The Monsters Among Us

Allison Quantz: The summer of 1816 is sometimes called the "Year Without a Summer." Because of a volcanic eruption, Europe was cold and dark. There was widespread famine. And to a group of young writers staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, it seemed like the world might be ending in ice.

Andrew Stauffer: They didn't have a cause for it. They didn't know where this was coming from, but they just were in the face of this sort of implacable cold that seemed a sign of apocalypse.

Allison Quantz: So they spent their evenings around a crackling fire, reading and writing ghost stories.

Andrew Stauffer: "Let's all write a ghost story. Let's see who can write the best ghost story, scare the other ones, a challenge." And, you know, Mary Shelley clearly wins.

Allison Quantz: It was that summer and that group of young people that birthed one of our most enduring monsters: Frankenstein.

Andrew Stauffer: Frankenstein is a modern myth. It's escaped from its covers, as it were. You don't even have to have read the novel to know it, and that doesn't happen very often. Once it happens, then it belongs to all of us.

Allison Quantz: From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Allison Quantz, and today on the show: Monsters and the stories we tell about them.

Allison Quantz: Unseasonable cold, dark skies, young writers fleeing home for art, intellectual conversation, and, of course, sex. Honestly, what could be better? In his forthcoming book, Dark Season,

Andrew Stauffer invites us into the villa on Lake Geneva with Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others. Andrew Stauffer is an English professor at the University of Virginia, and he's here to welcome us into the moment that gave the world not one, but two monsters: Frankenstein and, believe it or not, the modern vampire.

Andrew, your new book drops us into Switzerland in the summer of 1816. Can you set the scene for me?

Andrew Stauffer: Right. It's uh summer of 1816. It's a cold, wet summer because a volcano has erupted the year before in Indonesia, uh unbeknownst to everyone there, covering the stratosphere with dust and interrupting the sun and, therefore, it is unseasonably cold, wet. There's a sense of impending famine, crops have failed several times uh already and there's more to come. And so there's a kind of darkness over most of Europe and really America at this time.

That's part of the backdrop just geographically. Then you have these young people who have come from England to sightsee on the one hand, and to encounter the Alpine glories of, you know, Mont Blanc and all of that, and to write and to collaborate, and in a certain way to be in love with one another as young people will do. And so the the book is a is a story of that summer and their connections, their creative collaborations, and their encounters with that natural landscape.

Allison Quantz: So this this set of young people, it's an incredible cast of characters, and a lot of names that I think many of us are familiar with to some extent or another. Um who were they? Tell me about them.

Andrew Stauffer: Right, so you have Mary Godwin, who is not yet Mary Shelley, but she's the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. She has uh eloped with Percy Shelley, the the sort of radical young poet who was a big fan of her father. Uh her father, radical philosopher. He has um come into the Godwin household and sort of spirited away both Mary and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. So they all three of them have absconded to the continent together, even though Shelley is already married to someone else and has a couple children. There is it's kind of the scandalous um elopement, particularly with both girls, who are about 18 years old.

Allison Quantz: And how old was he?

Andrew Stauffer: He was 23 or 24 at that time, so pretty young himself, also young. Um and before they leave, Claire, the stepsister, has had a brief affair with Lord Byron, who is sort of the celebrity poet of the era. Uh he’s a little older, in his later 20s, um but she has seduced him and been impregnated by him, and then three days later, Byron left for Switzerland. And so there she has convinced Mary and Shelley to follow her lover and to join Byron, you know, by Lake Geneva.

And, you know, they're they don't know that she's pregnant. They don't even know she's had an affair with Byron, but they admire Byron's poetry. They they've always been fans and they and um so they're like, "Oh, this is great. You have an entrée to this incredible poet that we've admired. Let's all meet him and and hang out together."

And so that's how it begins. And then Byron brings along with him this man, John Polidori, who's a 21-year-old recently graduated medical student uh who's worked on sleepwalking. Somnambulism has been his specialty. But so he gets drawn in the doctor gets drawn into this kind of ghostly summer as well and becomes an important figure.

Allison Quantz: And so they're all staying in the same house together?

Andrew Stauffer: Well, there's two houses. They're about a 10-minute walk from each other, but they spend a lot of time at Villa Diodati, which is the one Byron rents. It's the bigger one. You know, Mary and Percy bring with them a 4-month-old child that they've had, William. So he's there too. There's they immediately hire a babysitter or nanny nanny in Switzerland. There's the doctor, you know, there's the servants. So there's actually a a larger cast of characters in these places than we than we might imagine.

But they're all living close to the side of Lake Geneva, boating on the water, sometimes spending the night together all in the same house, sleepovers, late-night conversations, drinking, dining, talking, all of that.

Allison Quantz: Oh man, I can't wait for the thriller written from the nanny's perspective. Like, that's a Ruth Ware novel waiting to happen.

Andrew Stauffer: Right? Yes, yeah, I try and in the book, I try to give the servants' perspectives as much as we know. And nanny Elise, her name's Elise uh Duvillard, and she's an interesting character too.

