ABSTRACT
Amanda Boyd examines how motifs of monstrosity found in medieval and early modern narratives have survived, evolved, and been transformed in the modern world. The Wild man almost universally represents the fearsome, dangerous, yet infinitely beguiling liminal space between nature and culture, and fulfills this role in medieval epic, in Germanic foktales, and, apparently, in the popular American television series. Bigfoot, the American Yeti, is the modern Wildman, which Boyd reveals to be a synthetic melding of indigenous and European folkloric traditions with the preoccupations of contemporary popular culture. Boyd argues that the show, “Grimm,” employs a popular monster to explore a constellation of related psychological anxieties, and to delve, as Boyd remarks, into the borderlands of the human psyche, the boundaries between masculine and feminine, between violent rage and self-control, and between the conventions of civilized social discourse and uninhibited gratification of what we perceive as our “natural” desires.
