J. Hogle’s The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002) is one of the most influential and important secondary sources. The qualitative findings use a linear, sociocultural framework to reveal linguistic patterns in the expression of the unfamiliar, fear-mongering monsters of Gothicism. Hogle evaluates monsters as symbolic mechanisms who possess ghostly disguises in the form of uncanny abjections to confront the audience with the root of our actuality (16). Hogle’s identification of monsters are further supported by Sigmund Freud’s ‘Uncanny’ (1919) which coherently supports the familiarity of these unfamiliarly, frightening monstrous forms.
Other philosophical developments Hogle interprets include Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) who presents monsters are beings who “rise from below the threshold” and “excite ideas of pain and danger” (Hogle 2002: 14). In these defining renditions, the Gothic monster is viewed as a reflection of interpersonal fear; a symbol of our inner monster which both attracts and deters us from addressing psychological and cultural fears.
Within this scholarly frame, Botting’s Gothic (1995) examines contemporary anxieties and political conditions of Gothicism by drawing from neoclassical and quasi-medieval monsters. Examining the continuous existence of monsters, Botting concludes that monsters are postmodernist entities which exist to be unfixed and unstable, yet necessary in their emergence in specific narratives (104). His particular focus is marked by his later publication of Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (2013) which examines the emergence of Victorian body-horror and its prevalence in contemporary society as cyborgs or cybernetic organisms (half-human and half-machine).
Ultimately, the existence of such unsettling beings mirrors the acceptance of hybridity and sociocultural anxieties with monsters as they are left to be “unsurprising, ubiquitous, visible and overlooked at the same time” (158). Botting’s paradoxical definition disregards any chance of a solid understanding of Gothic monsters, however his research is grounded in the societal, political and historical changes which evoke these malformed beasts.
J. Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, published in 1995, analyses the patterns of these monstrous forms. Halberstam manages to heavily condense the vast realm of Gothic monsters as: “metaphorized representations of monstrosity between inside / outside, female / male, body / mind, native / foreign, proletariat / aristocrat.” (1).
His definition encouraged me to familiarise my research with patterns to reveal similarities in monsters across literature. Monsters have continuously been grounded in racism, sexism and the gap between rich and poor societies. Halberstam’s monster-conventions identify the human signifier which exists within the anatomy of the gothic monsters; everything is a “metonym for the human” from the tight skin of Frankenstein, the dark ambience of Hyde and the paleness of Dracula (7).
Even contemporary literature which allows lovers or friends as monsters, there is an unstable otherness about their humanity. In simple terms, Halberstam puts forth that monstrous forms (even in non-monstrous settings) are imprinted with race, sexuality, class and gender for the purpose of multiple interpretations based upon our own inhumane human condition (84 – 85). Instead of stabilising a monster’s existence, we should allow their existence to be everchanging and manic as their perverse and abstractness reveals real-world threats which ground our very own monstrous existence.
In the context of the existence of monsters in real-world environments, there is a fantastical shift in the portrayal of otherworldliness which, for instance, Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) explores using evidences from post-modernism, semiotics and subculture. The portrayal of the fantastical either manifests desire or expels desire which can be disturbing to the cultural status or continuity of societal norms (47). Monsters are enticing to the audience as there is an otherworldly explanation for their existence. In guise of otherness, fantastic shapes emerge such as hybrid creatures, monsters, devils, beasts, reflections which create a formlessness fear which expresses a countercultural environment; thrusting the fantastical, monster-filled world into repressive reality (72).
Richard Kearney’s Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2009) further delves into the fantastical elements of monsters; not just fantasy fiction. He contends that the fantastical form of a monster is morally immoral (57). Kearney’s exploration lightly relies upon Gothicism to explore monsters; marking them as independent entity grounded in folklore, religion and superstition. This is extremely important as it gives monsters agency to symbolises the civilised, rational human against the aberrant, anarchic human (monster); influenced by the fantastic elements of our own inhumanity.
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) introduces a melancholy glamour to immortal life whilst humanising the self-destructive lifestyle of a modern vampire in the form of a journalist reporting the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac. The dominant aesthetic of the monstrous form creates a vampiric paradigm as Louis, Lestat and Claudia are not the historically, solitary creature which lurked in the dark of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Furthermore, Rice’s frequent expression of spectres in a familiarly unfamiliar manner normalises their existence as shown in The Witching Hour (1990). Both texts include stylistic devices which are consistent in Gothicism and have grounded my understanding contemporary monsters.
In order to prove Rice’s Gothic literature includes spectral characters and creatures to support the Gothic narrative, I will take inspiration in my own short stories to correctly establish a monster in a Gothic genre.
Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1983) antagonist reveals itself to be Reverend Lowe who transforms into a werewolf during the moon cycle. Its omniscient narration grounds the story’s small-town atmosphere and characters in Gothicism. Unlike Rice’s monster-protagonists, King utilises monsters in the Gothic as an expression of moral depravity which is reminiscent of what conceptualised Gothic in the first place: “It howls once, in triumph, and then it buries its face and snout in Neary's neck…” (1983: 31)
King’s expressive use of monsters portrays the werewolf in a sinister, unforgiving manner. There is depth to Lowe’s human desire to control the wolf and ultimately allowing it to overtake him which humanises the existence of the monster.
In order to understand the terrifying bodily gore of King’s novels, David Hume’s Gothic vs Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel essay explains new forms of Gothicism as: “‘Terror-Gothic’ plays on the reader’s response to suspense, while ‘Horror-Gothic’ attempts to involve him with the villain-hero protagonist” (1969: 286). Hume’s research offers an understanding to the environmental form of a gothic story whereby evil exists either in a monstrous or human form.
Wider reading of gothic literature grounded in an outlandish and derelict environment includes Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1998) whose protagonist solicitor, Arthur Kipps, must settle the affairs of the deceased Alice Drablow whilst being haunted by Jennet, who ultimately follows him home and causes the death of his wife and child. Both narratives contemporarily write under the influence of the “terror-gothic” (Hume 1969: 286) whereby a monster awaits the protagonist in a historically, foreboding setting. The intermixture of terror and beauty begs the question of whether a monster can exist without an unsettling world surrounding it, or if it is the monster that transforms the environment into an expression of its own terror.
