The synthesis in Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is very tightly packed. For a moment I just want to unwrap some of what he made me think about. Throughout his argument my mind was brought to the idea of “the Other”. The outsider, or complete opposite, from the human self. I started to think about the idea of calling another human a monster, but even more so the idea of monsters embodying human difference. Particularly in the last four theses of his argument.

Cohen uses examples of beasts and creatures: godzilla, nosferatu, alien. While monsters can be literally different in form, they also all personify a difference from one’s self, which is a lot of what Cohen is getting at. Just as someone can be scared of monsters, it seems fair to say that humans are scared of difference; scared of change.

Cohen’s argument of portrayal, monsters linger in difference, demonstrates humans’ more artistic rendering of the fear of the Other. “In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing ‘Saracens’ as ‘monstra;’ propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of the East by the West.” (8) His example of caricaturization makes me think of political cartoons. Especially in his brief discussion of “political or ideological difference” as being “much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm.” (8) A dehumanizing representation of humans, especially those whose arguments and decisions are not in line with your own.

In his thesis regarding monsters policing the borders of possible Cohen explains “the monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of identity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear incessantly.” (16) As a religious text, the Bible is something many philosophers seem to turn to in analyzing social patterns. Some of the earliest examples of embodied fear or difference with consequence. It’s through this example that I started to think about how we use the word monster in the modern world and how human a monster can be.

I had one thought that sums up his section on fearing the monster being an embodiment of desire. In putting another down one is attempting to raise oneself. Humans pick on others out of jealousy and envy.

In defining monsters as mystical, I agree with Cohen’s final argument – that more fantastical monsters exist through knowledge and in the mind. But I find his concluding statements about monsters one last reference to the idea of monsters as an embodiment of the fear of difference. “Monsters are our children… These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place.” (20)

Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts left me wondering how we were supposed to read Margerie’s character. Was she an innocent teenager gripped by a dangerous mental illness, or a monster living among us? In this blog post, I will evaluate her against Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses). All seven points and their summarizing quotations come from this essay.

Thesis I: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body – “An embodiment of a certain cultural moment” (4).
Female sexuality is a cultural moment that Margerie is aware of and capitalizes on. She makes people uncomfortable by appearing in a sports bra and her possession often takes on sexual forms, such as in the masturbation scene (86). Margerie is also tech-savvy and uses the internet to further her creepy knowledge-base and our media-saturated society to try and expose her father.

Thesis II:  The Monster Always Escapes – “No monster tastes of death but once” (5).
This one seems to discount Margerie as a monster. She does die, seemingly for good. However, in our technological society, dying is a complicated act. Margerie has stopped living and aging, but she lives on through mediated representations of herself (although, was the Margerie that was captured on cameras and will eventually be captured in the book is arguably not the “true” her but just a part she was playing). She also lives on in Merry’s memory, which at times seems almost obsessive. 

Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis – “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6).
Like other stories of possession, a Head Full of Ghosts relies on the of categories to create fear. The possessed is a female child, seemingly the most innocent example of humanity, yet they act in horrible ways that disgust us. Margerie also blurs the boundaries between sane and insane, well-meaning and malicious. She is a daughter, sister, student, devil, sadist, and family annihilator all-in-one – i.e. a monster.

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference – “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual” (7).
As Cohen says, “the woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender roles risks becoming” a monster (9). Margerie is seen as too smart for “a girl like her” and is seen as aberrant because of this (179). Her mom, the fellow female, points out that a young girl is definitely capable of possessing her knowledge about seemingly obscure topics. The priests, however, are attempting to other Margerie in order to turn her into a monster that they can exorcize.

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Border of the Possible – “the monster prevents mobility…delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move” (12).
I had a hard time mapping this thesis onto Margerie until I focused on the line that stated that all monsters are living a “double narrative” – the one about how they came to be and another about the cultural utility they serve. Margerie certainly has a double narrative, at least by her own account. She claims that she wanted to pretend to be possessed in order to expose her dad’s real sickness, but the ending of the book suggests that she was actually sick, therefore her cultural utility was showing just how delusional and manipulating individuals can be.

