Monstrosity

Abstract

From the 12th-century representations of the ‘‘Monstrous Races’’ to the serial killer Ted Bundy and the mass murderer Anders Breivik, Alexa Wright explores the transition from morphological to behavioral monstrosity in human history. In this she follows Michel Foucault’s thinking in The Abnormal series of lectures of 1974–75 and his exploration of Otherness in his 1978 lecture ‘‘The Dangerous Individual.’’ Wright’s concern is with how a narrative of monstrosity is imposed on certain appearances and behaviors, and how it changes over time and social contexts. She bases her understanding of her subject on the etymological root of ‘‘monster,’’ ‘‘monstrosity’’ and ‘‘monstrousness’’ (whose meanings are not interchangeable) as the Latin monstrare, which means both ‘‘to show’’ and ‘‘to warn.’’ The monstrous is seen as the inverse of what is human, the warning sign at the edge of human identity before it transgresses the boundary of the amoral and unhuman. Monstrosity is the narrative imposed on a corporeal irregularity, and the monster is the subject in which these two come together. Monstrosity is not therefore a history of monsters, but an engagement with monstrosity as a visual phenomenon. In the case of the Monstrous Races and the 16th-century Monster of Ravenna, the monsters were deemed to be of this world, their representations constructed out of imagined unknown beings that were part human, part animal, the product of crossing natural boundaries, and so both warnings and indicators of social norms and disruptions. Wright takes issue with Georges Canguilhem’s proposal that the monstrous started being dismantled in the 18th century by science, and that it became tamed as a curiosity in, for example, the spectacle of freak shows [cf. Visual Anthropology, 7(2): 163–165]. It is in this period, after all, that physiognomy developed as a science that aimed to prove that there was such a thing as a criminal character and that this was manifest in the features of an individual. Against this, Wright juxtaposes the case of the ‘‘Elephant Man,’’ Joseph Merrick, whose repulsive physical deformity cloaked a figure of romance in popular society, suggesting that the transition away from equating moral monstrosity with morphological deviation was well underway. Too narrow a reading of this would not be able to account for the later flowering of eugenics, Nazism, or indeed apartheid. Visual Anthropology, 28: 458–459, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2015.1086219