How Monsters Are Made: The Monstrous Grotesque in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Chuck Palahniuk's...

American Grotesque 300817

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How Monsters are Made: The Monstrous Grotesque in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Chuck

Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters and Angela Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple”

Introduction

This paper aims to illustrate the central importance of the monstrous in grotesque literature

through a theoretical discussion of the relationship between the grotesque and the

monstrous followed by a close reading of Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love (1989), Chuck

Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters (1999) and Angela Carter’s short story “The Loves of

Lady Purple” (1974). While all three works fall within the realm of the grotesque, they depict

different kinds of monstrosity that belong to specific cultural moments. In order to account

for this, this paper employs the method of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ‘monster theory’ which

posits that cultures can be understood “through the monsters they bear” (Cohen 4).

Furthermore, this paper makes a case for the view that the three works can be seen as

examples of the female grotesque where gendered power structures play a decisive role in

the depiction of the female body and the transgression of gender norms as monstrous and

grotesque. Lastly, the use of the monstrous and the female grotesque in the three works is

summed up in a final conclusion.

The three works selected for analysis in this paper are not about classic monsters,

but instead illustrate how the monstrous can be used for subversive purposes. Geek Love is

ostensibly not about monsters at all, but about sideshow freaks and geeks. Yet it can be

argued that the freak is the human counterpart to the mythological monster (Edwards and

Graulund 82), and that the unstable boundary between the freakish and the monstrous is of

central importance in the novel. While the ‘monsters’ in Invisible Monsters are also human,

Palahniuk problematizes the meaning of the human category in the postmodern age. Finally,


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Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple” has been included as an example of a monster story in

the gothic tradition with a subversive feminist twist.

The Relationship between the Monstrous and the Grotesque

The central importance of the monstrous to the grotesque aesthetic can be traced back to

the very origin of the term. As an aesthetic term, the grotesque is grounded in the visual

and the physical, since it originally referred to a specific ornamental style discovered during

fifteenth-century excavations of ancient Roman murals which depicted figures combined of

human, animal and vegetable parts in fantastical, swirling patterns (Kayser 19-20). Hybrid

figures such as these have been perceived as monstrous since the beginning of human

history: the mythologies of the world abound with monsters that are combined of human

and animal parts, such as the centaur and the harpy, or combined of parts from different

kinds of animals, such as the chimera and the manticore. Justin D. Edwards and Rune

Graulund note in Grotesque that in classical mythology the monstrous hybrid body often

signifies “the conflict between the animal appetites of the beast and the ‘civilized’ behavior

of humanity” (Edwards and Graulund 38), and this exemplifies how the monstrous body

achieves one of the purposes of the grotesque by transgressing boundaries and “[forcing] us

to question what it means to be human” (Edwards and Graulund 3).

Another central effect of the grotesque that monsters often embody is the tendency

to evoke contradictory responses of horror and laughter, fear and pity, disgust and

attraction. Edwards and Graulund point out that while hybridised monsters represent a

frightening threat to one’s basic humanity, they can also be “comically absurd or ludicrous”

(Edwards and Graulund 37). Since the 19th century there has been a growing tendency to

depict increasingly nuanced monsters (Weinstock 2013, 276). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein


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(1818), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Gaston Leroux’s The

Phantom of the Opera (1910) are prime examples of monster stories that evoke both fear

and pity for the monster. Moreover, these stories show that monstrosity is increasingly

becoming an internal matter: like the fairy tale Beast, the monsters in these stories have the

potential for redemption if their basic human need for love and understanding is met, and

the monstrous actions of normal-looking human characters like Victor Frankenstein and

Dom Claude Frollo make it clear that monstrosity is not always a matter of appearances.

Finally, monsters can represent taboo desire since they are linked to the forbidden (Cohen

16-17). Many monsters are gendered and dangerously attractive, such as the vampire and

the succubus, and their excessive or transgressive sexuality makes them simultaneously

alluring and repulsive. By evoking all of these contradictory responses, the monstrous

captures the dialectic tension that always characterises the grotesque.

Wolfgang Kayser explains in his seminal work on the grotesque that monstrous

hybrid forms also have a deeply defamiliarising potential, since they embody the subversion

of the natural order of things and ignore the laws of statics, symmetry and proportion

(Kayser 21). In that sense, the monstrous is also an embodiment of what Kayser sees as

another primary effect of the grotesque, namely “our failure to orient ourselves in the

physical universe” (Kayser 185). Kayser asks: “who effects the estrangement of the world,

who announces his presence in this overwhelming ominousness?” (Kayser 185). The answer

is, of course, the monster: “Apocalyptic beasts emerge from the abyss; demons intrude

upon us. If we were able to name these powers and relate them to the cosmic order, the

grotesque would lose its essential quality” (Kayser 185). Kayser’s point is that in order for

the grotesque to retain its defamiliarising effect, it must be inexplicable – a statement that

can be compared to Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s definition of the grotesque as “a condition of


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being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language” (Harpham 3). Like the hybridised

monstrous body, the grotesque “stands at the margin of the known and the unknown …

calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organising the world” (Harpham 3).

