1. See the appendix for a listing and classification according to subgenre of the 117 horror texts published between 1963 and 1983 I selected as most telling and central to the family-horror genre. Bibliographical details may be found there. I have included a number of narratives that do not directly revolve around the nuclear family; these focus on pain or are structured in the form of a case study (Judith Rossner's novels most particularly), which are a theme and a form, respectively, crucial to the development of family-horror literature. In following the sometimes eclectic careers of the practitioners of the family-horror genre, in talking to editors at the paperback publishing houses that publish them in quantity (Avon, Dell, NAL, Berkley, Bantam and Pocket), it seems clear that neither the authors nor the publishers precisely distinguish, as I do, the genre of “family horror” from the larger category of the “thriller.” Lawrence Block and Lawrence Sanders, both vastly prolific, have spent most of their time writing detective fiction: Block, 's Ariel (New York: Berkley, 1980)Google Scholar and Sanders, 's The Case of Lucy Bending (New York: Berkley, 1983)Google Scholar, both about disturbed, possessed young girls, are anomalies in their work. Yet the plot ingredients and concerns of these tales are predictable. This is a genre-in-the-making; like much of the most interesting American fiction past and present, it constitutes and continues an underground tradition of sorts.

2. See Douglas, Ann, “Soft Porn Culture,” New Republic, 08 30, 1980, 25–9Google Scholar. For a more sympathetic, balanced view, see McNall, Sally Allen, Who Is in the House: A Psychological Study of Two Centuries of Women's Fiction in America, 1795 to the Present (New York, Elsevier, 1981)Google Scholar and Modleski, Tania, Loving With A Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982)Google Scholar. Statements of symbiotic attachment are a staple in the romances. In Richards, Stephanie's Chesapeake Autumn (New York: New American Library, 1983)Google Scholar, the heroine, after one night of passion with a stranger, knows “she would never belong solely to herself again” (p. 52). She admits she feels as if she had “sold” her soul “to the devil” (p. 77). Her lover insists he can make her “turn any color,” and proves it (p. 90). Despite the efforts of romance publishers to diversify and expand their markets, the pattern of enthrallment or thralldom still dominates the most-successful lines, Harlequin chief among them. (Interviews with Robin Grunder, editor of New American Library's Rapture Romance series, July 12, 1983 and November 30, 1983.)

3. The sense of fatality about the nuclear quality of the modern family, perhaps masking a partially unacceptable choice, is evident in an omnipresent fear of siblings, young and old, expressed in family-horror novels. The members of the sixties generation, usually from families with three or four children, helped put group therapy, political rallies, and open-air concerts on the psychological and collegiate maps. They also discovered the limits of peer control at events like the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert in 1969, the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, and bizarre collective phenomena like Andy Warhol's Factory or Charles Manson's Family. The family-horror narratives make clear that more is involved in the move toward one- or two-children families among today's young adults than the obvious financial imperatives of a recessive economy. The heroine of Jensen, Ruby Jean's Hear the Children Cry (New York: Leisure, 1983)Google Scholar, deciding between two men – one offers her a claustrophobic ready-made nuclear family, the other a congenial extended family – chooses the former.

4. It has been difficult to obtain biographical information about all the family-terror authors listed in the appendix. Stephen King, the “king” indeed of the genre, fits exactly into the category of middle-class, professional, liberal babyboomers I describe. From the information gleaned from reviews, editors, guides to current authors, acknowledgments, and dedications, so do roughly two-thirds of the authors considered here. John Coyne, for example, served in the Peace Corps from 1962–5, and acted as dean of students at State University of New York-Old Westbury before becoming a full-time fiction writer. Andrew Niederman, a strong liberal, teaches high school in Fallsburgh, New York. It seems clear that this genre about baby-boomers is produced by them and by those most interested in their development. Family-horror fiction is a collective autobiography of a generation's psyche in adulthood, as sixties rock was the group memoir of their bodies in music.

5. The clearest example of this acceptable—unacceptable split-identity baby is Andrew in Levin, Ira's Rosemary's Baby (New York: Dell, 1967)Google Scholar. His sire is literally a devil who rapes Rosemary, using the body of her weak, ambitious husband.

6. Sandor Ferenczi is the often-unacknowledged single most important and brilliant source for the current psychoanalytic revision of Freud's “family romance.” See “The Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct,” where Ferenczi breaks with Freud over the seduction theory in Final Contributions to the Problems and Method of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Balint, Michael (N.Y.: Brunner/Mazel, 1955), pp. 102–7Google Scholar. Two other books that are, like The Exorcist (New York: Bantam, 1971)Google Scholar, inverted allegories about the difficulties of child-bearing and -rearing, are Levin, Ira, Rosemary's BabyGoogle Scholar, which focuses on the horror of impregnation and pregnancy, and Vance, Steve's The Hybrid (New York: Tower, 1981)Google Scholar, which depicts the adolescent-as-(literally)-monster.

