In Perfume, a text most critics, including Woods and O’Brien (n.d.), Fleming (1991) and Donahue (1992), would agree is a postmodern pastiche, author Patrick Süskind uses the Gothic monster in the form of the odourless perfumer and serial strangler, Grenouille, in this tale of “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages”, that era being eighteenth century France (Süskind 2003, p. 1). If the Gothic monster, as Botting (1998, p. 163) claims, signifies “ugliness, irrationality and unnaturalness”, then Grenouille is indeed such a creature. From his grisly birth under the gutting table of a fishmonger to his frenzied, gruesome death, or rather consumption, cannibalised by a group of homeless desperadoes, Grenouille’s entire existence is unnatural, his body misshapen and deformed, his behaviour and ambition irrational and most devious and foul. Yet it is difficult to despise this monster, for Grenouille, not having the odour of a human, nor any odour at all, is an outcast, a mere shadow of a human in an acrid, pungent sea of humanity with all its scents from sweet to sour. Grenouille merely wants what most people would deny themselves with perfumes, lotions and creams. Grenouille wants to smell – to exude the odour of human flesh. Grenouille just wants to be a part of the human race; to be acknowledged as human and to be loved as human. In a way, his arrival amidst a mess of entrails and his demise, being eaten and digested, is an ironic metaphorical treatise to the inhumanity of that which Grenouille both loathes and lusts for, humanity itself.

Perhaps Grenouille is not so much a monster, but rather, as Botting (1998, p. 163) states while referring to that most famous of monsters created in Shelley’s Frankenstein (2003), “more a victim of monstrous social exclusions”. There are certainly some unmistakable similarities between the two, both rejected at birth and both resorting to self-imposed exile high in the mountains as far away from society as possible. There is even a connection with another well-known outcast of Gothic literature, the ‘Count of Otherness’, the sucker of blood in Stoker’s Dracula (1997). Grenouille, referring to his determination to achieve his goal of acceptance, likens himself to a tick, a parasite that, as Donahue (1992, p. 38) states, “literally lives off the blood of others” and patiently waits till it smells that blood before it risks all to fall from a tree to its prey. When Grenouille exiles himself to the mountains, he makes his bed in a tunnel “a hundred and fifty feet below the earth…as if in his own grave” (Süskind 2003, p. 126). His escape from society, his home away from what humans would call home, is a crypt: “For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived” (Süskind 2003, p. 127). He lives, as Dracula lived, as the ‘Undead’.

When Grenouille returns from his exile to the land of the living, he is adopted by an eccentric marquis:

he was softened for several hours in baths…waxed from head to toe with nut-oil soap….His finger- and toe-nails were trimmed, his teeth cleaned…he was shaved, his hair cut and combed, coiffed and powdered….Grenouille was fitted out in a silk shirt…silk stockings, frock coat, trousers and vest of blue velvet, and handsome buckled shoes of black leather, the right one cleverly elevated for his crippled foot.

(Süskind 2003, pp. 148-149)

The marquis is overwhelmed with the result of his efforts, making of them ‘Frankensteinian’ success: “I have made a man of you” (Süskind 2003, p. 149). But no amount of grooming or finery will make a ‘real’ man of Grenouille. In order for Grenouille to become a ‘real’ man, he needs to acquire a scent. Ironically, this scent, Grenouille decides, is the scent of “very lovely young girls” whom he has to kill in order to obtain their odorous essence (Süskind 2003, p. 203). This ‘perfume d’homme’, the smell which Grenouille hopes will, as Fleming (1991, p. 83) claims, “make him lovable”, makes him more a god of love. He wears this perfume when he is to be executed for the murders of all those young girls whose scent was its primary ingredient. But the crowd, congregated to celebrate his public crucifixion, are suddenly overcome by his odour, overcome by ‘love’:

It was as if the man had ten thousand invisible hands and had laid a hand on the genitals of the ten thousand people surrounding him….The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen.

(Süskind 2003, p. 247)

Yet though Grenouille has finally achieved his goal to be loved, or to inspire love in its physical form at least, he does not feel either love or loved. He feels hatred: “And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred – in hating and in being hated” (Süskind 2003, p. 249). He realises he can never be accepted for who he is, no matter how potent a perfume he wears. Any adulation will only ever be for the scent, not the being beneath it. This “suffering monster”, as Botting (1998, p. 163) would call him, is not so much “a figure of vice and transgression” or an “excessive and viciously improper…character”. This monster is a monster in the Gothic tradition, an outcast, an other, “seeking”, as Woods and O’Brien (n.d., p. 9-5) claim, “the acceptance of the society into which they are unwittingly, and rather violently born”. Süskind uses this Gothic monster, as Donahue (1992, p. 36) argues, in “a dense montage of allusions…as a critique of reason, of Romantic fascination with criminality, and of the psychology of aesthetic decadence and obsession”. Süskind uses this Gothic monster, as does Shelley and as does Stoker, to hold a mirror up to society and ask the question: who really is the monster?

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