Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The confrontation with difference embodied by alien beings emerges as a prominent aspect of numerous science fictional works. In the context of such encounters, the Other may stand for multiple categories of alterity that depart from the normative and universalized conception of the human as the Western white male. Most often, early science-fictional works reflect an anxious need to define the human against that which is not human according to Western standards. This very opposition between human versus nonhuman can be detected in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912). In this light, this paper considers how Burroughs’s work depicts the encounter between the main hero John Carter toward the alien species he encounters on Mars. The novel’s attentive descriptions of the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of Mars reveal a similar anxiety, engendered by the aliens’ hybridity, to that expressed toward monstrous beings within medieval texts. The paper analyzes, through the use of Cary Wolfe’s notion of species grid and of concepts drawn from the field of monster studies, how the different aliens on Mars are placed within a species hierarchy based on the degree of animality they display. The way the different alien species are divided into rigid categories is discussed along with hybrid monstrous creatures that haunted the medieval imagination, which were similarly subjected to sharp classifications.