On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (23 page)

One way to help us navigate the various attitudes toward monsters, especially during the birth of science, can be found in the “three levels of response to the marvelous” defined by the historian Madeleine Doran.
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Around the time that Shakespeare was composing
Macbeth
, the British naturalist Edward Topsell was publishing his bestiary. Nature, at this time, was only half extricated from magical thinking. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with exotic creatures, ghosts, and witchcraft,
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and audiences of the day could enjoy these plays on three different levels.

First, an audience could accept fully and uncritically the marvelous phenomena. This is full-on credulity. When Shakespeare draws back the curtain on the witches of
Macbeth
, or even the humorous characters of Puck and the ass-headed Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the first kind of response is innocent belief. No doubt many in Shakespeare’s audience would have accepted the reality of witches, and even the reality of waking up with a donkey’s head where one’s normal head once perched. A witness to such phenomena, whether it be on stage or in a beer-house traveler’s tale, would not flinch from accepting it as true. In this modality, a Shakespearean patron accepts a witch in precisely the same uncritical way that I, at a contemporary play, accept the storyline of a character who’s dying from radiation poisoning. The latter is not in my immediate range of everyday experiences, but reports of it are widespread enough in the general culture for me to accept it without hesitation. And we don’t have to go all the way back to Shakespeare’s day to find credulous responses to witches, demons, and supernatural transformations. Many people today accept the literal reality of demon possession and exorcism, which shows us how these “responses to the marvelous” can be transhistorical categories of belief.

The second mode of response to the marvelous is intermediate, the “entertainment of the possibility without actual belief; it often arises from a conflict between a rational attitude of skepticism and an emotional willingness to believe.” Here one humorously protests and even ridicules the believers in witches or werewolves, but then quickens one’s pace and furtively clutches one’s crucifix while crossing the moor at dusk. Here, too, one loudly denounces the superstitions of the day, but then on another occasion
knocks on wood when describing one’s good health. The Shakespearean audience would have been well stocked with people of this intermediate variety. They might have mocked or raised their eyebrows at the ghost and witch characters, but they couldn’t help feeling the fears and worries that attend such creatures.

The third response to the marvelous is the suspension of disbelief. Here one confidently disbelieves in the marvelous phenomena but willingly plays along with the fiction in order to extract some symbolic or imaginative satisfaction. Shakespearean audiences would have taken this attitude toward the Greek pagan gods and monsters that occasionally made it onto the Elizabethan stage, and we today similarly suspend our disbelief when considering an Elizabethan witch hunt story. The devil, as he appears in Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
, for example, must have been much more real to the Elizabethans than he is for us. For many of today’s fans of the Faust story, the devil is embraced provisionally as response mode 3, but for early moderns he would have elicited response modes 1 and 2. To underscore the transhistorical aspect of these modes: today’s evangelical Pentecostal will likely respond to the devil in art, media, and scripture in much the same way as the Elizabethan did.

In Shakespeare’s
Othello
the Moor is accused of using witchcraft to lure Desdemona into marrying him. He defends himself by explaining that he simply wooed her with his rich and exotic travel stories. Othello mentions the headless Blemmyae, though not by name, in Act 1, Scene 3:

Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field

Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence

And portance in my travels’ history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven

It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline:

But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,

She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear

Devour up my discourse.

The appearance of men “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” is included in
Othello
without irony or satire. The Blemmyae are symbolic monsters, indicating the foreign, exotic aspect of Othello himself; only a man of the world would have encountered these far-off creatures. But it is likely that Shakespeare’s audience would have
responded
to the headless monsters using modalities i and 2, not the suspension of disbelief. Audience members would have accepted, intellectually or at least emotionally, the reality of headless monsters. As natural history progressed in the two centuries that followed, the marvelous monsters shifted (for the most part) into the third modality. Now when an audience enjoys Shakespeare’s plays the exotic monsters are merely quaint or symbolic.

The purpose of introducing these three monster modalities is to provide us with a transhistorical way of expressing the diversity of responses or attitudes in any given historical era; one mode may be dominant in the educated classes (e.g., suspension of disbelief) at the same time that another modality (credulity) is strong in the unlettered classes. We might now extend the tripartite model well beyond its original formulation, into the nineteenth-century fascination with nondescripts, freaks, and monsters.

By the early 1800s natural history had come a long way from its wonder-cabinet days. And yet, in this sober era of straight science, we find the hilarious and grotesque nondescript specimens of Charles Waterton (1782–1865). Waterton was born into an upper-class British family in Yorkshire, one that proudly traced its family tree back to Sir Thomas More. But Charles preferred the life of the explorer to that of the Yorkshire gentleman and famously traveled throughout South America (in 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824), recording observations and collecting specimens. Many of his findings about the tropical flora and fauna of places like Guyana and Brazil were celebrated by the scientific community via Waterton’s friendship with Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society. Waterton had a reputation for eccentricity, first for being a Roman Catholic in otherwise Protestant England, and then for his habits of walking barefoot in parks and regularly climbing trees well into old age to read Latin poetry.

Waterton described many natural monsters of the tropics, including Camoudi snakes (anacondas) that grew to be “forty-feet long” (local legend putting them at eighty feet), twelve-foot long caimans that “just keep their heads above water, and a stranger would not know them from a rotten stump,” and vampire bats that plagued every veined creature of the region.
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“At the close of the day,” Waterton reports, “the vampires leave
the hollow trees, whither they had fled at the morning’s dawn, and scour along the river’s banks in quest of prey. On waking from sleep, the astonished traveler finds his hammock all stained with blood. It is the vampire that hath sucked him. Not man alone, but every unprotected animal, is exposed to his depredations: and so gently does this nocturnal surgeon draw the blood, that instead of being roused, the patient is lulled into a still profounder sleep.”

