On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma Page B
Authors: Stephen T. Asma
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liminal being.
Liminal
comes from the Latin word
limen
, meaning “threshold.” When you are on a threshold, you are neither inside nor outside but in between. Hermaphrodites, with their ambiguous genitalia, are in between the traditional categories of male and female. One sees, immediately I think, that the idea of a liminal being, something between categories, is a very useful way to think about many of the subjects of this book, not just hermaphrodites. Griffins, with their ambiguous avian-quadruped shape, would qualify as liminal, as would centaurs, the chimera, the Gorgons, the Minotaur, and the Hydra. Mosaic beings, grafted together or hybridized by nature or artifice, reappear throughout the history of Western monsters as the Golem, Frankenstein’s creature, and transgenic animals. Even zombies, though not hybridized, are liminal monsters because they exist between the living and the dead. In short, liminality is a significant category for the uncategorizable. Of course, the extraordinary and the ordinary are often just different by degree rather than kind. So the extent to which
everyone
is a little hard to categorize is the extent to which we are all liminal.
Theory aside, Livy chronicled many murders of hermaphrodites in the last two centuries before the Common Era. A short sampling of his very long list will suffice to demonstrate the common perception of hermaphroditesas monsters. In 133, “in the region of Ferentium, a hermaphrodite was born and thrown into the river”; in 119 “a hermaphrodite eight years old was discovered in the region of Rome and consigned to the sea”; in 117 “a hermaphrodite ten years old was discovered and was drowned in the sea”; in 98 “a hermaphrodite was thrown into the sea.”
The practice of drowning hermaphrodites was extended to all seriously disabled children in the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables. “A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster, or has a form different from that of members of the human race.” Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a hermaphrodite sketch in Ambroise Paré’s sixteenth-century
On Monsters
.
Many other types of monsters are cited in Livy’s encyclopedic history, including many unfortunate developmentally disabled children. A sad litany of abnormalities is offered as examples of bad omens, including conjoined twins and babies born with no hands and feet or too many hands and feet. Livy himself seems completely unmoved by any of these stories and recites them as though he’s reading sports scores. His entry for 108 BCE reads, “At Nursia twins were born to a freeborn woman, the girl with all members intact the boy with the following deformities; in front his abdomen was open, so that the uncovered intestine could be seen, and behind he had no anal opening; at birth he cried out onceand died. The war against Jugurtha was carried on successfully.” But things seemed to be looking up for hermaphrodites, at least, by the time Pliny writes his
Natural History
. We find a refreshing tolerance developing toward hermaphrodites when he states, “There are people who have the characteristics of both sexes. We call them hermaphrodites, the Greeks
androgyny
. Once considered portents, now they are sources of entertainment.” 6
Some scholars see a teleological arc here. That is to say, the transition from superstitious murder of hermaphrodites to benign neglect and even amusement looks like progress. It looks like progress because it
is
progress, ethically speaking. But history and ethics don’t always converge on the righteous path. The classicist Luc Brisson and the gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling both suggest that hermaphrodites suffered terribly in the early days of Roman law, but then rational progress ultimately created a more hospitable Rome for first-century hermaphrodites. 7
But even while Pliny was assuring the reader that hermaphrodites were in the clear, so to speak,
Liminal
comes from the Latin word
limen
, meaning “threshold.” When you are on a threshold, you are neither inside nor outside but in between. Hermaphrodites, with their ambiguous genitalia, are in between the traditional categories of male and female. One sees, immediately I think, that the idea of a liminal being, something between categories, is a very useful way to think about many of the subjects of this book, not just hermaphrodites. Griffins, with their ambiguous avian-quadruped shape, would qualify as liminal, as would centaurs, the chimera, the Gorgons, the Minotaur, and the Hydra. Mosaic beings, grafted together or hybridized by nature or artifice, reappear throughout the history of Western monsters as the Golem, Frankenstein’s creature, and transgenic animals. Even zombies, though not hybridized, are liminal monsters because they exist between the living and the dead. In short, liminality is a significant category for the uncategorizable. Of course, the extraordinary and the ordinary are often just different by degree rather than kind. So the extent to which
everyone
is a little hard to categorize is the extent to which we are all liminal.
Theory aside, Livy chronicled many murders of hermaphrodites in the last two centuries before the Common Era. A short sampling of his very long list will suffice to demonstrate the common perception of hermaphroditesas monsters. In 133, “in the region of Ferentium, a hermaphrodite was born and thrown into the river”; in 119 “a hermaphrodite eight years old was discovered in the region of Rome and consigned to the sea”; in 117 “a hermaphrodite ten years old was discovered and was drowned in the sea”; in 98 “a hermaphrodite was thrown into the sea.”
The practice of drowning hermaphrodites was extended to all seriously disabled children in the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables. “A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster, or has a form different from that of members of the human race.” Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a hermaphrodite sketch in Ambroise Paré’s sixteenth-century
On Monsters
.
Many other types of monsters are cited in Livy’s encyclopedic history, including many unfortunate developmentally disabled children. A sad litany of abnormalities is offered as examples of bad omens, including conjoined twins and babies born with no hands and feet or too many hands and feet. Livy himself seems completely unmoved by any of these stories and recites them as though he’s reading sports scores. His entry for 108 BCE reads, “At Nursia twins were born to a freeborn woman, the girl with all members intact the boy with the following deformities; in front his abdomen was open, so that the uncovered intestine could be seen, and behind he had no anal opening; at birth he cried out onceand died. The war against Jugurtha was carried on successfully.” But things seemed to be looking up for hermaphrodites, at least, by the time Pliny writes his
Natural History
. We find a refreshing tolerance developing toward hermaphrodites when he states, “There are people who have the characteristics of both sexes. We call them hermaphrodites, the Greeks
androgyny
. Once considered portents, now they are sources of entertainment.” 6
Some scholars see a teleological arc here. That is to say, the transition from superstitious murder of hermaphrodites to benign neglect and even amusement looks like progress. It looks like progress because it
is
progress, ethically speaking. But history and ethics don’t always converge on the righteous path. The classicist Luc Brisson and the gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling both suggest that hermaphrodites suffered terribly in the early days of Roman law, but then rational progress ultimately created a more hospitable Rome for first-century hermaphrodites. 7
But even while Pliny was assuring the reader that hermaphrodites were in the clear, so to speak,
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