Feminist disability theory

Gendering Disability, edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison (Rutgers University Press, 2004) is a collection of eighteen essays based on a three-day conference organized by the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) at Rutgers University, March 1-3, 2001. Other research emerged from the Institute for Women's Leadership, supported by the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The book is divided into four parts: Positions; Desire and Identity; Arts and Embodiment; Citizens and Consumers.

The contributors include:

Catherine Kudlick, Lisa Schur, Melissa McNeil, Thilo Kroll, Russell Shuttleworth, Sumi Colligan, Ann Fox, Adrienne Asch, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Bonnie Smith, Sarah Chinn, Daniel Wilson, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, Robin Adele Greeley, Kristin Lindgren, Allison Kafer, Corbett O'Toole, Georgina Kleege 

Introduction

Bonnie G. Smith explains her sense of 'exponential intellectual excitement' at the coming together of disability and gender studies. She looks forward to 'a better vision of a common landscape that can provide new room for growth.' There is also an awareness of the 'activist and scholarly paths' that run through this collection (1).

This was a stimulating book and in my view lived up to his declared project to show 'the possibilities for crossdisciplinary hybridity and for intellectual and activist growth.' (6)

Having just re-read Erving Goffman's Stigma (1963) which deals at length with the social interactions between the stigmatized and 'the normals' I was intrigued to read Adrienne Asch' account of her experiences and her conclusion that 'The law can do nothing about the sorts of informal interactions described above that make up so much of the lives of people with disabilities...' ("Social Justice and Personal Identity", 9-44, 12)

Selected Quotations from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Corporeal comparisons

'To embrace the supposedly flawed body of disability is to critique the normalizing phallic fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness. The disabled body is contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 100)

Understanding the common ground

'The informing premise of feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 77)

An outline of the four aspects of disability:

'first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 77)

Recalling the pioneers

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that there is a lack of knowledge in disability studies of the relevance of the earlier work in Women's studies and feminist theory. As a result, 'disability studies does a great deal of wheel inventing.'  (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 73)

Emergence of new academic discipline

'Over the last several years, disability studies has moved out of the applied fields of medicine, social work, and rehabilitation to become a vibrant new field of inquiry within the critical genre of identity studies.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 73)

The Bigger Picture: Identity based critical enterprises ...

'such as gender studies, queer studies, disability studies, and a proliferation of ethnic studies, all of which have enriched and complicated our understandings of social justice, subject formation, subjugated knowledges, and collective action.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 73)
 What feminists need to do

'Conversely, feminist theories all too often do not recognize disability in their litanies of identities that inflect the category of woman.' (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 73)

Disability studies and feminist theory working together

'both are insurgencies that are becoming institutionalised, underpinning inquiries outside and inside the academy. A feminist disability theory builds on the strengths of both.'  (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 73)

The Return to humanity

'to understand how disability operates is to understand what it is to be fully human.'  (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: 100)

Publisher Description

Disability and gender, terms that have previously seemed so clear-cut, are becoming increasingly complex in light of new politics and scholarship. These words now suggest complicated sets of practices and ways of being.

Contributors to this innovative collection explore the intersection of gender and disability in the arts, consumer culture, healing, the personal and private realms, and the appearance of disability in the public sphere—both in public fantasies and in public activism. Beginning as separate enterprises that followed activist and scholarly paths, gender and disability studies have reached a point where they can move beyond their boundaries for a common landscape to inspire new areas of inquiry. Whether from a perspective in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or arts, the shared subject matter of gender and disability studies—the body, social and cultural hierarchy, identity, discrimination and inequality, representation, and political activism—insistently calls for deeper conversation. This volume provides fresh findings not only about the discrimination practiced against women and people with disabilities, but also about the productive parallelism between these two categories.

Critical analysis of Kristeva's use of the Abject

Introduction

Definitions of the Abject

• The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth

• The excrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement, vomit

• The uncanny; the corpse

• The monstrous mother; the alien

• A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

• “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” (Kristeva)
•  "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject". (Kristeva)

Cultural Applications:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

Abject Art:

Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Kelly , Genesis P. Orridge, GG Allin, Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee , Kira O' Reilly. Joel Peter Witkin, Andres Serrano.

Whitney Museum of Abject Art (1993).

Outline of the Strengths and weaknesses 

of the Kristeva's model of the Abject

 

Strengths

Appeals to universal sense of disgust when faced with body fluids and waste products

Explains popular cultural narrative of horror and misogyny

Builds on a tradition of psychoanalysis derived from Freud and Lacan

Appeals to the reality of violence against women and links with its psychosocial dimensions.

Relates to common patterns of encoding based on distinctions between clean and unclean

Creates an ambiguous and richly poetic metaphor for the sense limit and liminality

Outlines a conflict in gender between patriarchal signification and the female imaginary

Explains female oppression as an inability to cast off the internalization of the mother

Maps out an aesthetic and political category derived from both from psychoanalytic reading and corporeal differences

Establishes a widely- deployed key term to describe and organize an abject art movement

The Weaknesses

A fuzzy, confused and contradictory category is loosely sketched.

The psycho-analytic foundations have been superseded and discredited.

The psycho-analytic models appeal to an academic and professional cult rather than open enquiry

Tends to re-enforce horror and disgust rather than celebration of the open body (Bakhtin)

The abject category relies on a questionable notion of primary matricide

The explanatory model is grounded primarily in  its application to avant-garde art

Rather than being actually or potentially emancipatory, the abject school of enquiry reproduces the script of exclusion and exploitation.‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you?’ (Spivak 1992: 62)

The mythological or aestheticizing approach displaces the actuality and singularity of lived bodily experience

It is unclear how affirmative or redemptive forms of the abject upstage and displace negative and destructive modes of abjection

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks: ‘What are the cultural politics of application of the diagnostic taxonomy of the abject?’ (Spivak 1992: 55)

Dr Ian McCormick is the author of

 The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences

(Quibble Academic, 2013)

 

Further reading

Betterton, R. (2006) ‘Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination’, Hypatia 21(1): 80–100.

Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Constable, C. (1999) ‘Becoming the Monster’s Mother’, pp.173–202 in A.Kutin (ed.)

Alien Zone II. London: Verso.

Covino, D. C. (2004) Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture. New York: The State University of New York Press.

Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Frueh, J. (2001) Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gear, R. (2001) ‘All Those Nasty Womanly Things: Women Artists,Technology and the Monstrous-Feminine’, Women’s Studies International Forum 24(3): 321–33.

Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, 295–337 in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P.A.Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.

Harrington, T. (1998) ‘Speaking Abject in Kristeva’s Power of Horror’, Hypatia

13(1): 138–57.

Jacobs, A. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Menninghaus, W. (2003) Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. H. Pickford. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1991) “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman.”  New Left Review 188 137-150.

Oliver, K. (1993) Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Russo, M. (1994) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. NewYork: Routledge.

Shildrick, M. (2002) Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. New York and London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1990) ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, 54–60, in Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym.London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1992) ‘Extreme Eurocentrism’, Lusitania 1(4) (Special Issue ‘TheAbject America’): 55–60.

Ussher, J. (2006)  Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. London: Routledge.

Yaeger, P. (1992) ‘The “Language of Blood”: Toward a Maternal Sublime’,

Genre 25 (Spring): 5–24.

Young, I. M. (2005) On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elephantiasis...and Indolent Dispositions in Diseases

 In this source text, John Hunter, the distinguished eighteenth-century surgeon  discusses unnatural growths, elephantiasis, and Indolent Dispositions:

Of the unnatural Growth of Parts.—These often form what may be called a species of monstrosity of parts, either diffused or circumscribed. They are generally situated in the cellular membrane, and feel doughy and soft, and are usually superficial, extending to the skin till it hangs as if by its own weight, sometimes having a broad base, but often hanging by a small neck : they appear to be in the cellular membrane what exostosis is in bone. These parts are less ductile than the natural parts. I have seen the double chin become one of these ; I have seen them on the belly. Perhaps they produce absorption in the parts on which they press ; for the bones underneath have been sometimes found deficient.

    Preternatural accumulations of fat take place in the same manner; not depending on a deposit of interstitial substance, nor being adventitious, but a preternatural growth ; and are common to every part of the body, not excepting the internal parts. People have died of fat on the pericardium, and sometimes it is found in the bellies of cattle, as sheep. In the human subject these accumulations acquire an immense size, being composed of very solid fat, and in some degree moveable, being in separate parts, or lobulated, when between the skin and muscles. They may in general be distinguished by the former being of a regular uniform softness, whilst the latter appear to be composed of solid pieces of fat, having a surface irregular to the feel.

The interstitial or diffused thickening of a part arises from the interstitial deposition of matter in the cells of the part, and is of three kinds.

Elephantiasis.—The first, or diffused, is very slow in increase, forming gradually. A whole leg will become stiff and feel tight by a loaded cellular membrane. It is most frequent in the legs, and almost peculiar to some countries and to some peculiar constitutions. A similar increase occurs in the thyroid gland : but this is of the second kind. The diffused is very common in the legs of Barbadoes' people; I have also seen it in this country, but very rarely. The legs of young people I have seen so swelled as to be all of a size. It arises from an extravasation of coagulable lymph equally diffused; the parts become firm and similar to dropsy, only there is no pitting : it may be a kind of dropsy, for dropsical swellings often degenerate into this kind of swelling; yet the cause of the two may be very dissimilar : it is most frequent in young people. From its being so diffused and general, and in the legs, and most at the lower parts, I should think one of its immediate cases was a depending situation, with a weakened action of the system in general, as a simple bandage to support these parts often prevents it. [A preparation was shown, in which a thickening of the leg put on the appearance of brawn.] There is no fixed cure. In the case I saw I recommended mercurial ointment to be rubbed into the parts, and a slight bandage. The ointment was omitted ; but the patient got perfectly well in a few months. If these had failed, I should have sent him to bathe in the sea. Pressure hinders the extravasation of more fluid, and we see that tight boots make the legs thinner.

   The second kind is an original disease, though it may be attended with pain and inflammation. It is not circumscribed, though confined to a spot, but gradually lost in the surrounding parts. It spreads in proportion to the power of continued sympathy. A node is similar in appearance to what this is of the soft parts, and perhaps is of the same kind.

    The pain of indolent swellings is very little or none at first, which is owing to the slow increase of the part not arousing the sensibility ; but afterwards they have a heavy dull pain, producing sickness. This is often from the size, as well as from the tumour itself pressing on some other parts; for sometimes there is more pain in the surrounding parts than in the tumour itself. I may also observe that they seldom or ever inflame, but continue increasing till they press on surrounding parts, and raise inflammation in these parts and not in themselves ; they are then often broken down into a curdly substance, but appear not to be dead, as they do not give the stimulus of extraneous matter: though the surrounding parts become thickened, yet they cannot properly be called encysted. If it appears to be scrofulous, the cicuta, sea-bathing, sal sodae, sea-water poultices, &c. are to be tried; but these are sometimes useless, and extirpation becomes necessary; or sometimes cutting into them is sufficient. They sometimes suppurate, and then the sores are very difficult to heal.

    The third kind consists in the interstitial increase of a circumscribed part. This is it when the swelling keeps to the original part, that part being circumscribed, as lymphatic glands, and also tumours or enlargements of the fiver or spleen. They seldom affect the cellular membrane till they suppurate, and often not then at first, which shows they have something specific in them ; for if merely indolent the surrounding parts would sympathise with them, as is often the case in the mixed cases. Although these diseases are interstitial increases, yet they often become similar to a tumour, and are understood as such.

