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MO
NST
ERS A Companion
Edited by Simon Bacon
 MOMonsters

NST
Monsters • Edited by Simon Bacon

ERS A Companion
Edited by Simon Bacon
Genre Fiction and Film Companions

Series Editor: Simon Bacon

MO
NST
ERS A Companion
Edited by Simon Bacon

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed
bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bacon, Simon, 1965- editor author.
Title: Monsters : a companion / [editor] Simon Bacon.
Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2020. | Series: Genre fiction
and film companions, 26318725 ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020012239 (print) | LCCN 2020012240 (ebook) | ISBN
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9781788746663 (epub) | ISBN 9781788746670 (mobi)
Classification: LCC P96.M6 M64 2020 (print) | LCC P96.M6 (ebook) | DDC
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Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 2631-8725
ISBN 978-1-78874-664-9 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-665-6 (ePDF)
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© Peter Lang AG 2020

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom
oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Simon Bacon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Editor of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsix

Sherry C. M. Lindquist
Foreword: Culture’s Monsters: Monster Marks (Lindquist 2018) xi

Simon Bacon
Introduction1

Part I Home

Angela M. Smith
Madness: The Babadook (Kent, 2014) – Monsters of Mental Illness 15

Simon Bacon
Domestic Abuse: The Invisible Man (Whannell, 2020) – Domestic
Monsters23

Phil Fitzsimmons
Paedophilia: The Nightingale (Kent, 2018) – Monsters of Abuse 31

Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Immigrants: The Lure (Smoczyńska, 2015) – Monstrous Outsiders 41
 vi Contents

Society


Part II

John Edgar Browning

The Mask: Slasher Cinema (1978–1998) – Teaching the Monster 51

Lauren Rosewarne
The Cyberbully: Cyberbully (Binamé, 2011) – Monsters of Cyberspace 69

Anthony Curtis Adler

Lady Gaga: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (1986–present) –
Monsters of Celebrity 77

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
The Slit-Mouthed Woman: Carved (Shiraishi, 2007) – Monsters of
Urban Legend 85

W. Scott Poole
Melmoth: Melmoth (Perry, 2018) – Monsters of War 93

Part III Cultural Intersections

Benjamin Baumann
Phi Krasue: Inhuman Kiss (Mongkolsiri, 2019) – Thai Monsters 101

Inés Ordiz
La habitación del desahogo (2012) – Mexican Monsters 111

Gail de Vos
Baba Yaga: Hellboy (Mignola, 1997–2004) – Russian Monsters 119
Contents vii

Partha Mitter


Deumo: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984) –
Monsters of Colonialism 129

Yasmine Musharbash
The Hairies: Cleverman (Griffen, 2016–2017) – Aboriginal Monsters 137

Part IV Gender

Eddie Falvey
Satan: The Witch (Eggers, 2015) – Patriarchal Monsters 149

Emily Brick
Warlocks: AHS Apocalypse (Murphy and Falchuk, 2011–present) –
Monsters of Masculinity 157

Craig Ian Mann

She-Wolves: When Animals Dream (Arnby, 2014) – Monsters of
Femininity167

Daniel Sheppard
Serial Killers: Bates Motel (Ehrin, 2013–2017) – The Queer Monster 175

Murray Leeder
The Skeleton: Game of Thrones (Benioff, 2011–2019) – Monsters of
Death183
 viii Contents

Futures


Part V

Leah Richards
Clones: Orphan Black (Manson and Fawcett, 2013–2017) –
Monsters of Reproduction 193

Dahlia Schweitzer
The Master: The Strain (del Toro and Hogan, 2014–2017) –
Monsters of Contagion 201

Carl H. Sederholm
The Ecomonster: Megalohydrothalassophobia (Abhorrence, 2018) –
Monsters of the Anthropocene 209

Gerry Canavan
Aliens: District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009) – Monsters of Hybridity 217

Elana Gomel
Zombie: The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey, 2014) – Posthuman
Monsters225

Patricia MacCormack
Afterword: Becoming Monstrous and the Monster
Becoming: Hannibal (Fuller: 2013–2015) 233

Bibliography245

Notes on Contributors 267

Index275
Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Laurel Plapp and the team at Peter Lang for all their help
and assistance, the always helpful suggestions of friends and colleagues
along the way and particularly all those at the Horror Studies SIG FB group
and the invaluable comments made by Reviewer No. 2. As always, I cannot
thank my wonderful Mrs. Mine enough for her continual help, support and
encouragement, and our two little monsters, Elbi and Majki, who are always
“helpful” by just being themselves. I na koniec, bardzo dziękuję Mam i tacie
za wsparcie… i “sernik Magdy”.


Figure 1. Wangechi Mutu (1972–), Untitled, 2004, mixed media collage on paper,
93.345 cm x 66.04 cm x 5.08 cm. Collection of Dr James Patterson. Photo: Jason
Miller. Reproduced with permission.
Sherry C. M. Lindquist

Foreword: Culture’s Monsters: Monster

Marks (Lindquist 2018)

Foreword
The charismatic being – part-human, part-animal, part-machine – in an un-
titled collage by Wangechi Mutu embodies Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s thesis
that monsters announce category crisis, that they resist ‘any classification
built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition’, that they are ‘full of rebuke
about traditional methods of organizing knowledge and human experience’
(Cohen 1996: 7). This work was shown at an exhibit I curated at the Art
Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM) in 2018 entitled Monster
Marks (Lindquist 2018). It hung in the largest gallery, which, to commem-
orate the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King
Jr in Memphis, was dedicated to the theme of how contemporary artists use
the visual vocabulary of monstrosity to address issues of race and racism. It
could as easily have been placed in the gallery dedicated to feminism and
posthumanism, and it is certainly in dialogue with the historical works in
the third gallery, which interrogated the relationships of monstrous themes
to the power of rulers in the dominant art historical narrative. The exhibit
itself had a monstrous quality, since it resisted traditional ways of organ-
izing historical and contemporary art, bringing together works of different
media, historical periods, and geographical origins made by canonical, estab-
lished, emerging, and student artists. Monster Marks takes its cue from Fred
Wilson’s landmark exhibit, Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical
Society in 1992. Fred Wilson mined the collections of a single museum to
expose the hierarchies and ideologies built into traditional museum displays
purporting to be both neutral and true (Corrin 1994). Monster Marks mined
the culturally significant objects gathered in the collections of a single city –
Memphis – to explore how the themes of monstrosity and the uncanny
surfacing in them might (re)shape identity and make new meanings when
considered together. Wangechi Mutu has said that ‘Every little bit of culture
 xii Sherry C. M. Lindquist

can be used to investigate almost any other bit of culture’ (Cultural Cutouts
Foreword

2015: 9:24–9:27). In dialogue with other bits of culture in the Memphis ex-
hibit and in this volume, Mutu’s collage is revealing about both the perils and
the possibilities of our monstrous imaginations.
The collage exhibited in Monster Marks is representative of Mutu’s work,
which expresses themes of violence, colonization, overconsumption, and cul-
tural annihilation, as well as human interconnectedness and resilience. Here,
as in her other early collages on paper, Mutu uses ethereal watercolour washes
to fit together body parts snipped from popular magazines. She has said that
‘there’s a kind of violence to breaking up an image – if one looks at collage
technique. Cutting is violent’ (Schoonmaker 2013: 115). And indeed, her works
frequently show wounded, dismembered beings as well as splatters that sug-
gest bodily fluids, like the bloody red tendrils dripping from the mushroom
on which the woman-Holstein hybrid is perched. The mushroom is a clue to
the being’s status and identity. For Mutu, ‘Fungus was one of those things that
played into my sense of the grotesque’; a mushroom is phallic-looking, but also
resembles a little stool, structure, or ‘a little man in a hat’ (Enright 2008). In
pondering a colony of mushrooms in her shed, she thought ‘they were almost
like a migrant culture that exists in the most decrepit parts of the city, and what
emerges are these fascinating people and interactions. They’re also in-between
… a little alien family found in the middle of these two massive kingdoms’
(Enright 2008). The mushroom, like the human/animal/cyborg it supports,
is not one thing or another, and the liminal world it evokes calls into question
the normative cultural categories defined by elite and majority populations.
It is not easy to know what to make of the arresting protagonist inhabiting
the non-place conjured up by Mutu’s uprooted fungus. The figure here is in-
fused with nervous energy, having just nimbly landed on the spongy surface.
Clipped from fashion or pornographic magazines, her composite hands-as-feet
are bent at right angles, and her long neck is arched. The tendrils on her back
seem to undulate, and her tail forms a question mark. Perhaps the artist’s de-
cision to give this being a bovine body evokes the Kenyan agricultural shows
that fascinate Mutu, fairs that feature the ‘biggest cow and the most plump
cabbage’, and which ‘have a circus freak side to them. That’s where you can see
something like a double-headed calf or a bearded woman’ (Willis 2014). The
animals in the show seem analogous to the models in fashion magazines: both
are selected for physical qualities and put on display to provide visual pleasure,
Foreword xiii

whether for the price of admission, or to sell products. Mutu’s works forces

Foreword
viewers to confront biological realities obscured by the sanitized, sexualized
staging of women’s bodies in popular culture. There are, for example, recur-
rent themes of suckling in Mutu’s works, which may be related to the melding
here of woman and cow (e.g. The Bourgeois is Banging on My Head, 2003).
Her other works bring in even more explicit imagery from anatomy books
and pornographic magazines. The in-between beings exemplified by the one
in this untitled collage are once centred and marginal, isolated and engaged,
seductive and discomfiting, too real and surreal, energized and poised, glam-
orous and abject.
Mutu has said of her use of glossy magazines, ‘I really got to vandalize the
original narrative to make something dignified, beautiful, unreal and to me
attractive about these things that kind of bothered me’ (Inside My Studio 2018,
4:14–4:27). Mutu’s figure is aware she is being looked at, which is part of the
exploitative narrative of her origins: her seductive smoky eye, plump lips, and
glittering accessories were designed for visual consumption. This is true also
of the featured engine part fused to her forehead – its polished, customized
copper surface fetishized in magazines for motorcycle enthusiasts. And yet,
this being’s hybrid nature and unfamiliar surroundings undermine the Western
consumerist narrative. The motorcycle part evokes an elegant African-style
headwrap, read as a sign of exoticism in the Eurocentric magazines she plun-
ders. As Mutu notes, they ‘portray women as perfect and idealized and often
very homogenous in the kinds of women they have’ (Inside My Studio 2018,
3:55–4:03). Mutu transforms this clichéd, photoshopped brand of glamor
into unrecognizable, no longer human, beings, like this one, who radiate an
insistent, powerful presence. These beings undercut strict gender binaries; she
describes them as ‘female-ish’ (Moos 2010, 99). She has said,

I believe our bodies are only a single part of the many dimensions of our identity and, in
some ways, the body becomes a trap in the understanding of the whole. We can invent,
transform, re-imagine ourselves through manipulating our outer appearance and, thus,
‘conquer’ adversity through our physicality; or we can become subjugated … often there
may not be a choice. (Moos 2010, 99)

Mutu identifies the human body as a battleground that can be colonized,

conquered, and subjugated, but also as a protean origin for multiple pos-
sible futures. The fiction of a normal human body serves as a foil for Mutu’s
 xiv Sherry C. M. Lindquist

enigmatic beings, just as it creates the ‘monster culture’, identified by Cohen

Foreword

and other recent theorists of monstrosity.

When we encounter Mutu’s fantastic beings in their perplexing habitats,
when we are outnumbered them as in an exhibit, or a catalogue of her work
(e.g. Schoonmaker 2013), our notions of normativity, difference, otherness,
and monstrosity must shift. Who are we in relationship to them? Mutu’s
objects create meanings in a different way when they are exhibited with the
works of other artists, as was the case with this single collage in the 2018 ex-
hibition in Memphis. It shared a gallery with artists whose works addressed
racism in myriad ways.
Visitors viewed the works on the walls through the elements of the striking
installation in the centre of the main gallery, made especially for the exhibit by
Memphis artist Le Marquee la Flora. La Flora’s sculpture, The Old Landmark,
consists of upside-down nooses that seem to rise to the ceiling of their own
volition, invoking the ghostly presence of the African-American lives cut short
by lynchings. He used lighting effects to place his work in dialogue with a series
of large-format Polaroid prints by the photographer William Christenberry,
whose Metamorphosis (4 Works), shows the horrifying transformation of a
wholesome-looking ragdoll into a
Klansman.
Christenberry had written of
these and his other Klan-themed
works that, as a white southerner,
he felt obligated to address the
atrocities resulting from white
southern culture, to ‘deal with evil’
and ‘to reveal what we might call
a strange and secret brutality, the
Ku Klux Klan’ (Ferris 2013: 188).
By lighting the nooses so that they
cast unnerving shadows between
Figure 2. Installation photo of Monster Christenberry’s disturbing images
Marks. The Art Museum of the University of
Memphis, curated by Sherry C. M. Lindquist
of another inanimate, uncanny,
(25 March–28 July 2018). Photo: Jason dreadful object, La Flora under-
Miller. Reproduced with permission. scores the culpability confessed by
Foreword xv

