Horrifying women, terrifying men: A gender-based study of sexual horror in the fiction of Robert Aickman, John Hawkes, Angela Carter, and Joyce Carol Oates, 1965-1980

This dissertation argues a correlation between the Women's Movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960's and the pervasiveness of horror imagery in the literary works of Robert Aickman, John Hawkes, Angela Carter, and Joyce Carol Oates. Because these writers concern themselves with the complexities of the heterosexual relationship in a post-feminist world, they reflect society's fear of changes in gender roles and sexual mores, in both England and America. The dissertation examines the manifestations of this fear as the uncanny and the grotesque, based on the theories of Freud, Jung, and Thomson. Chapter 1 establishes the precedence for the study of sexual horror: It argues that horror imagery can be analyzed on the symbolic level, based on past critical analyses of Dracula, and that it can be examined as a measure of societal angst. The horror resurgence of the 1970's is discussed in a feminist context, utilizing the theories of de Beauvoir, Paglia, Annis Pratt, and Virginia Allen.; The remainder applies this theory to the aforementioned writers. Chapter 2 argues that Aickman's stories are an assimilation of Jungian archetypes and horror imagery. His fiction from 1968-1980 shows an increase in sexual horror, which corresponds to the increased sense of male dread, as defined by Karen Horney. Through his use of ironic detachment, Aickman challenges the myth of Woman as Idea and the virgin/whore dichotomy. Chapter 3 discusses Hawkes's sexual grotesques in the sexual triad and The Passion Artist. Hawkes also chronicles an increased sense of male fear and similarly employs irony to debunk the myth of Woman-The-Enemy. Chapter 4 analyzes Carter's novels and tales, and asserts that the terrifying, bestial men who populate her works of the late 1960's become more humanized, sometimes approaching the comic, with The Bloody Chamber. This parallels the increased number of independent and sexually liberated women who become her subjects in the late 1970's. Chapter 5 theorizes that Oates's stories of the 1970's exhibit the same pattern as Carter's, for the vacuous, terrified women who are the subjects of her early collections are replaced by career-minded, independent women.