      Observations on the Cure of Indolent Dispositions in Diseases.—We tnust first inquire whether they are wholly constitutional, partially so. or merely local, as upon this rests our treatment. We must not be satisfied with the present symptoms, but inquire into the constitution, whether it is indolent or irritable. Such as arise from the constitution are generally more diffused, and are often in many parts; and such constitutions as produce local complaints show something wrong in them ; however, the symptoms are not always satisfactory. I suspect these indolent dispositions of the constitution require a specific stimulus, having something specific in their nature. They do not spontaneously take on steps of cure, as inflammation does ; and if they suppurate, they do not suppurate kindly ; and a variety of things are required to assist them. The first thing to be done is to remove the cause, if practicable, which it often is not, as changing the country and situation. In all, resolution should be preferred, if possible, by absorption ; for suppuration will do much harm. To procure suppuration in such, a particular mode is required, for we are not to lessen the living powers, as in adhesive inflammation that is healthy, but to increase them. The earlier the treatment is pursued the better, before the habit has suffered, or the surrounding parts have sympathised : sometimes a constant application of mercury to the part, which produces a kind of irritation short of inflammation, is advantageous ; if this is insufficient, fumigations with cinnabar, or with plants which have essential oil in them, may prove serviceable. If these fail, we must remove the indolent disposition by exciting an action which they are incapable of taking on themselves. Salutary inflammation in surrounding parts will produce other good effects in indolent diseases, for indolence arises from a want of predisposition to healthy action ; thus, blistering the parts, and giving cordials internally, are often of use ; but the more violent the inflammation, the more effectually is the indolence of the part removed, if it can bear it. Many indolent swellings are content with their own natural actions, as natural parts are with theirs; but this is not so always ; but they take on an inflammatory action, not salutary, but leading to a bad kind of suppuration. The means of restoring the thickened parts is healthy inflammation, which, as it goes off, does not leave them in their former state, but occasions an absorption of the extravasated matter; nevertheless the part, after healing, often retains somewhat of the original disposition. This treatment will not do either in cancer or scrofula.

Of the Suppuration of Indolent Parts.—-Resolution cannot always be effected, and suppuration will take place, which suppuration seems to arise from defective animal powers, and not from exerted powers. The matter is glairy, and the superficial parts are so little susceptible of this that the matter is long in coming to the skin; so that stimulating medir cines must be applied to bring on, if possible, good suppuration, which can seldom, however, be done. Quick ulceration is best effected by exciting and hastening the inflammation: this is necessary in sound abscesses even, but much more necessary in indolent ones. The next thing is opening them, which should not be done too early, as the matter which remains in may increase the inflammation, which is necessary to the cure. When an opening is made, it should be as large as possible ; and even crucial incisions are frequently necessary : in many cases scarifying the sides of the abscess is proper, to excite quick inflammation, and if there are any sinuses these should be traced to their full extent: the parts then feel a greater necessity of action. But this is not always sufficient, for after good granulations are formed, the indolent state often returns, the granulations becoming dark-coloured, and the matter thin and glairy, according to the specific nature of the indolence ; this is the case often in old sores which have become habitual from bad treatment. In old indolent parts and encysted tumours the sac is often thickened, and even ossified, and the inflammation then is sometimes so violent as to threaten mortification. But these parts often become insensible to the common causes of inflammation, and when inflammation does arise it is sluggish. In such, nothing can cure but dissecting out the parts. Many abscesses, if out of the reach of surgery, or ill-treated, run into an indolent state. Many means are necessary in treating them, but we know of few useful ones : balsams and warm dressings are commonly used ; sometimes they do good, at other times they have no effect; and when they agree they lose their powers by continuance, when it becomes necessary to change them, or increase their power. These balsams should often be mixed with red precipitate. Tincture of myrrh also is often very useful in indolent sores, requiring to be applied often, as it soon loses its efficacy : solutions of alum, tincture of bark, solution of lunar caustic, aqua camphorata, &c., are often useful, and require to be applied as often as three times a day, or oftener if the disease is considerable.

Further Reading

Unlocking the secrets of the Elephant Man. BBC article.

Ablon, Joan. "‘The Elephant Man’as ‘self’and ‘other’: The psycho-social costs of a misdiagnosis." Social Science & Medicine 40.11 (1995): 1481-1489.

   

Angell, Katherine. "Joseph Merrick and the Concept of Monstrosity in Nineteenth Century Medical Thought." Hosting the Monster (2008): 131-152.

 

Cohen, M. Michael, John M. Optiz, and James F. Reynolds. "Further diagnostic thoughts about the Elephant Man." American journal of medical genetics 29.4 (1988): 777-782.

 

Darke, Paul Anthony. "The Elephant Man (David Lynch, EMI Films, 1980): an analysis from a disabled perspective." Disability and Society 9.3 (1994): 327-342.

 

Durbach, Nadja. "Monstrosity, Masculinity and Medicine: Re-examining'the Elephant Man'." Cultural and Social History 4.2 (2007): 193-213.

 

Graham, Peter W., and Fritz Oehlschlaeger. Articulating the elephant man: Joseph Merrick and his interpreters. Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 1992.

 

    Holladay, William E., and Stephen Watt. "Viewing the Elephant Man." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1989): 868-881.

 

   Howell, Michael, et al. The true history of the Elephant Man. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.

 

King, Louise. "Saints and sinner Sir Frederick Treves." Bulletin of The Royal College of Surgeons of England 94.8 (2012): 284-285.

 

Larson, Janet L. "The Elephant Man as Dramatic Parable." Modern Drama 26.3 (1983): 335-356.

 

Massey, Janice M., and E. Wayne Massey. "Dr. Trevelyan and Mr. Treves: Sherlock Holmes and the Elephant Man." Southern medical journal 78.7 (1985): 854-857.

 

    Messer, Richard E. "The elephant man and the problem of suffering." Psychological Perspectives 12.2 (1981): 162-169.

 

Miles, A. E. W. "The Elephant Man." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 85.9 (1992): 589.

 

Pomerance, Bernard. Elephant man. Grove Press, 2007.

 

Porter, Roy. "The true history of the elephant man." Medical History 25.2 (1981): 218.

 

Sandell, Richard, et al. "In the shadow of the freakshow: The impact of freakshow tradition on the display and understanding of disability history in museums." Disability Studies Quarterly 25.4 (2005).

 

Smith, Andrew. "Pathologising the Gothic: The Elephant Man, the Neurotic and the Doctor." Gothic Studies 2.3 (2000): 292-304.

 

Tibbles, J. A., and M. M. Cohen Jr. "The Proteus syndrome: the Elephant Man diagnosed." British medical journal (Clinical research ed.) 293.6548 (1986): 683.

 

Treves, Frederick. The elephant man and other reminiscences. BiblioLife, 2009.

 

White, Ann K., et al. "Head and neck manifestations of neurofibromatosis." The Laryngoscope 96.7 (1986): 732-737.

Wilkie, Theodore F. "The elephant man—A tragic syndrome." Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 3.1 (1979): 327-337.

Australian Bunyip Monster

The Last Lemurian: a Westralian Romance  by Scott, [George] Firth

"Adventure story set in Western Australia of the discovery of pigmy subhuman people ruled over by Tor Ymmothe, the last Lemurian." - Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 191.

 "Exuberant, somewhat ludicrous semi-juvenile adventure romance ... Motifs include a lost race of Lemurians who live around an extinct volcano; a bunyip -- a monster with a human head, crocodile body, and assorted appendages; a sleeping beauty who awakens but later crumbles into dust; a curse laid on the land by a mistreated missionary; semi-vampirism and bondage; alchemical gold; and a ghost."

-         Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 1450.

-         Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 1982.

-         Eichner, Atlantean Chronicles, p. 202.

-         Blackford, et al., Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, p. 228.

-         Larnach, Materials Towards a Checklist of Australian Fantasy to 1937 (1950), p. 20.

-         Australian and New Zealand "Lost Race" Fiction in the Collection of Stuart Teitler (private list), p. 3.

-         Bleiler (1978), p. 176. Reginald 12823.

Publication

London: James Bowden ... New York: M. F. Mansfield,. [1898]. original pictorial green cloth, front panel stamped in white, black, red and gold, spine panel stamped in gold..

The Human Monster in Visual Culture

MONSTROSITY: The Human Monster in Visual Culture

By Alexa Wright

From the Monster of Ravenna to the Elephant Man, Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of ‘real’, human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance.
Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is ‘normal’ and what is not.

Alexa Wright is Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster. She is also a practising artist who works with video, sound and interactive digital media.

Paperback 224 pages 216 x 134mm ISBN: 9781780763361 £17.99 June 2013

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Plato and the Delight in the Corpse

Corpse of Patroclus - Firenze - 2nd C BCE

The strange relationship between delight and disgust is a common feature of the grotesque. As I have pointed out many times, the grotesque mingles oppositions: disgust in itself is not enough. That's why we speak about fascination with the grotesque, and we acknowledge the call, or appeal, of the the monstrous to us.

The grotesque is therefore a form of heterogeneity. If there is simply disgust then what we have experienced stops with the sense of horror from which we recoil, for its is anguish in its pure form.
In The Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato recounted a story told by Leontion

he noticed some corpses lying on the ground with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, and yet at the same time held himself back in disgust. For a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at last his desire got the better of him and he ran up to the corpses, opening his eyes wide and saying to them, 'There you are, curse you, - a lovely sight! Have a real good look.

According to Plato this story shows 'that anger is different from desire and sometimes opposes it.' The story is told in the context of a discussion of righteous indignation, within a broader discussion of the role of justice in state and individual.

But do we need to distinguish between the narrative used as a philosophical example, and the lived experience of the moment. And how does the story communicate, when it is decontextualised?

Also problematic in the ethical sense are those images that people regard as offensive because they are blasphemous. But the counter-argument is that the purpose of these kinds of images, beyond the aesthetic, is to open up our historical, social and ethical categories. We are shocked out of our narrow or limiting perspectives.

Another distinction compares the aesthetic formal pleasure of an art work with its morally repugnant content. This is one of the key issues for the movement that begins in the glorification of perversity, degeneration and decay - Decadence.

Psychologically, we also need to question the staged and scripted rituals than permit the participants to engage, by choice, in sado-masochistic activities. These need to be distinguished from the non-consensual will to, or action, that leads a perpetrator to inflict pain. But again, these illegal 'acts'/events are also enactments of the cultural fantasy of rape, or racism, or nationalism.

And it would also be the case that some feminists do not subscribe to the model of abjection that Julia Kriesteva appears to find transgressive in some way. It will be recalled that Powers of Horror simultaneoulsy showed the revulsion from death, decay, fluids, orifices, sex, defecation, vomiting, illness, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, while at the same time showing the delight, beauty, and jouissance, of these encounters. In Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, Winfred Menninghaus records that:

In the 1980s, a new buzzword entered political and ... critical discourse... The word is `abjection,` and it represents the newest mutation in the theory of disgust. Oscillating, in its usage, between serving as a theoretical concept and precisely defying the order of concentual language altogether, the term `abjection` also commonly appears as both adjective (`abject women,` `abject art`) and adjective turned into a substantive (`the abject`) (2003: 365).