Kayser argues that the grotesque is “an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic

aspects of the world” (Kayser 188). According to Kayser, the psychological effect of the

grotesque is a sense of “secret liberation” once “[t]he darkness has been sighted, the

ominous powers discovered, the incomprehensible forces challenged” (Kayser 188).

Harpham essentially presents the same argument when he states that the contradictory,

incomprehensible effect of the grotesque is dispelled when it is translated into meaning:

“like the grotesque, paradox is a sphinx who dies once its riddle is solved” (Harpham 24).

Harpham’s image of the defeated sphinx exemplifies that the obvious way of figuring the

interpretative process of the ominous grotesque – that is, deep-rooted cultural taboos and

anxieties – is through confrontation with the monster.

Lastly, it is important to note that both the grotesque and the monstrous depend on

notions of normalcy. For example, in the western patriarchal society there is a perceived

affinity between the female body, the monstrous and the grotesque since women are

‘other’ in relation to the male norm and therefore potentially grotesque. Mary Russo

describes in The Female Grotesque how the view of the female body as particularly

grotesque is also related to the etymology of the word, the grotto-esque: “[a]s a bodily

metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to looks like … the cavernous anatomical female body”

(Russo 1). Russo points out that while the perceived connection between the female body

and primal, earthly elements can be empowering, it can just as easily turn into “the

misogyny which identifies this hidden inner space with the visceral” (Russo 2), making the

female body a site of grotesque revulsion and terror. However, the grotesque also has the


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subversive power to “reveal how the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ are

fluid, not fixed” (Edwards and Graulund 9), including the boundaries for gender norms. One

of the ways that this can be accomplished is through the depiction of grotesque female

monsters that parody, transgress and challenge heteronormative categories and patriarchal

discourses.

Homebred Monsters in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Frankensteinian monstrosity is central to the plot of Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love:

frustrated with the lack of attractions in his traveling carnival, Aloysius “Al” Binewski decides

to breed his own freak show. Guided by Al’s vision, his wife Lillian “Lil” Hinchcliff Binewski

ingests everything from prescription drugs to insecticides and exposes herself to radiation

during her pregnancy in order to genetically alter their children and make them as ‘special’

as possible (Dunn 7). Clearly, this situation is deeply grotesque. Firstly, it elicits an

ambiguous response since readers are both inclined to laugh at the sheer madness of the

Binewskis’ project and to be disgusted and horrified at their extreme transgression of how

parents are expected to behave towards their (unborn) children. Secondly, the Binewskis

are not only dehumanising their children by deliberately deforming them, but also by

turning them into commodities that they mean to profit from, and as Kayser points out the

alienating effect of the grotesque is always invoked when human beings are reduced to

objects (Kayser 183).

Al Binewski, “a standard issue Yankee, set on self-determination and independence”

(Dunn 7), can be viewed as an explicitly American version of Doctor Frankenstein who does

not create monsters for the sake of scientific discovery, but in order to succeed in the

tradition of American capitalism and individualism. As Victoria Warren points out in “An


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American Tall Tale/Tail: Geek Love and the Paradox of American Individualism”, Al is a

grotesque version of the American ‘new man’ who proudly produces something that people

are willing to pay for (Warren 324). Although Olympia “Oly” Binewski, the first-person

narrator and protagonist of the novel and the youngest daughter of the Binewski family,

proudly asserts that “a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born” (Dunn 20) it is

important to note that the Binewski children are constructs made according to their

parents’ design, and this sets them apart from the typical freak whose abnormal features

are a natural phenomenon and brings them closer to the category of monsters. If one

accepts Cohen’s thesis that monsters are “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of

a time, a feeling and a place” (Cohen 4), the Binewski children must be seen as

embodiments of the consequences of American capitalism taken to the extreme, where

anything can be turned into products and any way of starting a business venture is

acceptable as long as it is financially successful.

The distinction between normality, freakishness and monstrosity is problematized

throughout the novel. Arturo “Arty” Binewski, the ‘Aqua Boy’ and oldest son of the family, is

an avid reader of monster stories in his childhood (Dunn 46), and he clearly finds them

empowering and identifies strongly with them. When Oly, who helps him turn the pages

since Arty has flippers instead of arms, asks: “Don’t you get scared reading those at night?”,

Arty contemptuously responds: “Hey nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms.

