science fiction field, as did the preponderance of fantasy
literature. H.P. Lovecraft and many of his circle published in the science fiction magazines of the 1930s. And the letter-writing subcultures generated by the science
fiction magazines interpenetrated with the horror field,
creating one body, so that by the late 1930s the active
fans commonly identified themselves as fans of the
fantasy fiction field.
In 1939, the great science fiction editor, John W.
Campbell, Jr., whose magazine, Astounding Stories,
dominated science fiction, founded a companion magazine, Unknown, devoted to fantasy and horror, and to modernizing the style and atmosphere of the fiction.
Campbell, who had written an influential science fiction
horror story in 1938, encouraged his major science
fiction writers to work for his new magazine, and in the
five years of its existence, Unknown confirmed a bond
between horror and science fiction that has not been
broken, a bonding that yielded the flowering of SF horror
movies in the fifties and encouraged a majority of the
important horror writers for the next fifty years. Shirley
Jackson once told me in conversation that she had a
complete run of Unknown. “ It’s the best,” she said.
Several of Jackson’s stories first appeared in the 1950s in
The Magazine o f Fantasy and Science Fiction (as did, for
instance, one of the earliest translations of Jorge Luis
Borges). Since the 1930s, a majority of the horror stories
in the English language have first appeared in genre
magazines.
In times when censorship or conventions operated
to deter authors from dealing specifically with
certain human situations, the occult provided a
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David G. Hartwell
reservoir of images which could be used to convey
symbolically what could not be presented literally.
— Glen St John Barclay, Anatomy o f Horror
Meanwhile, from the 1890s onward, to a large extent
under the influence of Henry James, writers such
as Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton and others devoted significant portions of their careers to the literary ghost story. “In a certain sense, all of his stories are ghost
stories—evocations of a tenuous past; and his most
distinguished minor work is quite badly cast in this
rather vulgar, popular form. ‘The “ghost story,’” he
wrote in one of his prefaces, ‘as we for convenience call
it, has ever been for me the most possible form of the
fairy tale.’ But at a deeper level than he consciously
sought in doing his intended stories of terror (he called,
we remember, even ‘The Turn of the Screw’ a ‘potboiler’), James was forever closing in on the real subject that haunted him always: the necrophilia that has always so
oddly been an essential part of American romance,” says
critic Leslie Fiedler.
At the time of his death, Henry James was writing The
Sense o f the Past, a supernatural novel in which a
character named Ralph becomes obsessed with a portrait and is translated into the past as a ghost from the future. The supernatural and ghosts were major strains
in the work of this great and influential writer throughout his career and, under the pressure of his Modernist admirers, have often been ignored or banished from
consideration by being considered only as psychological
metaphors during most of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf, for example, in defending the ghost stories, says the ghosts “have their origin within us. They are
present whenever the significant overflows our powers of
expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by
the strange. . . . Can it be that we are afraid? . . . We are
afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in
Introduction
7
ourselves.” True, of course, but a defense of the metaphorical level of the text at the expense of the literal surface—which is often intentionally difficult to figure
out.
Since the Modernists considered the supernatural a
regressive and outmoded element in fiction, the contemporaries and followers of James who were strongly influenced by the literal level of his supematuralism have
been to a large extent banished from the literary canon.
Most of them are women writers. A few, such as Edith
Wharton, still have critical support, but not on the whole
for their supernatural works. Those whose best work was
largely in the supernatural, such as Violet Hunt and
Gertrude Atherton, Harriet Prescott Spofford and Mary
Wilkins Freeman, have been consigned to literary history and biographical criticism, marginalized. In the recent volume, Horror: 100 Best Books (1988— covering literature from Shakespeare to Ramsey Campbell), five
women writers were chosen for the list, omitting novelists such as Ann Radcliffe, Emily Bronte and Anne Rice, and every short story collection by a woman— except
Maijorie Bowen’s and Lisa Tuttle’s.
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
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David G. Hartwell
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,” says 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 t
he 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 o f 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 fic
Introduction
9
tion, 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 bums, 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
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David G. Hartwell
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.
II
The Sublime Transaction
The sublime provided a theory of terror in literature and the other arts.
— Carl Woodring, The Penguin Encyclopedia o f
Horrpr 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 o f 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
Introduction
11
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”
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 o f Horror and the Supernatural, says: “As did the scholars of tragedy, [Edmund] Burke
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David G. Hartwell
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 o f 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
Introduction
13
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.
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 2
