Abstract
Downey traces resonant images that connect Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Queen’s Twin” (1899) to Stephen King’s shorter fiction and Wharton’s “Bewitched” (1925) to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979). What unites these texts is the repeated evocation of feminine supernatural forces associated with and opposed to the landscape in complex ways. This chapter argues that narratives in which a male character is menaced by both a howling wilderness and the stifling attentions of a potentially murderous woman are essential building blocks for American horror texts. It explores the complexities of the triangulated relationship between men, women, and landscape, in light of the masculinist stereotypes associated with the “myth” of the American Frontier. Downey argues that such narratives veer uncomfortably close to celebrating misogynistic violence.
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Notes
- 1.
See Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
- 2.
See also Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 293.
- 3.
- 4.
See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 54, for a more detailed discussion of these issues.
- 5.
See also Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
- 6.
See Susan S. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 14–15.
- 7.
A full explanation of New England’s (and particularly Maine’s) fictional status as a locus of horror is beyond the scope of this essay. See, for example, Faye Ringel, New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth Through Twentieth Centuries (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995).
- 8.
For further examples of the trope in work by women from the long nineteenth century, see Louisa May Alcott, “A Pair of Eyes, or, Modern Magic,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 17, no. 421 (24 October 1863), and 17, no. 422 (31 October 1863); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York and Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2002), 284; and Wharton, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” in Ghost Stories, 22.
- 9.
See also J. Samaine Lockwood, Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 87.
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Downey, D. (2018). Men, Women, and Landscape in American Horror Fiction. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_6
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