SOURCE IDEAS:

“Before I was able to replace them, the tin was sent flying, and, while I was still partially recumbent within eighteen inches of me, that beetle swelled and swelled, until it had assumed its former portentous dimensions, when, as it seemed, it was enveloped by a human shape, and in less time than no time, there stood in front of me, naked from top to toe, my truly versatile oriental friend. One startling fact nudity revealed, — that I had been egregiously mistaken on the question of sex. My visitor was not a man, but a woman, and, judging from the brief glimpse which I had of her body, by no means old or ill-shaped either” (152) 

“How Paul, suddenly returning home, had come upon Holt engaged in the very act of committing burglary, and how, on his hearing Holt make a cabalistic reference to some mysterious beetle, the manhood had gone out of him, and he had suffered the intruder to make good his escape without an effort to detain him”(211). 

SYNTHESIZING COMMENT/ANALYSIS:

These two comments pick up on this idea of the uncategorizable nature of the beetle, especially regarding gender, but also this recurring theme of its relation to making men, Paul mostly, lose their ‘manhood’ or in some way feminize them by the reactions to the beetle. In this first quote, the scenario is Sydney getting a close look for the first time at this transformation of the beetle into its (kind of) human form — we can call back the encounter Holt has with this figure and how he remarks his categories or descriptors to try and identify what exactly “it” is are failing him. In this scene, we do get a more concrete aspect of their gender, but it is still defying those norms of identification in a very interesting way. Later in the book, where Marjorie is narrating, she recalls hearing about Paul’s reaction to the name of the beetle being invoked and how his ‘manhood had gone out of him’ and while I am not entirely sure what to make of that, I am intrigued by this ability for the creature to inspire this gender confusion both in its actual physicality and in the notion of how these men who encounter it are supposed to behave and what they are labeled as when they don’t.

QUESTION: 

Is there more we could look to with this idea of monsters and their transgressive nature surrounding social norms, etc., that we could apply to gender and also maybe connect with the uncategorizable nature of the beetle regarding Egypt and its connection with the mixtures of traits and species of its gods/deities? What might this added layer of context about the uncategorizable nature of Egyptian historical figures mean when we apply that to Victorian society’s gothic monster culture with the idea of mixture and defying norms?