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The Monstrous [Whatever]

piny

Okay, so Little Light’s piece, which I’m sorry I didn’t link to before, has been subjected to some incredibly unfair attacks. I’m gonna post about something related to it instead of that. I’ve really enjoyed the long answer posts (although, God only knows why, I didn’t expect the last one to go the direction it did). I’ve got some questions for all of you:

How many sympathetic monsters have you encountered? Who are they? Are there any you identify with in particular, any that seem like family? When did you meet them? Are there creators of wonderful monsters to whom you owe an especial debt? Have you ever felt monstrous? Have you ever taken pleasure in feeling monstrous?

This is a short (not complete) list of the monstrous associations that came up when I read Little Light’s piece:

Sandy Stone
Kate Bornstein’s hands
Grendel
The Invisible Man–the broken clock, “booful,” the room full of light
Olympia
Sycorax
Othello
Junglee Girl
Mona in the Promised Land
Bears
Frida Kahlo
Catherine Opie
Diana Courvant
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
“The Bitch’s Grave”
Medea and her chariot
Medusa
That Delmore Schwartz poem

39 thoughts on The Monstrous [Whatever]

  1. Janet Reno. How wonderful it was to see a big bold woman in such a position of power. And after she developed Parkensins? She was still a big bold woman in a very hig profile position. I was awestruck. I couldn’t get enough of her.

  2. I have always sympathised with the particular kind of monstrous mythological figure that is a violent woman (somehow un-woman in her construction). Medea, Clytemnestra, and all the rest are the ones that I was drawn to. I felt like they had bigger stories than the ones that were being told.

  3. Sula/Beloved
    Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
    Invisible Man – especially on the gurney in the hospital
    Medea
    Blanche – A Streetcar Named Desire
    Bette Davis
    The dark side of Dorothy Parker
    Bessie Smith
    Hedda Gabler
    Edna St. Vincent Millay

    After reading Gilbert, Gubar, Cixous, Irigaray, Butler, Woolf, etc – and coming out of it not knowing which way was up, what part was me, what part was generations of women before me, and what to do with what I learned, yeah, monstrous would be a good way to describe it.

    As most of mine are literary, I feel an affinity toward those characters deemed “crazy” or “monstrous” or “evil” – those attempting to create an alternate reality when their own is unacceptable or uninhabitable.

  5. The origins of the Medusa myth fascinates me – originally there was the Libyan triple goddess, Pallas-Athena-Medusa, who did not have snakes for hair. As patriarchal religions took over the region, Athena was distanced from all matriarchal roots and said to have popped out of Zeus’s head; Pallas became part of Athena’s name (or, depending on the source, Athena’s sister whom Zeus tricked her into killing), and Medusa became a monster to be slain. Later myths have it that Athena turned Medusa into a Gorgon as punishment for having been raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, since Unkie Poseidon couldn’t be punished for the desecration. (sad to think that victim-blaming goes back to ancient times)

    Oh my god I’m such a huge mythology nerd, plus I directed a short play once about Medusa and got to do a ton of research about her then. If I don’t stop here, I’ll go on all day about the evolution of myths and the subjugation of matriarchal religions in the ancient world…but my point is about my perception of monstrosity as a cover-up for things that are too intimidating for some to see as they are. The bastardization of Medusa’s story is a pretty good template for this masking of female wisdom and strength as not only hideous, but dangerous.

  7. I think I was supposed to be akin to Tiny Tim, or fragile little Clara from Heidi. In reality, I always felt closer cousin to Frankenstein’s monster.

    I don’t limp, I lurch.

    I couldn’t manage a proper faint to save my life, but I can quite easily break stuff by accident.

    I’m not tiny, fragile, or pretty. I take up space.

    I don’t have some undefinable weakness of the legs that can be cured by a brisk stretch of healthy living. I’m put together strangely; sturdy, awkward, functional enough when I need it, and strong.

    If I slip and fall, I’m more likely to smash something, or land on someone, than I am to be really hurt.

    I’m not delicate, and I doubt I could be if I tried. I can be dangerous, though.

  8. Because I’m a sucker for monsters… One of my beefs with a lot of modern monsters is that they lack sympathetic traits. I don’t care about, say, Freddy, because there’s absolutely no redeeming traits there. The best monsters are the ones that have some kind of attribute that makes you feel sorry for them, or outraged at the treatment they receive, even if you recognize that they may deserve some punishment for their actions.

