Terrestrial monsters were projected onto foreign Eastern origins
Evidence
European monsters were also situated in anxieties outside of gender. One famous example is the tales of beasts that roamed the Massif Central region of France, an area known as Gévaudan. Like many other monsters of the late eighteenth century, these beasts (probably wolves that attacked women and children tending sheep) were explained as a consequence of Divine unrest. … One theory of the Gévaudan monster(s) was that it came from the East—a monstrous Simian from Malaysia. It was also identified as a hyena, a beast long associated, as we have seen, with Jews. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 355
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: the Eastern/foreign explanation for Europe’s own monsters shows the same projection mechanism applied to the beast, the Jew, and the Muslim monster.
- SEED: Angle: the beast of GĂ©vaudan as a case study in how Europeans outsourced their own farm terrors to the East centuries before contemporary Islamophobia.