She gets very entangled with the Shelleys' lives. Um and this is outside the scope of this book, but it seems clear to me that Shelley impregnates her at some point, and she has a child by Shelley. Now, that is not proven, but there is a story there. And so she stays with them for a number of years. This that was a number of years later, three or four years later that she had that child, and then was dismissed from service. And the child died as an infant, but it it was a scandal at the time because it wasn't clear who the father was.

But, you know, part of what's going on is that Shelley, Mary, and Claire all believe in free love. You know, we would we would call it maybe polyamory today or something else. But the idea that um monogamy is a trap and it's a a relic of patriarchal values, and that, you know, love should be spread, you know, widely, and that sexual ownership is not a good thing for humans, and all of that. So they go into it with these pretty radical ideas about erotic life and sexual life. And so it can look strange from our perspective now sometimes. And we expect, "Oh, Mary and Percy, they're the happy married couple." Well, it's they're more radical than that. There's there's more complicated things going on, particularly at this early phase of their relationships when they're all in their late teens and early 20s.

Allison Quantz: There has been so much written about Frankenstein, about Mary Shelley, about this crew of romantics. What more is there to say?

Andrew Stauffer: It's true. I mean, the story's really been catnip for biographers, storytellers, but there is no one book that tells the story from all perspectives equally. There are biographies of Mary Shelley that tell her version of it, particularly the creation of Frankenstein, the dream that Mary Shelley has on that particular night, the ghost story competition that produces that novel. But a lot of other things happen that summer, as you can imagine, and other important literary works are written as well.

And the whole climate crisis aspect of that volcanic eruption that has induced the weather, that's of course something they didn't know about and then, you know, modern science didn't even really know about until relatively recently that that's what had happened and had caused that weather and that and that famine. So I think putting all the pieces together and providing a new perspective on it just gives it a kind of synergy of storytelling that individual pieces of it haven't had in the past.

Allison Quantz: Yeah. Take us to that summer. Tell me how things unfolded for these young people.

Andrew Stauffer: Well, it started with trying to get away from the families. Shelley is alienated from his family, Mary and Claire are persona non grata at the Godwin household because of this elopement.

They've got to put London behind them. Byron has just separated from his wife in a highly scandalous set of affairs and debt and rumor and scandal and all of that and also is, in a certain way, exiled or fleeing from British society. And so they all see themselves as as exiles in one way or another. But on on Shelley on the side of Shelley and the Godwin sisters, it's it's a sort of principled self-exile like, "I'm leaving because, you know, England is too small for us and for our ideas." Byron is really trying looking for a place to kind of escape and start over and put his wife uh behind him and and re-create himself, which and he he will never return to England. That's that's it for him. He he will stay abroad forever.

So that's kind of the setup. And then um, you know, when they meet, there there's an instant kind of wary but strong bond among them. Claire and Byron, of course, already have a sexual connection. Percy has slept with both women and is now really sort of just sleeping with Mary. Um Polidori is hard to say. He he seems to have a crush on Mary, he's interested in this whole free love situation, but he doesn't seem to ever really get involved with it. Um but they're instantly talking about ideas. They're up to date on modern science. They're interested in in uh natural philosophy and in galvanism, electricity, the principle of life, um all of this.

And these late-night bull sessions turn into really advanced philosophical speculations about the nature of the human mind, what does it mean to have free will, where does life come from, all of this, the kind of you might have had in a dorm room in your teens and 20s. And but but out of it um, you know, because the the weather is so bad, they need things to do, they get a little cabin fever, and they find a book of old ghost stories sitting in the in the villa and read them to each other, you know, as the fire is crackling and the cold weather is outside, and even though it's mid-summer. And Byron says, "Let's all write a ghost story. Let's see who can write the best ghost story, scare the other ones, a challenge."

And, you know, Mary Shelley clearly wins. She she she's worried that she can't keep up with, you know, Byron, this famous poet, Shelley, who has written a couple Gothic novels already and is, you know, writing poetry. She really hasn't written much yet, but she's the one who has this dream of the pale medical student bending over his creation and bringing it to life. And that, she knows, "This will be my entry in the competition." And, you know, it wins by by every measure.

Allison Quantz: Ooh, I just got chills when you were describing that. It's so good. So before we get to Frankenstein, tell what are the other entries? Do they does anything come of them?

Andrew Stauffer: Well, the other one that's really significant is it's sort of a complicated story, but Byron writes a short story about a man who dies abroad and his friend watches him die, but then later his friend sees him alive back in England, seducing his sister. And it seems clear that this was a vampire uh situation, but it although that word isn't used in Byron's little fragment.

