COVE

Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration “Lucian’s Strange Creatures,” originally published in 1894 in “Lucian’s True History” portrays various overlapping grotesque figures. The monsters include snake, bird, and satyr-like creatures bordering the image, a “bald but breasted figure resembling a shop dummy” held by a “Pierrot,” at the bottom of the illustration and the “foetus,” held by a human-like figure highlighted in the middle (Fletcher 156, 150, 141). Beardsley’s work is illustrated in black in white with strict lines, contrasting the colours “against one another” (Fletcher 146). By displaying an array of strange unidentifiable creatures within a binary of conflicting colours, Beardsley contrasts the creatures to one another as different yet overlapping and touching. Comparable to the weird and the way the weird “defies categorization,” Beardsley’s “boundary-crawlers,” occupy a liminal space transcending the binaries of human versus animal, male versus female, black versus white (Luckhurst 1042, 1055).

Works Cited

Beardsley, Aubrey. “Lucian’s Strange Creatures.” Internet Archive, W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1894, archive.org/details/lucianha01luciuoft. 

Fletcher, Ian. “A Grammar of Monsters: Beardsley’s Obsessive Images and Their Sources.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 30, no. 2, 1987, pp. 141–63. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/article/374723/pdf

Luckhurst, Roger. “The Weird: A Dis/Orientation.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 6, 2017, pp. 1041–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358690.