in glove with this celebrity news focus is what Anne Summers calls the “breeding creed”, “a powerful new ideology that defines women first and foremost as mothers.”3 Celebrity mothers are news, and as Summers notes, women’s magazines are “doing their bit to promote motherhood.” But what is the message?

150 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ In a world of mediated voyeurism, text has now been displaced by the image and the celebrity object is there to be seen and recognised, its value lying in our need for something to look at, admire, envy, and talk about. Photographic images as negotiated interpretations of ‘reality,’ grounded in particular social and cultural contexts, are increasingly influential in creating public opinion in a world which is experiencing the “collapse of conversation and the rise of the image.”4 Photographs of pregnant celebrities feed our quest for voyeuristic pleasure; the image is the essence of visual entertainment that requires no reciprocal communication or feedback to the person observed. The celebrity news image, usually capturing intimate moments, reduces issues, such as motherhood in the 21st century, to the personal, individual level, displacing social and political issues with our voyeuristic interest in the personal lives of those inhabiting the world of celebrity. Calvert argues that one of the social forces fuelling voyeurism is that we are an increasingly hedonistic, selfabsorbed society in which we get our pleasure from watching others’ lives.5 In a world of mediated voyeurism, discourse has been reduced to the public gaze, displacing public discourse on such issues as childbirth, child care, parental leave, post partum depression, levels of community support, abortion and infanticide. Political and social discourse has become the shadow of celebrity news. In terms of female newsworthiness, the pregnant celebrity or royal now sits at the top of the hard news agenda. Maternity is not only the new fashion accessory for the female celebrity, but it also defines womanhood and the maternal in news culture. In any given week tabloid stories on celebrity mothers abound. Maternity is the new must have; must do, for the female celebrity – in contemporary parlance motherhood is ‘wicked.’ In the week of April 25 Woman’s Day and Who magazines both ran front-page features on Britney Spears’ pregnancy. Who displaying a bikini-clad Spears with the heading “I’m pregnant!” followed by a four-page spread of scantily-clad Spears relaxing on a Florida beach with friends under the oversized heading: She’s having a baby!6 According to the tabloid Spears has been transformed from “mean and lean” to “soft and sensual.” Turn to the next double-page spread and you have the baby clues: “The hair, the clothes, the, um, expanding body of evidence” and the cravings - chilli con carne, baked potatoes and burgers. And then of course the obligatory drama - celebrities can’t have straightforward pregnancies or births. Woman’s Day, under “Pregnant Britney’s hospital dash” told its readers: The star spent two nights fearing for the life of her unborn baby in a leading Florida clinic after experiencing stomach cramps and severe bleeding.

151 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ “She was in a terrible amount of distress and her husband was at her side,” an ‘insider’ said. Kevin, 26, and a group of bodyguards were later seen pacing outside the medical facility fearing the worst. But on Sunday the young singer was given the all clear and Kevin took her home.7 Celebrity motherhood copy is not just the realm of tabloid magazines; now mainstream news discourses are occupied with celebrity motherhood stories beside serious news. The London Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all ran the story of Spears’ pregnancy as a hard news story. The Houston Chronicle’s headline said it all: “Britney prepares for motherhood - and we can’t take our eyes off her.” Our little Mouseketeer is all grown up now and ready to start a nest of her own. On Tuesday, Britney Spears confirmed what so many of the tabloids and celebrity-obsessed Web sites had mused: the pop star is pregnant with her first child. The pregnancy is just the latest headline for Spears, who in the past 16 months had married and divorced a childhood friend, wed dancer Kevin Federline, gotten a new dog, and welcomed a new stepson. We wonder what Madonna, the queen mum of music, would think of her bussing buddy’s launch into motherhood. Madonna was 38 when she gave birth to her first child, Lourdes. Spears is 23. At this rate, Spears could be a grandmother by 40.8 Thirty years have passed since Helen Reddy empowered women with her song “I am Woman … I am invincible”; now we have Britney’s celebrity motherhood status appropriating the public news agenda as she sings: My loneliness is killing me I must confess I still believe When I’m not with you I lose my mind Give me a sign Hit me baby one more time. Woman’s Day continues with the celebrity motherhood trope with a frontpage photograph of Nicole Kidman wearing a high-waisted Givenchy dress that sparks pregnancy speculation that:

152 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ she may already be pregnant with the baby she so desperately wants. While the star continues to deny she is expecting she has gained some new curves, and even admitted to wearing maternity clothes. And, like a little girl struggling to keep a big secret, she’s been blurting out increasingly personal details about her longing to have a baby and her past struggle with miscarriage.9 Kidman reportedly said, “I’ve hormones running through my system as I sit wriggling on my chair.” The issue here is not the sagacity, the truth, of these tabloid magazine texts, but the fact that they appropriate public discourse in such a way that news outlets, driven by the profit imperative, now feel compelled to enter into this vacuous motherhood discourse. This is in part due to the cross promotion concomitant with cross-media ownership – a subversive way of promoting tabloid magazines through elevating their ‘soft’ stories into the realm of serious ‘hard’ news texts. In the same week the tabloid magazines brought us Nicole and Britney under the rubric of celebrity mothers, the iconic symbol of modern motherhood, Demi Moore, came under the tabloid radar at the other end of the motherhood spectrum, as a bad mother. Moore created the idealised icon of motherhood in 1991 when, heavily pregnant to Hollywood action man Bruce Willis, she appeared nude on the front cover of Vanity Fair. This iconic image is credited with starting the media obsession with celebrity motherhood, and the sexualization of the pregnant woman. Fourteen years on and the icon of modern maternity is now the monstrous maternal. In a glossy paparazzi spread the headlines admonished: “Demi - pregnant and smoking?” Demi Moore’s cigarette habit has landed her in hot water as she’s caught on camera smoking while thought to be 11 weeks pregnant. These snaps of the star puffing away led one US magazine to exclaim, “Demi, you should be ashamed!”10 Keep turning the pages and you come to a full-page advertisement for face cream depicting a pretty young model smiling at the camera as she pushes a pillow underneath her blouse, and the tag: “Now you don’t have to be expecting to have that radiant glow everyday.”11 If pregnancy is the new beauty product, then why not pregnancy as the ultimate TV reality game show? According to Endemol, the makers of Big Brother, the next reality TV programme will be “Make Me A Mum.” In July 2004 the producers launched the concept of a new show that would see 1,000 men vie for the chance to father a child. “Make Me A Mum will whittle down

153 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ the candidates until two hopefuls are selected to compete against each other,” press reports said: The childless woman will choose the man she believes makes the best father – judged on sex appeal, personality, wealth and fitness. A second man will be picked on the basis of genetic compatibility and sperm quality.12 The proposal is to screen a “sperm race” using new technology, which would allow viewers to see which of the two finalists’ sperm reaches the woman’s egg first. Meanwhile the originators of the reality TV show pushed the maternity-as-entertainment concept one step further featuring a pregnant contestant in the 2005 Dutch version. The woman, known only as Tanja, was seven months pregnant when she entered the house in August. While the Netherlands government was grappling with whether to grant a work permit allowing the baby - essentially a child actor - to make an appearance on the show, Endemol’s spokeswoman Cathelinjne Nijssen said that the producers had not decided exactly what the program would show when the pregnant woman goes into labour. “She may be voted off the program first,” Cathelinjne Nijssen said.13 She wasn’t and in mid October, according to a BBC report, “the Dutch version of the reality TV show Big Brother has broken new ground broadcasting a contestant giving birth.”14 The Irish Examiner reported: The cameras were whirring when Tanja gave birth today to a healthy daughter, in footage that the new mother hopes will boost her chances of winning a €366,000 prize on the reality program Big Brother.15 According to CBC Arts local critics accused the Dutch Big Brother producers of exploiting the birth to boost ratings.16 And if pregnancy is the new reality TV game show and the new beauty product, then childbirth is the new art form. A recent global news story “Performance The Art of Birth” told of Berlin artist Winfried Witt inviting 30 people to witness the birth of his child in the DNA-Galerie. Witt claimed “It’s a gift to humanity, a once a lifetime thing.”17 He and fellow artist and partner Ramune Gele wanted to challenge artistic norms, gallery owner Joann Novak told Germany’s Bild newspaper. The gallery, known for its installations and video art, would be closed during the birth. Invited guests would be summonsed as soon as Gele’s contractions became regular. “The private aspect will be maintained,” Noval said. Reuters reported another gallery owner in the street as saying “I find it mad.” An AFP story quoted the

154 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ artist as saying the spectators, who registered for the exhibition via the Internet, would participate in “an exceptional experience.” According to the artist, “Man, because he is unique, is an existential object of art.” Witt wanted to “show living people, perceived at the same time as object and subject through a kind of magnifying glass and to expose man in the situations of his personal life.”18 While “man, because he is unique” may be “an existential object of art,” pregnant woman, in the form of Ramune Gele, remains mute. As the “existential object” of this living art she does not need a persona beyond that of a pregnant human. Gele is in fact the perfect parturient woman, silent and submissive, captured for the voyeur’s gaze in the throes of childbirth as an artistic fetish. Through the female form Witt projects himself as the winner of the ultimate sperm race. The birth was due to take place in May 2005, though nothing further was publicised about the proposed ‘artistic’ performance. Motherhood as living art and prime-time TV may be the extreme, but the idealisation of motherhood through the representation of celebrity mothers in tabloid news and magazines is now accepted unquestioningly as the crucial ingredients of a daily media diet. 2.

“Breast Nazis” Post delivery, a glamorous, fur-draped, scarlet-lipped and sultry Jerry Hall was featured on the front page of Vanity Fair in 1999 offering her infant son a full, pendulous breast. This provocative image caused a divisive debate about mothers breastfeeding in the public, a debate which still holds news currency today. In August 2004 Washington Post columnist, Roxanne Roberts, wrote a column “Do Me a Favor, Keep a Lid on Your Double Latte” in which she claimed her right to a peaceful cup of coffee was being undermined by women breastfeeding in Starbucks.19 Her attack was on one particular mother, Lorig Charkoudian, a Silver Spring woman who not only wants to breast-feed her daughter at Starbucks whenever she likes but expects me to avert my eyes or leave if I don’t share her enthusiasm for double breast milk latte. It’s not enough that a new Maryland law supports her right to lactate in public - no, she wants Starbucks to issue a nationwide corporate policy supporting her position. Speaking for the school of not letting it all hang out, let me say: Don’t. Please, please please. Just don’t. The demonising of women who breastfeed in public, branded by Roxanne Roberts as “Breast Nazis”, is a core concept of society’s expectation that motherhood is sacred. Women who openly breastfeed in public push us

155 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ to acknowledge that breast-feeding is simultaneously sacred and sexual, thus creating an anxiety in Western culture which continues to inform debates about motherhood. On the one hand the new mother is vilified for breastfeeding her baby in Starbucks and on the other hand she is pressured to ‘get back’ her prepregnancy figure, to make herself sexually attractive, or run the risk of being vilified as fat and frumpy. Celebrity mothers, as personified by the gorgeous Liz Hurley, so the tabloid magazines tell us, lost all of the 24 kilos she gained during her pregnancy within ten weeks, create an ideal which the average woman - without the personal trainer, the nanny and the villa in Gibraltar can never live up to. Journalist Dominique Jackson posed in a recent article: While it is clear that glamour, social life and career do not have to be casualties of motherhood, what of the downside of the celebrity approach? The women who can’t live up to the expectations? What if you don’t feel like exercising a week after giving birth? What if you can’t re-emerge, Liz-Hurley-like, more gorgeous than ever?20 Psychologist Helen Skouteris, a lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia, is researching the impact of body image on post-natal depression, and thinks the media’s creation of celebrity mothers can be both damaging and reassuring. On the one hand, the models in the media make it look like you can regain this amazing figure weeks after having a baby; on the other hand, even famous, wealthy women, when they have babies, have fluid retention and stretchmarks.21 What effect does the marketing of pregnancy as sexy, and of babies as the latest must-have fashion accessory have on public opinion? How does the formation of public opinion on the status of motherhood play out in the general community? This distorted representation of motherhood, from the idealised Madonna to the evil Medea, does influence the way society conceptualises motherhood. The publicity attendant with celebrity fame puts celebrity women under the unrelenting scrutiny of the media gaze, as we have seen with the transformation of Demi Moore from perinatal sex goddess to deviant mother, but it also presents an often unattainable ideal for the majority of mothers. Importantly such discourse colonises the column space once taken up with the discussion of social, welfare and judicial issues relating to parenting.

156 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ 3.

Sporting Mothers Successful sportswomen of child-bearing age regularly find themselves as news copy, not for their sporting achievements, but because of their maternal status – athleticism and motherhood, like sexuality and breastfeeding, are an uncomfortable mix and the dominant media ideology projects the female athlete who is a mother as within the ‘sporting mum’ rubric. When Australian diver Chantelle Newbery won gold at the 2004 Olympics she was immediately projected out of the sporting shadows into the media spotlight as “Gold medal mum Chantelle Newbery” thus foregoing Ian Thorpe’s sponsorship dollars, fast cars and luxury boats… and in the moment of her greatest sporting achievement she became the subject of media speculation as to whether this “mother of a two-year-old” would continue on in her sporting career or choose to give it up to be a full-time mother.22 The British have seen corresponding coverage with Paula Radcliffe: “Radcliffe’s longing for motherhood put on hold”, readers of the London Times were told, with Radcliffe’s supposed admission that she has delayed starting motherhood while she concentrates on her running career. When Alison Hargreaves became the first British woman to climb Everest unsupported by oxygen or Sherpas, the media wanted to know how she could go off climbing mountains when she was the mother of two children? When Hargreaves tragically died on a subsequent expedition to K2, the media turned on her in an unprecedented manner. While male sporting elites who are struck down in their prime are afforded heroic status, Hargreaves was immediately vilified as a bad mother and accused of being irresponsible to leave her children behind as she attempted her lifethreatening climbs. Hargreaves’ partner, Jim Ballard, later told an Observer journalist: “There were some very hurtful things said in the press after Alison died.” 23 4.

‘Monstrous’ Mothers In their bid to entertain and increase profits for shareholders, the media idealise motherhood in the form of celebrity mothers, but also seek out the equally newsworthy and highly saleable darker side of motherhood in the representation of the ‘monstrous’ mother. While Medea news stories entertain their audience, they also inform on many levels, and significantly impact on the ways in which society views motherhood. GQ magazine in 2002 managed to package sex and infanticide into a highly disturbing media discourse. Illustrated with a full-page colour photograph of a beautiful topless model with her back to the camera, Robert Draper’s article “A Prayer for Tina Marie” begins: “Gentleman, here is your child, 22, with a soft round face you could hold in one hand and chew like a peach muffin… She will have sex with you on the first night…”. The subject of the article was a young Texan woman, Tina Marie Cornelius, who is

157 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ serving a life sentence for murdering her two young children. According to Draper, Cornelius “turned to prostitution and drugs after unwanted attentions from her former stepfather.”24 Kathleen Folbigg in Australia, like Andrea Yates in America, became the media icon of monstrous motherhood when in 2003 she was convicted of the murder of her four infant children. The Daily Telegraph published a running banner: “Monstress: the diary of a child murderer” as they catalogued Folbigg’s record of infanticide through the publication of her incriminating diaries. 25 One chilling entry: January 16 1998 The gym was pivotal (sic) part of me, and now because I can’t go without taking Laura its (sic) put a damper (sic) on everything. I’ve had my one and only escape taken away from me. Judith Warner’s book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, examines the American condition she has coined ‘the mommy mystique.’ Warner, who interviewed 150 well-off Manhattan mothers, says mothering has gone from an art to a cult, with devotees driving themselves to ever more baroque extremes to appease the goddess of perfect motherhood. Warner fails, however, to acknowledge the other end of the spectrum where poor mothers are under the increased economic, social and psychological pressure that saw one young American Mother, Christina Rigg, with no food in the house for her children, smother her babies. She was executed in 2001.Warner believes our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothers can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide level. 5.

Crack Mothers In the mid to late 1980s a moral panic emerged in the US from Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs which saw crack-addicted mothers demonised. In 1985 Susan Spencer reporting for CBS News used as her source a New England Journal of Medicine study claiming that cocaine had just as devastating an effect on pregnancy as heroin, that it caused spontaneous abortions, and that babies born to mothers who used coke went through withdrawal.26 Amidst the media hype that followed Spencer’s story, one of the authors admitted the research was a “limited but important study” designed to raise questions and concerns about using cocaine while pregnant.27 Spencer’s story focused on the health warnings for all pregnant women, but the media campaign picked up on the compelling narrative of drug-addicted mothers, quantified by the statistic reported by CBS that “15%

158 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ of all babies born had mothers who abused drugs.”28 This focus quickly saw the media direct the spotlight to black or Latino women. According to Douglas and Michaels in their recent publication, The Mommy Myth: The idealization of Motherhood and How it had Undermined Women, the news networks documented the epidemic by showing “the requisite premmie in a neonatal ICU,” then routinely showed dozens of bassinettes lined up side by side in maternity wards, all of which allegedly contained “crack babies.” All kinds of estimates were thrown out – that anywhere from three to five hundred thousand crack babies would be born that year alone, that 15 percent of babies born were crack babies, that five years hence the, that five years hence the schools would be overrun by “a tidal wave” of crack kids who would be handicapped in all kinds of ways.29 There was, however, no epidemic of underweight babies damaged for life, destined to become a menace to society because their mothers were smoking crack. Crack babies were a media creation, a hyping and misrepresentation of medical studies… It turns out that the symptoms the news media attributed to crack use as often as not were the effects of alcohol, tobacco and, most importantly, poverty and lack of prenatal care.30 The “crack babies” moral panic may have dissipated, but drug-using mothers are still headline copy. In a recent case of neglect in Australia a 19year-old drug-injecting mother whose third baby was born by emergency caesarean five weeks premature due to her drug use was found guilty of neglect when it was revealed that the 10 month-old infant weighed just 6.82 kilograms. The court heard how the mother was ‘spread thin’ and was under the pressure of poverty and lack of support in parenting her three children. Nowhere in the press discourse is there a mention of the responsibilities of the father. John Hartley argues that: A community fear of child-abuse is news; ‘teaching’ how to sustain a culture of child-care is not. The consequence is that news rarely reports what may be learned from instances of child-abuse by parents, carers and children themselves. There is no editorial urgency about preventative policies.31

159 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ 6. A Master Narrative - Murdering Mothers and the 10-pointTriple Back Flip In the UK in recent years four mothers, Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, Trupti Patel and Donna Anthony were part of a highly newsworthy master narrative of murdering mothers. These women each became collective fodder for a media feeding frenzy on deviant motherhood, which has recently been forced to do a complete turnaround. Sally Clark, convicted of the murder of her two infant sons Harry and Christopher in 1999, was portrayed in the media as a selfish, career-driven drunk who resented her babies for the loss of her pre-pregnancy figure. The Daily Telegraph ran an article “Against the Odds” after Clark’s conviction and when the public discourse - outside of the media - was questioning her conviction. This Telegraph article illustrates the media’s agility in being able to spin a story 360 degrees without missing a beat, but also the way a media organisation can be at one and the same time part of the pack and apart from the pack. The Telegraph’s Bob Woffinden in a 2001 article claimed the media had treated Clark poorly. Sally Clark, he said, had been portrayed as enjoying a “champagne lifestyle” in a luxurious cottage in the stockbroker belt of Cheshire and was portrayed as: a selfish, alcoholic, grasping, depressive, career-obsessed woman who liked pretty clothes, and who first abused and then murdered her children because they ruined her figure and stood in the way of her lucrative future.32 As Sally Clark’s husband, Steven, reminds us, “in the pursuit of sensation, no media, at the time of her trial, pointed out that the prosecution’s medical evidence was flawed and discredited, even by the Crown’s own witnesses.” Another of these murdering mothers, Trupti Patel, was portrayed in a negative light as a career-driven, cold and uncaring mother. Patel’s case is doubly disturbing because her media misrepresentation continues. Unlike the other women, Patel was never convicted of murdering her children, she was found innocent of all charges; she never spent time in gaol. And yet British newspapers in 2005 were running news stories in the new master narrative of martyred mothers wrongfully convicted of murdering their babies, in which all of these women, including Patel, were convicted and gaoled for murder. Donna Anthony, who spent six years in gaol for the murder of her two children, was labelled by the press a “baby-killing bitch” and “evil mother” who killed her son to get sympathy and to make her estranged husband feel guilty after an argument.33 Angela Cannings was portrayed as a dull and ordinary woman who couldn’t cope with motherhood so she serially smothered her children.

