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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
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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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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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