Chelsey Lucas

Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dimino, Andrea

Keywords

Horror Fiction, Slave Narratives, Gender, Race

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis presents an analysis of the relation between the human and the monster as it is used in nineteenth-century American slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs) and British and American horror fiction (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Glen Duncan’s Last Werewolf trilogy). I begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), asserting that Victor Frankenstein attempts to abject his own monstrousness through the creation of his monster. The creature tries to discover his nature in relation to human persons, and acquires language and literacy. Through this, he becomes a recognizable person despite his physical deformity, at least for the reader. He remains ostracized and rejected by his father/creator, however, demonstrating a distinct split between monster and human, and also the transcendence of these categories when Victor becomes monstrous and the creature becomes recognizably human-like. In the next chapter, I use Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) to demonstrate how both write their own stories to claim their own humanity and readerly sympathy. Under slavery, black-bodied individuals were perceived and represented as less-than-human. In slave narratives that detail slavery’s atrocities, however, the slavemaster is perceived and depicted as monstrous. Finally, Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf trilogy (2011; 2012; 2014) shows the monster and the human existing in a single body. Protagonists Jake and Talulla depict a dual identity as human and “wulf,” while their babies, born werewolves, represent a hybridization between the two formerly distinct categories. This thesis challenges the notion that human and monster are distinct categories with monster theory, deconstruction, and gender theory, and questions where the line is drawn if it ought to be drawn at all.

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