And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that’s what.

We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares” (Dunn 46). Arty always thinks in

terms of power structures and the identification with mythological monsters clearly appeals

to him since it places him and his siblings in the role of predators in relation to the ‘norms’,

their prey. As he puts it: “the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark


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before it sucks their last breath – that’s me” (Dunn 46). Furthermore, Arty’s comment that

“[t]hese books teach me a lot” (Dunn 46) foreshadows his gradual transformation from

freak into monster as he commits one monstrous act after another: he suffocates his

younger sister Leona, tries to do the same to his younger brother Chick, asserts his control

over his sisters, the Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia by giving them to the disfigured Bag

Man as wives and he eventually has Elly lobotomised. It is important to note that all of

Arty’s monstrous acts are violent. While the freak may be threatening on a purely

psychological level by inducing anxiety about the integrity of the human form, it is only the

monster that poses a physical threat per definition (Weinstock 1996, 328).

Finally, Arty uses his cult, Arturism, to invert the typical monster narrative in which

the monster just wants to assimilate and become ‘one of us’. By convincing his followers to

be remade in his own image, Arty constructs a new formula where the ‘norms’ are

desperate to join the monsters instead of the other way around. Arty even goes as far as to

invert the perception of monstrosity versus normality when he says: “I get glimpses of the

horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own

ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique” (Dunn 223). Moreover, Warren notes

that Arturism is another example of a grotesque capitalist endeavour in the novel and that

“Dunn portrays Arturo as the consummate American individualist” (Warren 331). Put

differently, Arty is repeating Al’s Frankensteinian monstrosity on an even grander scale:

although he claims to be turning his followers into freaks, this contrasts with Oly’s assertion

that freaks are born, not made. In reality, Arty is simply dehumanising his followers by

turning them into products of his own narcissistic fantasies and exploiting them financially in

order to prove his worth as the highest earner of the family. A product of his father’s

grotesque form of entrepreneurship himself, Arty has learned that his worth as a person is


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inextricable from his worth as an attraction at the carnival. This is the root of his deep

insecurity and bitterness and it is what makes him go to any length to draw a crowd. As he

puts it to Oly: “I’m just an industrial accident! But I made it into something – Me! I have to

work and think to do it” (Dunn 103).

Despite her physical state as a bald, hunchbacked, albino dwarf, Oly does not initially

perceive herself as a monster and shakes her head at Arty when he tells her that “[t]he thing

that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choir boys--that’s you, Oly”

(Dunn 46), but throughout the novel she fears that she may turn into one. When she finds

herself gloating over the rape of her beautiful and popular sisters at the hands of the Bag

Man she is terrified of her own reaction and wonders: “What if I were really a monster?

What if they were really miserable and I didn’t do my best to help? What kind of thing

would that make me?” (Dunn 254). She has a similar reaction to her own violent emotions

towards her daughter, Miranda: “My rage terrifies me. I am a monster. I would rip her to

shreds” (Dunn 39). This shows a crucial difference between the way Arty and Oly perceive

monstrosity: to Arty, the Binewski children’s abnormal bodies automatically makes all of

them monsters. To Oly, monstrosity is not physical, and perhaps not even psychological, but

based entirely around one’s actions. As she later reflects: “[w]anting to do it didn’t make

[Arty] evil. Getting away with it is what turned him into a monster” (Dunn 166).

The next sentence explains Oly’s dilemma when she decides to kill Miss Lick, another

character whose actions make her a monster: “Of course I will have to apply this rule to

myself eventually. And I’m glad I’ve discovered whiskey” (Dunn 166). Murdering Miss Lick in

order to save Miranda is an ultimate act of love and sacrifice since Oly knows that she will

lose her humanity, and with it her sense of self, in the process. This is essentially why Oly

must kill herself as well as Miss Lick at the end of the novel. Similarly, when Chick uses his


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telekinetic powers to cause an explosion after realising what a monster Arty has become, he

also kills himself in the process. As the only one of the Binewski children who is born with a

powerful supernatural ability, Chick might easily have turned into a super-human monster

despite his outwardly normal appearance, but instead his only act of violence is

paradoxically benign, “a current of love” (Dunn 319), which finally puts an end to the

monstrous capitalist endeavours of the carnival.