7. See Freud, Sigmund, “Family Romances,” in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, ed. Rieff, Philip (NY: Collier Books, 1978), pp. 41–6Google Scholar. For a recent discussion of Freud's case studies, see Marcus, Steven, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity (Boston and London: Allen & Unwin, 1984).Google Scholar

8. This assessment of the validity and meaning of a “craft movement” in mass art stems from my extensive research in the primary materials of popular journalistic and visual culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and the post-World War II era. Of particular use in approaching the problem of the relation between mass art and political change were Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217–52Google Scholar; Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Warren Susman's paper on “The Culture of Abundance and the Works of Frank Baum” delivered at Columbia in October, 1983; Michael Denning's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, “Popular Fiction and Working-Class Culture in the Era of the Dime Novel,” (Yale University, 1984), Gilbert Seldes's two books, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957)Google Scholar and The Great Audience (New York: Viking, 1950)Google Scholar, the first a defense of “popular art,” the second an attack on mass culture, are provocative, and also suggested to me that there might be a third position, which Seldes ignored. Leftist popular writers and artists of Seldes's generation defined themselves as “craft” artisans; see Stewart, Donald Ogden, ed. Fighting Words (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940)Google Scholar. Illuminating on “genres” is Cawelti, John's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories on Art and Popular Culture (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar. The single best book on American mass culture is Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978)Google Scholar. Leslie Fiedler's work has been central for twenty-five years to the debate on popular mass culture; see especially Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Delta, 1966)Google Scholar; Freaks: Myths & Images of the Secret Self (New York: Touchstone, 1978)Google Scholar; and What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).Google Scholar

Another quality of modern “craft” art is its practitioners' ability or compulsion to simultaneously cite from, and live in, the worlds of high and low culture. Stephen King quotes Wallace Stevens and popular songs of the fifties; Detective Kinderman in Blatty's Legion ranges in his allusions from Jung to Bogart, engages in unending theological speculation, and eats junk food. By definition, craft art fights the distinction between high and low culture.

9. Even an addicted reader cannot be sure if the threatened and/or threatening child, a figure who is a staple in the genre, will live or die. Four-year-old Tad Trenton dies in King, Stephen's Cujo (New York: New American Library, 1981)Google Scholar; five-year-old Danny Torrance lives in King's The Shining (New York: New American Library, 1977)Google Scholar. In other words, definition of the ending — key to stereotypic formation — is negotiable. Yet it should be stressed this genre is mass-marketed, in supermarkets, stations, and drugstores, side by side with the romances.

10. See particularly Stephen King's intelligent study of his genre, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House, 1981).Google Scholar

11. Writing in her journal about a lost short story called “The Mummy,” Plath asks: “Is it simply feminine frills, is there any terror in it?” See The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Hughes, Ted and McCullough, Frances (New York: Ballantine, 1982), p. 317Google Scholar. Her comment on “Daddy” is quoted in Rosenblatt, Jon, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 124Google Scholar. “Horror” is a word Plath uses repeatedly in her journals. Her statements that the proper subject of poetry includes Hiroshima, Dachau, and “a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark” (v. Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath, pp. 12, 64Google Scholar) – significant parallels – are well known. Plath's desperate attempts to find the right form and tradition for her imagination, her eventual, barely recognized, entire possession of both in Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)Google Scholar and several of the stories in Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts, ed. Hughes, Ted (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)Google Scholar constitute, to my mind, major testimony to both the undefined nature and the central place of the American tradition of family-horror fiction. Plath has found appropriate followers today in family horror: Dunne, H. P.'s Daughter of Darkness (New York: New American Library, 1981)Google Scholar starts with a quote from “Daddy” and the novel is a clear dramatization of Plath's poem.

12. I have juxtaposed several of Hawkes's comments on his own work. See Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–70 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), pp. 203, 204, 206.Google Scholar

13. See Marie Balmary's brilliant study, Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father, trans. Lukecher, Ned (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982)Google Scholar for a discussion of the “faults” of the father and mother.

14. In the post-World War II “beat” and “confessional” authors, children cause acute dis-ease, but they are viewed through an adult's eyes, even as they are depicted watching adults. For examples, see Leon Levinsky's (Allen Ginsberg's) subway encounter with a “hip” child who simply “understand[s],” in Kerouac, Jack, The Town and the City (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1950), pp. 375–9)Google Scholar and Robert Lowell's poem about his infant daughter's almost eerie unawareness of his then-recent bout with insanity, “Home After Three Months Away,” in Life Studies: For the Union Dead (New York: Noonday Press, 1964), pp. 83, 84.Google Scholar

15. Hawkes, John, The Cannibal (New York: New Directions, 1949), p. 195.Google Scholar

16. See the appendix under “Case Studies” for novels dealing with analysis or purportedly factual accounts of a patient's memories in analysis.

