Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” juxtaposes the Dominican Republicans’ notions of beauty with hideousness to explore their values. What is described in aesthetically pleasing terms are things relating to the Dome and money. Alex is described to be very handsome and rich, riding “his father’s burner, looking so fit” (Díaz 7). He is the essence of capitalism and luxury, and even his cheekbones look “machine-made” (8). Mysty is aso described in terms of beauty, and even her body is man-made: she is “definitely on the receiving end of some skin-crafting and bone- crafting, maybe breasts, definitely ass, and who knows what else” (10). The ugliness in this story comes from the disease that only affects poor Haitians, the people who the privileged from the Dominican Republic already perceive as worthless because of their dark skin and poverty. This disease resembles the dying coral reefs, which have also been rejected by a capitalist, industrial society that would rather live in luxury than preserve the earth. This coral-like growths that emerges from the Haitians’ skin are described in truly repulsive terms- the narrator calls it “black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies” (2). The hideous descriptions correspond to what the privileged area of the Dominican Republic rejects (nature and the impoverished Haitians) and the beauty corresponds to what they value (money and man-made creations), thus revealing the value system of the sheltered, wealthy population.
This grotesque combination of rejects resists the United States’ attempts to kill them, morphing into twenty foot tall cannibals who infiltrate the beauty of the Dome. Even the beautiful Alex and Mysty are hinted to be harmed in some way when they go to Haiti. These monsters reject the modern notions of beauty what society values.
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The ending of Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, in which Zenzon the factory worker kills his former boss Max and mixes him into the meat, is a symbolic infection of the consumerist market. Max represents everything wrong with industrialism and capitalism, disregarding the safety and health of his workers as he forces them to overwork and clean toxic chemicals to maximize production. He is apathetic to their suffering and does not treat them as human beings, instead regarding them merely as a means to make a profit. Zenzon, the oppressed worker who is the leader of a union, symbolically takes power by putting Max through the meat grinder, murdering him like one of the pigs he has been forced to kill for years. He feeds the symbol of industrialism to the consumers who Zenzon has spent his life providing for, infecting them and causing them to die. Max is not a human, he is a disease. Eating him instantly causes “severe gastric distress, colicky burps, stomach aches & poisonous farts” for a group of boy scouts (Foster 199). However, Zenzon does not become sick from eating him, claiming that he “may consume [the hotdogs that Max is inside of] with relish & lick [his] fingers” (220). Zenzon obtains power from the murder and consumption of Max because these actions free him from capitalist production. In contrast, Max literally infects the general market who eats him because in a perverse form of justice the consumerist society is punished for their extreme capitalistic ways.
However, Zenzontli the Keeper of the House of Darkness’s communistic world is also condemned, and he is punished. He is among the most powerful in his society, and suffers a terrible fate (although it is unclear whether or not he imagines this). He heartlessly slays people around him and thinks nothing of it, defending his actions and the society that encourages it. When others are getting sacrificed on the pyramid he still does not feel empathy, but when it is his turn he suddenly becomes filled with fear and “prepare[s] a major speech which would denounce the current failed leadership and their deluded policies of the state” (146). He shows his hypocrisy and, since he is a powerful man and therefore is representative of his society, the hypocrisy of his entire government. The leaders of his world are willing to sacrifice lives for the good of their world and claim that they’ll “cut out [their] own hearts. So the world can go on like this, in all its Glory,” yet when they are actually in jeopardy they realize the horror of their world, thus revealing the flaws of communism (5). To us, the European-cultured, non-Aztec readers, our world makes sense. We understand that the Europeans won against the Native Americans, spread their beliefs across the world, and shaped our modern day into what it is. However, to the Aztecs who were dominated and oppressed, this new world that the Europeans brought to them (effectively erasing every convention of life that they have ever known) must have been confusing, and terrifying, and the Europeans must have seemed monstrous. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex recreates this feeling for the modern reader by placing them completely out of their comfort zone in a world where time, grammar, and characters are completely foreign to them. The novel’s confusing plot is frustrating and extremely difficult to follow, jumping between different universes, places, and times and we are “getting fucked in the head” (Foster 1). We are supposed to feel this confusion because if we were supposed to focus on the plot, Foster would not have made it so difficult to follow. In this role-reversal we are vulnerable, subject to helplessly try to follow the plot wherever it takes us without being able to fully comprehend it, just as the Aztecs were forced to blindly navigate through life when the Europeans dominated and enslaved them.
