Japan monster history reading response

Monstrous Imagination

MARIE-HELENE HUET

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

1 993

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Introduction

Where do monsters come from, and what do they really look like? In the Renaissance, answers to these puzzles were as numerous and varied as the physiological prodigies they sought to elucidate. Monsters came from God and the Devil, they were caused by stars and comets, they resulted from copulation with other species and from flaws in their parents' anatomies. The cosmic range of spec- ulations also tried to account for the physical aspect of the marvel- ous beings observed in nature. Some monsters lacked an essential part of the body, others claimed an extra member, some looked like · mythical animals, and a few were born with hermetic symbols im- printed on their strange physiology. Thus the much-discussed Rav- enna monster was born without arms, but with a beautiful pair of wings, a fish tail, and mysterious markings on his chest: an epsilon, a cross, and, in some accounts, a half-moon as well. 1 But a remark- ably persistent line of thought argued that monstrous progeny re- sulted from the disorder of the maternal imagination. Instead of reproducing the father's image, as nature commands, the mon- strous child bore witness to the violent desires that moved the mother at the time of conception or during pregnancy. The result- ing offspring carried the marks of her whims and fancy rather than the recognizable features of its legitimate genitor. The mon- ster thus erased paternity and proclaimed the dangerous power of the female imagination. The theory that credited imagination with a deceiving but dominant role in procreation continued to be the object of heated discussions until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Around the same time, literature reappropriated the complex

1

Introduction

Thde. Ravenna monster, after Boaistuau, from Ambroise Pare Des t pro 1ges, 1573. • mons res et

Introduction 3

relationship between imagination and resemblances, between un- fulfilled desires and the act of generation. By assigning to the artist as monstrous father the power once attributed to the mother to create singular progeny, the Romantic metaphor of procreation restaged in its own terms the ideology of misguided desires that spawned aberrant offspring. Imagination, already rehabilitated in the 1777 Supplement to Diderot's Encyclopedie as a powerful crea- tive agent that "belongs to genius" and spurs poetic "fecundity," 2 played a privileged role in the conception of the Romantic oeuvre. The first part of this book thus examines the role of the maternal imagination as it was debated in Western Europe from the Renais- sance to the end of the Enlightenment. The second part of the book considers the Romantic claim that artistic creation was a mon- strous genesis and the work of art a form of teratological disclo- sure.

In the fourth book of Generation of Animals, Aristotle wrote: "Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases Nature has in a way strayed from the generic type. The first beginning of this deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male, though this indeed is a neces- sity required by Nature, since the race of creatures which are sepa- rated into male and female has got to be kept in being; ... As for monstrosities, they are not necessary so far as the purposive or fi- nal cause is concerned, yet per accidens." 3 These lines make a deci- sive association between the monstrous and the female as two de- partures from the norm, as two exceptions to another tenet of Aristotelian doctrine, namely, that "like produces like." The mon- ster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity. "The female is as it were a deformed male," Aristotle also pointed out {II, iii, p. 175). Since she herself is on the side of the dissimilar, it was argued, the female appears to be destined by nature to contribute more figures of dissimilarity, if not creatures even more monstrous. 4

But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, noted Aristotle, a useful deformity; the monster is gratuitous and useless for future generations. Aristotle's thoughts on generation offered a definition of monstrosity that was primarily linked not to physical imperfections but rather to a deficiency in the natural and visible

Introduction

link between genitors and their progeny. "Monstrosities," he re- pea~~d, "c.ome _under the class of offspring which is unlike its par- ents (IV, iv, p. 425). But the monster is also monstrous in another important way, one that Aristotle described as a "false resem- blance" to another species.

It is n~t easy, by statin? a s.ingle mode of cause, to explain ... why sometimes the offsprmg is a human being yet bears no resem- ?Iance to a~y ancestor, sometimes it has reached such a point that m the end It no longer has the appearance of a human being at all, but that of an animal only-it belongs to the class of mon- strosities, as they are called. And indeed this is what comes next to be treated ... the causes of monstrosities, for in the end, when the movements (that came from the male) relapse and the mate- rial (that came from the female) does not get mastered, what re- mains is that which is most 'general,' and this is the (merely) 'ani- mal.' People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has th,e head of another, e.g., a calf has a child's head or a sheep an ox s head. The occurrence of all these things is due to the causes I have named; at the same time, in no case are they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only, and this of course comes about even when there is no deformation involved. (IV, iii, pp. 417-419, emphasis added)

Monstrosit~es ar~ th~s doubly deceptive. Their strange appear- ~nce-a m1sle~dm? likeness to another species, for example-be- lies the otherwise ngorous law that offspring should resemble their parents. By presenting similarities to categories of beings to which they are not related, monsters blur the differences between genres and disrupt the strict order of Nature. Thus, though the monster was fir.st ?efined as that ':hich did not resemble him who engen- dered it, It nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance, to an object external to its conception.

