Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Nineteenth-century belief in the sea serpent became a profession of faith in the unknowability of nature combined with, ironically, the willingness to accept unconfirmed personal experience (“eyewitness accounts”) as evidence. Belief in the creature lost traction by the second half of the century as scientists fully professionalized their disciplines by placing their work under the umbrella of major universities. Here they would form organizations that would issue credentials based on educational requirements and publish journals that vetted scientific research through the judicial process of peer review. These standards of proof replaced subjective experiences and alleged “eyewitness reports” in determining empirical truths.

  The sea serpent fell back into the realm of myth in the wake of emerging scientific consensus about the nature of evidence. Contemporary historian Sherrie Lynn Lyons, in her detailed examination of this debate, describes how the sea serpent came to be seen as an insoluble problem by American science. No specimen of the creature existed. The numerous sightings and affidavits for the creature’s existence failed to meet established standards for discerning truth. Given these facts, science refused to say that sea monsters did not exist, but simply pointed out that the lack of fossil evidence or specimens to analyze in controlled settings made it impossible to assert that such a creature did exist.29

  Popular culture in the United States refused to shed its enthusiasm for the sea serpent as a source of entertainment and wonder, despite the scientific community’s refusal to credit its existence. In the second half of the nineteenth century, sea beasts may have been, by far, the most popular American monster. Their alleged existence offered Victorian America a sense of wonder at the marvelous unknown and even seemed to strengthen and support religious belief. Sea serpent entrepreneurs could claim that the serpent was not only a natural animal, but a supernatural visitation, perhaps even one of the marvelous, unknown creatures described in scripture as Leviathan. Such ideas proved attractive to religious Americans who felt their beliefs about nature to be under assault after the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

  Promoters quickly claimed fossil finds on an Alabama plantation in 1842 as evidence for a sea monster with sacred meaning. Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick about these remains, reporting the story that “credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for one of the bones of the fallen angels.” In fact, credulity was not limited to Alabama slaves when it came to these fossils. In 1845 a carnival promoter exhibited them in New York and New England, placed in an undulating shape, with head raised. This was the same physical position as most artistic renderings of serpent sightings in Gloucester harbor.30

  Advertising copy for the Alabama sea monster claimed that carnival goers would see a creature one hundred and fourteen feet in length. Handbills asserted that the creature did not represent a scientific specimen, but rather a sign rich with theological meaning. The advertisement for the beast went back to Ezra Stiles’ doctrine of monsters by claiming the creature to be Leviathan from the book of Job. In fact, scientists later concluded that the carnival monster represented an achievement of ingenious taxidermy, a human construction made out of at least five different types of fossil remains.31

  Exhibitions such as these underscore how much the sea serpent became a celebrity. Significant sightings became embedded in American popular culture of the period. An original composition known as the “Sea Serpent Polka” became a popular piece of sheet music, its cover replicating the image of the serpent well known from the Gloucester sightings and reenacted by carnival exhibitors. Captains, meanwhile, christened their ships “Sea Serpent” and sightings of similar creatures in America’s lakes became common.32

  Entrepreneurs eagerly sought to cash in on the sea serpent craze. Carnival exhibits promising gigantic fish, sea monsters, and even the great kraken of Scandinavian mythology proliferated as the century drew to a close. In November of 1880 a carnival known as “W. C. Coup’s New United Monster Shows” promised a “giant devil fish … the most perfect specimen of the monster squid ever captured” as being “39 and ½ feet long with tentacles spread.” This represented a trimming back of the carnival’s claim. The same show had advertised two months earlier that it had the remains of such a creature “fifty feet in length.”33

  Hydrarchos! Sea Serpent

  By the end of the century, whale shows, the ancestors of today’s marine spectacles staged at SeaWorld and similar venues, had become popular. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century whale shows tended to draw much more heavily on monster imagery than today’s exhibitions that emphasize the anthropomorphic traits of sea creatures and Disney-ify them for their “cuteness.” Whale shows of the 1890s, in contrast, emphasized the inhuman characteristics of sea beasts and described the violent struggles in which they had been captured. As late as 1932, a whale show in Georgia described its exhibit as “a monster of the deep captured after 16 hours of death defying combat.” Advertisement for the show, like past handbills for sea serpent exhibitions, emphasized the size and power of the creature, insisting that the whale was fifty-feet long and sixty-eight tons.34

  Fascination with sea monsters in nineteenth-century America seems mostly whimsical, even when the power and size of the creatures are emphasized. Unlike Lovecraft’s twentieth-century monsters, giant beasts arising from the depths fit either into a biblical or scientific order of things (or both). They were not purely creatures of chaos that would upset the social and cosmic order. But a frightening thing that did threaten the human order swam just beneath these relatively placid cultural waters.

