Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
If any name in this book reverberates through American horror, it’s that of Richard Matheson. Between his career writing short stories that he later scripted as some of the most memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone, his landmark take on the postapocalyptic novel with I Am Legend, and of course his own adaptation of his short story “Duel” into Steven Spielberg’s debut motion picture, Matheson has put his stamp on every aspect of modern horror. His precision strikes on genre clichés, along with his tremendous gift for finding the empathy in the unnatural, grip his readers, forcing them to consider tough questions and feel concern for the ordinary people caught in the horrors, as seen as early as his first published story. That story, “Born of Man and Woman,” sees Matheson already employing those immense talents to interrogate the reader’s empathy, asking if they can find the humanity even in those they might look upon as grotesque and shambling horrors.
Unfolding as a series of journal entries, “Born of Man and Woman” puts us in the head of the unnamed narrator, a child chained to a wall in a basement. Through their limited interactions with the outside world, the reader is taken through glimpses of their daily life—their attempts to hide that they removed their chains from the wall, the idea that weather falls from “upstairs,” and the horror experienced as they’re repeatedly beaten for such minor infractions as “going upstairs,” “being too loud,” and “not staying chained up in the basement.” Gradually, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary child but an unnerving creature with the mind of a child, and if their parents continue to mistreat them, the narrator might be tempted to prove how “monstrous” and “inhuman” they truly are.
Matheson’s always had a talent for exploring the boundary between horror and humanity—one need only look at the collisions between a modern understanding of psychology and the gothic in his work, or his masterpiece of human-monster interplay I Am Legend to see that he knows the territory. We see this, in this story, in his decision to reveal the narrator’s true nature—in revealing that the abused child is a literal monster, Matheson illuminates numerous failures of empathy by the end of the narrative. Matheson’s point, while it might strike some readers as blunt and poorly aged, is clear: the narrator of “Born of Man and Woman” is still at their core human, regardless of how they may look or act—their relative “inhumanity” is based entirely in their appearance and the fact that they’re a child who was raised in conditions of horrifying abuse without any knowledge of the outside world. Their monstrous exterior is mainly used to question the empathy of the reader—how does one feel if the victim is monstrous, if the tormentors are human?
Obviously an eight-year-old octopus-baby who spits green slime everywhere is different than a human child to some degree, at least contextually. The reader spends much of the story feeling sorry for the poor child. Should that sympathy go away just because the child looks like a shambling monster from a ’50s comic? It’s clear Matheson’s monster child has no concept of having done anything wrong, only of negative consequences, beatings, and punishment. Without any context or guidance, the child is simply going to try not to get hurt rather than learn the reason the things they did were wrong. Not that the parents, abusive as they are, are particularly interested in explaining themselves or attempting to engage with the child in any meaningful way.
There’s a strong element of ableism in the parents’ reactions, as well—they view the (albeit unconventional) child as a burden and a punishment, not as a thinking, feeling being. The punishments they use—beating their child, chaining them to the wall, and harming them every time they “make a scene” or do something other than pretend not to exist at all—echoes the kinds of abuse heaped upon “lower-functioning” children who might have outbursts or look “different” enough to engender repulsion rather than empathy. Having a second child, an average daughter, even amplifies these tendencies, as they heap attention on the child who can function in conventional society, focusing all their support and empathy on the narrator’s sister.
Empathy (in both fiction and reality) is rather perniciously often tied to likeability. If someone is scary or otherwise a deviation from what people understand as “the norm,” they are more likely to be seen as “creepy” or “untrustworthy” in some way. It’s a mainstay of many gothic stories, for example, that the deformed villain will menace beautiful and innocent young women and children, thereby revealing the true depths of their villainy. Matheson even references this over the course of “Born of Man and Woman” by way of a tense encounter between his narrator and the narrator’s sister in the coalbin, with the narrator accidentally murdering their sister’s cat. The scene plays out like something from a horror movie, with the human sister and her cat moving towards the hidden narrator in his coalbin, the cat hissing and biting the narrator, and the narrator squeezing the cat too hard and killing it. The difference is that we’re seeing it from the “monstrous” narrator’s perspective, in which they’re very afraid of their sister, only squeezing the cat after it hisses at them and bites them.
The true genius of Matheson’s approach to his narrator is that it pushes the reader out of any comfort zone they might have been clinging to, forcing them to question long-held morals and beliefs. He front-loads that empathy in the early parts of the story, getting the reader to feel for the poor child chained up in the basement and then gradually revealing the more monstrous elements of the narrator’s nature. By the time the child is revealed as a nightmare from the id of a ’50s comic artist, the reader is already on the narrator’s side and (hopefully) feeling genuine concern toward them. The gradual reveal isn’t some kind of shocking twist but meant as an interrogation of the reader’s empathy—if the reader sees the narrator’s humanity first, will they simply discard it when they realize the narrator’s a gigantic land octopus dripping green slime all over the place?
And if they would discard that empathy, what does that say about then, and how they act towards others in their lives?
And now to turn it over to you: Was Matheson’s focus on empathy in this tale a forward-looking examination of ableism on the part of the parents, or merely an interrogation of creaky centuries-old themes? What was your favorite of Matheson’s Twilight Zone episodes? And would you have hugged the octopus-child?
Please join us in two weeks as we take another unorthodox journey into the gothic with legendary feminist author Joanna Russ and “My Dear Emily.”
