Victorian Horrors: Theory Frameworks
“Even conservative (texts and films) put on display hopes and fears that contest dominant hegemonic and hierarchical relations of power.” ….
They [also] put on display both the significant dreams and nightmares of a culture and the ways that the culture is attempting to channel them to maintain its present relations of power and domination”
1. Cognition and affect (Noel Carroll): “art horror” as it
works on the mind and the emotions via category disturbance, category
ambiguity, formlessness, magnification, massification, etc.
2. The modern bourgeois imaginary (Stallybrass and White):
horror’s cognitive and affective operators feed into a social-class construct
that does two things: distinguishes the “higher” middle classes from the “low”
poor and working classes; projects a cultural imaginary or “unconscious” of
assorted “horrors” that seduce, fascinate, and suggest a hidden or veiled
“truth.” (Note that the latter is very
close to the Freudian unconscious, which itself may be viewed as a Victorian
construct; see Foucault, HS.)
3. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: horror’s cognitive and affective
operators work subversions and inversions of dominant social orders and
categories. Horror in the grotesque
(body distortions) and carnivalesque (collective phenomena of festival, excess,
bodies in motion) contests Victorian middle-class propriety re the body,
gender, and private and public space.
4. The rise of the modern and modernity in light of the panoptical
and biopower (Michel Foucault; DP;HS).
Modern power is elaborated via knowledge rather than punishment. Systems of classification, surveillance,
and inspection at the macro and micro levels aim to penetrate every aspect of
life (this is biopower ). Biopower involves optimal social engineering,
maximum control of populations and their “life,” meaning their productive labor
capacity. This control works at the
level of the nation, the family, and the individual. Broadly speaking, it is articulated using
concepts of the “normal” and the “pathological.” “Sex” and “sexuality” are part of this articulation:
real-life sex, bodies, and pleasures are elaborated into a “confessional”
discourse where it is assumed that “sex” is the hidden secret/”truth” of the
individual, the family, and society (Foucault effects a deconstruction of Freud
and psychoanalysis, arguing, in effect, that Freud’s work is itself a Victorian
artifact, caught up in defining “the normal” and invested in the biopolitics of
the bourgeois patriarchal “family.”)
A quick sketch of modern power/knowledge moves:
*Making the invisible visible (in service of a search for a
secret or “truth”)
*Producing imaginaries (by means of narratives and scenes of
such making-visible)
*Problematizing bodies, minds, and collectivities (the
making-visible is succeeded by all kinds of analysis, discourse, talk, sciences,
classifying, etc. about its objects)
*Constructing a “soul” or “psyche” (the minds and feelings
of individual subjects as well as collectivities [“the poor”; “savages”; “the
Irish”) are elaborated in terms of specific imaginaries and in terms of
specific rhetorics and languages of medicine, psychology, literature, etc.)
*Inducing individual and collective channels of
affect/feeling (“we are all British”; we must correct the problem of “the Great
Unwashed”; “savages are all the same, and all like children”, etc.)
Horror’s cognitive and affective operators in this context
serve to heighten what Foucault calls “the pleasure-power spiral” of
panopticism/surveillance (HS).
The thrill of horror rides along with the thrill of power as
the secret or “truth” is made visible.
Horror charges up and justifies the imperatives of the British state and
imperial power to search out and classify and bring under control resistant
layers and outliers.
Horror builds public feeling for and against, forges national and
imperial bonds using passions about “Us” versus “Them”
(of course War and its horrors are part of this story,
too).
5. Feminism and Queer Theory (Gilbert and Gubar; Armstrong;
Walkowitz; Miller; et al). The Victorian
period is itself a defining one for modern feminism. Woman writers such as the Brontes, Elizabeth
Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and Vernon Lee implicitly and
explicitly critique patriarchal male-dominated society and imagine alternative
narratives and communities of affiliation among women. “Woman” at the same time becomes a major
fantasy site for the bourgeois imaginary (prostitutes, women of color, queer
women, femmes fatales, etc.). And women
are a main target of modern biopower, both in their reproductive capacity (the
nation needs bodies for work and for war) and as the “glue” of the normativized
“family” (cf Nancy Armstrong’s DDF for a classic reading of Jane Eyre in this
light). Notoriously, women become
“hystericized” by the new “scientific” discourses of psychiatry and
psychoanalysis, women’s putative disposition to mental as well as physical
pathology giving greater purchase to modern biopolitical power over their minds
and bodies (remember The Yellow Wallpaper?)