The genesis of that false resemblance played a crucial role in one of the ~~st ancient a~d enduring theories of generation, namely, the trad1t10n that credited the mother's imagination with the shape of her progeny. A lost text, attributed to Empedocles, first sug- gested what was to become one of the most popular beliefs in the study of procreation. Empedocles was said to have stated that "progeny can be modified by the statues and paintings that the

Introduction 5

mother gazes upon during her pregnancy." 5 Far from being dis- carded by medical thought when discoveries on ge_neration r~de­ fined the respective roles of the father and mother m procreat10n, the view that the maternal imagination was responsible for the shape of progeny gained a growing number of follo~ers in se;en- teenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In 1621, Ma1tre Andre du Laurens the chancellor at the University of Montpellier as well as first ph;sician to the king of France, expanded on Empedocles' suggestion as follows:

Empedocles the Pythagorician links [res~mbla~ce] to imagina- tion alone, whose power is so great that, JUSt as it often changes the body of one who has some deep thought, so. it in.scri~es its form on the fertilized seed. The Arabs granted 1magmauon so much power that, through it, they thought the soul could act n.ot only on its own body, but on that of ano~her. It seems that "':ns- totle recognized the imagination's power m the act ~f concepuo.n, when he asked why individuals of the human speoes are so dif- ferent from each other, and answered that the quickness and ac- tivity of human thought and the variety of the human mind leave different marks of several kinds upon the seed. 6

As late as 1788, Benjamin Bablot reminded his readers that "the philosopher Empedocles, from Agrigenta in Sicily, who.' according to received opinion, died at a very old age when he fell mto the s~a and drowned in 440 B.C., acknowledged no other cause for dis- semblance between children and their parents than the imagina- tion of pregnant women. Acco~ding to Amyot, Plutarch:s .naive translator, Empedocles held that it was through the womans imag- ination during conception that children were formed, for o~ten women have been in love with images and statues and have given birth to children resembling them." 7 Thus, following Empedocles' theory, it was long believed that monsters, inasmuch as they di~ not resemble their parents, could well be the result of a moth~r s fe- vered and passionate consideration of images. More speofically, monsters were the offspring of an imagination that literally im- printed on progeny a deform.ed, m.isshap~n resemblance to an ob- ject that had not participated m their creat10n. They_ were pro~ucts of art rather than nature, as it were. Of course, durmg the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mother's imaginati~n was only o.ne of several elements believed to cause monstrous births: others m-

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u Introduction

eluded sex with the devil or animals, as well as defective sperm or a deformed womb. Yet no theory was more debated, more passion- ate~y attacked or defended, than the power of the maternal imagi- nation over the formation of the fetus. s

Sever~! traditions _linked th~ word monster to the idea of showing or warnmg. ~ne beh~f, followmg Augustine's City of God, held that the word monster derived from the Latin monstrare: to show, to dis- play_ (montrer in French). Monster, then, belongs to the etymological family that spawned the word demonstrate as welJ.9 For Renaissance readers, this tradition confir1:1ed t~e i?ea that monsters were signs sen~ by_Go?, me~sage_s showmg his will or his wrath, though For- tumo L1cet1gave1t a simpler meaning in 1616: "Monsters are thus named, not bec~use they are signs of things to come, as Cicero and the ~ulgat~ believed ... but because they are such that their new and mcred1ble appearance stirs admiration and surprise in the be- holders, and startles them so much that everyone wants to show t~em to others [se les monstre reciproquement)." IO Another tradi- tion, the one adopted by current etymological dictionaries, derived the word monster from monere, to warn, associating even more cl_osely the abnormal birth_ with the prophetic vision of impending disasters .. These etymologies gave monstrosity a pre-inscribed in- terpre~at1_on. They also justified its existence by including the mon- ster w1thm the larger order of things. Monstrous births were understood as warnings and public testimony; they were thought to be "demonstrations" of the mother's unfulfilled desires. The mo~ster was_ then seen as a visible image of the mother's hidden passions. This theory gained a greater audience in the seventeenth c_en~ury an~ culminated in the hotly debated Quarrel of Imagina- t10msm, which lasted through the eighteenth century. Altho~gh the mother's imagination was never conside.red the

