34”x34” Pt. 2 © Nadia Daniels-Moehle. 2020. Acrylic on wood.

Inside each story, fictional or true, is a world. Spending my childhood, adolescence, and now young adulthood within stories, I’ve learned that the more I get to know a story, the more I grow aware of the world in which stories are born. The stories that pulled me closest to the world came from unexpected places, from stories of antagonists and monsters. Perhaps this is because the world is dark and complex and never quite what it seems to be. Stories of monsters aren’t escapism for me so much as escaping limitations and categories–something that gave my queer teenage self an outlet and possibility. Monsters invite, or scare, us out of the usual, and sometimes, back into it. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives” poet Rainer Maria Rilke penned (WorldCat / Bookshop),“are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”

At about eight-years-old—in the rustic campground where I saw the northern lights before I could remember and learned to ride a bicycle and hand-grind coffee—I sat in a fold up camp-chair listening to my dad recount a rendition of the myth of Perseus and Medusa. As I listened, I realized I didn’t care about the hero, I was enchanted by the beheaded monster. I wondered who she was, what made her, and what being turned to stone by her gaze might feel like.

From then on, whenever I listened to or read mythology, I felt as if I were existing in a space between imagination and my present, fascinated by the stories that inspired the authors who inspired authors who inspired authors who wrote the stories I read and loved. Then, at 15, I dove headfirst into a course on Classical Mythology, there I re-encountered Medusa and this time, I didn’t find her “best known” myth, I found Medusa’s story.

Those Gorgons who captured my excitement and fascination as I sat in a camp-chair, those snake haired women, startled loose my outrage as I found reflections of Medusa’s story in the world around me. In popular culture, I would see Medusa portrayed as a sexy antagonist, tempting and punishing. It would make me feel sick for the entrapment she experienced within her own monstrous power. I saw how monsters are made by the stories we tell about them, or that they tell about themselves.  

In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (WorldCat / Bookshop), Frankenstein’s Monster–made of corpses and thrust into life without choice–challenges his maker to “Hear my tale”. With narrative, a brutal creature becomes a childlike figure full of sorrow and anger at finding a world afraid of him. His delight and despair carved away at my preconception of “monster” leaving a misunderstood hero in their wake.

Perhaps this is why Frankenstein is such an unsettling story and because by sharing the monster’s perspective Wollstonecraft Shelly (who conceptualized the story at 18) created a “counter-hero [who] possesses the hero’s superior power of action without possessing his or her adherence to the dominant culture”. Maureen Fries continues to theorize (WorldCat / Bookshop), “[w]hile the hero proper transcends and yet respects the norms of the patriarchy, the counter hero violates them in some way.” And there may be nothing as terrifying as realizing the norms in which we live are faulty or harmful or simply inaccurate.

If we dare to enter a monster’s story, their histories and lives and vulnerabilities, we may have the courage to look a Gorgon the face and find that we haven’t turned into stone but are, as Historian Jill Lepore articulated (WorldCat / Bookshop), “looking into one face and seeing, behind it, another, face after face after face.” We may find story after story after story weaving together our experiences—our fears and mistakes and desires—until a dragon becomes a princess; until we have the courage to reflect on and question the cultures surrounding us so that we may incubate stories that learn to capture the beautiful, terrifying, and challenging complexity of our world.

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Painting inspired by the monster from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Medusa, and dragons.

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