The grotesquely unstable boundaries between normality, monstrosity and

freakishness in Geek Love can be read as a subversive critique of a compartmentalised view

of humanity where people fit neatly into any one of these categories. In addition to the

unstable relationship between freakishness and monstrosity, Geek Love subverts notions of

normativity through Oly’s first-person narration where grotesque situations are presented

as if they were normal, such as in the first chapter where Lil is sewing in her lap while Al tells

the children stories about their mother’s past as the carnival geek. Likewise, Oly’s

perspective means that the carnival world is depicted as a homely setting instead of a nexus

of otherness. However, it is important to note that Oly’s inside view is contrasted with other

texts and voices, such as various newspaper articles and the critical notes and recordings

made by the journalist Norval Sanderson. These other voices show that Geek Love is not an

unproblematic celebration of freakishness, but a highly ambiguous exploration of otherness

where different perspectives are constantly being constructed and deconstructed.

The theme of construction is crucial in Geek Love as characters are constantly trying

to create narratives in accordance with their own world view and inscribe them upon the

bodies of others. As mentioned previously, Al and Arty do this as part of their internalisation

of American capitalism and individualism. The fact that systems such as capitalism are not

subverted within the Fabulon, but instead exaggerated grotesquely, ties in with Katherine


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Weese’s argument in her article, “Normalizing Freakery: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and

the Female Grotesque”, where she claims that “Dunn’s ironic treatment of the Binewski

carnival itself—her undermining of its subversive potential—challenges the notion that

carnival is in and of itself radical” (Weese 352).

Another discourse that is inscribed upon the female body throughout Geek Love is

that of patriarchy. Weese’s main point is that Geek Love fails to invert gender norms, since

patriarchy is alive and well within the Fabulon and “the power of artistry is wielded solely by

men” (Weese 351). It is difficult to argue with this position, but it is possible to expand upon

Weese’s argument. For example, Lil originally joined the carnival because she dreamed of

becoming an aerialist (Dunn 6-7). Russo discusses how female aerialists can be seen as

embodying upwards (social) movement and freedom from “oppressive bodily containment”

(Russo 26). Lil never achieves this, however; she falls during practice and “lost her nerve”

(Dunn 7). In spite of Oly’s cheerful assurances that Lil gladly gave up on her dreams to

become “an eager partner” in Al’s business venture and that she was “willing to chip in on

any effort to renew public interest in the show” (Dunn 7), it is difficult not to view Lil’s literal

fall as a more metaphorical fall from high to low; from aerialist to breeding machine; from

the open active space where she had agency and artistry of her own to a closed, domestic

space where she is merely a passive receptacle. If Al is the gardener who tends his “rose

garden” (Dunn 9), Lil is the merely the soil he plants it in.

Elly and Iphy are reduced to the basic functions of their anatomy in the same way.

When they become pregnant and approach Dr. Phyllis to have an abortion she mockingly

says: “Papa wouldn’t do it? No. Papa would want you to hatch the monster” (Dunn 258-

259). Of all the Binewski women, only the twins make a real attempt to break out of the

oppressive patriarchal system. Before they become pregnant, they decide to prostitute


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themselves. Warren sees this as just another capitalist endeavour and an attempt “not to be

outdone by Arty” (Warren 331), but it could be argued that Elly and Iphy are actually trying

to take control of their own bodies. Even if they are also doing it for the money, it is at least

a way of becoming the salesmen as well as the products.

Moreover, it can be argued that they are acting in opposition to the romanticised

view of female Siamese twins. Leslie Fiedler mentions in Freaks: Myths and Images of the

Secret Self that the Siamese twins have typically won the hearts of the audiences by playing

musical instruments and that conjoined females tended to evoke less disgust than other

freaks and were often “laden with terms of endearment” (Fiedler 199). This is also true for

Elly and Iphy who perform by playing the piano and are constantly referred to by Al in

romanticised language. Al especially uses endearments when downplaying their fears and

overhearing their desperate pleas for help against Arty and the Bag Man: “Oh my

sweetlings! … Natural fears, girlish hesitation! … Adore you, my butterflies!” (Dunn 251). The

twins try to escape this kind of gendered stereotyping by transforming into something

monstrously grotesque - “Two Women with One Cunt”, as Elly puts it (Dunn 205) – although

it is, of course, a inadequate attempt since they are still operating within the oppressive

systems of capitalism and patriarchy.

Weese claims that “[i]n contrast to the male-dominated carnival world, the world

Olympia inhabits after the carnival’s demise is matriarchal” (Weese 353), but this does not

mean that women are liberated from patriarchal discourses outside of the Fabulon. On the

contrary, Olympia continues to objectify Miranda by insisting that she keep her tail since it is

the only thing that makes her special, a position that Weese also notes “smack[s] of Arty’s

vocabulary and his priorities” (Weese 355). Similarly, Miss Lick expresses a paradoxically

misogynist form of feminism. At first glance, it may appear that she is actually working in the


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interest of the subversive female grotesque by deforming women’s bodies in order to

reclaim them by putting them outside the boundaries of normative femininity and sexuality.

