Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (48 page)

72
Anthony Comstock “Vampire Literature,”
North American Review
417 (1891): 161–62; Mary Gabriel,
Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1998), 185.

73
Frisken,
Victoria’s Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution
, 46–47.

74
Andrea Tone,
Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 14, 15.

75
Carole Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 226–28.

76
The most detailed history of interracial sex, combined with the racial anxieties and obsessions that went with it, can be found in Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

1
  A full exploration of Frankenstein as a cultural symbol appears in Susan Tyler Hitchcock,
Frankenstein: A Cultural History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

2
  Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, “Introduction,” in
Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 2.

3
  Melinda Cooper, “Monstrous Progeny: The Teratological Tradition in Science and Literature,” in Knellwolf and Goddall,
Frankenstein’s Science
, 87–89. Michael J. Hyde in
Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010) shows that Shelley also revolted against her father’s fascination with famed chemist Humphry Davy who regarded nature as a “she” whose mysteries had to be uncovered. See 98–104.

4
  Julia V. Douthwaite,
The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 216.

5
  Scott L. Malcomson,
One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 352–54. Malcomson suggests that emancipation terrified whites, by calling the meaning of whiteness into question. Only in this way can we make sense of the “pathological” fears that created the horrifying spectacles of lynching.

6
  Gregory quoted in Elizabeth Young,
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 212.

7
  Clive Bloom,
Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present
(London: Continuum, 2010), 171.

8
  David Robinson,
From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On the “purpose-built cinema,” see 89–98.

9
  Amy Louise Wood,
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 119, 137.

10
Wood,
Lynching and Spectacle
, 121–22.

11
George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
(Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 278.

12
Quoted in Fredrickson,
Black Image in the White Mind
, 277.

13
Fredrickson,
Black Image in the White Mind
, 279.

14
A general description of post-Civil War violence against African Americans appears in Leon F. Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 276–80. See also Steven Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 426–27.

15
Quoted in Orlando Patterson, “Feast of Blood,” in
Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
(New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998), 194, 195.

16
Patterson, “Feast of Blood,” 198.

17
Quoted in Melvin E. Matthews Jr.,
Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Great Depression and World War II
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2009), 254.

18
A complete discussion of
Birth of a Nation
appears in John Hope Franklin, “Birth of a Nation—Propaganda as History,” in
Hollywood’s America: United States History through Its Films
, ed. Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2001), 42–52.

19
Jonathan Lake Crane,
Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994), 26.

20
Readers should be aware that while the term “freak” carries derogatory connotations, it is the preferred term for both disabled people who work in sideshows and those who theatrically create abnormal differences in themselves for display and profit. See Robert Bogdan,
Freak Show
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xi. I discovered in my research that entering the term “freak” into search engines and library catalogs results in the message that “this library does not use the term freak. Search under monster.” (!)

21
See P. T. Barnum,
The Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 225. An excellent examination of Barnum and his world can be found in James W. Cook,
The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). See esp. 1–6 on his career and 80–118 on the Feejee Mermaid.

22
Barnum,
Life of P.T. Barnum
, 234–45. See also Joe Nickell,
Secrets of the Sideshow
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 10–15, and Stephen Asma,
On Monsters
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 136.

23
Robert H. Brisendine Papers, box 9, file folder 28, Emory University Special Collections.

24
Brisendine Papers, box 9, file folder 28..

25
Brisendine Papers, box 10, file folder 16 and box 11, file folder 22. For ethnographic shows more generally, see Joy S. Kasson,
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 212–19.

26
Rachel Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.:
Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 29–31.

27
See Dean Jensen’s
The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton
(Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 2006), 151–54, 193, 312–14; Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
, 73–74; Nickells,
Secrets of the Sideshow
, 125–26; Bogdan,
Freak Show
, 166–73.

28
Daniel P. Mannix,
Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others
(New York: Powerhouse Books, 2000), 70–71.

29
Thomas G. Dyer,
Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race
(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana University Press, 1980), 141–45. See also Lynn Dumenil,
Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 35–45.

30
Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
, 31.

31
See
Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture
, ed. Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2003).

32
The full story of eugenics is explored in Nell Irvin Painter’s
The History of White People
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 256–77.

33
For more on audience reactions to the film
Freaks
, see Matthews,
Fear Itself
, 54–58. Rachel Adams writes that “
Freaks
is less concerned with establishing the normality of its disabled characters than with subverting the notion of normative standards altogether.” Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
, 72.

34
See George M. Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

35
See Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture
, 212–21, for a detailed discussion of the Scopes Trial and its antecedents.

36
See Nell Irvin Painter on the “American School” and Agassiz in particular in
History of White People
, 190–200.

37
Nell Painter,
History of White People
, 112–13, 212–13.

38
Edward Spitzka, M.D., “The Development of Man’s Great Brain,”
Connecticut Magazine
9 (1909): 327.

39
See Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume,
Ota Benga
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).

40
Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
, 32. This comports with Linda Frost’s contention in
Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages and Whiteness
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) that whites came to see blackness as a kind of spectacle. See esp. 57–62.

41
“Negro Ministers Act to Free the Pygmy,”
New York Times
, Sept. 11, 1906; “Bushman’s Champions Angry,”
New York Tribune
, September 12, 1906; “Still Stirred About Benga,”
New York Times
, September 23, 1906.

42
Cook,
Arts of Deception
, 128.

43
Quoted in Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
, 40.

44
Edward J. Larson,
The Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 239–46.

45
“Reading Race into the Scopes Monkey Trial: African American Elites, Science and Fundamentalism,”
Journal of American History
90, no. 3 (2003): 891–911. See esp. 902–3.

46
Quoted in Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A
, 39–40.

47
Philip A. Shreffler,
The H. P. Lovecraft Companion
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press), xi.

48
“Call of Cthulhu,” in
More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Dell Trade Paperback, 1999), 172–216.

49
T. E. D. Klein, “A Dreamer’s Tale,” in
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
(Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House Publishers, 1965), xxiv, xxv.

50
Susan Bordo discusses a similar image that appeared in a Guess jeans ad in the midst of the O. J. Simpson trial. A blonde Nicole Brown look-alike is shown being grasped from behind by a large African American man, himself an O. J. look-alike. The caption reads, “If you can’t be good, be careful” (
Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 102–5).

51
Joshua David Bellin examines the racial imagery of
King Kong
thoroughly in
Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 1–2, 9–10, 21–47. Elizabeth Young writes that
King Kong
’s “distance from realism enables the explicitness of its rape imagery.” See Young,
Black Frankenstein
, 182–83.

52
Harvey Roy Greenberg explores this from another angle, pointing out how Denham himself kills the beast by summoning the Air Force, suggesting that the destruction of the monster makes the final line of the film an example of “preadolescent fascism.” See Greenberg, “King Kong: The Beast in the Boudoir—or, ‘You Can’t Marry That Girl, You’re a Gorilla,’” in
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film
, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 350.

53
Karen Grigsby Bates, “Race and King Kong,” NPR, December 22, 2005,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5066156
. Noel Carroll explores the relationship between
King Kong
and the evolution controversy thoroughly in “King Kong: Ape and Essence,” in Christopher Sharrett,
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 212–39.

54
Aesthetic documents such as
Birth of a Nation
make their intention clear; this is not a matter of “reading too much into” a cultural production.

55
Young,
Black Frankenstein
, 183.

56
Young,
Black Frankenstein
, 184.

57
Brian Donovan,
White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887–1917
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 22–23.

58
Donovan,
White Slave Crusades
, 26, 27.

59
The classic study is John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925
(New York: Athenaeum, 1963).