The Specter of Conformity: Stefan Brijs’s The Angel Maker

Abstract: This essay reads Stefan Brijs’s 2005 novel The Angel Maker in the context of Dutch consensus culture and pillarization, arguing that conformity, not difference, is the real monster. In the history of the Gothic, monstrosity is most often associated with the “Other.” Brijs critiques consensus culture, and conformity more broadly, through his depiction of the horrors created by two seemingly polar opposites—the religious community and the scientific/academic one. The novel’s protagonist, embryologist Victor Hoppe, embodies conformity not only because he clones himself, but also because he represents monolithic thinking in two worlds, the religious and scientific. While the horrors of the novel evoke the fictional horrors of the early Gothic and the very real atrocities of Nazi Germany, Brijs provides some hope (albeit subtly) in three maternal figures whose failure to conform to gender norms makes them angels of compassion.