Horror
Shelley’s Daughters
Reviews by TERRENCE
RAFFERTY
Published: October 24, 2008
When the strange, arresting,
thoroughly frightening novel called “Frankenstein” was published in London on
New Year’s Day, 1818, there was no author named on the title page, and readers
and reviewers, almost to a person, assumed the book had been written by a man.
They were mistaken. The creator of “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” was
Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of the radical political thinker William
Godwin (to whom it was dedicated) and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the
wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — and who, when
she finished the novel, a few months shy of her 20th birthday, became the
mother of horror.
In that capacity she has had many more sons than
daughters. Or so it seems, at least, for in the nearly two centuries that have
passed since this teenage English girl delivered herself of the first great
modern horror novel, men — as is their wont — have coolly taken possession of
the genre, as if by natural right, some immutable literary principle of
primogeniture. Until fairly recently, just about all the big names in horror,
the writers whose stories dominate the anthologies and whose novels stay in
print forever, have been of the masculine persuasion: Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker, Lovecraft, M. R. James, King, Straub.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s remarkable 1892 tale of madness, “The Yellow
Wallpaper,” manages to creep into the odd collection, as does Shirley Jackson’s
story “The Lottery,” which is so disturbing that it induced a significant
number of New Yorker readers to cancel their subscriptions when it appeared in
the magazine’s pages in 1948. But for the most part, a woman’s place in horror
has been pretty well defined: she’s the victim, seen occasionally and heard only when she
screams.
It’s probably unwise to
speculate on the deep reasons for this, to assert, say, that men have some
greater temperamental affinity for the hideous doings horror thrives on, or
that women are more likely to shrink from the contemplation of pure, rampaging
evil. (It may be the case that men have historically been afflicted with a
rather more urgent need to test themselves against such dangers, but let’s
leave all that to the gender-studies departments, shall we?) What can be said
with certainty, though, is that women writers, even the best of them, have
rarely made a career of horror, as the male
luminaries of the genre mostly have. Gilman, for example, occupied herself
primarily with nonfiction on feminist issues, and Jackson, aside from “The
Lottery” and her superb 1959 novel, “The Haunting of Hill House,” in fact wrote
very little that fits comfortably into the genre: no vampires, no werewolves, no zombies, just a lot of people whose lives feel to them
inexplicably threatened and unstable. (Her 1954 novel, “The Bird’s Nest,” about
a young woman with multiple personalities, is a prime example of the sort of
real-world unease her eerily detached prose tends to generate; it has, come to
think of it, quite a bit in common with the mundane domestic horror of “The
Yellow Wallpaper.”)
Even Mary Shelley, after her
initial triumph, merely dabbled in the unspeakable for the rest of her writing
life. The second half of her too-little-known 1826 novel, “The Last Man,”
imagines the end, by plague, of humankind, but is, despite its dire subject,
less horrific than elegiac — it’s a book about the death of Romanticism. Three
of Shelley’s shorter forays into the fantastic were collected in 2004 in a slim
volume called TRANSFORMATION (Hesperus, paper, $13.95) and demonstrate conclusively that horror as
such didn’t interest her profoundly: for her, fiction was more about ideas than
sensations. In recent years, though, women — perhaps emboldened by the success
of the florid vampire novels written by the pre-Jesus Anne Rice — have been
claiming a much larger share of their genre birthright, even devoting
themselves, in many cases, exclusively to horror. Or maybe it would be more
accurate to say they’re writing fiction that uses the traditional materials of
horror for other purposes, because novels like those of the wildly popular Laurell K. Hamilton or the Y.A. phenomenon Stephenie Meyer don’t appear to be concerned, as true
horror should be, with actually frightening the reader. (Rice wasn’t, either.)
The publishing industry has even cooked up a new name to brand this sort of horroroid fiction, in which vampires and other untoward
creatures so vividly express their natural and unnatural desires: it’s called
“paranormal romance.”
Unreadable as most of this
stuff is (at least for us males), there’s a certain logic to this turn of
pop-cultural events, in that we the reading public no longer share a clear
consensus on what constitutes abnormal, or indeed scary, behavior. In the
unlamented prefeminist world, women were themselves
so routinely marginalized as “different” or “other” that perhaps it’s not such
a stretch for them to identify, as many now seem to, with entities once
considered monstrous, utterly beyond the pale. And, further, quite a few of
these monsters, notably the vampires, are beautiful, worldly and unstoppably strong — which makes them useful vehicles for
empowerment fantasies.
A measure of doubt, or at
least ambivalence, about what should terrify us isn’t necessarily a bad thing
for a writer. Times change, as do the shapes of our fears:
it’s probably just as well not to be too
sure where the real threats to our bodies and souls are coming from.
Women horror writers, who seem less certain these days than men, have been
doing some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre. In
2003, Sara Gran published a terrific short novel called COME CLOSER (Berkley, paper,
$6.99), in which a happily married
young urban professional finds herself suddenly and incomprehensibly attracted
to violence, obscenity, promiscuity, all the nasty sensations her orderly and
apparently satisfying life has always excluded. This overpowering
walk-on-the-wild-side impulse leads to some extremely unpleasant behavior. The
novel is either a demonic-possession story or, like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a tale
of a woman’s everyday madness, and Gran blurs the
line suggestively. Is it scarier if the demon is external and real, or internal
— self-generated and imagined? In “Come Closer,” the distinction feels purely
academic.
Gran is, in the tradition of
women writing horror, only a sporadic contributor to the genre. The sole book
she’s come out with in the past five years is a noirish
crime novel called “Dope.” But “Come Closer” remains one of the signal works of
contemporary female horror because Gran manages to locate in her heroine’s
anguished sexuality a kind of terror that the paranormal romancers routinely
(and lucratively) deny, the uneasy sense that the forces unleashed inside her
might be uncontrollable — rampant, voracious, indifferent to natural limits and
not unambiguously benign.
Sex has always, of course,
been the dirty little secret of horror’s appeal, because what terrifies us is
also, often, what attracts us. Where sex is concerned, the distinction between
freedom and helplessness — being, as a Romantic writer might say, in the thrall
of one’s passions — can be a very, very fine one. And the feeling of
helplessness is at the heart of horror. Even when sex isn’t the subject, the
good female writers in the genre seem more intimate with that feeling than
their male counterparts. Although the protagonist of Alexandra Sokoloff’s recent novel THE PRICE (St. Martin’s,
$23.95) is a man, it’s difficult to
imagine a male horror writer putting a member of his own sex through what Sokoloff’s Will Sullivan endures: the advanced cancer of
his young daughter, the loss of his wife’s love and trust, the long hours spent
roaming hopelessly through the corridors of a hospital, a setting in which even
the strongest of us can, as the endless days of chronic illness grind past,
start to feel defeated, impotent. When the only way out of the impasse comes in
the form of a smooth-talking man offering deals fishier than even 21st-century
Wall Street would countenance, the hero’s no-exit despair appears fully
justified, and irreversible. Sokoloff has the
integrity to leave this dire situation essentially unresolved, the glib devil
unvanquished, evil still at large in the hospital and in the world.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
More articles: Next
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Lorena Levy Ballester
lolevyba@alumni.uv.es