The pressure of the normative and the related discourse of “sex” at the
same time projects “perversions” and the concepts of gender “inversion” and
“homosexuality” (these terms did not exist until the late-Victorian period; see
HS).
This was in keeping with a biopolitical imperative of classifying bodies
and maximizing social productive power to serve capitalist economics and the
labor and military needs of the British nation-state-empire. The modern heteronormative begins here. Queer desire and gender indefinition of any
kind is classified as pathological.
In this context, horror’s cognitive and affective operators
may support stereotypical patriarchal-cultural images of improper, “dangerous”
women, and dovetail with the Victorian bourgeois-imaginary’s repulsion-attraction
to the “low” woman (prostitutes, etc.).
Similarly, the “invert” or “homosexual” gets articulated as a “horror”
serving to define the heteronormative. Conversely, horror effects may support
different lines of feminist and lgbt/queer critique and resistance (category
breakage; grotesque/carnivalesque modes; alternative knowledge/power).
6. The making of the
modern British nation-state and the British Empire. Victorian lit and culture is hugely about
imagining nation and empire. Nation as
cultural imaginary of course is built by narration, by telling stories (the
classic account is Bhaba’s Nation and
Narration). Horror tells stories
about matters fundamental to making and sustaining nation and empire: stories
about bodies, about affects, and about social orders and disorders. A cultural fantasy of purity, wholeness, and
homogeneity. A fantasy of some great One
exerting control over the Many. (We can
guess how this connects with, say, Western metaphysics and ontotheology where
monotheism and other holisms hold sway.)
In such stories, horror enlists emotional energies
traditionally evoked by the sacred, by ritual and religion (cf Herbert’s rat
worship piece). Victorian horrors then
may be viewed as performances or enactments that dramatize issues of nation and
empire. The poor swarm in their slums
and filth, like rats; they are inferior matters that must be cleaned up by
government action, by inspections, policing, and other forms of social control. The Irish are similarly imbued with horror
and have no political rights; colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Australia
are consistently represented with similar rhetoric and imagery of horror. Conrad’s Kurtz in heart of Africa intoning
“the horror, the horror” plays such issues across a double register: horror as
characteristic move of the British system that sees non-Europeans as inferior
“horrors”; horror in a further, critical turn as precisely what the British
system is itself steeped in with its violence against and its economic
exploitation of colonized peoples.
Horror: it clings, it’s contagious.
Victorian horrors can stage various potentials for the
system breaking down, being overwhelmed or exceeded or escaped from (the
Victorian “archaic” and Victorian apocalypses are two interesting turns this
takes in the 1880s-1890s). The sacred
exposes the unstable and passional nature of social order, the fundamental fact
that such order is imposed, performed, and in reality continually patching
itself together. Horror exposing the
seams and gaps, the bloody sutures holding together the social body, so to
speak.
7. These big-picture
frameworks make things pop when we look at specific cases in texts. Our process:
*ID the horror factor and consider it in light of Carroll’s
account. Categories being
unsettled? Heightening massification,
etc? Thematic or other resonances?
*Zero in using one or more of the frameworks #2-#6.
*Look very carefully and closely at form (things like point
of view, genre conventions, character patterning, etc.) and look very closely
at language (direct quotes and specific word choices, syntax, imagery and
metaphor, prosody and rhythm, etc.)
DP=Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison (classic text on panoptical, etc.)
SU Library holds all of these (except perhaps the Bakhtin--I have it if you are interested, but it's widely excerpted online and available elsewhere).
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