Oh, The Horror

Unit: Creative Writing 212-2 – Genre Shortfiction.
Notes and thoughts, from readings of Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl and Horror. (unable to access The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe)

Horror: “is often used interchangeably with terror to describe the intense emotions produced by objects of fear, whether they be uncanny or sublime, repulsive or threatening.” (Botting, 123)

Horror fiction (which, as explored in Literature Studies 212 and very possibly in another Botting work, Gothic Excess and Transgression) is gothic by its very nature. Thus, you would expect to find that it uses the gothic themes – such as those of liminal spaces, doubling effects and subterranean spaces. Botting goes on to say horror's “object remains uncertain, lost among a general blurring of images.” This would be the employment of liminality, as such spaces exist neither here nor there, but rather in the middle. Liminal spaces, then, create a sense of unease through their refusal to be placed into defined opposites. In terms of Horror, Botting uses Dracula as an example of a narrative – undeath occupies a liminal space which clearly creates a sense of unease to the living.

Horror fiction itself evolves with the changing times. Wheras vampirism appeared once to be an exploration of Victorian taboo - “indeed, the strange and uncanny sensations that Harker experiences in castle Dracula are linked to a general eruption of familiar and culturally repressed ideas... vampires release repressed natural energies.” (Botting,128) However, come the 19^th century, vampirism becomes linked to scientific experimentation. Dracula is no longer a religious agent, but one whose powers are now chemical energies. (think here something like Ultraviolet, in which vampirism is a genetic mutation engineered by scientists)

Oates' Goat-Girl is then an inhabitant of the liminal space between human and animal, which Botting also explored. (using E.F Benson's The Horror-Horn as an example) “animality and sexuality conjoin to shroud a recognisably human form with the regressive features that are perceived as diabolically human. The conjunction of human shape and animal characteristics evokes horror: it is a being that refuses to remain a symbolically established place and, shifting between animal and human features, confounds what should be a definite and absolute distinction.” (Botting,129)

The horror arising from the Goat-Girl seem not to come from her animalistic appearance, but rather the human behaviour that is attributed to her. Simply, animals cannot be human. Her agelessness also appears to give some sense of unease to the narrator. The Goat-Girl's inability (or refusal?) to grow older almost grants her a sense of immortality, perhaps standing in for the ideas of undeath, blurring the concepts of linear living and dying. There are also uncomfirmed hints throughout the narrative that suggest the Goat-Girl is the child of two humans, namely the parents of the narrator. The horror here would be the suggestion that animality can be born from humans, further blurring the lines between what is human and what is animal.

That the Goat-Girl loses her daytime shyness during the night and becomes something stronger and more terrifying also lends to the horror/gothic code. After all, how many horror stories take place in the day, or how many gothic creatures take their strength from the night/moon? There is something in the darkness that terrifies man, and appears here to be the source of the horror's strength. It is by the night that the Goat-Girl takes her most human attributes, no longer content to remain in her paddock frolicking, but coming closer to the house with “her defiant posture, her glaring pale eyes,” (Oates, 500) and an apparent hatred of those that dwell within the house.

Readings
Botting, Fred. “Horror.” The Handbook of Gothic Literature. Ed. Marie-Mulvey-Roberts. London: Palgrave Macmilliam, 1998. 123-131
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick. London: Oxford UP, 1993. 498-501.