UC Santa Cruz

In Victorian monster fiction, monsters are not bound by western cartography. Subsequently, western people imagine monsters’ locality as contrasted with the geographic fixity of western cities such as London and Berlin. In doing so, western people imagine non-western geography solely in western terms. This approach to maps creates a geographic erasure of non-western cultures from cartography altogether. In doing so, not only does it make the monsters feared for their mysterious whereabouts and “otherness,” but it geographically erases the monsters’ existence from the western eye.

This thesis explores the implications of monsters’ geographic non-representation in western cartography, specifically in terms of violence as a result of geographic erasure. I argue that monsters’ geographic erasure rids him of subjectivity in the eyes of the west, for they are portrayed as already dead, per their absence from western maps.