Polidori reads this and says, "Aha, I am going to finish this and I'm going to make the vampire a sexy aristocrat like Byron." Because up until that happened, vampire stories were creepy like like zombies. Vampires were disgusting grave crawlers, they were not beautiful, they were not aristocratic, and they were not or they may maybe were but if they were they were rotten and and completely putrid and all of that. It's it's Polidori's innovation working with that stub of Byron's story to say, "Let's write a vampire novel where the villain is a seductive, slick, a seducer rather than just an attacker. That he will draw upon your own desires and and that, you know, sort of somehow the erotics of the vampire uh really get drawn out in that story."

So, you know, you could say that this summer produces two of these sort of modern myths of the horror canon: Frankenstein's creature and the sexy, seductive, suave, aristocratic vampire, which is how we think of vampires most of the time now anyway. That that comes out of this.

Allison Quantz: Was he a writer before he got there that summer?

Andrew Stauffer: No. And it's not a good nov- it's not good, right? Like, the People are like, "Ooh, I want to go read the vampire." It's Vampyre with a y. Um but don't expect uh, you know, a deathless work of literature, uh but it is interesting in the history of vampire fiction and the history of horror fiction. It you you sort of have to know it because see, you know, where does it come in the genealogy of this of this modern monster.

Allison Quantz: Okay, so let's let's get to Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster and Mary Shelley. You talked about how this came out of a dream she had. Um what is it about this book that has been, and not just book, the character that has been just so enticing to us, to writers and filmmakers and readers for centuries now?

Andrew Stauffer: Yeah, one place you might start to answer that is you think, okay, Byron says, "Let's have a ghost story competition." Well, Mary actually doesn't write a ghost story. There is nothing supernatural, there are no ghosts, there's no magic, there's no no there's nothing in Frankenstein except science. Um it's really science fiction, and it's often put as the beginning of the of a whole genre of fiction we now call sci-fi um in that she, and Shelley are both atheists. They don't believe in God or anything like that, and they're very interested in modern chemistry, modern biology, modern electricity, um and modern philosophy.

And so the novel is, on the one hand, a Gothic novel, but it it's also a kind of uh techno-fable about the dangers of of what to them was cutting-edge modern science. And so ever since then, you know, that was at the beginning of a kind of rise of enlightenment, modern science and technology that of course we're still very much living in the midst of. And so every generation finds in that story another cautionary tale about the dangers of a scientific overreach.

The subtitle of the novel is The Modern Prometheus, a kind of ironic um label for Victor Frankenstein that is, you know, the one the god who brought technology to man. Well, here's a modern version of it, and look how pathetic, look how frightening, look how um damaging it is to release a nontrained, uh intelligent, non-human agent into the world and see what happens, right?

You can begin to see why for our moment, AI, you know, the novel is having another life as thinking about, well, is the creature an AI? Is that what that is? You you it's not human, um it is intelligent, it can be reasoned with but only to an extent. But for previous generations, you know, it was I mean and maybe even still for ours, it would have been a parable about say genetic editing. Before that, it would have been something like the nuclear bomb or anything anything that science produced that then you know, sorcerer apprentice-like could not be controlled by humans and then it was having its own, you know, destructive effects. So there's that, um I think is a big part of it.

But it's also, you know, very much a story about the limits of the human. What does it mean to be a human being? The creature can talk, it can reason, it can feel, it can feel pain, it can do all these things. Therefore, does it qualify as a human, and what what what moral obligation does it have on those people the people around it? The problems of the novel result primarily from the fact that the creature is so ugly that no one can look at it and treat it with any sympathy or love. And so it's an instant outcast and it it's a violent incel. He wants a mate, he can't find one, everyone hates him, everyone flees from him, runs from him, eventually he becomes murderous. And so that's part of that the story of it too um is a sort of a moral tale.

Allison Quantz: It does seem like the metaphor is more complicated than we than just saying, you know, "This is a cautionary tale about technology," because in some ways, you could almost read it as the reverse, right? That it's the rejection of the technology that creates him as a monster, not the technology itself, right?

Andrew Stauffer: That's right. Yeah, sort of, yeah, what are the obligations we have to, you know, our creations? And in that way, it's also deeply um a novel about parenthood. And it's bound up with, you know, Mary's relationship with her mother and her father. Her mother died giving birth to her. Mary herself has already had lost a one child, an infant who died very young. And so she associates birth and death in a way, and then Victor as the example of a bad father, right? That's he's he's his creature is born and he rejects it and he runs away and he treats the creature terribly. And, you know, you might say, "Well, if Victor had just been a better dad to his son, none of this would have happened."

And of course, Mary and her father William, to whom she was very close and to whom she dedicated the novel, um they had a very complicated relationship. Um and he had rejected her when she ran off with Percy Shelley, so.

Allison Quantz: Ouch. Wait, was the dedication a snipe or was it?

Andrew Stauffer: Well, it's it's very interesting to to look at the first few pages of that novel because the epigraph is from Paradise Lost and it says: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" And then you turn the page and it's like, "To my father, William Godwin." You know, to the illustrious William Godwin.

