1
What is a Monster? (According to
Frankenstein)Peter Brooks

• Prepared by
• Dr. Kay Picart

2
Aim

• To discuss Brooks various characterizations of
  monstrosity
• To discuss how the monstrous body is often
  envisaged in film and dance

3
Monstrosity

• The outcome or product of curiousity or
  epistemophilia pushed to an extreme that
  resultsas in the story of Oedipusin confusion,
  blindness, and exile. (218)

4
Monstrosity--2

• It cannot be located in any of the taxonomic
  schemes devised by the human mind to understand
  and to order nature. (218)

5
Monstrosity--3

• It is an excess of signification, a strange
  byproduct or leftover of the process of making
  meaning. (218)

6
Monstrosity--4

• It is an imaginary being who comes to life in
  language and, once having done so, cannot be
  eliminated from language. (218)

7
Questions

• Are monsters specifically gendered, raced or
  classed in Frankenstein?
• In cinematic depictions of the Frankenstein myth,
  are monsters raced, gendered or classed?

8
Evolving Replies According to Brooks

• A monster is a woman seeking to escape the
  feminine condition into recognition by the
  fraternity. (218)
• A monster eludes gender definition. (219)

9
Question

• How is the monstrous body represented in comedic
  horror versions like Young Frankenstein and The
  Rocky Horror Picture Show?

10
Concluding Remarks

• In Frankenstein, language is marked by the body,
  by the process of embodiment. We have not so
  much a mark on the body as the mark of the body
  the capacity of language to create a body, one
  that in turn calls into question the language
  that we use to classify and control bodies.
  (220)
• Question What implications re. bodily
  categorization follow from these remarks?