Foundations of Fear Read online

  Horror, often cast as ghost story, was an especially useful mode for many woman writers, allowing them a freedom to explore the concerns of feminism symbolically and nonrhetorically with powerful effect. Alfred Bendixen, in the introduction to his excellent anthology, Haunted Women (1985), says: “Supernatural fiction opened doors for American women writers, allowing them to move into otherwise forbidden regions. It permitted them to acknowledge the needs and fears of women, enabling them to examine such ‘unladylike’ subjects as sexuality, bad marriages, and repression.” He goes on to identify stories rescued from virtual oblivion and observe that “most of the stories . . . come from the 1890s and early 1900s—a period when the feminist ghostly tale attracted the talents of the finest women writers in America and resulted in some of their most powerful and intriguing work.” Alan Ryan, in his excellent anthology, Haunting Women (1988), adds the work of Ellen Glasgow, May Sinclair, Jean Rhys, and Isak Dinesen, extending the list into the present with works by Hortense Calisher, Muriel Spark, Ruth Rendell and others. “One recurring theme,” say Ryan, “. . . is a female character’s fear of a domineering man, who may be father, husband, or lover.”

  Richard Dalby, in the preface to his Victorian Ghost Stories by Eminent Women Writers (1988—from Charlotte Bronte to Willa Cather), claims that “over the past 150 years Britain has led the world in the art of the classic ghost story, and it is no exaggeration to state that at least fifty percent of quality examples in the genre were by women writers.” And in the introduction to that same volume, Jennifer Uglow observes, “although—perhaps because—they were written as unpretentious entertainments, ghost stories seemed to give their writers a license to experiment, to push the boundaries of fiction a little further . . . Again and again we find that the machinery of this most conventional genre frees, rather than restricts, the women who use it.”

  An investigation of the horror fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that a preponderance of the supernatural fiction was written by women and that, buried in the works of a number of women writers whose fiction has been ignored or excluded from the literary canon, there exist significant landmarks in the evolution of horror. Harriet Prescott Spofford, for instance, is emerging as one of the major links between Poe and the later body of American women writers. Gertrude Atherton’s “The Bell in the Fog” is both an homage to and critique of Henry James—and perhaps an influence on The Sense of the Past. It is provocative to wonder, since women were marginalized in English and American society, and since popular women writers were the most common producers of supernatural fiction, ghostly or horrific, whether supernatural fiction was not in part made marginal because of its association with women and feminine concerns. Just as James (except for “The Turn of the Screw”) was forgotten as a writer of supernatural fiction for most of the Modernist era (although it was an important strain throughout his career), so were most of the women who wrote in that mode in the age of electricity. But the flame still burns, can illuminate, can heat the emotions.

  In the contemporary period, much of the most popular horror is read by women (more than sixty percent of the adult audience is women in their thirties and forties, according to the most recent Gallup Poll surveys of reading). Best-selling horror most often addresses the traditional concerns of women (children, houses, the supernatural), as well as portraying vividly the place of women and their treatment in society.

  Intriguingly, the same Gallup Poll indicates that in the teenage readership, an insignificant percentage (“0%”) of girls read horror. The teenage audience is almost exclusively male. Perhaps this is because a very large amount of genre horror fiction (that is published in much smaller numbers of copies than best-selling horrific fiction) is extremely graphic and characteristically features extensive violence, often sexual abuse, torture, or mutilation of women alive, who then return for supernatural vengeance and hurt men. One wonders if this is characteristic of boys’ concerns.

  L. P. Hartley, in the introduction to Cynthia Asquith’s anthology, The Third Ghost Book (1955), remarked, “Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill.” And a more recent comment: “Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world . . . it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation . . . our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys.” So says Leslie Fiedler in his classic study, Love and Death in the American Novel. Still, one suspects that the subject of who reads horror, and why, and at what age, has been muddied by the establishment of genre and category marketing, and is more complex than has been illuminated by market research and interpretation to date.

  The sublime provided a theory of terror in literature and the other arts.

  —Carl Woodring,

  The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

  . . . confident skepticism is required by the genre that exploits the supernatural. To feel the unease aimed at in the ghost story, one must start by being certain that there is no such thing as a ghost.

  —Jacques Barzun, Introduction to

  The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

  Supernatural horror, in all its bizarre constructions, enables a reader to taste a selection of treats at odds with his well-being. Admittedly, this is not an indulgence likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society unto themselves, if only because their memberships elsewhere were cancelled, some of them from the moment of birth. But those who have sampled these joys marginal to stable existence, once they have gotten a good whiff of other worlds, will not be able to stay away for long. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemetaries, waiting for some terribly propitious moment to crash the gates.

