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Concurrent Session 10a: Monsters Novelistic and Told
Chair: Kirk Combe

The Space of Monstrosity in Gardner’s Grendel: A Novel
Josephine Mariea
University at Buffalo, USA

John Gardner's Grendel offers a text through which to explore the ways in which space, time, and monstrosity mutually constitute each other, demonstrated through the manner Grendel moves from liminal individual monster to a complex network of questions and responses regarding the space of individuality within and contiguous to the space of community. I read monstrosity in Grendel as a showing forth of the interactions of hæcceity and alterity through the space and time of developing civilization, using W. E. B. DuBois’s “double consciousness,” Jean-Luc Nancy’s work around shared spatiality in Being Singular Plural, and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “stratigraphic time” with which to consider the interpenetrations of identity, space, and time.
Using the two “horrible and holy propositions” articulated by the priest—that “things fade” and “alternatives exclude”—to launch my investigation of the necessity of alterity in the formation and continuance of civilizations, I find that the role Grendel simultaneously plays and resists is one that is necessary for a community’s self-identification. As community inclusion is made meaningful through a coincident exclusion, the origin and continuance of civilization is dependent upon designating elements that divide and define, and in so doing, are set outside the space of community while still being included in the total defining structure of that community. Grendel, however, questions both the validity of this exclusion as well as his subjection to it, while he simultaneously and paradoxically accepts the inherent truth of his defining difference. I consider this paradox through the way Grendel examines the validity of the space of possessed land and borders while also approaching his relationship with human civilization as a continual violation of their space, thereby granting authority to those presumptions of legitimacy. In doing so, he accepts an inherent and violent duality within his own conception of his identity: from this “double-consciousness” stems the violence of Grendel’s life and death and his resultant monstrosity.

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The Monstrous and Maternal in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Inderjit Grewal
Royal Holloway, University of London, London, United Kingdom

This paper will explore how Toni Morrison’s discourse depicts black motherhood against the backdrop of African-American slavery. It will offer a feminist analysis of her fictional representations concerning the maternal role of slave women. These are reflective of a historical period that brought into question the concept of motherhood itself, with use of offensive terminology like “breeder”. In Beloved, Morrison introduces a monstrous element: Sethe is a mother who takes an axe to her daughter’s throat. Yet, her violent actions are validated as “motherlove”. Morrison will not wholly condemn such an act; presenting the monstrous as a necessary means of resistance against a patriarchal slave system which views the black – especially reproductive – body as it possession. Sethe’s children are the lawful property of her white master who wishes to emulate the supremacy of the Holy Father while becoming the Colonial Father. His own monstrosity comes to light in this disturbing text.
In opposition to the power of an objectifying slave system, the monstrous can be defined as the subjective voice of an African-American woman-mother. It reveals an important feminist statement against the violation of her body and identity. This voice is (albeit partially) Margaret Garner’s testimony: the slave mother guilty of committing infanticide and the original source for Morrison’s text.  Perspective is key to a reading of Beloved. While her crime lay exposed across newspapers intended for the judgement of nineteenth century white readers only, Morrison now reunites Margaret with her experience and subjectivity. Beloved’s revelation is that at the cost of harming her “best thing” – her motherhood – the criminalized slave woman must unleash a dangerous monstrosity, so as to expose the greater evil of slavery in its denial of her the right to be a mother.

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