The characters are also confusing to us, performing absurdly monstrous acts, observing strange customs such as harvesting human hearts, and showing little regard for human life. The narrator even says, “he looks like a loser and a big fuck-up to me” about a man being shot at while on fire, which appallingly lacks empathy (73). To us the Aztecs in the novel seem like inhuman monsters because we cannot understand them, yet this must have been how the Aztecs in real life observed the Europeans. They raped, killed, and enslaved them for the purpose of colonization, yet the Aztecs probably perceived the violence as purposeless and nonsensical. By turning the Aztecs into monsters and bringing us into a supernatural and terrifying world, Foster is holding a mirror up to us to show us what our ancestors did to the Aztecs, making us the true monsters. Throughout Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, fukú haunts the Cabrals and curses them. It evades being destroyed or identified and, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests in his “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” “the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear somewhere else” (4). It does not die with Oscar but continues to live on, perhaps to terrorize future generations of the family. Though Oscar does end up having sex he dies as a result (a clear sign of misfortune), and on his way to the canefield he imagines his entire family getting on a bus, driven by a mongoose with a man without a face collecting the fare. The man without a face is symbolic of fukú, because he always appears when something terrible is happening to the Cabrals. The mongoose is symbolic of immigration because “the Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe, is also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa” (151). If it is driving his family away while fukú collects a fare, Díaz is perhaps showing that it does not matter where the family goes, fukú will always be there to take something away from them. The final demonstration of fukú’s evil is Oscar’s murder because of his sexual relations, and perhaps the sex between Oscar and Ybón is a symbolic rebirth of fukú, ready to haunt future generations.
Fukú also evades identification. Oscar may have finally solved its mystery and identified it in his manuscript that he sends to Lola, yet the package never arrives. Fukú remains just as mysterious, and the knowledge that Oscar has discovered dies with him. Though Yunior still has the notes and books from Oscar in his refrigerator and is planning to someday give them to Lola’s daughter so that she might solve the mystery, we have no way of knowing what will happen to these documents by this time, or to her. We do not know whether the mystery of fukú will ever be solved, but when the novel ends, it remains an enigma. Though Oscar, Lola, and Beli are not superhumans in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, they each go through transformations that leave them mutated and isolated. These physical oddities are realistic yet their hyperbolic descriptions and the science-fiction motif in the novel make their changes reminiscent of the supernatural. When Beli goes through puberty her body is portrayed in impossibly exaggerated terms. Her breasts are described as “so implausibly titanic they [make] generous souls pity their bearer and [drive] every straight male in their vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life [...] And what about that supersonic culo that [can] tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their motherfucking frames?” (92). Words like “titanic” and “supersonic” placed in the midst of science-fiction references throughout the novel make her reminiscent of a character from a comic book. Her new body makes men stare at her with lust and women stare at her with hatred, effectively isolating her from her community. Oscar is also transformed by puberty in as equally a dramatic fashion, yet in the opposite way of his mother. Puberty makes him hideous, “scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his skin with zits, making him self-conscious” (16-17). His ghastly appearance as well as his interest in science-fiction make him an outcast in his community, shunned by everyone. Lola transforms into “a siouxsie and the Banshees-loving punk chick,” prompting kids to call her “devil-bitch” (54). The Cabral family is doomed to stick out from their community, turning them into outcasts.
This family of abnormal “monsters” are each plagued by isolation following the immigration of Beli from the Dominican Republic to New York. These mutants reflect the isolation and segregation experienced by the diasporic community, thus demonstrating the theory expressed in Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” that the monster can be representative of a cultural movement and “is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment--of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, anxiety, and fantasy” (4). The supernatural elements in the descriptions of the characters are necessary to convey just how stark the contrast is between each character and his or her community, which is representative of the fact that many other immigrants found themselves to be mutant-like, not blending into their new surroundings and feeling lonely, isolated, and afraid. For my paper I will write about the power of fear in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. My first argument will be that the true power of the ghosts lies in the fear that they provoke in others, since they never actually interact with the real world. It is the young companion's fear of the sister’s harassment that makes her kill herself, although the sister is never a physical threat. This paranoia continues with the houseguests which them turn against each other, and Eleanor’s fear of being alone makes her kill herself so that she can always have a place to belong in the house. The only dangerous things that happen, therefore, are when the characters let fear dictate their decisions.