So, on the one hand, it's an it's a, you know, a sort of confrontation like, "Did I ask to be born?" And then, you know, the next page is to the illustrious William Godwin, and then you get into the story about, you know, Victor Frankenstein, who is clearly, you know, by any measure, a bad father if you consider his relationship to his creature a fatherly one. And yeah, and there's all sorts of ways that the creature is coded feminine and almost and shares certain things in common with Mary, actually. Um so if you look at her notebooks in Geneva, some of the things that the creature says when he tells his story are taken from things she observed in her notebook privately about Geneva and coming there for the first time. So there's all this crossover and it's really it's really fascinating.

Allison Quantz: So I know that Mary Shelley and Frankenstein has been taken up by contemporary feminist critics and writers, and that there's been a lot of ink spilled about this book as really a book about motherhood. But I hadn't really heard this this element of kind of digging at her father.

Andrew Stauffer: Yes, it's complicated. Yeah, I mean, she the whole idea of bringing a creature sort of back to life from the dead, that dream seems to have originally come from a nightmare she had after she lost her baby. And she writes in her journal, "I dreamed that my baby was only cold, and I warmed it by the fire and it came back to life." And, "I woke up and then there I had no baby and it was I was very sad." But there's the the sense that that idea of of again, birth and death, the kind of toggling between the two… some ways the horrors of giving birth. Mary would go on to have miscarriages, she would lose almost all her children at some point to childhood diseases, it was common in that time, but it wasn't. Didn't make it any easier.

Allison Quantz: You spoke about Mary's personal journals from this time. Were there.. I imagine there was a lot to go through. You've got all these writers in a house. I imagine they're doing a lot of writing while they're there. Were there particular treasures that you found that when you read them you thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe that's there.

Andrew Stauffer: In some ways, it's just sort of being able to track what they were doing day by day. I'm trying to think, I mean, there's a there's a great drawing in Percy Shelley's notebook that he brought along with him as they went to visit Mont Blanc in the Alps on a special excursion, and he draws a sort of picture of Mont Blanc, and he just writes on it "power" and that is a key word for his response to the Alps, and it actually becomes a kind of key to this whole poem he writes, called Mont Blanc, where he is wrestling with this sublime force of nature, and he's his thing is the human mind is the most powerful thing, the natural world has to, you know, sort of bow down to the human mind's imagining, but confronted with the with Mont Blanc is sort of a boss level encounter, he's like, "I'm not sure my mind is up to this, this is the most sublime, you know, ecstatic, wonderful, frightening, fascinating thing I've ever seen, and so that, that just that one word, power, that you see written on this, it's sort of a thrilling moment, but that's, you know, there's so many moments like that, where you can sort of see them in process of thinking of things that will become important later.

There's a letter that Claire writes to Byron early on in their affair, she's always trying to get him to love her more, and he really doesn't care about her, but he's putting up with it because she's throwing herself at him. In the first letter she writes to Byron, this is basically fan mail at this time, and she writes, "My folly may be great, but the creator ought not to destroy his creature. I'll read that again. My folly may be great, but the creator ought not to destroy his creature. Now, that's long before anything of Frankenstein has happened. That's that's back in England. None of them have even left for the continent yet, and she hasn't even had an affair with Byron, but that language is already sort of present in her conception of herself, that she is somehow his creature, and that he has created her by being so attractive and compelling, and that now her heart belongs to him. So that creature creator stuff, that's that brings you up short when you see that in a letter

Allison Quantz: From Claire!

Andrew Stauffer: From Claire, right? Exactly. So, but it's, it's a sign, you know what you can't quite see, but you can glimpse are these these connections among them? All you know the way that they, you know that their traces in their journals, their poems, their letters to one another and to other people. You can see phrases and ideas recurring, which are just the tip of an iceberg of all those late night conversations, which, of course, aren't recorded in any, you know, real way, but that you can see the trace of, oh yeah, they were all talking about this stuff all the time, and we just have the little bits and pieces, but you can see that it was really a productive collaboration.

Allison Quantz: Oh yeah, wow, I love that. I want to return to the climate aspect of it, the sort of real life gothic darkness that enveloped the summer. Were they writing and thinking and responding to that.

Andrew Stauffer: Yeah, I do think that that the cold weather and the darkness certainly contributed to the gothic atmosphere of everything that was going on there. It's not that every day was not, they did see the sun, it's not that every day was dark and cold, but it was unseasonably and unnaturally, maybe supernaturally cold and dark, and as they, you know, once they saw the glaciers and these mountains of ice and the avalanches, there was a sense that what the Shelleys were afraid of is that the world was was going to end in ice, the glaciers were growing, and that actually they were entering an ice age, and so it's a reverse of the kind of climate fears we have now. Byron actually writes a poem that summer called Darkness, in which he imagines the sun going out and the world coming to an end, because everything freezes to death, and Shelley writes about this when he visits the glacier in the Alpine glaciers, that they seem to be moving forward. At the rate of several feet a year, and are eventually going to just swallow the entire village, and then the entire community, and maybe the entire world. So, given the cold weather, I think they were afraid that they were at the beginning of a new ice age, and that the climate crisis that had been caused, unbeknownst to them, by a volcanic eruption, they didn't have a cause for it. They didn't know where this was coming from, but they just were in the face of this sort of implacable cold that seemed a sign of apocalypse.

