From the Mountain to the Monsters

Take nature as your moral guide, and before long you find yourself haunted by nightmares of monsters. The relation between cosmic nature and human ethical conduct was the most important intellectual problem of the nineteenth century. Not coincidentally the invention of monsters on the grand scale was among the most lasting nineteenth-century literary achievements. One of the little noticed genealogies of literary history is the direct line that runs from William Wordsworth at the beginning of the century to such vivid offspring as Mr. Hyde (1886), Dracula (1897), and the Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) at its end.

Monsters loomed large in the romantic imagination from the start. What Wordsworth refers to in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805 version) as "the impressive discipline of fear" is the preeminent means by which the natural world impresses itself on the developing mind. In one of that poem's most famous passages he describes a minor childhood transgression and the haunting that followed it:

One summer evening (led by her [Nature]), I found A little boat tied to a willow tree Within a rocky cove, its usual home. Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice Of mountain echoes did my boat move on

Soon the grim shape of retribution appeared as the mountain itself seemed to follow the child:

        a huge peak, black and huge As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.

The neurotically imaginative boy quickly returned the boat; but for days afterward he remained fearful and depressed at the sight:

        No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colors of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Every era in criticism interprets the literary symbols of the past according to its own tastes and fancies. A look at contemporary writing about Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and especially about Bram Stoker's Dracula, demonstrates, not surprisingly, that psychoanalytic and feminist critics have recently had the monsters almost to themselves. After all Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in the interpretation of dreams, and while the cast of Dr. Jekyll has no significant female characters, an ability to unleash women's sexuality is one of Count Dracula's conspicuous charms. Postcolonial criticism, another school of the past twenty years, has also taken a crack at the monsters, seeing them sometimes, in the jargon of multiculturalism, as misunderstood "others" and perceiving them alternatively as manifestations in the ruling-class mind of fears inspired by the Irish, the proletariat, or other downtrodden and potentially rebellious groups. As do Freudians, though in more explicitly political terms, postcolonial critics find in any monster worth its salt the rising up of the repressed—in this case, repressed guilt and terror dole out justified retribution.

Perhaps, because the contemporary critical emphasis on repression, both psychological and political, is so strong, few critics emphasize the continuities between late nineteenth-century monsters and early nineteenth-century romanticism. Yet a perfectly plausible account that puts the monsters in their historical place can be devised in terms of moral and intellectual categories the nineteenth century would have easily recognized, without denying that repression of several kinds plays a part in the monster's power over the twenty-first-century reader's imagination. The question is not so much one of direct influence—though Wordsworth's impact on the later nineteenth century was enormous—as it is a set of attitudes that was common currency among Victorian writers. Remember that Freud himself was a Victorian doctor who developed his theory of repression at around the same time when most of these...