Download Style Sheet 1
(pdf)

Download Style Sheet 2
(pdf)

Session 9b: Skins, Wolves and Vampires
Chair: Duane Kight

Between Skins—The Form and Function of Composite Monsters in Ancient Greece
Katharine Polak
University of Cincinnati, USA

As civilization and literatures have evolved, the things that go bump in the night have evolved as well. Though monsters are widely recognized, their forms have changed in such significant ways over time that there is some question as to meaning—while they are often theorized as the personification of cultural fears or manifestations of the destructive parts of human nature, and these are valid interpretations, monsters need further analysis when noted with an eye to their persistence through literature. The classical period in ancient Greece was home to the human-animal composite monster, a combination of human and animal parts, representing the combination of base impulses and reasoning, functioning as a scapegoat for society.
The nature of the composite monster draws attention to its construction, as a sort of synecdoche of horror. Each feature of each monster must be individually analyzed to adequately assess the monster’s full role in the text and in the culture. The composite monster is a non-unified form—it is perceived by its parts rather than as a whole. This indicates the place of the composite monster in literatures: as that which lies between savagery and enlightenment, but also as that which lies between two unified periods—the past and the future. The present is fragmented because of the other characters’ limited perception, and this limitation is embodied in the composite. Recognition and the uncanny make this type of beast—in the composite monster, we recognize qualities of humanity displaced via structure and function, but also a displaced version of the immortal. In examining three “species” of human-animal composite monsters, the Minotaur, the Sphinx, and the Sirens, we can gain a better understanding of this transitional period in Western culture, and put forward methods for future analyses of how the parts make a monster and how their construction is related to their function.

Download Conference Paper -

The Witch and the Werewolf: Rebirth and Subjectivity in Medieval Verse
Hannah Priest
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

In the fourteenth-century romance William of Palerne, a young man’s stepmother uses necromancy to transform him into a werewolf. Though the presentation of this woman as a ‘wicked stepmother’ follows some conventions of the stereotype, the relationship between the witch and the werewolf is complex. The stepmother is presented as behaving ‘wickedly’ but use of narrative techniques speaks of a fundamental connection between witch and victim. The werewolf’s humanity is preserved throughout his transformation, and through their connection, the witch is also presented as a rational human being. The witch is not a monster; necromancy in this text – as in other medieval romances – is presented as evidence of secret, female learning. The stepmother, however, stands in opposition to social norms and threatens to overturn the ‘natural’ order of inheritance and succession. The intimacy of the transformation back to the human indicates, again, the close relationship between witch and werewolf. As in other medieval tales, the witch must be alone with her victim to effect the change back into the human. The embarrassment evident in the young man represents not only the physical vulnerability of the newly-transformed human, but also the crisis of identity brought about by the fracturing of corporeal subjectivity. The witch’s undoing of her spell allows for a refiguring of her relationship with the werewolf-stepson. Although, as she was responsible for the ‘birth’ of the werewolf, she has stood in a pseudo-parental relationship to the creature, she is now able to enter into a more socially normative parental role – clothing, bathing and comforting the new human. The forgiveness of the witch by her stepson demonstrates the redemption of their relationship. Thus, through her relationship with the werewolf, the witch embodies both the transgression of societal norms and the potential for their reassertion.

Sunlight and Shadow: Murnau’s Appropriation of the Vampiric Figure in Nosferatu and Expressionist Cinema in the Weimar Republic
Deborah Christie
English Department, University of Miami, Florida, USA

Films are like dreams:  when we congregate with strangers in the darkness of the cinema, it’s a kind of public dreaming where we process, mostly unconsciously, the more insistent concerns of our lives. 
Australian director George Miller

The appetite for horror seems almost timeless in its persistence, but such films thrive in periods of low-level social anxiety, such as WeimarGermany, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. 
Morris Dickstein

American filmmaker George Bluestone asserts that “in film, more than in any of the other arts, the signature of social forces is evident in the final work” (Roth 245), while Horace M. Kallen refers to film as “visible hieroglyphics of the unseen dynamics of human relations”(809).  Along those lines, the post-war films of the Weimar Republic (1918 to 1924) as a whole have been the subject of numerous studies, both literary and anthropological, as evidence of a traumatized society struggling to deal with a national identity crisis.  Expressionism provided the opportunity for directors to reflect this fragmentation of the German national identity in the divided and alienated images they produced on screen. 
In 1922, German expressionist filmmaker, Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau, filmed his own art house version of Stoker’s novel in Germany under the title Nosferatu:  Ein Symphonie Das Grauens[A Symphony of Horror].  The film was plagued by a copyright infringement lawsuit pressed by Stoker’s widow, and many have speculated that the changes Murnau makes in his version—shifting the location to Germany and renaming the characters—were a pragmatic attempt on his part to avoid any copyright confrontations. However, beyond character name and setting, Murnau radically alters the physical appearance of the vampire and originates such tropes as the use of a coffin and the lethal effects of sunlight.   An examination of the specific changes Murnau incorporates as well as what those alterations reveal about the social and political anxiety present in the Weimar Republic forms the basis of this presentation.   In tracing Murnau’s utilization of the vampiric figure, as well as his innovation of said figure, I will argue that Nosferatu represents both an aesthetic and artistic vision of war as a political monstrosity that literally feeds on the lives of its populace.   In a world where human interaction had become so monstrous as to engage in mass annihilation, the horror of war and the subjugation of humanity that it entails could only be represented by a figure of nightmarish aspect.  Count Orlok is the perfect post-WWI vampire; he is not the Victorian foreigner threatening to infect polite English society, but rather the very embodiment of the debasement of humanity rising out of a war torn Germany.

© Wickedness.Net 2007