And that kind of apocalyptic thinking kind of informs some of the horror fiction that they're writing as well. It's a sense of helplessness that the world is changing, and we, we don't know where, why, or and there's nothing we can do about it, except, except wait.

Allison Quantz: To me, the real paradox of this story is how specific it was, these specific characters with these specific stories at this very specific moment, and yet, how perennially resonant it is, and you read it with, with college students today, and they, it speaks to them, it speaks to me. At nearly 40 years old, it's, you know, this book never stops feeling like it's on the cutting edge, which is quite a magic trick. What do you think we’ll do with it generations to come?

Andrew Stauffer: It is an amazing artifact of this scene, you know. There was some magic alchemy in these particular people at this particular time, in this particular place, in the kind of flow of cultural history that happens sometimes. You know, you get these scenes where there's incredible outpouring of art, whether it's the Bloomsbury Group or the East Village in the 1970s or wherever, that you get the right people together almost by accident, and an amazing flowering of kind of art happens. I mean, Frankenstein is a modern myth, it's escaped from its covers, as it were, you don't even have to have read the novel to know it fairly well, in a sense, you know, to know the myth well, and that doesn't happen very often. Once it happens, then it's common property, it belongs to all of us. You, you can read the novel, you can see the movies, you can look at the adaptations, you can, you know, read about it, and it's just all part of the long cultural life of Mary Shelley's dream.

Allison Quantz: Andrew Stauffer, thank you so much for speaking with me today. On With Good Reason

Andrew Stauffer: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

Allison Quantz: Andrew Stauffer is an English professor at the University of Virginia. His book, tentatively titled Dark season, the summer of Frankenstein isn't available yet, but it should hit shelves in early 2028

This is With Good Reason. We'll be back with more monsters from land and sea.

Allison Quantz: Welcome back to With Good Reason from Virginia Humanities.

Goliath might be the most famous giant from the Bible, but he's certainly not the only one. Paul Thomas is a religious studies professor at Radford University. He's working on a book about how monsters show up in religion.

Paul, there's a whole field of study known as monster studies. Is that right?

Paul Thomas: It is. So, we could start, for example, with Sigmund Freud and his theories of the unconscious and repression, and talk about how in modern monster studies, the monster comes to represent those things that are repressed in the unconscious.

But Freud also wrote an essay on The Uncanny, which is an important concept in the monstrous as well. So, have you ever known anybody who was afraid of clowns or dolls?

Allison Quantz: Sure!

Paul Thomas: Well, what Freud's theory of the uncanny tells us about that is, there's something about the clown or the doll that seems familiar, right? They have faces and hands and legs and things like that, but they're also unfamiliar at the same time. They're just different enough to make us feel uncomfortable. And he called that sensation unheimlich—unhomely.

So, from Freud, then we could talk about J.R.R. Tolkien, who gave an influential lecture on Beowulf and its monsters. And his argument took scholars of Beowulf to task for being embarrassed about and ignoring the monsters in Beowulf. His argument says we have a lot that we could learn about the culture that wrote Beowulf, maybe even ourselves, if we actually pay attention to the monsters.

We can talk about the philosopher Michel Foucault, who gave a series of lectures on abnormality. He kind of defines "the other"—people that are sort of outside social norms and conventions, and how they end up there.

Really, this all kind of coalesces in an essay by medieval scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen about what monsters represent. Monsters represent social anxiety, for example. We've got this id, right, that wants to just wreak havoc and do everything, but it's kept in control. It's kept in check. The monster, according to Cohen, gives us a space to express those repressed things.

Allison Quantz: And you are writing a whole book about monsters and religion. How did you first get interested in the subject?

Paul Thomas: Well, that goes back to graduate school. And I had a professor, and we were going through the Book of Genesis. We came across Genesis 6:1–4. But what's happening in this story is that the sons of God—angels, if you will—look down on Earth, and they notice women, and they're attracted to the women. So they're like, "Why don't we go down and make wives with them?" Uh, they come down from heaven, they make wives with the human women, and they have children. And those children are giants. They're monsters.

Paul Thomas: And that's pretty much all that Genesis says about it. So, there are ancient Jewish texts that fill out the story, like the Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch describes the giants as these creatures that have these massive appetites that consume everything. So God then decides, "Well, I've got to destroy it and start over." So, this whole Genesis 6:1–4 is a prelude to the flood narrative. It actually outlines a reason why the flood had to happen—because God needed to destroy the giants.

Allison Quantz: I never knew that!

Paul Thomas: I know, and it blew my mind, too, when I learned this because, my gosh, this sounds like something that you might find in Greek myth. It opened my eyes to giants in the Hebrew Bible. So, when I went into my PhD program, I delved into the literature on monsters.

