The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence

by Susan J. Navarette

Susan J. Navarette examines the ways in which scientific and cultural concerns of late nineteenth-century England are coded in the horror literature of the period. By contextualizing the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to reenact textually the entropic forces they perceived in the natural world, Navarette reconstructs the late Victorian mentalite. She analyzes aesthetic responses to trends in contemporary science and explores horror writers' use of scientific methodologies to support their perception that a long-awaited period of cultural decline had begun. In her analysis of the classics Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, Navarette shows how James and Conrad made artistic use of earlier "scientific" readings of the body. She also considers works by lesser-known authors Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, and Arthur Machen, who produced fin de siecle stories that took the form of "hybrid literary monstrosities."

Genres: Literary Criticism, History, Nonfiction, Horror

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 24, 1997

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In terms of xenophobia, eugenics and theories of cultural devolution as the ligaments of 19th century cultural production, The Shape of Fear is the best book in town. Susan J. Navarette chronicles ‘writers seeking to record and to reenact in narrative form what they understood to be the entropic, devolutionary, and degenerative forces prevailing within the natural world’. Implicit here is that literature is assembled stochastically, that the lateral multitudes of epistemic regimes are modulated through the fear & anxiety of artists sensitive to them and cross-bred into the shaggy mutts of literature, paintings and reactionary journalism about African ape-men & monster-Jews. The book covers the fin de siecle period but its implications reach much further than that, groping at the nape of the present day.

Why is some of the best horror written by racists and weirdos and some of the worst written by...I dunno, people whose politics are anything less than repulsive?

Modernism inveighed against pomposity & melodrama by finding the great crest of the sublime in the marginal & mundane; Postmodernism in the condensation of mutual exclusivity into irony. The subtlety of these modes sometimes evinces a discomfort, a weary sigh of nihilism or a queasy sense of the uncanny, but they aren’t actually scary. On the other hand, the derangement which arises from a fear of being deranged is the magma chamber burrowed under so much great horror. Germinal to this literature is visceral hate, fear and prejudice. The intensity of horror is nourished on darker impulses than a wistful classicism or detached wryness.

The Shape of Fear measures its claims very carefully, metabolizes exhaustive scholarship into an air-tight read. The resultant style is kinda conservative, though, resisting the ostentatious flourishes which define the literature which it analyzes. The surfeit of detail can be lacking in pizazz, sometimes a little tedious, but whatever, it’s an academic book. If you’re having too much fun reading it, it’s not doing its job.

[Mary Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fabulous read, I would really recommend it to anyone who is reasonably well read and interested in late-Victorian Decadent horror fiction and art. Emphasis on well read. I was constantly putting the book down to look up some story or person I'd never heard of but was expected to know, and yet I chalk this up to myself needing to brush up on my Victorian knowledge than any fault in Navarette's writing. Her thesis, essentially, is that the "fin de siecle" culture of decadence in late Victorian horror fiction is the main precursor to the modernist mode of the early twentieth century, and her case is convincing. Besides, any book that ends by quoting T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is an amazing book in my opinion.