First Year Seminar in Victorian Monsters and Modern Monstrosity

Frankenstein’s monster, Scrooge’s ghosts, Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, the Hottentot Venus, Bertha Mason, the Elephant Man, and Jack the Ripper. The Victorians both adored and reviled their monsters, and ever since their inception, Americans and Europeans alike have delighted in adapting them and their stories into art and film. As Foucault once said, we are the new Victorians—and so we too are perversely fascinated by Victorian beasts and what they represent, including violence, sexuality, cannibalism, physical strength, and a complete disregard for human laws and norms. While we may believe we distance ourselves from such monsters as something inhuman, in fact the reason we revive them again and again is because they symbolize our deepest fears and conflicts. These include our fears of the unknown, the uncanny, and the irrational; our fears of failed progress and brutish authority; and our fears that we will be violated by those whom society has deemed backward, unworthy, or somehow Other.

Through narratives, films, and photographs from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, in this firstyear seminar students identify, consider, and discuss how monster narratives are constructed; what monsters have in common across time and cultures; how monsters express the concerns, hopes, questions, and anxieties of their contemporary societies; and how (ironically) monsters remind us of what it means to be human. As a result, students also examine interconnections between beasts and the culture that produced them by considering some of the major issues of both then and now: science and evolution, industrialization and commercialism, race and empire, women’s rights and domesticity, aesthetics and criticism. Throughout the semester, students also discuss our current views of Victorian monsters through the medium of popular culture, watching contemporary films as part of "Creepshow" screenings and examining photographs containing all manner of monstrosities.