Deviants, Donestre, and Debauchees: Here be Monsters

St Augustine suggested that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify (monstrare) something, whilst Foucault argued that one ancestor of today’s abnormal individual was the human monster, a class of being characterised by a composite nature. This essay examines what two very different mixed human monsters can show us. The donestre, a mediaeval race of lion-headed polyglots with a taste for human flesh, demonstrate an ancient form of monstrous transgression by their corporeal violation of both social and natural law. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, meanwhile, illustrates a modern form of monstrosity in which a person’s instinctual character, their potential conduct or behaviour, marks them out as deviant. The study of monsters helps to debauch our minds with learning and thus, in the words of William James, to make the natural, explanatory power of ‘instinct’ seem strange. Monstra sane dicta perhibent a monstrando, quod aliquid significando demonstrent. (The name ‘monster’, we are told, evidently comes from monstrare, ‘to show’, because they show by signifying something.) (Augustine, City of God, p. 982/XXI.8) It takes ... a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. (William James 1981 [1890], Principles of Psychology, II, p. 1007) The normative project Augustine suggests that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify something, that they fulfil a demonstrative function (aliquid demonstrant).1 Drawing on Foucault’s instructive account of monsters from mediaeval to modern times I would like to ascertain what the changing nature of monstrosity can show us today. I will examine two monsters in particular: amongst the many 1 Augustine’s derivation here follows that of Cicero (1933: 129/I.iii.7; 1923: 325/ I.xlii.93): a monstrum is indeed a shown thing.