Allison Quantz: I immediately think of Goliath when I think of a biblical giant. He's the—and I guess in my mind, he was the only one.

Paul Thomas: Well, and I think that's true for most people, and they know the story of David versus Goliath. But in the Hebrew Bible, there are references to other named giants, like Og. And there are references to entire races of giants, including Nephilim, Anakim—another term for a biblical race of giants. And Goliath is described as descendant from these. Ishbi-benob is another named biblical giant.

But I—I want to circle back and tell you a story about Og. This is one of my favorite stories. So, you have the flood. God sends the flood to destroy the world and, ostensibly, the giants, right? If the giants are destroyed during the flood, how is there a giant on the earth for David to fight after the flood? So, they tell this story, this ancient Jewish story.
Noah is preparing the ark, and he's ordered to bring all the creatures onboard the ark. As the ark is nearing completion, Noah is starting to fret because he hasn't tracked down a unicorn. If he doesn't find the unicorn, he won't fulfill God's command to rescue all the animals. While Noah is—is constructing the ark, on a hill nearby is sitting the giant Og, the offspring of the angels and the human women.
So Og approaches Noah and says, "I can get your unicorn, but in—in return, you have to save me from the coming flood calamity." Noah agrees. So Og goes out and gets a unicorn, and the unicorn he brings back is, itself, gigantic. It won't fit on the ark.

So Noah says, "Well, thank you for finding me this unicorn." Noah proceeds to tie it up with like a halter to the back of the ark, and the idea is it's going to tread water during the flood. But Noah reneges on his promise. He reneges on his part of the deal and says, "I'm going to take this unicorn, thanks for bringing it, but I'm not bringing you."

So Og stomps off to his hillside. The waters start rising, the—the ark starts rising, the unicorn starts treading water, and the ark starts drifting closer to Og's hill. Og sees his opportunity. He jumps from the hill onto the back of the unicorn! And from there, he starts laughing at and taunting Noah. The ark comes to rest, the animals leave, Og wanders off, and he survives the flood—which then is used to explain why there are giants after the flood, specifically like Goliath for David to fight.

Allison Quantz: Wait, this is wild! So this—this story is not in the Bible. This is a story that's—it's like a folk tale?

Paul Thomas: That—that's exactly right. And these are very much like Jewish folk tales to explain gaps and inconsistencies. And this one explains why there are giants after the flood.

Allison Quantz: Wow. That's amazing.

Paul Thomas: They weren't afraid of gaps and inconsistencies in the story. They used these as creative spaces to tell stories and do more theology. It's an interesting comparison to how some people approach the Bible today. You will find some Christian communities that are afraid of those gaps and inconsistencies. It's—it's just a fascinating and a very different approach.

Allison Quantz: Yeah. How—how do giants figure as—as a monstrous character as we move through time, as we get closer to today?

Paul Thomas: Yes, giants don't go away, right? One of the truisms of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's monster theory is that the monster always comes back. If you know all the iteration of the Jason movies—"Oh, he's dead." "No, he's not." "Oh, he's dead." "No, he's not. He's back," right? The monster always comes back.

If the monster represents on some level our cultural fears and anxieties, those fears and anxieties never really go away. So, the giants survive. Uh, the Middle Ages are just filled with stories about giants. Uh, some of them malevolent and evil, like the Giant of Mont Saint-Michel. In Arthurian romances, a giant that King Arthur kills, and this is a raping giant that's just terrorizes everybody. There are also, in the Middle Ages, some good giants who are either friends of heroes or are heroes themselves. But they're kind of mellowed, like the good giant in the Middle Ages kind of adopts courtly culture. So this giant acts like a chivalrous man should act.

Moving into American history, Cotton Mather was interested in monsters. Puritan preacher Cotton Mather. He was interested in demons and devils, but he also was a believer in biblical giants. So, Cotton Mather came across or viewed a giant tooth. Now, we would recognize it today as probably a woolly mammoth tooth. But he didn't know about woolly mammoths, right? They didn't know about dinosaurs. And in fact, a lot of the speculation about the historicity of giants results from mistaken dinosaur bones.

Allison Quantz: Oh, wow.

Paul Thomas: Yeah. So, he views this massive tooth, and he holds this up as evidence of Nephilim, the biblical giants, which, you know, inhabited the wilderness surrounding the Puritans. The wilderness was a place of—of demons, and therefore the inhabitants of that wilderness, namely Native Americans, must therefore be in league with demons—which then explains a lot of the Puritan attitude toward Native Americans at this time.

Allison Quantz: Mhm. I'm thinking about sort of more contemporary pop culture, and I'm kind of coming up short. There are things like Godzilla and King Kong, who are giant-like figures.

Paul Thomas: Yes.

Allison Quantz: But—but I can't think of a—a sort of a human-bodied giant in more contemporary culture.