  —Thomas Ligotti,

  “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

  II The Sublime Transaction

  The transaction between reader and text that creates the horrific is complex and to a certain extent subjective. Although the horrifying event may be quite overt, a death, a ghost, a monster, it is not the event itself but the style and atmosphere surrounding it that create horror, an atmosphere that suggests a greater awe and fear, wider and deeper than the event itself. “Because these ideas find proper expression in heightened language, the practiced reader of tales in our genre comes to feel not merely the shiver of fear, but the shiver of aesthetic seizure. In a superior story, there is a sentence, a word, a thing described, which is the high point of the preparation of the resolution. Here disquiet and vision unite to strike a powerful blow,” said Jacques Barzun. M. R. James said that the core of the ghost story is “those things that can hardly be put into words and that sound rather foolish if they are not properly expressed.” It is useful to examine literary history and criticism to illuminate some of the sources of horror’s power.

  We do know, from our study of history, that there was a time in our culture when the sublime was the goal of art, the Romantic era. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, painting strove to embody it. Horror was one of its components. Carl Woodring, summarizing the subject in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, says: “As did the scholars of tragedy, [Edmund] Burke and others who analyzed the sublime asked why such awesomeness gave pleasure when it might be expected to evoke only fear or abhorrence. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), explained: “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” Kant noted that the sublime could be mathematical—“
whereby the mind imagines a magnitude by comparison with which everything in experience is small—or it could be dynamic—whereby power or might, as in hurricanes or volcanoes, can be pleasurable rather than frightening if we are safe from the threat of destruction.”

  One response to this aesthetic was the rise of Gothic fiction in England and America, and in Germany, “the fantastic.” Jacques Barzun gives an eloquent summary of this period in his essay, “Romanticism,” in the aforementioned Penguin Encyclopedia. “What is not in doubt is the influence of this literature. It established a taste for the uncanny that has survived all the temporary realisms and naturalisms and is once again in high favor, not simply in the form of tales of horror and fantasy, but also as an ingredient of the ‘straight’ novel.” He goes on to discuss at length the fantastic, the Symbolist aspect of Romanticism, tracing its crucial import in the works of major literary figures in England, France and America. Here, if anywhere, is the genesis of horror fiction.

  If the short story of the supernatural is often considered as an “inferior” literary genre, this is to a great extent due to the works of those authors to whom preternatural was synonymous with horror of the worst kind. To many writers the supernatural was merely a pretext for describing such things as they would never have dared to mention in terms of reality. To others the short story of the supernatural was but an outlet for unpleasant neurotic tendencies, and they chose unconsciously the most hideous symbols . . . It is indeed a difficult task to rehabilitate the pure tale of horror and even harder, perhaps, for a lover of weird fiction, for pure horror has done much to discredit it.

  —Peter Penzoldt,

  The Supernatural in Fiction

  Now that we have an historical and aesthetic background for the origins of horror literature, let us return to the nature of its power. Horror comes from material on the edge of repression, according to the French critic, Julia Kristeva, material we cannot confront directly because it is so threatening to our minds and emotional balances, material to which we can gain access only through literary indirection, through metaphor and symbol. Horror conjoins the cosmic or transcendental and the deeply personal. Individual reactions to horror fiction vary widely, since in some readers’ minds the material is entirely repressed and therefore the emotional response entirely inaccessible.

  But as Freud remarked in his essay on the uncanny, horror shares with humor the aspect of recognition—even if an individual does not respond with the intended emotional response, he or she recognizes that that material is supposed to be humorous or horrific. Indeed, one common response to horror that does not horrify is laughter. Note again the M. R. James comment above.

  The experience of seeing an audience of teenage boys at the movies laugh uproariously at a brutal and grotesque horror film is not uncommon. I have taught horror literature to young students who confess some emotional disturbance late in the course as the authentic reaction of fear and awe begins to replace the dark humor that was previously their reaction to most horror.

  Boris Karloff remarked, in discussing his preferred term for the genre, “horror carries with it a connotation of revulsion which has nothing to do with clean terror.” Material on the edge of repression is often dismissed as dirty, pornographic. It is not unusual to see condemnations of genre horror on cultural or moral grounds. One need only look at the recent fuss over Brett Easton Ellis’ novel, American Psycho (1990) to see these issues in the foreground in the mainstream. Certain horror material is banned in Britain.

