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Monsters in America

Monster in America is a literature book by W. Scott Poole. The book reflects on the

American history from the past to the present. Frontier wilderness beasts, Freddie Krueger,

witches of Salem, alien invasions, and freak show oddities are some of the monstrous creatures

that Poole have used to describe the events of his narrative. Monsters in America is a story that

brings a unique history and the culture of Americans to expose the dark concepts that have

helped build the American identity.

The vast beginnings of a state constructed on the slaughter of indigenous peoples and the

enslavement of Africans are the difficulty of the first chapter. In chapter one, Poole discusses the

tendency of the European to construct the native peoples of North America as colossal cannibals

and demonic servants, as well as the role of the supernatural in demonizing the savage races. He

additionally reveals the roots of the racist folklore that construed African American guys as

monsters, as, for example, in seventeenth-century demonological texts that likened black people

to apes and forged them as incarnations of Satan or the familiars of witches (Poole 30). However,

monstrous creatures no longer only figure anxieties about the other; they are additionally put to

indispensable use using these who suffer underneath oppressive sociopolitical regimes. Frederick

Douglass, for instance, masked slavery as Americas pet monster, a large and many-headed

abomination (Poole 51). Monsters function to symbolize terror of the feared different as well as

reason to give an explanation for why slavery thrived in the land of democracy (Poole 51)
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Poole opens through sketching a quick history of the political, religious, and scientific

ideologies at the foundations of America, revealing how monsters have traditionally figured an

interested. However, terrified cultural response to the other that suggests that our hatreds of

difference grow out of the worry that our very own identities, our very selves, are insecure and

could bring about the risk of difference (Poole 14). The primary thought right here that we fear,

fetishize, and are involved by way of the other is by this time something of a commonplace, but

analyzing American records from the colonial length to the current as a many-headed-monster

story yields insights that are worrying nonetheless.

The author is communicating to the world and Americans in specific. Poole is careful to

identify the revolution that the Americans have caused over the years by monstrous activities

such as war, spying on other nation, weapon production and acting as the world monitor. He uses

the term monster to attempt and make people understand the messiness of the American history.

The ambiguity of the term brings the meaning of a violent history that is fraught with racism,

sexism, religious mania, scientific insanity and economic injustices. In the beginning, the author

warns that he wants to give the reader an unpleasant dream. The explicit goal of the writer is to

implicate the readers in often suppressed American history of prejudice, hatred, and violence.

Excellent chronicles of the American obsession with monsters. Poole analyzes our

nationalist and religious principles to see how we have dealt with the other in our long,

perplexing existence as a nation. Everything from feminists, Communists, Dracula and

foreigners to Candyman, and The Exorcist are examined for the social attitudes to evil that they

illuminate

Summary of Chapter 1
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Beginning with his introduction, Poole explicates the issues and problems with the

acceptance of monsters, commencing with a hilarious, if twisted, anecdote of American writer F.

Scott Fitzgerald is vomiting after encountering conjoined Siamese twins over lunch. In this easy

incident, which is well threaded and recalled at some point of the textual content for maximum

effect, is the base response that we all have once we determine to confront our monsters. In

different words, when we simply get down to the hardcore records of History and the high

incidents have taken place, its painful enough to choose to vomit it all again up and start again.

Nowhere else is this more obvious than in the horrors of slavery and the therapy of

African Americans. Two Poole precisely important points with explicit, revealing lookup the

public lynching that had been filmed and shown to mass audiences that included children, the

horrific, squalid conditions of slave ships, and the constantly propagated concern of the African

American male. All of this provides up again and again to one of many shameful dark secrets and

techniques that, amongst different things, our rooted thinking of American exceptionalism has

tried to repress. This particular notion, which America has a fundamental role as a unique light in

the world, is fantastically laid to rest via Pooles metaphor: the very thinking of exceptionalism

itself trades on the concept of American innocence that the United States. Is in some feel safe

from the terrors of history. In this view, the United States is Forrest Gump, wandering innocently

through a world of fighting and, much less through accident, making it a higher place.

As we dig deeper with Poole into the breaks of history, we study the horrible truth; that

the United States is a long way from innocent. Two, Whether its the publicized worry of your

next-door neighbor, the approaching fear of the atomic bomb and the radioactive fallout, or the

war in Vietnam, the history the United States unfolds like a sadistic story littered with the empty

shells of our psyches.

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Work cited

Poole, W. Scott, and W. Scott. "Monsters in America." Our Historical Obsession with the
Hideous and the (2011).