The Dark Allure of Evil: Why Literature and Art Mythologize Monsters Like La Quintrala
La Quintrala is one of Chile’s darkest historical figures—a colonial aristocrat infamous for cruelty, torture, and the mass killing of Indigenous people. Yet despite her atrocities, her name has transcended mere infamy. She has become a legend, a mythologized monster, her story fostered by academics, celebrated in art, dramatized on stage, and turned into a cultural icon.
Why do we turn figures of pure evil into enduring myths? Why does human culture repeatedly crown monsters as legends, polishing brutality into something almost admirable?
The Myth of La Quintrala: From Atrocity to Cultural Icon
History often tells us that evil fades with time, that the memory of atrocity eventually dissolves into silence. La Quintrala proves otherwise. Her cruelty was extreme, her crimes well-documented, her reign of terror feared in colonial Chile. Yet centuries later, the name La Quintrala carries not only horror but fascination.
Books, plays, paintings, and even scholarly works have contributed to this transformation. They have fostered the legend, shaping her image into something larger than life, turning real suffering into dark spectacle. This is more than storytelling—it is the mythologizing of evil.
This transformation is not unique to La Quintrala. History and fiction repeatedly reshape brutality into legend. Vlad the Impaler, a 15th‑century ruler infamous for mass killings and terror, was reborn centuries later as Dracula—a dark, fascinating myth admired across literature and cinema. Evil once feared becomes a spectacle, a story polished by time and culture until its horror seems almost admirable.
Why Do We Mythologize Monsters?
Humanity has always lived in tension between two forces:
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The Apollonian, pursuing beauty, altruism, reason, the sublime ideals that lead us to build cathedrals and chase higher truths.
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The Dionysian, driven by primal instincts, the fascination with power, domination, and survival at any cost.
Perhaps this explains why society is repeatedly drawn to figures like La Quintrala. The reptilian core within us admires power even when it is violent, even when it destroys. By elevating evil to legend, we flirt with its raw force, taming it into a story, pretending that atrocity can be transformed into greatness if only it is grand enough.
The Role of Academics and Art in Glorifying Atrocity
We expect intellect and culture to resist brutality, to name evil for what it is. Yet too often, academics foster myths, layering atrocities with interpretation until they seem complex, tragic, even admirable. Art paints monsters in shades of fascination, literature grants them tragic depth, and history reshapes them into myths that overshadow their victims.
This is not neutral analysis—it is value inversion. Across centuries, we have witnessed virtue vilified, atrocity exalted, truth distorted, lies enthroned as noble tales. La Quintrala’s legend is one of these uncomfortable cases, where atrocity has been given a crown and turned into an intellectual spectacle.
Do Sexual Instincts Feed the Mythologizing of Evil?
Sexual identity is one of the most precious and intimate dimensions of our being. It is woven into the earliest threads of who we are—our connection to our parents, our childhood experiences, the way we unfold emotions, perceive beauty, and communicate with others. Sexual expression surrounds us everywhere: in the rhythms of nature, in the human body, even in the cosmic movements of planets. It is a vital force, shaping how we relate to the world and to ourselves.
Yet, this instinct, powerful and essential, also touches the most primal and irrational layers of our brain. It can blur boundaries between admiration, fear, and fascination. In the dark mythology of figures like La Quintrala, there is often a distorted erotic undertone—a mix of power, dominance, and perversion that intrigues even as it horrifies.
We must therefore ask: from the psychology of pleasure, how is personality shaped, and to what end? If desire and fascination can be twisted to admire cruelty, does our deepest instinct sometimes conspire with our darkest impulses, feeding the myth of monsters rather than rejecting it?
The case of the Marquis de Sade illustrates this unsettling fusion of pleasure, power, and amorality. His writings, born of unrestrained desire and cruelty devoid of empathy, transformed private perversion into public spectacle. Today, his name evokes not only depravity but intellectual fascination, as if relentless immorality could be elevated to radical thought. When sexual instincts escape moral grounding, they can feed a darker myth-making—turning transgression itself into an object of admiration.
Who Are We, Really?
Every time we mythologize monsters, every time we crown brutality as legend, we reveal something unsettling about ourselves: that part of the human spirit not only condemns evil—it envies it.
A Final Reflection
La Quintrala’s name should not rest on a pedestal beside genuine legends of courage or virtue. Her legacy is not heroic, not tragic, not misunderstood—it is a chronicle of domination and death.
And yet, speaking of heroes and anti-heroes, leaders and villains, history offers darker possibilities still. Think of the monstrous figures who scarred the recent history of Germany, whose actions unleashed terror on a scale humanity still struggles to comprehend.
What a terrifying question. And yet, the precedent exists. Every time we mythologize evil, every time we turn brutality into legend, we lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s monsters to be crowned, not condemned.
It is a haunting, almost a philosophical puzzle to wonder whether the ravens will always circle above our heads, waiting for the next monster we choose to enthrone as a legend. All of this evokes Goya’s dark covens, that haunting truth that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”—and so many other images and ideas that it would take a book of books to contain them all.
© 2025 Daniel Piedrabuena Ruiz‑Tagle. All rights reserved.
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