17. Freud, Sigmund and Breuer, Joseph, Studies On Hysteria, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Avon, 1966), pp. 55–82.Google Scholar

18. For Emmy von N., see Studies on Hysteria, pp. 83–143Google Scholar. See also Freud, , Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Rieff, Philip (New York: Collier Books, 1969)Google Scholar; Three Case Studies, ed. Rieff, Philip (New York: Collier Books, 1963)Google Scholar; The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, ed. Rieff, Philip (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 47–183.Google Scholar

19. Trilling, Lionel, “Reality in America,” in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (London: Mercury Books, 1950), p. 11.Google Scholar

20. Other analysts in Freud's day and since have seen the “I” as an amalgam of partially socialized selves. See especially Sullivan, Harry Stack, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1940).Google Scholar

21. See Ferenczi, , Final Contributions, pp. 156–67.Google Scholar

22. Freud, unlike his colleagues Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, gave little credit to his patients. An early patient, Elizabeth von R. (Freud, and Breuer, , Studies in Hysteria, pp. 175–223Google Scholar) helped Freud invent the talk therapy of free association, yet Freud does not express his debt to her. For a classic study of psychoanalysis and its indebtedness to its largely female subjects, see Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1970)Google Scholar. For two among many reinterpretations of the evidence Freud's patients placed before him, see Marcus, Steven, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History” in Representations (New York: Random House, 1976)Google Scholar; Ramas, Maria, “Freud's Dora, Dora's Hysteria: The Negation of a Woman's Rebellion,” Feminist Studies 6 (1980), pp. 472–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

23. A component in Freud's break with Ferenczi was Ferenczi's commitment to working with psychotics and children. See Ferenczi, , Final ContributionsGoogle Scholar, passim. For Freud's partial insight into the incomplete nature of his perceptions of female and child patients, see Freud, Sigmund, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,”Google Scholar “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” “Female Sexuality,” in Rieff, Phillip, ed., Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 160–70, 183–211Google Scholar; An Autobiographical Study, trans. Strachey, James: New York: Collier Books, 1952), 67nGoogle Scholar; and his remarks in The Wolfman, ed. Gardiner, Muriel (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 244–5Google Scholar. For Freud and feminism, see Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1975).Google Scholar

24. Particularly fine examples of this consolation genre are Bellow, Saul's Henderson the Rain King (New York: Viking Press, 1958)Google Scholar and Herzog (New York: Fawcett, 1961)Google Scholar. Without disparaging the works of this genre, I find them less interesting and innovative than the works of the beat, confessional, neoterror (Hawkes, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, et al.) and avant garde schools (Pynchon, Nabokov, Ellison, Gaddis, et al.).

25. See “Dante's Letter to Cam Grande,” trans. Howe, Nancy, in Essays on Dante, ed. Musa, Mark (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1964), pp. 32–47Google Scholar. The finest, if controversial, study of medieval allegory remains D. W. Roberton Jr.'s monumental A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Fletcher, Angus's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (London and Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964)Google Scholar is indispensable.

26. Bloomfield made this observation to the author in a tutorial session in the fall of 1966.

27. In Shirley, John's Cellars (New York: Avon, 1982)Google Scholar the chief character, Lanyard, notes: “You're driving down a highway and the highway's horizontal plane becomes vertical in your mind's eye so that you feel … you are no longer driving cross-country, but pitching headlong into a … shaft” (p. 136). I cannot sufficiently stress that all the literary terms, even much of the imagery I use in this paper, is common currency in the texts themselves.

28. Hersey, John, Hiroshima (New York: Bantam, 1948), pp. 115–16.Google Scholar

29. Lifton, Robert Jay, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1979), p. 169.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 136.

31. The secularizing society is the subject of Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar. Terrible Honesty: Secular Culture in New York City 1915–1935 and Clytemnestra Kills Again, two books on which I am currently working, deal with secular and postsecular culture respectively. I project a fourth, Victorian Sainthood, on Lincoln, Whitman, Thoreau and Dickinson as studies in a religious [sub]culture.