Christenberry’s photographs. And yet, La Flora graced these nooses with gold

Foreword
leaf, and in some cases gold-coloured nails. These details, along with the seeming
upward movement of the nooses and the work’s title after a heartening gospel
song, suggest a narrative of forgiveness and redemption. From its place in the
centre of the gallery, The Old Landmark encourages viewers to make connec-
tions among themes evident in the works on the walls: of trauma and survival,
woundedness and resilience, guilt and forgiveness. In this context, Mutu’s
collage links the experiences and aspirations of the global African diaspora it
addresses with other, specifically American horrors and hopes at a poignant
moment and place: Memphis on the
anniversary of the assassination of Dr
Martin Luther King.
The hybrid denizen of Mutu’s
stark fungal landscape shares its
postapocalyptic, Afrofuturist aes-
thetic with a painting by Memphis
artist Roger Cleaves, which was
shown next to Mutu’s collage in the
main gallery.
Cleaves’s renderings of a trauma-
tized people named ‘Forget Me Nots’
are oil paintings, not collages, but they
still look as though they have been cut
up and put back together. Barely sur-
viving in an inhospitable underwater
environment, this Forget Me Not
is under attack: stabbed by swords, Figure 3. Installation photo of Monster
bitten by a shark, weighed down by Marks featuring details of Le Marquee
balls and chains. Even though the La Flora (1993–), The Old Landmark,
Forget Me Nots belong to a much 2018 (rope, gold leaf, nails, collection
larger fictional world constructed of the artist), and William Christenberry
by Cleaves, his imagery neverthe- (1936–2016), and Metamorphosis (4
Works), 1984 (large-format Polaroid
less refers to motifs identifiable with prints, 86.36 cm x 109.22 cm, collec-
slavery and Jim Crow in our world – tion of Dr James Patterson). Photo: Jason
not only the leg irons, but also the Miller. Reproduced with permission.
 xvi Sherry C. M. Lindquist
Foreword

Figure 4. Roger Cleaves (1980–), You Can’t Drown a Shark, 2017 (oil on canvas,
collection of the artist, 122 cm x 152 cm). Photo: Jason Miller. Reproduced with
permission.
Foreword xvii

lynching victim that sprouts from a plant on a miniature island formed by

Foreword
the Forget Me Not’s hand. The ‘afroglyphic’ in the lower left corner – with
its obvious references to Egyptian writing – affirms the diasporic connection
between African-Americans and their mother continent. Side-by-side, these
works by Cleaves and Mutu reinforce each other, and together they ask their
Memphis audience to consider the issues of race and racism addressed in the
gallery with a diasporic global perspective.
Noticing such affinities can be powerful and revelatory. In the Memphis
exhibit, the Afrofuturist aesthetic of Cleaves and Mutu links the themes of
race and racism in the main gallery to those of feminism and posthumanism
on display in an ancillary gallery. There, Saya Woolfalk’s video, Chima
TEK: Hybridization Machine also presents an alter world that creates hybrid
humans.

Figure 5. Saya Woolfalk (1979–), Still from Chima TEK: Hybridization Machine,
2013 (single-channel video loop with sound by DJ Spooky). Collection of Dr James
Patterson. Reproduced with permission.

In Woolfalk’s imagined future, an industry arises to enable humans to

create designer hybrid selves by merging with plants. Their liminality is vol-
untary rather than violent and seems to celebrate a multicultural, posthuman
future. Even so, Woolfalk’s Utopia has its dark side: the Hybridization Machine
may be creating catastrophic environmental damage. In common with other
works shown in this gallery (by Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura and
others), Woolfalk’s groovy-looking video considers the promise and perils
 xviii Sherry C. M. Lindquist

involved when we, in Mutu’s words, ‘invent, transform, re-imagine ourselves’

Foreword

(Moos 2010: 99). This process can turn us into monsters for better or worse.
Like the fictional, privileged customers of Chima TEK, those who are
able to effect beneficial self-transformations, to transcend accepted norms, to
leverage the power of the monstrous for their own advantage, are most often
the wealthy and powerful. Thus, these contemporary works resonate with
the historical works featured in the exhibit. In the latter images, rulers may
incorporate fearsome monstrous characteristics to project strength, as shown
in samurai armour and images of Mayan kings morphing into hybrid jaguar
deities, but monstrous imagery may also be used to dehumanize the other.
A sixteenth-century map of Africa by Abraham Ortelius designates the site
of the legendary kingdom of Prester John, thought to rule over a land of won-
drous beasts and monstrous hybrid peoples. European conquerors hoped to
find this mythical Christian ally, to help them stake a claim to the wealth of
the continent and to subdue the Africans, whom they imagined as semi- or
non-human, hybrid monstrosities. By bringing together these disparate mani-
festations of the monstrous in art and visual culture, Monster Marks contem-
plates the power and multivalence of monsters and monstrosity in the past,
present, and hypothesized futures.
The being in Mutu’s collage is frozen in a moment in time, and we don’t
know her story. In fact, in her more recent work, Mutu ponders the future of
the traumatized, prepossessing, ‘female-ish’, characters of her early collages. It
is a question that arose for her when making ‘a film that felt like the collages
had come alive’ (The End of Eating Everything 2015, 0:40–0:43). The film was
The End of Eating Everything, in which the singer Santigold channels one of
Mutu’s collage characters presented as a ‘planetary persona’ (The End of Eating
Everything 2015, 1:49). At once strangely beautiful and repulsive, she floats in
an ominous sky devouring a flock of birds, snake-like tresses undulating behind.
Her hulking body, glittering with day-glow tumours and shiny machine
parts, is animated by human arms and spinning wheels. About this creature,
Mutu has said,

I didn’t go out of my way to make her look grotesque … My thing was that she was going
to evolve into something that was quite familiar but at the same time was obscene – ob-
scene in the sense that, you know, it’s like encountering a dirty lake or a dump, you know,
Foreword xix

Foreword
Figure 6. Wangechi Mutu (1972–), screenshot from On the End of Eating Everything,
2013 (taken from the video interview with Wangechi Mutu, On the End of Eating
Everything (Louisiana Channel, 2015)).

a big dump with garbage. Is it grotesque or is it magnificent, or is it just absolutely sad? …

I was going for something that would change her from something we could understand to
something that made absolutely no sense. (The End of Eating Everything 2015, 3:09–4:01)

Mutu’s monstrous beings, like all monsters, are not supposed to be reason-
able. They are contested. They are commandeered by one constituency and
another. They are confusing. They make us wonder. Wangechi Mutu’s refusal
to make sense of the grotesque, magnificent, obscene, hybrids – like the one
that challenges us in this early collage – is why they have the ability to un-
settle us, to make us different, to make us change how things are. To subvert.
Simon Bacon

Introduction

Introduction
Monsters. The etymological roots of ‘monsters’ illustrate how monsters are
supposed to tell us something: ‘monstrum’ and ‘monēre’ mean ‘omen’ and
‘warning’ respectively, establishing monsters as harbingers of change and
facilitating the realization of the fragility of the world we live in. Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen notes that monsters are born from very particular cultural
moments (Cohen 1996: 4) and provide something of a road map to the cul-
tures that have produced them (Cohen 1996: 3). This does not mean an in-
finite supply of newly created monsters appearing one after the other to ex-
press every new twist and turn of unravelling history, but rather monsters that
‘return in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contem-
porary social movements, or a specific determining event’ (Cohen 1996: 5).
It should come as no surprise that Cohen was talking about a particular kind
of monster when describing an eternally transforming entity: the undead –
it is worth noting that ‘undead’, although commonly understood as refer-
ring to vampires and/or zombies, is a category that can cover any entity that
continually returns, exceeds the normal in some way, and embodies a threat,
often existential, to humanity. In relation to a particular expression of the
undead, Nina Auerbach wrote that each generation gets the vampire it needs
(Auerbach 1996: 9) and Jack Halberstam, in noting the non-universalism
of a specific monster – in this case Dracula (Halberstam 1993: 335) – de-
scribed how a monster evolves, or rather carries the marks of its birth with
it into the future as it changes and mutates (Halberstam 1993: 349). ‘Birth’
here denotes the kind of ‘determining event’ that Cohen spoke of earlier and
is largely situated around a point of crisis that is often about difference or
resistance to categorization. Difference, as Cohen further notes, is centred
around culture, politics, race, economics, and sexuality, and categorization
more often involves a change in what was previously considered acceptable
or normal but equally implies terms such as recognition, misrecognition
 2 Simon Bacon

(wilfully recognized as something it’s not), or non-recognition. Much of the

Introduction

anxiety around the figure of the monster is its resistance to being categorized
or contained within current cultural parameters, thus forcing a reconfigur-
ation of some sort. Cohen sees the monster as providing a catalyst of sorts
to resolve the clash of extremes – thesis, antithesis, and eventual synthesis –
and, quoting Marjorie Garber, sees it as way of questioning binary thinking.1
Similarly, Elaine Showalter sees the monster (Dracula) as offering a third al-
ternative or more specifically a place/space outside, or beyond, normativity
(Showalter 1992: 164). The space of the monster is worth considering more
closely, but first it is worth unpacking a little of what has been said in relation
to the specific objectives of this companion.
Halberstam, Auerbach, and Cohen all mention the monsters of the nine-
teenth century – Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Count
Dracula – partly because of their importance within Western, English-language
literature, but also because they are considered seminal within the Gothic genre.
Dracula is often pinpointed. Halberstam writes of the vampire count being
‘birthed’ from the intersection of homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia,
and misogyny that typified a certain moment in the late Victorian period
in general, and the 1890s, in particular, when Bram Stoker put pen to paper.
The traces or scars Halberstam subsequently describes are those that remain
latent in all later incarnations of the count from Transylvania, or indeed fig-
ures/monsters based upon Dracula. However, Dracula was not created from
a void and it is obvious that Stoker knew of earlier works in the genre, such
as J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1874), and John Polidori’s The Vampyre
(1819). In fact, although Stoker invented some characteristics of the vampire
that were unique, most came from earlier literary or folkloric sources. The
vampire panic of the early 1700s is a case in point: reports of people returning
from the grave to feed on the living spread from the Eastern outposts of civ-
ilized Europe into the newspapers and salons of London, Paris and Vienna
and arguably created the popular awareness that Byron (‘The Gaiour’ 1813),
Coleridge (‘Christabel’ 1797) and even Polidori would respond to. This was
before popular iterations such as Varney the Vampire (Prest and/or Rhymer,
1845–7), and Carmilla (Le Fanu, 1872) brought further scar tissue with them.

1 Garber 1992: 11.

Introduction 3

Count Dracula, then, was already an evolving monster, a point upon a trajec-

Introduction
tory that brought the fears of outsiders, ignorance, and the old world with it
before adding the specific points of crisis that came with the end of the nine-
teenth century in Victorian England.
It is important to note that in 1897 the vampire did not just take the form
of a bisexual, blood-sucking immigrant from Eastern Europe. In the same
year as Dracula was published, Florence Marryat, in Blood of the Vampire,
saw her vampire as a young girl travelling to Europe from the Caribbean, but
as a daughter of miscegenation she drains the life energy out of all those she
loves, and H. G. Wells, in War of the Worlds,2 saw vampires as creatures from
Mars that were dependent upon machinery and driven by a need to consume
the Earth and human blood to survive. Unsurprisingly all these different rep-
resentations contain many of the same points of crisis – the fear of reverse
colonialism, miscegenation, and cultural degeneration – yet the differences
in representations illustrate how certain characteristics of monsters become
foregrounded whilst others regress, with the monsters’ subsequent popularity
or obscurity revealing how, for parts of a society, certain ‘scars’ remain fresh
and raw, whereas others heal and become barely noticeable.
Obviously the lasting popularity of a text like Dracula points to an ongoing
resonance not only within the cultural moment in which it coalesced – the
word ‘coalesce’ most aptly suggests the conglomeration of anxieties that come
together at a moment in time to produce a specific monster – but also its
ongoing relevance, or stickiness, within popular culture as an ever-changing
phenomena. Something similar could be said about War of the Worlds, except
that the literal vampirism of Wells’ original is downplayed in favour of the
metaphorical vampire of colonial consumerism, which is brought into sharper
focus. Count Dracula rather interestingly shows how a monster can remain
quite similar in its appearance over time yet represent very different things to
different generations. That said, it is worth noting that various aspects have been
changed during that evolution with the result that the Transylvanian count
with bushy eyebrows and moustache in Stoker’s late Victorian work changed
into the evening dress-wearing, debonair, aristocrat from Europe with the

2 Whilst the novel of War of the Worlds was published in 1898, it was first serialized the
year before.
 4 Simon Bacon

distinctive accent by the 1930s in America – a monster created to encourage

Introduction

American isolationism, showing that even sexy, mysterious Europeans were

dangerous and should be kept over there and not over here. By the twenty-first
century, this particular monster can be seen to have fragmented into a myriad
of monstrous shards that include teenaged sparkly boys who promote abusive
relationships and suave businessmen who will do anything to recapture the
love of their eternal soulmate.3 Count Dracula is a useful example, especially
for an author such as myself who researches such things, but the same is true
for a range of well-known monsters, such as werewolves, zombies, Satan, Phi
Krasue (from Thailand), or Baba Yaga (from Russia), all of which will be
discussed in this companion. In this sense, as Cohen also notes, all monsters
will go away, but more often than not they return. The problems, or crises,
that produced them are rarely solved (resolved) for good and inevitably re-
emerge, slightly changed, at a later date. This throws up two further points
that require looking at in this introduction as they are important aspects of
this companion: space and meaning (interpretation).
Space, or place, with the latter intimating a more focused area of inter-
action, is vital not just in relation to the form of the monster, but also to the
levels of disturbance it creates. As described above, the monster is created by,
and in, a specific cultural moment but tends to interact on a much more in-
timate scale. So, although all monsters are arguably culturally produced, their
actual space of operations can range from the most intimate to the societal
or beyond. This can be seen in the scale of monster activity from the child-
hood monster under the bed – an invasion of an especially vulnerable and
intimate place – to the Godzilla that can destroy cities and the societies con-
nected to them. Of course, monsters often act within multiple areas at once;
an interesting example of this can be seen in the film It Follows (Mitchell,
2014). The monster in this film, although focused on the most intimate of
places, sexual contact, acts on a cultural, almost global, level, as the monster
is able to follow its chosen victim anywhere – the victim is chosen by the pre-
vious victim, who passes their curse on before the monster can kill them. This
growing chain of (potential) victims – once the monster kills one, the curse