160 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ So, what does the media do when the women they so energetically vilified as monstrous Medeas are found to be innocent after all, the victims of faulty expert medical evidence? They seamlessly perform a 10-point-Triple Back Flip and recreate these women in another sensationalised news construct as the ‘martyred mothers’, and at the same time find a new monster in Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the medical expert witness whose evidence has since been found to be misleading in Sally Clark’s trial. In June 2005 Meadow was struck off by the General Medical Council after his misleading evidence in the Clark case. Dr Theodore Dalrymple wrote in a 2003 Daily Telegraph profile on Meadow: Professor Sir Roy Meadow is the villain of the week, the man we all love to hate. This once highly-respected indeed world-famous, emeritus professor of paediatrics at Leeds university, now 70 years old, has been called “ the childsnatcher-in-chief” by The Daily Mail, a sobriquet that will probably further confuse the part of the population that has difficulty distinguishing between paediatricians and paedophiles.34 What Dalrymple got wrong was the calculation that Meadow would be villain for a week, that his newsworthiness would be transitory. Meadow’s expert medical evidence in hundreds of criminal and family court cases over the past decade is now under scrutiny. News audiences have a new monster narrative and are now lapping up the ‘demon doctor’ narrative with the voracious appetite of a gallows pack. The martyred mothers narrative, I suspect, with its symbiotic relationship to the demon doctor, will be consumed within this new master narrative, allowing the deviant mother narrative to survive in its many manifestations. 7.

Conclusion The media has clearly identified motherhood’s news values as coming from the two extremes: from the idealised to the demonised: from the sex goddess whose perfect body has been transformed by the seductive fecundity of maternity, to the “monstrous mother” who murders her own babies. In terms of media attention, outside these disparate constructs, ‘regular’ mothers can only register on the news values radar when they are perceived as super mothers with ten kids under eight, give birth to quintuplets, or deliver on the right calendar event - Christmas Day, New Year’s Day or Mother’s Day. Anything in between these extremes holds little or no news value. While regular sleep-deprived mothers, struggling to nurture their babies amidst household debt, social isolation, ill-health, stretch marks and flabby

161 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ stomachs, continue to be absent from the media motherhood discourse, society’s expectations of mothers and motherhood will remain trapped into a damaging circularity, shutting out important social discourse on issues such as poverty, social isolation and child-care which impact directly on women’s mothering experiences. Jennie Lusk recommended in her 2001 study of Mexican neonaticide that consideration be made to the “societal implications of our impulse to shun neonatidical mother.”35 Motherhood discourse itself has been reduced to simplistic news narratives that seeks to entertain with stories about celebrity Madonnas or monstrous Medeas. In an increasingly Huxleyan world where, according to Neil Postman, culture is becoming a burlesque and the population is distracted by trivia: when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.36 Public opinion is formed in part by media discourse; individual opinions and knowledge of crime and health issues, such as infanticide, are rarely base on direct experience. Instead highly abstracted and tenuous opinions are formed from and based upon media discourse. Contemporary motherhood news narratives continue to polarise complex issues into melodramas of good and evil. Michelle Oberman writing about the media’s coverage of women who kill their children says “…parents, social service agencies, and the legal, medical, and mental health communities have stumbled in their responsibility to address the complicated, myriad issues that smoulder beneath a layer of public indignation over the lurid details that surround these killings.”37 While mothers in their various constructs are defined as newsworthy or not newsworthy, women are rarely the definers of news. Newsroom culture and practice means that few women, few mothers reach the upper echelons of gate-keeping. When they do the pressure is on to keep the winning status quo, to maintain the ratings, to increase the circulation figures - and as we all know the highest rating newspapers are tabloids with their diet of barebreasted page-three girls, of celebrity mums, and monstrous and deviant mothers. Public opinion is informed by media coverage, decision makers, from policy makers to parliamentarians, from judges to juries, are all informed in part by a ‘common-sense’ knowledge of the world which is informed by public opinion. The demonising of certain mothers and the idealisation of

162 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________ others creates a pattern of representation which negatively impacts on the way society constructs motherhood.

Notes 1

Schultz, Julieanne, “Stars, lies and propaganda,” Griffith Review 5 (2004): 9. 2 Anna Gough-Yates, Understanding Women’s Magazines, Publishing, Markets and Readerships. (London: Routledge, 2003), 136. 3 Anne Summers, The End of Equality, Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003 ), 7. 4 Clay Calvert, Voyeur Nation – Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2004), 73. 5 Ibid, 74. 6 Anonymous, “She’s Having a baby!” Who Weekly, 25 April 2005, 34-35. 7 Anonymous, “Pregnant Britney’s Hospital Dash,” Woman’s Day, 25 April 2005, 10. 8 Lana Berkowitz, “Britney prepares for motherhood – and we can’t take our eyes off her,” Houston Chronicle, 15 April 2005, sec. HLF. (24 April 2005). 9 Anonymous, “Nicole Reveals – ‘I’m in baby mode’,” Woman’s Day, 5 April 2005, 14-15. 10 Anonymous, “Demi pregnant and smoking?” Woman’s Day, 25 April 2005, 8-9. 11 Anonymous, “Now you don’t have to be expecting to have that radiant glow everyday,” Woman’s Day, 25 April 2005, 27. 12 Anonymous, “Sperm Race,” Metro, 23 July 23 2004, sec C, p. 3. 13 Toby Sterling, “Pregnant woman is reality for the Dutch ‘Big Brother’” Associated Press, 30 August 2005, (31 August 2005). . 14 Anonymous, “Birth first for Dutch Big Brother”, BBC News UK Edition, 19 October 2005, (26 October 2005). . 15 Anonymous, “Contestant gives birth on Dutch Big Brother,” Irish Examiner, 18 October 2005, (24 October 2005). . 16 Anonymous, “Reality’s new milestone: TV contestant gives birth,” CBC Arts, 19 October 2005 (24 October 2005). . 17 Anonymous, “Performance the Art of Birth,” The Weekend Australian, 23-24 April 2005, sec. C, p. 25.

163 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ 18

Anonymous, “Artist Invites Public to Birth of His Child”, AFP, 25 April 2005. 19 Roxanne Roberts, “Do Me a Favor, Keep a Lid on Your Double Latte,” Washington Post, 11 August 2004, sec. CO1. 20 Dominique Jackson, “Accessory after the act,” The Weekend Australian Magazine, 29-30 March 2003, 33-37. 21 Ibid. 22 Rebecca Williams, “Newberry keen to make new golden splash,” The Hobart Mercury, 27 Jan 2005, sec C. p. 40. 23 Dee O’Connell. “What happened Next?” Observer, 30 March 2003 (24 April 24 2005). . 24 Jane Hall, “How the Media Cover Women”, Fox News Watch 8 November 2002 (29 April 2005). . 25 Anonymous, “Monstress: the diary of a child murderer,” Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2003, sec B. p.31. 26 Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth - The Idealization of Motherhood and How it has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, 2004), 154-5. 27 Ibid. 28 CBS News, January 9, 1989; cited in Douglas et al., 155. 29 NBC News, Oct. 29, 1988; cited in Douglas et al., 156. 30 Douglas et al., 160. 31 John Hartley, “JUVENATION News, Girls and Power” in News, Gender and Power, ed. Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allen, (London: Routledge, 1998), 47-70. 32 Bob Woffinden, “Against the Odds,” Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2001, sec. 2177. 33 Ken Norman, “Donna Anthony,” 18 November, 1998, (24 April 2005). <www.portia.org/chapter04/anthony.html>. 34 Dr Theodore Dalrymple, “Roy Meadow Profile,” Daily Telegraph, 14 December, 2003, sec. Op Ed. 35 Jennie Lusk, “Modern New Mexican neonaticide: Tranquilizing with this jewel/ the torments of confusion,” Texas Journal of Women and the Law 11(2001):1. 93-130. 36 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 155-156. 37 Julie Brienza, “When the bough breaks: Can justice be served in neonaticide cases?” Trial 33 (1997): 13-17.

164 Monstrous Mothers and the Media ______________________________________________________________

References Batt, John, Stolen Innocence - The Story of Sally Clark. London: Ebury Press, 2004. Brienza, Julie. “When the bough breaks: Can Justice be served in neonaticide cases?” Trial. 33 (1997): 13-17. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation - Media Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: West View Press, 2004. Dally, Ann, Inventing Motherhood, The consequences of an ideal. London: Burnett Books, 1992. Douglas, Susan J. and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The idealization of Motherhood and How it has Undermined Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Gough-Yates, Anna. Understanding Women’s Magazines, Publishing, Markets and Readerships. London: Routledge, 2003. Hartley, John. “JUVENATION News, girls and power.” In News, Gender and Power, edited by Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allen, 47-70. London: Routledge, 1998. Hollows, Joanne, Feminism, femininity and popular culture. Manchester: MUP, 2000. Lusk, Jennie. “Modern New Mexican Neonaticide: Tranquilizing with this jewel/ the tormenta of confusion.” Texas Journal of Women and the Law. Austin. 11 (2001): 93-130. Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Schultz, Julieanne, “Stars, lies and propoganda,” Griffith Review 5 (2004): 712. Summers, Anne, The End of Equality, Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003.

165 Nicola Goc ______________________________________________________________ Surette, Ray, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice - Images and Realities. California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998. Warner, Judith, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Wykes, Maggie, News, Crime and Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2001.

Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets: Autoerotic Desire, Sexual Exchange and the Cinematic Serial Killer Greg Tuck Abstract Of all the sexual behaviours to gain cinematic visibility since the ‘liberalisations’ of the 1960s, masturbation seems to have taken the longest to establish itself. However, rather than this increased visibility reflecting either a simple relaxation of attitudes, or a postmodern, ironic attitude to sexuality, many if not most direct representations continue to promote a negative view of masturbation. This paper argues that this attitude is informed as much by the anti-masturbation hysteria of the eighteenth and nineteenth century as by contemporary attitudes to the practice. In particular, it will discuss why representations of masturbation are employed to demonstrate the perverse sexuality of the serial killer, a lone individual caught in a spiral of ever increasing insanity, alienation, sadism and masturbation. What seems particularly monstrous about their masturbation is the total consumption and objectification of the victim by the serial killer is merely an activity that facilitates a consumption of the self. A reading of the behaviour of Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Nofrio) the serial killer of The Cell (Tarsem Singh, USA, 2000) will be presented, which maps the alienated and monstrous autoeroticism of the serial killer. It will suggest that rather than ‘exceptional’ these masturbating serial killers are merely an ‘extreme’ reflection and metaphor of a more general anxiety regarding the autonomy of the selfpleasuring lone individual of both modernity and the market economy. Likewise, rather than suggesting an emergent ‘postmodern’ attitude to sexual autonomy, this anxiety is as old as the free market itself. Key Words: Masturbation, Autoeroticism, Serial-Killers, Insanity, Consumption, Individual, Market Economy, Postmodernism

Alienation,

As much scholarly work over the last thirty years or so has demonstrated, sexuality, both in terms of human sexual behaviour and representations of that behaviour, has a history. At different times and in different cultures what counts as normative and what counts as deviant, which forms of sexual pleasure are socially accepted or celebrated and which forms are considered problematic or even outlawed and vilified has shown a wide degree of variation. However, at the same time, the actuality of the human body and the sites and pleasures available to it are materially limited,

168 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ so despite the censure, people throughout history have often enjoyed many of the same types of ‘wrong’ sex. Indeed, as the archaeologists, Timothy Taylor has claimed, ‘as soon as there are written records, from around 5,000 years ago in the Near East, we find references to many of the sexual practices homosexuality, male and female transsexualism and transvestism, masturbation - familiar to us today’.1 So there appears to be a profound split or gap between what people do and what the ruling patriarchal, economic and theological classes wish us to do, or not to do. Undoubtedly this gap reflects a variety of social concerns over the split between our pursuit of sexual pleasure and the material actualities of our procreative function or capacities and the perceived need to bring the former under the control of the latter. In crude terms there are social forces that want us to make babies rather than make whoopee. However while issues of paternity, title and property offer the primary motive for the policing of sexuality, rather than the prevention of pleasure per se, it is the pursuit of sexual pleasure outside codified and socially sanctioned systems of reproduction that most commonly stands as the object of censure and control. However, in our contemporary historical situation, that is post the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, many would argue that this historically typical censure against pleasure seems to be on the wane. Furthermore, in the West, at least, the material reality of contraception has for decades allowed sex to be nonreproductive, whilst the recent developments in IVF have now freed reproduction from sex. No more would this change in attitudes appear to be visible than in attitudes towards, and the representation of, masturbation. For much of western history masturbation has been overwhelmingly and often hysterically vilified for being a sexual practice that is not simply not-reproductive, but anti-reproductive. Beyond the mere denial of a procreative event, the solitary rather than the intersubjective nature of the act has been seen as anathema to social solidarity in general. Nowadays however, especially in ‘self-help’ literature, one is more likely to find masturbation ‘widely recommended as a major source of sexual pleasures, and actively encouraged as a mode of improving sexual responsiveness on the part of both sexes’.2 Furthermore, according to surveys of sexual behaviour virtually 100% of men and 70% of women now admit masturbation at some time, with the figure for female masturbation according to more recent survey’s by the likes of Shere Hite, rising.3 This would suggest that the sexual-political articulation of masturbation is undergoing a revolutionary change, not least in the closing of the gap between actual human practice and social/theoretical belief. An acceptance of the overwhelming harmless and often beneficial effects of masturbation in conjunction with the admission of its ubiquity seems to be negating previous anxieties. The willingness to represent masturbation in mainstream cinema, a mass art form that tends to follow and reflect rather than lead or challenge

169 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ changes in social and sexual attitudes, could therefore be read as part of these changes. As the following selection from amongst many demonstrates, masturbation is now widely portrayed. The multiple Oscar winner American Beauty (Sam Mendes, USA, 1999), the critical successes Happiness (Todd Solondz, USA, 1998), Pleasantville (Gary Ross, USA, 1999), Mullholland Drive (David Lynch, France/USA, 2001), and Secretary (Steven Shainberg, USA, 2002), and the box office hits There’s Something About Mary (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, USA, 1998), and American Pie (Paul Weitz, USA, 1999), all contain explicit representations of masturbation – explicit not in the strict proto-medical sense of pornography, but explicit in that (within current censorship regimes) the act is simulated rather than merely inferred, implied or suggested, and explicit in the sense that the scenes explicate pivotal narrative moments. They are not merely ‘incidents’, horrible, humorous or otherwise, but central to the portrayal of a particular subjectivity, a form of lived embodiment, that is thrown into relief by this particular embodied activity. While in comparison with earlier periods of film production this would suggest that masturbation has become ‘representable’ in the mainstream the question is, why now? Well, one possibility, following Fredric Jameson analysis of our contemporary cultural situation, is to suggest that these representations are related to and symptomatic of a wider social transformation - namely postmodernity. While something of a disputed term, from Jameson’s essentially historical materialist position, postmodernism describes a cultural and aesthetic formation that can be read as a marker of the cultural style of late, or more specifically consumer, capitalism.4 In crude terms Jameson attempts to articulate the broad periodisations offered in the work of the Marxist economist, Ernst Mandel with Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural ‘structures of feeling’ to suggest that different economic modes express different modes of culture. In addition to the obvious differences between massively different economic formations such as the slave-based economies of classical antiquity, medieval feudalism and industrial capitalism, one can trace periodisations within these periodisations, such that developments within capitalism can be identified. While not necessarily in pure synchrony let alone a relationship of linear determination it is claimed that the specific way we make and consume commodities and the specific way we make and consume wider cultural formations inform one another. While obviously something of a broad brushstroke, the coal, steam and iron phase of nineteenth century capitalist production can be analysed in terms of a particular dynamic relationship with realism, while the petrol, electric and steel phase of the first half of the century occupies a similarly structured relationship with modernism. Now we have entered a new stage of electronic, nuclear and plastic production a new cultural logic, postmodernism, has emerged to accompany it. Postmodernism is therefore another word for late