    A few that come to mind, besides those already mentioned:
    The Creature from the Black Lagoon
    Frankenstein’s monster
    The Incredible Hulk
    The Thing (from the Fantastic Four)
    Solomon Grundy
    (in fact, there are *tons* of characters like these in comic books, now that I’m thinking about it)
    Quasimodo
    The Phantom
    King Kong
    (can you tell I like the classic monsters?)
    Judas

    I have to admit that I’d never really thought of Grendel as particularly sympathetic, but it’s been ages since I read Beowulf.

  9. Also, while I was looking around for more information on some of monsters you listed that I wasn’t as familiar with, I found this.
    It’s, well… effing crazy might be an understatement. It’s old, too, but I thought some of you might get a kick out of learning that “monsters, like leftists, don’t reproduce naturally.” We perpetuate ourselves “through blasphemous acts…” Good to know. Also, apparently, Jason, Freddy, and Pinhead are “semi-sympathetic anti-heroes.”
    Really?
    Yeah.

  12. Don’t forget Grendel’s mom!!
    Echidna, mother of monsters!
    Lilith, like little light mentions — especially the recent take in Lucifer
    Phaethusa, daughter of Hyperion, in a book I just read called Orphans of Chaos — she’s a four-dimensional squid being, considered a monstrosity from beyond space and time, in the rapidly-growing-up body of a teenage girl
    Gorgons, Furies, Erichtho, the Fates.
    Granny Weatherwax
    Arsenic and Old Lace
    Catwoman!
    The Iron Giant!
    Kyo from Fruits Basket
    Jean Grey aka the Phoenix
    The Beast of the Apocalypse (and the Whore of Babylon)

    This sandworm:
    http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20010507/gallery/Sand_Worm.jpg

    OMG, phallic and dentatariffic at the same time!

  13. I have gone out, a possessed witch,

    haunting the black air, braver at night;

    dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

    over the plain houses, light by light:

    lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

    I have been her kind.

    I have found the warm caves in the woods,

    filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

    closets, silks, innumerable goods;

    fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

    whining, rearranging the disaligned.

    A woman like that is misunderstood.

    I have been her kind.

    I have ridden in your cart, driver,

    waved my nude arms at villages going by,

    learning the last bright routes, survivor

    where your flames still bite my thigh

    and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

    A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

    I have been her kind.

    –Anne Sexton

  15. Scylla, both the one of the Odyssey and the one of the Heroides.
    Sethe.
    Medea, again.
    The Maenads, all of them, ever. (There’s a paper to be written on female experience trumping the male narrative in the death of Orpheus, I swear.)
    Juno and her rage, harrying Aeneas to the ends of the earth.
    Dido and her suicide on the pyre, the kingly queen.
    Cleopatra, the Other, the barbarian who could have been an Empress of Rome.
    Lilith, oh, Lilitu, the mother of demons.
    Yehudit, beheading an oppressor and bearing his bloody head in a basket.
    And the Snark.

    PS I read the Robin Morgan poem, as posted in Heart’s comments, and – I find it far less powerful than little light’s writing. But what do I know? I’m not a radical feminist mommy lesbian.

  16. Monsters I sympathize with?

    Morgan Le Fey
    Darth Vader (and I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned that by now!)
    Dark Phoenix, aka Jean Grey, as has been said.
    Gollum, of course. How can you not feel sorry for that?
    Shelob, while we’re on LOTR
    Maleficent from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty
    Gargamel and Azriel, from the Smurfs.
    Dragons in general
    The Wicked Witch of the West

    I’m sure I could find a whole bunch more, if I did some digging through Teh Collection, but this’ll do for now.

  17. The Wargs, monster-wolves in LOTR. Think about how we Westerners / Europeans have twisted these highly intelligent, social animals that are so full of grace and so supremely adapted to its environment – into things of such evil. That’s me. I’m a Warg. A trans-warg.

    More LOTR figures:
    The Annabon – called Oliphants by the Hobbits.
    The faces in the Marshes Of The Dead.

    And, from the Silmarillion: Melkor, one of the Valar, who fell from grace.

  19. Ooo – GreyLadyBast! I *always* wanted to be Maleficent when I was little. How can you not LOVE her? (“Now you shall deal with ME, O Prince, and all the powers of HELL!!”)

    Medusa. I don’t know if Clytemnaestra falls under the category of ‘monster’ but she was definitely on my list of kick-ass women growing up. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just pure genuis. The Alien queen from Aliens. Dark Willow from Buffy.

