Content area
Abstract
Monstrous desire refers to unspeakable desires, hence anything outside traditional, domestic heterosexual romance. In particular, as Oscar Wilde demonstrates in The Picture of Dorian Gray, monstrous desire is not inherently monstrous but it is turned monstrous by a regimented society. As such, the homosexual finds himself burdened with the scorn of mass culture, forced into the margins to discover the frequently disastrous results of his secret passions.
Prose fiction exhibits the relationship between homosexuality and monstrous desire in two ways: (i) during the first century of the Gothic genre the monster or villain displays aspects of ambiguous sexuality, and (ii) as the nineteenth century came to an end, the once monster becomes a man, frequently a homosexual man. A development takes place from Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the alter-ego or mysterious double displays a strange, sometimes gruesome, homosexual entanglement. The reason for this often complex display of two identities is that prior to the mid-twentieth century, literature does not usually reveal open homosexual themes. Instead, homoerotic undercurrents and questionable homosexuality permeated the novel, especially the Gothic novel. In this thesis I will present a reading of key Gothic novels and the possible homosexual components to demonstrate the impact of this movement on twentieth-century American literature.
In contemporary literature the Gothic monster is not as enigmatic as the nineteenth-century predecessors. Usually a man, the monster evolves into the homosexual, discovering the same treatment that the monster does in an intolerant world. In the selected texts in this thesis the homosexual protagonist is kept in the margins, living a clandestine existence, and exhibits the journey toward destruction and despair. Even the recent re-construction of the vampire by Anne Rice—despite his immortality and supernatural gifts—finds himself burdened with unsatisfied homosexual desire. Throughout this thesis, the chosen texts will demonstrate how these themes re-surface in literature since the 1950's, and reveal the troublesome social contexts that illustrates homosexuality as monstrous desire.