170 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ capitalism. Jameson is at pains to argue that the boundaries between these phases are wide and diffuse and again, following Williams, residual, dominant and emergent economic and cultural formations exist side by side. Likewise, rather than a crude claim for the economic determination of cultural production (let alone as in our case of sexuality itself), this is simply to suggest that economic, aesthetic and sexual ideas and practices are mutually co-determining. How we produce and how we reproduce, our experience of commodity pleasure and of sexual pleasure, are not as separate realms as they might at first appear to be. As Frederick Engels described it, According to the materialistic conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.5 So, rather than grading each of these inseparable spheres of human life, the point is to grasp how in ‘real life’ the sexual and the economic actually share an underlying model or schema of both human embodiment and of value. What counts as true and permissible in each field, that is, the underlying logic through which their different interpretations and patterns are built, identified and proceed are actually more similar than they are different. Despite or indeed prior to any claims made regarding whether it is our sexual or our economic lives that, in Althusser’s famous phrase, ‘determine in the last instance’6 the fact is they both rely at a fundamental level on the same axioms and assumptions. Hence the ideological attitudes promoted in the economic sphere inform the sexual sphere and vice versa and therefore the postmodern turn should be recognisable at the level of sexual, as well as, cultural and economic practice. It is in this respect that, the re-evaluation, indeed the promotion of masturbation both as an actual behaviour as well as a cultural metaphor seems both, a motif for the sexual style and a privileged site of analysis for the sexual logic, of late capitalism. As with Jameson’s description of the postmodern turn more generally, the masturbatory turn could therefore be read as equally reflecting the key markers of postmodernism, but within the sexual rather than the economic or the aesthetic sphere. These markers were, first, and most obviously, a sense that every aspect of life, even those previously beyond or less touched by market relations such as sexuality were now coming under their sway. Secondly, a growing distractedness and depthlessness both within art and the subject, in essence a waning of affect, and a concomitant distrust of any grand or overarching narrative (with the exception of the market itself)

171 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ that would claim to return us to a state of meaning. Third, the promotion of consumption over production as the key economic and cultural descriptor, which both seemed to promote the interest of the individual while at the same time channelling and limiting them to serve interests other than their own. When applied to the field of sexuality, masturbation and more importantly the new commodities (such as sex toys, home consumed pornography and erotica via video, DVD and now the internet, cable and satellite television, phone sex etc) associated with masturbatory pleasure would seem to clearly demonstrate the final penetration of commodificatory dynamics into the realm of social and sexual relations. First, we no longer simply partake of masturbatory pleasure directly, we manufacture distribute, exchange and consume masturbatory pleasure, such that it is mediated through market forms. Furthermore such industries and consumer goods would support the idea of a certain degree of reversibility with regard to the vector of determination between the sexual and the economic. That is, while these commodities helped facilitate masturbation their economic success and expansion were equally driven by masturbatory desires, a model that suggests the inherently masturbatory pleasure of commodity consumption more generally. With the masturbatory commodity, consumer goods seem to have reached an apotheosis, an almost pure form. However, even if we would do well to not collapse or homogenise consumption and sexual pleasures quite so fully or so easily, such an analysis does at least suggest that in both cases (the general consumer commodity and the sexual commodity) the political locus seems to have shifted from productive classes to single and autonomous consuming subjects. We now live in a social formation where self-pleasure has become the paramount driver of economic activity so it becomes untenable for this economic logic not to effect our understanding of sexual logic. More specifically masturbatory satisfaction mimics commodity satisfaction in that it is both fully heterogeneous, it is based entirely on a conception of the monadic ‘free’ individual, and fully homogeneous at the same time in that all these individuals consume the same thing, despite the individual packaging. Indeed if not entirely outside of the notion of sexual difference, masturbation does seem in excess of it as both genders and all sexualities can partake of it. As with capitalism generally however, the effect of such sexual abstraction and sexual reification are both ambiguous and paradoxical as they are lived ‘as catastrophe and progress altogether’.7 In the emergence of a sexually autonomous subject in whom sexual desire can finally break free of the tethers of sexual function, it suggests a progress. This is where the sense that masturbation is in excess of sexual difference should not be read as a simple claim for masturbatory androgyny. For example, the role of masturbation in the development of second wave feminism, in particular its vital role in the development of the bodysex workshops of Betty Dodson in

172 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ the early 1970s cannot be underestimated. Dodson developed a new discourse on masturbation that came to define female masturbation as a right and a form of self-love rather than self-abuse. In 1974, the woman’s magazine Ms. ran an article that widely publicised Dodson’s views and which later became the groundbreaking book, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Selflove. This promotion of a women’s right to self induced orgasm, their autonomous control over their own bodies, undoubtedly rendered masturbation a ‘political’ act. Yet at the same time and again following Jameson postmodernism thesis, in the potential alienation of the subject not merely from a specific other, but any other, the promotion of masturbation could equally suggest a catastrophic waning of affect. Literally nothing, beyond ourselves, can touch us. From this perspective the sexual consumption of the self suggests the deepening reification of the sexual body, an objectification of sex, a process indexed through the growing profits of the atomising entertainment industry generally and the pornography sector in particular. Even from a more neutral standpoint however, somewhere between either of these utopian or dystopian readings, the promotion of masturbation as a model of both commodity consumption and sexual autonomy certainly suggests at least the blurring of the sexual the economic and the cultural. The ethical and social use-value of sexuality is either being replaced by an aestheticised and privatised exchange-value, or the boundary between them has become so fluid as to render their separate existences problematic. However, again following Jameson, to accept the recent ‘appearance’ of representations of masturbation within contemporary cinema as actually signifying such a truly radical change or break with the past, as marking ‘shifts and irrevocable changes in the representations of things and of the way they change’,8 is to do more than note, a mere lessening of the previous censure. As is often lost in discussions of Jameson’s position there is a danger here of eliding the difference between postmodernism as an analytical description of a social formation and a political proscription of a social formation. Indeed, for all of its radical claims of ultra modernity, the celebratory reading of postmodernity is actually typical of the centuriesestablished liberal models of bourgeois modernity. What must be resisted here is the liberal (if not specifically Whiggish) desire to read such change in terms of historical ‘progress’, or in terms that suggest or support an ideology of moral evolution. Jameson himself attempts to avoid this pitfall by insisting that while 'distracted' by the process of variation at work in the surface multiplicity, one must assign no distinction of value to these different registers. The main claim is more that sexual practices and sexual desire are no longer anchored to a referent in nature, but instead mark a world ‘in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature”’.9 That is, in the rejection of the liberal notions of historical tendency or progress as well as any

173 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ substantive content to our sexual identity the masturbatory turn marks a move from an ethical to an aesthetic analysis of sexuality. However, while the above description would seem to offer a number of useful theoretical tools through which to analyse the representation of masturbation we would do well to pause before pursuing it further. I would argue that it is questionable whether we should accept the recent ‘appearance’ of such representations, particularly within contemporary cinema, as actually signifying such a radical change or break with the past in the first place. First, how far sexuality has ever been so simple or directly anchored to a referent in nature is a moot point. Second, as is so often the case for arguments in favour of the ‘newness’ of postmodernity (whether as active celebration or even neutral observation), they tend to suffer from a certain degree of historical and theoretical amnesia in which ones own theoretical aporias are misinterpreted as social symptom. In simple terms, there is not that much which is actually new, or radically so, in these representation of masturbation. To begin with the majority of contemporary cinematic representations of masturbation are clearly critical of the practice and critical in ways that, as we shall see, are not particularly postmodern. For most representations of masturbation, particularly but not exclusively male masturbation, the masturbator remains, as they have for much of the last three centuries, a sad, bad or mad subject. The characters involved in teen ‘caughtmasturbating’ scenes, such as in American Pie (Paul and Chris Weitz, USA, 2000), are usually portrayed as anxious and often physically feeble. The masturbating paedophile Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and obscene telephone caller Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) of Happiness (Todd Solondz, USA, 1999), the police Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) in Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, USA, 1992) and the writer Melvin Udall (Jack Nicohlson) in As Good As It Gets (James L. Brooks, USA, 1997) are all represented as in some sense, not only morally bankrupt, but caught in a masturbatory self-reflexive critical loop with their own sense of personal degeneracy. However, it is in the common linkage between masturbation and insanity that any postmodern interpretation of these representations meets its strongest challenge. For what seems particularly striking in these representations of the mad (and more often than not, criminally insane) masturbator, is the persistence of a distinctly eighteenth century, an early modern rather than twenty-first century, or postmodern, attitude and sensibility. Before turning to the origins of this eighteenth and nineteenth century anti-masturbation attitude, if not hysteria, it is worth noting the prevalence of these representations of mad masturbators within mainstream cinema, representations which seem almost the antithesis of the ironic, and unaffected attitude associated with postmodernity. Indeed, cinematic representations of mad masturbators are common and include both men and

174 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ women; men such as Miggs (Stuart Rudin) in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, USA, 1991), Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn) in the remake of Psycho (Gus Van Sant, USA, 1998), and Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) in The Cell (Tarsem Singh, USA, 2000), and women such as Hedera (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, USA, 1992), Joanna (Ashley Judd) in Eye of the Beholder (Stephan Elliott, USA, 1999), Betty/Diane (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA, 2001) and Marie (Cecile De France) Haute Tension – Switchblade Romance (Alexandre Aja, France, 2003), to name but a few. In these films masturbation not only indexes, but is also presented as in some sense causal of madness, the madness of a lone individual who is caught in a spiral of ever-increasing insanity, social separation, violence and intensifying masturbation. For these text, to masturbate is to commit a crime against reason, the self, society, indeed, life itself. Furthermore, the semiotic clarity of these representations not only suggests the madness of the character, but also equally tends to suggest the madness of masturbation per se. That is, there is no distance between the characters behaving like that, masturbating, and being like that, insane. Both act and state are manifestations of the same thing, the subject’s separation from any externally mediated or determining agency or authority. Theirs is a mad, alienated sexuality through which as a direct result of the attempt to achieve primacy in matters of sex and/or sense via purely intra-subjectively generated unilateral notions of totality, that is via a desire for the self as total authority, the subject loses all contact with the other. Consequently the very fortification of the self against the authority of the other blocks the possibility of a genuine encounter and hence the possibility of establishing both the other as object and the self as subject in the first place. Indeed whether the insane masturbator is properly self-conscious at all is in some dispute and these particular types of representation of masturbation often present an ambiguous position that wants these characters to be both less than human, yet still culpable. They are denied both the innocence of animality and the subjectivity of a properly self-conscious, ethical subject. This combination of both a metaphoric and causal relationship between the separation of the psychotic from social intercourse and the separation of the masturbator from sexual intercourse has a long heritage. That is, one can identify an epistemological break in attitudes towards masturbation, but it occurred, or started to occur not under postmodernity, but about three hundred years. As a number of medical historians have noted, among them, Peter Lewis Allen, Around 1700 [...] the concept of ‘self-abuse’ leapt over the dividing line between religion and medicine, as doctors warned for the first time that masturbators were

175 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ endangering not only their souls, but their bodies as well’.10 Concurrent with both the age of reason and rise of market relations an anti-masturbation hysteria began that ragged across both Europe and America for over two hundred years. Whilst history rarely offers us clear dates for such shifts, with the anonymous publication in 1715 of a pamphlet entitled Onania, or The Heinous Sin of pollution and All its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes considered, with physical and spiritual advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice, 11 the idea that masturbation was not only sinful but that it caused physical and mental disease was establish. Onania combined the absolutist morality of the bible, particularly the condemnation of Onan’s spilt seed (Genesis 38 4-10), with the quasi-empirical Ancient Greek model of the bodily humours developed between 500BCE to around 200 AD, to imply that the loss of vital fluids, in both male and female masturbation, was both bad and dangerous. Unlike the emphasis on balance inherent to the humoral model as it had previously been understood, any loss was now considered dangerous. Accumulation of fluids, not their balanced expenditure was the key to a healthy life and the body was more and more viewed as an ideal rather than material system, something that was owned rather than lived, lost rather than experienced. By 1750 the support offered to these ideas by the eminent Swiss physician, Tissot had established the dangerous effects of masturbation as a ‘medical fact’. Even that arch rationalist Immanuel Kant defined Onanism as an ‘abuse of the sexual faculty [by which] a man sets aside his person and degrades himself below the level of animals […] and no longer deserves to be a person’. 12 By Victorian times this hysteria had reached epidemic proportions. Now the ‘cures’ on offer were no longer limited to potions and pamphlets but included forms of bondage clothing, toothed anti erection rings, genital cages and even barbaric surgical intervention such as suturing closed the foreskin, cauterisation of sensitive tissue, and even castration and clitoridectomy. There were obviously a number of factors involved in this phenomenon. The rise in literacy and the growing popularity of sexually explicit literature, the development of singular rather than collective bedrooms, the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, all undoubtedly contributed to the ideological notion that masturbation was on the increase. However, as with Jameson’s insistence on the mutually determining role of economic, social and sexual logic, of particular note was the rise of the market economy, which developed and promoted a notion of the free individual that was difficult to confine to the economic sphere. As the historian Thomas Laqueur has suggested,

176 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ the debate over masturbation that raged from the eighteenth century onwards might best be understood as part of the more general debate about the unleashing of desire upon which a commercial economy depended and about the possibilities of human community under these circumstances - a sexual version of the classic ‘Adam Smith problem’.13 In simple terms, the problem identified by Adam Smith in his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (1759) was how do social and moral notions survive the self interest unleashed by a market economy? Smith held that our ability to put ourselves in the position of a neutral observer tempered our natural economic selfishness and allowed an acceptable level of self-interest to drive capitalism. As with the majority of Enlightenment thinkers Smith’s appeal is to the developing notion of ‘reason’. However, whilst such neutrality was presented as possible in matters of economic logic this ontological model seemed less capable of restraint when it came to matters of sexuality which seemed beyond or outside such reason. The notion of a neutral sexual body, one outside affect, makes little sense. The problem would seem to be that the development and promotion of the bourgeois individual concurrent with the rise of capitalism and the ideological role of this individual in the mechanics of a ‘free’ market, developed an ontological model of the subject that is specifically vulnerable to the contradictions and limitations of masturbatory logic. That is, as the dominant object of political ontology under capitalism became the monadic human body, the prosaic if not ridiculous counterpart of the newly dominant and sublime Cogito, the ideological attack on masturbation increased in severity precisely as the practice became more logically viable. This is the paradox at the heart of the consumer capitalist model of embodiment that continues today. The insane masturbator materialises this paradox. First they are conceived of as lone individuals who live outside of both social and sexual community, yet they equally want to have absolute sexual mastery and ownership of others. Simultaneously they cannot have relations with persons, only things, that is they must literally objectify their victims. However an object cannot confer the sense of mastery they seek, it does not of itself have value, so the object must be revalued or fetishised in some way so as to demonstrate the sense of mastery the serial killer believes to be the source of pleasure that they seek. This is why the serial killer’s masturbations are not represented as solitary acts, but usually involve an abused if not murdered other. They present a notion of the free/isolated individual and then imagine how (yet fear the impossibility of), reincorporating such monads into a social or intersubjective sexual formation. Hence while the victim is reduced to little but a masturbatory prop, they are fully objectified, they have only a

177 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ limited use value in this state, one that seems incapable of conferring the sexual mastery the serial killer seeks. To be seen to be master, to be recognised as master, the object must have some degree of subjectivity that can be mastered in the first place, so they must be further fetishised. The object must be reinvested with some degree of subjectivity in order to offer recognition. It is in this act of fetishisation that the victim gains not merely a use value but an exchange value and can no longer be understood as simply objectified, but more specifically commodified. By exchange is meant the precise sense in which the serial killers’ act buys recognition rather than simply consumes or uses the victim. Furthermore, rather than the fetishisation actually being premised on the individual and perverse desires of the ‘individual’ killer, the fetishisation renders the victims as both interchangeable and exchangeable in an ‘objective’ manner. Indeed, it is this paradoxical demand for ‘objective’ recognition, a form of recognition that can only be conferred by a ‘subject’, which demonstrates how the serial killer is no more divorced from or beyond the sexual/social intersubjective matrix than anyone else. They are, in effect, trying to find a way out of the Adam Smith problem, without giving up their selfishness. However as the market is an intersubjective social relation masquerading as an objective and monadic one, this absolute selfishness is self-defeating. Without some social confirmation of the value of their victim they can never receive the absolute confirmation of their mastery they seek. Yet to accept this need for intersubjective and socially determined notions of value requires them to give up on their mad dreams of total mastery. This is why they are condemned to repeat, as the object of consumption is logically incapable of delivering the satisfaction that it promises. So while such sexual fetishisation is most commonly read in psychoanalytic terms, it is in Capital that Marx offers a model of fetishisation (specifically in relation to commodity fetishism and to the fetish object par excellent - money) that allows us to analyses this process in a way more amenable to these scenes of sadistic, consumption driven, masturbation. First, as with his notion of the market itself, no one is ‘free’ of it, second it is not premised or reliant on notions of sexual difference and hence the masturbatory nature of the act can remain the central focus and third, it explicitly analyses the conversion of use value to exchange value.14 Indeed, it is in their perversion of an intersubjective sex act, even an abusive one into a masturbatory event that much of the anxiety and moral censure around these mad masturbations seems to stem. Hence the cinematic serial killer as opposed to their real life counter part is rarely represented as a rapist. Instead they are more often than not represented as specifically incapable of rape, which while a negative and exploitative act, is after all still a direct intersubjective encounter. Instead the sexuality of the serial killer is specifically described as paradoxically a desire for absolute sexual mastery