    Carrie. Carrie Carrie Carrie. I took a class in undergrad on the horror genre and became totally obsessed with horror films and gender. Carrie is a film that plays both sides: it gives us a sympathetic portrayal of justified female rage, but then labels it too out-of-control, too monstrous, and so she must be destroyed. In class we read a critic who thought that by the film’s end, Carrie had lost the audience’s sympathy, but to me she never did. (Too much high school trauma, I guess. 🙂

    My latest obsession is female werewolves and the gender boundaries they cross (body hair, physical strength, aggression, etc), and the ways they are punished or contained, etc. I did a digital video for a class in the fall about female werewolves in film and on TV over the past 10 years, and I’m gonna keep going with that for a while.

    I’m sure I’m missing some, but those are the ones that spring to mind. Images of female monstrosity, of female rage and physical strength, of teeth and fang and unrestrained power definitely inspire me, even if the dominant narrative says they’re evil. I believe that anything labeled monstrous or grotesque by our culture merits closer examination.

    (On a side note, I have to say THANK YOU to Little Light for the post that inspired this. I don’t have time to create a blogger account right now, so I can’t respond there, but it was amazing. Words can’t express how deeply it moved me.)

  20. trillian – From one mythology nerd to another, if the gorgon/Medusa stories interest you, you might want to do some searching for the “lion-headed god” of Mithraism. He is also depicted as having a head of snakes.

    Some of the parallels in snake/mane/solar ray symbolism are pretty interesting. It’s been hard to find resources online, but this is one of the books I read and there is a mention of the lion-headed god near the bottom of the page.
    The Cosmic Mysteries of Mithras

  21. Gollum is probably my favorite monster ever. What a great character. So tragic…

    Someone above mentioned Tempest–Caliban is a great monster too.

    This is kind of a bizarre one and I don’t know if it counts but–considering how famous Andrea Dworkin was for her “ugliness” maybe she counts too? When I learned who she was that was the first thing I loved about her, that she was so adamantly “unpretty.”

    There are a bunch of monsters in the Sandman series, many of them sympathetic (like the woman, I forget her name, whose face is half beautiful, half decayed, and who is Lucifer’s loyal lover. I always liked her, brief though her appearances were).

  22. There are a bunch of monsters in the Sandman series, many of them sympathetic (like the woman, I forget her name, whose face is half beautiful, half decayed, and who is Lucifer’s loyal lover. I always liked her, brief though her appearances were).

    As a kid, I had one of those prepubescent crushes on Dr. Blight from Captain Planet. She was half-pretty, half-mutated, although we only ever got glimpses of it under her hair (I think there were intended to be horrifying, but came off more teasing). In the shiny-bright kiddie cartoon morality, there can be something strangely appealing about the bad, the evil, the poisonous. And she was pretty much the poison woman.

    The Incredible Hulk

    Hell, yeah! Hulk SMASH!

  23. Thank you very much, Tricia, I look forward to checking those out. There’s a brilliant book called The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by a scholar named Roberto Callasso that weaves the Greek myths together the way they might have been understood at the time; it looks at the patterns within less-obvious relationships and family ties and how the semantics of different translations illuminate various subtleties…god, here, I go, and I never did answer the post’s original question.

    Sticking with the Greeks for a minute: Calypso, the Titans (like the Native Americans, they were here first, y’know), and that whole generation of monsters Gaia bore to be soldiers in her children’s war. The Hindu goddess of destruction Kali. The phantom of the opera (and there’s another great example of the popularized vs. original version). The elephant man. Chuck Pahlaniuk has a great book called Invisible Monsters about a model whose face gets shot off. Javert in Les Miserables, but now I might be veering too far into sympathetic villains. The Beast, as in Beauty and (seriously). Someone said that Grendel isn’t really sympathetic, and it’s been too long for me to recall, but I remember that his mother sure was.

  25. Piny,

    I feel I’m missing something here. You mention in your list of “sympathetic monsters”:

    Kate Bornstein’s hands

    I know who Kate Bornstein is, and I’ve read some of her material, but I’m afraid the allusion here is somewhat lost on me?

  26. Something interesting, on monsters. In college, my friend and I tried a role-playing game, Shadowrun. I thought I was going to play the elf in that, because you know how elves in those games are. Tall, pretty, slim, graceful, elegant, fast, and magic. Fitting both the classic idea of noble athleticism, and the classic idea of feminine beauty.

    Everything I’m not.

    But the sample-elf in the game annoyed me. It was rather stuck up. So out of contrariness, I went completely the other way, and decided to make a troll-character, instead.

    What I came up with was big and strong. Not a fast runner, but fast reflexes and tough. Smarter than people would expect from someone like her. Good in a fight. Not what most humans would call pretty. Hard to destroy. No layer of shiny magic perfection. Very much like me.