What she actually does, however, is eradicate their femininity and sexuality altogether by

convincing the women to have double mastectomies and clitoridectomies (Dunn 338). As

Weese argues, Miranda is the only woman in the novel who ultimately manages to create

her own artistry and accept her own body without reducing it to individual body parts

(Weese 357-358). To sum up, Geek Love is filled with homebred monsters, not only in the

narrow literal sense of Al’s homemade freak show, but also in the broader sense that every

monstrous act, and every monstrous body that functions as a product or signifier of such

acts, has been bred on American soil by cultural values and systems such as

entrepreneurship, capitalism and patriarchy.

Monstrous Makeover in Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters

Invisible Monsters starts in medias res, a narrative device which adds to the filmic quality of

the novel as the reader is plunged into a visceral description of a posh wedding reception

turned murder scene. Palahniuk’s visual writing style is of central importance to Invisible

Monsters because the plot revolves around the focus on exteriors and surfaces in popular

culture. This is made apparent in the opening scene of the novel where gushing blood and

gunshot wounds are juxtaposed with detailed descriptions of the wounded Brandy

Alexander’s “amazing suit jacket” (Palahniuk 12). The defamiliarising effect of this grotesque

juxtaposition captures the unreality of the scene as Shannon McFarland, the protagonist

and first-person narrator of the novel, experiences it: “I’m standing at the bottom of the

stairs but only in a physical way. My mind is I don’t know where” (Palahniuk 11). Shannon is

not simply in a state of dissociative shock after seeing her friend Brandy - who is also her


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brother, previously called Shane - being shot by her former best friend and now nemesis,

Evie Cottrell, however. On the contrary, the opening scene shows how even this violent

incident fails to feel authentic due to the deeply ingrained artificiality of the characters’

lifestyles. As Shannon puts it: “Not that anybody in this big drama is a real alive person …

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum

cleaner, a Barbie doll … We’re all such products” (Palahniuk 12).

The monstrous is always closely related to the non-human (Weinstock 1996, 328)

and Shannon lives in a postmodern world where the boundary between human beings and

inanimate objects is dissolving, since everyone appears to be “cloned from all those

shampoo commercials” (Palahniuk 12). An obvious symbol in the novel of how women in

particular are turned into lifeless products is the talking doll Katty Kathy, “one of those foot-

high flesh-tone dolls with the impossible measurements … comes naked in a plastic bubble

pack for a dollar, but her clothes cost a fortune, that’s how realistic she is” (Palahniuk 170).

As a gorgeous fashion model whose life has revolved around photo shoots, fashion shows

and commercials, Shannon feels that she is “[n]ever getting anything real accomplished …

[t]rapped in a beauty ghetto … Stereotyped” (Palahniuk 286). She is brought so close to the

brink of non-human existence by this appearance- and brand-obsessed culture that her only

salvation is to give herself a definitive “makeover” (Palahniuk 287) with a gunshot that “tore

the entire jawbone off [her] face” (Palahniuk 59). Left with the choice of turning into a

monster of all surface and no substance or a disfigured ’invisible monster’ - someone who is

no longer seen by a society whose collective gaze is constantly turned towards bodies that

conform to normative standards of beauty - Shannon chooses the latter.

Clearly, the dissolving boundary between people and objects in this postmodern

world and the resulting dehumanisation is deeply grotesque and alienating. As Kayser puts


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it, “[t]he mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life, the human by being

deprived of it” (Kayser 183). By estranging the familiar world in this manner, Palahniuk

prompts the reader to reconsider contemporary cultural values and norms. Similarly, the

voiding effects of contemporary beauty standards and celebrity culture in Invisible Monsters

capture the essence of the postmodern monstrous. Judith Halberstam argues in the

introduction to her work, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, that

“monstrosity in postmodern horror films finds its place in what Baudrillard has called ‘the

obscenity of immediate visibility’” (Halberstam 1). Halberstam is referring to the French

philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard’s view on postmodernity as an age where

there is “an over-exposure or explosion of visibility by which all becomes transparency and

immediate visibility” (Barker 211), resulting in a society where everything is reduced to

surfaces without any depth. Halberstam’s example of a monster that embodies this

depthless society is Buffalo Bill, the killer in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), because he is

“all body and no soul” (Halberstam 1) – a description that can also be applied to the

characters in Invisible Monsters.

Paradoxically, Shannon becomes ‘invisible’ in this image-obsessed culture despite

the immediate visibility of her disfigured, jawless face. This becomes extremely clear when

she goes shopping and finds that no one will look at her (Palahniuk 54-55). Testing the limits

of her invisibility, Shannon steals a turkey but still finds that “[n]obody’s even looking.

