Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

by Poole, W. Scott

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

  Gore and Mourning

  The violence of the American Civil War far exceeded the expectations of both North and South. At least one Southern political leader claimed that he would be able to soak up all the blood spilled in the conflict with his pocket handkerchief. His fool’s prediction became a twisted joke as over half a million corpses piled up on American battlefields.48

  Stephen Crane, author of the The Red Badge of Courage, famously pictured the war as “a machine that produces corpses.” These corpses became an object of fascination as well as grief and horror. The war drove an American obsession with the dead body that found an outlet in the nature of the emerging funeral industry, an interest in “death photography” of loved ones, and attachment to certain folk aspects of the mourning process. This cultural meditation on the dead prepared the way for new American monsters, not only in the form of popular ghostly tales, but also in the birth of a new kind of horror entertainment. As science continued to detail the origins of the human body, exposing its secrets, a cultural fascination with the literal insides of the human body—gore—began to grow.49

  The enormous number of Civil War deaths accounts for only part of the macabre atmosphere of postbellum America. Wounded bodies filled American streets in the late nineteenth century; missing arms and legs of disabled veterans testified to the technological brutality of a modern conflict. War wounds had debilitated one-third of elderly veterans that lived in Tennessee and North Carolina “Soldier’s Homes.” State governments devoted a considerable portion of their budgets to the care of wounded veterans in the thirty to forty years after the close of the conflict. Traumatized bodies, seared, scored, and amputated, became cultural symbols of the conflict.50

  The enormous death toll of the Civil War had a strange chronicler in photographer Matthew Brady and his assistant Alexander Gardner (who took many of the most famous images associated with Brady’s work). Brady set out to document the war with photography, showing the carnage to the American public in a way that never had been done before. He and his team actually posed the bodies of the fallen for maximum emotional effect. His photographs of the bloody battle of Antietam appeared at a New York exhibition in October of 1862, causing a sensation in the press. Although the popularity of his work faded for a time after the war, his images soon became central to representations of the conflict in both academic and popular works. Congress purchased the images in 1875 to serve as the photographic record of the conflict.51

  Brady was far from the first photographer of the dead and certainly not the first to pose the dead for photographs. Scholar of American religion and popular culture Gary Laderman has shown the strong impulse in nineteenth-century America to seek comfort from the physical remains of a loved one. Photographic advances in the 1840s made postmortem photographs of loved ones increasingly common and these were always posed images. Photographers generally hand-colored the image to remove all troubling signs of death while adding to the composition “floral designs, flying angels, and other sentimental iconography.”52

  Brady’s Civil War photography ignored such conventions, replacing sentimental comfort with a shocking horror. Bodies lay on the ground, arms and legs in unnatural contortions. Brady and his associates used gothic conventions in their compositions, posing gravediggers with piles of corpses and even skulls. Rather than images of battlefield valor, his photographs only showed the aftermath, fields of corpses instead of heroes. Fascination with these images testifies to a growing interest in viewing the bodies of the dead.53

  Brady’s images, and the cult of death that they served, represent the birth of gore as an American entertainment. Popular culture scholar Annalee Newitz has pointed out a similarity between Brady’s photographs and Victorian murder scenes, another subject of growing interest to the American public. Brady gave America nightmare images of death where the murderer had abandoned the images to ruin and rot. These terrifying images could not be dressed up in the language of religious comfort. And yet Americans reveled in such images, both during and after the war, hungry for sensationalist iconography and books that used the destruction of the human body to frighten and entertain.54

  Brady was not alone in creating sensational images of bodily death from the events of the Civil War. The press in both sections of the divided country reported that the other side had desecrated the remains of the dead. Sometimes this had a basis in fact, while at other times it tested credulity. A New York Tribune reporter claimed in the summer of 1862 that gory souvenirs of war were found in a captured rebel camp, including a cup made from the skull of a fallen Union soldier. Even more sensational, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated showed a woodcut entitled “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir.” In a set of images easily imaginable in a Rob Zombie film, a woman sits reading a letter in a room covered with body parts and rib cages. Her child plays with a skull near her feet. The caption purports to contain some lines from her Confederate husband in which he expresses the hope that she has received “all the little relics” he has sent. He promises her that he will soon send “a baby rattle for our little pet, made out of the ribs of a Yankee drummer boy.” In a hundred years, slasher film killer-heroes Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees would emerge from this cultural obsession with bodily mutilation.55

  In the late nineteenth century, strong countercurrents in American culture sought to prevent the dead body from becoming a gory spectacle. The American funeral industry became the primary proponent of the dead body as the happy soul. The Civil War had introduced embalming techniques that gave rise to the professionalization of the funeral industry. Official associations and trade journals soon followed (journals with names like The Casket). The funeral director (a title that trade journals insisted should replace the older, more evocative, term “undertaker”) made it his job to hide the corpse from the living and surround death with a sentimental language about the passage to “the other side” and the comforts of heaven.56

