I don't quite see why Madame Bovary is a horror story. It's a horrible story, and it's a horrifying story--and it's certainly a cautionary tale, as many horror stories are. But if you call it a horror story, I think you've diluted the horror genre to the point where the term becomes meaningless.
There are two different tacks I can take in answering your question--which, I should add, I think is a completely fair question and one worth asking. One would be to pursue my dissertation (http://www.sarahmonette.com/dis-pref.html), which argues that Renaissance tragedy is the precursor of modern horror. But I don't think that line of argument is particularly useful in this instance; I mention it mostly to reassure you that I have actually thought about horror as a genre and the issues involved. The other would be to cite John Clute's The Darkening Garden, which crystallized the genre for me beautifully: Clute says that what characterizes horror is the a priori given that the world as we know it is a lie. Horror stories are about the process of uncovering the lie. (In these terms, Madame Bovary is not a horror story because we as readers know all along that Emma Bovary is self-deluding. There's no revelation for us, only watching her stupid, pointless tragedy unfold. But Flannery O'Connor writes horror, because her stories rip away our protective belief in the decency of human beings.) So horror, as a genre, rather than being defined by the presence or absence of elements contrary to consensus reality, is defined by this process of revelation, what I suppose, paralleling Tolkien's eucatastrophe, we might call dys-epiphany. But because horror always leads to the dys-epiphany, it also has a natural affinity for the fantastic, because what horror says, over and over again, is in essence, "The monsters they told you were make-believe are real."
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2009-03-13 06:45 pm (UTC)There are two different tacks I can take in answering your question--which, I should add, I think is a completely fair question and one worth asking. One would be to pursue my dissertation (http://www.sarahmonette.com/dis-pref.html), which argues that Renaissance tragedy is the precursor of modern horror. But I don't think that line of argument is particularly useful in this instance; I mention it mostly to reassure you that I have actually thought about horror as a genre and the issues involved. The other would be to cite John Clute's The Darkening Garden, which crystallized the genre for me beautifully: Clute says that what characterizes horror is the a priori given that the world as we know it is a lie. Horror stories are about the process of uncovering the lie. (In these terms, Madame Bovary is not a horror story because we as readers know all along that Emma Bovary is self-deluding. There's no revelation for us, only watching her stupid, pointless tragedy unfold. But Flannery O'Connor writes horror, because her stories rip away our protective belief in the decency of human beings.) So horror, as a genre, rather than being defined by the presence or absence of elements contrary to consensus reality, is defined by this process of revelation, what I suppose, paralleling Tolkien's eucatastrophe, we might call dys-epiphany. But because horror always leads to the dys-epiphany, it also has a natural affinity for the fantastic, because what horror says, over and over again, is in essence, "The monsters they told you were make-believe are real."