MONSTRUM

Monstrum

By Jenica Amalita

Imagine a man—he’s tall, dark, and lean, the kind of fright found only in the bathroom mirror or the darkest nightmares. He has grown up being judged for not being able to work fast enough, hard enough, good enough. Everyone at home has overlooked him for not being as smart or popular as his brother, for not being able to stand first in class, though he has—on multiple occasions—stood second or third. 

Now, at work, he always pushes himself harder than the rest to achieve what he calls ‘perfection.’ He has managed to rise to the level of CFO in a relatively short period, but he is still discontent. At home, he screams perfection into the hearts of his children, and his family moves in scared silence around him, working hard to appease if not satisfy his desire for excellence.

Whenever he finds imperfection, he turns into a raging beast, devouring the innocence of those around him. In those moments of blind rage, he is unstoppable. But when that cloud has passed, he feels no end of remorse for the damage he knows he has caused. 

One night after one such spell of madness, as he walked past his child’s room to go to bed, he heard the little one whisper in prayer, “Dear God, thank you for my mother, but can I please get a better father?” He then heard the other hush the child. “Don’t say things like this, you’ll awaken the monster.”

***

Monsters can be found in all mediums, from books to films to the physical world we occupy. Likewise, monsters come in all shapes and sizes. As inferred by Author Natalie Lawrence in her 2015 research paper, What is a Monster?, monsters are created mostly due to the moral and existential crises one experiences rather than reality. Thus, one person’s ideation of a monster might not necessarily be someone else’s monster. 

In Author Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls, the main character, Conor, isn’t afraid of the yew monster that takes on the form of a humanoid tree, because he is more afraid of a recurring nightmare that is also his reality—his mother dying. Throughout the story, the yew monster tells the boy three stories that end quite differently than one would imagine. However, when it is Conor’s turn to tell his story, the nightmare doesn’t change, and Conor’s mother does die. What we call the monster, till the end, never does instill fear in the boy. The word monster comes from a mix of the Latin monstrare which means ‘to demonstrate’ and the word monere meaning ‘to warn’. In Ness’ work, the presence of the monster always means that something bad is about to occur – whether the monster has anything to do with it or not. The monster is thus, both a warning and the object of the destruction to come.

Beyond literature, monstrosity is often represented through cinema, highlighting the implications of fear, inhumanity, and evil. The children’s film Orion and the Dark follows the main character, Orion, who is afraid of Darkness. Even upon getting to know the Dark and realizing that he’s not as bad as anticipated, Orion still prefers staying in the light. As the world comes across a peculiar phenomenon, the absence of night, Orion turns away from his trepidation and tries to bring Darkness back. The realization that Darkness isn’t a monster doesn’t necessarily change the fact that even Darkness, due to the fear that accompanies his presence, considers himself one.

Since the 19th-century movements that followed Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the way society perceives monstrosity has changed from the external monster that looks and acts like one to the internal one that lurks within oneself. The monster has evolved to occupy two shapes – the one a person creates, and the one a person becomes. In her article for Weird Fiction Review, “A Brief History of Monsters,” Theodora Goss talks about how the monster can also be the self, an idea quite contradictory to man’s initial concept of the monster as something unhuman. The monster helps define who belongs and who doesn’t. As such, the monster should look different enough for us to recognize that it is not the ‘self,’ though, at the same time, it should look similar enough to throw one off. Similarity ensures that people can identify it and therefore be appalled at its transgression and monstrosity, rendering it unacceptable. Instead of being seen as symbols of diversity, Lawrence argues that monsters’ transgressions help to define the boundaries of what belongs and what doesn’t.

In allusion to the Greeks, Goss writes that the ancient culture believed monsters were creatures to marvel at because they had a divine nature. They were the manifest representations of primordial chaos, and though they were divine, they could only be created as a consequence of human transgression. As such, monsters were proof that people had crossed the boundaries set by the then society either culturally or morally, resulting in the emergence of a physical entity that portrayed their intangible crossing over through its inability to stay within a single category.

As Christianity spread across the world, the narrative shifted and monsters were seen as creatures made by God under His sovereign rule, a measure taken to bring Him glory. As such, monsters were divided into two kinds – those like the leviathan and behemoth that found mention in the Bible, and those that didn’t. According to Goss, those beasts left unmentioned were considered monsters that symbolized evil and were outside the rule of God’s kingdom. As time passed, monsters were seen as symbols of sin because they represented evil, and so they had to be vanquished, destroyed, or exiled, to protect the people from destruction.

During medieval times, when a person sinned, they transgressed. When this transgression reached a point that it crossed a boundary, the monster was manifested. The third century AD saw a shift from heroes and knights to Christian saints because they, with divine favor and spiritual strength, were the only ones who could win in any battle against a monster. The death of the monster was accompanied by the repentance of the people as they were freed from their sins. While monsters were still an external threat, they pointed to an internal cause. 

With the Renaissance, hedonism, and the rise of positivism, the monster lost its status as a creature to be feared. However, the monster has been resurrected by society in the modern age, only to occupy an entirely different role. The monster of today—while still the subject of fear—forces mankind to rethink the boundaries and push them further to allow the monster acceptance.

The monster of today is not the one of the past that was misunderstood because it was different but is one that is sought to be understood as much as possible because it is different. Since it shares some amount of similarity with us, it becomes the bridge to what is still unknown—all we have to do is push the boundaries a little further.