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Regina Granados Moreno

The Corruption and Degeneration of the Self: The Feminine Embodiment of Insanity,
Otherness, and Pollution in “The Eyes of the Panther” by Ambrose Bierce and “The
Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson

Although in plain sight, Bierce’s werecat story and Hodgson’s nautical tale do not have much
in common, both texts center around women that become the source of degeneration and
corruption of the human condition. The women in these stories represent a threat to
institutions like marriage, that hold together the fabric of what is considered a modern,
civilized society, and, in the same way, they destabilize notions found at the core of our sense
of identity and what we believe makes us human. Both “The Eyes of the Panther” by
Ambrose Bierce and “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson deal with the fear
of contamination, pollution, and degeneration of the body and mind, though they do so in
different ways. In “The Eyes of the Panther”, Bierce builts the story of a werecat woman,
doomed since before she was born with the curse of animality, who refuses to get married on
the basis of her insanity. Whereas Hodgson tells in “The Voice in the Night” a fiction of the
dangers of the sea, a relentless fungus that physically and mentally consumes an unmarried
couple and drives them to live in isolation. In these texts, the authors find an excuse to bring
up the anxieties that afflicted men at the beginning of the twentieth century and that
commonly appeared in gothic literature, like the human response to supernatural situations,
the decentralization of the individual subject in relation to the world and to the other, and our
inability to control nature. Both stories have plenty of aspects deserving of close analysis that
allow many interpretations; however, in this essay, I will focus on the connections between
women, nature, and degeneration.

The Other: Women and Nature as Corruptors of Selfhood

To frame my interpretation of these two short stories, I find it relevant to first talk
about the conceits that, in literature and artistic representations in general, connect women
with the uncanny, the corrupt, the other, and, therefore, to nature. It can also be said the other
way around. Women have been culturally and historically associated with nature —think
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about mother earth, about all the metaphors that equate women’s beauty to a landscape or a
landscape’s beauty to women; think about the way their value resides in being providers of
care and resources and the extractivist attitude we have towards them both— and, since, in
modern industrial society, nature is seen as a threat or as something to be tamed, the
connection can go either way. In literature, according to Annis Pratt, “the hero comes to
"know" woman and through her[,] the natural world, [the] hero, perceiving this feminine
phenomenon of coextension with nature, uses the woman as a portal through which the green
world is perceived.” (478) In the stories by Bierce and Hodgson, the female characters are
used as a portal through which the menace of nature is introduced. Irene and the fiancé, from
The Eyes of the Panther and The Voice in the Night respectively, pose a threat to the integrity
of our identity as humans, which I believe relies heavily upon our distinctiveness among
other forms of life. Their dual configuration as part human and part animal, or part fungus,
tempers the idea of selfhood; they become the other that by exclusion defines the self.
This uncanniness —defined by some authors as the ominous return of something
secretly familiar that has been repressed, and as the quality of making limits uncertain (Freud
and Gentile in Alcalá 63)— presents a conflict in the diegesis and creates a frightening effect
for both the characters and the readers, as it challenges an idea that informs our entire
understanding of the world. These abject, uncanny women represent a fracture in our culture
which is based on human exceptionalism. Allowing myself to go on a little tangent, I think it
is worth it to entertain the question of what it means to blur the limits that maintain mankind
in the center of a universe well defined and well-differentiated from him. In the late
nineteenth century, when Bierce and Hodgson wrote their stories, the anxieties referring to
the degradation of man arose from the evolutionary postulates of the mid-century, from the
need to support the supremacy of the urban life, and as a response to a growing social
deterioration, due to an increase in crime and vices (Alcalá 11). The scientific discoveries that
point to a common origin for humans, animals, and other living beings, and that, therefore,
strip us from the well-secured place at the top of the hierarchy of life in which western
culture positioned mankind for many centuries, prompted a fear of going backward, of losing
even more of our singularity. The female characters in these stories represent the loss or
diminishment of rationality, the fear of moving down one step in the evolutionary ladder
through the merging with beings that we consider less intelligent than us.
Following another tangent, we could think about our very anthropocentric definition
of intelligence and consider the multiplicity of knowledge and sentiments that all beings
experience and to which we are oblivious. Nevertheless, I will come back to the
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limit-blurring characters in the texts that concern this paper and how they embody the
degradation of the self, the loss of reason, and the drive into madness. But before I dive into
the analysis of these ideas in a close reading of Bierce and Hodgson’s works, I would like to
elaborate on a few more questions that underlie both texts. One of these questions would be:
why is nature considered inferior? or, rather than such a wide anthropological question, what
does the perceived inferiority and otherness of nature tell us about our perception of ourselves
and how is this expressed in literature? Julia Kristeva defines the abject as “what disturbs
identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between,
the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4); our western society, driven by an urge to create
systems that provide order and an urge to impose borders that civilize spaces, finds in nature
the perfect other, the abject. But using the other as a repository of what is unacceptable in
ourselves leaves us with a permanent risk: the element we have neglected returning to us
sooner or later (Alcalá 62). In the stories, this element returns in the shape of half-panther,
half-fungus women that represent the degeneration of the self and the obliteration of the
divisions that separate humanity from the natural world it tries to tame.
The urge I mentioned above for creating systems that give us a sense of order might
respond to the need to differentiate ourselves from the wild, the uncivilized, and the inhuman.
In addition to our intelligence and rationality, or perhaps as a result of them, what
distinguishes us from animals, plants, and fungus is our ability to erect institutions that aim to
guide our behavior and that ultimately preserve the identity we have created as a society.
Both “The Eyes of the Panther” and “The Voice in the Night” deal with the topic of marriage
—a pillar, if not «the» pillar of social order—in different ways, and I will comment on that
later; but, at last, I would like to tie down the connection between women, nature, and
degeneration. Thus, if women are almost inescapably associated with nature, as I mentioned
earlier in this section, then men represent civilization. In Cartesian dualism, the man was
assigned the mind and the woman was assigned the body; at the top of our heads, men are
linked to reason, power, conquer, dominance, to the civilized; women are linked to body,
nature, emotion, madness, to corruption. As early as in the old testament, women are depicted
as agents of corruption, as a source of contamination that draws men out of divinity and
makes them mingle with the beasts of the earth.
Under this notion, women have occupied an inferior position to that of men in the
hierarchy through which we filter our interactions with each other and with the world around
us. Because our character is seen as more erratic, irrational, more corporeal, and more bound
to nature, it is expected that, historically and culturally, images of women and feminine
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archetypes are used to personify the same anxieties and fears that nature provokes in us.
Symbolically, both nature and women represent the other. In a manner, human subjectivity in
the West, which is masculine and arguably white, has been constructed upon the othering of
women, people of color, and, of course, nature. The woman is considered to be the other to
the neutral human subject, the male. In that sense, the female characters in Bierce and
Hodgson’s short stories embody a double existence of otherness, that of female and of nature.
This double potential for contamination makes them the perfect device to express the
anxieties and fears of the time. In “The Eyes of the Panther”, we find the topic of animality,
along with insanity and degeneration, the last two being present as well in Hodgson’s story;
on the other hand, “The Voice in the Night” deals with a parasitic fungus that invades the
human body and its spaces. In the next section, I will take a detailed look at each text with the
intention of drawing a connection between the two short stories through the ideas I just
presented.