It will be noted that the taste for the grotesque, and its cultivation as commercial product and fashion is a recurring feature of the argument that we are living in degenerate times. This is a recurring theme, from the medieval sense of the grotesque as purposeless play (Bernard of Clairvaux) to the Victorian judgment delivered by John Ruskin:

A head, - huge, inhuman, and monstrous, - leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described ... in that head is embodied the type of evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline.

But there is major difference between making images for aesthetic pleasure, and the representation of those who were actually victims of horrendous brutality.
...

The image below presents the horror of the holocaust. The monstrous tragedy of what happened is captured in a bleak and melancholy photograph, but it is quite different from the image above.

On the one hand there is a pressing sense of the need to recall and to witness; on the other hand, the heightened consciousness of looking challenges the spectator to rethink what it means to 'consume' an image. Is there a kind of violence built into the very notion of looking?

English: "A truck load of bodies of prisoners of the Nazis, in the Buchenwald concentration camp at Weimar, Germany. The bodies were about to be disposed of by burning when the camp was captured by troops of the 3rd U.S. Army., 04/14/1945"  Pfc. W. Chichersky, April 14, 1945. Deutsch: Eine Wagenladung Leichen von Gefangenen der Nazis im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald bei Weimar, Deutschland. Die Leichen sollten durch Verbrennung beseitigt werden, als das Lager von Truppen der 3. US-Army eingenommen wurde.

See:

Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 2nd edn, Part 5, Book 4, pp. 215-216, 1. 439e-1.140a.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1874), Vol. 3, Chapter 3, Section 15, p. 121.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Foley, Barbara. "Fact, fiction, fascism: Testimony and mimesis in Holocaust narratives." Comparative Literature 34.4 (1982): 330-360.

Young, James Edward. The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. Yale University Press, 1993.

Young, James E. At memory's edge: After-images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture. Yale University Press, 2002.

Insdorf, Annette. Indelible shadows: film and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. The longest shadow: In the aftermath of the Holocaust. Indiana University Press, 1996.

Horowitz, Sara R. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. SUNY Press, 1997.

Kremer, S. Lillian. Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature. Wayne State University Press, 1989.

"The Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom: Revelling in the Natural Law of Libertinage." By Amanda di Ponio. Here.

Behold the Monstrous Eyeball

While researching the monstrous eye and grotesque vision I came across the frightful creature depicted above.

In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games one of the classic monsters dating from 1975 is the Beholder.  

This violent and xenophobic aberration, aligned with lawful evil appears as a floating globule of flesh with a large mouth, a single central eye, and a variety of smaller, flexible eyestalks. These possess deadly magical powers.

In addition to observers and spectators, there are many variant Beholder species such as the gauth and the gouger,  eyes of the deep, elder orbs, hive mothers, the death kiss and the death tyrants.

I'm now searching/looking for other monstrous eyeballs. Next on my list is Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) - a 1960 film directed by Georges Franju.

Encyclopedia of the Monstrous and the Grotesque

Terminus - Hans Holbein the Younger

Terminalia (23rd February) - a festival celebrating boundary stones. Ends and beginnings. Openings and closure.

Abjection. See Julia Kristeva's theory in Powers of Horror: "Through frustration and prohibitions, this [maternal] authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted ... maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self's clean and proper body." (p. 72). This work draws on the ideas of Freud, Lacan, and Mary Douglas. Kristeva's book has been widely cited and has proved influential in the field of abject art and film studies. More.

Abominable Snowman. Also know as Yeti (Tibetan) and Alma (Russian). Hairy biped or 'wildman' which inhabits mountains or woodland. Similar monsters include Bigfoot and Sasquatch. I was delighted to come across the unfortunate grotesque melting snowman simile in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) 'Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire.'

Absurdity. In the grotesque "The familiar structure of existence is undermined and chaos seems imminent. This aspect is intensified when concrete manifestations of decay appear and a feeling of hopelessness and corruption is developed. The ludicrous aspect, in turn, arises from the farcical quality inherent in such scenes of absurdity and approaching chaos"(Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose).
It's also worth examining William Hogarth's "THE BATHOS."

Acephalous. 'Having no part of the body specially organized as a head' (OED).

Aldrovandi, Ulisse. (1522-1605) Natural History. Cynocephali from Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642); Goose-headed Man from Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642).

Alterity is a term used in philosophy to mean 'otherness.' It has also been adopted in anthropology, theology and cultural studies. Further reading: Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (trans. Michael B. Smith) Columbia University Press, 1999[1970]; Jeffrey Nealon Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Duke University Press, 1998; Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives, Westview Press/ Perseus Books, 1999; Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. Routledge, 1993.

Amazons. The all-female warrior race, sometimes associated with lesbians. From Ancient Greek: Ἀμαζόνες. In some legends they had the left breast cut out to assist in combat (a-mazos = without breast). The name is also associated with 'virility killing' Iranian (ama-janah). Famous amazons included Penthesilea and Hippolyta.

Ambivalence. "The present tendency is to view the grotesque as a fundamentally ambivalent thing, as a clash of opposites, and hence, in some forms at least, as an approximate expression of the problematic nature of existence. It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation." Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (11)

Anamorphosis. Distorted projection or drawing which looks normal from the a particular point, or when a suitable mirror is applied to it. See Jurgen Baltustraitis.

Androgynous.Combining male and female. See Hermaphrodites.

Animals. Exotic and marvellous, or difficult to categorize. Duck-billed platypus, coral, camels, giraffes, elephants, apes, rhinoceros-unicorn etc.

Apes. "In discourse I have heard to fall, somewhat in earnest, from the mouth of a philospher ... That man was a meer artificiall creature, and was at first but a kind of Ape or Baboon, who through his industry (by degrees) in time had improved his Figure and his Reason up to the perfection of man" (John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis 1650, B3r)

Arbus, Diane. Steven Shainberg’s film Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus features Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and depicts her relation to the furry werewolf –like neighbour Lionel (recalling Stephan Bibrowsky’s role as ‘Lionel the Lion-faced man.’ The hairy character’s role hints at uninhibited sexual drive and the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming animal.’ See Hypertrichosis.

Arcimboldo. Giuseppe. Painted faces which on closer attention are an accumulation of parts of other objects. Cooking from Giuseppe Arcimboldo's The Genius of Cooking (1569). Electric Kingdom Postmodern Arcimboldo. Club Flyer, 13 March 1999.

Aristotle. On sex. Aristotle's Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1963): "The female is as it were a deformed male" (2.3.175); "The first beginning of this deviation is when the female is formed instead of the male." (4.3.401). On the marvelous. According to Rensselaer Lee, poets and artists found justification for the fantastic and the marvelous in the Poetics and Rhetoric. See 'Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,' Art Bulletin 22 (1940): 230. 'Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense of the not of the terrible, but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of Tragedy' (Aristotle, Poetics, XIV, 2)."

Artificial Wonders. 'artificialia' examples include automota, topiary, elaborate fountains and stage machinery. [This entry will be developed]

Art of Architecture (1742). Grotesque poem based on Horace.

Assemblage. A machine of becoming, as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: 'We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetarting multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each of us is caught up in an assemblage that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre statements they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but we could just as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal becoming-wolf or –wasp or –butterfly machine, which Frud attributes to the hysteric character...' A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum Impacts No. 21) 2004: p. 41.

Atomic age. "Our world has led to the grotesque as well as to the atom bomb... But the grotesque is only a way of expressing in a tangible manner, of making us perceive physically the paradoxical, the form of the unformed, the face of the world without face; and just as in our thinking today we seem to be unable to do without the concept of the paradox, so also in art, and in our world which at times seems still to exist only because the atom bomb exists: out of ofear of the bomb" (Friedrick Duerrenmatt).

Automota. Artificial machines that appear to mimic the living or the natural.King of Brobdingnag on Gulliver "when he observed my Shape exactly, and saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, conceived I might be a piece of Clock-work, (which is in that Country arrived to a very great Perfection) contrived by some ingenious Artist" (II.iii). Also as Lusus Naturae.

Bacon, Francis. (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992). British painter who depicted semi-human figures imprisoned by their environments. In their loss of identity and plasticity there is a grotesque process at work. See Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) in the Tate Gallery, London, UK.

Bacon, Francis. (1561-1626) Called for the collection and study of monsters as errors or deviations of Nature. These preternatural phenomena should be collected by the scientist and sorted into the natural or the supernatural. Monsters were a means to access and perhaps capture the secret workings of nature. Bacon also uses monster in an creative sense in his Essays: "The poets make Fame a monster. They describe her in part finely and elegantly, and in part gravely and sententiously. They say, look how many feathers she hath, so many eyes she hath underneath; so many tongues; so many voices; she pricks up so many ears."

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1895-1975) His classic book Rabelais and His World (published in 1965) has been an influential and fascinating history of carnival and the world-turned upside down. He explores the relationship between authority (Church/ State) and the life of the common people which he associates with the 'open' body, grotesque realism, and subversive comic energy.

Basilisk. A crowned snake. In some versions it had to be born of an egg laid during the days of the dog star Sirius by a seven-year-old cock. Its egg had a membrane rather than a shell and was spherical rather than ovoid. The egg could only be hatched by a toad. In 1587 a basilisk hunt took place in Warsaw.

Bath. English City. (On the city and its people). "The same artist who planned the Circus, has likewise projected a Crescent; when that is finished, we shall probably have a Star; and those who are living thirty years hence, may, perhaps, see all the signs of the Zodiac exhibited in the architetecture of Bath. These, however fantastical, are still designs that denote some ingenuity and knowledge in the architect; but the rage of building has laid hold on such a number of adventurers, that one sees new houses starting up in every out-let and every corner of Bath; contrived without judgment, executed without solidity, and stuck together with so little regard to plan and propriety, that the different lines of the new rows and buildings interfere with, and intersect one another in every different angle of conjunction. They look like the wreck of streets and sqaures disjointed by an earthquake, which hath broken ground into a variety of holes and hillocks; or, as if some Gothic devil had stuffed them altogether in a bag, and left them to stand higgledy piggledy, just as chance directed. What sort of a monster Bath will become in a few years, whith these growing excrescences, may be easily conceived [....] All these absurdities arise from the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept away all, even the very dregs of people [...] Such is the composition of what is called the fashionable company at Bath; where a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians, whi have neither understanding nor judgment, nor the least idea of propriety and decorum; and seem to enjoy nothing so much as an opportunity of insulting their betters [...] Thus the number of people, and the number of houses continue to increase; and this will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistable torrent of folly and extravagance, shall either be exhausted, or turned into other channels, by incidents and events which I do not pretend to foresee. This, I own, is a subject on which I cannot write with any degree of patience; for the mob is a monster I never could abide, either in its head, tail, midriff, or members; I detest the whole of it, as a mass of ignorance, presumption, malice, and brutality; and, in tis term of reprobation, I include, without respect of rank, station, or quality, all those of both sexes, who affect its manners, and court its society." (Bramble's letter of April 23rd, in Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker).

Bathos. The ridiculous. See Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous and William Hogarth's print "THE BATHOS, or Manner of Sinking, in Sublime Paintings, Inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures [...] See the manner of disgracing ye most Serious Subjects, in many celebrated Old Pictures; by introducing Low, absurd, obscene & often prophane Circumstances into them."

Beardsley, Aubrey (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898). Displayed an "extraordinarily knowing assimilation of the grotesque and aestheticism" (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 2 ). 

