(Re)encountering monsters: animals in early-twentieth-century weird fiction

Abstract

Early twentieth century weird tales occupy an important place in the development of genre fictions. Among the innovations they contribute are new forms of monsters, diverging from earlier Gothic or mythological traditions, which spring, in part, from a strand of post-Darwinian thought that understood any bodily shape to be possible in adaptation to environmental conditions. This paper explores three stories which, by staging human encounters with animal monsters of radical unknown shapes, suggest new ways in which humans and animals might relate to each other: William Hope Hodgson's The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' (1908), Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Horror of the Heights' (1913) and Will A. Page' 'The Air Serpent' (1911). The encounter between characters and monsters is at root a colonial encounter between humans and the natural world, and often a violent one. By presenting weird animals as monstrous, the stories engage a number of anxieties associated with human-animal kinship and evolutionary superiority. By presenting monsters as strange Others but also as fellow creatures fit for their environments, however, these tales reach towards understanding animals as subjects in their own right with a claim to existing in their own spaces, destabilising the anthropocentric assumptions with which the human characters approach their adventures.

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“…] weed men" (quoted in Ashley 2007, p. 460). As Emily Alder observes, these "[a]nimal monsters" are so unsettling because they "reveal the limits to scientific mastery over the natural world" (Alder 2017(Alder , p. 1084. "They violate," she continues, "existing norms and knowledge systems; they flourish in environments in which humans are unfit and cannot dominate" and disturb "a colonialist centrism structuring relationships between humans and the more-than-human world" (ibid.).…”