“The Eyes of the Panther”: Animality, Insanity, and Marriage

“I am insane. [...] That is what the physicians would say,” the

woman continued— “if they knew. I might myself prefer to call
it a case of ‘possession’.”
(Bierce 201)

“The Eyes of the Panther”, by Ambrose Bierce, tells the story of Irene Marlowe, a
beautiful young woman who refuses to get married because she suffers, in her own words,
from a case of possession. As the tale progresses, we find out that before she was born her
family lived in a cabin in the forest, and one night, while she was in her mother’s womb, a
panther appeared at the window as the completion of a terrible omen, that causes the death of
her older sister, smothered in the arms of their traumatized mother. “Is it likely, [...] that a
person born under such circumstances is like others—is what [we] call sane?” (Bierce 206);
in the tragic end, it is revealed that the panther that with its luminous eyes tormented the town
was, in fact, Irene, possessed by animality. Bierce’s story is essentially about a monster (as
well as Hodgson’s), but what constitutes monstrousness? As I discussed in the past section of
this paper, our definition of the other will often tell us more about ourselves than about them.
The monster endangers the borders that make us feel safe and comfortable and that mark a
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clear distinction between us and everything else. Irene is the embodiment of the in-between;
she is composite, the effacing of clear-cut mutually exclusive categories like human and
inhuman, civilized and savage. The unsettling effect that werecats create, or werewolves, or
werepanthers, in this case, is in part due to their unclassifiable and unknown nature; one fears
what one does not know and can not understand. But Irene could also be read as an
illustration of the evolution theory-induced anxieties and fears that remind us of our own
animality.
This hybrid condition is seen as a curse, as a degeneration of the human body but,
more significantly, of the human mind and its conventions. It could be debated whether
Irene’s feline nature is a detriment or an enhancement to her physical self for, although it
makes her a monster, it is not described in a grotesque and horrid manner; it actually makes
her captivating: “She may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied
attention to all else” (Bierce 200). However, the effects of animality on Irene’s mind are
portrayed as unequivocally negative and destructive to her sanity. Allegorically, this could
represent a disruption in the logical, rational order of society through contamination of what
is considered inferior, that which would bring us a step down the evolutionary ladder. The
underlying conflict of the story —Irene’s refusal to get married to her boyfriend Jenner
Brading— shows two opposing forces: the untamable wilderness against the rational
civilization, characterized as a woman and a man respectively, carrying all the connotations I
described before. Jenner, an attorney, a man of law, embodies the institutions in which we
take pride as they signal our intellectual supremacy over other life forms. He conducts
himself through rationality: “he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in
his mind—what a scientist would have called a hypothesis; a detective, a theory” (Bierce
206), and refuses to believe Irene’s story because that would mean the obliteration of his
whole system of beliefs and he would have to face the fear of degeneration.