  Herman Melville tapped into the dark undertones of America’s sea monster obsession with antebellum America’s greatest monster tale, Moby-Dick. Melville’s story of mad Captain Ahab’s chase of the gigantic and terrifying beast that maimed him is as daunting in its size and complexity as the great whale itself. Though the vast critical commentary that exists on the novel is not easily navigated, the book offers significant insights into the American obsession with sea beasts. The novel serves as a key to the fascination of nineteenth-century America with monstrous creatures from the sea, a fascination with what Melville called “the unspeakable terrors of the whale.”35

  Cultural critic Andrew Delbanco calls Melville’s novel part of “his lifelong meditation on America.” It is an America obsessed with violence, fearful of the other, and at times a museum of horrors. The ship on which Ahab and his unlucky sailors embark on their doomed mission is the Pequod, a name directly referencing the Pequot War and the bloody blot that campaign of extermination left on the New England landscape. In his descriptions of the whaling ships, vessels so essential to early New England prosperity, we see floating factories of destruction, covered in the gore of the creatures they hunt relentlessly. Melville presents these charnel houses as metaphors for American expansion, the ugly truths behind America’s entrepreneurial fervor.36

  Melville transforms the emerging American national identity into a haunt of monsters. Throughout the novel, supernatural terror is a brooding presence, preparing the reader for a series of encounters with the great beast of the deep that embodies all terror. When Melville’s putative narrator, Ishmael, visits the Spouters Inn, a haunt of New Bedford whalers, he is greeted by a history of horror. On the wall hangs an ominous picture with “such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows” that some artist “in the time of the New England hags” must have painted it to represent “chaos bewitched.” This picture, what Melville calls “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture,” evokes all the chaos of the sea and the terrors attendant on the whole project of whaling.37

  Chaos meets horror on the opposite wall of the entryway. Here “a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears” greets Ishmael. These implements allegedly represent weaponry gleaned from the South Sea Islands, a display that causes Ishmael to wonder “what monstrous cannibal and savage could have ever gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement.” But it is not only the weaponry of the cannibal tha
t appears on display. A harpoon belonging to an American whaler shares space with the tools of the monster, a harpoon that is also a “hacking, horrifying” weapon. This juxtaposition destroys any distinction between the whaling industry, a multimillion dollar engine of prosperity in antebellum America, and the enterprise of cannibalism. Melville makes these links explicit throughout the novel, muddying differences between the American self and the other, and raising questions about the cannibalistic nature of America’s search for economic prosperity.38

  The role of supernatural horror and the constant reminder of the possibility of horrific violence in Moby-Dick suggest that Melville’s meditation on America had caused him to contemplate the darkest undertones of the national experiment. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick, Melville’s gothic vision of American life and history help make sense of the antebellum fascination with monsters. Melville’s evocation of the Puritan experiment, and its slaughtering of Native Americans and “witches,” seems of a piece with his novel of cannibals, barbarous violence, ghostly apparitions, and that great “murderous fish” that becomes the focus of the tale. The wreck of the Pequod, the final victory of chaos over order, represents an ill omen for Melville’s America, facing its horrific civil war. The ship goes down, “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”39

  Ahab’s vengeful search for Moby-Dick, his “tormented chase of the demon phantasm,” seems oddly out of place in the midst of sea serpent mania. The American public’s fascination with beasts from the sea seems altogether more playful and deadpan literal. Moby-Dick became in Melville’s tale a representation of all the unknown terrors of the universe, an uncomfortable imagining of the sea serpent mythology that perhaps explains why the novel proved generally unpopular at the time of its first appearance. Melville is the ancestor of H. P. Lovecraft. Although Hawthorne and Poe are often, and generally correctly, seen as Lovecraft’s chief influence, the terrors of the unknown awakened by Melville, and the “murderous fish” that Ahab chased, prepared the way for Lovecraft’s terrible monsters, able to drive human beings insane with their gigantism and uncaring destruction of human life and civilization.40

  While Melville worked on Moby-Dick in late 1850, congressional debates raged over whether or not America would continue to countenance, as it always had, the enslavement of millions of human beings. The “Compromise of 1850” allowed the Kansas territory “popular sovereignty” in deciding whether or not slavery would be allowed when the region became a new state. In one of the many dark ironies of the American democratic experiment, voters would decide in a popular election whether or not they would become a slave society. The compromise did little to tamp down the conflict. Kansas became “Bleeding Kansas,” an open wound of partisan warfare on the American landscape.41

  Slavery had entwined like a snake around the very origins of the republic. The desire on the part of a significant segment of American society to enslave their fellow human beings, and the willingness of a much larger segment to either support or look with apathy on this institutionalized horror, helped to breed even more gothic American tales as the nation edged closer to war.

