Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (16 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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 morbid 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.”
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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”
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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.

Roderick shrieked with horror when he saw that his allegedly “beloved” sister had broken free of the tomb. The conservative response to the emerging demands of feminism in the late nineteenth century revealed a similar sensibility. Traditionalism constructed women who refused to be the “angel of the house” as monsters roaming the national landscape, seeking to destroy the family and the scripturally sanctioned rule of male over female in marriage.
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The response of conservative forces in American society to feminist leader Victoria Woodhull provides one of the best examples of this mentality. Woodhull became, in the years following the Civil War, an advocate for liberalized divorce laws that would allow women to leave unhappy marriages, retaining both their property, and what Woodhull called, “the ownership and free use of her sexual organs.” Woodhull’s demands for gender equality resulted in accusations that she supported “free love.”
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Woodhull’s challenge to American patriarchy made her the target of Anthony Comstock, a lifelong moral crusader who believed that “licentious literature” was poisoning the American spirit. Comstock
especially liked the use of monster metaphors to describe his crusade, viewing himself as a Van Helsing seeking to destroy a Dracula-like pornographic evil. In an essay published in the
North American Review
in 1891, Comstock described “spicy stories” of sexuality as “vampire literature.” Books that feature human sexuality, especially those that celebrate female sexuality, were in Comstock’s view “devil seed-sowing” and “preying upon youth.” Comstock saw “indecent” literature as a giant beast, referring to the “hydra-headed monster” of pornography.
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Woodhull received Comstock’s attention for a number of stories in her newspaper,
The Weekly
, that exposed the sexual misdeeds of the powerful, including the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s infamous affair with Elizabeth Tilton. Like “Young Goodman Brown,” the gloomy Comstock could not believe that a woman who wrote of such things could be anything but a devil. Woodhull would be imprisoned, along with her sister Tennessee Claflin, for sending “indecent” materials through the mail. Woodhull would be portrayed in the press as a satanic monster tempting wives to leave their marriages for a life of “free love.”
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The attack on Victoria Woodhull represented part of a larger conservative counterrevolution in the late nineteenth century. Comstock’s crusade coincided with the first wave of legislative restrictions on abortion as well as efforts to limit access to improved contraceptive devices. Historian of medicine Andrea Tone notes that obscenity laws during this period increasingly limited access to information about birth control while preventing women (and men) from receiving contraceptive devices in the mails. Between 1866 and 1877 thirty states passed laws restricting abortions. The sensationalist press was filled with tales of the gory deaths of “fallen women” who attempted to procure abortions. The
National Police Gazette
freely traded on the monster metaphor for women who sought and provided abortions. One of the most infamous images the infamous paper ever produced shows a woman with a monstrous creature consuming her womb. A caption reads “The Female Abortionist.”
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By the beginning of the new century, an obsession with controlling the bodies of women had become firmly embedded in state laws, as well as established and defended by the threat of rhetorical and real violence. The world of “conservative society,” as Victoria Woodhull described it, labeled monstrous anyone who stepped outside these gendered and racial parameters. A time of cultural fissures that promised to swallow older institutions beneath the ground became a time of reactionary violence. Anthony Comstock embodied a new kind of witch-hunter. In the newly dawning century, angry mobs became monster killers.
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“Sweets for the Sweet”

Candyman
built on the gothic visi
ons of two hundred years of American history to create its story about white power and paternalism, a story in which the terror of America’s racial history comes to life. The Cabrini Green housing project is surely meant to set the frightening tone for white audiences. Surrounded by “gangbangers” who sexually threaten Madsen’s white character when she enters one of the buildings, it is covered in graffiti and steel mesh like some funky medieval fortress.

Cabrini Green functions in the film as the same gothic fortress that has been appearing in our nightmares since Horace Walpole. Full of secret passages and the threat of unmentionable acts of violence, it is the public housing project turned haunted house. During the course of the film, the audience learns that the tony apartment building where Helen lives with her trendy academic husband was once part of the housing project that became Cabrini Green. Rebuilt for white yuppies, it functions as another kind of haunted house, one that has tried and failed to efface its gothic past. The entire American landscape, with its history of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching, is Candyman country.

“Sweets for the Sweet” is a phrase that appears throughout the film. We learn that it is a phrase intimately connected to the folk homage given to the Candyman. The film never makes the meaning of this phrase explicit, though it clearly emerges out of the entwined symbolism of the romantic gift of chocolates and Candyman’s brutal murder at the hands of sexually anxious white men. Slathered in honey and devoured by insects before he burns, he became a true candyman.

This twentieth-century film offers a near-perfect representation of America’s historic racial obsessions. Postbellum America had a deep fascination with what was commonly called “miscegenation.” A wave of legislation in the 1870s outlawed interracial marriage. White lynch mobs committed acts of inhumane atrocity against black men, acts of violence that rivaled and surpassed the Candyman tale. Political rhetoric worried the American public incessantly with fears of “amalgamation.” The desire to control white women’s bodies, even in their most intimate activities, joined with racist folklore about the African American man and his sexual desires. The result could only be, and usually was, horrific violence.
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