Beast of Gevaudan. (La Bête du Gévaudan.) French wolf-like monster that savaged people of the region in the period 1764-67.

Becoming. Phenomena are often monstrous in transition. A grotesque state between order and chaos.This inbetween state of cosmic evoloution was described by the Greek philosopher Empedocles. See also Assemblage.

Behemoth. 'Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. [...] Behold, he drinketh up a river and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.' (Job 40:15-18; 23-24). The Book of Enoch (apocryphal) also includes a description 'And in that day will two monsters be separated, a female named Leviathan to dwell in the abyss over the fountains of waters. But the male is called Behemoth which occupies with his breasts an immeasurable desert named Dendain.'

Beholder. In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games one of the classic monsters dating from 1975 is the Beholder.  This violent and xenophobic aberration, aligned with lawful evil appears as a floating globule of flesh with a large mouth, a single central eye, and a variety of smaller, flexible eyestalks. These possess deadly magical powers. In addition to observers and spectators, there are many variant Beholder species such as the gauth and the gouger,  eyes of the deep, elder orbs, hive mothers, the death kiss and the death tyrants.

Berserkers. Norsmen wearing bear-shirts who fought like wounded bears.

Biddenden Maids. Born 1100 in Biddenden, Kent, died 1134. Mary and Elizabeth Chulkhurst were united at the shoulders and hips. One died before the other, who refused to be separated, saying 'As we came together, we will also go together.' Their legacy was to be used to produce commemorative cakes for the poor, showing their image. See Gould and Pyle pp. 174-77.Biddenden Maids "Pygopagous twins".

Bigfoot. Hairy biped or 'wildman' which inhabits mountains or woodland.

Blemish. "dischorde in Musick maketh a comely concourdaunce: so great delight tooke the worthy Poete Alceus to behold a blemish in the joint of a wel shaped body." E.K. in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar.

Blake. His works often 'range under the category of of the impossible; are crude, contorted, forced, monstrous.' See Alexander Gilchrist Life of Blake, 2 vols (1863).

Blemmyae, or headless monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Boiastuau, Pierre. Writer on monsters. His Histoires Prodigiueses was translated in 1569 by Edward Fenton: "Amongst all the thinges whiche maye be viewed under the coape of heaven, there is nothying to be seene, which more stirreth the sprite of man, which ravisheth more his senses, which doth more amaze him ... than the monsters, wonders, and abominations, wherein we see the workes of Nature,. not only turned, misshapen and deformed, but (which is more) they do for the most part discover unto us the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God."

Bosch, Hieronymous. (1450-1516) produced several grotesque and fantastic pictures such as The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of St. Anthony. In 1560 Felipe de Guevara noted that Bosch was "the inventor of monsters and chimeras". Walter S. Gibson (1973) has noted his "world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes."

Botany. See interest in taxonomy. Problems of classification and hybridity especially in the pioneering work in the eighteenth century led to many anomalies. See the work of John Ray and Karl von Linne (Linnaeus.)

Brobdingnagian. See the giant people in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1728).

Browning. 'Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry.' See Walter Bagehot, Essay, National Review, November 1864.

Buchinger, Mathew. For intra-uterine amputations see Gould and Pyle, pp.94-97.

Burlesque. The 'low' literary styles are often grotesque. Burlesque is sometimes associated with farce and pantomime. There are elements of gentle mocking or humorous ridicule. Often a 'high' subject is treated in a low, grotesque manner. A literary example that satirizes a trivial event by presenting it in an epic style is Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock (1712-14). In recent times the body predominates in progressive states of undress or kinky, decadenet display. Chris Baldick notes that in the United States 'burlesque is also a disreputable form of comic entertainment with titillating dances or striptease.' (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1991: 27). Burla (a joke) also has links with comic interludes and the Italian commedia dell'arte traditions.

   

Cabinets of Curiosities or Rarities often contained monstrous specimens. See Hans Sloane (1660-1753) whose collection became the British Museum. Thus early collections often specialised in the marvellous and the strange. Larger displays were sometimes called a Wunderkammer, or room of wonders.

Caliban.'A salvage and deformed slave' in Shakespeare's The Tempest. See for example Act II, Scene 2: Trinculo: 'What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? a fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of, not of the newest Poor-John. a strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. legg'd like a man! and his fins like arms! Warm o' my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander, that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt...' See Kahan, Jeffrey. "Ambroise Paré's Des Monstres as a Possible Source for Caliban." Early Modern Literary Studies 3.1 (1997): 4.1-11. Available here.





Carnival. World Turned Upside Down. Fantastic and exotic aspects. See Bakhtin. Carnivalesque. For festive developments from public to more private enclosded spaces see Terry Castle's book Masquerade and Civilization.

Carlyle. 'a problem necessary to the appreciation of of the Carlylean grotesque, the oscillation between the monstrous and the ridiculous' ... 'His protean personifications (monster, chimera, satirist, sage) appear throughout this book' (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 3 ).

Carter, Angela. See Nights at the Circus. Russo, Female Grotesque.

Catch-22. A grotesque satire and a novel by Joseph Heller. I argue that the book has links to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Read more.


Centaur. 'A fabulous creature, with the head, trunk, and arms of a man, joined to the body and legs of a horse' (OED).

Cephaloid. Shaped like a head.

Chameleon.Reptile that changes colour and lives (fabulously) on air. See Hamlet III.ii.98.

Chaos.Source of grotesque forms, before they achieve structure. "The grotesque will always appear and take hold of those ages which are under the strain of disaster, feeling the sinister and chaotic aspects of life, but advanced enough to appease the mind by laughter" (Martin Foss, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience). See also Milton, Paradise Lost (II.907-914):
Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns: next him high arbiter
Chance governs all. Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and, which thus must ever fight [...]

Cicero. "If a pregnant woman greatly desires a chickpea, she will deliver a child bearing the image of a chickpea. That is how Ciciero's family got its name" (De naturalium effcetum admiradorum causis [Basel, 1556].

Circe. Turned men into swine. See Homer, The Odyssey.

Classification of Monsters. For early examples see Pare. Gould and Pyle propose the following for those that have lived after birth: (1) union of several fetuses; (2) union of two distinct fetuses by a connecting band; (3) union of two distinct fetuses by an osseous junction of the cranial bones; (4) union of two distinct fetuses in which one or more parts are eliminated by the junction; (5) fusion of two fetuses by a bony union of the ischii; (6) fusion of two fetuses below the umbilicus into a common lower extremity; (7) bicephalic monsters; (8) parastic monsters; (9) monsters with a single body and double lower extremities; (10) diphallic terata; (11) fetus in fetu, and dermoid cysts; (12) hermaphrodites.

Colossal statue of Helios/Apollo at Rhodes. Stood astride the harbour. 'Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms' See Pliny, Natural History, book 34, chap. 18.

Combination. "the grotesque object always displays a combination of fearsome and ludicrous qualities [...] it simultaneously arouses reactions of fear and amusement in the observer" (Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose).

Commedia dell'arte. Defended by Justis Moeser in 1761 (tr 1766) in Harlequin: or a Defence of Grotesque Comic Performances.

Conjoined twins. Eng and Chang born in Siam in May 1811. Discovered by Robert Hunter in 1824; described scientifically by Prof. J.C. Warren at Harvard University in 1829. Reach 44yrs they both married two English sisters who were 26 and 28yrs. Travelled in Europe again in 1869. Died January 17, 1874. See the Hungarian sisters, the Biddenden Maids. Also Parasitic ectopy; Siamese twins from Johann Schenk's Monstrorum historia memorabilis (1609).

Craniopagi. Monsters joined by some of the cranial bones. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire cites the example of two girls born in 1495 joined at the forehead forcing them to stand face to face.

Crowds. See Mob.

Crews, Harry. "Relying heaving on the grotesqueness of the freak, Crews creates a great number and variety of freaks in his fiction, from the dwarf Foot in The Gospel Singer (1968) to Jester, the 90-pound midget jockey in Naked in The Garden Hills (1969), from the five foot, 600-pound Mayhugh Aaron of Garden Hills to the sexually perverted Oyster Boy in The Knockout Artist (1988), from Marvin Molar, the crippled deaf-mute of The Gypsy's Curse (1974) to the hammer-mutilated brother in Scar Lover (1992)." from Jack Slay Jr 'Delineations in Freakery' in Literature and the Grotesque (1995) ed. Michael J. Meyer, pp.100-101.

Curiosity. 'This is what prolongs the troubles of those afflicted with blind curiosity, i.e., those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them, for gradually they become so full of wonder that things of no importance are no less apt to arrest their attention than those whose investigation is more useful' see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, pp. 354-56.

Custom. 'We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be.' Montaigne, "Of a Monstrous Child" (II, 30, p. 539).

Cyclops. Had one enormous eye. See Homer, The Odyssey.

Cynocephalus. One of a fabled race of men with dog's heads. Cynocephali from Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642).

Dancing. See Catherine Mazzina, described in John Bulwer's (Anthropometamorphosis 1650): "of a comely forme, and 27 inches and a Palme over in heighth, but wanting Hips and Legs, and consequently Feet, her Armes were perfectly formed, being longer than her breast and trunke, the lower part of her body did not appear bifid, emulating the bottom of a Harpe; She spake to purpose, sung, plaid on a Lute, danced with her hands Spanish, Mauritanian, Italian and French dances, in like manner to the sound of Musique she so composed the Gestures of her imperfect body, that they who had seen her afar off, would doubtelessly have said, she had danced with her Feet. And so to the endowments of the mind, there was nothing wanting to her which is granted by Nature to other men. Moreover she was endowed with both Sexes, yet she drew nearer to a woman, and was more vigorous in that Sex, and therefore was rather called a woman than a man." (453).

Death. Takes a sublime or grotesque form. See Milton's Paradise Lost:
The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast
With horrid strides, hell trembled as he strode
The undaunted fiend what this might be admired,
Admired, not feared; God and his Sopn except,
Created thing nought valued he nor shunned;
And with disdainful look thus first began.
Whence and what art thou, execrable shape,
That darest, though grim and and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated front athwart my way
To yonder gates . II.666-684

Decay. "The familiar structure of existence is undermined and chaos seems imminent. This aspect is intensified when concrete manifestations of decay appear and a feeling of hopelessness and corruption is developed. The ludicrous aspect, in turn, arises from the farcical quality inherent in such scenes of absurdity and approaching chaos"(Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose).

Defoe, Daniel. (1659-1731) Noteworth is his 'mongrel' account of the True Born English-man (1703)

Demonic. Grotesque as "the demonic made trivial". See Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.
Deviation. See Error, Sport of Nature etc. On sex see Aristotle's Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1963): "The female is as it were a deformed male" (2.3.175); "The first beginning of this deviation is when the female is formed instead of the male." (4.3.401).

Dickens, Charles. "realist transmutation of caricature as monstrosity" (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 2 ). According to G.H. Lewes, he loses himself in masks, caricatures and distortions (Fortnightly Review (1872) 141-54).

Diseases. "Finally, it should be observed that those whose illness is communicable, such as the scrofulous, the scorbutic, the herpetic, the syphilitic, and so on, will not be able to marry, or will be permitted to marry only women past fifty, who might be willing to expose themselves to the disease. This will apply also to those attacked by epilepsy, consumption, and so on." From Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne's L'andrographe (1781), Article 28.See also marriage.