    And what surprised me was that I liked it so much. It’s good to be the monster sometimes. It fits.

  27. Yeah, that was me about Grendel.

    Like I said, it’s been ages since I’ve read Beowulf, but I remember Grendel being kind of a murderous jerk. His mother, though, definitely. As I recall, her beef is that, you know, Beowulf cut off her son’s arm, and then came after both of them.

    God. I feel stupid for not knowing this one better. It’s just been over a decade since I read it. *sigh*

    Speaking of Dark Phoenix, by the way, don’t forget Madelyne Prior/Goblin Queen.

    She’s perfect.

    Cyclops hooks up with her and eventually marries her because she looks like his dead girlfriend, has a child with her, and then abandons her and his son to shack up with with (the now alive again) Jean Grey. She and the son are attacked and kidnapped. Does Cyclops care?
    No.
    She makes a deal with a demon to get the power to get revenge on Cyclops and to find her kidnapped baby,
    And someone, she’s the monster of the story, because her husband leaves her to have an affair and isn’t particularly concerned about the fact that his baby is, you know, kidnapped by cyborgs. Riiight.

  28. The Uncanny Valley really interests me in terms of this topic, i.e. that it’s the monsters who are the most like humans that really scare us. Oscar the Grouch? Adorable. Max Headroom? Effin creepy, even before his doppelganger pirated Chicago tv. The concept doesn’t necessarily directly apply to all of this conversation, but it’s illuminating that the closer that a manifestation of Otherness comes to winning our human empathy, the more immediately it provokes revulsion, or the instinct to distance ourselves. Which may or may not have something to do with Little Light’s beautifully (and originally!) expressed instinct to fully reclaim her own monstrosity.

  29. There are a bunch of monsters in the Sandman series, many of them sympathetic (like the woman, I forget her name, whose face is half beautiful, half decayed, and who is Lucifer’s loyal lover. I always liked her, brief though her appearances were).

    Mazikeen!

    And for other Sandman monsters: well, we coul start with Delirium and Despair themselves, add the Merkin (mother of spiders), Hippolyta Hall and the other Kindly Ones, the Three-In-One, Rose the dream vortex, the Cuckoo that destroys a world, Titania the Queen of Faerie… I’ll stop geeking out now, I promise.

  30. Don’t stop geeking on Sandman on my account — all Neil Gaiman’s monsters are fascinating. The ones that weird me out the most are Mr. Alice and the assassins from Neverwhere. Not sympathetic, though. :::shiver:::

    Heh, Sesame Street, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought about that. I held off posting for a while because what I had stuck in my head was how much I identified with Snuffalupagus as a kid. Not with having him as a friend, as being him.

    This went a long with my insistance that, “if I were an animal,” I would be a duck-billed platypus. Which caused quite a bit of head-scratching among teachers and such.

  31. Hey, Antigone was never a monster.

    On an Atwood kick, I always felt bad for Serena Joy. You might say she got her “Just desserts” but really, no one deserved that.

  34. Andrea Yates, though it makes me shiver a little to say it. With a husband THAT nuts, how can you not feel for her at least a little?

    Also: Jim Jones. I’m from the San Francisco area, so the Peoples Temple is a piece of local history that everyone knows about or has a story about. Jones had some very progressive ideas for his time–the problem, however, was that he was totally batshit crazy, which manifested itself in a number of ways (abuse of children, sexual manipulation of some of his followers, et cetera), and ended with the mass murder/suicide of 918 of his followers.

    Fictional:
    Carolyn in American Beauty, because I’ve known people similar to her.

    The Phantom of the Opera. How the hell could you not sympathize with that character?

  35. Speaking of comic books, everyone in Doom Patrol is a monster. There’s absolutely no one who isn’t.

    Yes, props to Mr Gaiman and Mr McKean (for whom I will always be grateful), but Grant Morrison was a much weirder guy. Even if he’d never done more than make me go out and find the text of “The New Mother,” he’d merit inclusion in my personal pantheon.

    This is the guy who came up with assassins (the Dry Bachelors) made from skin flakes and the photographs you throw away when love has ended. That carried big hammers and balloons that spoke for them — and spoke only in anagrams.

  38. Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” – is that the one I’m thinking of? The one that ends with “And I eat men like air”?

  39. Nomie,
    I was gonna mention Lyta Hall in keeping with other’s responses of Medusa 🙂

    Also from that series (well you know what I mean) is Ishtar/Belili/Astarte

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