As another illustration of the credulity problem for naturalists, who were regularly faced with exotic monsters that didn’t fit into known categories, we should note Waterton’s sloth. Certain legends about the sloth had already traveled to Europe, but Waterton debunked the “exaggerated history” of the creature, which included the idea that it was in a “perpetual state of pain,” and offered descriptions from the field: “Man but little frequents these thick and noble forests, which extend far and wide on every side of us. This then is the proper place to go in quest of the sloth.”
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When he reported that the strange creature lived its entire life hanging upside-down from tree branches, he was openly mocked by colleagues back home; they found the behavior and the described morphology unbelievable. “When the reviewers impugned his veracity,” according to his biographer, J. G. Wood, “he troubled himself very little about them, saying that the creatures which he had described would one day find their way to the Zoological Gardens, and then that everybody would see that he had but spoken the truth.”
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In addition to taxidermied specimens of many of these exotic creatures, and in a seemingly defiant mocking of his critics, Waterton proffered even more extreme “border-line” creatures. He returned to England with a strange humanoid monster that could not be fit into any known taxonomic group, so it was called a “nondescript.” Waterton describes his acquisition of the oddity:

I also procured an animal which has caused not a little speculation and astonishment. In my opinion, his thick coat of hair, and great length of tail, put his species out of all question; but then his face and head cause the inspector to pause for a moment, before he ventures to pronounce his opinion of the classification. He was a large animal, and as I was pressed for daylight, and moreover, felt no inclination to have the whole weight of his body upon my back, I contented myself with his head and shoulders, which I cut off: and have brought them with me to Europe.
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He continued to pique the reader’s curiosity by wondering if there were other such creatures skulking through the tropical jungle. After all, another specimen procured by the courageous explorer could confirm the existence
of a new humanoid species. “Should anybody be induced to go, great and innumerable are the discoveries yet to be made in those remote wilds.” He closes the discussion by acknowledging the skeptics. Some had accused Waterton of creating an elaborate hoax with his nondescript, but he protested that nobody to date had the taxidermy skills to effect such a beautiful fraud. “If I have succeeded in effacing the features of a brute, and putting those of a man in their place, we might be entitled to say, that the sun of Proteus has risen on our museums.”

But masterful taxidermy fraud was precisely what Waterton had created. He had built the convincing bust of the nondescript by using the head and shoulders of the red howler monkey. Using his own novel techniques, he shaved the flesh from the back of the animal’s face until he had created a thin layer of skin that he could manipulate into all manner of creature. In addition, he found that two skins similarly prepared could be molded together when wet to create the illusion of a hybrid animal. He was a taxidermy genius, and he used his skills to prank his stuffy professional peers and the gullible lay audience. So convincing was his humanoid grotesque that some observers complained that Waterton should not be allowed to kill natives in order to demonstrate his taxidermy skills. But an early reviewer called him out on his mischievous monster, claiming that the nondescript looked suspiciously like a well-known master in Chancery from the House of Commons. “It is foolish,” the reviewer said, “to trifle with science and natural history.”
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As if natural history wasn’t troubled enough by real oddities, pranksters like Waterton added confusion to the attempts to order and organize nature. He created other composite hoax creatures, such as the “Noctifer” (part eagle, owl, and heron), and he severely twisted a monkey into a devilish smiling humanoid that he privately titled “Martin Luther After His Fall.” Hucksters like Waterton reveal that, in the history of monsters, the scientific cleanup of superstitions only reorients people back to the animal monsters. Religious monsters such as demons and witches eventually submerged below the intellectual cultures of the West, but new zoological cryptids, more in keeping with
natural
monsters of the ancient world, took their place in the imaginations of both official and popular cultures.

The nineteenth century may have been an era of acute hucksterism because it corresponded with the increasingly public mass-media culture, which included print media but also large-scale public museums and fairs.
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The professionalizing of science had become relatively successful in the
eighteenth century, but all that newly acquired and standardized knowledge needed to be transmitted from gentlemen peers to the working-class masses. The marvelous was employed by educators as the hook experience for instruction and edification. The American naturalist Charles Wilson Peale (1741–1827), for example, started a noble edutainment philosophy of “rational amusement” for the masses, but P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) eventually purchased Peale’s collection and increased the “amusement” part of the philosophy, gradually relegating the “rational” part to less and less value.

P. T. Barnum, the self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbug,” has to be mentioned here, in the context of natural history monsters. His “Feejee Mermaid” alone would qualify him for any discussion of liminal creatures, but that curious specimen was only one of many nondescripts and oddities. After unsuccessful attempts at being a newspaper man, a grocer, and a lottery agent, Barnum entered show business at age twenty-five. In 1835 he purchased and exhibited an African American slave, Joice Heth, as the “nurse of George Washington.” He claimed that she was over 160 years old and that she had tended the dying General Washington. She died one year later, but before her demise she made Barnum a decent amount of money and he had glimpsed the potential prosperity of showmanship. He capitalized twice on the Joice Heth scam because he also sold his inside story about the hoax to any newspaper that would buy. In 1840 the
New York Atlas
wrote, “We are now in possession of all the facts, documents, etc. connected with the origin, progress and termination of the exhibition of Joyce Heth, who was palmed upon the public with perfect success, as the nurse of Gen. Washington, aged 161 years! The truth is, she was not eighty years old when she died in 1836! The extraordinary developments and amusing, side-breaking anecdotes connected with this exhibition, illustrates the potent power of
HUMBUG
and the gullibility of mankind in a most eminent degree.”
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