Monsters appear in literary and political writings to signal both a terrible threat to established orders and a call to arms that demands the unification and protection of authorised values. Symptoms of anxiety and instability, monsters frequently emerge in revolutionary periods as dark and ominous doubles restlessly announcing an explosion of apocalyptic energy. Christopher Hill, for example, describes the fear evoked by the masses represented as a 'many-headed monster' in the decades leading up to the English Revolution.
On one level, the monsters of the French Revolution are no exception, since they signify the uncontrollable violence of the mob, Edmund Burke's 'swinish multitude', that tramples over civilised society. But there are other forms of monstrosity that also appear in the conflicts produced by revolution in France: among the waves of riotous noise individual and monstrous voices make themselves heard. Incarnated in identifiable shapes, monsters begin to be defined by the dangerous words they speak, words that question and resist, like the speech of Frankenstein's creation, the terms of the system into which they are born. Such resistance, indeed, partially accounts for the identity of 'monster' that is given them.
The figure of speech that classifies the
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In The Rights of Man the aristocracy is described as a monster, while Burke's method is considered to be of a 'marvellous and monstrous kind' (229, 201). Burke, a maker of monsters, is reconstructed as a monster himself. Similarly, Wollstonecraft's attack on Burke questions the conditions which produce {53} monsters: 'man', she argues, 'has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he is born' ( 73). Unjust modes of social organisation display their own monstrosity by their manufacturing of monsters: for William Godwin, government by courts and ministers forms a 'monstrous edifice'