“The Monster Is Never the Monster”: Gothic Fiction and Otherness
What truly makes a monster?
This profound and somewhat unsettling question lays at the heart of the literary tradition surrounding the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. In many ways, literature itself may be perceived as “a monstrous or mutant discourse, a humanism that is also inhuman, alien,” where the entire project of the Western literary canon can be seen “to bulk up like a vast mutation out of the animal, vegetable, astral, bestial, petrific, spirit and parahuman transformations” (Bennett and Royle 298–99).
In a recent video, YouTube creator Ian Danskin over at Innuendo Studios explores the thematic threads within the work of prolific Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, a director known for his strong visual style and some of the most memorable and inventive monster designs in contemporary cinema, including the Academy Award-winning, Spanish-language Grimm fable Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the 50s sci-fi/fantasy drama The Shape of Water (2017):
Aside from obvious cinematic touchstones like high-concept monsters, clockwork contraptions, and misfit ensembles, Danskin asserts that the core tenet running through del Toro’s Gothic-tinged films is that “The monster is never the monster.” According to Danskin, this principle can be further broken down into four constituent pieces, which del Toro’s films typically incorporate as either primary characters and/or narrative story beats:
1) The Monster
2) The Hero
3) The Other
4) The Wince
And while I will do my best to not retread over Danskin’s excellent analysis here (seriously, watch the video and his other work; it’s all brilliant), I want to interrogate the connection between points 1) and 3) above, specifically around how they relate to the established conventions of Gothic literature.
The Monster, the Other & Gothic Fiction
In the introduction to Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Jack Halberstam notes that the Gothic novel produces symbols for “interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster” (3), and specifically focuses on explorations of ‘Otherness’ by using “the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies” (6).
Halberstam details how this tradition of profound ‘Otherness’ has its origins in the Gothic monsters of the nineteenth century, where representations of monstrosity served to metaphorise “modern subjectivity as a balancing act between inside / outside, female / male, body / mind, native / foreign, proletarian/aristocrat” (1).
In this view, the phenomenological relationship of the modern subject or self to ‘the Other’ can be understood in two distinct ways:
Oppositional: the self receives acknowledgement of its own ontological corporeality through ongoing tension with the Other as an entirely distinct subject, one that is dissimilar, strange, exotic and alien to its own sense of personal and social identity.
Appositional: the self also relies on the Other to constitute the essential and superficial characteristics of the self-image through a relationship of inner-difference, which in turn, validates the reality and existence of the self as a distinct entity.
As Christina Schneider explains:
Monstrous bodies represent the strangeness of others and thus help to structure the self and the group the self belongs to. Accordingly, they are used to draw boundaries between the ‘I’ and the ‘not I’. (2)
During the Victorian era, notions of modern subjectivity and the self were undergoing a radical paradigmatic shift, as developments in contentious issues of race, class, gender, and politics threatened to upset the traditional status quo. In turn, this period of rapid societal change became representative of larger anxieties, fears, and repressed emotions within Victorian England, stemming from an overwhelming sense of “uncertainty due to the decline of religious certitude, which grew with every new scientific discovery” (Schneider 2).
For Halberstam, “Victorian monsters produced and were produced by an emergent conception of the self as a body which enveloped a soul, as a body, indeed, enthralled to its soul” (2). The Gothic monster can then be understood as personifying both the evolution/degeneration of the self or ‘the soul,’ where this dialectical struggle is fully realised through the grotesque and deformed corporeal body.
Let’s take two seminal Gothic texts as our examples: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Both texts employ the Gothic monster as an archetypal villain; however, they diverge in their characterisation of Gothic monstrosity and how the ‘Otherness’ of each villain is personified.
Works of Gothic fiction embody this state of Otherness through emphasising the criminal and deviant form of the monster, which, according to Halberstam, “announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption” (2).
As a form of psychological and moral decay, the use of the grotesque body as a nexus of deviancy and degeneracy is evident in both texts and their respective Gothic monsters: the re-animated terror of Victor Frankenstein’s begotten scientific misdeeds, a dreadful spectacle stitched together from lumpen human body parts; and the cruel, despicable figure of Mr Hyde, the dark, physical transformation and realisation of Dr Jekyll’s inner savage and animalistic fury, the by-product of sublimated rage, perverse desire and Victorian repression. As Tabish Khair notes, both texts:
“are rooted in imperial and colonial anxieties and draw upon and engage with, consciously or not, notions of Otherness… However, both these books — very different from each other in many ways — also situate this engagement differently along the axis of emotion and reason” (91).
Frankenstein (1818)
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the text, Shelley describes the process of Frankenstein and authorship in a curious yet telling fashion: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (264).
