Session 5(a): Dramatic Fear and the Gothic Sublime

Concurrent Session 5a: Dramatic Fear and the Gothic Sublime
Chair: Steven Allen

And the Moral of the Story IsY. Horror Cinema as Modern Fairy Tale
David Carter
Film Critic

The article looks at the cultural progression from traditional “fairy tales” to their modern equivalent the horror film. A range of works is examined including classic horror series as Friday the 13th and similar “slasher” films, Frankenstein and other sci-fi, through more recent works such as Roth’s Hostel and the Saw trilogy.  Though culturally frowned upon, horror films present moral themes that are similar in tone and intent to fairy tales. The article examines both the subtle and overt socially conservative and repressive messages present in the horror genre. Many of horror’s most clichéd images (promiscuous teens being murdered, scientists destroyed by their own hubris) are reinforcements of traditional Judeo-Christian values; the intended purpose of fairy tales and other moral lesson works aimed at children. Each film genre is examined along with the moral or religious ideas it espouses, in addition to films that deviate from this model. The paper’s primary focus is to examine the mixed signals sent by many horror films; glorifying certain unacceptable behaviors (e.g. violence) by using them to punish other unacceptable behaviors (e.g. sex, drug use), and the origins of these concepts in traditional folktales and children’s literature.

Download Conference Paper (pdf)

“Witches! Live Witches! The House is Full of Witches!” The Concept Of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama
Madeleine Harwood
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

The years of the witch-hunts in Early Modern England saw an uprising in the publication of literature on the subject to coincide with the obvious increase in interest among the masses. The vast majority of these works take an instructional or informative stance: discussing the religious implications of witchcraft; publishing accounts of more high-profile trials; or simply telling the tale of some strange, abhorrent or wonderful occurrences attributed to supposed witches. The period also spawned a number of more entertaining pieces – drama and balladry – that, although still a minute percentage of the dramatic literature published during those years, represent the most concentrated cluster of theatrical publications on the subject in history.
The purpose of the drama seems to have been to engage, rile and strike fear into both audiences and readers of the text. This paper, therefore, intends to analyse the language and stage-direction used by playwrights in the Early Modern period – namely Middleton; Dekker, Rowley and Ford; Heywood and Brome; and Shadwell – and to attempt to present how these authors created an atmosphere of fear, or otherwise, in relation to witchcraft in their text. Supplementary to my ongoing thesis The Changing Perceptions of Witchcraft in Literature in England 1560 to the modern day, this paper will also track any significant changes that occur in such writing from the first drama at the very beginning of the 1600s until the publication of Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches in 1684. The most interesting and significant of these being the dichotomy between the creation of a genuinely frightening atmosphere, and one in which the fear is so intense as to be almost comical.

Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
Maria Beville
Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland

This paper analyses terror in relation to the philosophical strands of the sublime in Gothic fiction. Emphasising the role of terror in Gothic aesthetics, and in fulfilling the obligation to the ‘unrepresentable’, I will consider a number of Gothic texts from different historical and social contexts (namely, the early and late nineteenth century, modernism and postmodernism) to analyse whether similar events in the evolution of culture have contributed to the re-emergence of terror in literature as a particularly Gothic expression of the fear and angst that plagued society as it developed toward capitalism and globalisation.
The Gothic in many respects may be regarded as a discursive site for various aspects of dislocated subjectivity. In its dealings with these arguably unrepresentable attributes of being, terror has been the primary power of the Gothic; a liminal state that problematises concepts of self, reality and the nature of existence. This quality of terror has been underlined as sublime by philosophers from Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke to Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. This paper will sketch out how this range of philosophical approaches to terror has been presented to us in Gothic fiction.
The focus of textual analysis will be on the Gothic concern with arousing transcendental aspects of the imagination and the sublime effect of ‘genuine heterogeneity’ (Lyotard) on the subject. Brief studies of terror in works such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses will offer a perspective on the history of the philosophy of terror as it has been expressed in literature as a means of exploring those aspects of being that remain mysteriously unknowable and unrepresentable in art.