Disorientation. "The present tendency is to view the grotesque as a fundamentally ambivalent thing, as a clash of opposites, and hence, in some forms at least, as an approximate expression of the problematic nature of existence. It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation." Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (11)

Donoghue, Emma. Writer and researcher. See Mary Toft, the Woman who gave Birth to Rabbits. A novel by Emma Donoghue.

Dore, Gustav. "conflation of grotesque illustration and London topography" (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 2 ).

Dragon. 'They hide themselves in trees, covering their head and letting the other part hang downe like a rope. In those trees they watch until the Elephant comes to eate and croppe of the branches; then suddenly, before he be aware, they leape into his face and digge out his eyes. Then doe they claspe themselves about his neck, and with their tayles or hinder parts, beate and vexe the Elephant untill they have made him breathlesse, for they strangle him with theyr fore parts as they beate him with the hinder' (Topsell's History of Serpents, 1608). Other versions of dragons are snakes or worms, e.g. Anglo-Saxon Wyrm. For Biblical references see Revelations 12:9. See also Ulisse Aldrovandi's Historie of Serpents and Dragons (1640).

Dryden, John. "There is yet a lower sort of poetry and painting, which is out of nature; for a farce is that in poetry, which grotesque is in a picture. The persons and action of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsisting with the characters of mankind. Grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this; and Horace begins his Art of Poetry by describing such a figure, with a man's head, a horse's neck, the wings of a bird, and a fish's tail; parts of different species jumbled together, according to the mad imagination of the dauber; and the end of all this, as he tells you afterward, the cause laughter: a very monster in a Bartholomew Fair, for the mob to gape at for their two-pence. Laughter is indeed the propriety of a man, but just enough to distinguish him from his elder brother with four legs" Dryden 'A Parallel of Poetry and Painting' Prefixed to Du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica).

Dunn, Katherine. Author of Geek Love (1988). "Like Crews, Dunn portrays freaks who have found a peace in in their freakishness; they delight in their malformed limbs, their twisted bodies." See Jack Slay Jr 'Delineations in Freakery' in Literature and the Grotesque (1995) ed. Michael J. Meyer, p. 107.

Durer. Monstrous pig of Landseer by Albrecht Durer (1496).

Ears. Long-eared Phanesians from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).
Elephant-headed man from Fortunio Liceti's De Monstris (1665).

Empedocles. See Chaos.

Error. Latin 'errare' to wander. Links with 'erratic' and 'errantry'. For monstrous errantry see Spenser's Faerie Queene. For Errors of Nature, see Lusus Naturae.

Exaggeration, grotesque. Kurt Wittig on Robert Henryson and Scottish literature examined "the juxtaposition of understatement and overstatement"

Excess. Monstrosity sometimes caused by excess of seed, fertility, or imagination. See also Lack; Pare.

Execution, grotesque, in Swift's Gulliver's Travels: "The Malefactor was fixed in a Chair upon a Scaffold erected for the Purpose; and his Head cut off at one Blow with a Sword of about forty Foot long. The Veins and Arteries spouted up such a prodigious Quantity of Blood, and so high in the Air, that the great Jet d'Eau at Versailles was not equal for the Time it lasted; and the Head when it fell on the Scaffold Floor, gave such a Bounce, as made me start, although I were at least an English Mile distant" (II.v.)

Exotica. Representations of the East, the Orient, its religions and mythologies have been a rich source for grotesque representation.

Eyes. One-eyed monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493). Cyclops had one enormous eye. See Homer, The Odyssey.

Fairholt. See Eccentric and Remarkable Characters (1849) and Gog and Magog, the Giants of Whitehall (1859).

Fairy Tale have been a rich source for grotesque representation and psychoanalytic interpretation.

Farce. "There is yet a lower sort of poetry and painting, which is out of nature; for a farce is that in poetry, which grotesque is in a picture. The persons and action of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsisting with the characters of mankind. Grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this; and Horace begins his Art of Poetry by describing such a figure, with a man's head, a horse's neck, the wings of a bird, and a fish's tail; parts of different species jumbled together, according to the mad imagination of the dauber; and the end of all this, as he tells you afterward, the cause laughter: a very monster in a Bartholomew Fair, for the mob to gape at for their two-pence. Laughter is indeed the propriety of a man, but just enough to distinguish him from his elder brother with four legs" Dryden 'A Parallel of Poetry and Painting' Prefixed to Du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica). "The familiar structure of existence is undermined and chaos seems imminent. This aspect is intensified when concrete manifestations of decay appear and a feeling of hopelessness and corruption is developed. The ludicrous aspect, in turn, arises from the farcical quality inherent in such scenes of absurdity and approaching chaos"(Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose).

Fear. "the grotesque object always displays a combination of fearsome and ludicrous qualities [...] it simultaneously arouses reactions of fear and amusement in the observer" (Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose). 

Female Grotesque.See maternal impressions; Angela Carter; Scriblerian Satire (Swift and misogyny). See Aristotle's Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1963): "The female is as it were a deformed male" (2.3.175); "The first beginning of this deviation is when the female is formed instead of the male." (4.3.401).

Film. I recommend David J. Skal's The Monster Show; John Landis's Monsters in the Movies.

Festivals. See Saturnalia, Lord of Misrule, Carnival. Bakhtin.

Freaks. "The true freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, howver altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. Passing either on the street, we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but in the latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries on which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. On the true Freak challenges the conventinal boundaries between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth." Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p.24.

Gargantua. See Rabelais.

Garnett, David. Novelist and author of Lady into Fox (1922)


Gesner, Konrad. His Historia Animalium included many marvelous creatures. [This entry will be developed]

Giants. Described in the Bible, Numbers 13:33 'And there we saw giants; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight'; Deuteronomy 3:11 'For only Og King of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon?'; Genesis 6:4 'There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, and the same became might men which were of old, men of renown.'

Goat-people (satyrs) from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Goethe on Savonarola 'a grimacing, fantastic monster who juts into the bright world of the Renaissance like a Gothic gargoyle.' (See Kayser 1963 :196)
Gonzalez, Pedro of the Canry Islands. Body completely covered with hair.
Goose-headed Man from Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642).

Gould and Pyle. Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. 1896. Encyclopedic collection of rare and unusual cases.

Goya. See 'The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters'.

Griffin. Griffon. Gryphon. 'A fabulous animal having the head and wings of an eagle and the body and hind quarters of a lion. (Believed by the Greeks to inhabit Scythia and to guard its gold' (OED). In some reports griffins consumed horses. See noble grotesque.
Hairy Man from John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed: or the Artificial Changling (1653)

Harlequin.Commedia dell'arte. Defended by Justus Moeser in 1761 (tr 1766) in Harlequin: or a Defence of Grotesque Comic Performances.

Harpy. ' fabulous monster, rapacious and filthy, having a woman's face and body and a bird's wings and claws, and supposed to act as a minister of divine vengeance' (OED) See noble grotesque.

Heller, Joseph, Catch-22. A grotesque satire and a novel about war and bureacracy. I argue that the book has links to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Read more.


Hermaphrodite. Having both male and female sexual parts.

Histoires Prodigieuses. See Boiastuau

History of the grotesque. 'new perceptions and conceptions of the grotesque occurred with every new generation of artists and critics; each created its own grotesque art, understood the past in its own way, and invested the word with its own meanings' See Barasch (1971) 152.

Hofstadter, Albert. The tragicomic is "the effective copresence of opposites"; the tension between pathos and comicality in an equilibrium that "points to no possible resolution."

Hogarth, William. See 'Royalty, Episcopacy, Law' for a grotesque that builds on the work work of Arcimboldo and "THE BATHOS, or Manner of Sinking, in Sublime Paintings, Inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures [...] See the manner of disgracing ye most Serious Subjects, in many celebrated Old Pictures; by introducing Low, absurd, obscene & often prohane Circumstances into them."

Homer. Marvelous esp. in The Odyssey. [This entry will be developed], Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, Cyclops etc

Hood, Thomas. "use of the grotesque 'comic vernacular' in the popular literature of the 1830s" (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 2 ).

Horace. See Art of Poetry.

Human Monsters from Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophia (1517).

Humorous. "Full of grotesque or odd images" in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1773).

Hungarian sisters, Helen and Judith, were born in 1701 at Szony in Hungary. Placed in a convent at 9 years. Verses inscribed on a bronze statuette of them:

Two sisters wonderful to behold, who have thus grown as one,
That naught their bodies can divide, no power beaneath the sun.
The town of Szoenii gave them birth, hard by far-famed Komorn,
Which noble fort may all the arts of Turkish sultans scorn.
Lucina, woman's gentle friend, did Helen first receive;
And Judith, when three hours had passed, her mother's womb did leave.
One urine passage serves for both; - one anus, so they tell;
The other parts their numbers keep, and serve their owners well.
Their parents poor did send them forth, to world to travel through,
That this great wonder of the age should not be hid from view.
The inner parts concealed do lie hid from our eyes, alas!
But all the body here you view erect in solid brass.

(See Fisher, Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1866).

Hydra. 'I have also heard that in Venice in the Duke's treasury, among the rare monuments of that city, there is preserved a serpent with seven heads, which if it be true, it is more probable that there is a hydra, and that the poets were not altogether deceived that say Hercules killed such a one' (Topsell, 1607). Killing the nine-headed monster as the second of Hercules' twelve labours.

Hypertrichosis (sometimes popularly called the Ambras or Werewolf syndrome) refers to loval or generalised (full body) instances of excessive hair growth. See also Pastrana, Julia. More.

Imagination and pregnant women. See James Blondel's The Power of the Mother's Imagination over the Foetus (London 1729): "the mere longing for Muscles is sufficient to transubstantiate the true and original Head of the Child into a Shell-Fish". See also Pietro Pomponazzi, "If a pregnant woman greatly desires a chickpea, she will deliver a child bearing the image of a chickpea. That is how Ciciero's family got its name" (De naturalium effcetum admiradorum causis [Basel, 1556].

Ischiopagi. See Pare's example of twins joined at the pelves called Louis and Louise, Paris, 20 July, 1570. Also Licetus's case of Mrs. John Waterman who gave birth to a double female monster in Fishertown, Salisbury, England, 26 October, 1664. Called by him 'Monstrum Anglicum'.

Janus. Janiceps. See Gould and Pyle, p. 190 Janus had two faces. "January"

Jealousy. 'O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; /It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on' See Shakespeare's Othello.

Johnson, Samuel, defines 'humorous' as "Full of grotesque or odd images" in his Dictionary (1773).

Jokes. Grotesque example of a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. Searching for a cure to this anomaly he finds a doctor whose magic potion sends him to sleep. Upon waking the golden screw has disappeared. Delighted, he jumps out of bed and his ass falls of. See Pynchon's V, p. 30.