3 Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008), and Jonathan Rhys
Meyers’ count in Dracula (Haddon, 2013–14).
Introduction 5

reverts back to the one who passed it on – could, in theory, include hundreds of

Introduction
people, yet the monster is amazingly individual in that only the cursed person
can see it. Although those around the victim can see the physical effects of
the monster at work – things being knocked over, etc. – to all purposes, it is
invisible. As Jeffrey Weinstock notes, it can become anyone or anything; it is
literally everywhere at once (Weinstock 2017: x).
Just as importantly, the monster from It Follows invades the mind of the
victim, so it is as much a product of an individual’s consciousness as it is of
the culture around them – indeed, even more so, given that society is largely
unaware of the monster in its midst. This departs from the view of Marina
Levina and Diem-My T. Bui, who see the current age as inherently monstrous
and believe that the pace of change in contemporary life and its associated
technologies constantly creates new and continually changing monsters. It
Follows suggests that monsters are actually more relative in their nature: what
is an existential threat to one individual is just a plastic table and chairs being
knocked over for those around them. This, of course, is equally true on a
larger scale: what one culture calls a monster is seen as funny or ridiculous by
another – Chinese green, hairy, and hopping vampires being a case in point.4
With that in mind, it can be seen that monsters, or at least aspects of them,
have certain effects in particular spaces, be they private or public, which can
be global, societal, or limited to a city/town, the home and/or the individual.
Count Dracula is again a useful example here as he has provoked very dif-
ferent responses to his monstrousness in different spaces of interaction. On
one level, he is configured as a threat from outside, endangering England and
the British Empire on an ideological level, though he also causes very real
fear and panic in the countryside around his lair, corrupting the sanctity and
the refuge of hearth and home, while eliciting deep sexual responses from his
victims.5 In a sense, this also addresses aspects of the notion of living in times
of monstrosity as, not unlike Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero with a thousand faces’,
the same monster will show differing versions of itself to those looking at it,
even within the same historical moment.

4 Unless one has seen Rigor Mortis (Mak, 2013).

5 This should be qualified as not all the count’s victims receive the same level of personal
attention.
 6 Simon Bacon

This leaves the interpretation or meaning of monsters. Halberstam calls

Introduction

them ‘meaning machines’; as noted above, this says as much about us as

humans – ‘what it means to be human, our relations to one another, and to
the world around us, [and] our conception of our place in the greater scheme
of things’ (Weinstock 2017: x) – as it does about the monsters themselves. By
and large, what the construction of the monsters says about humanity can be
interpreted on a psychoanalytical level as transgressive acts and/or desires that
are repressed. On a social level, this conforms more to Mary Douglas’ idea of
‘Purity and Danger’ (1966) and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject (1980).
Douglas, in particular, with extensive nods to Michel Foucault, sees the idea
of social taboo as a way for society to keep itself ‘pure’ from outsiders and
controlling, unruly insiders. Kristeva envisions a similar outcome through a
more personal, psychoanalytical approach. Of course, much of this utilizes
a theoretical sleight of hand that automatically equates the cultural with the
individual consciousness, something even Sigmund Freud was wary of until
Moses and Monotheism (1939). Consequently, most readings of monsters per-
form a curious act of balancing things that transgress the ideological mores of a
given culture and the individual psychic responses to them, as well as personal
fears, phobias and prejudices. Arguably, then, the effectiveness of the mon-
ster is predicated on how closely the societal and the individual mesh, so that
the ‘best’ monsters become self-regulating, which sees the separate members
of society reinforce the points of abjection that are ideologically required to
monsterize the unwanted and transgressive (Foucault 2008).
Necessarily, and indeed appropriately, some monsters will foreground
particular interpretations or readings for the times within which they appear,
many of which will be touched on in this collection. Of note is the idea that a
cultural or national consciousness has a memory, which is assumed to work in
a very similar way to that of an individual, so that the (re)appearance of mon-
sters connects to the memories of any of their earlier manifestations in that
culture/nation – obviously cultural ‘memory’ is temporally longer than the
memory of individual humans. These memories or echoes of previous mani-
festations recall Halberstam’s idea of traces, which could further be equated
with a sense of an undead memory that sees the monster rise again from the
cultural subconscious – the grave, as such – bearing the scars and traces of its
earlier self in each new resurrected form.
Introduction 7

Whilst discussing monsters through a psychoanalytical lens, it is worth

Introduction
touching on what might be termed our undead desire for them, for even
though we do our best to repress or remove them from our conscious mind –
the real world – without any kind of resolution, synthesis, or reparation, they
will eventually destroy us and what we might become. Desire, here, does not
automatically imply a sexual element, although sexual transgression is often
present within the body of the monster, but it certainly implies an irresistible
pull towards that which is made abject and monstrous. Kristen Wright talks
of the tension between disgust and desire in relation to the monster and how
something that purposely causes such extreme emotions does not necessarily
hold them as Manichaean opposites, but rather as equal points of excess that
can switch or bleed into each other (Wright 2018: vii). Ernest Jones has an
interesting take on this idea. A relatively early exponent of Freudian theory
on the supernatural and ‘nightmares’, he notes, in relation to vampires and
revenants, that only those who are loved are brought back from death ( Jones
1951: 104–9), that it is our desire for monsters that brings them back from
the grave (the subconscious). Vampires are an obvious case in point, but it
does suggest a not unsurprising correlation between sex and death (the death
drive, in particular, at least symbolically) and the desire to recreate (the syn-
thesis of thesis and antithesis) society and ourselves anew. Consequently, this
companion, whilst noting the different individual and cultural spaces that
the monster operates in, will conclude with examples of human/monster be-
coming, illustrating ways in which humanity (culture) evolves into something
other than what it is now.

Monsters, Traces, and Portents

The companion itself will be comprised of twenty-six original essays,

including a Foreword, ‘Culture’s Monsters’, by Sherry C. M. Lindquist to
set the scene for what follows and an Afterword, ‘Becoming Monster and
the Monster Becoming’, by Patricia McCormack, which, whilst bring the
thematic of the volume to a conclusion, also suggests what is to come in
 8 Simon Bacon

the ongoing evolution of our (humanity’s) monsters. The remaining essays

Introduction

are divided into five thematic parts, in an inside-to-outside trajectory, ex-

ploring the various places/spaces that we as humans inhabit and the kinds of
monsters we have created to express our ongoing relationships and our anx-
ieties about them. The five parts, ‘Home’, ‘Cultural Intersections’, ‘Society’,
‘Gender’, and ‘Futures’, each feature a contemporary or recent example of a
monster, which is then used as a lens through which to examine the historical
evolution of that manifestation and the individual and/or cultural anxieties
that produced it. ‘Home’ centres on the most intimate of places: places we
consider as home in some way, which can include our own mental space,
our home and relationships, and our ‘home’ society/nation and those that
are seen to endanger it. Accordingly, the first chapter by Angela M. Smith,
on ‘Monsters of Mental Illness’, looks at madness in the film The Babadook
(Kent, 2014) and the kinds of monsters that are created to express fears re-
garding the state of madness itself, as well as those deemed to suffer from
it. Simon Bacon looks at ‘Domestic Monsters’ and specifically abusive re-
lationships through the main character in The Invisible Man (Whannell,
2020), which describes the processes of violence and gaslighting that fea-
ture in such situations. Thereafter, Phil Fitzsimmons considers ‘Monsters of
Abuse’ in The Nightingale (Kent, 2018), in which both the home and societal
space are invaded by colonial monsters. The last piece in Part I, by Agnieszka
Kotwasińka, concerning ‘Monstrous Outsiders’, is a more general, and top-
ical, invasion of the space of the ‘home’ nation, as seen in the film The Lure
(Smoczyńska, 2015) through the body of the mythical immigrant from the
sea, the mermaid.
Part II, ‘Society’, remains in what can be considered as the space of the
‘home’ nation and looks at the ways in which monsters are used as an ideo-
logical tool or to represent certain focus points of anxiety within society. It
begins with John Edgar Browning’s chapter on ‘Teaching the Monster’, in
which the Slasher film provides an educational framework for examining what
lies behind the mask of contemporary ideology. The next chapter, by Lauren
Rosewarne, on ‘Monsters of Cyberspace’, looks at a related area of interaction,
that of cyberspace and a recent manifestation of the Monster, the Cyberbully,
as portrayed in the eponymous film, Cyberbully (Binamé, 2011). Following this,
Anthony Curtis Adler considers a further related area of social media and the
Introduction 9

modern manifestation of ‘The Celebrity Monster’, as exemplified in the figure

Introduction
of Lady Gaga (1986–present), who is especially apt as she uses the notion of
‘the monster’ as part of her celebrity status. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas takes
the use of social media and popular culture even further in the creation and
contagion of ‘Monsters of Urban Legend’, where unreality becomes real, even
deadly, as seen in the figure of the Slit-Mouthed Woman in Carved (Shiraishi,
2007). The last chapter in Part II looks at the deadliest of social realities, which
becomes almost imaginary in its monstrosity, as explored by W. Scott Poole
in Melmoth (Perry 2018).
Part III stays with the idea of the ‘home’ nation, but in different cultural
settings. The chapters in this part illustrate how other cultures have created and
evolved their own monsters, though often in ways that have become transcul-
tural or have evolved in resistance to, or in line with, colonial appropriation.
Benjamin Baumann considers a resolutely ‘Thai Monster’ in the figure of Phi
Krasue, as seen in the film Inhuman Kiss (Mongkolsiri, 2019), a monster that
has a long history in its homeland but rarely travels. Inés Ordiz takes the figure
of La Llorona, a ‘Mexican monster’ that is getting more and more attention
in a transcultural sense and is evolving from straightforward monstrosity to a
symbol of female agency. Gail de Vos shifts to a more European location and
considers a figure, Baba Yaga, a ‘Russian Momster’, that also has a wider in-
fluence, as evidenced by its appropriation in Hellboy (Mignola, 1997–2004).
Transculturalism is replaced with colonial appropriation in Partha Mitter’s
chapter on ‘Monsters of Colonialism’, in which Mitter considers the con-
tinual misrecognition and misuse of the Indian deity Deumo since the time
of early European adventurers up to the present, as seen in the relatively recent
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984). Yasmine Musharbash
brings this part to a close with an example of colonial resistance, as seen in
the ‘Aboriginal Monsters’ of the Hairies in the television series Cleverman
(Griffen, 2016–17).
Part IV turns to more existential concerns, which, although expressed
within a particular cultural setting, are global in character. Non-normative
gender positions have often manifested within the body of the monster and
never more so than in times when gender is considered an individual choice
rather than an ideological, patriarchal given. Appropriately then, the first essay
on ‘Satan’ by Eddie Falvey looks at the Christian world’s Big Bad through
 10 Simon Bacon

the lens of The Witch (Eggers, 2015), which is portrayed as inherently male
Introduction

and bestial. The problematics of unquestioned male dominance are further

explored in a chapter on ‘Monsters of Masculinity’, in which Emily Brick
considers AHS Apocalypse (Murphy and Falchuk, 2011–present) and male
resistance to sexual equality and religious ignition in the twenty-first century.
Craig Ian Mann shifts the perspective to feminine resistance in his chapter
on ‘Monsters of Femininity’, which considers When Animals Dream (Arnby,
2014), in which the she-wolf represents a necessarily bloody, hairy manifest-
ation of the historical monsterization of femininity. Daniel Sheppard queers
these perspectives to focus on a monster that refuses to accept or conform to
simplistic binary positions whilst demanding the right to sexual expression.
Murray Leeder concludes the section by looking at a figure beyond or outside
of gender, yet oddly suggestive of many, if not all, available positions, as seen
in the skeleton in his chapter on ‘The Monster of Death’, which uses Game
of Thrones as a lens through which to consider its subject (Benioff, 2011–19).
The final part explores what might be thought of as twenty-first-century or
future monsters. Highlighting manifestations of humanity’s current position
in the world in terms of science, ecology and human evolution, and how the
monsters of today reveal the hopes and fears of tomorrow and even ask the
question of whether there will be a tomorrow. It begins with Leah Richards’
consideration of ‘Monsters of Reproduction’ and the economics of science and
identity, as seen in the series Orphan Black (Manson and Fawcett, 2013–2017).
The next chapter shifts to a related topic: that of disease and contagion, an
ongoing fear in an increasingly connected world. Dahlia Schweitzer considers
‘Monsters of Contagion’, as represented in The Strain (del Toro and Hogan,
2014–17), configuring both biological and ideological viruses. Contagion can
also be read through an ecological lens. The relationship between humanity and
the planet is picked up on by Carl H. Sederholm in his chapter on ‘Monsters
of the Anthropocene’, which considers the album Megalohydrothalassophobia
(Abhorrence, 2018), in which soundscapes communicate the insignificance of
mankind in the larger order. Whilst humanity is often subsidiary to the future
of the earth, Gerry Canavan begins to describe ways forward in his chapter on
‘Monsters of Hybridity’, in which contamination and miscegenation, as seen
in District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009), offer paths towards human evolution and
becoming. Elana Gomel concludes the section with a chapter on ‘Posthuman
Introduction 11

Monsters’, in which the monsters of the future combine both fauna and flora

Introduction
and humanity is rejoined to the planet in an ongoing symbiotic union, as in
The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey 2014). The companion ends with Patricia
McCormack’s discussion of the series Hannibal (Fuller, 2013–15), in which the
human is recognized as its own monstrous self, but in which the aestheticized
stuff of humanity is an ongoing momento mori to its beautiful insignificance.
In this world the eternal traces of our monsters will be the only monument
to our passing.
Part I

Home
Angela M. Smith

Madness: The Babadook (Kent, 2014)

Monsters of Mental Illness

Gothic and horror have long conflated madness with monstrosity, evil, and
murderous violence. From the villainous Manfred and his ‘tempest of mind’
in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), to the ‘lunatic’ Bertha
Mason of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), to perpetual asylum escapee
Michael Myers in the Halloween films (1978–2018) and The Beast in Split
(dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2016), horror’s mad monsters offer sensational-
istic portraits of mental illness as a demonic or pathological threat to nor-
malcy (Zimmerman 2003, Phillips 2012, Gupta 2017, Hovitz 2017). But
the genre also aligns viewers with sympathetic mad victims who experience
trauma and distress due to forces outside their control. Such representation
can exceed understandings of mental illness as a pathology located only in
certain devalued bodyminds, vividly rendering mental illness as a real and
painful experience common to human experience.1
A recent example is Jennifer Kent’s Australian horror film The Babadook
(2014). Through its mad monster and sympathetic mad victim, the film in-
vokes shifting historical and cultural views of psychological disturbance: as
demonic possession, innate and visible deviance, and socially shaped experi-
ence. In combining these perspectives, The Babadook renders as monsters not
its mad characters but the stigma and isolation that intensifies their pain. It
thus engages principles of disability studies and mad studies that recast os-
tensible ‘defects’ in terms of human variation while emphasizing the harms of
systemic oppression and exclusion.2
The Babadook initially positions viewers in a realist mode, seeming to
associate the beliefs of childhood, folklore, and superstition with madness.

