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eBook details

• Title: Monstrous Bodies: Freakish Forms and Strange Conceptions in the First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
• Author : Ariel
• Release Date : January 01, 2002
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 238 KB

Description

Andrew Halfnight, the narrator of Eric McCormack's gothic novel The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, is born with a twin sister wedged tightly against his chest. Once prised apart, they leave permanent birthmarks on each other: "a dark purple stain in the shape of a triangle marked the upper body area, from nipple to nipple to belly-button, of both me and my sister. The shape looked vaguely like a dog's head, or maybe some kind of rodent" (4). This stain defines Andrew as "monstrous" or "freakish," because it signifies his strangely conjoined physical being (always himself and always, in part, his dead sister) and because it aligns him with the animal world (always himself and always, in part, something canine or rodent-like). In this novel filled with satiric references to Presbyterianism, the stain suggests preordained doom. Andrew's sense of monstrosity, diagnosed by a psychiatrist as "'lingering trauma'" (235), results from his physical marking, combined with his uneasy relation to his mother's body and his Calvinist contempt for flesh. Women, especially his mother and his Aunt Lizzie, horrify Andrew. He loves them and loathes them. He fears they desire him, and he fears desiring them in turn. Uneasily inhabiting his marked body, Andrew alleviates his anguish by repudiating desire and displacing monstrosity onto women. In The First Blast of the Trumpet, discourses of deformity, derived from John Knox, Robert Burton, John Milton, and other Renaissance writers, make Andrew's body a palimpsest of past and present attitudes towards the freakish. Although McCormack's writing is always darkly comic, in the tradition of grotesque narrative that evokes nervous titters--grotesquery is the "victory of laughter over fear" (Bakhtin 90)--his preoccupation with monstrosity raises the problem of defining the postmodern body. Medical, political, anthropological, and other representations overlay the body. Moreover, the body accumulates historical representations that have no scientific validity but that persist nonetheless, such as the belief that epilepsy is a divine disease, or that lines criss-crossing the palms predict destiny. For McCormack, the body, medium of personality and instrument of dark deeds, verges on unknowable otherness. Competing discourses and representations make the body indecipherable. Two crucial features of the postmodern body emerge in The First Blast of the Trumpet: the body is discursive as well as material; monstrosity is a psychological disorder more than a physical one.

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