  “Thrill the Land with Horror”

  The violence of the institution of slavery produced monsters that filled American popular culture and haunted the African American mind. Contemporary literary critic Theodore Gross once made the point that “the nightmare world of Poe and Hawthorne has become the Monday morning of the negro author,” an idea that Candyman explores when Madsen’s folklorist describes the apparitions in the mirror as a way for a community to express the horror of their daily lives. Toni Morrison makes this much less abstract when she writes that, for African American people, the existence of horror never surprises. After all, she writes, “we might live right next door to it.”42

  Black and white abolitionists turned to the language of monsters as quickly as did proslavery apologists. Abolitionists especially favored the gothic convention of the “evil double,” that suggested that despite the glamorous image presented by the southern planter, slavery had a true face that would sicken and appall. Boston abolitionist Theodore Weld, for example, wrote that if Americans knew the “true conditions of slaves” the facts would “thrill the land with horror.” Moreover, scholars of the slave narrative have shown how frequently the language of gothic horror made its way into the genre.43

  Abolitionist tales of slavery’s monstrosity made use of the language of conspiracy to describe its power over the United States. The phrase “the Slave Power” came into general usage among antislavery and abolitionist forces in the 1840s. Used to describe what was seen as the undue influence of proslavery politicians, the metaphor proved a powerful one in part because it ignored the issue of race. An umbrella term, it was used by everyone from abolitionists who wanted to see immediate emancipation based on a vision of human equality to those who simply thought that slavery, and enslaved Africans, corrupted the American political system.44

  By the time of the American Civil War, language about the Slave Power morphed into the language of the monster. In 1861 committed abolitionist Charles Sumner, a devoted fan of Mary Shelley, referred to the Confederate States of America as “the soulless monster of Frankenstein, the wretched creation of mortal science without God.” Sumner described the new Southern nation as a “monster empire” and the Union war effort as an attempt to exclude “the monster empire from the family of nations.”45

  Monster language came readily from the lips and pens of proslavery writers as well. The Nat Turner Rebellion, as we saw earlier, provided some of the most potent images. Not only did the Richmond Enquirer transform Turner into a monster not unlike Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” other American newspapers tapped into the gothic possibilities of seeing the rebellion as a monster’s revolt. A September 1831 account in the Constitutional Whig features the reporter retracing Turner’s steps and telling a tale of a horrible monster on the loose. Following this route, his “mind is struck with horror.” He can see, like phantasms rising out of the earth, “the helpless women and children” killed by Turner and his “banditti.” He suggests “in future years, the bloody road will give rise to many a sorrowful legend; and the trampling of hooves, in fancy, visit many an excited imagination.”46

  Literary scholar Teresa Goddu, interpreting this passage from the Whig, brilliantly argues that the newspaper created a metaphor that allowed Turner “to haunt the imagination of future travelers much like the Headless Horseman.” The slave rebellion became more than a slave rebellion and at the same time a bit less. The transformation of the insurrection against American slavery into a monster tale, made it strangely comforting in the way the bloodiest horror film can offer strange comfort through its juxtaposition of extreme violence and unreality. The story symbolizes violence but also contains that violence. If Turner is Frankenstein’s monster or the Headless Horseman, he becomes a tale to frighten children rather than a live political option. He is written off as “a monster” rather than a freedom fighter. Rebellion, the raised fist against the slave system, is reduced to a memory. The slave rebel becomes a character in a fairy tale.47

  The coming of the American Civil War forced white America to face the monsters it had created. The political struggle between North and South over the fate of slaves in the western territories rode a wave of anxiety over the meaning of millions of enslaved Africans in the midst of white American society. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry filled the chamber with powder. Abraham Lincoln’s election, the election of a man wrongly perceived by Southern whites as an abolitionist, pulled the trigger. Ironically, South Carolina’s secession from the Union in December of 1860 unleashed a nightmare for white America. For enslaved Africans who saw the conflict as an opportunity to destroy the monster empire of slavery forever, the war for the Union became a war for emancipation.

  The coming of the war brought out many a monstrous metaphor. Popular illustrator Henry L
ouis Stephens drew one of the most compelling. Appearing in Vanity Fair in May of 1862, it bears the title “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster Rebellion.” The image shows a traditional representation of the Southern planter being lifted violently over the head of a muscular black figure. A crown falls from the southerner’s head (suggestive of the collapse of the Slave Power) as the great creature prepares to hurl him over the ledge and into the abyss.

  The image proved prescient. Gradually the American Civil War became a war centered on the issue of slavery. The first efforts to recruit African American troops for the Union Army began in 1862. This also marked the moment when the formerly enslaved began to disassemble the plantation system from within, running away in large numbers to reach the safety of Union lines. Southern proslavery writers had tried to play their rhetorical game both ways, portraying the slave as the docile child and the horrid monster. The image of the new Frankenstein squared the ironic circle, portraying the slaveholding South as destroyed by the institution it had created, a victim of its pet monster.

  The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster Rebellion