Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

From Medieval Marsh Monsters toFuturistic Space FiendsThe Continual Evolution of theMonstrous Kin of CainMaura WhitmanThey are born out of darkness and haunt our nightmares withdisfigured images of brutality and violence, terror and rage. Theythreaten our safety, yet capture our imaginations so that though wemay be repulsed, we cannot look away. Jeffery Cohen writes, “Theycan be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse,hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recessesof our mind, but they always return” (Cohen 20). Indeed, monstershave always been with us and it is clear that they are here to stay. Itis also evident through studying both medieval and modern textsthat certain types of monsters are more prevalent than others inWestern society’s imagination. It is possible to track the evolutionof these monstrous archetypes as they continuously reemerge, oftensomewhat altered yet still recognizable over the course of time.One such reoccurring archetype is that of the biblical God-cursedmurderer, Cain. In the rich medieval tradition of Cain monstermyths, Cain has often been described as a violent, cannibalistic,deformed and exiled enemy of humankind, condemned to foreverwander the borderlands of civilization and credited with havingfathered of all of the malevolent, mythical creatures that have everbeen thought to exist. Placing one of Western literature’s mostmemorable monsters into this tradition of Cain myths, the poet 1