178 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ over the other, but a mastery that demands such a high degree of mediation to protect them from a truly intersubjective sexual encounter, it inverts and becomes a quest for ‘masturbatory-mastery’. It is the perilously similar logic of commodity consumption and masturbatory mastery, their shared reliance on modes of objectification, mediation and fetishisation, that is the underlying horror of these representations. For example, the Sadeian masturbation of Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio), the psychotic serial killer of The Cell, which occurs over the brutalised corpse of his mechanically drowned victims, would at first seem to offer a perfect description of a self-consciousness in search of such absolute sexual mastery. Both narrative and mise-en-scène draw on virtually all the major themes, concepts and anxieties of the anti-masturbatory hysteria of the last three centuries, not least in the narrative’s promotion of murder, madness and masturbation as activities that are logically homologous. All three are presented as determinedly anti-intersubjective phenomena that express an active desire for the subject’s total or absolute domination of the other and mark the subject’s attempt to negate his dependence on the mutuality and reversibility of human contact and the priority of our social interdependence. Furthermore, although Carl is in one sense ‘heterosexual’ in that he specifically abducts and murders young women, he does not rape them, not even necrophilically, and in this respect his masturbatory priorities place him both inside and outside the normative sexual binary. Indeed, he is specifically represented as incapable of having any direct sexual/physical contact with them at all as even the death of Carl’s victims is brought about remotely, in the absence of Carl. After their abduction in which they are rendered unconscious, Carl’s victim’s wake to find themselves alone in a prison cell, which has a glass front and side. After a short time, a powerful shower comes on and the cell automatically, but very slowly, begins to fill with water until after a long and terrifying ordeal to stay afloat, they drown. The cell is located underground in an abandoned industrial unit in the desert. Carl is not present at the drownings although, crucially, he does video the event. This video evidence of his mastery is one level of mediation with the resulting video acting as one of the main fetish objects that Carl seems to truly value. We witness Carl’s horror, indeed fear, of the other as a live person when we first meet him as he comes to collect his latest victim. As he passes the cell, the young female victim shudders and kicks in either her last gasp of life, or merely in an automatic nervous reaction. Either way, rather than enjoy the unmediated spectacle, Carl retreats in horror and hides behind a desk. Of note is the fact that to comfort himself he clutches his penis, holding himself like a little boy for reassurance rather than pleasure. After she is killed and as with his numerous previous victims, Carl takes the corpse home and bleaches it in a bath full of chemicals until the

179 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ body is white and doll like. The cadaver is now the second form of fetish object with the bleaching process ensuring that all these individual young women have been rendered physically interchangeable. An individual live woman has been mediated into an interchangeable dead thing. The prepared body is then laid out on a slab in his cellar. Using a mechanical hoist and thick chains connected to large metal piercings down his back, upper arms and legs, Carl then body suspends himself above the corpse and masturbates over them while watching the video tape of their terrified reactions to their ordeal, timing his own orgasm for the moment of their deaths. The videotape is a second order level of fetishisation in which the dead universal thing has been reinvested with the particularity of a specific victim, but in such a mediated form that no direct encounter is risked. It is therefore the objective knowledge of a subject that Carl seeks. As with Marx’s description of commodity fetishism in general and the specific value of money, the fetishized value of money, like the fetishised value of Carl’s doll and video, is not merely a facilitator of exchange, her death is simply exchanged for his orgasm, but it is created in the very act of exchange itself.15 It is her mediation into a pornographic prop, not her direct death or suffering, that is the locus of value. Indeed, her unique (use) value must be processed into an interchangeable (exchange) value, via a process that first objectifies and then fetishises her. Carl’s victims have therefore been through a process that extracts value and then fetishes that extraction in a way that is uncannily close to Marx’s description of the factory system. Beginning with the cell itself, it is not merely a machine for killing, but better conceived as a factory for extracting the life from his victims in order for Carl to then consume this extraction. The mediating agency of technology exposes both an intersubjective distance and creates an opportunity for exploitation. The cell is designed not merely to cause and record death, but vitally to record/capture and maximise the labour of life qua resistance to death. It is the production and consumption of this resistance that adds value to the materiality of Carl’s victim’s deaths. This is, after all, the only evidence that the particular subjectivity of his victim, that only quality of being that is capable of offering Carl recognition as master, actually exists. However the material process involved in this abstraction of such essential humanity also transforms that humanity into something not quite human, something more cybernetic - in short, a commodity. As Marx explained, In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage […] Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the

180 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.16 Furthermore what Carl’s methods make clear is that the process of production actually relies on the victim/worker being doubly consumed. First the maximum amount of labour in the form of her trying to stay afloat and stay alive is extracted from her. Unlike the usual factory system however none of this labour need be reinvested in keeping her alive so her labour can be fully extracted, she can be fully reified or totally transformed into surplus value and as such she has been fully commodified. A person has been turned into a thing. This is the first moment of consumption. However both the evidence of resistance and the objective truth of her death does not of itself demonstrate Carl’s mastery until he fully confirms his mastery by recombining her actual death as universal body and her specific individual death as mediated through the video. This is when the thing is reanimated; it is literally fetishised such that it can be (mis)recognised as a person. Indeed as Carl is not present at the actual death of his victim it is only in its mediated form that it is available to him. It is only when their deaths are consumed the second time, not during the production of their death but during Carl’s act of consumption that the value of his victim’s subjectivity becomes known to Carl. This consumption of the victim by the factory system (her use value) leads to her transformation into a commodity, which may then be consumed again but remotely from the production of this commodity (her exchange value). It is then in this commodified form as both corpse and video, that Carl consumes her, as something killed and dead that has subsequently been anthropomorphised and reanimated. Carl’s mode of production mimics the capitalist mode of production more generally, in that the object of production has been simplified in order for it to become amicable to mass production, whilst the value of the production, the value of the commodity, rests on the amount of dead consumed labour necessary to produce it. This is the role of the factory apparatus in creating the paradoxical ontology of alienated labour that both fetishises and abuses the worker’s body. Likewise Carl’s victim who seems to be both sexualised and economised by his psychopathology. Not only are they rendered the ‘other’ of an alienated masturbatory sexuality, but they are also commodified by a factory system. However, it is not merely Carl’s victim that is reified through their insertion into a mechanical apparatus, but Carl as well. The only way he can consume this abstracted value is by his own insertion into the apparatus. Hence as with the capitalist mode of production more generally, whilst capitalists benefit from their exploitation of the proletariat they can do so only at the price of their own alienation. This similarity but inequality must be stressed. That is, against the general appeal to process of reification and

181 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________ subjective destitution at the hands of a mechanised instrumental logic, the usual appropriation of a Marxist model of alienation within cultural studies, it is the unevenness of the relationship that remains paramount. Beyond the generalised philosophical alienation of modernity the specific political exploitation of capitalism demands analysis. However, from within the class position of the bourgeoisie, it is not Carl’s alienation that seems the primary cause of anxiety, but his own consumption of the object of production. It is his perversion of the factory system that reveals the two-fold bourgeois anxiety at the heart of the Adam Smith problem. First, as with the Sorcerer’s apprentice, while endless production is on the surface an attractive fantasy, once the forces of mechanisation have been unleashed, there is little to prevent means totality dominating ends, leading to a crisis of over-production and a collapse in value. It is the democratic availability of masturbatory pleasure that seems horrifying. Without scarcity, the logical benefits of ownership are negated. Indeed beneath the purely instrumentalist appeal of the factory system as a rationalisation of production, lies a notion of competition that demands the uneven ownership of this production. This is why the free market is in effect always a demand for inequality. Second, if production is self-consumed, the market is likewise done away with and once again capitalist value is obliterated. It is the profligate heart of masturbation that both mimics and mocks commodity production that seems at issue here. In demonstrating and demanding a subjective and individual rather than collective or even hierarchical terminal point of ownership and consumption the notion of masturbation both requires and supports a capitalist notion of the subject as a free agent capable of such individual ‘having’. It is no longer a commonwealth but individual wealth that indexes notions of value. Yet in being an activity outside or beyond a system of exchange, masturbation is equally anathema to such a model, as it reveals the self-subverting and inherent negativity of the logic of market freedom. It demonstrate the ideological limit of the free individual of capitalism as the one freedom capitalism cannot offer such an individual is of course freedom from the market, the right to withdraw or opt out of market relations. In this respect it is the metaphoric power of insane masturbating serial killer conceived as secession from both the sexual market and social relations that articulates this paradox. Masturbation stands as a concrete materialisation or demonstration of the moment when freedom conceived as a property of monadic individuals becomes isolation and the logic of consumption disintegrates due to the absence of value outside social systems of accumulation and exchange. It reveals that for all the ideological attention paid to the individual under the capitalist mode of production, it is only an individual suspended within the matrix of the market (rather than over the body of a victim) that can enjoy such rights and pleasures. Furthermore, as is the case of all commercial markets, the inherent abundance or availability of

182 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________ masturbatory pleasure causes its own inversion into worthlessness. That which cannot be exchanged or circulated cannot attract value and so despite the promotion of individual desire encouraged by capitalism, the value that underpins that system only occurs at this social level. In conclusion, the addition of the logic and ideology of the ‘free’ market from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards to existing religious and medical attitudes to masturbation created a new synthesis, or mode of address towards the practice that revealed a fundamental ideological aporia within the ontology demanded by market logic. As a moment of sheer consumption masturbation seems to generate exactly the type of monadic consuming subject required by capitalism, but in its inversion of the protestant work ethic’s injunction to accumulate masturbation equally negates the ideological desirability of its own logic. This ambivalence at the abstract or theoretical level is also visible at the concrete level of capitalist practice. That is, whilst on the one hand many direct representations of masturbation, particularly on film continue to be negative, on the other, a less direct but positive appeal to masturbatory pleasure pervades consumer culture. Indeed, the promotion of consumption at an individual level, that is representation that offer positive portrayals of ‘solitary’ pleasures, are commonplace. Furthermore, in the rise of branded goods, the role of fetishised modes or recognition within commodity culture is becoming more and more obvious. In this respect whilst rejecting any notion that there has been an ‘arrival’ of masturbation in mainstream culture, a boundary that marks a postmodern scission or definitive new historic period, it does suggest that the current emphasis on consumption reveals a facet of capitalism that is particularly sensitive to both the pleasures and the costs of a masturbatory subjectivity. As always, our monsters are not monstrous in their alien otherness, but in their sameness and the masturbating serial killer of much contemporary cinema is not so much ‘exceptional’ as an ‘extreme’ reflection and metaphor of a more general anxiety regarding the autonomy of the lone individual of both modernity and the market economy. That such representations of masturbation eschew the possibility of presenting masturbation as a cost-free, exploitation-free form of sexual pleasure available to all, a demonstration not only of the generosity of the flesh, but of our ability to escape endless desire and achieve moments of sated pleasure, is probably the clearest demonstration of the madness of the market rather than the masturbator.

183 Greg Tuck ______________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Timothy Taylor, The Prehistory of Sex, (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), p.182. 2 Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1992), p.16. 3 Shere Hite, Women as Revolutionary Agents of Change: The Hite Reports, 1972-1993. (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p.54. 4 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (London: Verso, 1991) 5 Engels, cited in Jameson, Fredric, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 19711986 Volume 2, Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988). 1988, p.211. 6 Louis Althusser, For Marx. (London: New Left Books, 1977), p.113. 7 Fredric Jameson Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (London: Verso, 1991) p.47 8 Ibid., p. ix. 9 Ibid., p.ix. 10 Peter Lewis Allen The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) p. 80. 11 Anonymous, Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered. 8th Edition. (London: Thomas Crouch Booksellers,1723) 1. 12 Immanuel Kant cited in: Sobel, Alan. Philosophies of Masturbation, (29 November 2000). 13 Thomas Lacquer, ‘The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea’, in: P. Bennett and V. A. Rosario, (eds) Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. (London: Routledge, 1995) p.157 14 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961)pp.71-84. 15 Ibid.,69-83. 16 Ibid., 422-423.

184 Of Monsters, Masturbators and Markets ______________________________________________________________

References Anonymous, Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered. 8th Edition. London: Thomas Crouch Booksellers, 1723 Allen, Peter Lewis, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 Althusser, Louis, For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1977 Giddens, Anthony, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992 Hite, Shere, Women as Revolutionary Agents of Change: The Hite Reports, 1972-1993. London: Bloomsbury, 1993 Jameson, Fredric, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 Volume 2, Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991 Laqueur, Thomas, ‘The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice and Pouring Tea’, in: P. Bennett and V. A. Rosario, (eds) Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. London: Routledge, 1995 Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume One. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961 Sobel, Alan. Philosophies of Masturbation, <-http:// www.uno.edu/~asoble/pages/masturb.htm> (29 November 2000).

Section Four

Miscellaneous Monsters (They can be evil, male, female, but most importantly beware, they can be cute)

Nobody’s Meat: Freedom through Monstrosity in Contemporary British Fiction Ben Barootes

Abstract “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Thus spake Angela Carter. On the surface, this statement seems to suggest that a free woman is demonized by her unliberated society. A different reading, however, reveals a deeper truth: in order that a woman may be free within an unfree society, she must first be monstrous. It is her monstrosity – that which separates and distances her from society – that enables the woman to escape her social shackles. As Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil demonstrates, an ugly woman is not bound to a society that values beauty and the helplessness of women. Carter’s fiction, specifically the short stories contained in The Bloody Chamber, addresses how monstrous women – vampires, tigresses, and werewolves – are freed from such bonds as time and sexual characterization. Carter further explores this concept in her novel Nights at the Circus wherein she examines how even the seemingly monstrous female can find not only liberation but also power and control. Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry warns of those who go too far: a monstrous woman whose expressions of her free will amount to death and destruction. Freedom through monstrosity is not limited to women alone – other marginalized groups and individuals can also achieve sovereignty by embracing their (often imposed) monstrous nature. This is the case for both Saladin Chamcha and the non-Anglo-Saxon youth of London in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Whether the monster is a woman or an immigrant, natural or constructed, these texts all argue that freedom is gained through the acceptance and celebration of one’s own monstrosity. Keywords: Woman, womanhood, freedom, literature, she-devil, vampire, autonomy

In The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter writes, “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.”1 On the surface, this statement seems to suggest that a free-acting or -thinking woman is demonized by her unliberated society. This is not a surprising interpretation - it is one we have all seen and heard time and again. Michel Foucault tells us that in a disciplinary society such as our own, a person who

188 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ deviates from societal norms is portrayed as a thing unnatural - or, at least, bestial. As the Carter short story “In the Company of Wolves” warns: “if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you.”2 If one deviates from the straight and narrow, one will fall prey to the wild carnal hunger of the licentious lupus - one will lose the human element (civilization) and become no more than a rough beast. A different reading, however, reveals a deeper truth: in order that a woman may be free within an unfree society, she must first be monstrous. It is her monstrosity - that which separates and distances her from society, that which singles her out - that enables the woman to escape her social shackles. As Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil demonstrates, an ugly woman is not bound to a society that values beauty and the helplessness of women. Carter’s fiction, specifically the short stories contained in The Bloody Chamber, addresses how monstrous women - vampires, tigresses, and werewolves - are freed from such bonds as time and sexual characterization. Jeannette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry further examines these concepts as well as the death and destruction that often go hand in hand with monstrous realizations of freedom. Of course, freedom through monstrosity is not limited to women alone - other marginalized individuals and groups can also achieve sovereignty by embracing their own monstrous natures. This is the case for both Indian expat cum British citizen Saladin Chamcha and the non-Anglo-Saxon youth of London in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Whether the monster is a woman or an immigrant, natural or constructed, these texts all argue that freedom is gained through the acceptance and celebration of one’s own monstrosity. Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil is the story of a woman scorned and her consequential quest for vengeance (with its auxiliary benefits of wealth and success). You can be sure that Ruth Patchett, the housewife turned she-devil, hath Hell’s Fury at her disposal every step of the way. Ruth certainly is a woman who bursts the boundaries of her society. She belongs to a culture (reminiscent of our own) that places a high value on the physical beauty and helplessness of a woman. The beauty so treasured and praised by Ruth’s society is rigidly defined and categorized: petite, preferably blond, fair of skin, effeminate. Likewise, this idealized woman should be lost in the world if not for her man - he who “is her child, her father, her everyone, her everything”.3 This ideal is embodied in Ruth’s arch-nemesis, the romance novelist Mary Fisher, who, as Ruth describes her, is “small and pretty and delicately formed, prone to fainting and weeping”.4 Ruth, of course, is the antithesis of this ideal. She stands over six feet, with broad shoulders and hips. She is swarthy and has a quatrain of moles upon her chin - a trio of which sprouts hairs.5 Ruth is clumsy, lacking in all womanly graces.6 She is not, in fact, considered a woman in the least. As Ruth’s

189 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ husband walks out on her, he shouts, “You are not a woman at all…what you are is a She-Devil”.7 Because of her departure from her culture’s definition of womanhood, Ruth is not bound by the restraints that are regularly applied to women in her society. It is her monstrous nature that allows her to transcend gender stereotypes and roles. Ruth is no longer jailed in her home, tethered to the stove, watching over her brood. As she says herself: she-devil and mother are mutually exclusive terms. Following this, she abandons her children on the doorstep of her husband’s mistress, the romance novelist Mary Fisher. Unencumbered by maternal and spousal duties, Ruth can ambitiously embark on business ventures: she owns and operates the highly successful Vesta Rose Employment Agency, which specializes in “finding secretarial work for women coming back into the labour market - either from choice or from necessity” and also provides courses in “’assertiveness training” to counter the lack of “worldly confidence…[caused by] years of domesticity.”8 Through her business, Ruth is able to increase her personal agency extending her sphere of influence to “that other world of power - of judges and priests and doctors, the ones who tell women what to do and what to think”.9 She places her operatives in strategic positions throughout the working world - she sets up typists, secretaries, and office temptresses as pawns in her game - as pieces of her puzzle of power. Having gained sovereignty, Ruth can not only enter this world, she can (and does) come to dominate it. It is not only so-called “ugly” women whose monstrous natures permit them to exist unbound. The Lady of the House of Love, an eternally young and beautiful vampiress and the title character in one of Angela Carter’s short stories from The Bloody Chamber collection, provides an example of monstrosity enabling an exochronic existence. At the height of modernity, she lives alone in her ancient mansion, above a timeless town devoid of citizens. (This estate is, of course, built on that side of the Danube.) In her castle, the Lady is for ever cartomancing - day and night her “inevitable tarot” endlessly reveals the same fate.10 She leads a life three times as tense as our own: she lives simultaneously in the past, present, and the future. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer discusses what he terms the absolute past. This is the time to which mythic beings and events belong. It is, in a sense, engaged with the historical past and yet is removed from it. As such, it is not subject to the ravages of Chronos - it does not fade, dissipate or erode. According to Cassirer, this absolute past is directly connected to a perpetual present. The unfading constant of the absolute past is just that: constant. It is perpetually occurring. Herakles is continuously slaying the Hydra; Ahab is for ever hunting Moby Dick; and Medusa the Gorgon is endlessly confronted with her own monstrous image.

