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Carnal Creeps: How Sexually-Charged Monsters Evolved with Shifting Sexual Attitudes

Phoenix, St. John D.

Abstract Details

2017, M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, English.
The horror genre has a long-standing tradition of being sexually charged. There could be a simple explanation for this: horror encompasses an array of content that has historically been considered mature, such as violence and terror, and, since sexuality has also been considered mature, horror has made an appropriate vehicle for dealing with sexual themes. Horror has also been described as a genre which allows humans to exorcise their fears and anxieties by giving them form through literary representation, allowing scholars to gauge the fears of a society by examining its horror fiction. In this essay, I will argue that the evolution of sexually-charged monsters follows the evolution of sexual attitudes of a culture, and can, by analyzing works from the Victorian period and post-Great War period, reveal the sexual anxieties of said culture. The two, sexuality and fear, are linked in horror, and that relationship manifests itself through fictional monsters. By analyzing select horror fiction from England and America with psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer criticism, there is indication of not only what sexual anxieties were bubbling just beneath the surface of the overall cultural consciousness, but how those anxieties shifted between time period and regions. These shifts will reveal themselves through the monsters and other entities in the works: Frankenstein’s monster reveals the unspoken anxieties of motherhood; Jonathan Harker from Dracula feels emasculated in his imprisonment and the novel presents some of the hidden horrors of domestic life; the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft become something beyond nature and larger than life, as sexuality becomes more open and the world is rocked by World War I. The horror, it would seem, between the Victorian and post-Great War periods becomes literally larger and less intimate.
Jeremy Glazier, M.F.A. (Advisor)
61 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Phoenix, S. J. D. (2017). Carnal Creeps: How Sexually-Charged Monsters Evolved with Shifting Sexual Attitudes [Master's thesis, Ohio Dominican University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1494008069845133

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Phoenix, St. John. Carnal Creeps: How Sexually-Charged Monsters Evolved with Shifting Sexual Attitudes. 2017. Ohio Dominican University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1494008069845133.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Phoenix, St. John. "Carnal Creeps: How Sexually-Charged Monsters Evolved with Shifting Sexual Attitudes." Master's thesis, Ohio Dominican University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1494008069845133

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)