Maranto 1

Marilyn Maranto
Dr. de Fee
English 584
25 October 2015
The Brute, Within and Without
A brute can be either a savagely violent person or an animal, and the broad
nature of this definition allows for a binary notion of what constitutes a monster. The
brutish monster can simultaneously be half-human and half-monster, and this dichotomy
has frightened audiences since ancient times. The literary tradition of the brute begins
with Grendel, and then shifts to the prodigies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. It continues on to monstrous men such as McTeague in the nineteenth
century before finally culminating in the brute killers of modern horror films. Although
these monsters share brutish qualities, each reflects the fears of his specific era.
Grendel combines the fears of pagans and Christians, being at once man-like,
monstrous, and demonic; prodigies challenged the religious folk of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries because their abnormalities made people question the
connection between monsters and God; McTeague begins as a normal man, who
becomes a monster under the pressures of society; and the sadistic rednecks of
modern horror raise the question of how to face the monsters within ourselves.
Grendel embodies the fears of both medieval Christians and Anglo-Saxon
pagans. Neither fully man nor beast; he is warped/ in the shape of a man . . . / bigger
than any man, an unnatural birth who kills for pleasure and feasts upon his victims
(Heaney l. 1351-1353). Like other pagan monsters, Grendel represents death and

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destruction for humans and for civilization, but he cannot defeat the hero. However,
Grendel is not simply some dangerous, man-eating hybrid. He is also a demon, a
member of Cains clan, whom the Creator had outlawed/ And condemned as outcasts
(Heaney l. 106-107). According to the Bible, Grendel has inherited his evil, or natural
sin, from his forefather in much the same way humans inherit their sin from Adam and
Eve. As a descendant of Cain, Grendel reminds Christians of their own sin, their own
weakness to temptation, because he enjoys killing and refuses to pay the death-price as
an honorable warrior would. He is an outcast of both society and God, a living reminder
and warning to Hrothgars people of the dangers of violating societys mores and
Biblical teachings.
As Christianity gained strength in Europe, Christians had to face the following
question: Why did God create monsters? Saint Thomas Aquinas addressed the issue by
defining the terms natural, preternatural, and supernatural. Aquinas argued that natural
and supernatural creatures were within Gods purview, for only God could fashion truly
supernatural beings whereas preternatural creatures resulted from others actions.
Thus, both miracles and monsters like the Leviathan were Gods creations and
demonstrations of his power, yet humans, demons, angels, and nature itself could
produce preternatural beings (Lim 107-108). For medieval Christians, monsters could
take many forms: they could be humans, like witches; they could be others, like
demons; or they could be half-human and half-animal. These half-human, half-animal
creatures were labeled prodigies, portents or signs of Gods displeasure. While Gods
wrath could take the form of natural disasters, Christians also considered the
appearance of Siamese twins or other birth defects among humans or animals to have

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similar significance. Indeed, some monsters were interpreted as portents of the Catholic
Churchs demise. In 1523, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon published a pamphlet
featuring two woodcuts, one of a monk-calf and one of a pope-ass. To these
leaders of the Reformation, such monsters literally represented the sins and monstrosity
of the Church, everything they wanted to purge from religion (Daston and Park 26).
These monsters reflect not only the fear and hatred of the Catholic Church, but also fear
of Gods wrath and punishment; such distortions of human and animal form were a
physical representation of sin, of the guilt and shame humans carried within them.

Fig. 1. Monk-Calf of Freyburg. 1545. Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta.

Pitts Theology Library: Digital Image Archive. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.

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The rise of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rather than
eradicating monsters, only provided new methods with which to investigate and
understand mysterious and frightening creatures. However, despite improved scientific
methods, human abnormalities remained as confounding and horrifying as they had
been in the Middle Ages. The theory of evolution only seemed to compound the
confusion, raising questions about the influence of heredity and environment on
humans. McTeague, for example, is by nature like a draught horse, immensely strong,
stupid, docile, obedient when he first meets Trina (Norris 3). Despite his ambitions,
McTeague behaves like an animal throughout the book, relying on instinct and reacting
instead of acting. After suffering the loss of his practice, his ambitions, and finally his
concertina, McTeagues inner brute leaped instantly to life, monstrous, not to be
resisted (Norris 172). His treatment at the hands of Trina and Marcus releases his inner
animal because he becomes frustrated both sexually and financially; Trinas insistence
that they not move to larger quarters especially highlights McTeagues animal behavior
as he paces their one narrow roomwith the restlessness of a caged brute (Norris
223). He also tortures himself by refusing to adapt to his new life. McTeague represents
the fears of his time, the harmful effects of city life and repression of natural instinctsthe fear that civilization would somehow highlight or heighten the natural or hereditary
animal, or brute, elements lurking in all humans. Monstrous behavior was no longer
connected exclusively to religious sin, but rather to moral flaws being passed on through
heredity and genetics.
Whereas Grendel and the prodigies were outcasts of society and McTeague is a
gentle giant altered by societys influence, one type of brute seems to prefer living in

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exile- the inbred, incestuous, or cannibalistic hillbilly. The inbred hillbilly as monster is
another version of frontier anxiety; it does not represent the fear of nature, but rather the
fear of how isolation in nature can warp humans, physically and psychologically.
Furthermore, while they also reflect liberal, educated Americas fear of redneck America,
these films are also an example of scapegoating. Americans have a history of blaming
the other for Americas problems. By demonizing country dwellers, city dwellers can
exculpate themselves, by comparison, of the racism, violence, and sexism that plague
America. While it is considered offensive to mock other religions or ethnicities, the
unsophisticated, backwoods brute is always fair game, and it is this trope and attitude,
taken to the extreme, which modern horror movies exploit. The hillbilly brute is the
converse of a monster like McTeague, who is brutish because civilization distorts his
nature. Hillbillies are brutes because of their separation from or rejection of society. The
movies The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre demonstrate this premise
well because they feature killers living in rural areas who break all the rules of society.
In both movies, seemingly civilized urbanites are forced to result to extreme violence in
order to escape savage, cannibalistic monsters. In the modern age, where humans fear
nature much less than their ancestors, hillbillies personify what urban America dreads
the most, that they share the same prejudices and savagery as the monsters in movies
like The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The brute terrifies humans like no other monster because he (or she) is a
quadruple threat; the brute resembles them and also mirrors their own worst fears about
themselves as well as their fears about others, including nature and animals. All brutes
exhibit, despite their human or human-like veneer, animalistic behavior and suggest that

Maranto 6
the human animal is the most dangerous of all. In addition to the physically monstrous
qualities they possess and demonstrate, such as brutal strength and murderous
instincts, brutes also embody fears about humanitys frailty, about what happens when
humans are denied the comforts and conveniences of modern life. However, most
disturbing of all is the notion that the monster may display our own moral weaknesses
and failures, that the monster one is trying to defeat or destroy shares ones own beliefs
or behaviors. The history of the brute is the history of humanitys fear that ones external
imperfections, deformities, and behaviors are actually an external expression of internal
flaws, prejudices, and destructive urges.

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Works Cited
Daston, Lorraine J. and Katharine Park. Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters
in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England. Past & Present 92
(1981): 20-54. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.
Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique.
Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Google books. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.
http://books.google.com.
Monk-Calf of Freyburg. 1545. Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta. Pitts Theology Library:
Digital Image Archive. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.
Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: Cosimo, 2009. Print.