190 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ The Lady’s above-mentioned “inevitable Tarot” perhaps best illustrates the concept of the whole of time - past, present, and future - as a single and all-encompassing point. The cards exist in the past: “[t]he Tarot always shows the same configuration”.11 The Tarot’s synonym, the arcana, itself suggests something out of the depths of time, a thing veiled by the mists of time - something ancient, antique, arcane. However, the cards also demonstrate the perpetual present. The spread is a construction in the present - a construction that is perpetually the same. Each time she cartomances, the Lady creates the past in the present. So too is her future contained within the Tarot. The very nature of the arcana is to reveal the future. It is a means of constructing the future in the present. But her “cards always fall in the same pattern”.12 Thus her future is also her past, both of which are continuously assembled in the present. She is not only bound to “a future which is irreversible”, but also to a past which endlessly recurs.13 For this femme fatale, “all is as it has always been and will be”.14 As a vampire, the Lady is relegated to “the timeless Gothic eternity”, to the absolute past of the mythic being.15 Her subsequent perpetual present is an endless reflection of her past. The ever-repeated spread of her tarot deck is a self-fulfilling prophesy of her future - a future as bleak and dreary as the dilapidated castle she inhabits. Her freedom from temporal shackles is further attested to by her absence of menses. As she is not subject to the cycles of days, of seasons, or of years, so too is she liberated from the monthly cycle. The Lady “has never seen her own blood before.”16 Physically, she is in the prime of her life - a beautiful young woman. And yet she is both pre-menarchal and post-menopausal. She is both “maiden and death”:17 she is spring and autumn, dawn and dusk, past and future. The Lady’s vampiress identity causes her to be a singularity - a lone figure in who all temporal periods are contained. And yet her existence is one of stasis - an unending nightmare from which she cannot awake. She does not participate in Time’s forward march. The Lady is a “closed circuit” running beyond Time’s mother (or should I say father?) board.18 Both Ruth and the Lady of the House of Love dwell on the thresholds of their societies: they are beings beyond its boundaries but are also - to varying extents - engaged with the society. In fact, all of the monstrous female characters discussed herein live a liminal existence. Throughout her monstrous pursuit of vengeance, Weldon’s She-Devil, Ruth Patchett, dwells in the shadows, on the periphery of her society. She lives in a seedy motel, servants’ quarters, a Prison for the Criminally Insane, a shabby office building on a narrow street, the back room of a council flat, a dilapidated clergy house, and a separatist feminist commune.19 As Vesta Rose, employment agency entrepreneuse, Ruth never fully presents herself to the society in and for which she works. She declines photographs and grants interviews only by telephone;20 she remains disembodied, an ethereal being

191 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ of the fringe. So too does the Lady of the House of Love. She roosts in a castle perched above a ghost town: beyond civilization’s reach, she remains within sight of it. Similarly, although she is outside of the regular flow of time, the time-bubble of her singularity is - like a boat on a river - surrounded by it. As a vampiress - an undead (un)being - she stands the threshold between life and death; she “hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”21 As Hélène Cixous explains, the “other” can never truly, entirely be “other” for it would be “elsewhere, outside: absolutely other.”22 If the other were entirely divorced from that to which it is opposed - monster from ‘normal,’ for instance - it could not be discussed and analysed; “it cannot be theorized.”23 Thus, we arrive at the border-straddling existence of the monstrous women discussed herein. Although they are removed from society, it is necessary that the female monsters and the monstrous females maintain a connexion, an interaction - contact - with that society. They are its frame of reference. “We keep the wolves outside by living well,”24 and we know how to live well because the wolves are outside. We can find this concept in the early days of the Western literary and philosophic traditions, as found in Greek mythology. The Amazons, a matriarchal society comprised of strong, proud warrior women, are set up as a foil to Hellenic society. As such, their homeland is located on the very fringes of the known Greek world - in Scythia or, less commonly, in Ethiopia.25 The idea being that the further one goes from the centre, the stranger (more unnatural, more monstrous) all things become. We see a similar construct in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. This is the tale of a woman of monstrous proportions (her weight is enough to catapult an elephant into the stratosphere),26 her experiences and adventures as she raises her adopted son, Jordan the banana-inspired explorer-to-be, in 17th century London. Throughout the course of the novel, the Dog-Woman (thus named for she breeds and raises a host of hounds of the Hyde Park fighting variety) encounters Puritan uprisings, civil war, regicide, bananas and pineapples (the latter ‘discovered’ by her son on his first expedition). The Dog-Woman too inhabits a liminal space. She is gigantic of body, almost too big for her society - she does fit in physically, or, as we shall see, sexually. As a Royalist, she is out of place in the Interregnum period of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The Dog-Woman lives littorally: her shack lies on the banks of the Thames, between London and the wild world without. Monstrous figures, like wolves skulking just under the eaves of the forest, dwell on the threshold. However, these monstrous characters are likened to beasts in more ways than this liminal existence. Deviants are often not seen as something fully human; they are not viewed as something supra-, but rather sub-, human. Contemporary British fiction is fraught with the

192 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ opposition of the human and the beast and its subordinate binaries: the prudish and the lusty, civility and abandon, repression and assertion, reason and passion. The oft-reproduced and reinterpreted story of Beauty and the Beast best categorizes such a contrast. Beauty, the female, is virginal and self-controlled. The male Beast, on the other hand, represents unbridled sexuality - an utter lack of restraint. Traditionally, Beauty and her social mores win, transforming the Beast into a fine gentleman of suppressed urges and desires. However, if the young woman opts to embrace her sexuality - if she gives in to her desires and becomes master of her flesh - it is she who is transformed. This is indeed the case in Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” (one of her many takes on the Beauty and the Beast story). Upon seeing La Bestia naked bare as is, the unnamed heroine recognizes a part of his animal nature within her self. She admits this seemingly monstrous sexuality is a part of her being, embraces it, and permits herself to revel in it. She decides to release her lamb-self and “run with the tigers”.27 Each lick of her tiger-lover’s tongue rends her human skin, removes the veil of so-called civilization to reveal “a nascent patina of shining hairs…beautiful fur”.28 “In the Company of Wolves” also addresses this idea of sexual liberation via an acceptance and celebration of one’s own bestial (or monstrous) nature. In this riff on the Little Red Riding Hood theme, the heroine refuses to be raped; she ridicules, refutes, and razes the aggressive advances of the “carnivore incarnate”29: What big arms you have. All the better to hug you with… What big teeth you have!... All the better to eat you with… The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake or her own discarded clothing.30 She realizes that she is no mere morsel; she is more than breasts and rump. Having accepted her monstrous assertive role, she takes to her hysteric helm. She becomes one of the “women who grab their sexuality and fight back”; her sexuality becomes “active (rather than passive or suppressed altogether).”31 Dead, passive, inert meat is transformed into living, lively flesh. The passive voice gives way to the active: rather than being forced, she chooses to spend her nights “between the paws of the tender wolf”.32 “In the Company of Wolves” symbolizes the suppression of sexuality by the clothing worn by each. It is the veil society places over the characters’ (both female and male) sexual (animal, monstrous) natures. Carter’s Red Riding Hood first tears off her own clothes, throwing them into

193 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ the fire to be followed by the wolf’s wear. She thus liberates her sensuality, her sexuality, her desire. Shirking passivity, she becomes - if not aggressive assertive. She confronts the devouring sensuality (both the interior and exterior wolves) and laughs at it “full in the face.”33 Rendering the threat null, she embraces it and gains “power, strength and a new awareness of both self and other.”34 After gaining sexual autonomy, the heroine, as an active subject, can help the wolf to lose the false skin that covers his (true) self. Her newly gained freedom is passed on to her (former) assailant - he too is released from the bonds of phallocentric hegemony. She transforms the initial (traditional) sexual relationship - male aggressor and passive female - into one of mutual desire. By levelling the sexual hierarchy, the heroine slays the “carnivore incarnate.” She rids the situation of carne - “transform[s] ‘meat’ into ‘flesh’”35 - and, removing the socially fabricated role of the male, renders tender the wolf, makes him her companion rather than her attacker. Throughout these tales, we are reminded that the road to emancipation can be littered with the corpses of the oppressors, paved with the cobble-bones of the unfree. The Marquis de Sade (who found freedom in his own monstrous way) wrote that the only way to gain complete freedom is through the utter domination and obliteration of the other.36 This is reflected in the sexual practices of these women - one of the primary means whereby these devilish dames actualize their freedom. To engage in an act of sex with these women leads to the end of one’s own self: as Carter puts it they “only [know] one kind of consummation”.37 Ruth’s romp with Carver, the half-wit groundskeeper, causes the senior citizen to have a fit and she leaves him “lay in a pool of his own excrement”.38 The man is entirely debased by Ruth’s process of release. Winterson’s Dog-Woman follows suit; she devours the two men with whom she has sexual contact. At one point, an intrepid lover attempts to mate with the mongrel matron. Her vastness proves an impediment. In an effort to improve the situation, she flexes her sexual muscles; as a result the man is sucked entirely within her, “balls and everything.”39 Consummation indeed. When a Puritan hails the Dog-Woman and requests that she perform oral sex upon him, she obliges him as best she can. However, her physical characteristics - her mountainous body, her flat nose, heavy eyebrows, her scarce and broken teeth, all surrounded by a deeply scarred face - have led her to an existence outside the realm of human sexuality (repressed or otherwise).40 Understandably, she does not comprehend the practices and motions of a sexual relationship: she believes the phallus becomes detached during copulation and produces the new life in the woman’s body.41 She thus assumes that the male member, once having been chomped and detached, will simply - though slowly - grow anew.42 The Dog-Woman terminates any future fuckery for her fellated fellow.

194 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ Echoing the Marquis, Carter stresses the necessary subjugation of the other so that a woman may achieve and further her own liberation: [The free woman’s] freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder.43 Winterson’s Dog-Woman certainly does. She does not find herself a slave to the social taboos against murder, taking no more though of the act than she does of caring for her dogs. The Dog-Woman has a “natural capacity for murder”.44 Throughout the course of Sexing the Cherry, she slays at least a baker’s dozen of men,45 including her father and her nemeses and oppressors, Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace.46 The act of murder, however, need not be a literal one. The Red Riding Hood figure of “In the Company of Wolves” kills the aggressive sexual tendencies of the wolf; she does not destroy the body. If we return to the Dog-Woman’s act fellatio/feast, we see this idea ‘fleshed’ out more fully. She does not kill the man’s physical being, she slaughters the psychological one. She debases his concept of self; she undermines the “self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism.”47 By removing the man’s member, she succeeds in decentralizing the phallus. She reduces the man to a “disembodied phalli…a depersonalised prick,”48 a lonely penis without a point of reference, without a self to empower - an inconsequential object which can be spat out and tossed to the dogs.49 The Dog-Woman carries out the opposite act from Carter’s Red Riding Hood: she renders the privileged flesh of the man into nothing more than a hunk of meat. She does so through the very act of biting: one does not eat flesh, one eats meat. The Dog-Woman robs the flesh (the living phallus) of the skin (social constructs of gender and sexual roles). To use Carter’s formula: “flesh minus skin equals meat.”50 She ends the Puritan’s (traditional) sex life; she takes the liveliness (the flesh-nature) out of the phallus - she carries through the act of predation, deadening the flesh, making meat. In this sense, she commits murder. Thus far female protagonists have been the subject of discussion. Freedom through monstrosity is certainly not limited to females alone. All marginalised groups - all demonized persons - can realize freedom by accepting and embracing the monstrous images imposed upon them by the dominant powers of society. One such group - an oft-treated subject of recent British fiction - is the varied immigrant population of London. Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel, The Satanic Verses, is - among a great many other things - an examination of the demonized immigrant. Upon returning from a trip to his resented homeland of India, Saladin Chamcha is mistaken to be an immigrant and thus demonized by anti-immigration Thatcherist Britain.

195 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ Chamcha is quite literally demonized - transformed into a behooved creature, complete with the requisite tail. With horns wreathing his head, he is long of beard, hairy of body, foul of breath and has the ability to fill the room “with dense and sulphurous smoke”.51 He spends the better part of two hundred pages in this Pan-ic state. That is, until his seething anger and hatred come to a boil. (I’m not one to advocate the Dark Side but) when Chamcha gives in to his hatred, when he submits to his anger - when he allows himself to “be what he has become” - he is transformed.52 Or, to use Rushdie’s term, he is “humanized”.53 In this form (which one may find it helpful to imagine the Al Pacino-style devil: sporting both a well-tailored suit and glowing red eyes to match), Chamcha is free: free to leave his temporary prison, the Shaandaar B and B; free to interact with fellow human beings (and Londoners); free to carry out his revenge. This rubric is reminiscent of Ruth Patchett’s experience. Once she comes to grips with her true and terrible identity, Ruth is free to pursue her goals, wants and desires: revenge, power, money and the one-way street of unrequited adoration.54 Saladin Chamcha is not the only character in The Satanic Verses to be granted freedom via an acceptance of the labels and images others enforce upon him. Rushdie has his version of the Prophet assume a derogatory alias. He is “neither Mahomet or MoeHammered” - he takes on the identity of “the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym”, Mahound.55 This is the way, according to Rushdie, that the marginalized and demonized - woman or immigrant or other - gain autonomy. They adopt “the names they were given in scorn”.56 The acceptance of monstrosity and the freedom it enables is not restricted to the individual level. The Satanic Verses shows the secondgeneration immigrant youth of London - those “of the tinted persuasion” as one character puts it - adopting this same strategy. Rather than rail against the half-devil label the dominant culture applies to them, these half-children revel in their chthonic characteristics. The image of the horned beast appears on “button-badges sweatshirts posters…the chests of young girls and in the windows protected against bricks by metal grilles”.57 The Asian youth - like many before them: Whigs, Tories, Blacks - “turn insults into strengths”.58 This tactic culminates with a sub-cultural fad of wearing rubber and plastic devil-horns upon their heads: a final physical manifestation of the demonic characteristics attributed to them by the powers that be. In doing so, they free themselves of the shackles of characterization, of definition-by-the-other they create a group identity, one founded firmly upon their shared monstrous nature. Contemporary British fiction gives us a great many monstrous characters: vampires, giantesses, lupine ladies, maternal mongrels and impish immigrants. These monstrous figures demonstrate Carter’s assertion: those, as monsters, who are made to dwell beyond the boundaries of society are not

196 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ subject to its limitations. A she-devil is not confined to the idealized passive role of womanhood; as an unwoman, she is free to enter and succeed in the world of male powerbrokers. A vampiress, an unnatural (and undead) female is beyond the reach of Father Time. Similarly, those who cease denying their monstrosity - those who embrace their true nature, who proudly proclaim I am that I am - are granted release from the bonds of hegemony. The monstrous are exiles. Adrift or incarcerated, they are made to dwell on the fringes of society - in the liminal spaces; thus they become “peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.”59 Freedom is not the cause of monstrosity - it is the effect.

Notes 1

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27. 2 Angela Carter, “In the Company of Wolves,” The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 111. According to Hélène Cixous, patriarchal Western society encourages woman to avoid putting oneself in such a position: “Above all, don’t go into the forest” (Cixous, “Sorties,” 68). 3 Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil (Chatham, Kent: Sceptre, 1983), 144. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Ibid., 11. 6 Ibid., 24. 7 Ibid., 47. 8 Ibid., 131-3 9 Ibid., 130. 10 Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love,” The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin, 1979), 94. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Ibid., 97. 13 Ibid., 95. 14 Ibid., 97. 15 Ibid., 97. 16 Ibid., 106. 17 Ibid., 93. 18 Ibid. 19 Weldon, 88, 93, 121, 130,178, 198, and 213.

197 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ 20

Ibid., 131-2. Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 103. 22 Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 71. 23 Ibid. 24 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 115. 25 Elizabeth Vandiver, “Female Monsters and Monstrous Females,” Classical Mythology (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2000). 26 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (Toronto: Vintage, 1989), 19. 27 Angela Carter, “The Tiger’s Bride,” The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin, 1979), 64. 28 Ibid., 67. 29 Angela Carter, “In the Company of Wolves,” The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin, 1979), 110. 30 Ibid., 118. 31 Merja Makinen, “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality,” Feminist Review 42 (Autumn 1992): 3 and 4. 32 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 118. 33 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 118. 34 Makinen, 10. Cf. Cixous’ argument that the other is necessarily connected to, associated and interacts with the self (Cixous, “Sorties,” 71). 35 Ibid., 11. 36 Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 117. 37 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 103. 38 Weldon, 60. 39 Winterson, 109. 40 Ibid., 29 and 17. 41 Ibid., 38. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 27. Hearkening back to Classical foundations: the Greek historian Herodotus refers to the Amazons as androktones “killers of men” - from the Scythian oiropata (Histories, 4.110.1). 44 Winterson, 133. 45 Ibid., 62-3. 46 Ibid., 88. 47 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 249. 48 Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 90. 21

198 Nobody’s Meat ______________________________________________________________ 49

Winterson, 37. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 138. 51 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Toronto: Vintage, 1988), 283-5. 52 Ibid., 298. 53 Ibid., 304. 54 Weldon, 49. 55 Rushdie, 95. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 295. 58 Ibid., 95. 59 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 253. 50

References Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Penguin, 1979. Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 245-65. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing, 63-78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Herodotus. Histories. 4.110.1. Makinen, Merja. “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality.” Feminist Review 42 (Autumn 1992): 2-15. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. Toronto: Vintage, 1988.

Vandiver, Elizabeth. “Monstrous Females and Female Monsters.” Classical Mythology. Audio CD. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2000.

199 Ben Barootes ______________________________________________________________ Weldon, Fay. The Life and Loves of a She Devil. Chatham, Kent: Sceptre, 1983. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. Toronto: Vintage, 1989.

God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil and the Diabolical Monstrous Human in Heavy Metal Niall Scott

Abstract The recent release of Metallica’s documentary ‘Some Kind of Monster’ and the proclamation of the band’s identity as ‘This Monster Lives’ provides an explicit statement of a familiar theme of monstrosity in the culture surrounding Heavy Metal. This notion of monstrosity is linked to conceptions and images of human evil evident in lyrics and art work amongst other Metal themes. In this paper I will explore Kant’s conception of radical evil and the evil in human nature in relation to discourses of evil and human nature in Heavy Metal culture. One of Kant’s discussions on evil In Religions within the boundaries of pure Reason alone sees it in terms of a vice in the predisposition to humanity. He describes this as the human inclination to create a worth for oneself in the opinion of others occasioned by the attempts of others to gain a hated superiority of over us”. Releases by bands such as Slayer (God hates us All), Deicide, Metallica , Hatebreed and Marilyn Manson to name but a few, provide opportunities for an exegesis of Kant’s conception of the evil in human nature as well as a critique of it. I argue that the commitment to the celebration of the monstrous in Heavy Metal lyrics is ambiguous. It can be read as a positive pursuit of human identity, or is dependent on human identity in the religious history of (satanic) evil. The possibility of a genuine commitment to the diabolical is examined in the light of Kant’s theory of evil. Keywords: Kant, evil, Heavy Metal, Metallica, Slayer, diabolical, Satan satanic.

