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The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969

american sterling silver and enamel eros and psyche relief vesta case, c. 19oo

@onpyre asked if I knew any books about monster theory, and I decided to share my list with everyone. I haven’t read all of these, so please let me know if any of them is absolute crap.

Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (particularly his ‘Seven Theses’)

The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (great introduction to a lot of different texts and ways of approaching this kind of study, so big rec!)

Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity, Allen S. Weiss + this lecture

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (particularly the introduction)

Monsters, John Michael Greer

Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, David D. Gilmore

Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale, Kirk J. Schneider

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen T. Asma

Other related resources:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke (here)

The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud (here)

Abnormal, Michel Foucault (here)

Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, ed. Michael E. Heyes

The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal

Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Richard Kearney

Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, And The Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity, Fred Botting (here)

Theses on Monsters, China Miéville (here)

monster theory 101

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a violent crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

It is important to note that while this essay is considered fundamental in the concept of monster theory and it’s study, Cohen’s work is built upon work like Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror: Essays on Abjection, and Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine. Additions to the field have been added since then; collected editions like the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters, Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters, as well as essays in journals, collected editions on other wider topics (like horror, fantasy, sociology in literature). But the field is still relatively small at this point. I’ll be putting together a sort of reading list at some point in a post about where you can really get a good overview of the area, but the central starting point for monster theory is decidedly Cohen’s essay (which is the introductory chapter to an entire book on the subject). 

“Take my heart and hurl its fragments to the moon, the trees, the beasts, in the air, the dark, the waters, so that nothing returns to me ever again.”

— Anna de Noailles, tr. by Jean Morris, from Poems; “Ariadne’s Lament,”

In other words, Cassandra is not just a translator, she is also an embodiment of the very function of translation: her prophetic speech often appears to be suspended between languages, like Benjamin's translator who operates in the realm of 'pure language' that is beyond any single linguistic code. Cassandra takes and reformulates and incomprehensible message from the future and becomes incomprehensible in the process, (re)producing a message in such a way that it demands a second, or third or fourth translation. Sometimes she descends from a trance-like state of prophecy to initiate the next link in the chain of interpretations herself, reframing her own message in more prosaic language, only to find that this speech too is received with confusion. Her utterance is always both a target and source text at the same time. The proliferation of translation acts within her single body evokes a kind of never-ending self-translation; like the self-translator, Cassandra suffers a splitting of the self, one part of which is committed to the spirit of the original composition, while the other struggles to reframe it for a new audience that can never grasp the meaning of the original.

Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca.1633-37, detail) Francesco Cairo

merricat by angie hoffmeister / merricat by william teason

you might've gotten this question before but I wondered, what are your favorite fairytales/myths? also just wanted to say i love your blog so much, scrolling through it feels like wandering in a magical garden 💚

apologies for answering this 3 days late! thank you so much for asking this, and for loving my blog… how lovely of you! i appreciate it, truly ♡

some fairytales i love:

bluebeard’s bride

death and the nightingale, by hans christian andersen. it’s about an emperor, a nightingale, a clockwork bird, and the grim reaper.

the goose girl

east of the sun, west of the moon -i’m linking a version with kay nielsen’s famous illustrations, because they add a lot to it!

i couldn’t find a text of this, and i know it’s obscure, but there’s this kashmiri folk tale called ‘the chinese princess’ that is about a lamia. i read it in ‘angela carter’s book of fairytales’ and it has stuck with me… i recommend hunting the book down digitally if you can!

my friend doe @rosedaughter once talked of a palestinian version of little red riding hood that i found so delightfully chilling and incredible… here’s the post where she recounts it.

this only loosely counts, but in the silmarillion by jrr tolkien, the creation myths - the music of the ainur, and how that fictional world was created - have stuck with me. i always found it wonderful to read. it’s called the ainulindale, it’s about the length of a chapter, and here is the text of it.

the frame story of 1001 nights - of sheherazade spinning tales every night to a prince and his court.

the crane wife / tsuru no ongaeshi 

the twelve dancing princesses …i really love this one, it always fascinated me.

loosely related to the 12 dancing princesses, there is an anime called ‘princess tutu’ that’s about fairytales and story meta and character trope subversion and it’s incredible and i can’t recommend it enough. and although linking a fic is probably odd, there’s a fanfic for princess tutu that rewrites the story of the 12 dancing princesses in such a stunning way. i believe you can enjoy it even if you don’t know the show. it’s one of my favourite pieces of writing ever, read it here.

the ballad of tam lin! it’s a scottish fairytale that resembles a beauty and the beast-type tale, and i love it very much. here’s the wiki for it, you can read the full text from the link there.

again, this only loosely counts, but the poem ‘goblin market’ by christina rossetti is so beautiful. i love it, it counts to me.

vasilisa the beautiful and her brief encounter with baba yaga.

swan lake, the ballet, in general.

cupid and psyche from greek mythology!

i hope you enjoy these!