  And I have spoken to writers, such as David Morrell, who confess to laughing aloud during the process of composition when writing a particularly horrific scene—which I interpret as an essential psychological distancing device for individuals aware of confronting dangerous material. L. P. Hartley, in the introduction to his first collection, Night Fears (1924) said: “To put these down on paper gives relief . . . It is a kind of insurance against the future. When we have imagined the worst that can happen, and embodied it in a story, we feel we have stolen a march on fate, inoculated ourselves, as it were, against disaster.” Peter Penzoldt, in his book, The Supernatural in Fiction, concurs: “. . . the weird tale is primarily a means of overcoming certain fears in the most agreeable fashion. These fears are represented by the skillful author as pure fantasy, though in fact they are only too firmly founded in some repression . . . Thus a healthy-minded even if very imaginative person will benefit more from the reading of weird fiction than a neurotic, to whom it will only be able to give a momentary relief.” There is a fine border between the horrific and the absurdly fantastic that generates much fruitful tension in the literature, and indeed deflates the effect when handled indelicately. Those who never read horror for pleasure, but feel the need to condemn those who do, like to point to the worst examples as representative of the genre. Others laugh. But the stories that have gained reputations for quality in the literature have for most readers generated that aesthetic seizure which is the hallmark of sublime horror.

  The modern imagination has indeed been well trained by psychiatry and avant-garde novels to accept the weird and horrible. Often, these works are themselves beyond rational comprehension. But stories of the supernatural—even the subtlest—are accessible to the common reader; they make fewer demands on the intellect than on the sensibility.

  —Jacques Barzun,

  Introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

  Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.

  —Frederic Jameson,

  Magical Narratives

  A category is a contract between a publisher and a distribution system.

  —Kathryn Cramer,

  unpublished dissertation

  . . . one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot quite be sure that it couldn’t exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our awareness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, both at the individual and collective levels, horror operates with an eerie autonomy.

  —Thomas Ligotti,

  “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

  III Category, Genre, Mode

  Sir Walter Scott, to whom some attribute the creation of the first supernatural story in English, said, “The supernatural . . . is peculiarly subject to be exhausted by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of a character which is extremely difficult to sustain and of which a very small proportion may be said to be better than the whole.” This observation, while true, has certainly created an enduring environment in which critics can, if they choose, judge the literature by its worst examples. The most recent announcement of the death of horror literature occurs in Walter Kendrick’s The Thrill of Fear (1991), which demise Kendrick attributes to the genrification of the literature as exemplified by the founding of Weird Tales: “Weird Tales helped to create the notion of an entertainment cult by publishing stories that only a few readers would like, hoping they would like them fiercely. There was nothing new to cultism, but it came fresh to horror. Now initiates learned to adore a sensation, not a person or a creed, and the ephemeral embarked on its strange journey from worthlessness to great price . . . By about 1930, scary entertainment had amassed its full inventory of effects. It had recognized its history, begun to establish a canon, and even started rebelling against the stultification canons bring. Horrid stories would continue to flourish; they would spawn a score of sub-types, including science-fiction and fantasy tales . . .” But three lines later he ends his discussion of literature, and his chapter, by declaring that by 1940, films had taken over from literature the job of scary entertainment. Thus evolution marches on and literature is no longer the fittest. It seems to me very like saying that lyric poetry is alive and well in pop music.

  That an intelligent critic could find nothing worthwhile to say about horror
in literature beyond the creation of the genre is astonishing in one sense (it betrays a certain ignorance), but in other ways not surprising. Once horror became a genre (as, under the influence of Dickens in the mid-nineteenth century, had the ghost story told at Christmas), it became in the hands of many writers a commercial exercise first and foremost. One might, upon superficial examination, not perceive the serious aesthetic debates raging among many of the better writers, from those of the Lovecraft circle, to Campbell’s new vision in Unknown, to today’s discussions among Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, David Morrell, Karl Edward Wagner, and others on such topics as violence, formal innovation, appropriate style (regardless of current literary fashion), and many others. That money and popularity was a serious consideration for Poe and Dickens, as well as King and Straub, does not devalue them aesthetically. Never mind that Henry James was distraught that he was not more popular and commercial, and expressed outrage at “those damned scribbling women” who outsold him—even his so-called “pot-boilers.”

  The curious lie concealed in James’ last phrase (which he used to describe “The Turn of the Screw”), and in the public protestations of many writers before and since, up to Stephen King, today, is illuminated by Julia Briggs. In her Night Visitors, she states her opinion, based upon wide reading and study, that the supernatural horror story “appealed to serious writers largely because it invited a concern with the profoundest issues: the relationship between life and death, the body and the soul, man and his universe and the philosophical conditions of that universe, the nature of evil . . . it could be made to embody symbolically hopes and fears too deep and too important to be expressed more directly.” She then goes on to say, “The fact that authors often disclaimed any serious intention . . . may paradoxically support this view. The revealing nature of fantastic and imaginative writing has encouraged its exponents to cover their tracks, either by self-deprecation or other forms of retraction. The assertion of the author’s detachment from his work may reasonably arouse the suspicion that he is less detached than he supposes.”