The Nature Of Horror Analysis

Carroll’s argument of art-horror qualifies Gilman’s story by causing a horrified feeling in the audience. Gilman creates this feeling through the story’s setting. In the story, “The Nature of Horror”, Carroll explains that the human experience of art-horror is reliant on two necessary conditions: disgust feeling, and monsters tied with the sense of being threatened. Carroll states, “We shall presume that this is an emotional state whole emotion we call art-horror” (Carroll 52). According to Carroll art-horror is like an emotion which needs to cause a horrified feeling in audience in response to the fictional monster. Similarly, Gilman makes the horrific style of the story very clear from the beginning. She makes her style obvious when gives …show more content…
In the story, “The Nature of Horror” Carroll describes the “Overreacher Plot” where the character seeks for the forbidden knowledge and acts on it which makes the situation worse (57). This links to Gilman’s story where she shows how the narrator was forbidden from leaving her bed, writing, reading, socializing, etc. So, to seek for the forbidden knowledge the narrator identifies more and more different patterns in the wallpaper. Gilman mentions, “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes” (316). The more she gets involved in the wallpaper, she became very obsessed with the different patterns, in the wallpaper and convinced herself that she sees a woman in the design. As a result, the narrator turn into a monster after she totally surrounds herself with the wallpaper. Gilman states, “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight” (318). The narrator starts acting on her forbidden knowledge when she behaves like a monster. She also sees a ghost type of pattern behind the main pattern which was only visible in day light. That pattern turns out as a desparate woman who is continuously crawling all around and looking for freedom similar to Jane. That is why Jane became so obseed because she was sharing similar views with …show more content…
Carroll makes arguments such as a horror story needs a monster who is threating other characters, and Gilman proves this by bringing the monster in the narrator as well as a hidden lady monster in the wallpaper. Furthermore, Carroll’s argument on art-horror that a fictional story must create horrified feelings in the audience which will scare them. Gilman does this through her setting of the story. Thus, by using such strange and horrified elements in the story Gilman proves that this was meant to be written like a horror