I will then go on to explain that ironically, Jackson is using fear to promote this message. Fear can be very convincing, which she shows through the nonsensical actions of the haunted while also making the reader afraid and almost sympathetic with the characters. It makes us put ourselves in the position of the houseguests and wonder if we would be just as irrational as them. This shows us that everyone, even ourselves, can let ourselves fall victims to fear. Fear can be used to convince people of anything, which is why Jackson chooses the haunting as a means to convey her message. My concluding idea will be that, since the novel was written just after the Red Scare, perhaps Jackson is showing readers the danger of fear and just how far people will go when they are afraid. People were so afraid of Communism that they sought people out, looking for signs of Communists where there were none, and arresting innocent people. Through the haunting Jackson is showing us the ridiculousness of letting an emotion cause people to do such drastic things and urging her readers to not repeat this historical horror. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Amy sings a haunting song to Sethe about “Lady Button Eyes” which is an apparent metaphor for Sethe killing Beloved (95). Since eyes are the windows to the soul and reflect emotion, a lady with buttons instead of eyes cannot feel anything at all. This woman “smooths the eyelids down/ Over those two eyes of brown,” perhaps killing the children she so tenderly caresses (96). When Sethe kills Beloved she, like Lady Button Eyes, cannot let emotion stop her from doing what she knows she must do; she must become numb. Her eyes do not reflect emotion, because all she can feel is emptiness. When she slaughters her child she “look[s] like she [doesn’t] have any [eyes]. Since the whites in them [have] disappeared and since they [are] as black as her skin, she look[s] blind,” as if her eyes have been replaced with buttons (177).
By providing an image for Sethe’s lack of emotion this metaphor highlights how Sethe’s humanity has been taken away from her by the toils of slavery. The image of a woman with button eyes is frightening and inhuman, showing the monster that slavery has forced her to become. However, though Lady Button Eyes is implicated to be committing a terrible crime, she does it “in such soothing tender wise” showing that she, like Sethe, is not evil (96). Sethe tries to kill her children to save them showing that her intentions are pure. Lady Button Eyes has “white hands overspread” and, though not in physical appearance, Sethe’s hands are also white in their symbolic innocence (96). It is not her fault that she must become a monster; she is haunted and possessed in a sense by her white oppressors. To the white people who wrote about her in the newspaper, and even to the rest of the black community, all that is visible is her outward monstrosity. No one acknowledges that Sethe is innocent, and her act is the cause of “the jungle whitefolks planted in” her, the spread of which “was hidden, silent, except once in awhile you could hear its mumbling in places like 124,” where Sethe becomes filled with the horror of white people’s spite, driving her to kill her children just so they can escape it (234-235). In Toni Morrison’s Beloved the ghost of Beloved haunts each character whom she meets in a different way. She fills Sethe with a sense of motherly affection and Denver with a desperate feeling of companionship, and she torments Paul D. Beloved, a baby who died to escape slavery, represents every horror of Sweet Home that Paul D thinks he left behind. Everywhere he looks he sees Beloved, the girl whom he believes is preventing him from finally achieving happiness and starting his new life. Though he is no longer at Sweet Home it’s memory will continue to haunt him and no matter how much he tries to repress his pain he will constantly be reminded of it in the form of Beloved. He thinks he can “keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be,” yet Beloved opens emotions in him that he has not explored in years (86). He feels an irresistible urge to have sex with Beloved and after she tells him to say her name he says “red heart,” indicating that to him, she is the embodiment of the pain and memories that he had previously stored in the “tobacco tin” of his mind (138).