“The Voice in the Night”: Infection, Insanity, and Unlawfulness

“There was a sweetish taste upon my lips where the thing had
touched me. I licked them, and was immediately filled with an
inhuman desire. I turned and seized a mass of the fungus. Then
more and--more. I was insatiable.”
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(Hodgson 14)

In “The Voice in the Night”, by William Hope Hodgson, the contamination and
degeneration of the body and mind are presented in a different way. It deals not with the mix
between a human and a beautiful animal but instead, it leans more into body horror with the
grotesque invasion of a parasitic fungus that turns a normal couple into disgusting monsters.
Even though they develop differently, we find the same core themes as in “The Eyes of the
Panther”: degeneration, insanity, and, in a less obvious way, the topic of marriage. The story
is mainly narrated by the passenger of a small boat that approaches a couple of sailors in a
schooner to ask for some rations. In gratitude, the man in the dark tells them the story of how
he and his fiancé “came across odd patches of [a] queer fungus” (Hodgson 9) that later would
cover their bodies making them deformed and frightening, which is why he could not show
himself under the light. In Hodgson’s story, the fear of degeneration is expressed through the
infection of the body by something more alien to us than animals. The amalgamation with the
fungi kingdom signifies one step further down in the hierarchy of evolution as fungi are the
absolute alterity, even more so than plants. They are utterly and ineffably strange; even now,
after all the scientific discoveries that happened after Hodgson’s time, we still do not fully
understand fungus and the way they behave. In the text, the infectious condition produced by
the fungus could be interpreted as an attack by nature that uncontrollably invades what has
been created by human beings (Alcala 103); it corrupts the human spaces like the ship where
the couple found it, and corrupts the body from the inside when eaten and from the outside
when it appears on their skin; it also, very distinctly, corrupts their sanity.
The irredeemable degeneration of the couple’s humanness occurs when they eat the
fungus and by doing so they erase the division between the inside and the outside, between
the self and the other, and they renounce all logic to give in to madness. The couple leaves
reason behind and engages in an act of delicious consumption of that which makes them
monstrous. Following the connections between women, nature, and degeneration pointed out
before, I find that the irrational appetite and desire that the fiancé feels for the fungus and that
ends up contaminating their mind and making them insane can be read as a reference to
sexual appetite and the deterioration of values that comes with it when is attended outside of
marriage. Although the woman in this story is not innately corrupt like Irene, she is still a
source of pollution; her “desire for [the fungus, that] had come suddenly” (Hodgson 14)
resembles the desire for the forbidden fruit that got mankind out of paradise and forced him
to interact with the natural world that he sees as the other. As they become infectious and
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dangerous for “healthy humans” (Hodgson 12), the couple is forced to live on the outskirts of
society, isolated from civilization and from the organized life that distinguishes us from
animals, plants, and fungus. Contrary to Jenner in Bierce’s story, the characters from “The
Voice in the Night” gave in to the degenerative forces of nature. As “the fungoid growth took
hold of [their] poor bodies” (Hodgson 14), they accepted nature as part of themselves and
they became part of nature. They surrendered themselves to the idea of living the rest of their
days as in-between beings and dying on the island where they had learned to live with the
fungus. “And so–[they] who had been human, became -- Well, it matters less each day”
(Hodgson 14).

Conclusion

In stories like “The Eyes of the Panther” and “The Voice in the Night”, the anxieties
that troubled men between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century
are explored through the supernatural. I believe that the female characters in these texts by
Bierce and Hodgson are used as a narrative vessel to pour in all that we think is frightening
and menacing about nature. Our inability to control nature and the ability that nature has to
corrupt, erode, and degenerate our idea of self is the underlying preoccupation I think both
stories share. Although there are plenty of other interpretations and aspects that could be
developed, in this essay I tried to point out the connections I see between women, nature, and
degeneration.

Works Cited

Alcalá González, Antonio. La Caída del Hombre Tras el Fin de Siècle: Manifestaciones de
Degeneración en la Obra de William Hope Hodgson y H. P. Lovecraft. Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 2016.
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Bierce, Ambrose. “The Eyes of the Panther.” Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales,
& Memoirs. The Library of America, 2011, pp. 200-09.
Hodgson, William Hope. “The Voice in the Night.” The Voice in the Night, 1907.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trad. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia
University Press, 1982.
Pratt, Annis. “Women and Nature in Modern Fiction.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no.
4, 1972, pp. 476–90.