Monsters and body horror: The expression and annihilation of cultural anxieties

Date of Award

5-5-2024

Degree Name

M.A. in English

Department

Department of English

Advisor/Chair

Rebecca Potter

Abstract

Within the Gothic genre, most books incorporate visible specters or embodied monsters. Authors who produced monsters most often came from marginalized groups within their cultural contexts: Bram Stoker was Irish and Mary Shelley was a woman. Marginalized authors were best equipped to produce monster stories since the body of the monster embodies and enacts the author’s personal and the wider culture’s anxieties. Monsters remain relevant due to their adaptability to expressing and embodying new anxieties in new eras, independent of the author’s original anxieties written into the monster. Monster Theory posits that the body of the monster represents and exhibits the larger culture’s fears, desires, and values, and describes permissible and transgressive behaviors in order to teach and control the community. This paper, using Monster Theory to analyze the monster’s body, examines the two most famous Gothic monsters, Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature, to see where anxieties are enacted and destroyed. Bram Stoker encodes anxieties of female sexuality, queerness, recolonization, and political tensions over Irish Home Rule within Dracula’s, the vampire bella’s and Lucy’s bodies. The violent death of the vampires are attempts to reinforce English middle-class hegemony against the sexual and invading force of Dracula. Mary Shelley explores her anxieties about child- and parenthood, creation and death, knowledge in isolation, and failure of genius within the creation, growth, and death of the Creature. The Creature’s offer to live in harmony with mankind and his extratextual death demonstrates Shelley’s desire to accept her anxiety in order to de-threaten it. This research has implications for further study in other monster stories as well as asks pertinent questions about the nature and function of monsters within the cultural psyche.

Keywords

Monster Theory, Cultural Anxiety, Gothic Novel, Frankenstein, Dracula

Rights Statement

Copyright 2024, author

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