Fear in a handful of dust: The role of fear and reader reaction in French literature through the nineteenth-century conte fantastique

This dissertation explores the ways in which the provocation of fear in the reader of the chanson de geste, conte folklorique, conte merveilleux, the gothic and the nineteenth-century conte fantastique contributes to the formation of individual and collective identity. I begin with an analysis of the epic, the folkloric and the marvellous. Through close readings of selected texts, I identify the mechanisms by which the provocation of fear encourages characters and readers to act according to the goals and ideals of the collective social group. I argue that in these genres the present-day notion of the individual is indistinguishable from the collective social group, and that the role of fear centres on the textual manipulation of emotion as benefits that collective. Turning to the fantastic, I challenge notions of the fantastic as a subversive genre. Considering the professionalization of medicine and science as well as the development of the concept of human rights, I look at how the French fantastic of the two primary "waves" (1830s and 1880s) focuses on the interior, psychic development of the individual not at the expense of the collective, but as a unit of sociohistoric change. To reveal the therapeutic mechanisms at work in the conte fantastique and the ways in which it anticipates modern-day notions of individuality, I consider the presence of historical cultural trauma in nineteenth-century France. I examine instances of loss in the fantastic, and I demonstrate how fear ushers the main character into the bereavement process. I draw parallels between the fantastic narrative and the process of mourning work outlined by Freud and others as I argue for the fantastic text a potential forum for the mourning work of the nineteenth-century reading population. Through close readings of Gautier and Merimee's fantastic short stories, I show how fear in the first wave provokes what Freud terms 'reality-testing' in the form of libidinal cathexis to an object of desire. Ultimately, the narrator ceases his narcissistic identification with the lost object and assumes a traditional role in society. As a result, he purges his fears. In my analysis of the second wave of the French fantastic, I focus on Maupassant's short stories. I draw on Freud's definition of pathological mourning as well as additional bereavement theories that incorporate the persistence of trauma post-loss. I argue for Maupassant's fantastic narrative as a forerunner of the intake interview common in psychiatric sessions and as an act of what psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer terms 'meaning reconstruction,' or the integration of traumatic events into a personal narrative. I then demonstrate how fear provokes the reconstruction of the narrator's traumatically shattered selfhood while eliciting the crucial participation of the sympathetic reader-as-witness. In conclusion, I argue that not only does the French fantastic of the nineteenth century offer a historic parallel to the mourning process, but that it also anticipates notions of trauma theory, bereavement and the construction of selfhood as we know them today.