In the opening cacophony of Slayer’s 2001 musical presentation to the world comes the proclamation: “God Hates Us All, God hates us all”. The lyrics in the second track ‘Disciple’, display a vehement and aggressive rejection of Christian theism, followed by what Kerry King writes as ‘his own philosophy’: “I hate every one equally, you can’t tear that out of me/ No segregation-separation/ just me in my world of enemies/ I never wanted to be God’s disciple/ I’ll never be the one to blindly follow/ I’ll never be the one to bear the cross- disciple/ I reject this fuckin’ race/ I despise this fuckin’ place.”1

202 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________ This portrayal of a character (perhaps a Job like figure), both accepting of and promoting a supreme misanthropy, opens up a portal into the monstrous - the subject of hate and the eulogising of a venomous dissemination of hate. The album/cd sleeve has more of such lyrics, concerning subjects ranging from genocide to witch execution, through to proclamations against Christianity and expressions of individual hate written out in red ink, as additions to the book of Job. This text is presented with passages crossed out, circled and annotated. However, the album moves to a rather different conclusion from the biblical Job, rather than reconciliation, it advances themes of separation, gladly accepting rejection and revelling in it. One may think that these themes characterise evil- hatred, anti Christian sentiments, violence, human depravity, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant would have it. In the same musical genre, but on a different theme, Metallica’s recent contribution in the title track of their album St Anger an image is presented of the monstrous male. Furthermore the whole album identifies the band, its music and identity as a monster. This culminated in the release of a documentary film titled Some Kind of Monster, and an accompanying book This Monster Lives. In the title track of the album, ‘Frantic’ James Hetfield, the band’s singer identifies directly with the male monster as a tormented individual caught in a state of addiction and self loathing, yet needing to be a ‘family man’: “you live it or lie it/my lifestyle determines my deathstyle”2 The family, ‘the Metallica Family’, treats the band, and its followers as a member of society and the part of the successful corporate identity that is Metallica. The monster is individual and corporate. It expresses itself in hatehatred of others, but a depressed hate, a one of being tired of monotony and boredom. In deep need of a therapeutic solution in this crisis, the Documentary film ‘Some Kind of Monster’3 follows a sort of healing process to allow the corporate goal and creative force to drive on. The use of the monster metaphor identifies not only the band in crisis, the band as a living, breathing leviathan, but also heavy metal as monster and in the title of book narrating the making of the documentary, the film project is treated as monster: “This book is about a period when the monster had three heads. It was a time when Metallica, Phil Towle and Berlinger – Sinofky were all struggling to produce something in conjunction with the others”4 The monster here is the band trying to make an album, Phil Towle the therapist working with the band and the documentary film being made of this process. In the world of heavy metal culture, the use of themes and metaphor of evil, the monster, the monstrous and monstrosity will be common knowledge to those who partake as well those who observe from afar. Consider one of the key festivals- Monsters of Rock, founded in 1980 at Castle Donington, England or names of bands, lyrical content and imagery, such as Iron Maiden’s ‘Eddie’ or Marilyn Manson’s celebration of the

203 Niall Scott ______________________________________________________________ grotesque5 that show that monsters, evil and metal go together like vegetables and vegetarians. This paper has it origins in teaching Kant’s concept of radical evil in a course on Kant and Kantian ethics for final year undergraduate students at the University of Central Lancashire. In an attempt to explore a more creative approach to teaching Kant’s conception of radical evil, heavy metal lyrics provided a superb illustration of some of Kant’s ideas concerning evil in human nature, but also throw open the opportunity to critique the conceptions of evil and male monstrosities that heavy metal lyrics and its culture have to offer. Robert Walser’s careful study of Heavy Metal culture provides a balanced analysis of the relationship between Heavy metal discourse and conceptions of evil. Homing in on the sensationalist and unsupported attacks that usually come from nervous Christian academic writing he quotes Raschke, a theologian associating Heavy Metal with having a genuine commitment to Satanism: “Heavy metal does more than dissolve the inherent inhibitions against violence. It actively fosters, configures, anneals, reinforces and purifies the most vicious and depraved tendencies within the human organism”6 Walser does well to point out that such links that are attempted are based on anecdotal associations and insinuation, and there is no casual evidence to suggest participation in Heavy Metal and satanic/evil human behaviour. This is certainly true for the most part, but some readers may want to question this with regard to the predominance of misogynistic, misanthropic themes that are repeated and do suggest a secular evil prevalent in the genre. My interest however is to use the lyrical content and imagery of this genre which does play with these ideas, drawing on literature, art, human history and religious history to gain an insight into Kant’s theory of Radical evil for the benefit of teaching undergraduate university students.7 Along the way, however there will be opportunities to critique some of these lyrics as Kant’s theory can provide some philosophical depth to a genre that deserves attention. So what do these and other examples in metal culture and lyrics have to do with Kant theory of radical evil? Kant’s theory of radical evil supposes that humans have a propensity to evil, expressed through the capacity to the incorporation of maxims that lead to evil. He provides us not only with a theory concerning the nature of evil in the human, but also, in combination with his moral theory, an account of human nature itself. Kant sees evil as a feature special to human beings as rational beings. As such, it is not related to a natural state, which would be an animal state. Evil is thus as much a product of reason and the will as morality is. It needs to be freely chosen. The incorporation of maxims that lead to evil refers to the motivational structure of relating principles of action to actions themselves. In tracing back an action to a grounding principle, there are those that can lead to moral action, which follow the Categorical Imperative, and those that can subvert moral action or deviate from it. In Kant’s moral theory,

204 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________ the Categorical Imperative is a universal moral command that he held to be binding on all rational agents. In its most common form, it states that one should: “Act only according to that maxim through which you at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (G 4:421)8 This provides us with a formula against which a maxim can be tested. For example, Kant asks whether we can make false promising a universal moral law; in other words to make promises knowing that one has no intention of keeping them. For example borrowing money and giving a verbal promise to pay it back , but having no intention of doing so. If this were done a nonsense would be made of making promises- no one would trust another’s word. It then becomes clear that such a principle could never become a universal law, and logic dictates it would be immoral to do so- it goes against human reason.9 In the same way, the proposal that a maxim of lying to others whenever the situation arises as universally acceptable flies in the face of reason. One would never rationally will that such a principle could take hold. This is because one would be committed to anyone becoming the victim of lying, including oneself. This is something we would never rationally consent to. One can use this formula to assess whether an action would stand up to a test of universalisability, in other words, whether it is something that all could rationally consent to. It is important to note here that Kant considered morality to be a feature of rationality: to be moral is to be rational. At a deeper level, Kant’s formula demands respect for humanity in general, in respecting other humans, we do not only respect their individual worth as humans, we also respect the concept of humanity in people. An evil act according Kant is one that attempts to base actions on principles that corrupt this moral reason. It is a sophisticated alteration of moral principles. For Kant humans have a propensity to good and evil. This propensity is partly a product of human free will. We can choose to adopt good or evil maxims and act on these. He defines it as “the predisposition to desire an enjoyment which when the subject has experienced it, arouses inclination to it.”10 In this sense the propensity, which Kant thinks is universally present in humans further means that all human beings are actually evil.11 He identifies the propensity with an innate capacity to desire more of the same, despite only needing a single encounter with it. To illustrate his point, Kant in rather racist language of his time, refers to the desire for alcohol: “Thus all savages have a propensity for intoxicants; for although many of them have no acquaintance at all with intoxication, and hence no desire for the things that produce it, let them try these things once and there is aroused in them an almost inextinguishable desire for them.”12 – a rather apt illustration for the excesses in rock and Metal lifestyles. Metallica’s song Master of Puppets personifies heroin in this way: “I’m your source of self destruction/Veins that pump with fear, sucking darkest clear/Leading on your death’s construction/Taste me you will see/More is all

205 Niall Scott ______________________________________________________________ you need/You’re dedicated to /How I’m killing you”13. Kant divides the propensity to evil into three areas (grades) with regard to basing our actions on principles (maxims) that lead to immoral behaviour. The first is the least serious, the last the most corrupt: 1. 2. 3.

the general weakness of the human heart in complying with the adopted maxims (the frailty of human nature); the propensity to adulterate moral incentives with immoral ones; the adoption of evil maxims expressing the depravity of human nature or the human heart.14

These propensities emerge from a view of the human being predisposed to three definitional spheres, two of which can lead to good or evil, the third only generates good: 1. The predisposition to animality - where the human as a living being is capable of evil by behaving according to what Kant says are vices grafted on of savagery, those bestial vices of gluttony, lust and wild lawless ness 2. The predisposition to humanity- where the human is a rational being. Here evil acts can occur when for example self love leads to a comparison with others and the ‘inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others’ is sought. This generates vices of culture: envy, jealousy, rivalry, ingratitude, and joy in other’s misfortune. These are diabolical vices 3. The predisposition to personality- the human as a responsible being, where reason provides the incentive for action and respect for the moral law means that evil maxims cannot be ‘grafted’ on15. It is thus in the first two predispositions that we can locate the human propensity to evil. Here Kant does not permit a total commitment to evil, in that such a state is reserved for a diabolical being. It is interesting to ask whether the purely diabolical being is a possibility at all for Kant. Certainly the idea of the diabolical is frequently entertained as a metaphor in Heavy Metal Lyrics, with some pretenders expressing a genuine commitment to it through satanic inferences such as in the Scandinavian Black Metal genre. The first propensity to evil, the general weakness of the human heart, is rather neatly illustrated in the Metallica documentary ‘Some Kind of Monster’ Here we are reminded of radical evil in human nature as pathetic- a game played of posturing, but ultimately highly self destructive and, for Kant irrational). It is an expression of weakness, as Kant reminds the reader, quoting Pauline scripture: “What I would, that I do not!”16 (Rel. 6:29). Or as Metallica write in the struggle within, a song about motivational weakness

206 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________ and boredom: “So many things you don’t want to do/ What is it? What have you got to lose?”17 The comparative weakness of moral motivation compared to inclination, is not only illustrated throughout the documentary in the constant struggle to reconcile 4 creative ego’s in the pursuit of the making of Metallica’s St Anger, it manifests itself in the goals that are aimed atfinancial incentives over friendship and creativity, such incentives providing enough impetus for engaging a 40,000 dollar a day therapist to sort out the bands problems and for James Hetfield to enter into rehab. The documentary explores these themes of mixed motivation, bringing out that which is weak (in the male) monstrous behaviour of its protagonists: This is captured cynically by a journalist’s comment: “In the end, when Ulrich claims "the band has proven that it can make aggressive music without negative energy," one can only laugh, as the film has been a wallow in the negative energy created by big egos that can't get along but must find ways to make their business entity function.”18 The second propensity evil is to adulterate moral maxims with immoral ones - in other words, to mix moral incentives with non-moral ones, affecting the purity of the motive. An additional ‘bribe’ as Henry Allison puts it, is needed to be able to do what the moral, Categorical Imperative commands. At work here is also the possibility of self deception, that one’s motivation is purely moral. An example of this is the hero who is out to save the day, but is motivated not by the need of others primarily, but the possibility of basking in success. They cannot be heroic unless there is something in it for them. Metallica gives us a character in ‘My Friend Misery’, but this time, the saving figure wallows in self pity and guilt for his heroic deeds: “You’re out to save the world/ Misery/ You insist the weight of the world should be on your shoulders/ Misery.” This gives us an indication of the third propensity to evil where moral motivation is left behind. This intentional guilt that is psychologically self destructive is rather different from the more convincing commitment to evil which we can find in Slayer’s expression of hatred of mankind. Kant mentions in a quotation taken from LaRouchefoucauld, an expression of the worst of all vices- that which is ‘hidden under virtue’ – he quotes La Rochefoucauld: “dans l’adversite de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplait pas,”: In the adversity of our best friends, we find something that is not altogether displeasing in us”19 This human depravity in the case above involves taking enjoyment in the suffering of others. It is also captured by the strong misanthropy nicely illustrated, not just in Slayer’s God Hates Us All, “I despise everyone equally” but also in the song South of Heaven from the same named album: “The root of all evil is the heart of a black soul/ A force that has lived all eternity/ A never ending search for a truth never told/ The loss of all hope and your dignity.”20

207 Niall Scott ______________________________________________________________ This third propensity although the most serious commitment to evil, does not open the way to the human being a diabolical being. Kant explicitly denies the possibility of this. He thinks that even the most morally corrupted agent still requires a recognition of or a commitment to moral reasoning to be able to subvert it. A diabolical will Kant defines as one that “explicitly denies the authority of the (moral) law.”21 This is neatly illustrated in Mercyful Fate’s lyric From the song ‘Evil’ the 1983 album Melissa: “You know my only pleasure/ Is to hear you cry/ I’d love to hear you cry/ I’d love to feel you die/ And I’ll be the first/ To watch your funeral/ And I’ll be the last to leave/ I’d love to hear you cry.”22 If the rise to a diabolical being is not possible, or incoherent as an idea, we can raise the question of whether this Heavy Metal monstrosity as a manifestation of evil in the human is only ever going to be an imitation of the diabolical. The claim that Kant makes regarding the propensity to evil can be neither purely diabolical nor animal. This is because in a purely sensuous, animal nature there is not the moral content available in behaviour, nor the capacity for free choice that would allow the rejection of a moral maxim. In a purely diabolical being, there would be a total commitment to evil, and no moral content whatsoever in their action. However it is interesting to question whether such a diabolical state can be chosen for. Radical evil involves the recognition of the rational capacity to adopt and act according to maxims that conform to the moral law (the categorical imperative), but the evil person adopts maxims that are contrary to the moral law and chooses freely to act according to them. Any reader of Kant is likely to not be content with Kant’s lack of attention given here to the possibility of the human rationally choosing to become a diabolical being. I would like to challenge the view that the truly diabolical is not possible in human affairs by raising the question of whether there can be such a thing as a diabolical categorical imperative- a principle of action that can be rationally chosen, promotes the self and provides its own incentive to resist moral reasoning. The third propensity to evil is then the first step to the fully fledged diabolical human. Thus an agent could initially choose to perform an immoral act grounded in a freely chosen principle, knowing full well what the status of the action is as immoral. Kant’s response to this would be that human freedom is inextricably bound with morality, so the very capacity to choose requires a logical commitment to the moral. However, one can recognise the origin of the first position and then depart from it. One could then continue to pursue a lifestyle that followed such. Such a choice I think would be rational but incredibly difficult to fulfil, to ‘hate everyone equally’ as Kerry King of Slayer writes, reinforcing the choice that rejects the origins of a Christian morality: “ I reject all the biblical views of the truth/Dismiss it as the folklore of the times/I won’t be force-fed prophecies/from a book of untruths for the weakest mind/I keep the bible in a pool of blood/So that none of its lies can affect me/This is the new faith/A different way of life”23

208 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________ A human being with evil reason itself (diabolical) might well be something different altogether than a human person, but may well have a rationale to the structure of its reasoning that is categorically evil. However Kant does not expand on this further, other than that “an absolutely evil will would contain too much, because resistance to the law would itself thereby be elevated to incentive (for without any incentive the power of choice cannot be determined)…”24 According to Kant, the evil will follows the choice that is made available to it, disregarding the exercise of choice that others have. Seriol Morgan notes that the evil will concerns outer freedom, being the absence of restraint on willing25, although the grounding of this evil is not empirical. This is a difficult aspect of Kant’s doctrine to grapple withthe relationship between inner freedom and outer freedom in the context of radical evil, where free choice is a feature of the expression of inner freedom. So to exercise free choice, and be capable of performing radical evil, its grounding must be located in inner freedom. However the effect of evil willing is that it concerns itself and limits itself to outer freedom. Thus in the context of the portrayal of evil in Metal culture, we can use it as tool for understanding Kant, but it presents us with an interesting possibility of not just the evil, diabolical human being rationally committed to this approach to life. If we can ignore for a moment the use of discourses of as a marketing gimmick to woo an interested audience into purchasing its product (for example as a vehicle of an expression of rebellion against parental, sometimes Christian morality in western culture) and look at these songs, images and lifestyles pointing towards a more sinister character in human nature. It is worth noting as well that Kerry King says of his lyrics that “They’re just stories, like making up your own kind of thing and don’t reflect on me in any way”26 Nonetheless they are stories that refer to something- something rather unpleasant concerning human experience and human behaviour However, it is more likely that the presentation of monstrosity as evil in the human, in the examples from Metal culture is only ever going to be an imitation of the diabolical. That is if we accept the Kantian line of reasoning above. There will never be a thing possible in the human realm such as the truly diabolical, only a reflection of it. This can be put against the attempt in Black metal to embrace the diabolical and express it through human agency. The history of the Scandinavian and more specifically the Norwegian metal scene is notorious for its links with violent events that include associations with church burning, murder and suicide, grounded in Odinism and Satanism27 The problem with the diabolical is fairly apparent in the attempt in Black Metal where it has attempted to embrace the diabolical and express it through human agency, through acts of violence. But although there are serious pretenders to embrace Satanism of various kinds, for example in bands such as Deicide, Ackercoke, Mayhem, Merciful Fate, this

209 Niall Scott ______________________________________________________________ genre usually descends into a parody of itself, projecting with irony the incoherence of a truly diabolical being in the place of a human being. Either this or, “To play with the most dangerous ideas but never be defined by them, or by anything or anyone else is an aesthetic philosophy with much more artistic potential that the shriller naive pronouncements of certain Black metal bands. Listen to the best black metal of today and you’ll hear the sound of ‘the true’, but the sound of those who know how to play with fire without getting burnt.”28 Things don’t look to good for Metal then in either state: not only is the possibility of the truly diabolical not very convincing, the freedom demanded and sought after is probably better suited to an existential analysis, rather than a Kantian one. Faced with Nietzschean existentialism that demands supreme self discipline and a rejection of the kind of morality that Kant advocated we may find the diabolical here. But that requires a different paper. There are of course serious problems in the comparison with, or treatment of, Kant’s theory in the context of Metal. One could hold that because the leaning here is towards an existential conception of evil, we are at cross purposes, because we are talking about an entirely different thing from the Christian conception of evil. However, there is of course a fair amount of incoherence in the Metal scene- there is no philosophy as such being presented. When we take interpretations of reason for metal’s emergence we find differing views: Walser: the emergence of Metal “coincides exactly with the period of the greatest popularity of horror films and books”29 and that the metal audience is a generation of people in America that believes it will be worse off that their parents, suggesting that this “dark side of heavy metal is intimately related to the dark side of the modern capitalist security state: war greed, patriarchy, surveillance and control”30, where as Weinstein sees it as a response to oppression, where the metaphors of the underground, darkness and hell reflect such a culture in the dark31. These themes although projecting an existentialist approach to human life, are quite dependent on the Christian legacy for its imagery and as a target against which to rebel. Again, as commented on in The Black/death metal Terroizer magazine: “So Satanism tends to be expressed in the Boyd Rice sense of an extreme form of individualist anarchism. Again this is often paradoxically expressed: on the one hand the ideal Satanist celebrates the animal, the lustful, the instinctive, the ‘true’. On the other hand, Satanism is a paragon of self-control, of discipline and self sufficiency.”32 If the latter part of this quotation serves to highlight the Kantian notion of vice parading as virtue, the former demonstrates (if we consider Kant’s argument as to why one cannot be evil and animal) the more incoherent position of trying to relate animality and humanity in the evil in the same breath. Furthermore, let us not forget that we are dealing with a record industry here too. As review of the Metallica documentary scornfully makes

210 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________ the point underlying the impossibility of the being truly diabolical in the human: “Berlinger and Sinofsky, with their knack for penetrating the diabolical pretensions of weak and disaffected human beings, have brought Metallica to its knees.”33 It seems that with this we cannot get much further in human monstrous behaviour in Metal than Kant’s first propensity.

