Alienation and Abominations Part 2

The boundaries of what affect us change with time and location—and scientific progress. In the introduction to her collection titled The Female Thermometer, literary critic Terry Castle presents Sigmund Freud’s perspective that the uncanny arises from childhood fears and desires that have been warped into abstraction by our repressing them. Freud points out that fairy tales that feature toys that come to life or impossible circumstances never create the uncanny, because we leave reality at the door. Castle goes on to apply this to 18th century society: in the attempt to be more empirical, scientific and philosophical minds instead fertilized the fields from which the uncanny stems. More was impossible, so moments when those things seemed to intrude on our lives became more inescapable. The era sought to shine a light, but it only made the shadows more numerable.

              Theoretically, this means that there are even more occasions in our world for the uncanny to happen; there is more that cannot happen that might intrude in our stories. We run into the same problem as we have with storytelling devices that now come across as artificial, however: we are more cynical and surer in our world than people in the 18th century. We can still attain the goals of catharsis and terror if we pay attention to the world we have and the fears to which our psyches respond. In this context, that fear is the dissonance between ourselves and other people, and ourselves and our own minds.
              Though societal terror is now important enough to classify as a tool by itself, the original Gothic novels paved the way with terror through power dynamics: in Castle, Manfred is a lord and tyrant who terrorizes a friendless young woman to be his bride; The Monk features the faked death of a heroine solely so that a respected abbot can ravish her at his whim; the terror in Mysteries does not start until Emily’s loving father dies and she is left in the hands of cruel, capricious foreigners; the eponymous character in Frankenstein is an authority figure who has been given no boundaries, and his defiance of the laws of nature results in the imprisonment and execution of an innocent he could save; finally, the vampire slayers’ choice to isolate Mina Harker from their plans means they cannot protect her from Dracula.
             “Gaslighting” is a buzzword now, but it encapsulates the sense that you cannot trust those around you—and in today’s world, we cannot trust our own minds. For you, Nelson Mandela died in prison and never became president of South Africa—though Wikipedia says you are wrong. But you remember. How off, how often, does your perception of reality need to be, before you are crazy? This is the future of Gothic terror. The real threat, as evinced in these novels, is that of the dynamics of power against the main characters. What we need in our modern Gothic is also the sense of our minds giving way like paper, the idea that we might not see correctly, that those who seem to lie may be telling the truth—but what would that mean for our memories and minds? Alone in our heads, how do we know what is normal?
              Radcliffe went out of her way to explain every supernatural event in Mysteries as due to wax skeletons, hidden pirates spooking maids, or extremely good acoustics causing people to hear sounds from across the castle, because she felt her audience needed the lesson. We do not need Radcliffe to disprove the supernatural for us; we are, as a majority, born cynics and rationalists. Now we need to disprove the authority others hold over us, their word against ours. We need to experience the catharsis of proving that a main character is sane and see the tyrants that control his or her life falter, because we will never be able to say what we wish we could to our parents, or our bosses. We experience the terror, in simulation, of being unable to control our own lives, or believe in our own senses—but through the stories, we find our reality and our independence.
              All we can do with the world we are given is perceive it, and our perceptions are not consistent. As we struggle with the world around us, the issues around which we focus and the stories through which we find catharsis are ones that grapple with our own perspectives. We are more connected to everyone in the world now than we have ever been; we should feel more harmonious, but the cacophony of psyches often makes us feel more strange and isolated. We need the catharsis of narratives of societal terror because it allows us to feel and overcome the limitations and doubts we will never truly escape.

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