She is gutter-mouthed and slutty, plump and uneducated: Were it not for her flagrant disregard for the symbolic, the paternal order, she would not have the tool of the casual blowjob at her ready disposal to lure men, aided by her mobile phone, into her deadly trap. Her wanton ways serve as an abject transgression of moral boundaries made all the more transgressive by the fact of her being a mother: Similarly, the maternal monster comforts the killer with a glass of milk and a cigarette after the deed is done.
An Essay on Abjection, Leon S. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.
Click here to sign up. They were completely one of a kind. Then, they would see a completely different gothic house that stood out from their completely different small town. There was a vampy housewife named Lily Munster. Their house pet, Spot, was a barely-domesticated dragon. The Munsters and The Addams Family , two sitcoms, developed independently, about ghoulish suburban families, premiered within a week of each other. Both shows would last for exactly two seasons before being cancelled in the spring of And while neither show lasted long in its original incarnation, both would inspire massive cult followings, spawning tie-in merchandise, reboots and reunion specials, TV movies, feature films, Saturday morning cartoons, a Broadway musical.
The two shows were built on the premise that these families were at odds with American society, and yet both struck chords with prime time audiences that, in between laughing at sight gags, recognized something in these ostracized characters who abided by a consistent set of values that made sense to them. At their core, though, they were wildly different. One family was the creation of a major movie studio repurposing some of their most famous characters, while the other was created by a lone artist sketching in his New York City apartment.
The Munsters, though they had strange customs, ultimately behaved and lived like a traditional nuclear family, whereas the Addamses had no interest in fitting into an archetypal family structure. They were both outsider families, yet for completely different reasons. Besides, neither show could truly rip off the other in subject or spirit; they were both pop culture moments decades in the making. By the time talkies were being popularized in the early thirties, Universal was expanding their repertoire.
In , they would introduce the world to two of their most infamous creatures: The source materials came from novels penned by Bram Stoker in and Mary Shelley in , respectively. Nor were these films the first adaptations of either story. According to the biography Boris Karloff: When the film was released in November of , it broke records all over America. In Minneapolis, people fought to get into the screening.
Women were reported coming out of theatres trembling.
He came from pedigree; his maternal grandmother was Emma Louise Tufts Spear from the same family after whom Tufts University is named and he was a distant relative of social reformer Jane Addams. He was popular in high school, where he contributed drawings to the student publication. In , the same year Frankenstein and Dracula was released, he moved to New York City to attend art school.
He began submitting artwork to a burgeoning literary magazine called The New Yorker.
He continued to submit his cartoons to them while working as a layout artist at the pulpy True Detective magazine his jobs included diagramming crime scenes and touching up images of corpses. Throughout the s, The New Yorker bought more and more of his cartoons. His work became increasingly popular as it became creepier; a combination of indulging his own macabre impulses and the magazine assigning him ideas they felt suited to his style.
Earlier New Yorker comics were frequently the result of collaboration, with writers submitting premises or jokes that would be drawn by staff artists. An early hit of his depicted a downhill skier whose tracks in the snow behind him pass on either side of a tree. My personal favourite includes a woman sitting in an armchair in conventional living room, speaking on the phone.
On the bottom left hand corner, pushed mostly out of frame, are the lifeless legs of her victim her husband? Later in his career, The New Yorker would stop printing these cartoons. For all his subversive humour and fascination with the weird, Addams was still very much part of the establishment. Part of the reason he could lampoon polite American society so well was because he was right in the middle of it.
In August , Addams sold a cartoon that featured a lithe, witchy woman in a draping black dress standing with a tall, bearded companion in a dusty, decrepit, cobwebbed mansion. No well-appointed home should be without it!
He gave her a tall, brooding butler that, according to Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock, was not inspired by the Universal monster Addams had been drawing similar figures since childhood. That same year, Addams gave his witchy woman a new husband, replacing her earlier, bearded companion with a stout, short figure, hair parted in the middle like a toupee.
There was a girl, who was a smaller, glassy eyed version of her mother, and her blonde troublemaker of a brother, whose persona was inspired by comedian W. A bald, bulging-eyed man with an ambiguous relationship to the family debuted in There were more iconic characters introduced, including a portrayal of the Wolf Man by Lon Chaney Jr. These actors played their roles straight, but the movie was pure slapstick. The biggest boon to the monster movie industry came with the popularization of television. In , about a quarter of American households owned a television.
The story of Beowulf has been told and retold numerous times over the centuries. A warrior, Beowulf, arrives and defeats both Grendel and his mother; later, Beowulf faces a dragon and is less lucky. And though the original story of Beowulf is largely framed as the story of two men, Headley has centered her retelling around a pair of women, and in doing so questions exactly what makes a hero heroic and what makes a monster monstrous.
Headley became aware of these issues in the narrative after looking at the original text of the poem in Old English. Her own verse translation of Beowulf is due to be published in She points out the same word has been translated variously as hero and monster from the original. The Mere Wife opens in the aftermath of war: Dana, a soldier, is taken captive by extremists and mysteriously escapes death. She returns to her hometown pregnant and gives birth to Gren; the two then take refuge within the mountain outside of Herot Hall.
This is a solider who has PTSD.
This mother-son pair, Dana and Gren, exists in sharp contrast to another: Willa, who is married to the wealthy suburban developer, and her son, Dylan. Each mother is intent on protecting her son, while the two children secretly become friends.