They’re all reading those tabloid newspapers as if there’s hidden gold there. ‘Sejgfn di ofo

utnbg,’ I say … Nobody looks” (Palahniuk 55). Shouting in her incomprehensible jawless

language makes no difference either. The contrast between the small boy who cries out

“Look Mom, look over there! That monster’s stealing food!” (Palahnikuk 55) and the adult

shoppers who only react by “reading tabloid headlines harder than ever” (Palahniuk 55)


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clearly shows that it is only the child who has not yet internalised the norms of society who

will even acknowledge Shannon’s existence. In accordance with Cohen’s monster theory,

then, Shannon clearly embodies the worst fears of postmodern society: a deformed, broken

surface and an extreme deviation from the beauty standard.

While Baudrillard’s ‘obscenity of immediate visibility’ can be used to read the focus

on surfaces in the novel as typical of the postmodern perspective, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

has argued that there is also an opposing tendency in contemporary monster fiction to

reconfigure the monstrous to “a kind of invisible disease that eats away at the body and the

body politic” (Weinstock 2013, 276). The two theories are not necessarily mutually

exclusive, but simply indicate how the concept of monstrosity has become much more

nuanced and complex: Shannon’s disfigured face is monstrous, but so are the invisible

cultural forces of the depthless postmodern society that have reduced people to

commodities.

The plural form of the title indicates that Shannon is not the only monster in the

novel, however: as a transgender person, Brandy can also be seen as ‘monstrous’ because

she embodies an ambiguity that society tends to find threatening. As Cohen points out,

monsters evoke anxiety precisely because they refuse to “participate in the classificatory

‘order of things’ … they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist

attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (Cohen 6). Brandy’s “hairy pig-

knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle

bracelets” (Palahniuk 58) are the most obvious sign of her hybridity – something that Brandy

chooses to celebrate: “Beaded with rings to make them look even bigger, Brandy’s hands

are enormous … hands are the one part about Brandy Alexander that surgeons couldn’t

change. So Brandy doesn’t even try and hide her hands” (Palahniuk 23). Unlike Evie, another


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transgender character who dreams of being a “glamorous fashion model” (Palahniuk 72),

Brandy is not trying to assimilate into the dominant beauty culture – on the contrary, she is

trying to deconstruct fixed and binary categories for gender and identity and asserts that:

“I’m not straight, and I’m not gay … I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want

my whole life crammed into a single word … I want to find something else, unknowable,

some place to be that’s not on the map” (Palahniuk 261).

Judith Butler argues in her seminal work, Gender Trouble, that drag can be used as a

subversive performance and a tool for resistance against normative notions of gender and

beauty: “drag … mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender

category” (Butler 174). This is precisely what Brandy is doing by simultaneously adhering to

and subverting the beauty standard. In addition to her hybridity, Brandy is not just

metamorphosing into a woman; she is becoming excessively female with “her tits siliconed

to the point she can’t stand straight” (Palahniuk 214). The combination of hybridity and

excess clearly makes Brandy a grotesque figure: someone who both eludes and transgresses

boundaries. Although she is not monstrous in the same sense as Buffalo Bill, she can be

described as monstrously gendered. Just like Shannon, Brandy has chosen a ‘monstrous

makeover’ as a means of both resisting and drawing attention to the homogeneity of the

dominant beauty culture. In this way, both Brandy and Shannon exemplify the subversive

female grotesque. As Russo points out, the female grotesque is not limited to female

subjectivities and is related to queer theory since “[t]he category of the female grotesque is

crucial to identity formation for both men and women as a space of risk and abjection”

(Russo 12-13).

The subversive potential of Invisible Monsters is enhanced by the fragmented

timeline, composed of flashbacks, flashforwards and narrative twists, which force the reader


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to constantly change perspective and question reality as new information is revealed. The

novel’s grotesque humour has a similar effect. The grotesque bodies in Invisible Monsters

are simultaneously comic and disturbing: for example, the reader is torn between the

humorous image of Brandy’s enormous silicone breasts exploding when Evie shoots her in

the chest and the disturbing image of a human being in pain. Likewise, grotesque situations

such as the McFarland family dinners where subjects like “fisting” and “felching” (Palahniuk

92) are freely discussed across the dinner table are simultaneously hilarious and disgusting.