only possible ~ause of monstrosity, and did not receive exclusive medical attent1?n a~ any time in the history of thought on the pro- cess of generation, It nevertheless haunted centuries of medical re- search. In fa~t, the theory that the mother could be responsible for monstrous births persisted despite all possible evidence to the con- trary. In the nineteenth century, discoveries in the fields of em- br~ol?gy and heredity provi?ed scientists with new ways of ex- plammg res~mblances. But 1f the mother's imagination was no longer perceived by the medical field to be a factor in resem-

Introduction 7

blances, its role as the shaper of progeny was never totally forg?t- ten. The idea that imagination could give life and form to pass1~e matter became a central theme of Romantic aesthetics, and to this day popular beliefs still attribute birthmarks to maternal desires during pregnancy.

The theory that confers on the maternal imagination the power to shape progeny also suggests a complex relationship ~etween procreation and art, for imagination is moved by passion a~d works in a mimetic way. "Nature," wrote Claude de Tesserant m 1567 in Histoires prodigieuses, "portrays after a living mo~el, just as a painter would, and tries to make children r~semble thei~ par~nts as much as possible." u For Paracelsus, "By virtue of her im~gma­ tion the woman is the artist and the child the canvas on which to raise the work." 12 In 1731, Fram;ois-Marie-Pompee Colonna noted: "It is true that the semen is the visible agent, but we can also say that like the Painter, the Sculptor, and ?th~r Artisa_ns who use certain instruments to fashion their materials mto desired shape, similarly this invisible workman uses the male's seminal matter as

. l" 13 I the instrument that leads the female to generate an amma . n · 1812 in Tableau de ['amour conjugal, Dubuisson added, "The seme~

is to generation what the sculptor is to mar.hie; t~e male semen 1s the sculptor who gives shape, the female hquor is the marble or matter, and the sculpture is the fetus or the product ~f genera- tion." 14 From this point of view, the mother could be said to h~ve taken over the. male role of the artist when, overwhelmed by gazmg at images or by unchecked desires, she let her imagination inter- fere with the creative process and reproduce strange figures, or monstrosities. If Art must imitate Nature, in cases of monstrous procreation Nature imitates Ar~. Treatises.on the role of the moth- er's imagination received very httle attention after the theory was set aside by the medical world in the early 1800's. yet these t~xts offer a striking reassessment of the ma~ernal_ role m pr~crea~ion and at the same time elucidate the relationship between 1magma- tion and art, nature and mimesis.

Thus when the thesis that the maternal imagination played an important role in the formation of mons_trosities was finally ~ban­ doned toward the beginning of the nmeteenth century, it re- mained an important part of literary aesthetics. In many texts, we

u Introduction

find ex~licit ref~rence to the power of imagination in procreation. In Elective Affinities, for example, Goethe describes the birth of a child ~ho displayed the effects of his parents' imagination, thereby betraymg their moral adultery. Charlotte and Edward's son is the ~triking ima~e ?ot of his parents, but of those they love secretly: People saw m 1t a wonderful, indeed a miraculous child ... what

surprised them more ... [was] the double resemblance, which be- came more and more conspicuous. In figure and in the features of the ~a~e, it _was like the Captain; the eyes every day it was less easy to d1stmgmsh from the eyes of Ottilie." 15 E. T. A. Hoffmann's Car- dill~c, the monster of,his short story "Mademoiselle de Scudery," att~1butes _his fateful passion for jewels to "the strange impressions ~h1ch a~hct pregnant women, and ... the strange influence these 1mpress1ons from outside can have on the child." 16 "What vision of a tiger haunted my mother when she was carrying me?" asks Mus- set's dramatic hero Lorenzaccio. 17 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his best-known novel, Elsie Venner (1859), describes his heroine as the monstrous ~esult of her mother's imagination, the mother having been terrorized by an encounter with a deadly snake, "an ante- natal impression which had mingled an alien element in her na- ture." 18