Thesis VI: The Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire – “the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing” (17).
Merry looks up to her sister and seems to have a complicated relationship towards her possession. She continues to love her sister for the majority of the book. When Margerie’s room became off limits, Merry snuck in while everyone was asleep, obviously unable to resist what was forbidden.
In a different vein, Margerie pokes at a weak spot of the priest’s: an interest in kiddie porn. After an episode that we assume portrayed a reenactment of Margerie’s violent masturbation and Margerie’s discomfort when the priest touches her chest, she seems to be aware of and resisting her own possible taboo appeal.

Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold…of Becoming – “monsters are our children…they ask us to reevaluate…they ask us why we have created them” (20).
Perhaps Margerie was created to show us how technology ruins our lives, or how mental illness is a serious issue that can debilitate a person. She isn’t given the help she needed and everything went awry in the end, teaching us that money is not the answer, that reality TV isn’t reality, and that mental illnesses can’t be cured with exorcisms.

By Cohen’s definition, Margerie is indeed a monster, but I think that it’s important to remember that she was turned into one by society and that underneath of it all she was just a sick young girl.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory, 1996, pp. 3–25., doi:10.5749/j.ctttsq4d.4.

Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts. William Morrow & Company, 2017.

Cohen defines the monster as a representation of culture and uses medieval, Biblical, and Greek myths to fuel his “monster theory.” The ideas in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” are reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s essay “The Religious Symbol,” in which Tillich defines “symbolics” as “a general science of the self-expression of all groups, tendencies, and communities” (4). Cohen’s chapter feels like a branch from Tillich’s essay in that the monster is a specific form of the symbol used to embody abjection to “the other.” Cohen emphasizes sexuality, disability, and race as specific areas of anxiety to our culture. Tillich goes onto say that symbols may change unconsciously as cultures change, and thus create myths, which are used to explain one culture’s interpretation of existence (Tillich 9). Cohen references multiple myths in this chapter to show how many monsters appear throughout the history of storytelling. While Cohen includes that monsters represent a “certain cultural moment,” I wonder what he would think about a monster’s implication of that culture’s existence?

Part of the anxiety of monsters is a fear of the foreign or racial fears. On page 11, Cohen writes, “The political-cultural monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators… Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality…” This language reminded me of James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” in which Baldwin is explaining blackness in America to his nephew, but it was published in his book The Fire Next Time and meant to be read by both black and white. He writes, “…The danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations” (par. 9). This quote echoes Cohen’s statement that monsters threaten to destroy the world of its creators, who “have been mainly European [and American] and male” (Cohen 15). Cohen also mentions a fear of darker skin, and Baldwin’s language easily depicts the black man as a monster destroying the white man’s world, and even defying laws of nature or disrupting the order of things.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “A Letter to My Nephew.” The Progressive. Dec. 1, 1962. Web.

Tillich, Paul. “The Religious Symbol.” Daedalus, vol. 87, no. 3, 1958, pp. 3–21. JSTOR. Web. 

Monsters are a topic that’s not frequently discussed, however Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) allows for a more in-depth way of thinking about a universally unknown lifestyle.  One of the things that stood out to me was was Thesis VI, stating “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire,” because of it’s spooky ties to any postmodern novel, article, film, etc.  The entirety of postmodernism is to lure people in with the fear that they wouldn’t be able to face in reality.  Having people understand that this is within a Hollywood setting and not a household setting allows for some ease when discussing this culture. Along this idea, it’s important to understand that directors and authors are thriving off of this so-called “monster culture” because people are anxious about their worst fear, however they desire fear the most.

Cohan’s last quote of this thesis asks, “Do monsters really exist? Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we” (Cohen 20)? He is insisting that we are the ones who are most fearful of the monster itself, yet we are the creators and the true monsters of everything.  It’s fascinating to analyze Cohen because he dissects that none of this fear and none of this anxiety would even be present if it weren’t for humans craving fear, as well as being the main producers of it. When comparing this ideal to postmodern horror, humans are not only metaphorical producers, but they’re literal film producers as well, assigned with the job to stimulate the fear that other humans have created.

With the interesting point of humans being the real monsters, I found a powerful image that summarizes everything previously said.