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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Civilization, monsters and the monstrous

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Children, childhood, stories and monsters

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

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Making monsters; monstrous births

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Mutants and mutations; technologies of the monstrous

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

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

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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:

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___________________________________________________ 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;

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___________________________________________________ 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

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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

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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.

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___________________________________________________ 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

.

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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___________________________________________________ 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

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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___________________________________________________ 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.

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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.

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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 Ea