Paul Thomas: That's because they've kind of fallen out of favor. We're more interested in hybrid monsters, and that, for modern audiences, seems much more frightening than just a—this sort of expanded human body that looks like it was Xeroxed. So, the giants are relatively absent. There are a couple exceptions. Roald Dahl's book, The Big Friendly Giant, but he's a good giant.

I don't know if it's a resurgence of benevolent monsters in recent pop culture. You've got your things like Edward Scissorhands, and that's a modern retelling of the Frankenstein story, but he's good. You've got Hotel Transylvania, where the monsters in that animated feature are good, and they've actually, in the hotel, built themselves a sanctuary from the entities that might be the true monsters: people.
As we move forward in the 20th and 21st centuries, the monster is less and less about appearance and more and more about behavior, coupled with a very modern celebration of diversity, particularly physical diversity, right? Then we're focusing less on the physical appearance of the monster. Shrek is a great example of this. Shrek is a green ogre, but he's the good guy, right?

Allison Quantz: Right, Shrek is sort of explicitly about saying monsters aren't necessarily monsters, right?

Paul Thomas: That's right. You can't look at a monster like Shrek and just assume, based on appearance, that he's a bad person. The true monsters are those who react negatively to diversity. The true monsters become everyday people who want to persecute the Shreks, and the residents of Hotel Transylvania, and Edward Scissorhands, and entities like that.

Allison Quantz: Yeah, it's sort of like in some ways it feels like the earlier stories you're talking about are about taking the things inside people that we don't like and displacing them onto monsters. And instead, the more contemporary stories are more like taking the things we don't like and bringing them into how we are in our daily lives by sort of saying the opposite—right?—of—of accepting like, we're all kind of vampires sometimes.

Paul Thomas: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And—and—and I appreciate what you said about projection, right? Monsters for human history have been like a canvas that we paint on. People, us—we're the canvas now, we're kind of painting it on ourselves.
Yeah, and it's becoming a—a criticism of us as monsters.

Allison Quantz: That is so interesting. Paul Thomas, thank you so much for speaking with me today on With Good Reason.

Paul Thomas: Oh, you're very welcome. I very much enjoyed this conversation.

Allison Quantz: Paul Thomas is a religious studies professor at Radford University.

We're going to move from monsters who walked the earth to monsters who lurked in the deepest parts of the sea. Georgia Irby says that Greek and Roman mythology is filled with sea monsters. She's a classics professor at William & Mary, and she explains how ancient relationships with the ocean brought these monsters to life.

Georgia, sea monsters are all over Greek and Roman mythology and stories. Where does this come from?

Georgia Irby: Where does the sea monster come from? I think it comes from the fear of the natural world. The Greeks sailed all over, and they knew the water too well to trust it. They're aware of large animals in the water. They're not quite sure what they are. But you have to explain it in some way, and that allows you to control it. If you can control it, you no longer fear it—you're conquering it. Sending out your best heroes to conquer the beast. Heracles fought a sea monster, Perseus fought a sea monster, and we have sea monsters all over Greek art. Some of them are kind of cute, and some of them are kind of fearsome.

Allison Quantz: Part of what I love about what you're talking about here... I know you're a historian of science, and I think initially I had been expecting the sea monsters to—to simply be a metaphor for the unknown, right? The—the sort of demons inside us. But you're really connecting it with the actual scientific unknowns of the natural world around them.

Georgia Irby: Yes, indeed, because nothing comes out of nothing. All of the—the—the stories of the creation of the world, the stories of how the world works, they have to come from somewhere. Um, and these sea monsters, they might be octopods, they might be whales, they might be sharks, eels. Eels were very common throughout the Mediterranean and... I don't know about you, but when I see an eel in a tank in an aquarium, it really freaks me out. So I can see how an eel would inspire a sea monster.

Allison Quantz: Yeah, eels are still kind of terrifying, and we know a lot about them now! Um, what are some of the best-known stories of sea monsters from this time?

Georgia Irby: Heracles—this is probably the best known of the stories. The king of Troy had walls built around the city by Apollo and Poseidon. These are two very, very powerful gods. He had promised to pay the gods for the walls, but he refused payment. So Apollo, being a god of healing and plague, sends a plague. Poseidon, being a god of water and storms, sends a sea monster. The only way to appease the wrath of the sea monster is through the sacrifice of a virgin. And the only virgin who would be suitable would be the king's daughter, Hesione.

So, Heracles comes by and he says, "Oh, I can save the fair maiden!" And what he does is he takes his sickle, he has the sea monster swallow him, and he carves out the innards of the sea monster, thereby killing him from the inside out. The sea monster is slain, the girl is saved, but Laomedon, who's the king of Troy at the time, refuses to pay Heracles—Hercules. So, he kidnaps the girl. And that's the story.
Uh, there's a doublet of that story, which is Perseus. He's the one who went after Medusa's head. Medusa is the monster whose gaze, living or dead, will turn anything that—that looks at it into stone. So Perseus is tasked with obtaining her head, which he does. And when he's coming back from the western edges of the world, he looks down and he sees a beautiful princess chained to a rock. She is Andromeda.

