Fear in the Fin de Siècle

ELT 43 : 3 2000 Bronfen scrupulously avoids imposing finalities on Richardson's representation : "The final episode may therefore be regarded more as a final affirmation of an already familiar message concerning Miriam's formation of her own identity, reality and its poetic representation than as a final narrative explanation." The last chapter, "When the Tapestry Hangs Complete: March Moonlight " leads first into a very close reading of the Vaud section of March Moonlight and then back, by way of Richardson's theoretical statements , to the reader's own contemplative and transformative role in recreating the text οι Pilgrimage. These readers of Pilgrimage, in approaching Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory, have their work cut out for them. The book's origins as a thesis are apparent in its unrelieved seriousness, its systematic and repetitive working through of ideas, and its foregrounding of theory at the expense of practice. There are even a few errors of fact, in spite of Bronfen 's extraordinarily fine grasp of the text. For example, the room Amabel recreates was Miriam's half of the room she shared with Miss Holland; she did not share it with Amabel. And "going over to Rome" refers not to the character "B. V" but to the author Hugh Benson. A modest sprinkling of misprints will be found as well, over half of them in quotations from Pilgrimage. The worst is the omission of not in "a life that was [not] the life of wild nature" (IV, 265); and the substitution of not for but in "no one was alive not the lonely women" (II, 210). Readers who persist, however, will be rewarded by Bronfen's coherent elucidation of the process of Miriam's identity-formation, and by a thoroughgoing exposition of the phenomenological, mystical and religious belief system subtending the spatial structuring of Richardson's narrative. And at the end, they will find a systematic review of Richardson criticism, a bibliography, and a concise index. George H. Thomson __________________ Ottawa, Canada Fear in the Fin de Siècle Susan J. Navarette. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998. 314 pp. $37.95 SUSAN NAVARETTE explains that this book "concerns itself with the ways in which fin-de-siècle horror writers created an aesthetic that functioned as a response to and as a restatement of trends in contemporary scientific theory that . . . permitted [certain writers] to ad350 BOOK reviews vanee the idea that a period of cultural decline was imminent both in England and on the Continent." A few pages later Navarette continues: Conjoining the aesthetics of "horror," "decadence" (both cultural and stylistic ), and the methodology of scientific theory, The Shape of Fear diagnoses the form and the function of certain hybrid literary monstrosities and contextualizes the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to record and to reenact in narrative form what they understood to be the entropie, devolutionary, and degenerative forces prevailing within the natural world. Using the fascination of Hugo, Poe, Hawthorne, Hardy and others with "the grinning bare skeletal truth of things, the always denied triumph of the horrific: the rictus invictus," Navarette focuses on several turn-ofthe -century figures as the basis of her interpretations of the Shape of Fear: Walter da la Mare ("A.B.O."), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), Vernon Lee ("The Doll"), Arthur Machen ("The Great God Pan"), and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness). Her analysis of James's Turn of the Screw may effectively serve to illustrate Navarette's technique: The provisional nature of the governess's linguistic reconstructions (it is she who most often cauterizes the gaping wounds of sentences rent by the typographical gash that punctures speech) becomes more apparent when what substitutes for the momentary silence forced by the dash is the silence that announces the less easily governed spectral exchanges: "the intense hush" in which ... moments before her first encounter with Quint, "the sound of evening dropped," or her sense, later, that "all sounds from [Flora] had previously dropped" in anticipation of Miss Jessel's appearance by the Sea of Azov. The more satisfying analyses provided in this volume are...