1 ‘Bodymind’. See Price 2011: 240.

2 On mad studies, see Price 2011, LeFrançois and Menzies 2013, LeFrançois et al. 2016,
Russo and Sweeney 2016, and Aho et al. 2017.
 16 Angela M. Smith

The film follows Amelia (Essie Davis), whose husband, Oskar (Benjamin
Monsters of Mental Illness

Winspear), was killed in a car accident as they drove to the hospital for their
son’s birth. Amelia’s high-strung 6-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman)
discovers in his room a handmade children’s pop-up book entitled Mister
Babadook, which promises, ‘If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, You can’t get rid
of the Babadook’. The Babadook thus appears as a folkloric figure meant to
frighten children and govern their behaviour: his name echoes that of the
English/American ‘boogeyman’, Italian ‘Babau’, and Russian ‘Babayka’ (see
Warner 1999: 42–3, Bane 2016: 50, 65, 327) and that of the Big Bad Wolf, also
glimpsed in Sam’s book The Three Little Pigs. Sam becomes obsessed with the
Babadook: a charcoal-sketched figure with black top hat and cloak, shaggy
hair, wild eyes, gaping mouth, and pointed fingers.
He builds weapons to fight the monster and blames him for shards of
glass in soup and a defaced photo of his parents. When he ‘sees’ the Babadook,
he shrieks himself into a febrile seizure. Despairing, Amelia begs a doctor
to prescribe her son sedatives until he can visit a psychiatrist. Sam’s belief in
monsters is marked as aberrant, even for a child, and a matter for medical
intervention: Amelia’s sister declares, ‘It’s not normal for a kid to carry on
with this rubbish’.
The film thus reflects a contemporary worldview in which apparently
irrational beliefs, exemplified by Sam’s hallucinations or paranoia, are best
understood as pathologies requiring medical treatment. But as Ernst Jentsch
and Sigmund Freud point out in their
studies of the uncanny, our ostensibly ra-
tional selves, especially when confronted
by ‘the articulations of most mental and
many nervous illnesses’, remain haunted
by superstitious understandings of the
world and our own psyches ( Jentsch
1906: 225, Freud 1919: 243).
As The Babadook proceeds, it ex-
ploits this psychological uncertainty,
undermining Amelia’s and viewers’ dis-
Figure 7. The Babadook. The
Babadook, directed by Jennifer Kent belief in the supernatural. The monster
(Entertainment One, 2014). becomes audible, creaking and knocking
Madness 17

around the house. His book mysteriously returns from the trash, now with

Monsters of Mental Illness

gruesome images of Amelia killing her dog, Samuel, and herself. Eventually, the
Babadook becomes visible to Amelia and viewers. He lurks in the neighbour’s
living room, a pale-faced man with blackened lips and dark hat and overcoat,
and later takes the form of a large black shape that skitters across the bedroom
ceiling before lurching downward into Amelia’s open mouth.
His omnipresence is accentuated by a frequent background buzzing
and chittering that occasionally rises to a screeching volume, along with
the startling rasping shriek of his own name: ‘Ba-ba-Dook-Dook-DOOK’!
Amelia’s eventual acceptance of the monster’s reality corresponds to her
growing recognition of her own psychological distress and debility; in the
same way, viewers’ acceptance of the Babadook’s on-screen reality aligns
with their sympathetic belief in the reality and difficulty of Amelia’s mental
illness. In this way, the film functions like the speculative fictions considered
by disability scholar Sami Schalk, ‘representing a variety of differing realities’
to ‘critique the denial of individual experiences of reality without suggesting
that mental disability is not real and without denying that different experi-
ences of reality can be painful, frightening, or otherwise difficult’ (Schalk
2018: 67).
Before proffering a contemporary view of mental illness, however, The
Babadook invokes older understandings of madness. In the monster’s plunge
into Amelia, the film foregrounds ancient and medieval concepts of demonic
possession and humoral imbalance. As Sander Gilman explains, ‘maniacs’ were
thought to suffer ‘an excess of black bile’ that signalled the ‘infiltration of the
evils of the world and the flesh into the
purity of the soul’ and was ‘perceived as
the possession of the individual by actual
demons’. Treatment required exorcism, as
in early visual depictions where ‘the pos-
sessed is portrayed with arms askew, head
tilted back, the demon fleeing from his
open mouth’ (Gilman 1982: 21–2). The
Babadook invokes these tropes. Once ‘in- Figure 8. The Babadook. The
habited’ by the monster, Amelia exhibits Babadook, directed by Jennifer Kent
seizures, sleepwalking, increased strength, (Entertainment One, 2014).
 18 Angela M. Smith

levitation. She insults and threatens her son and strangles the family dog. Sam
Monsters of Mental Illness

ties his mother up and exhorts her to ‘get it out’! Her body contorts, she tries to
strangle Sam, and her head tosses back and forth at superhuman speed before
she vomits out a pool of black liquid. The Babadook thus recalls the assertion
by The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) of the reality of supernatural possession in a
modern and secular age, but also marks the enduring potency of Gothic and
supernatural horror as modes of representing madness.
The film also recognizes the displacement of such medieval notions of
madness by the Victorian era’s more medicalized views. The Babadook’s appear-
ance specifically invokes nineteenth-century efforts to taxonomize madness
in ‘deviant’ facial or physical forms. In 1806, for instance, Scottish physician
Charles Bell described the physiognomy of the ‘outrageous maniac’ as ‘strong
and muscular’, ‘his features sharp; his eye sunk’, ‘his hair sooty, black, stiff, and
bushy’, and ‘his colour … a pale sickly yellow’, while his ‘Burning eyen [eyes]…
stared full wide’ (Gilman 1982: 90). This view of madness, as discernible path-
ology in singular and defective bodies, resurfaces in the Babadook’s tall form,
dark-rimmed or ‘sunk’ eyes, bristling hair, ‘wide’ eyes, and ‘pale sickly’ skin. His
top hat and coat – which at one point drop emptily down the chimney into
Amelia’s bedroom – also link him to the hat- and cape-wearing mad monsters
of Victorian Gothic texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
The Babadook thus participates in a Victorian medical and Gothic trad-
ition that consolidates horror and madness in a monstrous and threatening
non-normative figure. His staring and dark-ringed eyes, wild hair, and fixed
facial expressions mimic early horror-film monsters in The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (Wiene, 1920); the Jekyll and Hyde adaptations of Robertson
(1920), Mamoulian (1932), and Fleming (1941); Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922);
The Phantom of the Opera ( Julian, 1925), glimpsed on Amelia’s TV in The
Babadook; Tod Browning’s London after Midnight (1927); The Man Who
Laughs (1928); and Browning’s Dracula (1931). These movies employ mad-
ness as a monstrous spectacle that shocks and thrills viewers. They do so
via racist iconographies: anti-Semitic motifs of beaked noses and long,
grasping fingers inform Nosferatu’s Count Orlok, Barrymore’s Hyde, and,
arguably, the Babadook, while the darkened skin and broadened nose of
Madness 19

Fredric March’s Hyde in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suggest

Monsters of Mental Illness

anti-Black stereotypes.3 They also perpetuate ableism and sanism, insofar
as these characters’ seizures, collapses, extreme or deficient emotional ex-
pressions, sickliness, and/or acts of violence confirm physical and psycho-
logical disability as threatening deviance (Smith 2011). These characteriza-
tions persist in contemporary film, absorbing notions of ‘psychopathy’ and
‘psycho killers’, to generate mad monsters such as Norman Bates, Michael
Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Hannibal Lecter, and the Beast in
M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016).
At the same time, Gothic representations of mad monstrosity persistently
undercut medical efforts to explain and contain madness in singular diseased
bodyminds. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) onward, horror texts
often present scientists and doctors as themselves mad, indicting medical fig-
ures for creating the boogeyman of the mad monster, asserting the prevalence
of madness, and depicting mental illness as profoundly influenced by social
context: Stevenson’s Hyde, for example, can be read as a product of and scape-
goat for a repressively heteronormative society.4
The Babadook thus constitutes a culturally familiar icon of monstrous
madness that registers the uncanniness of our opaque psyches and the disab-
ling social structures that intensify suffering due to illness or disorder. In par-
ticular, he powerfully manifests for viewers Amelia’s unresolved trauma and
grief, signalled also by the film’s opening nightmare, in which Amelia relives
the car accident that killed her husband. Because Amelia has been unable to
confront and process her loss, Samuel never gets to celebrate his birthday,
Oskar’s things remain locked in the basement, and Amelia lives in a twilight
state signified by the house’s dusty blues and greys and her exhausted affect.
Amelia’s mental distress is manifested in part by her wide-eyed spectatorship
of silent supernatural films, including scenes from George Meliès’ The Magic
Book (1901) and The Infernal Cake-Walk (1903) into which the Babadook
suddenly inserts himself.

3 For readings of the racial dynamics of Gothic and horror monsters see, for instance,
Halberstam 1995, Wexman 1988, Young 2008, and Means Coleman 2011.
4 For queer readings of Stevenson’s novel see, for instance, Showalter 1990, Halberstam
1995, and Sanna 2012.
 20 Angela M. Smith

These demonic spectacles link the

Monsters of Mental Illness

Babadook’s appearance to Amelia’s dis-

sociative experiences; indeed, the film
suggests not only that she put the glass in
the soup and defaced the photo, but also
that she created the Babadook book, since
she mentions her earlier life as a writer
of ‘kids’ stuff ’. Accordingly, viewers have Figure 9. Expressionistic monster. The
consistently interpreted Amelia’s behav- Babadook, directed Jennifer Kent
iour in relation to conditions such as de- (Entertainment One, 2014).
pression, PTSD, and traumatic bereave-
ment (Ingham 2015, Jacobsen 2016, Riggs 2018).
As the creator of the Babadook book, Amelia is aligned with another
tradition in Gothic madness: that of the woman author whose psychological
distress is represented in relation to traumatic experiences and oppressive
patriarchal structures. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, for instance,
Mary Shelley depicts both her book and its monster, her ‘hideous progeny’,
as reworkings of her mother’s post-partum death and her own experiences of
pregnancy- and child-loss. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892) compellingly depicts not only post-partum depression but also the
harms of a patriarchal ‘cure’ that suppresses female expression and creativity.
Critics have read such stories as entries in a powerful ‘female Gothic’ tradition,
generating feminist readings that interpret ‘mad’ behaviours as acts of social
and gendered resistance (Moers 1974, Gilbert and Gubar 1979, Creed 1993,
Smith and Wallace 2004, Wehler 2010, Kungl 2010).
The Babadook, a female-authored and -directed film, thus acknowledges
the gendered social structures that constrain women’s grappling with distress
and loss. Amelia is unable to grieve her husband’s death with what Jennifer
M. Poole and Jennifer Ward term a ‘good grief ’ that is ‘quiet, tame, dry, and
controlled’ (Poole and Ward 2013: 95), focused on ‘moving forward, progressing
through, and returning to a state of normalcy and productivity’ (Poole and
Ward 2013: 97). She is repeatedly castigated, disbelieved, or dismissed: by her
sister, her son’s principal and teacher, a doctor, an angry stranger, and social
workers. Lacking supportive spaces in which to explore her ‘mad grief ’, Amelia
creates Mister Babadook, a tale of rage and violence so inadmissible she keeps
Madness 21

her authorship secret even from herself, while nonetheless undertaking ‘a re-

Monsters of Mental Illness

sistant practice that allows, speaks, names, affords, welcomes, and stories the
subjugated sense of loss that comes to us all’ (Poole and Ward 2013: 95).
The book’s production enables Amelia to confront her trauma. Once
exorcized, the Babadook throws Samuel against a wall and then appears as
Amelia’s husband, compelling her to re-live the fatal accident. Left sobbing and
groaning, Amelia manages to articulate a protective maternal rage, screaming,
‘If you touch my son again, I’ll fucking kill you’! The Babadook rises to mon-
strous size, caped arms raised like a giant bat, but collapses, moaning, into a
pile of clothes, before ricocheting downstairs and into the basement, where
Amelia locks him in. In the film’s concluding scenes, Amelia feeds the Babadook
worms from her garden. Now an invisible presence, he looms frighteningly over
her before her reassurance – ‘It’s all right. It’s all right’ – returns him whim-
pering to the shadows. Out in the garden’s sunshine, Amelia reports to Sam
that the creature was ‘quiet today’. Sam performs a magic trick that appears
real, summoning an actual dove, and Amelia contentedly embraces her son.

