Tracking the Monster

Abstract

The association of the figure of the monster in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic fiction with queer sexuality and the persecution experienced by the social outcast makes it especially well-suited to representing the situation of the queer individual and the prejudice he can encounter. After examining Peter Ackroyd’s re-casting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his work of historiographic-metafiction The Case Book of Victor Frankenstein, the chapter discusses reference to the monster and the experience of monsterisation that the queer individual undergoes as represented in Winterson’s historical novel The Daylight Gate and Kathleen Winters’s intersex fiction Annabel. The chapter concludes with reference to the treatment of the motif of the monster in the context of racial and sexual politics, exemplified by the African-American Randall Kenan’s slave narrative ‘Let the Dead Bury Their Dead’.