Humans
A Monstrous History
Monsters are blurry beings—out-of-focus, liminal creatures between two categories. Bigfoot is man and ape, a category-breaking bipedal primate. Werewolves are shape-shifters between humans and wolves. Frankenstein’s monster exists somewhere between life and death, animate and inanimate. Mermaids are a hybrid of fish and human, occupying the space between land and water. Such monsters are more human than not, yet not fully human.
We may dismiss monsters as fictional fabrications used to sell pulp magazines and tacky movies. But monsters are more than meaningless fantasy. Beyond fright and amusement, monsters can help us understand the world around us by making us think about our categories and distinctions, our lines and borders. The word monster shares a common etymology with words such as monument and admonish. In a way, monsters are monuments that admonish us to question the ways in which we misplace boundaries.
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In Humans: A Monstrous History, British historian Surekha Davies offers a scholarly exploration of monsters and monster-making through the ages—from Minotaurs to Muppets, dwarfs to dragons. As she describes it, the book is not so much a history of monsters as a history through monsters. She deftly problematizes simplistic and dismissive views of so-called monsters and reveals the culpability of monster-makers who name others as monsters. Ultimately, rather than interrogating monsters she aims to interrogate the monster-makers. “There are no monsters, but all of them are real,” she writes. “Monsters are the work of the imagination.”
Davies provides concrete historical examples to help us understand our enduring fascination with monsters. Why were supposedly monstrous people found in medieval encyclopedias and displayed to lure crowds to Victorian-era circuses? What is so alluring to us about gazing at beings that blur boundaries, such as hairy children and humanoid machines? What power dynamics are involved in regarding such a being as a monster? Davies invites us to consider how these instances of monster-making are portals into understanding “how cultures have defined what they mean by human . . . how people define where human ends and other sorts of beings begin.”
Davies warns against actively framing others as less than the self, or as threats to normalcy. This kind of framing is prevalent in our world, and it always has been. She argues, “Monster-making has profoundly shaped how we think about science, society, and humanity. We cannot fully understand the present or avoid making the same mistakes in the future without attending to the long and volatile history of monsters.”
Monsters are not the problem, Davies reminds readers as she attends to this history. The “monstrification” of others is the problem. Davies seeks to flip the script on so-called monsters by shifting the spotlight onto the monster-makers. According to Davies, imposing boundaries and categories on others inflicts particular harm on those who exist in the liminal space between categories.
Finding fault in monster-makers, however, doesn’t answer the deeper question of what makes us into monster-makers. What is the sinister inclination behind our ostracizing of others? Davis leaves something lurking in the furtive darkness—our own monstrous tendencies. Davies says that we are all monsters in the sense that none of us fits perfectly into tidy boxes and categories. Yet she fails to explore the more troubling and truly monstrous aspects of our anthropology. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, we are all an “incongruous compound” of good and evil.
Davies does not intend for this book to be a history of religious thought, but for a brief moment she considers how the concept of sin has helped people make sense of monsters:
Ancient notions of the relationship between geography, climate, and human difference undergirded thinking about humanity and of the monstrous. So where exactly were the monsters? And why did they exist? Biblical scripture offers some explanations. One option was that monstrous peoples were regular folks who had become degenerate through sin. Cain (who killed his brother Abel) and Ham (who laughed at Noah as he lay on his ark in a drunken stupor) were thought to have prompted God to curse their descendants.
Here Davies draws upon 12th-century maps and commentaries related to sin and geography, using them as a proxy for the Christian theology of sin. This results in a rather myopic understanding of sin, one that regards some people (such as Cain and Ham) as sinful and others as exempt. Such a view can easily become self-serving.
It is also not the only (or even the predominant) way sin has been understood in the Christian tradition. Many Christians have drawn on Paul’s broader depiction: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). A truncated view of sin can lead us to monstrify those who we regard as sinful, calling others monsters—or calling out others as monster-makers—simply as a foil to the unexamined monster within us. The reality is that we are all monster-makers; therein lies our monstrosity.
So where do we go from here? Naming the cause of our own monstrous tendencies—our sin—isn’t enough to free us from the world of monsters and monster-making that Davies so vividly describes. We need salvation. And just as a person cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, salvation has to come from outside us—extra nos, in the language of theology. Not from a deus ex machina but from the God we know through Christ, the merciful one to whom Paul pleads as he reflects on his own monstrosity: “Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24).
A theological lens on the monster-making that Davies so elaborately analyzes unlocks the possibility of creating common ground between monsters and those who make them. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein tells his monster, “There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies.” Frankenstein fails to recognize what he has in common with his creature: human body parts and the innately human desires for love and acceptance. The creator’s refusal to offer love drives the creature to hatred, and the so-called monster declares, “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear;, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.” Without any hope for community and love, hatred ensues. Theology provides us a way to imagine such hope.
The self-monstrifying power of sin cries out for salvation. Our hatred (whether of self or of others) cannot create the love that delivers us from it. We are all incongruous compounds of good and evil, Jekylls trying to conceal our inner Hydes. The hope and good news of the Christian faith is that God refuses to see us as monsters. God’s creation, though plagued by sin, inspired the love of Christ Jesus. And that means we do not need to be monsters—or make monsters—in a world of inextinguishable hatred.