Kant, Immanuel. "In human nature, praiseworth qualities never are found without concurrent variations that must run through endless shadings to the utmost imperfection. The quality of the terrifying sublime, if it is quite unnatural, is adventurous. Unnatural things, so far as the sublime is supposed in them, although little or none at all may actually be found, are grotesque. Whoever loves and believes the fantastic is a visionary; the inclination toward whims makes the crank. On the other side, if the noble is completely lacking the feeling of the beautiful degenerates, and one calls it trifling. A male person of this quality, if he is young, is named a fop; if he is of middle age he is a dandy. Since the sublime is the most necessary to the elderly, an old dandy is the most contemptible creature in nature, just as a young crank is the most offensive and intolerable." (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans Goldthwait, 1960, p. 55) "Monasteries and such tombs, to confine the living saints are grotesque. Subduing one's passions through principles is sublime. Castigation, vows, and other such monks' virtues are grotesque. Holy bones, holy wood, and all similar rubbish, the holy stool of the High Lama of Tibet not excluded, are grotesque. Of the works of wit and fine feeling, the epic poems of Vergil and Klopstock fall into the noble, of Homer and Milton into the adventurous. The Metamorphoses of Ovid are grotesque; the fairy tales of French foolishness are the most miserbale grotesqueries ever hatched. Anacreontic poems are generally very close to the trifling" (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans Goldthwait, 1960, pp. 56-57).

Kircher, Athanasius. See also museums, Wunder- and Kunstkammer.

Koch, Albert. Sold an enormous skeleton to Frederick William IV of Prussia, claiming it was the remains of the biblical monster 'behemoth'. He called his 114 foot long specimen Hydrargos sillimanii.

Kraken. Described in Bishop Erik Ludvigen Pontoppidan's Natural History of Norway (1752) as the largest sea monster in the world. Described by Olaus Magnus (1555) as a monstrous fish: 'Their forms are horrible, their Heads are square, all set with prickles, and they have sharp a long Horns round about, like a tree rooted up by the roots: they are ten or twelve cubits long, very black and with huge eyes...' Probably a giant squid or octopus of the class Cephaloda.

Kristeva, Julia. "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, direced against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fascinates desire, which nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects ... But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflagging, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself." (The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982) p. 1. See Abjection.

Kunstkammer. [This entry will be developed]

Lack. Subtraction of body parts. Insufficient seed.

Lady into Fox (1922) Novel by David Garnett.

Lamia. Lamia See Topsell's The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1607, 1608, 1658).

Laughter. Defined by Henri Bergson as our sense of 'somethinh mechanical encrusted in the living' (84). See also Jokes.

Leonardo da Vinci. According to Vasari he created 'a fearsome and horrible monster' from 'a number of green and other kinds of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats and various strange creatures of this nature' He then depicted the creature 'emerging fom the dark cleft of a rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils in so macabre a fashion that the effect was altogether monstrous and horrible. Leonardo took so long over the work that the stench of the dead animals in his room became unbearable...' Lives of the Artists (Penguin Books, 1965), p. 259.

Leviathan. Sea monster from Hebrew poetry (See Job 41). 'Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn [...] Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears [...] Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. [...] Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. [...] he maketh the deep to boil like a pot; he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.' Leviathan was used as a metaphor for state or 'commonwealth' as an organism - see Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). The Book of Enoch (apocryphal) also includes a description 'And in that day will two monsters be separated, a female named Leviathan to dwell in the abyss over the fountains of waters. But the male is called Behemoth which occupies with his breasts an immeasurable desert named Dendain.' See also Sea monsters.

Lilliputian. Miniature people in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1728).

Lips. Big-lipped monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Locke, John. [This entry will be developed]

Lucian of Samosta. See Menippean satire such as A True Story. [This entry will be developed]

Ludicrous. "The familiar structure of existence is undermined and chaos seems imminent. This aspect is intensified when concrete manifestations of decay appear and a feeling of hopelessness and corruption is developed. The ludicrous aspect, in turn, arises from the farcical quality inherent in such scenes of absurdity and approaching chaos"(Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose).

Lusus naturae. A Sport (or play) of nature. Gulliver defined as a Sport of Nature in Brobdingnag.


Mandrake. 'is poisonous, having emetic and narcotic properties. Its forked root was thought to resemble the human form, and was fabled to shriek when plucked up from the ground' (OED). Mandrake from Herbarius (1485).

Mandeville, Sir John. Many reports of marvelous creatures in his Travels.

Margins. Often decorated with witty grotesque forms in illumated manuscripts.

Marriage. "Deformed men, as a compensation for their handicap, will be favored for all positions where celibacy is a suitable qualification [...] Every boy who has some bodily defect will be excluded from the legitimate classes, and different classes of cripples will be constituted, in accordance with their degree of infirmity. (1) Those disabled will have a choice of marriage or the ecclesiastical state, secular or regular, as with the following class. (2) The lame without any other deformity will form a second class who can be given young girls as wives if they are otherwise vigorous and healthy. (3) The bandy-legged will qualify only for widows. (4) Congenital hunchbacks and deformed men will only obtain women past forty. (5) The deaf and one-eyed will have as wives only rejected girls who have not been chosen at the marriage festivals. (6) The blind will have the ugliest girls who have not been able to find husbands. Selection among the malformed will have as many divisions as among the robust. Priority will be given to those uniting the least deformity with the greatest merit; the rest will be ranked in accordance with the merit which offsets their deformities, until that subject is reached who has the least merit and the greatest defomity. Finally, it should be observed that those whose illness is communicable, such as the scrofulous, the scorbutic, the herpetic, the syphilitic, and so on, will not be able to marry, or will be permitted to marry only women past fifty, who might be willing to expose themselves to the disease. This will apply also to those attacked by epilepsy, consumption, and so on." From Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne's L'andrographe (1781), Articles 25 and 28.

Marvelous. Fabcesco Patrizi listed twelve source in his La deca ammirabile (1587): ignorance, fable, novelty, paradox, augmentation, change from what is usual, the extranatural, the divine, great utility, the very exact, the unexpected, the sudden. See Weinbergy, History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, pp. 772-74.

Marvels. [This entry will be developed] Link to Miracles and Wonder.

Masquerade. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization.

Maternal Impressions. Effects of Imagination (1) Jonston's example of the Ethiopian who produced a white child. Thaumatographia naturalis. 1665; (2) Plot's example of the mouse-like child whose mother had been frightened by one. The Natural History of Staffordshire. 1686; (3) Lancet's example of a child with a dog face whose mother had been bitten. 1863 and (4) a child born with 'burns' whose mother had been frightened by fireworks (5) Graham's example of the rabbit-like children. British Medical Journal. i. 51. 1868. (6) turtle-man, q.v. (7)

Maypole. "Against May, Whitsunday, or other time, all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding overnight to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bring with them birhc and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel; for there is a great lord present amongst them, as superintendant and lord over their pastimes and sports, namely Satan, Prince of Hell. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they brig hom with great veneration ... Then fall they to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravity and reputation that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled." (Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses).

Medieval. One-eyed monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).Blemmyae, or headless monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).Long-eared Phanesians from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).Big-lipped monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493). Sciapodes from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493). Goat-people (satyrs) from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Medusa. In Greek mythology one of the three Gorgons, whose head, with snakes for hair, turned him who looked upon it into stone' (OED).

Memepunk. The ultimate DIY of ephemeral pop teratology.

Menippean Satire. An example is Seneca the Younger's  Ludus de morte Divi Claudii also known as the Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii, translated as The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius is a grotesque satire on apotheosis, the process or act of transforming an individual into a deity or god. See also Lucian of Samosta's True History, which was written two thousand years ago and has been considered to be the earliest form of science fiction because the fantastic voyages (parodies of Homer's Odyssey) include trips to the moon and the planet Venus alongsides descriptions of extra-terrestrial life. 


Metamorphosis. Die Verwandlung is a grotesque tale by Kafka in which Gregor Samsa is transformed into an insect. See also the entry on Transformation.
















Microscopic. 'little objects are to be compared to the greater and more beautiful works of nature, a flea, a mite, a gnat, to an Horse, an elephant, or a Lyon.' Hooke, Micrographia (1665). See also Nehemiah Grew's wonder at 'Nature's handicraft, which far surpasses the most elaborate Woof or Needle-wrok in the World' The Anatomy of Plants (1682).

Milton, John. Paradise Lost.Chaos, Sin and Death. [This entry will be developed]

Miniature. See also microscopic; Lilliputian. Il Raggio carved a relief on a shell that showed Dante's Inferno complete in miniature. See Vasari's Life of Filippino Lippi. Miniature Count Josef Boruwlaski with his wife Islina and their baby.

Miracles. From Latin 'miraculum', 'an object of wonder.' They were a source of the aesthetics of the marvelous; links with prodigies and portents.

Misogyny. Many fine examples of the grotesque in Swift ('Criticism') and Pope (Dulness)...

Mob. 'Seves and fear/The fury of the many-headed monster,/The giddy multitude' See The Unnatural Combat (IIIii) by Philip Massinger (1583-1640). See also Pope: 'There still remains, to mortify a wit,/The many-headed monster of the pit.' During the English riots of 2011 newspapers spoke of 'feral children'

Mordake, Edward. Man with two faces.See Gould and Pyle, pp 188-9. No source given.

Monsters. See Classificiation.

Monstrous Races. Usually depicted on the edges/margins of mediaeval maps. Human Monsters from Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophia (1517).

Montaigne. Custom: 'We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be.' Montaigne, "Of a Monstrous Child" (ed Donald M. Frame, p. 539).
Identity or inner self: "I have more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more ny deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself." (ed Donald M. Frame, p.787).
On his own writings: "And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques aqnd monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental.' (ed Donald M. Frame, p. 135).
"What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man." (p.539)

Nationality and Nature. See John Bulwer's "Enditement framed against most of the Nations under the Sunl whereby they are arraigned at the Tribunal of Nature, as guilty of High-treason, in Abasing, Counterfeiting, Defacing and Clipping her coin instampt with her Image and Superscription on the Body of Man" (Anthropometamorphosis 1650). See also monstrous races.

Natural History. By Pliny. Many examples of the monstrous, esp. Book 7.

Natural Wonders. Collected by Nathaniel Wanley (late 17thC).

Nature. Sometimes sportive, playful or ludic in the making of a novel form. e.g lusus naturae.Nature and nationality, see John Bulwer's "Enditement framed against most of the Nations under the Sun whereby they are arraigned at the Tribunal of Nature, as guilty of High-treason, in Abasing, Counterfeiting, Defacing and Clipping her coin instampt with her Image and Superscription on the Body of Man" (Anthropometamorphosis 1650) He defines the face in terms of its proper longitude and latitude. Sometimes art strives against nature. The New World is the most artificial. Where man "findes Hils, he sets himself to make Plains; where Plains, he raseth Hils; in pleasant places he seekes horrid ones, and brings pleasantnesse into places of horrour and shameful obscurity"; "When [Man] thinks he triumphs over his subdued and depraved Body, his own corrupt Nature triumphs ober him." (241)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. "We misunderstand the beast of prey and the man of prey (for example Cesare Borgia) throughly, we misunderstand 'nature,' as long as we still look for something 'pathological' at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for some 'hell' that is supposed to be innate in them; yet this is what almost all moralists have done." The Natural History of Morals, 197.

Nose. The nose of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was lost in a dul with a fellow student. The replacement nose was made of gold.

Novelty. Excites curiosity; aspect of the marvelous.

Number. Monsters often produced by too few or too many body parts. See also Excess; Lack; Pare.

Oannes. Half fish, half man from 3rd/4th century Babylonian story.

Obscenity. Hogarth mentions in "THE BATHOS, or Manner of Sinking, in Sublime Paintings, Inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures [...] See the manner of disgracing ye most Serious Subjects, in many celebrated Old Pictures; by introducing Low, absurd, obscene & often prohane Circumstances into them."; see Rabelais; Bakhtin.

