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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

The body is “a congealed metaphor,” observes Katherine Hayles; as an organism at once physical and social, it is a “structure whose constraints and possibilities” have been formed by history and shaped by cultural delimitations of “body boundaries” (284, 107). The body of the monster offers a particularly complex metaphor, one that has, over time, congealed in fascinating and suggestive ways. Emblem and exemplar of troubled boundaries, the figure of the monster both challenges and reinforces the borders of the human. Its meaning at once static and shifting, the monstrous body has possessed a peculiar plasticity: it has been shaped and re-shaped to articulate, in its unsettling deficiencies, the anxieties of its time. Living, dead, or imagined, on stages and museum shelves, in carnivals, sideshows, anatomical textbooks and the illustrations of fantastical travel tales, the distinctive bodies of so-called monsters have circulated for centuries as prized articles of entertainment or edification. As a literal embodiment of difference, the monster on display is potentially disruptive, evoking wonder, fascination, and attraction even as it generates suspicion, aversion, and repulsion. In this complex of reactions can be detected the complexity of the monster’s ambiguous relationship to the familiar and the normative. The monster may function as a “dialectical Other,” suggests Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, but at the same time it “can seldom be contained in a simple, binary dialectic” (7, 17). We may “distrust and loathe the monster,” but our fear, says Cohen, is also a kind of desire (17).

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