Figure 10. Exorcized of the monster. The Babadook, directed by Jennifer Kent
(Entertainment One, 2014).

In this concluding sequence, The Babadook makes several claims about

mental illness that coincide with mad studies approaches. First, it centres the
perspective of those with mental illness and insists on the reality of their ex-
perience without eliding its horrific and painful aspects, vividly impressed on
viewers by the Babadook’s monstrous attacks. Second, the film rejects stig-
matization, isolation, or exclusion as modes of ‘treating’ mental illness and
 22 Angela M. Smith

emphasizes the inadequacy of existing medical and social supports for Amelia
Monsters of Mental Illness

and Sam’s psychological needs. Third, The Babadook presents interpersonal love
and connection as necessary sustenance for those in mental distress. The film
particularly embraces a mad, queer, and/or ‘crip’ family constituted not only
of Amelia, Sam, and the Babadook but also their supportive elderly, disabled
neighbour Mrs Roach, whose name, referencing the cockroaches Amelia hal-
lucinates, signals the integration, rather than expulsion, of madness.5 Fourth,
the film affirms the commonplaceness of mental illness and the possibility of
pragmatic adaptation to it. The conclusion particularly glimpses mental illness
as what Gordon Warme calls ‘an expression of ordinary humanity’ and ‘a social
practice’; it models learning to ‘live with unsteadiness and uncertainty’ while
‘coming up with new and imaginative responses to human suffering’ (Warme
2013: 213). Sam’s act of magical creation constitutes such a response, reminding
viewers that top hats and capes are also the costume of stage magicians, and
that, as affirmed in Sam’s magical mantra, life is both ‘treacherous’ and ‘won-
drous’. Finally, in keeping with the ‘female Gothic’ tradition, The Babadook
celebrates horror as a genre wherein female rage, madness, artistry, and abjec-
tion can find expression.

5 On ‘crip’ as a defiant reclamation of a stigmatizing term, see Sandahl 2003 and

McRuer 2006.
Simon Bacon

Domestic Abuse: The Invisible Man

Domestic Monsters
(Whannell, 2020)

The Invisible Man is not a character that is necessarily connected to the do-
mestic space and yet, as this chapter explores, it is within intimate spaces that
his ‘power’ has its most physically and emotionally violent repercussions.
This chapter will look at how the changing representations of his invisibility
on screen do not so much hide the responsibility for his actions from the
world around him, but rather, as shown in The Invisible Man (Whannell,
2020), increasingly see him as a mirror reflecting the acceptance of violence
and abuse in the society around him. Consequently, the chapter will not
show the Invisible Man as a brilliant, if dangerously unstable, scientist, but
will rather cast him as the abusive, domestic monster he has always been.1
Invisibility is not uncommon in Western mythology, with objects such as
caps (the Helm of Hades),2 or capes (King Arthur’s ‘Mantle of Invisibility’)3
being able to bestow the power on their respective wearers. H. G. Wells’ story
of The Invisible Man (1896) uses the mythological tale of the Ring of Gyges,
as retold in Plato’s Republic, which made its wearer invisible. In that tale a
shepherd finds the ring and effectively invades the home of the King, bed-
ding/raping the Queen, then killing the monarch himself. Plato used the
story to warn against the dangers of giving in to one’s appetites, but he also
intimated that the site of the greatest danger in regard to the Invisible Man is
the domestic one. Part of the Invisible Man’s power is being able to escape the
regulating gaze of society, which in Plato’s and Wells’ hands allows a freedom
from accountability that can only end in madness. However, both Plato and
Wells only saw this freedom in relation to wider society, never as a tool of

1 Many thanks to Craig Ian Mann for coming up with the idea for this article.
2 See Hansen 2004.
3 In ‘Chulwch ac Owen’ [Chulwch and Owen], c. 1100.
 24 Simon Bacon

systematic and destructive abuse within the domestic sphere. Subsequent in-
Domestic Monsters

terpretations of Wells’ story, as discussed below, have begun to address this

discrepancy, shifting the focus of the story away from that which we cannot
see and on to the bruises, cuts, and emotional trauma that the Invisible Man
leaves in his wake.
Wells’ novel centres on a brilliant scientist, Griffin, who becomes in-
creasingly unhinged as the realization of the power he now commands in
being invisible affects his mental state. He rapidly transitions from scaring his
landlady to announcing a ‘Reign of Terror’ across Britain. Whilst his threat
is constructed as one aimed at wider society, outside in the world he is at his
most vulnerable – he is naked, open to the weather, leaves tracks and, unsur-
prisingly, it is there that he is eventually killed. In contrast, his monstrosity is
at its most powerful indoors. In enclosed spaces his presence is everywhere,
violence can explode from any place, or any direction. His invisibility makes
him seem virtually omnipresent even when he is no longer there. The 1933
film by James Whale follows the novel with Dr Jack Griffin (Claude Rains)
shown as a largely malevolent figure filling domestic spaces with a predomin-
antly malignant presence.

Figure 11. The Invisible Man’s violent energy barely contained by his bandages. The
Invisible Man, directed by James Whale (Universal Pictures, 1933).
Other documents randomly have
different content
shelves. A thrill of excitement passed through me from head to foot
when my hand rested on an apple.
I ate the apple there and then, kneeling upright, my toes bent
under me. I ate another and another. Feeling cautiously, I discovered
a tin box in which there were bread and cake. I ate of both. Getting
softly on my feet, I groped for other things, which proved in the
main to be no more than tea, coffee, spices, and starch. Then my
fingers ran over a strawlike surface, and I knew I had hold of a
demijohn.
Smell told me that it contained sherry, and such knowledge of
housekeeping as I possessed suggested that it was cooking-sherry. I
took a long swig of it. Two long swigs were enough. It burnt me,
and yet it braced me. With the food I had eaten I felt literally like a
giant refreshed with wine.
It occurred to me that this was a point at which I might draw
back. But the spell of the unknown was upon me, and I determined
to go at least a little farther. Very, very stealthily I opened the door.
I was not in a kitchen, as I expected to find myself, but in a
servants’ dining-room. I got the dim outlines of chairs and what I
took to be a dresser or a bookcase. Another open door led into a
hall.
My knowledge of the planning of houses aided me at each step I
took. From the hallway I could place the kitchen, the laundry, and
the back staircase. I knew the front hall lay beyond a door which
was closed. At the foot of the back staircase I stood for some
minutes and listened. Not a sound came from anywhere in the
house. The kitchen clock ticked loudly, and presently startled me
with a gurgle and a chuckle before it struck one. After this
manifestation I had to wait till my heart stopped thumping and my
nerves were quieted before venturing on the stairs. As the first step
creaked, I kept close to the wall to get a firmer support for my
tread. On reaching a landing I could see up into another hall. Here I
perceived the glimmer or reflection of a light. It was a very dim or
distant light—but it was a light.
I stood on the landing and waited. If there were people moving
about I should hear them soon. But all I did hear was the heavy
breathing of the servants, who were sleeping on the topmost floor.
Creeping a little farther up, I discovered that the light was in a
bedroom—the first to open from the front hall up-stairs. Between
the front hall and the back hall the door was ajar. That would make
things easier for me, and I dragged myself noiselessly to the top. I
was now at the head of the first flight of back stairs, and looking
into the master’s section of the house. Except for that one dim light
the house was dark. It was not, however, so dark that my architect’s
eye couldn’t make a mental map quite sufficient for my guidance.
It was clearly a dwelling that had been added to, with some
rambling characteristics. The first few feet of the front hall were on a
level with the back hall, after which came a flight of three or four
steps to a higher plane, which ran the rest of the depth of the
building to the window over the front door. In the faint radiance
through this window I could discern a high-boy, a bureau, and some
chairs against the wall. I could see, too, that from this higher level
one staircase ran down to the front door and another up to a third
story. What was chiefly of moment to me was the fact that the
bedroom with the light was lower than the rest of this part of the
house, and somewhat cut off from it.
With movements as quiet as a cat’s I got myself where I could
peep into the bedroom where the lamp burned. It proved to be a
small electric lamp with a rose-colored shade, standing beside a bed.
It was a rose-colored room, evidently that of a young lady. But there
was no young lady there. There was no one.
The fact that surprises me as I record all this is that I was so
extraordinarily cool. I was cooler in the act than I am in the memory
of it. I walked into that bedroom as calmly as if it had been my own.
 It was a pretty room, with the usual notes of photographs,
bibelots, and flowered cretonne which young women like. The walls
were in a light, cool green set off by a few colored reproductions of
old Italian masters. Over the small white virginal bed was a copy of
Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation.” Two windows, one of which was a bay,
were shaded by loosely hanging rose-colored silk, and before the
bay window the curtains were drawn. Diagonally across the corner
of this window, but within the actual room, stood a simple white
writing-desk, with a white dressing-table near it, but against the
wall. On the table lay a gold-mesh purse, in which there was money.
I slipped it into my pocket, with some satisfaction in securing the
first fruits of my adventure.
With such booty as this it again occurred to me to be on the safe
side and to go back by the way I came. I was, in fact, looking round
me to see if there was any other small valuable object I could lift
before departing when I heard a door open in some distant part of
the house—and voices.
They were women’s voices, or, rather, as I speedily inferred, girls’
voices. By listening intently I drew the conclusion that two girls had
come out of a room on the third floor and were coming down the
stairs.
It was the minute to make off, and I tried to do so. I might have
effected my escape had I not been checked by the figure of a man
looming up suddenly before me. He sprang out of nowhere—a tall,
slender man, in a dark-blue suit, with trousers baggy at the knees,
and wearing an old golfing-cap. I jumped back from him in terror,
only to find that it was my own reflection in the pier-glass. But the
few seconds’ delay lost me my chance to get away.
By the time I had tiptoed to the door the voices were on the same
floor as myself. Two girls were advancing along the hall, evidently
making their way to this chamber. My retreat being cut off, I looked
wildly about for a place in which to hide myself. In the instants at my
disposal I could discover nothing more remote than the bay window,
screened by its loose rose-colored hangings. By the time the young
ladies were on the threshold I was established there, with the silk
sections pulled together and held tightly in my hand.
The first words I heard were: “But it will seem so like a habit. Men
will be afraid of you.”
This voice was light, silvery, and staccato. That which replied had
a deep mezzo quality, without being quite contralto.
“They won’t be nearly so much afraid of me,” it said, fretfully, “as I
am of them. I wish—I wish they’d let me alone!”
“Oh, well, they won’t do that—not yet awhile; unless, as I say,
they see you’re hopeless. Really, dear, when a girl breaks a third
engagement—”
“They must see that she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t have to. Here
—this is the hook that always bothers me.”
There were tears in the mezzo voice now, with a hint of
exasperation that might have been due to the lover or the hook, I
couldn’t be sure which.
“But that’s what I don’t see—”
“You don’t see it because you don’t know Stephen—that is, you
don’t know him well.”
“But from what I do know of him—”
“He seems very nice. Yes, of course! But, good Heavens! Elsie, I
want a husband who’s something more than very nice!”
“And yet that’s pretty good, as husbands go.”
“If I can’t reach a higher standard than as husbands go I sha’n’t
marry any one.”
“Which seems to me what’s very likely to happen.”
“So it seems to me.”
The silence that followed was full of soft, swishing sounds, which I
judged to come from the taking off of a dress and the putting on of
some sort of negligée. From my experience of the habits of girls, as
illustrated by my sisters and their friends, I supposed that they were
lending each other services in the processes of undoing. The girl
with the mezzo voice had gone up to Elsie’s room to undo her; Elsie
had come down to render similar assistance. There is probably a
psychological connection between this intimate act and confidence,
since girls most truly bare their hearts to each other when they
ought to be going to bed.
The mezzo young lady was moving about the room when the
conversation was taken up again.
“I don’t understand,” Elsie complained, “why you should have got
engaged to Stephen in the first place.”
“I don’t, either”—she was quite near me now, and threw
something that might have been a brooch or a chain on the little
white desk—“except on the ground that I wanted to try him.”
“Try him? What do you mean?”
“Well, what’s an engagement? Isn’t it a kind of experiment? You
get as near to marriage as you can, while still keeping free to draw
back. To me it’s been like going down to the edge of the water in
which you can commit suicide, and finding it so cold that you go
home again.”
“Don’t you ever mean to be married at all?” Elsie demanded,
impatiently.
“I don’t mean to be married till I’m sure.”
Elsie burst out indignantly: “Regina Barry, that’s the most
pusillanimous thing I ever heard. You might as well say you’d never
cross the Atlantic unless you were sure the ship would reach the
other side.”
“My trouble about crossing the Atlantic is in making up my mind
whether or not I want to go on board. One might be willing to risk
the second step, but one can’t risk the first. Even the hymn that says
‘One step enough for me’ implies that at least you know what that’s
to be.”
“You mean that you balk at marriage in any case.”
“I mean that I balk at marriage with any of the men I’ve been
engaged to. I must say that; and I can’t say more.”
During another brief silence I surmised that Regina Barry had
seated herself before the dressing-table and was probably doing
something to her hair. I wish I could say here that in my
eavesdropping I experienced a sense of shame; but I can’t.
Whatever creates a sense of shame had been warped in me. The
moral transitions that had turned me into a burglar had been gradual
but sure. With the gold-mesh purse in my pocket a burglar I had
become, and I felt no more repugnance to the business than I did to
that of the architect. Notwithstanding the natural masculine interest
these young ladies stirred in me, I meant to wait till they had
separated—gone to bed—and fallen asleep. Then I would slip out
from my hiding-place, swipe the brooch or the chain that had been
thrown on the desk, and go.
“What was the matter with the first man?” Elsie began again.
“I don’t know whether it was the matter with him or with me. I
didn’t trust him.”
“I should say that was the matter with him. And the next man?”
“Nothing. I simply couldn’t have lived with him.”
“And what’s wrong with Stephen is that he’s no more than very
nice. I see.”
“Oh no, you don’t see, dear! There’s a lot more to it than all that,
only I can’t explain it.” I fancied that she wheeled round in her chair
and faced her companion. “The long and short of it is that I’ve never
met the man with whom I could keep house. I can fall in love with
them for a while—I can have them going and coming—I can
welcome them and say good-by to them—but when it’s a question of
all welcome and no good-by—well, the man’s got to be different
from any I’ve seen yet.”
“You’ll end by not getting any one at all.”
“Which, from my point of view, don’t you see, won’t be an
unmixed evil. Having lived happily for twenty-three years without a
husband, I don’t see why I should throw away a perfectly good bone
for the most enticing shadow that ever was.”
“I don’t believe you’re human.” Before there could be a retort to
this Elsie went on to ask, “How did poor Stephen take it?”
“Well, he didn’t go into fits of laughter. He took it more or less
lying down. If he hadn’t—”
“If he hadn’t—what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The least little bit of fight on his part—or even
contempt—”
As this sentence remained unfinished I could hear Elsie rise.
“Well, I’m off to bed,” she yawned. “What time do you have
breakfast?”
There was some little discussion of household arrangements, after
which they said their good nights.
With Elsie’s departure I began for the first time to be
uncomfortable. I can’t express myself otherwise than to say that as
long as she was there I felt I had a chaperon. In spite of the fact
that I had become a professional burglar the idea of being left alone
with an innocent young lady in her bedroom filled me with dismay.
I was almost on the point of making a bolt for it when I heard
Elsie call out from the hallway: “Ugh! How dark and poky! For
mercy’s sake, come up with me!”
Miss Barry lingered at the dressing-table long enough to ask:
“Wouldn’t you rather sleep in mother’s room? That communicates
with this, with only a little passage in between. The bed is made up.”
 “Oh no,” Elsie’s staccato came back. “I don’t mind being up there,
and my things are spread out; only it seems so creepy to climb all
those stairs.”
“Wait a minute.”
She sprang up. I breathed freely. My sense of propriety was
saved. The voices were receding along the front hall. Once the
young ladies had begun to mount the stairs I would slip out by the
back hall and get off. Relaxing my hold on the silk hangings I
stepped out cautiously.
My first thought was for the objects I had heard thrown down with
a rattle on the writing-desk. They proved to be a string of small
pearls, a diamond pin, and some rings of which I made no
inspection before sweeping them all into my pocket.
I was ready now to steal away, but, to my vexation, the
incorrigible maidens had begun to talk love-affairs again at the foot
of the staircase leading up to the third floor. They had also turned on
the hall light, so that my chances were diminished for getting away
unseen.
Knowing, however, that sooner or later they would have to go up
the next flight, I stood by the writing-desk and waited. I was not
nervous; I was not alarmed. As a matter of fact the success of my
undertaking up to the present point, together with the action of food
and wine, combined to make me excited and hilarious. I chuckled in
advance over the mystification of Miss Regina Barry, who would find
on returning to her room that her rings, her necklet, and her gold-
mesh purse had melted into the atmosphere.
In sheer recklessness I was now guilty of a bit of deviltry before
which I would have hesitated had I had time to give it a second
thought. On the desk there was a scrap of blank paper and a pen.
Stooping, I printed in the neat block letters I had once been
accustomed to inscribe below a plan:
 There are men different from those you have seen
hitherto. Wait.