  American religious life joined in this effort to ignore the horrors of bodily corruption and focus on death as a safe passage into heavenly delight. Protestant ministers emphasized the idea that the soul successfully escaped the corpse. Death afforded the soul an entry into a world not unlike this one, with all anxieties and discomforts removed. Spiritualism, the belief that the friendly dead could be contacted and convey messages of comfort to the living, reached its apogee of popularity in the 1870s. Even popular evangelical revivalists like Dwight L. Moody deemphasized death in their calls for conversion. When death did make its way into their rhetoric, it appeared as a language about the comfort of heaven.57

  Nevertheless, the bloodied corpse as entertainment remained a significant part of popular culture, suggesting that the attempts of ministers and funeral directors proved far from successful. The popular writings of former Union officer Ambrose Bierce placed the gored human body at the center of his narratives. Stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” imagined death as a fearful end with no possibility of comfort. His popular ghost stories did nothing to take the focus off the bloody corpse. Bierce’s ghosts are born of the murdered body, seeking vengeance. They certainly do not convey messages of comfort.58

  Along with a fascination with ghostly tales, Victorian America showed a growing interest in a new kind of monster, the mass murderer who used techniques not unlike modern surgery to rend and destroy the body instead of to repair it. The rising interest in what a later day would call a “serial killer” tended to focus on the murderer’s production of corpses, the form those corpses took, and the manner in which the murders occurred.

  News and imagery of the 1888 Whitechapel murders of “Jack the Ripper,” for example, became immensely popular in the United States. In fact, interest in the Ripper’s crimes seems to have been as strong in the United States as in England. Sensationalist papers like the National Police Gazette carried detailed descrip
tions of the Ripper’s crimes and even tried to Americanize the case by suggesting, in 1895, that he might be “at large in New York City.” The Atlanta Constitution suggested that the unsolved 1884 murders of a number of African American women in Texas had been the work of the Ripper. The American press wanted the great monster of the Victorian era to be an American monster.59

  Dime novels, popular, sensational pulp books and magazines in late nineteenth-century America, often featured Jack the Ripper. These popular and cheaply produced materials frequently sought to Americanize him, while emphasizing the savage and gory nature of his crimes. At least one of these narratives, A. F. Pinkerton’s The Whitechapel Murders; or, an American Detective in London, suggested not only that an American had committed the crimes, but that a Native American woman (called an “Indian princess” in the novel) had been responsible. This bizarre theory worked in the late nineteenth century since, as the historian of serial murder David Schmid notes, it drew on the stereotype of the “Indian savage,” an image especially powerful in an America seeking to justify its war of conquest on the plains. Schmid also notes that this fantasy both Americanized the tale for popular consumption while it “protected white males” from being represented as homicidal maniacs.60

  H. H. Holmes provided Americans with horrifying entertainment in the mid-1890s. Holmes, a doctor and real estate developer, transformed his enormous and strangely designed Chicago mansion into a factory of corpses, soon to be known as “Murder Castle.” Holmes also became the first serial murderer in America to attempt to tap into the potential of the emerging culture of celebrity. He received $10,000 from William Randolph Hearst for an 1896 confession that included such gothic elements as Holmes claiming that a pair of horns was emerging from his skull.61

  The obsession with the mass murderer is rooted in the battlefields of the Civil War and the efforts of nineteenth-century Americans to deal with the catastrophic number of Civil War corpses and the “living dead” among the wounded. The dead body, especially a dead body outraged by violence, had become a central element in American popular culture. Watching a monstrous war had taught Americans that the work of the monster is to destroy the body.

  Fallen Houses and Scarlet Women

  Interest in torn bodies seems metaphorical for the dismembered America of the late nineteenth century. America in the 1870s seemed as torn by conflict as it was in the 1850s. Violence in the South helped lead to the collapse of Reconstruction, disenfranchising African Americans and leaving them to the not-so-tender mercies of their former masters. Expanding American settlements on the western frontier encroached on Native American lands, setting off a round of wars of conquests by the American government. Major labor strikes, such as the Railroad Strike of 1877, by workers being ground down by the demands of America’s new corporations resulted in violent reprisals from the new industrial giants and their allies.

  The ongoing struggle for gender equality became one of the major cultural divides of the late nineteenth century. The national women’s suffrage movement splintered in the late 1860s, though this did nothing to abate the struggle for equality. Divisions within the movement allowed more radical voices to gain hearing, voices that raised questions about the nature of the American family and women’s reproductive health.

  These voices challenged the late nineteenth-century’s system of gender control. The Victorian ideology known as “the cult of true womanhood” had imagined middle-class women as sequestered in their homes, acting as mothers, wives, and caregivers. This limited set of personal and emotional options coincided with a belief in the asexuality of proper women. Sex was the path to motherhood, not an avenue of self-fulfillment. The “angel of the household” did not go out into the world of commerce or even have any fun in the bedroom. She sat, wax-like, in the parlor while servants bustled about her.62

  Ironically, two male writers from earlier in the century, each with their own gender hang-ups, used gothic fictions to interpret these conflicts over the nature of the family and its relationship to sexuality. Gothic fictions tended to raise questions about the familial household with their motifs of intergenerational violence and incest. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe created monstrous tales of the American family, twisting American expectations of gender and sexuality into lurid shapes to frighten their readers. Late in the century, the conventions they critiqued actually grew stronger, acquiring the force of law as male elites sought to control even the most intimate aspects of women’s lives.