But if many nineteenth-century writers explicitly referred to this a_ll-but-disc~rded theory of monstrosity, their implicit reappropria- tl~n of the 1~ea of the monstrous imagination was more striking stil~. _ln theories of monstrosity the maternal element repressed the leg1tm~a~e father. The. maternal imagination erased the legitimate fathers image from his offspring and thus created a monster. In the constitution of the modern episteme, the silent father regains his place. Romantic aesthetic theory sketched out a model genealogy for the work of art and the procreative role of the artist. 19 In so doing, Romanticism reassigned the vis imagi,nativa to the father alone. Romantic aesthetics reaffirmed the seductive power of the monstrous as aberration, and the creative role of the scientist, or the artist, as visible father. Imagination was reclaimed as a mascu- line a_ttribute, and just as theories of generation had long been theories of Art, Romantic Art became a theory of generation. For ~he Romantics, imagination was no longer the faculty to reproduce ~mages, but the power to create them. Imagination did not imitate, it generated, and in doing so, it also produced monstrous art. The

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Introduction 9

notion of monstrosity that emerged shifted its emphasis fro~ the maternal to the paternal but kept intact the key elements of s1~g~­ lar progeny. The act of artistic creation thus a_ppeared as an 1m1- tation of a monstrous genetic process: as pamted models, ~atal passions, striking resemblances, and ~reatures _that were as fright- ening for their deformities as for their perfection. The era~ure of the maternal role in procreation and new forms of mech_arnc~l en- gendering were also echoed in the myth of the Romantic art1~t as lone genitor in awe of his own creation. If the theory that cred1~ed the maternal imagination with the birth of unnatural proge~y im- plied a theory of art as imitat~o_n, Romanticism, i~ tur~, remter- preted art as teratology. The vision of the Romantic artist as crea- tor borrowed a metaphor of creation from the theory t~at l?ng ascribed the birth of monstrous progeny to the maternal imagma-

tion. . This reappropriation in literature of an idea ~ssociated pnm~r-

ily with medical beliefs was anticipated in treauses ~f _the Renais- sance which quoted with equal regard poets, physioans of An- tiquity, hearsay, and personal_ test~mo~ials. Tales of mon_strous births caused by the maternal imagmauon could be found m leg- ends, philosophy, and medical essays. Fo: th~s reason, my explora- tion of the belief that the mother's imagmauon was to be held re- sponsible for monstrous births could not be confined_ to a discussion of embryology, though the notion was, at one time, a topic of passionate debate among embryolo?i.sts. ~or are. my e~­ amples drawn only from the history of medicme, smce this tradi- tion reappropriated nonmedical materials sue? ~s legends and myths as acceptable evidence. Moreover, the beh~f m the power of the maternal imagination was also relevant to hteratu~e and art, inasmuch as it was primarily defined and understood _m ter~s of imitation and resemblances. This book will thus examme the idea of the monstrous imagination in areas as diverse as those fr~m which it first emanated. In the Renaissance, this theory was an m- trinsic part of the literature on prodigies; at otherymes it was de- bated in courts of law or by ecclesiastical authorities. It ap~ears intermittently in scientific speculations, philosophical reflection~, and texts of medical observations. No doubt cont~m_rorar_y medi- cal history could provide the reader with .man.y msi~hts mto the individual pathologies sometimes discerrnble m tesumony from

10 Introduction

scientists and physicians of the past. But although the development of the theory of the monstrous imagination may have been affected by specific considerations at different times in history, the theory itself never belonged to a single corpus or to a particular medical belief. The texts considered here are varied and represent both canonical views on imagination and popular reevaluations of mon- strosity. In this perspective, Ambroise Pare, Malebranche, Spallan- zani, Camille Dareste, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all contributed equally to the expression of an enduring idea that reflected in various ways the belief that progeny was art and art a monstrous progeny.

Part!

The Mother's Fancy

. . b k f Ambroise Pare Des monstres et A child with a live .snake ~atmg its ac 'd r~:i in Anomalies a~d Curiosities of prodiges, 1573. This drawmMg w~s rfdraon; Walter L. Pyle with the following Medicine (1896) by George . ou legend: serpent in a fetus.