Ogopogo. 'I'm looking for the Ogopogo. The funny little Ogopogo/His mother was an earwig, his father was a snail./I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail./I want to find the Ogopogo while he's playing on his old banjo.'

Opposites. "The present tendency is to view the grotesque as a fundamentally ambivalent thing, as a clash of opposites, and hence, in some forms at least, as an approximate expression of the problematic nature of existence. It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation." Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (11)

Orang Pendek. Short biped ('little man') of Sumatra

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Monstrous transformations; becoming.

Pantomime. [This entry will be developed]

Paradox, modern. "Our world has led to the grotesque as well as to the atom bomb... But the grotesque is only a way of expressing in a tangible manner, of making us perceive physically the paradoxical, the form of the unformed, the face of the world without face; and just as in our thinking today we seem to be unable to do without the concept of the paradox, so also in art, and in our world which at times seems still to exist only because the atom bomb exists: out of ofear of the bomb" (Friedrick Duerrenmatt).
Parasitic ectopy; Siamese twins from Johann Schenk's Monstrorum historia memorabilis (1609).

Pare, Ambroise. Des Monstres et Prodiges. Triton and Siren from the Latin edition of Ambroise Pare's Des Monstres et Prodiges (1582). [This entry will be expanded]

Pastrana, Julia. The famous Julia Pastrana was first exhibited in New York at the Gothic Hall on Broadway as ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’ in 1854. Promoted and sensationally advertising as a bearded and hairy lady and as a missing link or 'Nonedescript' Julia Pastrana then toured Europe in the 1850s. Her exploitation is undoubtedly shocking to modern sensibilities, but monstrous deformity of any kind was a means to make money in an era before state support was available.  In 1857 she came to Britain from America and was popularly known as the baboon-woman, a kind of Darwinian missing link. But her public displays did not end with her death; for she was to be mummified by her husband-manager. He continued to exhibit the corpse for several decades after her death. More.

Paternity. "what made monstrosity monstrous was that it served as a public reminder that, short of relying on physical resemblamce, paternity could nver be proven" Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination (1993), pp. 33-4.

Pegasus. The winged horse fabled to have sprung from the head of Medusa.

Phanesians. Long-eared Phanesians from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Pig. Monstrous pig of Landseer by Albrecht Durer (1496).

Plenitude. Notion that there are no gaps in the system of nature. Hence middle forms such as zoophytes, hybrids, etc.

Plesiosaurus. Class of enormous dinosuar marine reptiles described by Baron Cuvier. They 'astonish the naturalist by their combinations of structures which without the slightest doubt would seem incredible to anyone who had not been able to observe them himself ... The Plesiosaurus is perhaps the strangest of all the inhabitants of the ancient world and the one which seems most to deserve the the name monster.'

Pliny the Elder. Natural History has many accounts of the monstrous and prodigious. See Book 7.

Pope-ass and other monsters from Fortunio Liceti's De Monstrorum causis natura (1665).

Porta, Giovanni Battista della. (1635-1715) His Magia naturalis included topics such as the 'wonderful force of the imagination, and how to produce party coloured births'; 'plants changed, one degenerating into the form of another'; 'eggs hatched without a hen'.

Portents. Warnings or secret signs manifested in prodigies.

Postmodern 'plasticity'. "Gradually and surely, a technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed the very materiality of the body" (Susan Bordo, ' "Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern Culture' in Unbearable Women, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1993), 245.

Preternatural. Category of the 'yet to be explained', between the Natural and the Supernatural.

Prodigies. Examples of the intervention of God or the Devil in the rational/divine/natural order of things. Includes comets and monstrous births. See preternatural.

Prolificity. Margaret, wife of Count Virboslaus gave birth to thirty-six children on January 20, 1296. See Pare; Cromerus. Note also the case of Countess Margaret, daughter of Florent IV on Good Friday, 1278 claims 182 males, 182 female and 1 hermaphrodite; the Bishop of Treras baptized all of them either John or Elizabeth. Pliny records 12 births as maximum. Curious epitaph (1) 'Here lieth the body of Nicholas Hookes, of Conway, gentleman, who was one and fortieth child of his father, William Hookes, Esq., by Alice, his wife, and the father of 27 children. He died 20th March, 1637' Conway, Carnarvonshire.

Proportion. Distorted to produce monstrous forms.

Prosopthoracopagus. Image

Prosthesis.'That part of surgery which consists in supplying deficiencies, as by artificial limbs, teeth, etc" (1706).

Pygopagous twins. See Biddenden Maids

Q -  the Winged Serpent. Having built a nest on the spire of the Chrysler building,
the monstrous serpent Q terrorises
the people of New York.

A film directed by Larry Cohen, USA, 1982.





Querflügel. "A rare keyboard instrument, to be played diagonally, built in 1824 by Broadwood ("Traverse Piano") for the exclusive use of Prince Karl von Lobkowitz, who sported one longer and one shorter arm. The only surviving specimen, kept in the basement of Vienna's Palais Lobkowitz, bears an indecipherable dedication by Beethoven." Alfred Brendel quote.

Quetzalcoatl. In mexican mythology this monstrous creature was a large feathered serpent. A boundar marker between Earth and the Sky. Quetzalcoatl was also the patron god of the Aztec priesthood, of learning and knowledge.

Rabelais, Francois. (1494 – 9 April 1553) The author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Rabbits. Graham's example of the rabbit-like children. British Medical Journal. i. 51. (1868). See also Mary Toft, the Woman who gave Birth to Rabbits. Also a novel by Emma Donoghue.

Rarities.'This is what prolongs the troubles of those afflicted with blind curiosity, i.e., those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them, for gradually they become so full of wonder that things of no importance are no less apt to arrest their attention than those whose investigation is more useful' see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, pp. 354-56.

Rectum. There are records of cases of birth from the rectum! See Gould and Pyle pp. 120-21.

Resemblance Theory. Renaissance idea of equivalences, eg between sea and land creatures, hence bishopfish, monkfish, sea-horses.

Ridicule. Use of monstrous representation. See Pope, 'Sporus' from Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.

Roc. Giant bird mentioned in A Thousand and One Nights that fed elephants to its young, and sank one of Sinbad's ships by dropping rocks on it.

Romantic. See Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose; Wordsworth's Prelude on London; Byron on Horace; Shelley's Frankenstein. Emphasis on dream and nightmare; psychological factors.

Rossetti. "use of the 'Faustian' grotesque in his early graphic work" (Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, p. 2 ).

Royal Society, London. Transactions included many descriptions of monsters.

Ruskin. Stones of Venice described different kinds of grotesque including the 'noble'.

Sasquatch. Hairy biped or 'wildman' which inhabits mountains or woodland (Canada).

Satire. (From Satura, a 'medley' dealing with a variety of subjects; also associated with 'Satyr'). [This entry will be developed]

Saturnalia. In Roman times, a period of merrymaking held in December. See also World Turned Upside Down.

Satyr. 'One of a class of woodland gods or demons, in form partly human and partly bestial, supposed to be companions of Bacchus' (OED). Goat-people (satyrs) from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).


Savonarola described by Goethe as 'a grimacing, fantastic monster who juts into the bright world of the Renaissance like a Gothic gargoyle.' (See Kayser 1963 :196)
Sciapodes from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Schloss Ambras. [This entry will be developed]

Scottish Brothers. Conjoined twins at the Court of King James III. Skilled in music, languages. Had common sensation below the point of union; trunks fused in a single lower extremityDied at 28yrs, one several days before the other. See Buchanan. Rerum Scoticarum Historia, Aberdeen, 1762, L.xiii For similar examples see Gould and Pyle, pp. 184-187.

Scottish Literture. Exaggeration, grotesque. Kurt Wittig on Robert Henryson and Scottish literature examined "the juxtaposition of understatement and overstatement". See also Alasdair Gray's reworking of Frankenstein in Poor Things and Lanark. Ernest Baker claimed that Smollett had "that particular touch of acrid Scottish humour to be recognized in his compatriots Hawes and Dunbar, in the past, and in Charles Johnstone, Burns and Byron a little later.

The Scythian "Vegetable" Lamb

Scythian lamb. Included in John Parkinson's Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris. Lamb on a stalk that survived by eating the grass that grew within its reach.Scythian Lamb

Sea creatures. 'So is the great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou has made play therein.'
Leviathan. Resemblance between land and sea forms e.g. monkfish and bishopfish.

Seapunk. "Seapunk leather jacket with barnacles where the studs used to be" sparked a wave of nautical in-jokes, as well as inspiring a collective of musicians to make loopy, bloopy tracks.The visuals and lingo eventually begat seapunk music. Fire For Effect, Zombelle, Ultrademon, Slava, Unicorn Kid and, ahem, Splash Club 7 produced tracks overdubbed with narwhal mating calls and David Attenborough soundbites to accessorise their psychotropical videos. [The Guardian 15.12.2012 More here.]

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. See Caliban. See also Titus Andronicus. Grotesque comedy in King Lear was explored in an essay by G. Wilson Knight.

Siamese twins. Conjoined twins such as Chang and Eng.

Sidney, Philip. "only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another Nature, inmaking things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heros, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow want of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit." An Apology for Poetry.

Silvanus. Roman forest god, sometimes linked with sightings of 'wild men'.

Similarity and Difference. "In the past, individuals born with bodily differences, such as Siamese twins, dwarfs and midgets, or the human torso, would premise their sideshow exhibits on displays of their normality, which demonstrated their ability to accomplish everyday tasks with ease, to think intelligently, and to engage in respectable relationships with others [...] For example, the human torso Prince Randian was celebrated for his ability to roll a cigarette and light it with his mouth, and the marriage of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng to two normal sisters was widely publicized as proof of their remarkable condition. In contrast, those performers who were not born true freaks, such as the snake charmer, the savage, the strongman, or the tattooed person, emphasized their difference from the average person. If some biographies embellished the freak's identity by inventing exotic, faraway origins, others displayed an anxiety about genealogy, insisting on the normality of the freak's parents and offspring" (Rachel Adams, in Thomson [1996], pp. 278-9).

Sin. See also Death. Described in John Milton's Paradise Lost (Book II. 648-666):
Before the gates there sat
On either side a formidable shape;
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed
With mortal sting:a bout her middle round
A cry of hell hounds never ceasing barked
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled,
Within unseen. Far less abhorred than these
Vexed Scylla bathing in the sea that parts
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore:
Nor uglier follow the Night-hag, when called
In secret, riding through the air she comes
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon
Eclipses at their charms.

Singularities. See for example Andre Thevet's Les Singularitiez de la france antarctique.

Siren. Triton and Siren from the Latin edition of Ambroise Pare's Des Monstres et Prodiges (1582).

Size. Large Man Daniel Lambert. Big-lipped monster from Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (1493).

Slimespunk. "The Blob: original #slimepunk @ultrademon" Zombelle.

Sodomy. Anal sex was considered Satanic or bestial. [This entry will be developed]

Snake-man. Caused by strong maternal impression (q.v.) during pregnancy of a woman attacked by a rattle-snake. Body had shape and action of a snake, and serpent-like teeth. See Copeland, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, p.98 (1839).

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene. [This entry will be developed]

Sphinx. 'A hybrid monster, usually described as having the head of a woman and the (winged) body of a lion, which infested Thebes until the riddle it propounded was solved by Oedipus' (OED). See noble grotesque.