Notes 1

Kerry King, Slayer, ‘Disciple’ God Hates Us All American Records, (2001) James Hetfield, Metallica, ‘Frantic’, St Anger, Creeping Death Music & EMI Blackwood music (2003) 3 Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Metallica, Some Kind of Monster (Los Angeles California: Paramount Home Video, 2005) DVD recording 4 Joe Berlinger and Greg Milner, Metallica, This Monster Lives, (London, England: Robson Books, 2004) 5 Marilyn Manson The Golden Age of Grotesque (Nothin/interscope Records 2003) 6 Carl A. Raschke, Painted Black: From Drug Killings to Heavy Metal- The Alarming True story of How Satanism Is Terrorisuing Our Communitites. (New York: Harper and Row,1990) 175, quoted in Robert Walser, Running with the Devil Power Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University press: Middletown, Connetticut 1993) p.142 7 I am full aware that there is limited space here so I will not be dealing in detail with the vast subculture that exists in Scandinavian Black Metal which some may think deserves more attention. For those readers wanting to investigate this further, I recommend the text Lords of Chaos, The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind, (USA Feral House, 2003) 8 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:421, Ed. by Laura Denis, Ontario, Canada: Broadview editions 2005) 9 There is much more to this issue, but here I just want to introduce the Categorical imperative in order to demonstrate its relationship to radical evil. For a detailed discussion and critique on Kant’s universal law, I recommend Allan Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1999), 10 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) 6:29, footnote. (henceforth cited as Rel.) 11 Seiriol Morgan The Missing Formal Proof of the Universal Human Propensity to Evil in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Philosophical Review, 114, 1, (2005) forthcoming. I strongly recommend this article to any reader interested in looking deeper into the contradictions 2

211 Niall Scott ______________________________________________________________ and deep problems in Kant’s argument on radical evil. I do not dare delve too far into this territory here, as it takes this piece beyond my original aims. 12 Ibid. 13 James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett, “Master of Puppets”, Master of Puppets (Polygram Records 1988) 14 Rel 6:29-30 15 Rel 6:26 16 Rel 6:29 17 The Struggle Within, Metallica (‘The Black Album’) 18 Bill White, “Metallica Doc Strips Down Monsters of Rock to Egomaniacal Pussycats,” Seattle Post Special to the Post-Intelligencer, July 30, 2004. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/movies/184138_metallica30q.html 19 Immanuel Kant Rel.6:33 20 Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King “South of Heaven” South of Heaven Slayer:Def Jam Records (1988) 21 Henry Allison, Idealism and Freedom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ) 175 22 King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, ‘Evil’ Melissa, Roadrunner records (1983) 23 Kerry King, ‘New Faith’, God Hates Us All, Slayer: American Recordings, (2001) 24 Rel 6:35 25 Morgan “The Missing Formal Proof of the Universal Human Propensity to Evil in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” Philosophical Review, 114, 1, (2005) forthcoming 26 http://home3.inet.tele.dk/borgholt/articles/theyre_only_horrorstories.htm Author and date unknown (14 January 2005) 27 Chris Campion “In the face of Death” The Observer, Feb 20, 2005 28 Keith Kahn-Harris “ Black Metal Philosophy” Terrorizer magazine, 128, February 2005. 29 Robert Walser, Running with the Devil Power Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University press: Middletown, Connetticut 1993), 161 30 Walser, 163 31 Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal The Music and Its Culture (DA Capo Press 2000) For further Discussion on the discourse of heavy metal see the article: Adorno and Metal by Thomas C. Gannon at: http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/hm.html (06/08/03) 32 Kahn-Harris, 33 Bill White, “Metallica doc strips down monsters of rock to egomaniacal pussycats” Seattle post special to the post intelligencer, Friday, July 30, 2004

212 God Hates Us All ______________________________________________________________

References Allison, Henry. Idealism and Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 Berlinger, Joe and Milner, Greg. Metallica, This Monster Lives, London, England: Robson Books, 2004 Berlinger, Joe and Sinofsky, Bruce. Metallica, Some Kind of Monster Los Angeles California: Paramount Home Video, 2005, DVD recording Campion, Chris. “In the Face of Death” The Observer, Sunday Feb 20, 2005 Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:421, Ed. by Laura Denis, Ontario, Canada: Broadview editions, 2005 Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kahn-Harris, Keith. “Black Metal Philosophy” Terrorizer magazine, 128, February 2005. Morgan, Seriol. “The Missing Formal Proof of the Universal Human Propensity to Evil in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” Philosophical Review 114,1, (2005). Raschke, Carl A. Painted Black: From Drug Killings to Heavy Metal- The Alarming True story of How Satanism Is Terrorisuing Our Communitites. New York: Harper and Row, 1990, quoted in Robert Walser, Running with the Devil Power Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Wesleyan University press: Middletown, Connetticut 1993. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil Power Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connetticut, 1993. Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal The Music and Its Culture, U.S.A.: DA Capo Press, 2000. Wood, Alan. Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999.

Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyska

Abstract The paper focuses on the ambivalent power of cuteness and offers a preliminarily sketched map indicating some of the possible intersections of cuteness and monstrosity. The main idea is that these two - seemingly distant and contradicted - realms can be read/understood one through the other. The basis for such an assumption is to be found both in cuteness’ ambivalent aesthetics and multidimensional ethics. With respect to aesthetics, cuteness can be found both in the anatomy of a child and a freak (cuteness involves a certain malformation and exaggeration of infantile aesthetic diagram). As for ethics, cuteness can be thought of as a “sweet coating” that makes it easier to swallow bitter pill; it is in other words able to change meanings of ambivalent and simply negative issues, like violence or sexuality. Question that arises in the light of the above-mentioned inconsistencies of cuteness is: Can we define the nature of cuteness as transformative - shifting the monstrosity not even to the realm of beauty (for a cruel beauty is something within the spectrum of monstrous emanations), but to the very space that is thought of as absolutely pure and sweet? Keywords: Cuteness, monstrosity, otherness, popular culture 1.

Words, Words, Words According to common-sense definitional coordinates, cute and monstrous seem to inhabit distant and mutually exclusive realms. The Alien is by no means sweet and loveable, and you possibly couldn’t call Winnie the Pooh shockingly cruel. We can tell a monster when we see it. On the same terms we almost automatically identify the cute. We carefully separate the monster from the cutie and the very notion of tracing similarities between the two seems highly improper. Yet what is most fascinating about cute (and it is this fascination that brought me to the following notes in the first place) is its ambivalent nature, its certain hybridity that actually allows to link it to the monster. The very source of such monstrous potential happens to be the cute etymology.

214 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ The word cute is aphetic from acute, and the Latin word acutus which provides an etymological base for the adjective - roughly means sharp. Thus the first set of cute meanings revolves around sharpness of senses and of mind, around cleverness and wits. It is not that far from cute to cunning. And cunningness involves scheming that may be potentially dangerous. Cute is also attractive, very pretty and charming, yet these attributes can be manifested not only by innocent, sweet looks and behaviour, but also - as if synchronizing with the abovementioned psychical traits - by self-conscious, and even excessive sex-appeal. Dictionary definition of cute leads us therefore to conclusions quite contrary to its ostensive counterpart, with puppies, kittens, little chubby cherubs, and fluffy mascots as the ultimate icons of cuteness. The monstrous has also some secrets to reveal. And again - starting from the Latin etymology - we embark on a linguistic adventure. Originally monstrum was a synonym of something marvellous, a divine portent or warning. It thus first and foremost belonged to the sphere of sacrum, yet this meaning seems to be obsolete in contemporary understanding of the monstrous. A typical monster does dwell the realm of the Unknown, but his sacred potential vanishes from the common-sense definition being replaced by more down-to earth signs of monstrosity. Rather than of strange and prodigious, monstrous is equivalent of immoral, wrong, unusually large and ugly. Still, I would like to use this marginalised vision of the monstrous in making a comparison between the monstrous and the cute, which otherwise would be hazardous. And so - in the light of “porous” structure of definitions - the title-slash separating the monstrous from the cute, serves simultaneously as a bridge linking these two. Monstrous cute is - following this trait - a cute as read through its thesaurus (endearing, loveable, delightful, darling, pretty) and then re-read through the notion of strangeness and marvel (something that is not as it seems, something that suffers from innate contradictions); to read cute as monstrous is - in brief - to read it as an other. Such a suspicious (though interesting) linguistic operation can be possible due to the very nature of definitions. Definitions, originating from Latin definire: to limit, to describe, to explain, serve both as descriptions and examples of proper usage of a headword in question and as such can be deemed legends - literally this is what should be read. Definitions yet work as open texts, and their (only) seeming obviousness/non-paradoxical nature enables aberrant readings, that question the original descriptions giving birth to their ambivalent versions. Popular culture - seen from the poststructuralist perspective as the site of semiotic battle over meanings - is the most immediate and natural human environment and it is there, where the creation, reading, re-reading, acceptance, denial and destruction of most of our everyday definitions take

215 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ place. Popular culture can be thought of as a library of texts which contradict, overlap, enrich, and disempower each other. Popular culture’s text is a mixture of what R. Barthes referred to as writerly and readerly texts1 - accessible and easy in form but still open to multitude of interpretations. As such, it offers itself up to popular production; it exposes, however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and weaknesses of its preferred meanings; it contains, while attempting to repress them, voices that contradict the ones it prefers; it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them, and it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control2 Such text has two main features - it is excessive and obvious, and the seemingly paradoxical mixture - of “overflowing semiosis” and refuse of in-depth analysis - makes popular culture text practically bottomless well of meanings (within the limits set by intentio operis). My general assumption is that both the cute and the monstrous can be “read” as such popular texts. Different and unexpected usages of these two concepts add to their definitions, challenging the cleanness of the boundary raised between the cute and the monstrous. How much cute can the monster bear to maintain his monstrosity and escape from blurring into virtual nonexistence? How monstrous should the cutie become to turn amusement into terror and cross the boundary of monsters’ realm? Are the possible meaning transitions some signum temporis revealing the very ambiguities of our culture? These are only some of possible questions that the suggestion of certain cute-monstrous reciprocity evokes. And it may be so that the specifics behind the popular culture can shed some light on the curious nature of cuteness/monstrosity. Common definitions of cutie and monster (as extracted from the most recognizable icons of both these species - say Hello Kitty and Cthulhu) reveal the human tendency to assume aesthetic/ethic coherence and disclose the “innate” inclination to structure the world arranging the elements of it in sets of binary oppositions. Pure-type monster, though horrifying and abominable, though occupying the other side of the norm, the grotesque, impenetrable and dangerous “through the looking-glass” world, still has got more in common with the order than with the chaos. By taking place (being placed?) on the edge, on the boundary, the monster protects us from crossing it by the simple fact of showing (Latin monstrare) where it lies. Due to the assumed coherence between monstrous looks and behaviour, monster as such is predictable, mainly because of his being a portent of danger. The same,

216 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ though aiming at opposite direction, applies to cute. Cute is (or maybe should be?) predictable because its “safe” aesthetics connotes “harmless” ethics. The openness of cute concept enables us to read its aesthetics, its surface without linking it to “prescribed” cute ethics. It can be otherwise. Monstrosity of cuteness may be concluded either on the basis of its appearance or its behaviour leading - moreover - to disturbing as well as ironic conclusions (monstrous cutie can be thought of either as a threat or a trifle). In order to welcome the cute as a multivocal discourse we need a set of its “readings” where the sacred harmony between looks and behaviour is hardly ever sustained. Cute is first and foremost a circular concept. Frances Richards, in her Fifteen theses on the Cute3, noted that as a means of softening, neutralizing the sharp, threatening concepts it works inevitably as a sort of pendulum swinging to and fro, and thus being able to play its role only up to a certain point, where the sweetness becomes a mock and a pitiful or ironic alter-ego of itself. Cute can therefore serve as multipurpose descriptive/interpretative tool endowing its objects either with more positive or ambivalent connotations. To make cute a multifaceted concept we need the following instruction: Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject, the melancholic, the wicked, and the childlike. Now in the zones between add the erotic, the ironic, and the kitsch. Inter-sperse the Romantic/Victorian, the Disney/ consumerist, and the biologically deterministic. At the centre of this many-spoked wheel lies a connective empty space. Label it CUTE.4 2.

Aesthetical Incongruity: Cute as Freak The aesthetics of cuteness could be identified with the anatomy of a human (animal) baby, except for the fact, that in the process of making the cute, this infantile diagram serves as a raw material rather than final product. Manufactured cute (for this kind of cuteness is of main focus here) is stylized, perfected (de-naturalized) babyish appearance and behaviour. Infantile features are often (involuntarily or purposefully) caricaturized and exaggerated during the process of making the cute and the outcome is thus at the same time sweet and pathetic, pretty and ugly, and most of all anatomically incorrect. It seems that a certain degree of both physical and psychical weakness and disability can be seen as sub-types of childishness and both are essential parts of cute aesthetics and general sweet appeal. Cute and pitiful are often interchangeable concepts, says Sharon Kinsella.

217 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ Cute characters like Hello Kitty and Totoro have stubbly arms, no fingers, no mouths, huge heads, massive eyes which can hide no private thoughts from the viewer nothing between their legs, pot bellies, swollen legs and pigeon feet - if they have feet at all. Cute things can't walk, can't talk, can't in fact do anything at all for themselves because they are physically handicapped.5 Japanese term for cute is kawaii, a derivation of kawayushi principally shy and embarrassed as well as vulnerable, small and darling. As Kinsella notices, contemporary usage of kawaii reveals some traits of pity kawaii applies both to small babies and frail old women - and “the term kawaisô derived directly from kawaii means pathetic, poor, and pitiable in a generally negative if not pleasing sense.”6 Daniel Harris7 goes further linking the aesthetics of cuteness with that of deformity and dejection. Cuteness - in his opinion - makes a weird category of mutants and malformed outcasts which deserve our attention mainly by arising feelings of pity and sympathy. We could possibly trace numerous similarities between the species of cuties and that of freaks. In his Pathetic Manifesto, Kurt Brereton stated: There is a good slice of the pathetic in cuteness. Wrapped up in the cute are the sentimental appeal and the abject repulsion. The cute little doll is a watered down and stylized version of carnivalesque puppet - half monster half innocent happy face.8 Freak - an embodiment of monstrosity - is usually recognized by his unusual physiology that transcends the norms of the body, and is referred to as lusus naturae. In bodily terms, general attributes of freaks are: too few (or none) or two many limbs growing out of most inappropriate parts of the body; the absence or distortion of body proportion leading to monstrous forms and abnormal size; contradictive (or unspecified, multiple) genders, and strange colour of skin, eyes, hair. Now let’s take the absolute cute idol Hello Kitty, loveable white kitten. Wouldn’t she be an astoma, a mouthless freak? Couldn’t we interpret her lack of fingers (claws? hands?) as an actual sign of physical monstrosity? Wouldn’t her large head be a symptom of hydrocephalus? How can she see and smell having three dots instead of eyes and nose? One thing leaves no doubt - no matter how long this litany of questions would be, Hello Kitty remains an icon of cuteness. And it will rather be a pink, big-headed, button-eyed and chubby teddy bear, that wins children (and adults) hearts, than its natural-size, clawed and sharp-teethed counterpart. So more important than to prove the physical monstrosity of cute

218 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ (though it seems an intriguing task and quite plausible argument) is to ask where does the (nonnegotiable) boundary between cuteness and monstrosity lie? Harris’ statement becomes helpful here - for it is the emotion evoked by cuteness aesthetics that delimitates Hello Kitty from malformed monster. It is the disempowering feeling of pity and sympathy (aligned though, as Harris insists, to that of superiority and even certain cruelty) that deprives a monster of his monstrosity. Both monstrous and cute are concepts susceptible to change. This change may be understood twofold. It can be seen as the possibility to add unusual/unexpected/controversial meanings to both of them. Cute monster, for example, isn’t usually enclosed within the definition of a typical monster, but a typical definition of a monster can be (in the light of numerous examples) enriched with “a creature with monstrous looks and sweet nature”. Secondly, such hybrids are in position to change other definitions monstrous cutie possesses a hard to overlook potential to change a meaning of cruelty, whereas cute monster adds new meanings to the concept of goodness. Among various ways of “extracting” the cute monster (bearing in mind the multiple meanings of monster) the techniques proposed by H. R. Greenberg make a useful tool. In Heimlich Maneuvers: On A Certain Tendency of Horror and Speculative Cinema9 he shows the metamorphosis of unheimlisch (uncanny, distanced) into heimlisch (homely, intimate) taking form of the following transformations of “pure” monsters: making them figures of fun, friends/protectors of children, mascots requiring protection and friendship on the part of children, and (least relevant) mankind saviours. All these serve as means of rehabilitating the “coherent” monster. The work of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini - The young family10 can be thought of as another example of combining cuteness and monstrosity in a way that disturbs common understandings of these concepts. The titlesculpture depicts a mother lying on her side and suckling pups. And there would be nothing disturbing in such warm, touching setting, wasn’t it not for the fact, that the mother belongs to unknown species, she is a hybrid creature combining human and animal elements, she is a monster. Yet Piccinini refers to her as beautiful, for “she is not threatening, but a face you could love, and a face in love with her family.”11 The general impression is that though cuteness seems to be above all an aesthetical phenomena, its definition holds (only?) when it is embedded in emotional response. Cute is when it instils in the viewer an impulse to touch it. Cute therefore marks its presence by oozing positive feelings. Of warmth, safety, innocence and sweetness. 3.