This I pinned to the pincushion on the dressing-table, beginning at

once to creep toward the door, so as to seize the first opportunity of
slipping down the back stairs.
But again I was frustrated.
“I’m all right now,” I heard Elsie say, reassuringly. “Don’t come up.
Go back and go to bed.”
Miss Barry spoke as she returned along the hall toward her room:
“The cook sleeps in the next room to you, so that if you’re afraid in
the night you’ve only to hammer on the wall. But you needn’t be.
This house is as safe as a prison.”
I had barely time to get into the bay window again and pull the
curtains to.
Some five minutes followed, during which I heard the opening and
shutting of drawers and closets and the swish and frou-frou of skirts.
I began to curse my idiocy in fastening that silly bit of writing to the
pincushion. My only hope lay in the possibility that she would go to
bed and to sleep without seeing it.
With hearing grown extraordinarily acute I could trace every
movement she made about the room. Presently I knew she had
come back to the dressing-table again. Pulling up a chair, she sat
down before it, to finish, I suppose, the arranging of her hair.
For a few seconds there was a silence, during which I could hear
the thumping of my heart. Then came the faint rattling of paper. I
knew when she read the thing by the slight catch in her breath. I
expected more than that. I thought she would call out to her friend
or otherwise give an alarm. If she went to a telephone to summon
the police I decided to make a dash for it. Indeed, I meant to make
a dash for it as it was, as soon as I knew her next move.
 But of all the next moves, the one she made was the one I had
least counted on. With a sudden tug at the hangings she pulled
them apart—and I was before her.
I was before her and she was before me. It is this latter detail of
which I have the most vivid recollection. In the matter of time all
other recollections of the moment seem to come after that and to be
subsidiary to it.
My immediate impression was of two enormous, wonderful,
burning eyes, full of amazement. Apart from the eyes I hardly saw
anything. It was as if the light of a dark lantern had been suddenly
turned on me and I was blinded by the blaze. I was blinded by the
blaze and shriveled up in it. No words can do justice to my sudden
sense of being a contemptible, loathsome reptile.
“’Sh!” was the first sound that came from her. She raised her
hand. “Don’t make a noise or you’ll frighten my friend. She’s nervous
already.”
Instinctively I pulled off my cap, stepping out of my hiding-place
into the middle of the room. As I did so she recoiled, supporting
herself by a hand on the writing-desk. Now that the discovery was
made, I could see her grow pale, while the hand on the desk
trembled.
“You mustn’t be afraid,” I began to whisper.
“I’m not afraid,” she whispered back; “but—but what are you
doing here?”
“I’ll show you,” I returned, with shamefaced quietness. “I shall
also show you that if you’ll let me go without giving an alarm you
won’t be sorry.”
Pulling all the things I had stolen out of my pocket, I showered
them on the dressing-table.
“Oh!”
 The smothered exclamation made it plain to me that she hadn’t
missed the articles.
“May I ask you to verify them?” I went on. “If you should find
later that something had disappeared, I shouldn’t like you to think
that I had carried it away.”
She made a feint at examining the jewelry, but I could see that
she was incapable of making anything like a count. It was I who
insisted on going over the objects one by one.
“There’s this,” I said, touching the gold-mesh purse, but not
picking it up. “I see there’s money in it; but it has not been opened.
Then there’s this,” I added, indicating the pearl necklet; “and this,”
which was the brooch. “The rings,” I continued, “I don’t know
anything about. There are three here. That’s all I remember seeing;
but I didn’t notice in particular.”
She said, in a breathless whisper, “That’s all there were.”
“Then may I ask if you mean to let me go?”
“How can I stop you?”
“Oh, in two or three ways. You could call your servants, or you
could ring up the police—”
Her big, burning eyes were fixed on me hypnotically. The color
began to come back to her cheeks, but she trembled still.
“How—how did you get in?”
I explained to her.
“And the only thing I’ve taken,” I went on, “is the food I ate and
the wine I drank; but if you knew how much I needed them—”
“Were you hungry?”
“I hadn’t eaten anything for two days, and very little for two days
before that.”
“Then you’re not—you’re not one of those gentleman burglars who
do this sort of thing out of bravado?”
 “As we see in novels or plays. I don’t think you’ll find many of
them about. I’m a burglar,” I pursued, “or I—I meant to be one—but
I’m not a gentleman.”
“You speak like a gentleman.”
“Unfortunately, a gentleman is not made by speech. A gentleman
could never be in the predicament in which you’ve caught me.”
“Well, then, you were a gentleman once.”
“My father was a gentleman—and is.”
“English?”
“I’d rather not tell you. Now that I’ve restored the things, if you’ll
give me your word that I sha’n’t be molested I shall—”
“You sha’n’t be molested, only—”
As she hesitated I insisted, “Only what, may I ask?”
Her manner was a mixture of embarrassment and pity. She had
not hitherto taken her eyes from me since we had begun to speak.
Now she let them wander away; or, rather, she let them shift away,
to return to me swiftly, as if she couldn’t trust me without watching
me. By this time she was trembling so violently, too, that she was
obliged to grasp the back of a chair to steady herself. She was too
little to be tall, and yet too tall to be considered little. The filmy thing
she wore, with its long, loose sleeves, gave her some of the
appearance of an angel, only that no angel ever had this bright,
almost hectic color in the cheeks, and these scarlet lips.
“Was it,” she asked, speaking, as we both did, in low tones, and
rapidly—“was it because you—you had no money that you did this?”
I smiled faintly. “That was it exactly; but now—”
“Then won’t you let me give you some?”
I still had enough of the man about me to straighten myself up
and say: “Thanks, no. It’s very kind of you; but—but the reasons
which make it impossible for me to—to steal it make it equally
impossible for me to take it as a gift.”
“But why—why was it impossible for you to steal it, when you had
come here to do it?”
“I suppose it was seeing the owner of it face to face. I’d sunk low
enough to steal from some one I couldn’t visualize—but what’s the
use? It’s mere hair-splitting. Just let me say that this is my first
attempt, and it hasn’t succeeded. I may do better next time if I can
get up the nerve.”
“Oh, but there won’t be a next time.”
“That we shall have to see.”
“Suppose”—the mixture of embarrassment and pity made it hard
for her to speak—“suppose I said I was sorry for you.”
“You don’t have to say it. I see it. It’s something I shall never
forget as long as I live.”
“Well, since I’m sorry for you, won’t you let me—?”
“No,” I interrupted, firmly. “I’m grateful for your pity; I’ll accept
that; but I won’t take anything else.” I began moving toward the
door. “Since you’re good enough to let me go, I had better be off;
but I can’t do it without thanking you.”
For the first time she smiled a little. Even in that dim light I could
see it was what in normal conditions would be commonly called a
generous smile, full, frank, and kindly. Just now it was little more
than a quivering of the long scarlet lips. She glanced toward the little
heap of things on the desk.
“If it comes to that, I have to thank you.”
I raised my hand deprecatingly.
“Don’t.”
I had almost reached the threshold when her words made me
turn.
 “Do you know who I am?”
“I think I do,” was all I could reply.
“Well, then, why shouldn’t you come back later—in some more
usual manner—and let me see if there isn’t something I could do for
you?”
“Do for me in what way?”
“In the way of getting you work—or something.”
My heart had leaped up for a minute, but now it fell. Why it
should have done either I cannot say, since I could be nothing to her
but a fool who had tried to be a thief, and couldn’t, as we say in our
common idiom, get away with it.
I thanked her again.
“But you’ve done a great deal for me as it is,” I added. “I couldn’t
ask for more.” Somewhat disconnectedly I continued, “I think you’re
the pluckiest girl I ever saw not to have been afraid of me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t pluck. I saw at once that you wouldn’t do me any
harm.”
“How?”
“In general. I was surprised. I was excited. In a way I was
overcome. But I wasn’t afraid of you. If you’d been a tramp or a
colored man or anything like that it would have been different. But
one isn’t afraid of a—of a gentleman.”
“But I’m not a—”
“Well then, a man who has a gentleman’s traditions. You’d better
go now,” she whispered, suddenly. “If you want to come back as I’ve
suggested—any time to-morrow forenoon—I’d speak to my father—”
“Not about this?” I whispered, hurriedly.
“No, not about this. This had better be just between ourselves. I
shall never say anything to any one about it, and I advise you to do
the same.” I had made a low bow, preparatory to getting out, when
she held up the scrap of paper she had crumpled in her hand. “Why
did you write this?”
But I got out of the room without giving a reply.
I was descending the back stairs when I heard a door open on the
third floor and Elsie’s voice call out, “Regina, are you talking to
anybody down there?”
There was a tremor in the mezzo as it replied: “N-no. I’m just—I’m
just moving about.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake go to bed! It’s after two o’clock. I never
was in a house like this in all my life before. It seems to be full of
people crawling round everywhere. I think I’ll come down to your
mother’s bed, after all.”
“Do,” was the only word I heard as I stole into the servants’
dining-room, then into the closet with shelves, where I shut the door
softly. A few seconds later I was out on the cool ground, in the dark,
behind the shrub.
I lay there almost breathlessly, not because I was unable to get
up, but because I couldn’t drag myself away. I wanted to go over
the happenings of the last hour and seal them in my memory. They
were both terrible to me and beautiful.
I had been there some fifteen minutes when I heard the open
window above me closed gently and the fastening snapped. I knew
that again she was near me, though, as before, she didn’t suspect
my presence. I wondered if the chances of life would ever bring us
so close to each other again.
Above me, where the shrub detached itself a little from the wall of
the house, I could see the stars. Lying on my back, with my head
pillowed on the crook of my arm, I watched them till it seemed to
me they began to pale. At the same time I caught a thinning in the
texture of the darkness. I got up with the silence in which I had lain
down. Crossing the brick-paved yard and striding over the low wall, I
was again in the vacant lot.
 It was not yet dawn, but it was the dark-gray hour which tells that
dawn is coming. I was obliged to take more accurate precautions
than before, as, crushing the tangle of nettle, burdock, fireweed,
and blue succory, I crept along in the shadow of the house wall to
regain the empty street.
 CHAPTER III
The city was beginning to wake. Mysterious carts and wagons
rumbled along the neighboring avenues. From a parallel street came
the buzz and clang of a lonely early-morning electric car. Running
footsteps would have startled one if they had not been followed by
the clinking of peaceful milk-bottles in back yards. Clanking off into
the distance one heard the tread of solitary pedestrians bent on
errands that stirred the curiosity. Here and there the lurid flames of
torches lit up companies of gnomelike men digging in the roadways.
Going toward Greeley’s Slip, I skirted the Park, though it made the
walk longer. Under the dark trees men were lying on benches and on
the grass, but for reasons I couldn’t yet analyze I refused to thrust
myself among them. A few hours earlier I would have done this
without thinking, as without fear; but something had happened to
me that now made any such course impossible.
My immediate need was to get back to poor old Lovey and lie
down by his side. That again was beyond my power to analyze. I
suppose it was something like a homing instinct, and Lovey was all
there was to welcome me.
“Is that you, sonny?” he asked, sleepily, as I stooped to creep into
the cubby-hole which a chance arrangement of planks made in a pile
of lumber.
“Yes, Lovey.”
“Glad ye’ve come.”
When I had stretched myself out I felt him snuggle a little nearer
me.
“You don’t mind, sonny, do you?”
“No, Lovey. It’s all right. Go to sleep again.”
 For myself, I could do nothing but lie and watch the coming of the
dawn. I could see it beating itself into the darkness long before
there was anything to which one could give the name of light. It was
like a succession of great cosmic throbs, after each of which the veil
was a little more translucent.
In my nostrils was the sweet, penetrating smell of lumber, subtly
laden with the memories of the days when I was a boy. The
Canadian differs from the American largely, I think, in the closeness
of his forest-and-farm associations. Not that the American hasn’t the
farm and the forest, too, but he has moved farther away from them.
The mill, the factory, and the office have supplanted them—in
imagination when not in fact, and in fact when not in imagination. If
the woods call him he has to go to them—for a week, or two, or
three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life in which the
woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life. The
primeval still enters into his cities and his thoughts. Some day it may
be different; but as yet he is the son of rivers, lakes, and forests.
There is always in him a strain of the voyageur. The true Canadian
never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild
shores.
It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed
me as the river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of
paddle-wheels, followed by a bellow like the call of some sea
