Ann Radcliffe and Terror vs. Horror
Works of terror create a sense of uncertain apprehension that leads to a complex
fear of obscure and dreadful elements. The essence of terror stimulates the
imagination and often challenges intellectual reasoning to arrive at a somewhat
plausible explanation of this ambiguous fear and anxiety. Resolution of the
terror provides a means of escape.
Works of horror are constructed from a maze of alarmingly concrete imagery
designed to induce fear, shock, revulsion, and disgust. Horror appeals to lower
mental faculties, such as curiosity and
voyeurism. Elements of horror render the
reader incapable of resolution and subject the reader's mind to a state of
inescapable confusion and chaos. The inability to intellectualize horror inflicts a
sense of obscure despair.
Although the novels commonly referred to as "Gothic" are united
by certain thematic and stylistic conventions, they seem to vary a
great deal in the emotional responses they seek to elicit from
readers. Ann Radcliffe herself was among the first to draw an
affective dividing line down the middle of the newly emergent
genre. Conservative and rational in her own approach to the
Gothic, Radcliffe clearly objected to the shocking scenes depicted
in The Monk, and it is widely believed that she wrote The Italian as
a protesting response to Lewis' novel. She elucidated her stance in
an 1826 essay entitled "On the Supernatural in Poetry," in which
draws upon Edmund Burke in order to distinguish between terror
and horror in literature. She argues that terror is characterized by
"obscurity" or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially
horrible events; it is this indeterminacy that leads the reader
toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, "nearly annihilates" the
reader's responsive capacity with its unambiguous displays of
atrocity.
**Radcliffe was critical of texts that overdid the horrifying
elements in such an obvious way.
From The Mysteries of Udolpho
(Radcliffe)
A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from
that part of the room which communicated with the private
staircase, and she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of
the door having been fastened, during the preceding night, by some
unknown hand. Her late alarming suspicion concerning its
communication also occurred to her. Her heart became faint with
terror. Half raising herself from the bed, and gently drawing aside
the curtain, she looked towards the door of the staircase, but the
lamp that burned on the hearth spread so feeble a light through the
apartment, that the remote parts of it were lost in shadow. The
noise, however, shich she was convinced came from the door,
continued. It seemed like that made by the undrawing of rusty
bolts, and often ceased, and was then renewed more gently, as if
the hand that occasioned it was restrained by a fear of discovery.
While Emily kept her eyes fixed on the spot, she saw the door
move, and then slowly open, and perceived something enter the
room, but the extreme duskiness prevented her distinguishing what
it was. Almost fainting with terror, she had yet sufficient command
over herself to check the shriek that was escaping from her lips,
and letting the curtain drop from her hand, continued to observe in
silence the motions of the mysterious form she saw. It seemed to
glide along the remote obscurity of the apartment, then paused,
and, as it approached the hearth, she perceived, in the stronger
light, what appeared to be a human figure. Certain remembrance
now struck upon her heart, and almost subdued the feeble remains
of her spirits; she continued, however, to watch the figure, which
remained for some time motionless, but then, advancing slowly
towards the bed, [it] stood silently at the feet where the curtains,
being a little open, allowed her still to see it; terror, however, had
now deprived her of the power of discrimination, as well as that of
utterance.
From The Monk (Lewis)
[A light] proceeded from a small Lamp which was placed upon a
heap of stones, and whose faint and melancholy rays served rather
to point out, than dispell the horrors of a narrow gloomy dungeon
formed in one side of the Cavern; It also showed several other
recesses of similar construction, but whose depth was buried in
obscurity. Coldly played the light upon the damp walls, whose
dew-stained surface gave back a feeble reflection. A thick and
pestilential fog clouded the height of the vaulted dungeon. As
Lorenzo advanced, He felt a piercing chillness spread itself
through his veins. The frequent groans still engaged him to move
forwards. He turned towards them, and by the Lamp's glimmering
beams beheld in a corner of the loathsome abode, a Creature
stretched upon a bed of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale,
that He doubted to think her Woman. She was half-naked: Her
long dishevelled hair fell in disorder over her face, and almost
entirely concealed it. One wasted Arm hung listlessly upon a
tattered rug, which covered her convulsed and shivering limbs: The
Other was wrapped round a small bundle, and held it closely to her
bosom. A large Rosary lay near her: Opposite to her was a
Crucifix, on which She bent her sunk eyes fixedly, and by her side
stood a Basket and a small Earthen Pitcher.
Lorenzo stopped: He was petrified with horror. He gazed upon the
miserable Object with disgust and pity. He trembled at the
spectacle; He grew sick at heart: His strength failed him, and his
limbs were unable to support his weight.
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1966).
Mrs. Radcliffe, a mistress of hints, associations, silence, and
emptiness, only half-revealing her picture leaves the rest to the
imagination. She knows, as Burke has asserted, that obscurity is a
strong ingredient in the sublime; but she knew the sharp distinction
between Terror and Horror, which was unknown to Burke. "Terror
and horror...are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and
awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts,
freezes and nearly annihilates them...; and where lies the great
difference between terror and horror, but in the uncertainty and
obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?"
Sounds unexplained, sights indistinctly caught, dim shadows
endowed with motion by the flicker of the firelight or the shimmer
of the moonbeam invoke superstitious fear. "To the warm
imagination," she writes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, "the forms
which float half-veiled in darkness afford a higher delight than the
most distinct scenery the Sun can show."
The chords of terror which had tremulously shuddered beneath
Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers were now smitten with a new
vehemence. The intense school of the Schauer- Romantiks
improvised furious and violent themes in the orchestra of horror....
The contrast between the work and personalities of Mrs. Radcliffe
and ' Monk' Lewis serves to illustrate the two distinct streams of
the Gothic novel: the former representing the Craft of Terror, the
latter and his followers comprising the chambers of Horror....
The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference
between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between
the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse. Professor
McKillop, quoting from Mrs. Radcliffe, said that " obscurity [in
Terror] . . . leaves the imagination to act on a few hints that truth
reveals to it, . . . obscurity leaves something for the imagination to
exaggerate". Burke held that "To make anything very terrible,
obscurity seems in general to be necessary", and added that, ". . .
darkness, being originally an idea of terror, was chosen as a fit
scene for such terrible representations ". Burke did not distinguish
between the subtle gradations of Terror and Horror; he related only
Terror to Beauty, and probably did not conceive of the beauty of
the Horrid, the grotesque power of something ghastly, too vividly
imprinted on the mind and sense.
Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic
dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror
resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact
portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far
more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror
appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy
and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual
cutaneous contact with the supernatural...
Each writer of the intense school contributed a grotesque and
gruesome theme of horror to the Schauer-Romantik phase of the
Gothic novel. They wrote stories of black-magic and lust, of
persons in pursuit of the elixir virtue, of insatiable curiosity and
unpardonable sins, of contracts with the Devil, of those who
manufacture monsters in their laboratories, tales of skull-headed
ladies, of the dead arising from their graves to feed upon the blood
of the innocent and beautiful, or who walk about in the Hall of
Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands.... The baleful
hall of Eblis, "the abode of ve ngeance and despair", is pictured in
the full effulgence of infernal majesty. It conveys to us the horror
of the most ghastly convulsions and screams that may not be
smothered. Here everyone carries within him a heart tormented in
flames, to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish...