Enlightenment that can be based on conceptual considerations rather than

empirical ones. Throughout my discussion so far, I have stressed that the emotion of art-
horror involves a notion of nature that the monster—upon whom the emotion is
focussed—violates. Monsters are supernatural, or, if they are confected out of science
fiction fancy, they at least defy nature as we know it. Horrific monsters, that is, embody
the notion of a violation of nature. But to have a violation of nature, one needs a
conception of nature—one that relegates the beings in question to the realm of the
nonnatural. And, in this respect, one might want to suggest that the Enlightenment
supplied the horror novel with the norm of nature needed to produce the right kind of
monster. That is, where a reader operates with a cosmology in which witches, demons,
werewolves, and spectral forces are part of reality, albeit a fearsome part, the sense of
natural violation that attends art-horror is unavailable. The scientific world view of the
Enlightenment, however, supplies a norm of nature that affords the conceptual space
necessary for the supernatural, even if it also regards that space as one of superstition.
One would not wish to claim that the readers and writers of Gothics specifically and
horror generally were uniformly believers in the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the
Enlightenment perspective on that which scientific reality encompasses and on what
counts as superstitition was widely abroad. Readers and writers at the turn of the
eighteenth century probably did not have a working view of science, nor did they
necessarily accept everything that science proclaimed. However, like readers today, who
are generally not on top of recent scientific breakthroughs, they probably had enough of
a glimmering of that viewpoint to be able to identify, in the extremely broad way that art-
horror assumes, that which science counts as a superstitious belief, especially in terms of
a violation of nature. One hypothesis, then, about the correlation of the Enlightenment
and the emergence of the horror genre is that the genre presupposed something like an
Enlightenment view of scientific reality in order to generate the requisite sense of a
violation of nature. That is, the Enlightenment made available the kind of conception of
nature or the kind of cosmology needed to create a sense of horror. It need not be supposed
that the reading public accepted the totality of Enlightenment science, but only that they
had an operational sense of what that conception regarded as outside the realm of nature.
Nor is it presumed that readers agreed with this viewpoint, but only that for the purposes
of entertaining a fiction, they could recognize and use its perspective on the boundaries
of nature.71 58 / The Nature of Horror Of course, this hypothesis might be susceptible to
the kind of reservations discussed in terms of the return-of-the-Enlightenment’s-repressed
hypothesis. That is, it may be shown that the Enlightenment conception was not as
broadly familiar to the reading public as we assume. My own hunch is that it is not
problematic to believe that the view of nature proselytized by the Enlightenment was
widely known, even if it was not embraced by the majority of the reading public.
However, should this line of conjecture prove historically unsupportable, the upshot for
this theory of the nature of arthorror is not devastating. It would only refute these thoughts
about the origin of the genre of horror in the eighteenth century. It would not contest the
characterization of the nature of that genre.