Sport (or play) of Nature. Lusus naturae. [This entry will be developed]

Stage machines. [This entry will be developed]

Steller, Georg Wilhelm. While aboard a ship in the Gulf of Alaska (11 August 1741), he recorded sighting a 'sea ape'. He also noted 35 feet long sea cows that grazed on seaweed. They are believed to have become extinct by 1768. [This entry will be developed].

Strange birth. At Stonehouse, Plymouth (1635).

Su. Described in Konrad Gesner's Historia Animalium, 'The most obnoxious animal that might be seen, called Su in the New Lands. There is a place in the newly found land where lives a people calling itself in its language Patagones, and since the land is not very warm they cover themselves with fur from an animal they call Su, which means Water, by reason of its dwelling mainly near water. It is very dreadful and obnoxious, as may be seen. When hunted by hunters it takes its young upon its back, covers them with its long tail and flees; will be caught in pits and killed with arrows.'

Sublime and grotesque. "In human nature, praiseworth qualities never are found without concurrent variations that must run through endless shadings to the utmost imperfection. The quality of the terrifying sublime, if it is quite unnatural, is adventurous. Unnatural things, so far as the sublime is supposed in them, although little or none at all may actually be found, are grotesque. Whoever loves and believes the fantastic is a visionary; the inclination toward whims makes the crank. On the other side, if the noble is completely lacking the feeling of the beautiful degenerates, and one calls it trifling. A male person of this quality, if he is young, is named a fop; if he is of middle age he is a dandy. Since the sublime is the most necessary to the elderly, an old dandy is the most contemptible creature in nature, just as a young crank is the most offensive and intolerable." (Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans Goldthwait, 1960, p. 55) "Monasteries and such tombs, to confine the living saints are grotesque. Subduing one's passions through principles is sublime. Castigation, vows, and other such monks' virtues are grotesque. Holy bones, holy wood, and all similar rubbish, the holy stool of the High Lama of Tibet not excluded, are grotesque. Of the works of wit and fine feeling, the epic poems of Vergil and Klopstock fall into the noble, of Homer and Milton into the adventurous. The Metamorphoses of Ovid are grotesque; the fairy tales of French foolishness are the most miserbale grotesqueries ever hatched. Anacreontic poems are generally very close to the trifling" (Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans Goldthwait, 1960, pp. 56-57). 

Swift, Jonathan. Grotesque execution in Swift's Gulliver's Travels: "The Malefactor was fixed in a Chair upon a Scaffold erected for the Purpose; and his Head cut off at one Blow with a Sword of about forty Foot long. The Veins and Arteries spouted up such a prodigious Quantity of Blood, and so high in the Air, that the great Jet d'Eau at Versailles was not equal for the Time it lasted; and the Head when it fell on the Scaffold Floor, gave such a Bounce, as made me start, although I were at least an English Mile distant" (II.v.). See Yahoo

Supernatural. Demonic forms usually grotesque. [This entry will be developed]

Surprise. Important characteristic of grotesque entertainments. [This entry will be developed]

Taxonomy. The science of classification pioneered by Linnaeus. Early versions had categories for monstrous men and the not-yet-classified.

Teeth.“The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.” - Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Tennyson. 'Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry.' See Walter Bagehot, Essay, National Review, November 1864.

Teratology. From the Greek τέρας teras (genitive τέρατος teratos), meaning monster or marvel, and λόγος logos, the study of. See Environment and Birth Defects by John Wilson.

1. Susceptibility to teratogenesis depends on the genotype of the conceptus and the manner in which this interacts with adverse environmental factors.
2. Susceptibility to teratogenesis varies with the developmental stage at the time of exposure to an adverse influence. There are critical periods of susceptibility to agents and organ systems affected by these agents.
3. Teratogenic agents act in specific ways on developing cells and tissues to initiate sequences of abnormal developmental events.
4. The access of adverse influences to developing tissues depends on the nature of the influence. Several factors affect the ability of a teratogen to contact a developing conceptus, such as the nature of the agent itself, route and degree of maternal exposure, rate of placental transfer and systemic absorption, and composition of the maternal and embryonic/fetal genotypes.
5. There are four manifestations of deviant development (Death, Malformation, Growth Retardation and Functional Defect).
6. Manifestations of deviant development increase in frequency and degree as dosage increases from the No Observable Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL) to a dose producing 100% Lethality (LD100).

Terminalia (23rd February) - a festival celebrating boundary stones. Ends and beginnings. Openings and closure. Terminus, the god of boundaries.

Theology of Monsters. See A true and strange birth. At Stonehouse, Plymouth (1635).

Thevet, Andre. Sixteenth century collector of prodigies.

Titus Andronicus. "Andronicus, upon these calamities, feigned himself distracted and went raving about the city, shooting his arrows towards heaven, as in defiance, calling to hell for vengeance, which mainly pleased the Empress and her sons, who thought themselves now secure; and though his friends required justice of the Emperor against the ravishers, yet they could have no redress, he rather threatening them, if they insisted on it; so that finding they were in a bad case and that in all probability their lives would be next, they conspired together to prevent that mischief and revenge themselves; lying in ambush in the forest when the two sons went a-hunting, they surprised them, and binding them to a tree pitifully crying out for mercy, though they would give none to others, Andronicus cut their throats whilst Lavinia, by his command, held a bowl between her stumps to recieve the blood; then conveying the bodies home to his own house privately, he cut the flesh into fit pieces and ground the bones to powder and made of them two might pasties, and invited the Emperor and Empress to dinner, who, thinking to make sport with his frantic hunor, came; but when they heard eat of the pasties, he told them what it was; and thereupon giving the watchword to his friends, they immediately issued out, slew the Emperor's guards, and, lastly, the Emperor and his cruel wife, after they had sufficiently upbraided them with the wicked deeds they had done. Then seizing on the wicked Moor, the fearful villain fell on his knees, promising to discover all. But when he had told how he had killed the Prince, betrayed the three sons of Andronicus by false accusation, and counseled the abuse to the fair Lavinia, they scarce knew what torments sufficient to devise for him; but at last digging a hole, they set him in the ground to the middle alive, smeared him over with honey, and so, between the stinging of the bees and wasps and starving, his miserably ended his wretched days. After this, to prevent the torments he expected when these things came to be known, at his daughter's request he killed her; and so, rejoicing he had revenged himself on his enemies to the full, fell on his sword and died." In Shakespeare's play, the relevant lines are Act V.ii.167-206. Critic H.B. Charlton writes "So great is the weght of horror that the response of the senses themselves is finally stunned to stupor, and the disabled sensibility is deprived of the power to prompt mind and imagination to cope with such tremendous issues as are the essence of tragedy, the ultimate mysteries of human destiny. 'Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense of the not of the terrible, but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of Tragedy' (Aristotle, Poetics, XIV, 2)." Shakesprearian Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 1948). See also Shakespeare, Caliban.

Tofts, Mary. The famous 18th-century rabbit-woman. Novel by Emma Donoghue

Triffids. Category: Vegetable teratology. A book (1951) by John Wyndham, followed by two films and a TV series (1981/2009). Today we are also hearing more about genetic modification of plants: 'Frankenstein crops.'  More here. See also Study Guide.


Triton. Triton and Siren from the Latin edition of Ambroise Pare's Des Monstres et Prodiges (1582).

Transformation. Grotesque metamorphosis. Many cases in Ovid; Kafka's 1915 tale about Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect Die Verwandlung and Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream) in which Bottom becomes Ass.

Truth. "It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood." - Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.

Turtle-man. Parvin's example of the fisherman's wife frightened during pregnancy by the sight of a live turtle placed in a cupboard. International Medical Magazine, Phila. June 1892. See ectromelus and phocomelus.

Unicorn. 'But the cruellest is the Unicorn, a monster that belloweth horrible, bodyed like a horse, footed like an elephant, tayled like a swyne, and headed like a Stagge. His horn sticketh out the middle of hys forehead, of a wonderful brightness about foure foote long, so sharp, that whatsover he pusheth at, he striketh it through easily. he is never caught alive; kylled he may be, but taken he cannot bee' (1587). In the Bible see Job 39:9-12.

Verisimilitude. According to Vasari, Leonardo painted 'figures that lived and breathed'

Ventriloquism. The art of dissociated or displaced voices. More here.

Wanley, Nathaniel. (1634-1680) Best known for his book on prodigies The Wonders of the Little World; or a General History of Man. In Six Books (1678)

Wild Boy. Wild Men. See Yeti, Abominbale Snowman, Silvanus. See Richard Bernheimer's Wild Men in the Middle Ages.

Wonder. 'This is what prolongs the troubles of those afflicted with blind curiosity, i.e., those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them, for gradually they become so full of wonder that things of no importance are no less apt to arrest their attention than those whose investigation is more useful' see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, pp. 354-56. Montaigne: "Iris is the daughter of Thaumas. Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end" (Essays, p. 788). The wunderkammer (room of wonders) was a forerunner of the museum and contained marvels, rarities and grotesques.

Wordsworth. 'Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry.' See Walter Bagehot, Essay, National Review, November 1864. See also the grotesque city described in The Prelude, Book VII.

World Turned Upside Down is a variant of the carnivalesque, where the King becomes Beggar and the Beggar becomes King for a Day. See also Arsy-Versy and Topsy-turvy.



 





 
World Turned Upside Down. A popular image in seventeenth-century England during the period of the Civil War. See also the satirical pamphlet The Parliament of Women: with the Merry Laws newly enacted by them; to live in more Ease, Pomp, Pride and Wantonnesse; but especially that they might have superiority, and Domineer over their Husbands... (1646). Image from the British Library.






Yahoo. "Their Shape was very singular, and deformed, which a little discomposed me ..." See Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). In the Fourth Voyage the world has been turned upside down; the humans are presented as beast-like Yahoos, and rational man is ironically or misanthropically presented as a race of horses called the Houyhnhnms (the name sounds like the 'whinny' of a horse).

Yeti. Hairy biped or 'wildman' which inhabits mountains or woodland.

Zombelle. See Slimespunk. "The Blob: original #slimepunk @ultrademon" Zombelle.

Zombie. Walking dead. Originated from voodoo beliefs (Haiti).

Zombie Studies. "It is a class to die for - Zombie studies is now on the curriculum at the University of Baltimore." Reports the BBC. And Academia. Further reading: Boon, Kevin Alexander. "Ontological anxiety made flesh: the zombie in literature, film and culture." Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (2007): 33-43;Lieberman, Matthew D. "What zombies can’t do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness." In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (2009): 293-316; Petchesky, Rosalind. "Phantom Empire: A Feminist Reflection Ten Years After 9/11." WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 39.3 (2011): 288-294; Hassler-Forest, D. A. N. "Cowboys and zombies: Destabilizing patriarchal discourse in The Walking Dead." Studies in Comics 2.2 (2012): 339-355;

Soldier, Dave. "Eine Kleine Naughtmusik: How Nefarious Nonartists Cleverly Imitate Music." Leonardo Music Journal (2002): 53-58;Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. McFarland, 2010; Jones, Steve. "Gender Monstrosity: Deadgirl and the sexual politics of zombie-rape. (Taylor and Francis 2012); Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro. Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human. Fordham Univ Press, 2011;

McCullough, Joseph. Zombies: A Hunter's Guide. Osprey Publishing, 2010; Moreman, Christopher M., and Cory James Rushton. Zombies are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead. McFarland, 2011.

© Ian McCormick