When posed as an antagonist, Baba Yaga with her wild femininity is undeniably a representation of consequence in folklore. But I found her actions justified, seen in the clear correlation between her cruelty and her hunger, her hate and her desire. Regarding villains like Baba Yaga, Machado writes in her memoir, “They live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”
“(That girl on the news never invited that man to touch her. All I can think about is how I wish she had had something savage coursing through her skin.
God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.)”
Elisabeth Hewer, from God Should Have Made Girls Lethal, in Wishing for Birds
There lies a certain sort of freedom in wanting to be monstrous. Not simply ugly, but monstrous, and thus powerful. A monstrous woman is so far beyond the realm of acceptable that none of the rules apply to her anymore. She’s ferocious, fierce, free, and most of all (best of all): untouchable. The monstrous woman doesn’t need to be afraid of men and male violence, which is why it’s such a romantic fantasy for women.
Julia Armfield writes: “When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.” (Emphasis mine).
Daphne and Medusa are two women in the Metamorphosesthat are transformed either because of rape, or to escape rape. Daphne is transformed in the nick of time, but she becomes static, unable to escape the moment of terror that necessitated her transformation. And Medusa was not protected by her goddess, but rather punished, and said punishment made her a living weapon. Perseus had to wait until she slept to kill her, and he needed a goodie bag full of godly gifts to do it (not to mention that Athena guided his sword-hand).
The freedom inherent in monstrosity is clear in many of today’s current horror literature by women. Julia Armfield, Carmen Maria Machado, and more all explore this theme.
As does Hannah Williams, in her essay on the monstrous-feminine, which concludes thusly: “Sometimes, when I’m walking home on my own at night, I think about what it would be like to stalk silently behind men, my feet soft and easy on the pavement, quick flash of my shadow under the street lights. How I’d watch the whites of their eyes shine as they turned to look behind them – softly, quietly, can’t be too obvious – see the glisten of sweat on the back of their necks. I’d watch them quicken their pace with fear, recognise the measured gait – not wanting to run so as not to inspire a chase, keep calm, breathe deeply, act self-possessed but do not linger. I’d like to test it; to not be five-foot-four, soft-fleshed, short-sighted, to not think about the keys slotted between my fingers, the correct way to escape a chokehold. To not think, even in passing, of defence. Just once I’d like to think about attack: scaled wings, glinting incisors, long, yellowed claws. A pact with the devil that let me split concrete, burn with the touch of my finger.” (Emphasis mine).
The word aposematismis the act of advertising to predators that one is not worth eating or attacking. It’s adopting a defensive or frightening exterior to ward off those who would do us harm.
While there seems to be no research on this phenomenon in humans, or, as my focus is on, survivors of assault who want to appear to have fortified defenses, there is at least one woman who wrote about it.
Madeleine Davies, in her essay Becoming Ugly, writes: “For the first time, I don’t know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing, to become as repulsive as I can in an insult to these men—so many men—who hate women and the women who adulate them. Vanity keeps me from throwing away my makeup and sanity keeps me from, as I often feel the repugnant urge, breaking the mirror with the surface of my own face and leaving us both cracked open. But I also can’t deny my current impulse to become as ugly and unlikeable as I can, merely to serve as constant reminder of the ugliness inflicted upon us. We’ve been told time and time again that prettiness and likability will protect us from harm, that to be good women, we must play by these rules, but this is a lie. Nothing will protect us except for ourselves—and what’s more fortifying than a defensive exterior? There are days when all I want is to become a human road sign, a blinking hazard to any man misfortunate enough to cross my path: “I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.”” (Emphasis mine).
I think, too, there’s a common thread running through this and the men on twitter who claim that women dye their hair unnatural colors to ward away men. If blue or green hair was all it took - and actually worked- I think we’d all be sporting those colors.
There are days when I want nothing more than to adopt the image of the Gorgon as my own image, not as a mask but my true body; imagine the safety with which we could move through the world if we were all Medusa, crowned with snakes and perfectly, violently free from the male gaze.
They say “no research on this phenomenon in humans” and yet we all know that teenage girl who donned things spiked, ripped, wore extreme makeup, and scowls. That teenage girl was many of us, and for many still is, pushing back against a society that started sexualizing us at twelve.
“It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.”
—Anne Carson,Autobiography of Red
“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
—Clarice Lispector,The Hour of the Star
—Catherynne M. Valente,The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
“They say I’m a beast. And feast on it. When all along I thought that’s what a woman was.”
—Sandra Cisneros,Loose Woman
“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”
—Marina Warner,Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time; “Monstrous Mothers”
“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”
—Anne Carson,Decreation
—Louise Glück, “Blue Rotunda”
“How can I teach her / some way of being human / that won’t destroy her?”
—Margaret Atwood,Two-Headed Poems
“…and what I want to say / is that I am not what I was, I am / a changeling, half-creaturely,”
—Camille Norton,Corruption: Poems; “Wild Animals I Have Known”
“People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—”
—Anaïs Nin,Nearer the Moon
—Camille Norton,Corruption: Poems; “Index of Prohibited Images”
“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal,”
—Margaret Atwood,Murder in the Dark: Stories; “Women’s Novels”
“…does she wander still, searching human faces / For one who might speak of her / In her own language, look into her eyes / And gentle the wildness once and for all?”
—May Sarton,Letters from Maine: New Poems
“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”
—Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Lady of the House of Love”
—Hélène Cixous,The Laugh of the Medusa
“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them”
—Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
—Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”
“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”
—Richard Siken,Spork’s Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone
“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche,Good and Evil
“I was driven because I wanted to be like others. / I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.”
—Czesław Miłosz, “Account”
“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?”
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