Monsters

J.J. Cohen’s article Monster Culture (Seven Theses) introduces seven theses about cultures and its monsters.

In his first theses, he describes methods of burying and dealing with vampire corpses, before going on to explain that monsters, or their bodies, embody fear and negative emotions. The “monstrous body is pure culture” he says, fantasies and mental constructs of humans that serves to symbolize something other than what it really is. Cohen connects the concept of monsters to human emotions and mental states rather than perceiving the monsters directly as just fictional beings.

The second theses confronts the supposed existence of said monsters, with the fact that the “monster always escapes”. In some cases, like the Tibetan yeti, the monster is never found despite the many claims of its existence and the destruction it leaves behind. In other cases, like the ogre of Mount Saint Michael that King Arthur kills, the monster always returns from death, in one form or another. There are also monsters like vampires, which come back every century slightly different depending on the current social or cultural events. Cohen’s theory revolves around monsters existing as fragments and leftover clues rather than the monster itself.

“The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization.” In the third theses, Cohen explains the existence of monsters as hybrid anomalies that are excluded from any set systematic structures. Monsters will appear in times of crisis just to disappear back to their secluded origins again, breaking the laws of nature by its very existence. Monsters are not meant to be able to be understood and fit into the categories of life, they’re a mixture thereof, opening up new viewpoints of life and how it works.

The fourth theses brings up an eye-opening fact that can be applied to our current day situations; the fact that monsters are monsters because they’re different; be it culturally, politically, racially, economically, sexually, or anything. In famous cases like the Bible or the French crusades celebration, groups of people are described as “monsters” to dehumanize them, villainize them, and justify wrongful acts against them. In America, Native Americans were coined savages to make colonization seem the right thing to do, and make colonists seem more fit and proper for owning the land. Time and time again, we see humans dehumanize and monsterize other humans for being different, a common factor being fear. They fear people who are different, who think differently, who are abnormal in their eyes, even if they aren’t harmful. Many minority groups are discriminated against and oppressed simply for existing. Furthermore, we have people titled as monsters to differentiate them from common people; for example, people like to call Adolf Hitler a monster, say that he wasn’t human, attempt to disconnect the man from anything related to them. But all they’re doing is denying that Hitler was human, that he was just like any other human, he could love and laugh and the things he did were what he thought were right. Monsters aren’t their own separate being; they’re made up of multiple already existing life forces, bits and pieces taken here and there to form an entity, leading to many stories of monsters trying to find out reasons for its existence.

The fifth theses explains how monsters are more than just a fear factor; oftentimes, they serve as a warning sign on the threshold to the unknown. Stories like Jurassic Park show how some lines aren’t meant to be crossed, and that curiosity brings demise. There are limits to any kind of subject that could bring curiosity; science, politics, society, history, anything that has a border that is risky to cross. Often times these borders are set for social trafficking, especially women. They could also be set to discourage certain social actions, such as incest or interracial marriage. Women in Salem were hanged for crossing social norms and attempting dependence, but were accused of sexual relations with the devil. Fear and corruption brings humans to try and destroy monsters and anything related to said monsters.

While monsters are usually set up to enforce and discourage “forbidden practices”, they can have the opposite effect as well. The knowledge of something that shouldn’t be done, and the yearning and envy of the freedom and status of a monster that represents such a thing can evoke desire, and forms of escapist fantasies. In some cases, the monster can serve as an alter ego, based off certain emotions, or represent a place of freedom and joy. At the end of the sixth theses Cohen asks the reader if monsters really exist, before dropping a thoughtful comment: “if they did not, how could we?”

The seventh and last theses are of how monsters affect us. Being figments of our imagination, with no solid proven facts but rather piled up facts that formed an entity, monsters make us think about how we perceive the world, make us reevaluate our views, they question their existence and why they were created; not just by their original author but by us, each individual human, who have constructed the monsters based off stories we read.