Ethical Twist: Cute as Monster (?) Sweet side of cute is only one of its multiple faces. Porn cute and wicked cute - for these two are the most prominent examples of cute ethical

219 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ paradox - can be embraced by a more general cute-genre, namely the anticute.12 Anti-cute seems to be more self-conscious, more ironic and closer to cute original definition (as cunning, clever and not lacking wits) than its ohso-lovely kawaii counterpart. Anti-cute is the empowered cute. Anti-cute reveals the cute in disguise. The traits of such “malformed” readings of cute can be found in two main icons of techno: the Lolita and the Peter Pan, which both base on transgressing the cute/monstrous opposition, stretching the limits, setting new rules based on ambivalence. Their clothes well fit kawaii trends, but here the babyish, pastel tee shirts, braids, teddy bears and dummies do not connote the longing for childhood utopia, but work - paradoxically - as sexual attractors and means of manifesting the maturity (in various areas of life) via the physically immature body and childish arsenal.13 Japanese erotic-porn anime, better known under the hentai term in the western world, features sweet, cute, big-eyed, lovely-faced girls turned victims of sexual abuse or sexual abusers themselves taking part in orgies involving not only men and women of different age, but also animals and aliens of various kind. Chucky in Child’s Play could make a paradigmatic figure of monstrous cute. Gremlins would fit the schema as well. True. Yet the combination of sweet form (a doll) and monstrous behaviour (slaughtering) is followed here by aesthetical transformation which signalizes the ethical change; Malicious and murderous Gremlins, quite contrary to their cute initial Mogwai from, are scaly, slimy and clawed. Quite fair. Chucky and Gremlins thus represent the evil potential in harmless beings. As Richards puts it: “cute emerges as a ritualized and declawed sublimation of violence, a pantomime or parody neutralizing mortal threat”. The “schizophrenic” nature of cute allows it to be used as a sugarcoating layer for ideas and behaviour overstepping social rules and entering the realm of this, what is forbidden. Jamie Rap14 noticed a very important quality of cute, namely its being a power of transforming an object’s emotional power or value as well as the meaning. This transformative ability allows cute to act as a whitewash veiling an unfortunate reality or to comment on social taboos. Cute can also be played against itself in one form, for example acting as the cute icon and the scary monster simultaneously. The fascinating metamorphosis of cute into anti-cute reflects the above-mentioned circularity of the cute concept - for when cute acquires wicked features it in fact goes to the excess of cuteness, exploiting and parodying the sweetness to its very limits, poisoning itself while retaining the

220 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ artificially loveable texture. Cute becomes grotesque. One question becomes vital. Is monstrous cute really monstrous? By ridiculing the possible, potentially present aggression it seems to simultaneously give rise to dejection and fascination. As such it seduces the viewer using the very arsenal of otherness as described by Michel Foucault (1967) of Jeffrey Cohen (1996). Cute is always about a play. Happy Tree Friends (to be found on www.happytreefriends.com) are little, cute, cuddly, funny and sugary sweet cartoon characters15 that we are bound to love, but what awaits them in each of short episodes is sudden and terrible yet still cartoonish death (none of Happy Tree Friends dies for real, they posses a wonderful ability to regenerate, an ability typical for almost all cartoon characters). Each cartoon starts with an innocent set-up – we see Happy Tree Friends playing in the park, shopping, watching movies - safe, pleasant daily activities. And yet in each cartoon this harmony is destroyed by some catastrophe, some incident that turns a “Disneytopia” fable into splutter. Happy Tree Friends’ stories are referred to as “gory and above all funny situations” including sewing off limbs, decapitations, burnings, poisonings and hang ups to mention just a few examples of possible slaughter scenarios. Very often the lethal weapons are of cute origin themselves – take for example a lollipop or ice cream poked in the eye. Yet the characters do not hurt each other intentionally. The ruthless logic of Fate works here most of the time. The stories are set together by the everyday sayings that parents use on kids like don’t play with matches! except that here the possible outcome of disobedience is staged. Happy Tree Friends define death as a funny thing happening to others. It is a game which rules you accept not necessarily having to accept the context which gave life to it.16 Cute engages no responsibility neither on a part of viewer nor the cute itself. Happy (Freaky?) Tree Friends’ Smoochies announce: You have just adopted a HTF of your very own. Love it to death. Literally, to death. Isn’t there - apart from a sufficient amount of horror - a campish hint of upturning conventions? The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. The case of Happy Tree Friends can also be utilized as a proof supporting Daniel Harris findings on the curious nature of cute, which - by exactly the same sweetness that triggers maternal responses enables a certain degree of monstrosity on the part of its creator/user/viewer. Because cuteness aestheticizes helplessness and deformity, it almost always involves an act of sadism on the part of its creator, who makes an unconscious attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing he seeks to idolize.17

221 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ The claim of cutie owner’s monstrous behaviour can be a bit too farfetched, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning because the asymmetric relation between the cute and the owner leaves a potential for exercising such power. Marco Evaristti’s controversial work, Goldfish in blenders aptly depicts this paradoxical cute-viewer relation: when there is an option of turning the blender on, the question arises of power we do have over animals and other inferiors. The anti-cute genre, though emerged as a protest against too-sweet aesthetics and ethics, a critique of infantilisation of society and reality, seems to end up swallowed by cuteness. For if cuteness is about surface, appearance, form, it can be read as sweet, innocent and loveable against ironical artist’s attitude providing a preferred interpretational tool. Both cuteness and anti-cuteness operate within the frames set by popular culture. Readings of the anti-cute may thus involve both anxiety aiming at the fatal consequences of tainting the pure cuteness with violence and brutality, and a feeling of relief, that the “sacred” sugary-sweet childhood-utopia has been finally breached with the more down-to-earth understanding of what does it mean to be a child in an instantly accelerating and ever strange world of contradictions and transgression. And both these interpretations are important as far as they enable more profound understanding of the monstrosity’s enduring presence in the multiplicity of forms. 4.

Scheming Cute The main source of cute transformative potential seems to lie - as suggested above - in its aesthetic features, so the main strategies of evoking/revealing the monstrosity in cuteness will also base on its appearance. The assumption of the ethic/aesthetic coherence allows here to create not always cute scenarios telling stories not only about the monstrosity of cute but also of its creator. In his Biological homage to MM, Stephen Jay Gould18 sketched the transformation of MM stating that: as Mickey’s personality softened, his appearance changed. The change at work is progressive juvenalization. Gould draws on the concept of Kindchenschema proposed by a German ethologist, Konrad Lorenz. According to this idea, features of juvenility serve as a trigger releasing the mechanisms for affection and nutrition in adult humans.19 Among the Kindchenschema releasers are: a relatively large head, predominance of brain capsule, large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency and clumsy movements20

222 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ The power of Kindchenschema lies in the fact that, apart from its obvious adaptive function - sort of self-preservation programme for babies, we tend to seek this set of features not only among the infants of our own species, but in other animals and inanimate objects as well.21 The cute aesthetic being so much dependent on our feelings towards it is thus easily intersected with cute ethics. Kindchenschema is a code easy to decipher cute is in a need for protection and affection. It is subservient, tame and mute. Oozing cuteness disempowers its source. When do we most often say “Awww” approaching something cute? Daniel Harris insists it is when the object of “Awww” does something stupid and embarrassing, when it will show lack of coordination, lack of brains appearing more helpless that it in fact is. Harris states: Adorable things are often most adorable in the middle of a pratfall or a blunder: Winnie the Pooh with his snout stuck in the hive; the 101 dalmatians of Disney's classic collapsing in double splits and sprawling across the ice; Love-a-lot Bear in The Care Bears Movie, who stares disconsolately out at us with a paint bucket overturned on his head; or, the grimmest example of the cruelty of cuteness, the real live fainting goat, which has acquired of late a perverse chic as a pet (bred with myatonia, a genetic disorder, it coyly folds up and faints when you scream at it).22 Kindchenschema can yet serve as a manipulative tool revealing the hidden power of cuteness. From a Darwinist point of view, cuteness is constructed as a means for survival, in this case not of genes but of the object that it has been assigned to: if cuteness is ‘wrapped’ around a certain object that has an image with unwanted qualities, for example war, it is more likely to survive a cultural selection process.23 In this reading, cute becomes a deceivingly positive container for meanings with negative or ambivalent connotation. Cuteness can thus be understood as a selfish gene, as a virus. According to Lori Merish cited by J. Raap, cuteness is a highly conventionalized aesthetic, distinguishable both by its formal aesthetic features and the formalized emotional response it engenders.24

223 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ It is the softening, the watering down sharp, problematic areas that through the work of cutesification - reveals the potential monstrosity of cute becoming a camouflage for meanings far from sweet, and in consequence denying, ridiculing, disempowering and disarming the taboo, the monster.25 Cutesification is a consequence of realizing the sweet appeal of cute. Cute can work as such “one-size” and user-friendly form for conveying a multitude of diversified information exactly because it seems an object devoid of any malicious traits as well as potential self-distanced approach taking the form of, say, irony. Cute, a perfectly manufactured innocent naturalness, happiness and spontaneity, connotes safety. It makes you hug it and love it. Would any “pure-type” monster be able to evoke such a response? I very seriously doubt it. The following may be deemed a linguistic game only, making the whole monstrous-cute argument a joke. I leave it open to interpretation. Cute might be thought of as a watered-down version of pretty; which is a watered-down version of beautiful; which is a watered-down version o sublime; which is a watereddown version of terrifying. In this regard, the cute is akin to the ridiculous, which is a watered-down version of the absurd, which is again a watered-down version of that which terrifies. By extension, this suggests that all representation, whatever its stylistic bent is tinged with the experience of terror: the terror of the convincingly ersatz, the killing disjuncture of the otherized, the pseudoreal.26

5.

Framed Cute The domain, where most of the definitional play and counter-play take part is popular culture, or - more correctly - various cultures of popular culture seen as a heterogenic whole, an open text, a pleasure machine. Much has been said about popular culture, but what I would like to stress as a possible trait in grasping the paradox of cute/monstrous division, is that its nature is that of parasite in an endless search for a new feeder. It sounds like a cliché that postmodern culture is all about transgression and ambivalence, but these two come not only as a threat. The elements of social life exorcised so frantically beyond the boundaries of shared - comprehensible community, are now welcomed back. The uncanny, the unthinkable, the other, the paradoxical seem to construct a strange whole becoming a method of copying with the reality (quite similar in nature). The most natural environment of monstrous readings of cute seems to be a culture of alien-nation.27 It emerges as a result of fascination with strangeness, freakiness, otherness and ambivalence. It is a site of combining

224 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ together this, what seems to be mutually exclusive, of “familiarizing” this, what cannot be neither understood nor accepted within the existing sociocultural frames. Still, it would be a mistake to equal these techniques of embracing otherness with a birth of new global morality. The “reading” of alien-nation culture as a cultural crusade against intolerance and xenophobia is only one of the possibilities and not necessarily the most correct one, because alien-nation culture is as much a political culture of general tolerance and love, as a decadent popular culture, that exploits the motif of the Other and simultaneously reduces it to the aesthetical dimension.28 The notion of reducing the otherness to the surface is an important one. The very essential ingredient of postmodernity, the aesthetization - as described by Mike Featherstone – is in position to turn the reality we inhabit into configurations of signs which can be perceived without any ethical afterthought and gazed at with the eyes of flâneur, who is always just passing by, lured by the new and unexpected, devouring the images as they flow. This fascination with transgression and ambivalence can be read as Jeffrey Cohen (1996) reads the culture - through the monsters it gave life to. His proposal goes along the lines of Michel Foucault’s idea of negative structure of society - finding answers to such questions as “whom does the society reject? Whom does it exclude? What is the system of prohibition?”29 This refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration.30 The extraordinary is the fabric of the most fundamental legends we base our ordinary world on. Curious mixture of fascination and repulsion defines Foucauldian seduction and this seduction best describes the status of the Other. Due to its “borderland” ontology, it threatens to break structuring and sense securing binary thinking while simultaneously promising transgression which catapults us from one-dimensional world to the realm of Uncanny and Unexplored. If monsters should be indeed treated as indicators of our conditio as a culture, would the presence of hybrids such as cute monsters and monstrous cuties explain the transgressive and ambivalent faces of postmodernity? The cute (especially as cho kawaii) and the monster are both Others not belonging to the realm of This, What Is Normal. The transformative nature of monstrous cute/cute monstrosity is deeply embedded in its power to shift and even annihilate the binary distinctions separating the

225 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ well known orbis interior from the orbis exterior of Them, whatever they are. Monster incorporates the Out There, yet thought of in terms of Lovecraftian Outer Dimensions where nothing good awaits us. Cute - on the opposite side of the continuum - serves as a tangible extension of another, intangible Outerspace - the fluffy, light-hearted, sugary childhood (purged from bogeymen and monsters). The ambivalence is the word that makes it possible to position both cute and monstrous in one dimension, the space that Michel Foucault called heterotopia, the place outside the norm, the site of revolutionary potential to change, to pose an alternative order, where the coherence between words and reality is no more possible, where the paradox is the structuring rule. The fifth principle of heterotopias: “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”31 Beware the Cute. Dedicated to Basia Pawowska and Morelka

Notes 1

Readerly text is - in brief – essentially passive, receptive, and demands acceptance of the meanings provided, although is quite undemanding of its reader, while the writerly text challenges its reader to make sense out of it on his own, to try to decipher it, to take part in the meaning construction. John Fiske refers to popular culture texts as producerly texts; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1995) 2 Ibid, 104 3 Frances Richards, “Fifteen theses on the Cute”, [article on line] Cabinet Magazine 4 (2001), accessed 14 February 2005; available from: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/cute.php 4 Ibid 5 Sharon Kinsella,“Cuties in Japan“, [chapter on line] in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, eds. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1995), accessed 14 February 2005, available from: http://www.kinsellaresearch.com/Cuties.html 6 Ibid 7 Daniel Harris, “Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001 p. 4 8 Kurt Brereton,“The Pathetic Manifesto“, 2000, (15 April 2005).

226 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ 9

Harvey Roy Greenberg,“Heimlich Maneuvers: On A Certain Tendency of Horror and Speculative Cinema“, PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 1 October 2001 (31 December 2001). 10 www.patriciapiccinini.net 11 Linda Michael, We are family 12 More examples of anti-cute: Jamie Raap, Cute: a container insensitive to content and context, 2004 (14 February 2005). 13 See: Marek Krajewski, Kultury kultury popularnej (PoznaĔ: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2003) 14 Raap 15 Though two of them are thieves, one plays a playboy, other is psychopath, yet another suffers from terrible dandruff; one happens to be completely nutty and has a glass eye, other has serious dental problem, and yet another – seemingly mechanic – lacks hands, although is equipped with most necessary tools. Cruelty? Camp? Funny? Freaky? 16 People watching HTF are often aware of the ambiguity of this cartoon gore/splutter, but equally often express the following opinions: it is so unreal and the cartoons don’t die for real, so why worry; it’s funny seeing maltreated Cuddles, no one will cry for him after all, it’s just a parody of nice, neat Disney fables. People watching HTF supposedly aren’t a group sadists or psychopaths. It is (again supposedly) the ironic gaze, knowing the game’s name and distanced attitude towards reality that makes it possible to laugh at eyeballs dangling from the sockets, scorched fur and twisted limbs. Or isn’t it? 17 Harris, 5 18 In: Stephen Jay Gould, Niewczesny pogrzeb Darwina. Wybór esejów (Warszawa: PrószyĔski I S-ka, 1999) 19 I (following Gould’s argument) leave aside this presentation the issue of whether or not this affectionate response to babyish features is truly innate or learnt through the process of socialization. It is suffice to say that the so called “cute response” applies to most of us. 20 Ibid, 261 21 Unfortunately the issue of selling cute is to complex and dense to be sensibly encompassed within this short sketch, but it is worth stressing that a whole “fancy goods” industry exploits the emotional response the cute things achieve from their viewers and owners - for it has the potential to change an act of buying into an act of adopting the cute product. And this shift has important consequences. See e.g. Jamie Rapp, Sharon Kinsella and Daniel Harris (references)

227 Maja Brzozowska-BrywczyĔska ______________________________________________________________ 22

Harris, 6 Raap 24 Ibid 25 Which, when confronted with the title: “myths and metaphors of enduring evil” makes a very promising metaphor indeed and a very dangerous transformation of monster and its definition. 26 Richards 27 Krajewski, 105 28 Krajewski, 105-106 29 Michel Foucault, Filozofia, historia, polityka. Wybór pism (WarszawaWrocáaw: PWN 2000), 78 30 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster culture (Seven Theses)” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 6 31 Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces “, Diacritics, 31 (1986): 27 23

References Brereton, Kurt Pathetic Manifesto 2000. (15 April 2005) Cohen, Jeffrey J. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 Foucault, Michel “Of other spaces”. Diacritics, 31(1986): 22-27 Foucault, Michel. Filozofia, historia, polityka. Wybór pism, WarszawaWrocáaw: PWN. 2000 Gould, Stephen J. Niewczesny pogrzeb Darwina. Wybór esejów, Warszawa: PrószyĔski i S-ka, 1999 Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: the Aesthetics of consumerism. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001 Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” In Women Media and Consumption in Japan, edited by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, 220-254. Richmond, Surrey:

228 Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness ______________________________________________________________ Curzon Press, 1995 [chapter on line] available http://www.kinsellaresearch.com/Cuties.html (14 February 2005)

from:

Krajewski, Marek. Kultury kultury popularnej, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, PoznaĔ, 2003 Raap, Jamie. “Cute: a container, insensitive to content and context?” 2004 (14 February 2005) Richards, Frances “Fifteen Theses on The Cute”. [article on line] Cabinet Magazine, 4 (2001); available from: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/cute.php (14 February 2005)