The fact that he feels compelled to have sex with her while he is regularly having sex with Sethe shows that he cannot have one without the other. With the new life that he envisions with her comes his pain from Sweet Home as well as Sethe’s, which ultimately drives her to kill her own baby. Paul D hates this haunting girl, believing that if she were gone he could start anew with Sethe and live a life together. Beloved in turn is spiteful towards Paul D and his attempts to rid the house of her because she, as a symbol of the toils of slavery, refuses to be ignored. She will resonate with Paul D and remind him that he can never truly be free, because though the physical shackels binding his legs are gone, he will always be plagued with the emotional damage from years of abuse. The notion of a home, typically a place of warmth, comfort, and safety, is inverted when a haunting occurs and fear permeates this space. Though frightening phenomena does occur as in the case of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, there is no physical danger except for the violent outbursts of the inhabitants as a result of fear. Jackson’s ghosts cannot interact with the physical world, they can only affect the senses; and James’s ghosts are arguably a mere manifestation of the governess’s imagination. The deaths that occur in these stories are not caused by the spirits, but are caused by the haunted as a result of the effect that fear has on the mind. The governess, desperate to be praised by her peers for protecting her children, is so afraid of failure that she embraces Miles to death in an attempt to save his soul. Eleanor is desperate to belong and is afraid of being lonely, so she clings to the house that calls to her and kills herself to join the spirits that inhabit it.
The monsters in these stories act as warnings against the absurdity of fear. In the case of The Haunting of Hill House, this warning is reflective of a societal issue as suggested by “Thesis I: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body” in Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture.” Since the novel was written at the time of the Red Scare when paranoia about the spread of communism was present, Jackson is warning society about the detrimental effects of mindless terror. Ironically, these authors are scaring readers against being afraid, thus showing the manipulative power of fear and the power it has to control others. Though Jackson and James attempt to use fear for good purposes, it can just as easily be used for destruction. A home is a place in which a person spends most of their time and acts most freely like themselves. Whereas the homes in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw are more traditional places of living, complete with kitchens and bedrooms, the office in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is arguably the narrator’s less conventional home because of the time he spends in it and his comfortability when he is there. It is more a part of who he is than where he legally lives, as he seldom mentions the building in which he sleeps but frequently discusses events in his office space. Because of the amount of time an individual spends in his or her home and building of employment it becomes an integral part of his or her being, and vice versa. The individual adopts the traits of his or her surroundings, such as the dull personality of the narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” arising from years of being enclosed by the monotony of his office space. He is entrapped in a building with no window showing the outside world save one that provides a direct view of a brick wall, and thus he becomes a flavorless, passive being. One’s home can also be affected by the individual who dwells in it, such as Usher’s diseased, sickly body and mind dilapidating his house. He is incestuous and his soul is ruined, and so therefore his house is too, eventually crumbling with the weight of his sin. A home and its inhabitant can also affect each other simultaneously, as is the case in The Turn of the Screw. The madder the governess becomes, the more frequently she sees evil apparitions infesting the house, which in turn only makes her more insane. Whether the apparitions are actually there or not makes little difference- they exist in the governess’s mind, so they therefore exist in her own version of her home. The cycle of one infecting the other continues until her insanity reaches its peak and makes her a murderess.
Because of the interlocking of building and inhabitant, the hauntings that occur in these places are a direct representation of the people who are there. Bartleby’s robotic actions represent the monotonous nature of the workers of Wall Street. The governess’s sinful ghosts are a reflection of her own sexuality, and her fear of them corrupting the children are her fear that her own lust will stain her purity. The ghost of Roderick’s sister who dies from the same corruptive disease that all of the Ushers die from, an apparent disease of soul arising from sin, haunts Roderick as punishment for his incestuous tendencies. These hauntings, as “Thesis I: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body” of Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture” suggests, are a reflection of the ideals of a culture. Usher’s ghost is a warning against taboo sexual behavior, using disease and death (two primal fears of mankind) to deter people from exploring their sexuality outside the realm of social norms, demonstrating that sinful actions will corrupt the body. Bartleby’s unanimated, mechanic mannerisms reflect the lack of character and diversity of the inhabitants of Wall Street (save food preferences and temperament) and questions if humanity can be sustained in the monotony of the workplace, a question that many people with office jobs ponder. The governess’s ghosts reinforce society’s views of sinful sexual behavior (as both Quint and Miss Jessel, participants in an inappropriate sexual relationship, die) yet also reflects the author’s unique views about the danger of absolute repression. The more that the governess, a woman who has been deprived of any form of sexual exposure, clings to the innocence of the children and of herself, the closer these apparitions appear until she drives herself mad and kills Miles, becoming more evil than the apparitions whom she shuns. Though these hauntings occur in a physical space, they are in actuality the haunting of the individuals that occupy that space as well as the society who reads about them. |
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