From: librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Marriage as Hell: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on TV
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 21:14:23 GMT

I wrote:
>>The reaction of the literary-critical establishment to "The Yellow Wallpaper"
>>is fascinating.... [and continued blathering along in the same vein]

So fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster) wrote:

>Your comments are provocative, David.  I must admit that I, too, had
>never seen anything supernatural in Gilman's tale--nor had I considered
>that an overtly supernatural tale with a metaphorical subtext could be
>argued to be more subtle than an overtly psychological tale.  I've
>tended, for the most part, to think like Father Brown (of the Chesterton
>tales), and search first for the non-supernatural explanation of a tale.
>It's always been a puzzler to me that a supernatural vs. non-super-
>natural distinction is often made for horror literature in used
>bookstores.

My comments were not meant to provoke, only to observe.  I think a
"supernatural" vs "non-supernatural" distinction is the result, primarily,
of two different groups of readers, or at least the recognition by the
readers of two distinct purposes and effects to the stories.

Good supernatural horror, like good fantasy, enchants the world.  It does
this in an unnerving manner, but still it expands the commonplace world by
hinting at things beyond it.  Thus the setting (or at least the style) at
the beginning is often set in a familiar and often comfortable environment.

Splatter horror seeks to disenchant the world.  People are revealed as
rapists, axe murderers, tawdry little serial killers.  You're scared; but
it's the everyday fear of being beaten up by the bullies on the playground,
being jumped by a tiger as you left your cave in the morning.  It touches
neither the _outside_ nor the inner darknesses from which our childhood
night-terrors emerged.

Psychological horror I usually find disappointing.  It promises so much more
than it delivers.  (I suppose my biases are showing; you'll simply have to
accept 'em for the duration of this note.)

The observation I originally mentioned was a result of the perception that
traditional literary criticism (essentially a set of "mechanisms" for getting
at themes in a work of literature; taken about as far as it can go by Northrop
Frye) has never had a good way to talk about supernatural horror.  Constructed
to deal with the Novel, it does what it can with a psychological view of
horror stories, but it can't help favoring that view over the supernatural one,
despite the fact that the latter is often the more powerful and effective _to
the reader_.  (So Poe had, I think, both interpretations of "The Tell-Tale
Heart" in mind ... but he knew which one keeps readers awake at night,
listening to the creak of the floorboards.)  The only significant exception
I can think of is M.R. James, master of the supernatural horror story, and
beloved of old Cantabrigians, whose works have received a good deal of
sympathetic, serious criticism on their own merits _as ghost stories_.

Feminist scholarship comes at the problem with a different set of tools.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" yields up riches when these mechanisms are applied,
and I don't doubt that Charlotte Perkins Gilman intended her story to
talk about power-relations between a man and a woman.  (Oo!  The intentional
fallacy!  Run away!).  But she cast her vision in the form of a supernatural
horror story -- and yet a non-supernatural reading is often forced onto the
story, since that's not what feminists see in it.  I'd rather see a
multifaceted story recognized as such; feminist commentary and supernatural
fear.

Were there a critical discipline capable of discussing supernatural horror,
perhaps we'd see a more balanced view of TYW.  There is, of course, a lot of
criticism after Frye which is radically different, but I don't feel myself
knowledgable enough to comment on it.  (I have seen a "structuralist"
dissection of Poe's "Strange Case of M. Valdemar," done by a Frenchman whose
name I forget, but it struck me as having missed the point in a very stunning
way.)  Now horror is becoming grouped into "genre studies," in a sort of
egalitarian who-are-we-to-impose-a-heirarchy-on-art attitude, but anything
that can't distinguish between "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "It
Came From Mars and Ate My Brain" leaves me cold.

The point of a supernatural horror story -- or a fantasy -- is its
effect, which Ursula Le Guin suggests is due to literary style (in "From
Elfland to Poughkeepsie").  There's more to it than that, of course, but only
Le Guin, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Lem (mostly in regards to SF), and a few others
have even worked out a critical apparatus capable of _talking about_ the
stuff without missing the whole point, which is the effect, the transcending
of the ordinary.

The main activity in much modern horror, by the way, seems to be taking a
supernatural idea and reducing it to splatter horror.  Something unspeakable
comes out of space, possesses the body of a man, and promptly begins chopping
up little kids and necking teenagers.  The crawling fear of something truly
_outside_, something unknown to our comfortable world, is replaced by the
gut-fear of being hacked to death and having brains splashed across our
windshields.

Sorry this is so long, F.W., but few will stand up for the validity of "The
Weird Tale" (as S.T. Joshi calls it in his survey of six horror writers) as
worthy of sympathetic critical analysis, so I have to make my fumbling and
confused way up here to say something in its favor, and to try to keep good
horror stories from being argued entirely out of the field on the grounds of
short-term political expediency.

- David

P.S. short version of the above for those of you who just hit '$' to see how
long I was going to blather on: I concede everything to Fiona but still claim
that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is intentionally written as a supernatural horror
story.  Now you can safely hit 'n'.