The Monstrous Meal

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Gothic literature, allegories of flesh consumption and procr-eat-ive aberrance, a resistance to both procreating and eating, mark the monster’s transhuman body as a key site of articulation for the construction of species and national identity. In this essay, I employ an ecogothic approach to examine how the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1898) exhibit an alimentary economy that frames (non) consumption as a construct of monstrosity, setting the benchmark for a transnational discourse articulated in the monstrously troped protagonists of Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca (1869) and Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). Volponi, Paolo¹ In these works a recurrent thematics of inappetence coincides with one of procreative stasis: the Creature and the puppet are the products of a procreative collapse, while the Count and Fosca foster one. The Creature’s vegetarian decree to eat food that is “not that of man” (Shelley 99) and the Count’s habit of not eating animal flesh or, as Van Helsing observes, “not as others” (Stoker, Dracula 244) may be seen as a roadmap of counterconsumption, part of a broader trend in Gothic literature to navigate ideologies of nation with the fork. Whether of a human/ nonhuman constitution like the Creature, zoomorphic like the Count, a transhuman, arboreal mutant like Pinocchio, or unhuman like Fosca, the monster’s body is encoded with a herbivorous form of protest—an alimentary iconoclasm that might be summed up as a politics of “eating (against the) grain.”