It’s fitting then, that Frankenstein engages with themes of birth, life, and death, but also examines the perilous existence of a hideous monster which crosses “geographical, physical, and psychological barriers and [transgresses] moral norms” (Schneider 2). However, Shelley’s use of progeny here can also be viewed in two distinct ways: the famous story of Victor Frankenstein and his abominable, otherworldly offspring; and as the legacy of Frankenstein itself as text, a Gothic novel and a representation for monstrosity and Otherness which has persisted and thrived for two centuries.
Upon reading Frankenstein’s journal, and learning of its own morbid genesis, the creature’s story quickly escalates from an infant narrative to a slave narrative, as the creature is consumed by anger, rage and an insanity of spirit that bursts “all bounds of reason and reflection” (Shelley 406). By engendering sympathy for the Other within the text, Shelley’s use of internality functions as commentary on the political climate of nineteenth-century Europe, where contentious issues of race, class and gender were being openly debated and questioned within the public sphere.
Khair links the more deplorable actions of Frankenstein’s creature to Shelley’s interaction with the racial problems of the period:
The acts of vengeance — for instance, when the Monster murders both a woman and a child, and burns the De Lacey cottage to the ground — also bear an uncanny resemblance to the more sensationalist elements of accounts of slave revolts in the West Indies… He also presents a ‘classic threat’ associated with the coloured, in particular black, male in colonial accounts. (Khair 90)
In “Frankenstein’s Politics”, Adriana Cracuin discusses how Shelley’s text engages with the radical political philosophy of her father, English journalist William Godwin, and presents a reconfiguration of his views concerning metaphysical idealism and the potential for human immortality through reason:
Shelley uses Victor’s obsession with creation without sexual reproduction to recast Godwin’s utopian vision as a dystopian ‘usurpation of the female’. Had Shelley simply thus caricatured Godwin and his utopian project, Frankenstein would have been a forgettable anti-Jacobin screed, one of many. But instead, Shelley ingeniously imbricated the novel’s inflammatory politics in a series of concentric narratives, so that narrative authority is notoriously difficult to assign, making for a nuanced and ambivalent political vision. (85)
As Khair notes, this political dimension in Frankenstein the text relates to Frankenstein the character’s dialectic struggle between his idea of self, subjectivity and his conception of the creature as Other:
Frankenstein is almost always hysterical when he talks with or confronts the ‘monster’. On the other hand, the ‘monster’ — as critics have noted — is largely collected and reasonable, perhaps even eminently rational. (92)
However, despite Shelley’s inversion of the rational/hysterical tendencies of the individual within the text, and her rendering of the creature as an embodied entity which clearly displays the ability to think, feel and speak, “the ‘monster’ is experienced simply as a ‘horror’ and a threat: the common colonial perception of the Other, especially when the coloniser becomes aware of the ‘will’ that makes the Other irreducible to the Self” (Khair 92).
Through the prospering of her hideous progeny, in a multitude of forms, Shelley’s greatest lesson is one of responsibility and compassion in the face of life, creation and the potential for scientific abuse.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
In contrast to Shelley’s use of engendered sympathy in Frankenstein, where the internal voice and experiences of the creature are given entire sections of the narrative for characterisation and self-representation, the inner voice of the antagonist in Stevenson’s The Strange Case, the detestable Edward Hyde, is left curiously silent.
Hyde is only represented through hints of obtuse dialogue and vivid, visual descriptions from various interlocutors within the frame narratives of the text: the lawyer and protagonist Gabriel Utterson, Jeykll’s long-time friend Dr Hastie Lanyon, and Dr Henry Jekyll himself. For Stephen Arata, in the character of Hyde, Stevenson sought to capture “the troubled relation between the ‘text’ of Hyde’s body and the interpretive practices used to decipher it” (236).
Hyde is frequently described by others as having physical attributes akin to the monstrous and the grotesque. These types of encounters are typical for the text and its various interlocutors, who have strong, visceral reactions of disgust and hatred for Hyde, yet struggle to accurately define his monstrous features.
Stevenson frequently labels Hyde with animalistic, serpentine, and suggestive language: “a kind of black sneering coolness”; “easy and sneering” (5); “a hissing intake of the breath” (14); “The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh” (15). Stevenson’s reliance on externality in description lends Hyde an outward appearance of superficial mystery. As representative of the wholly ‘Other’, Hyde’s motivations and inner thoughts are kept from the reader, in order to cultivate a mood of terror and horror within the narrative. As Arata explains:
In Edward Hyde, Stevenson created a figure who embodies a bourgeois readership’s worst fears about both a marauding and immoral underclass and a dissipated and immoral leisure class. Yet Stevenson also shows how such figures are not so much ‘recognized’ as created [emphasis mine] by middle-class discourse. He does this by foregrounding the interpretive acts by means of which his characters situate and define Hyde. (235)
When Lanyon witnesses with his own eyes, the atavistic degeneration of Hyde in to Jekyll, his mind is “submerged in terror” (Stevenson 65), before he dramatically declares: “As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror” (Stevenson 66).