Brandy also plays a crucial role in the novel as Shannon’s guide. Shannon’s choice to

disfigure herself is not salvation in itself; unlike Brandy who has added to her original

appearance, Shannon only has a lack and nothing to replace it with. By constantly

constructing new identities and choosing names for her, Brandy teaches Shannon that

identity is not fixed, a lesson that Shannon takes to heart at the end of the novel when she

says: “What I need is a new story … to write my own story” (Palahniuk 296). Up until this

point, Shannon has been “incapable of loving anybody” (Palahniuk 198) as a result of being

conditioned to having some “fashion photographer telling [her] how to feel” (Palahniuk 13).

Throughout the novel, her behaviour and feelings are just as artificial outside of the studio

as inside it, signalled by the repetition of the words ‘Flash. Give me [emotion]’. Ultimately,

disfiguring herself is not what makes Shannon transcend her depthless narcissism – the

disfigurement is only a means to true authenticity as she finally learns to love Brandy

“[c]ompletely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward” (Palahniuk 295).

The Female Monster Unbound in Angela Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple”

Angela Carter is well-known for her feminist revisions and demythologizations of

representations of women in fairy tales and other folkloric narratives. In “The Loves of Lady


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Purple” Carter interrogates the depiction of transgressive female sexuality as a form of

mythological monstrosity through the figure of Lady Purple, a life-sized marionette. Every

night, Lady Purple is filled with “necromantic vigour” (Carter 43) at the hands of the

puppeteer, an ancient Asiatic professor who is so effective at “[transmitting] to her an

abundance of the life he himself seemed to possess so tenuously” that she “did not seem so

much a cunningly simulated woman as a monstrous goddess, at once preposterous and

magnificent … wholly real and entirely other” (Carter 43). The professor performs the same

show every night: the history of Lady Purple, once known as “the shameless Oriental Venus”

who has been petrified as punishment for her “unappeasable appetites” (Carter 44).

The professor’s story makes it clear that Lady Purple represents male fears of the

liberated female and her unrestrained sexuality. A monster of sexual excess, Lady Purple is

said to have been a woman “in whom too much life had negated life itself, whose kisses had

withered like acid and whose embrace had blasted like lightning” (Carter 44). Her

transgressions are numerous and extreme: as a child of twelve, she seduced and robbed her

stepfather, then murdered him and his wife, and as a prostitute she is said to have been so

excessively depraved that it “verged on the unspeakable” (Carter 46). Lady Purple’s

transgressive sexuality has even enabled her to invert the usual roles of prostitute and

customer: “she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted

themselves” (Carter 46). In a grotesque objectification of her male victims, Lady Purple

poisons a politician, notably a man in a position of power, cuts out his thighbone and “took

it to a craftsman who made it into a flute for her” (Carter 46).

Although Lady Purple is “irresistibly evil” (Carter 47) and embodies the contradictory

attraction and repulsion of the monster, her actions make her so threatening to the natural

order and social hierarchies that she is banished from society. Her escape to the beach


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perfectly illustrates Cohen’s thesis that the monster always escapes to “return to its

habitations at the margin of the world” (Cohen 6). Here she changes from the vampiric

monster who has left her lovers “squeezed … dry of fortune, hope and dreams” (Carter 46)

into a hag-like monster who “practiced extraordinary necrophilies on the bloated corpses of

the sea” (Carter 47) before finally turning into a marionette. As a marionette, Lady Purple is

simply deeply uncanny with her frozen smile and life-like movements, but the relationship

between her and the professor is grotesque in the sense that the boundary between self

and other dissolves when he takes control of her and becomes “like the swordsman trained

in Zen … no longer aware of any distinction between self and weapon” (Carter 48). During

the puppet show, the professor is also the voice of Lady Purple, a voice that “sounds like fur

soaked in honey” and which sends a titillating “shudder of pleasure down the spines of the

watchers” (Carter 44). When he is alone with her, the professor takes on female roles,

darning her clothes “like a good housewife” (Carter 48) and dressing her up as if she were a

doll and he were a small girl (Carter 49). This indicates that Lady Purple also functions as an

instrument for the repressed female aspects of the professor’s sexuality and identity.

It is when she metamorphoses back into a woman that Lady Purple once more

becomes truly grotesque, however. When the professor kisses his doll goodnight he feels

her “hot, wet, palpitating flesh” (Carter 49) respond to his own – a description that shows

how flesh can be extremely grotesque when it seems to be alive without any soul. Vampiric

once again, Lady Purple’s “next performance” (Carter 50) involves sinking her teeth into his

neck and draining his blood before heading for the nearest brothel. This is not a conscious

choice: “the mere repetition so many times of the same invariable actions, the brain

beneath the reviving hair contained only the scantiest notion of the possibilities now open

to it” (Carter 51). Although now a free, living woman Lady Purple does not have true agency


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but is doomed to “parody her own performance as a marionette” (Carter 51). Lady Purple is

a monster created by a patriarchy that fears transgressive female sexualities and even

unbound from her strings she is still bound to act in accordance with that discourse, thereby

illustrating Butler’s assertion that gender is a compulsory performance, a “stylized repetition

of acts” (Butler 179) that the dominant discourses of society imposes upon people.