  Hawthorne’s fictions are known for their use of Puritan notions of sin and guilt, taking these concepts and following them to their logical and horrific conclusions. The creepy short tale “The Minister’s Black Veil” is one of the most powerful American evocations of the uncanny. Hawthorne’s story of the minister that begins to go about with a funeral-pall black mask evokes the frightening unknowability of others and the consequences of Puritan notions of original sin. Meanwhile, Hawthorne’s best-known work, The Scarlet Letter, uses forbidden sex as the forge to create a gothic tale of sin, pride, and revenge.63

  Hawthorne’s most powerful monster tale, “Young Goodman Brown,” tells of a young Puritan who is convinced that his community is righteous and his young wife is “an angel.” On a night journey, he sees a dark vision of his whole community taking part in witches’ sabbat. Among them is his wife, “Faith,” who, we are encouraged to believe, Brown watches taking part in orgiastic satanic worship. The young Puritan wife, described to us earlier in the story as standing on a threshold with a pink ribbon in her hair, is found cavorting in the woods with devils.

  The subtext of “Young Goodman Brown” calls into question antebellum America’s fascination with female sexual purity and the engines of control built from that obsession. Hawthorne suggests throughout the story that “Goodman Brown” (note the irony of the traditional Puritan title being applied to him) has basically predatory instincts, voyeuristically searching out evil. Brown, who wants to be a monster hunter, is the true monster of the tale. He finds it, he thinks, and becomes a gloomy and forbidding patriarch. He is unable to love his wife because, for the ideology of domesticity, to fail to be an angel is to be a devil.64

  Hawthorne was not alone in visiting the dark cultural roots of American family life. Edgar Allan Poe rejected the sentimental images beginning to emerge around marriage and family life in antebellum America, seeing behind them predatory control and obsessions leading to insanity. Certainly no protofeminist, Poe still understood the dynamics of patriarchal families and saw them as producing monstrous visions and monstrous acts.65

  The work of Poe occupies a bizarre position in the American literary canon. Vernon Parrington infamously suggested that Poe’s place in American literature is a question best taken up by the psychologist rather than the literary critic. His tales of the weird and macabre seem to many to be deeply out of step with the America of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Moreover, Poe frequently creates medieval fairylands for his murderers, maniacs, and ghostly apparitions to inhabit. For Poe, there do not seem to be ghosts haunting the American landscape.66

  Poe’s ghosts hide behind the fantastic facade. His work delved into the dark undercurrents that ran beneath the surface of nineteenth-century America’s anxiety over gender, sexuality, and race. He writes of horrible siblings, marriage as a charnel house where the dead and their desires come back to life, and the possibility of violence that hides at the heart of every human relationship. Poe refused to accept the emerging myths of the American family, and his conception of family life as a horror film has had numerous reverberations in how pop culture has dealt with the monster. Tod Browning’s Dracula and, even more explicitly, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are representations of horrific families who feed on outsiders when they do not feed on each other. In this, they are Poe’s progeny.67

  “The Fall of the House of Usher” in some ways represents Poe’s definitive domestic nightmare. It is a tale of two siblings, Roderick and Madeline, who reside in a m
orbid ancestral mansion. Both of the odd pair suffers from what were popularly known as “nervous illnesses” in antebellum America. Roderick has an “an excessive nervous agitation,” while his sister Madeline suffers with “a settled apathy” and “transient afflictions of the cataleptical character.”68

  The narrator, Roderick’s boyhood chum who has come to cheer him in his distress, watches in horror the sister’s rapid decline and death and attends Roderick on Madeline’s burial. The nature of her disease, and the fact that she is described as being buried “with a faint blush upon the bosom and upon the face,” prepares us to learn that Madeline has been buried alive. The first-time reader is not prepared, however, for the return of Madeline, flinging open antique panel doors and standing enshrouded in burial clothes. Dripping with the blood of her struggle to escape her tomb, she falls on her brother, dying from the trauma of her ordeal and killing her brother with fright. The narrator flees as the House of Usher itself collapses suddenly and violently. Like the Pequod sinking beneath the seas that roll endlessly, the House of Usher falls like “the voice of a thousand waters,” and the ground closes “sullenly and silently over the fragments”69

  Shadowy elements of this short story have reappeared again and again in pop culture, its dark progeny including everything from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby to Stephen King’s The Shining. The tale itself presents an utterly deranged version of American family values in which the family unit, in this case the last living members of a family line, become all important to the narrative and to one another. The clear suggestion of incest in the subtext of the story is less important than the control that Roderick asserts over his sister, literally the power of life and death. Although he knows her to be cataleptic, he rather quickly entombs her. Madeline, who never speaks and who has no control over the fate of her own body, stands in for American women celebrated in the “cult of true womanhood” and entombed in Victorian domestic ideology.