Sunday Gathering: All of Our Monsters

The 19th Century gave birth to some of our most enduring nightmares. From Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to the haunted worlds of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” Gothic literature flourished during an age of extraordinary upheaval. Scientific discoveries challenged religious certainties; industrialization transformed cities and human labor; old social hierarchies began to fracture; and new anxieties arose around sexuality, madness, disease, death, empire, and the unknown capacities of the human mind. In this talk, Leader Curt Collier will explore the cultural and psychological forces that made monsters, ghosts, doubles, vampires, and haunted houses so compelling to 19th Century readers—and that continue to draw us to them today. These stories allowed people to confront what polite society struggled to acknowledge: forbidden desires, buried guilt, social exclusion, the fear of degeneration, and the unsettling possibility that human beings might create forces they could no longer control. Perhaps the monsters of Gothic literature have survived because they were never merely creatures lurking in the darkness. They were—and remain—reflections of ourselves. This Gathering is at the meetinghouse and on Zoom. To receive the Zoom link, please email admin@ethicalfocus.org by noon on Friday.