Lady Purple is consistently described in imagery that makes her an amalgamation of

mythological monsters: she is a “siren” and a “corrupt phoenix” (Carter 45), as a marionette

her “coffin-shaped case” (Carter 49) recalls the vampire while her “reviving hair” (Carter 51)

recalls the medusa. She is also likened to “a flower which, although perfumed, was

carnivorous” (Carter 45) and her arms wrap around the professor like “[c]rushing vines”

(Carter 50) – vegetable imagery that recalls the hybridised ornamental grotesque. Through

these descriptions, Carter draws attention to the ways in which women are derogatively

described in monstrous and grotesque terms when they transgress gender norms.

Moreover, Lady Purple’s ability to constantly change shape illustrates the monster’s ability

to appear and reappear in different shapes (Cohen 5).

Lastly, it is important to mention that “The Loves of Lady Purple” is heavily indebted

to the gothic as well as the grotesque. Fred Botting mentions Carter as an example of a

postmodern Gothic writer, emphasising how her flair for “self-consciously mixing different

forms … shows the interplay of narratives shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation

to the production of meaning for sexuality” (Botting 169). In “The Loves of Lady Purple”,

Carter does this by using elements of both the Gothic, such as the setting in “a dark

superstitious Transylvania” (Carter 41) and the grotesque, particularly the extreme

physicality and sexuality of Lady Purple and her crimes. With its focus on the uncanny,

defined by Freud as ‘the return of the repressed’, hauntings and past crimes, the Gothic is


21

very much a backwards-looking aesthetic. The grotesque, on the other hand, can be

described as a forwards-looking aesthetic because it always opens up spaces for new

possibilities and introduces new crises (Cohen 7). By locating her story in the gothic

tradition, Carter hints at the reactionary tendencies in storytelling where the same discourse

about identity and gender is repeated over and over. At the same time, she destabilises the

conventional woman-monster narrative by rendering it grotesque and ambiguous.

Conclusion

The monstrous embodies all of the most fundamental effects and properties of the

grotesque aesthetic: excess, defamiliarisation, the transgression of boundaries, the mixture

of heterogeneous elements, contradictory emotive responses and dialectic tension. The aim

of this paper has been to show how all of this is expressed through the monstrous bodies

and actions in Geek Love, Invisible Monsters and “The Loves of Lady Purple”. In all of these

works the monstrous is used to draw attention to the dominant discourses and structures

that shape our perception of normalcy with an aim to destabilise them and prompt the

reader to reconsider their merits. Moreover, the three works are linked thematically as they

all deal with the construction of female identity, the malleable female body and

transgressive forms of female love and sexuality. While Geek Love and “The Loves of Lady

Purple” both illustrate that a carnival setting is not a guarantee for female liberation if

artistry is solely wielded by men, Invisible Monsters shows that performance can be a means

to subvert normative and binary notions of gender and femininity. Finally, all three works

illustrate that monsters do not come out of the darkness – instead they come out of cultural

anxieties and fears that we collectively repress only to find them resurfacing in the

grotesque arts, for this is essentially how monsters are made.


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Bibliography

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2012. Web. Google Books. Accessed February 26, 2015. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble – Tenth Anniversary Edition. London, GBR: Routledge, 1999. ProQuest ebrary. Web. Accessed February 26, 2015. Carter, Angela. ”The Loves of Lady Purple”. In: Burning Your Boats. Print. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Print. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture: Seven Theses”. In Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25. Print (Scan). Dunn, Katherine. Geek Love. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Print. Edwards, Justin D. Graulund, Rune. Grotesque. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Other Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Print (Scan). Halberstam, Judith. “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”. In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 1-27. Print (Scan). Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print (Scan). Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Print. Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters. London and New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1999. Print. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Warren, Victoria. “An American Tall Tale/Tail: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and the Paradox of American Individualism”. In Critique, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2004). 332-336. Web. Accessed February 20, 2015. Weese, Katherine. “Normalizing Freakery: Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and the Female Grotesque”. In Critique, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2000). 349-363. Print (Scan).


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Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror and Contemporary Culture”. In: The Ashgate Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Eds. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. 275-289. Print. ---. “Freaks in Space: ‘Extraterrestrialism’ and ‘Deep-Space Multiculturalism’”. In: Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 327-337. Google Books. Web. Accessed February 21, 2015.

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