The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence, and: Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature (review)

Susan J. Navarette. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1998. 272 pp. $37.95.

Daniel R. Schwarz. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. 244 pp. $44.

These two entirely different books devote a chapter apiece to readings of The Turn of the Screw. Neither author-- wisely I believe--positions his or her reading of the story as definitive or enters deeply into the familiar debates about the tale which have raged since its publication in 1898. Still, their results could please the most impatient Jamesian, bringing as they do a variety of discourses and artistic traditions to bear on the story.

Susan J. Navarette believes fin-de-siècle horror writers generated an aesthetic that responded to and restated trends in contemporary scientific theory. The appropriation of these theories, she believes, helped horror writers further the idea that a period of cultural decline was imminent in England and on the continent. Navarette's selection of "horror writers" is broad and, at times, a bit strained--Victor Hugo, Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James all fall under her rubric--, but her analyses of their writings can be engaging and provocative. Her writing on James's friend Vernon Lee's ghost stories will be of special interest to many Jamesians.

Navarette's first chapter, "Rictus Invictus," is a densely intertwined tour de force in which she links fin-de-siècle scientific writing on the body and disease by a variety of scientists and physicians with work by artists who called their style and themselves Decadent. For Navarette, "Decadent literature in general was understood by both sides as a celebration of and an evocation on the variety of beauty bred of disease" (40). This beauty is not only revealed in characterization or plot but more importantly through the "contours, shadows, and rhythms created by a language that exposes the reader to a hidden malady." Navarette argues within Decadent literature that subtle affinities exist between "the soul of the subject and the soul of the plot" (58). In works such as Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, "the horror embodied in the soul of the plot is wrought out from within, little word by little word, in sentence and images that are symptomatic of the maladies of the soul" (58).

Navarette's chapter on The Turn of the Screw is less ambitious than its counterparts and draws more superficially upon late nineteenth-century scientific discourse than her other chapters. Most valuable in this chapter is her focus on Miles's death scene and the tale's fascinating resemblances to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Her reading of the tale begins when she expands on George Levine's work in texts such as Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Navarette notes that much Victorian literature predicates self-negation and often death as a paradoxical condition of knowledge, much as science aligns truth with objectivity. Like its Victorian counterparts, James's most famous horror story also "coils itself about the related issues of discovery, discernment, and possession" through self-abnegation, death, and paradox (112).

Much of Navarette's intricate reading focuses on The Turn of the Screw's final scene. Navarette believes that Mile's final death cry--"'Peter Quint--you devil! . . . Where?'"--embodies the irreducible terror that James found lacking in what he called "the new crop or new type of ghost story" (qtd. in Navarette 115). Mile's death, Navarette maintains, came as a doubly effective shock to the story's Victorian readers:

The ardor with which...