monster to its mate. Right below me and close to the slip I heard
the measured dip of oars. Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or
from deck to dock, had a weird, watchful sound, as though the
darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen. Lights glided up and
down the river—which itself remained unseen—mostly gold lights,
but now and then a colored one. Chains of lights fringed the New
Jersey shore, where, far away, sleepless factories threw up dim red
flares. A rising southeast wind not only hid the stars under banks of
clouds, but went whistling eerily round the corners of the lumber-
piles. The scent of pine, and all the pungent, nameless odors of the
riverside, began to be infused with the smell—if it is a smell—of
coming rain.
 I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and
present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no
period when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me
in pity and amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch
me still. In their light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw
myself as a boy again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of
lumber carried me back to our old summer home on the banks of
the Ottawa, where I had had my dreams of what I should do when I
was big. All boys being patriotic, they were dreams not merely of
myself, but of my country. It worried me that it was not sufficiently
on the great world map, that apart from its lakes and prairies and
cataracts it had no wonders to show mankind. As we were a
traveling family, I was accustomed to wonders in other countries,
and easily annoyed when one set of cousins in New York and
another in England took it for granted that we lived in an Ultima
Thule of snow. I meant to show them the contrary.
From the beginning my ardors and indignations translated
themselves into stone. I had seen St. Peter’s in one country, St.
Paul’s in another, and Chartres and châteaux in a third. I had seen
New York transforming itself under my very eyes—the change began
when I was in my teens—into a town of prodigious towers which in
themselves were symbolical. Then I would go home to a red-gray
city, marvelously placed between river and mountain, where any
departure from its original French austerity was likely to be in the
direction of the exuberant, the unchastened, the fantastic. All new
buildings in Canada, as in most of the States, lacked “school.”
“School” was, more or less in secret, the preoccupation of my
youth—“school” with some such variation from traditional classic
lines as would create or stimulate the indigenous. I had not yet
learned what New York was to teach me later—that necessity was
the mother of art, and that pure new styles were formed not by any
one’s ingenuity or by the caprice of changing taste, but because
human needs demanded them. Rejecting the art nouveau, which
later made its permanent home in Germany, I combined all the lines
in which great buildings had ever been designed, from the Doric to
the Georgian, in the hope of evolving a type which the world would
recognize as distinctively Canadian, and to which I should give my
name. In imagination I built castles, cathedrals and theaters, homes,
hotels and offices. They were in the style to be known as
Melburyesque, and would draw students from all parts of the
architectural earth to Montreal.
It was not an unworthy dream, and even if I could never have
worked it out I might have made of it something of which not wholly
to be ashamed. But as early as before I went to the Beaux Arts the
curse of Canada—the curse, more or less, of all northern peoples—
began to be laid upon me. In Paris I had some respite from it, but
almost as soon as I had hung out my shingle at home I was
suffering again from its cravings. I will not say that I put up no fight,
but I put up no fight commensurate with the evil I had to face. The
result was what I have told you, and for which I now had to suffer in
my soul the most scorching form of recompense.
The point I found it difficult to decide was as to whether or not I
ever wanted to see Regina Barry again—or whether I had it in me to
go back and show myself to her in the state from which I had fallen
more than three years before. In the end it was that possibility alone
which enabled me to endure the real coming of the dawn.
For it came—this new day which out of darkness might be
bringing me a new life.
As I lay with my face turned toward the west I got none of its first
glories. Even on a cloudy morning, with a spattering of rain, I knew
there must be splendors in the east, if no more than gray and
lusterless splendors. Light to a gray world is as magical as hope to a
gray heart; and as I watched the lamps on the New Jersey heights
grow wan, while the river unbared its bosom to the day, that thing
came to me which makes disgrace and shame and humiliation and
every other ingredient of remorse a remedy rather than a poison.
I myself was hardly aware of the fact till Lovey and I had crept out
of our cubby-hole, because all round us men were going to work.
Sleepers in the open generally rise with daylight, but we had kept
longer than usual to our refuge because we didn’t want to fare forth
into the rain. As sooner or later it would come to a choice between
going out and being kicked out, we decided to move of our own
accord.
I must leave to your imagination the curious sensation of the
down and out in having nothing to do but to get up, shake
themselves, and walk away. On waking after each of these homeless
nights it had seemed to me that the necessity for undressing to go
to bed and dressing when one got up in the morning was the
primary distinction between being a man and being a mere animal.
Not to have to undress just to dress again reduced one to the level
of the horse. Stray dogs got up and went off to their vague leisure
just as Lovey and I were doing. Not to wash, not to go to breakfast,
not to have a duty when washing and breakfasting were done—
knocked out from under one all the props that civilization had built
up and deprived one of the right to call oneself a man.
I think it was this last consideration that had most weight with me
as Lovey and I stood gazing at the multifarious activities of the
scene. There were men in sight, busy with all kinds of occupations.
They were like ants; they were like bees. They came and went and
pulled and hauled and hammered and climbed and dug, and every
man’s eyes seemed bent on his task as if it were the only one in the
world.
“It means two or three dollars a day to ’em if they ain’t,” Lovey
grunted, when I had pointed this fact out to him. “Don’t suppose
they’d work if they didn’t ’ave to, do ye?”
“I dare say they wouldn’t. But my point is that they do work. It’s
Emerson who says that every man is as lazy as he dares to be, isn’t
it?”
“Oh, anybody could say that.”
“And in spite of the fact that they’d rather be lazy, they’re all doing
something. Look at them. Look at them in every direction to which
your eyes can turn—droves of them, swarms of them, armies of
them—every one bent on something into which he is putting a piece
of himself!”
“Well, they’ve got ’omes or boardin’-’ouses. It’s easy enough to git
a job when ye can give an address. But when ye carn’t—”
We were to test that within a minute or two. Fifteen or twenty
brownies were digging in a ditch. Of all the forms of work in sight it
seemed that which demanded the least in the way of special
training.
Approaching a fiercely mustachioed man of clearly defined
nationality, I said, “Say, boss, could you give my buddy and me a
job?”
Rolling toward me a pair of eyes that would have done credit to a
bandit in an opera, he emitted sounds which I can best transcribe
as, “Where d’live?”
“That’s the trouble,” I answered, truthfully. “We don’t live
anywhere and we should like to.”
He looked us over. “Beat it,” he commanded, nodding toward the
central quarters of the city.
“But, boss,” I pleaded, “my buddy and I haven’t got a quarter
between us.”
He pointed with his thumb over his left shoulder. “Getta out.”
“We haven’t got a nickel,” I insisted; “we haven’t got a cent.”
“Cristoforo, ca’ da cop.”
As Cristoforo sprang from the ditch to look for a policeman, Lovey
and I shuffled off again into the rain.
We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid
avenues where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women,
and children of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and
fro, each bent on an errand. It was the fact that life provided an
errand for each of them that suddenly struck me as the most
wonderful thing in creation. There was no one so young or so old,
no one so ignorant or so alien, that he was not going from point to
point with a special purpose in view. Among the thousands and the
tens of thousands who would in the course of the morning pass the
spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one who
hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily
contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever
since did I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity.
There was no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to
which it didn’t go down. No one was left out but the absolute
wastrel like myself, who couldn’t be taken in.
Though it was not a cold day, the steadiness of the drizzle chilled
me. The dampness of the pavements got through the worn soles of
my boots, and I suppose it did the same with Lovey’s. The lack of
food made the old man white, and that of drink set him to
trembling. The fact that he hadn’t shaved for the past day or two
gave his sodden face a grisly look that was truly appalling. Though
the pale-blue eyes were extinct, as if the spirit in them had been
quenched, they were turned toward me with the piteous appeal I
had sometimes seen in those of a blind dog.
It was for me to take the lead, and yet I couldn’t wholly see in
what direction to take it. While I was pondering, Lovey made a
variety of suggestions.
“There doesn’t seem to be nothink for it, sonny, but to go and
repent for a day or two. I ’ate to do it; kind o’ deceivin’ like, it is; but
they’ll let us dry ourselves and give us a feed if we ’ave a sense of
sin.”
I wondered if he had in mind anything better than what I had
myself.
“Where?”
He took the negative side first.
“We couldn’t go to the Saviour, because I’ve put it over on ’em
twice this year already. And the ’Omeless Men won’t do nothink for
ye onless you make it up in menial work.”
“I won’t try either of them,” I said, briefly.
“Don’t blame you, sonny, not a bit. Kind o’ makes a hypercrite of a
man, it does. I ’ate to be a hypercrite, only when I carn’t ’elp it.”
He went on to enumerate other agencies for the raising of the
fallen, of most of which he had tested the hospitality during the past
few years. I rejected them as he named them, one by one. To this
rejection Lovey subscribed with the unreasoning dislike all outcast
men feel for the hand stretched down to them from higher up.
Nothing but starvation would have forced him to any of these
thresholds; and for me even starvation would not work the miracle.
“What’s the matter with the Down and Out?” I sprang on him,
suddenly.
He groaned. “Oh, sonny! It’s just—just what I was afeared of.”
I turned and looked down into his poor, bleared, suffering old
face.
“Why?”
“Because—because—oncet ye try that they’ll—they’ll never let ye
go.”
“But suppose you don’t want them to let you go?”
He backed away from me. If the dead eyes could waken to
expression, they did it then.
“Oh, sonny!” He shook as if palsied. “Ye don’t know ’em, my boy.
I’ve summered and wintered ’em—by lookin’ on. I’ve had pals of my
own—”
“And what are they doing now, those pals of your own?”
“God knows; I don’t. Yes, I do; some of ’em. I see ’em round,
goin’ to work as reg’lar as reg’lar, and no more spunk in ’em than in
a goldfish when ye shakes yer finger at their bowl.”
 Afraid of exciting suspicion by standing still, we began drifting with
the crowd.
“Is there much that you can call spunk in you and me?”
Again he lifted those piteous, drunken eyes. “We’re fellas together,
ain’t we? We’re buddies. I ’ear ye say so yerself when you was
speakin’ to that Eyetalian.”
I have to confess that with his inflection something warm crept
into my cold heart. You have to be as I was to know what the
merest crumbs of trust and affection mean. A dog as stray and
homeless as myself might have been more to me; but since I had no
dog....
“Yes, Lovey,” I answered, “we’re buddies, all right. But for that
very reason don’t you think we ought to try to help each other up?”
He stopped, to turn to me with hands crossed on his breast in a
spirit of petition.
“But, sonny, you don’t mean—you carn’t mean—on—on the
wagon?”
“I mean on anything that’ll get us out of this hell of a hole.”
“Oh, well, if it’s only that, I’ve—I’ve been in tighter places than
this before—and—and look at me now. There’s ways. Ye don’t have
to jump at nothink onnat’rel. If ye’d only ’ave listened to me
yesterday—but it ain’t too late even now. What about to-night? Just
two old ladies—no violence—nothink that’d let you in for nothink
dishonorable.”
“No, Lovey.”
We drifted on again. He spoke in a tone of bitter reproach.
“Ye’d rather go to the Down and Out! It’ll be the down, all right,
sonny; but there’ll be no out to it. Ye’ll be a prisoner. They’ll keep at
ye and at ye till yer soul won’t be yer own. Now all these other
places ye can put it over on ’em. They’re mostly ladies and parsons
and greenhorns that never ’ad no experience. A little repentance and
they’ll fall for it every time. Besides”—he turned to me with another
form of appeal—“ye’re a Christian, ain’t ye? A little repentance now
and then’ll do ye good. It’s like something laid by for a rainy day. I’ve
tried it, so I know. Ye’re young, sonny. Ye don’t understand. And
when it’ll tide ye over a time like this—they’ll git ye a job, very likely
—and ye can backslide by and by when it’s safe. Why, it’s all as easy
as easy.”
“It isn’t as easy as easy, Lovey, because you say you don’t like it
yourself.”
“I like it better than the Down and Out, where they won’t let ye
backslide no more. Why, I was in at Stinson’s one day and there was
a chap there—Rollins was his name, a plumber—just enj’yin’ of
himself like—nothink wrong—and come to find out he’d been one of
their men. Well, what do ye think, sonny? A fellow named Pyncheon
blew in—awful ’ard drinker for a young ’and, he used to be—and he
sat down beside Rollins and pled with ’im and plod with ’im, and—
well, ye don’t see Rollins round Stinson’s no more. I tell ye, sonny,
ye carn’t put nothing over on ’em. They knows all the tricks and all
the trade. Give me kind-’earted ladies; give me ministers of the
gospel; give me the stool o’ repentance two or three times a month;
but don’t give me fellas that because they’ve knocked off the booze
theirselves wants every one else to knock it off, too, and don’t let it
be a free country.”
We came to the corner to which I had been directing our
seemingly aimless steps. It was a corner where the big red and
green jars that had once been the symbols for medicines within now
stood as a sign for soda-water and ice-cream.
“Let’s go in here.”
Lovey hung back. “What’s the use of that? That ain’t no saloon.”
“Come on and let us try.”
Pushing open the screen door, I made him pass in before me. We
found ourselves in front of a white counter fitted up like a kind of
bar. As a bar of any sort was better than none, Lovey’s face took on
a leaden shade of brightness.
In the way of a guardian all we could see at first was a white-
coated back bent behind the counter. When it straightened up it was
topped by a friendly, boyish face.
Lovey leaped back, pulling me by the arm.
“That’s that very young Pyncheon I was a-tellin’ you of,” he
whispered, tragically; “him what got Rollins, the plumber, out of
Stinson’s. Let’s ’ook it, sonny! He won’t do us no good.”
But the boyish face had already begun to beam.
“Hel-lo, old sport! Haven’t seen you in a pair of blue moons. Put it
there!”
The welcome was the more disconcerting because in the mirror
behind Pyncheon I could see myself in contrast to his clean, young,
manly figure. I have said I was shabby without being hideously so,
but that was before I had slept a fourth night on the bare boards of
a lumber-yard, to be drenched with rain in the morning. It was also
before I had gone a fourth morning without shaving, and with
nothing more thorough in the way of a wash than I could steal in a
station lavatory. The want of food, the want of drink, to say nothing
of the unspeakable anguish within, had stamped me, moreover, with
something woebegone and spectral which, now that I saw it
reflected in the daylight, shook me to the soul.
I never was so timid, apologetic, or shamefaced in my life as when
I grasped the friendly hand stretched out to me across the counter. I
had no smile to return to Pyncheon’s. I had no courtesies to
exchange. Not till that minute had I realized that I was outside the
system of fellowship and manhood, and that even a handshake was
a condescension.
“Pyn,” I faltered, hoarsely, “I want you to take me to the Down
and Out. Will you?”
“Sure I will!” He glanced at Lovey. “And I’ll take old Lovikins, too.”
 “Don’t you be so fresh with your names, young man!” Lovey spoke
up, tartly. “’Tain’t the first time I’ve seen you—”
“And I hope it won’t be the last,” Pyn laughed.
“That’ll depend on how polite ye’re able to make yerself.”
“Oh, you can count me in on politeness, old sport, so long as you
come to the Down and Out.”
“I’ll go to the Down and Out when I see fit. I ain’t goin’ to be
dragged there by the ’air of the ’ead, as I see you drag poor Rollins,
the plumber, a month or two ago.”
“Quit your kiddin’, Lovey. How am I going to drag you by the ’air
of the ’ead when you’re as bald as a door-knob? Say, you fellows,”
he went on, pulling one of the levers before him, “I’m going to start
you off right now with a glass of this hot chocolate. The treat’s on
me. By the time you’ve swallowed it Milligan will be here, and I can
get off long enough to take you over to Vandiver Street.” He dashed
in a blob of whipped cream. “Here, old son, this is for you; and
there’s more where it came from.”
“I didn’t come in ’ere for nothink of the kind,” Lovey protested. “I
didn’t know we was comin’ in ’ere at all. You take it, sonny.”
“Go ahead, Lovikins,” Mr. Pyncheon insisted. “’E’s to ’ave a bigger
one,” he mimicked. “Awful good for the ’air of the ’ead. ’Ll make it
sprout like an apple-tree—I beg your pardon, happle-tree—in May.”
Before Pyncheon had finished, the primitive in poor Lovey had
overcome both pride and reluctance, and the glass of chocolate was
pretty well drained. The sight of his sheer animal avidity warned me
not to betray myself. While Pyncheon explained to Milligan and made
his preparations for conducting us, I carried my chocolate to the less
important part of the shop, given up to the sale of tooth-brushes
and patent medicines, to consume it at ease and with dignity.
Pyncheon having changed to a coat, in the buttonhole of which I
noticed a little silver star, and a straw hat with a faint silver line in
the hatband, we were ready to depart.
 “I’ll go with ye, sonny,” Lovey explained; “but I ain’t a-goin’ to
stay. No Down and Out for mine.”
“You wouldn’t leave me, Lovey?” I begged, as I replaced the
empty glass on the counter. “I’m looking to you to help me to keep
straight.”
He edged up to me, laying a shaking hand on my arm.
“Oh, if it’s that— But,” he added more cheerfully, “we don’t have
to stay no longer than we don’t want to. There’s no law by which
they can keep us ag’in’ our will, there ain’t.”
“No, Lovey. If we want to go we’ll go—but we’re buddies, aren’t
we? And we’ll stick by each other.”
“Say, you fellows! Quick march! I’ve only got half an hour to get
there and back.”
Out in the street, Lovey and I hung behind our guide. He was too
brisk and smart and clean for us to keep step with. Alone we could,
as we phrased it, get by. With him the contrast called attention to
the fact that we were broken and homeless men.
“You go ahead, Pyn—” I began.
“Aw, cut that out!” he returned, scornfully. “Wasn’t I a worse
looker than you, two and a half years ago? Old Colonel Straight
picked me up from a bench in Madison Square—the very bench from
which he’d been picked up himself—and dragged me down to
Vandiver Street like a nurse’ll drag a boy that kicks like blazes every
step of the way.”
As we were now walking three abreast, with Pyn in the middle, I
asked the question that was most on my mind:
“Was it hard, Pyn—cutting the booze out?”
“Sure it was hard! What do you think? You’re not on the way to a
picnic. For the first two weeks I fought like hell. If the other guys
hadn’t sat on my head—well, you and old Lovey wouldn’t have had
no glass of hot chocolate this morning.”
 “I suppose the first two weeks are the worst.”
“And the best. If you’re really out to put the job through you find
yourself toughening to it every day.”
“And you mean by being out to put the job through?”
“Wanting to get the durned thing under you so as you can stand
on it and stamp it down. Booze’ll make two kinds of repenters, and I
guess you guys stand for both. Old Lovey here”—he pinched my
companion’s arm—“he’ll forsake his bad habits just long enough to
get well fed up, a clean shirt on his back, and his nerves a bit
quieted down. But he’ll always be looking forward to the day when
he’ll be tempted again, and thinking of the good time he’ll have
when he falls.”
“If you’ll mind yer own business, young Pyn—” Lovey began,
irritably.
“Then there’s another kind,” this experienced reformer went on,
imperturbably, “what’ll have a reason for cutting the blasted thing
out, like he’d cut out a cancer or anything else that’ll kill him. I’ve
always known you was that kind, Slim, and I told you so nearly a
year ago.”
“I seen ye,” Lovey put in. “Was speakin’ about it only yesterday.
Knew you was after no good. I warned ye, didn’t I, Slim?”
Curiosity prompted me to say, “What made you think I had a
motive for getting over it?”
“Looks. You can always tell what a man’s made for by the kind of
looker he is. As a looker you’re some swell. Lovikins here, now—”
“If I can’t do as well as the likes o’ you, ye poor little snipe of a
bartender for babies—”
“What’ll you bet you can’t?” Pyn asked, good-naturedly.
“I ain’t a bettin’ man, but I can show!”
“Well, you show, and I’ll lay fifty cents against you. You’ll be
umpire, Slim, and hold the stakes. Is that a go?”
 “I don’t ’ave no truck o’ that kind,” Lovey declared, loftily. “I’m a
doer, I am—when I get a-goin’. I don’t brag beforehand—not like
some.”
I was still curious, however, about myself.
“And what did you make out of my looks, Pyn?”
He stopped, stood off, and eyed me.
“Do you know what you’re like now?”
“I know I’m not like anything human.”
“You’re like a twenty-dollar bill that’s been in every pawnshop, and
every bar, and every old woman’s stocking, and every old bum’s
pocket, and is covered with dirt and grease and microbes till you
wouldn’t hardly hold it in your hand; but it’s still a twenty-dollar bill—
that’ll buy twenty dollars’ worth every time—and whenever you like
you can get gold for it.”
“Thank you, Pyn,” I returned, humbly, as we went on our way
again. “That’s the whitest thing that has ever been said to me.”
Before we reached Vandiver Street, Pyn had given us two bits of
information, both of which I was glad to receive.
One was entirely personal, being a brief survey of his fall and rise.
The son of a barber in one of the small towns near New York, he
had gone to work with a druggist on leaving the high school. His
type, as he described it, had been from the beginning that of the
cheap sport. Cheap sports had been his companions, and before he
was twenty-one he had married a pretty manicure girl from his
father’s establishment. He had married her while on a spree, and
after the spree had repented. Repenting chiefly because he wasn’t
earning enough to keep a wife, he threw the blame for his mistake
on her. When a baby came he was annoyed; when a second baby
came he was desperate; when a third baby promised to appear he
was overwhelmed. Since the expenses of being a cheap sport
couldn’t be reduced, he saw no resource but flight to New York,
leaving his wife to fend for herself and her children.
 Folly having made of him a hard drinker, remorse made of him a
harder one. And since no young fellow of twenty-four is callous
enough to take wife-desertion with an easy conscience, my own first
talks with him had been filled with maudlin references to a kind of
guilt I hadn’t at the time understood. All I knew was that from bad
he had gone to worse, and from worse he was on the way to the
worst of all, when old Colonel Straight rescued him.
The tale of that rescue unfolded some of the history of the Down
and Out. As to that, Pyn laid the emphasis on the fact that the club
was not a mission—that is, it was not the effort of the safe to help
those who are in danger; it was the effort of those who are in
danger to help themselves. Built up on unassisted effort, it was self-
respecting. No bribes had ever been offered it, and no persuasions
but such as a man who has got out of hell can bring to bear on
another who is still frying in the fire. Its action being not from the
top downward, but from the bottom upward, it had a native impulse
to expansion.
Its inception had been an accident. Two men who had first met as
Pyncheon and I had first met had lost sight of each other for several
years. At a time when each had worked his salvation out they had
come together by accident on Broadway, and later had by another
accident become responsible for a third. Finding him one night lying
on the pavement of a lonely street, they had seemingly had no
choice but to pick him up and carry him to a cheap but friendly
hostelry which they knew would not refuse him. Here they had kept
him till he had sobered up and taken the job they found for him.
Watching over him for months, they finally had the pleasure of
restoring him to his wife and seeing a broken home put on its feet
again. This third man, in gratitude for what had been done for him,
went after a fourth, and the fourth after a fifth, and so the chain was
flung out. By the time their number had increased to some twenty-
five or thirty Providence offered them a dwelling-place.
The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it
contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that
might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was
going begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she
had left her residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s
Church, across the way. She had left it, however, as an empty
residence. As an empty residence it was in a measure a white
elephant on the hands of a legatee that had no immediate use for it.
St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the
fashionable house of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was
when Vandiver Place was the heart of exclusive New York. In the
’forties and ’fifties no section of the city had been more select. In the
’sixties and ’seventies, when Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s,
it had become time-honored. In the ’eighties and ’nineties the old
families began to move up-town and the boarding-houses to creep
in; and in the early years of the twentieth century the residents
ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of artificial flowers
and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the line of houses that
made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad thoroughfare cut
through a congeries of slums, the whole being named Vandiver
Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley.
Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St.
David’s, offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and
Out; but it was Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent
member of the club, who suggested this philanthropic opportunity to
Rufus Legrand.
“Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no
place to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped
to move the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three
beds left in it, and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there
for a few nights, while he got straightened out, and—”
“But you’d have no bedclothes.”
“Say, reverent, we don’t want no bedclothes. Sleepin’ in the Park’ll
learn you how to do without sheets.”
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