Her mother, Cassiopeia, said one day, "I am more beautiful than even the daughters of Nereus." Nereus is one of the gods of the sea. One of his daughters happens to be the wife of, you guessed it, Poseidon. So, Poseidon gets mad because this is an insult to his wife's beauty, it's an affront to the all the gods. So, he sends a sea monster to ravage the kingdom. And the only way to appease the wrath of the sea monster is—wait for it—the sacrifice of a virgin.

Allison Quantz: Oh, no!

Georgia Irby: So, this would be the princess of the kingdom. And Perseus looks down, he sees her, she's beautiful, he immediately falls in love with her—he's flying overhead. And he asks, "Can I marry her if I save her from the sea monster?" And they say yes.

So, he tells everyone, "Look away!" He pulls out the Medusa's head from this leather sack that he's keeping it in to protect everyone from the gaze of Medusa. He petrifies the sea monster. All of the seaweed immediately turns into coral, which explains why we have coral in the Mediterranean Sea. And the sea monster is vanquished and, uh, Perseus and Andromeda get married and live happily ever after.

Allison Quantz: I love the way, you know, these fantastical stories sort of mix in, again, the science of how did we get coral in the ocean, where does this come from? And then also these bigger ideas of, you know, beauty and—and greed. I'm wondering in these stories of sea monsters, do we see a conflict between the land and the sea? Is that a sort of prominent element?

Georgia Irby: Certainly. Part of the issue is, we don't really belong in the sea. We are not naturally maritime creatures. We are invading the territory of the—the Nereids and the other water nymphs, who are playing and swimming and riding dolphins. There's a charming scene, I think it's in Ovid, of the daughters of Nereus sitting on rocks, wringing out their green hair, sunbathing, frolicking with the dolphins, being chased by male composite sea creatures. It's very clear that when there's a storm, there's something in there that's going to hunt people who survive.

There's another passage, let some see if I can find that... Oh, this is actually an historical account. And here we have an example of a storm on the Rhone River in 15 CE. And there's a poem about it: "Now they see that ocean, who bears up huge monsters everywhere beneath its sluggish waves, as well as savage whales and watery dogs. Ocean is rising up and snatching the ships."
The fleet is in this storm on a river, but instead of focusing just on the storm, the poet, whose name is Albinovanus Pedo, is also focusing on the terrors of the huge sea monsters that we imagine are lurking beneath.

And we have lots of artwork showing scenes of shipwreck with sharks coming out and other strange looking fish circling the planks and the men, and there's this one that shows six or seven different men. One man has lost his head, one man's head is in the mouth of a fish, another man has lost an arm, other body parts are missing as these guys are trying to escape from the very real sea creatures that have come upon them during their shipwreck.

Allison Quantz: One of the things that I was thinking about coming into this conversation, I've been, I've done other interviews for this episode, we're talking about Frankenstein and vampires and all of these other monsters who are much more present, I think, in certainly in American culture today, and I was thinking the sea monster - there's like the Loch Ness monster, who's really a very friendly monster in today's world. I know you're a historian, but in contemporary, in the Mediterranean, now, is there more of this culture of the sea monsters remaining? Do you know

Georgia Irby: in the Mediterranean? I'm not sure, but you may be familiar with the tradition of Chessie in the Chesapeake Bay.

Allison Quantz: Oh, yeah, sure.

Georgia Irby: And I think that there are a couple of others. I mean, we don't know what's out there, but honestly, I don't have an answer for the modern Mediterranean, but I would be surprised if there weren't. If we have Chessie, certainly there's something enduring there, and I am one of the many millions and millions and millions of people who did make a pilgrimage to Loch Ness to see Nessie, so she endures. Her first sighting was actually by what was his name. I'm going to look this up, if you don't mind.

Allison Quantz: Yeah, go right ahead.

Georgia Irby: St. Columba. So this is the first recorded sighting of Nessie, and he sees this monster raging up from the water as he's walking along the banks of Loch Ness, and his biographer says the monster did rush up with a great roar in open mouth, but when the saint commanded it to replete, it obeyed.

Allison Quantz: I love it. Did you see Nessie?

Georgia Irby: I think I did. And I certainly stopped at the museum, and picked up a little messy baby in my dunnage.

Allison Quantz: Perfect.

Georgia Irby: I made my pilgrimage to Loch Ness as an impoverished graduate student, and never thought at the moment that that would count as legitimate research.

Allison Quantz: You picked the right subject, Georgia Irby. Thank you so much for speaking with me today on With Good Reason.

Georgia Irby: Thank you so much for having me.

Allison Quantz: Georgia Irby is a classics professor at William and Mary.

With Good Reason is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our production team is Sarah McConnell, Matt Darroch, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jennie Taylor for booking assistance for the podcast. Go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I'm Allison Quantz. Thanks for listening.