Stevenson also makes several comparisons in the text between Hyde’s evil visage and the demonic figure of Satan (5, 16, 65), drawing a connection between Gothic monstrosity and the fears and anxieties surrounding the decline in religious certitude (Schneider). In Jekyll’s final confession at the resolution of the text, he reflects on his own “monstrous” acts of “vicarious depravity”:
This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. (Stevenson 74)
In his creation of Hyde as atavistic monster, Stevenson shows that the desire for ‘the Other’ — and the inherent freedom the Other represents — is an innate aspect of human subjectivity. As Khair notes:
Jekyll can be seen as a person who represses the physical and emotional — emotions, as passions, have been traditionally located in or connected to… the body — and, hence, the ‘natural’ or the ‘animal’/savage in ‘man’. Here the ‘savage’, the repressed ‘natural man’ who comes out as Hyde, is seen, as savages were in imperial discourses, as having a distorted bodily presence — expressed also by a tendency to let his passions dominate reason. (91)
For Arata, The Strange Case is “an angry book” which can be read “as a meditation on the pathology of late-Victorian masculinity,” where Stevenson provides “a consummate critique of the professional men who formed the bulk of its readership” (244). Similarly, as Halberstam contends: “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (2).
In this respect, by having Hyde’s monstrosity function primarily through his appearance, through externality and surface — as an ‘Other’ merely glimpsed but never truly understood, not even by Jekyll himself — Stevenson creates a monster which “becomes a kind of metonym for the human; [where] its color, its pallor, its shape mean everything within a semiotic of monstrosity” (Halberstam 6–7).
The Monster Is Never the Monster
In an interview with Deadline, del Toro talks about his lifelong affection for the ‘otherness’ of creatures: “To me, monsters are different from anyone. They’re a spiritual cosmology for me.” Alongside his affinity for the Gothic conventions present in the works of influential American authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, del Toro explains in a separate interview how notions of Gothic monstrosity and ‘the Other’ are intrinsically linked:
Monsters are patron saints of imperfection. And they represent otherness… The creature of Frankenstein… as written by Shelley is a Miltonian figure… An outcast of paradise that was thrown into a world of pain and sensorial overload and disoriented existence by an uncaring father. Basically, the predicament of all the human race boiled down into one… Shelley [encompasses] exactly how you feel as an outsider, in a world that is impossible for you to understand.
In this view, the character of the tormented outcast and outsider is clearly present in both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s The Strange Case. In their discussion on the role of the monster or the ‘mutant’, Bennett and Royle relate the allure of the monster to ontological desire: “What is this fascination with the human as (also) other, this yearning to be other, to be unthinking or animal, hybrid or cyborg, mechanical or mutant, virtual, immutable, stony, inhuman, or dead?” (298–299).
Ultimately, Gothic monstrosity “unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning” (Halberstam 11). Not only is this fascination with form and meaning embodied in the monster as the archetypal villain of nineteenth-century Gothic texts, but also in the form of the Gothic novel itself. In dealing with debased and perverse subject matter, the popularity and longevity of the Gothic genre can be viewed as “a mutation or hybrid form of true art and genteel literature” (Halberstam 12).
It was this distortion of the Romantic literary tradition in nineteenth-century England which allowed Gothic authors like Shelley and Stevenson to create an audience and readership that both consumed monstrosity and revelled in it, who then surveyed “its individual members for signs of deviance or monstrosity, excess or violence” (Halberstam 12).
The true power of the Gothic novel rests in its exploitation of the monster and the grotesque body to produce horror and terror: the ability to reveal that our fears, anxieties, dreams and desires of ‘the Other’ — the foreigner, the savage, the alien, the profoundly unknowable — are but a reflection of the potentiality for darkness and depravity that lurks deep within us all.
As del Toro keenly observes: “monstrosity exist[s] in the human heart, not in appearance.” And in light of this, we might ask ourselves once more: What truly makes a monster? The answer then, is an obvious one: We do.
Because the monster is never the monster.
Works Cited
Arata, Stephen D. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’.” Criticism, vol. 37, no. 2, 1995, pp. 233–59, www.jstor.org/stable/23116549. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020.
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 5th ed., Routledge, 2016, pp. 298–299.
Craciun, Adriana. “Frankenstein’s Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 84–98, doi:10.1017/CBO9781316091203.008. Accessed 6 Jun. 2020.
Fairclough, Peter, editor. Three Gothic Novels. Penguin, 2006.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995, pp. 1–85.
Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 20–97.
Schneider, Christina. “Monstrosity in the English Gothic Novel.” The Victorian, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/view/151/76. Accessed 2 Jun. 2020.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Fairclough, 2006, pp. 256–497.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886. HarperCollins, 2010.