32. This biblical book, which obsessed Charles Manson [v. Vincent Bugliosi with Gentry, Curt, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (New York: Bantam: 1975)Google Scholar], preoccupies the authors of family-horror fiction. See particularly Johnstone, William, The Nursery (New York: Zebra, 1983)Google Scholar and A Crying Shame (New York: Zebra, 1983).Google Scholar

33. Quoted in Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Oxford History of the American People, vol. 3, 1869–1963 (New York: New American Library, 1972), p. 409.Google Scholar

34. For other examples of this belated craving for a child, see West, Owen, The Mask, (New York: Jove, 1981)Google Scholar, Vance, Steve, The HybridGoogle Scholar, Christmas, Joyce, Blood Child (New York: New American Library, 1982)Google Scholar, Hanner, Mary, Premature (New York: New American Library, 1981)Google Scholar, Coburn, Andrew, The Babysitter (New York: Pocket, 1979)Google Scholar, and Miller, JudiHush Little Baby (New York: Pocket, 1983).Google Scholar

35. Abortion versus right-to-life is an obsessive concern in these books; rightto-life officially wins. See Altman, Thomas, The True Bride (New York: Bantam, 1983)Google Scholar, and Shobin, David, The Unborn (New York: Bantam, 1982)Google Scholar for examples of the conflict. For nonfictive discussion of feminine ambivalence about abortion in the baby-boomer's generation, see Grossman, Atina, “Reproductive Rights in Historical Perspective,” Carasa News 5, no. 3 (04 1981)Google Scholar, and Petchesky, Ros, “Abortion and the Antifeminine Hysteria,” Carasa News 5, no. 2 (03 1981)Google Scholar. See also Willis, Ellen, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), pp. 205–27Google Scholar; Rich, Adrienne, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976)Google Scholar. For the most compelling and troubling arguments on the prolife side, see Hilger, Thomas W. and Horan, Dennis J., Abortion and Social Justice (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972).Google Scholar

36. See “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, 12 21, 1929, 17.Google Scholar

37. Skinner, B. F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 205Google Scholar. See also Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1976)Google Scholar for Skinner's most forceful and influential formulation of his views.

38. The finest of the horror novels that focuses on a Skinnerian experiment is Niederman, Andrew's Brainchild (New York: Pocket, 1982).Google Scholar

39. In Vance, Steve's The HybridGoogle Scholar, a mother does not want to give up her adopted son, Terry, although he is a homicidal member of a nonhuman species bent on destroying mankind. The father is forced to kill him and suffers from acute guilt. King, Stephen's latest novel, Pet Semetary (New York: Doubleday, 1983)Google Scholar, is a study in the ambivalence of wanting, or “wishing” (a word King uses here repeatedly) for, a child. Louis Creed, in his late thirties, a doctor with a wife and two small children, loses his son Gage; he can bring Gage back to life, but only as one of the “undead,” noxious at several levels. An adherent to desire, Creed – his name is a giveaway – does so, arguing that the reborn Gage will be like a Down's syndrome baby; that to consent to Gage's death is to assent to “Divine Abortion” (p. 260). He must finally kill the monster Gage has become. The ambivalences are clear here. How unfair to want and love a child if one can't guarantee the child's continued and healthy life. How impossible not to wish the child dead if he is radically defective. Given Creed's powers (to raise the dead as undead), all options are sharply delimited and unworkable. He can accept neither the life nor death of his son; his “wish” controls little and omits from consideration more.

40. Man's search for meaningful objects of hope and fear preoccupies Jung, Carl in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. Dell, W. S. and Baynes, Cary F. (London: Routledge, 1961)Google Scholar, and Frankl, Viktor in The Doctor & The Soul: from Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, trans. Richard, and Winston, Clare (New York: Vintage, 1955).Google Scholar

41. For examples of disastrous moves, see under “Possessed Small Towns” in the appendix. The new rural community usually harbors a coven anxious for fresh young blood.

42. See particularly Rhodes, Russell' Tricycle (New York: Pocket, 1983)Google Scholar, and King, Stephen's Carrie (New York: New American Library, 1974)Google Scholar and Firestarter (New York: New American Library, 1981).Google Scholar

43. Randall, Bob's The Calling (New York: Jove, 1981) p. 133Google Scholar. Alcohol and valium are the downers of choice for parents in this genre.

44. “Babies Satisfactorily Born” were the code words devised to tell Truman that the first atom bomb had been successfully tested on July 16, 1945. See Schell, Jonathan's fine if tendentious The Fate of The Earth (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 47.Google Scholar

45. For other family-terror novels focusing on this theme, see Saul, John, The God Project (Dell, 1982)Google Scholar and Johnstone, William, The NurseryGoogle Scholar. For novels in which (the sacrifice of) a child and (averting) nuclear war are strangely equated, see Conde, Nicholas, The Religion (New York: New American Library, 1982)Google Scholar and King, Stephen, The Stand (New York: New American Library, 1978).Google Scholar

46. For recent work on the plight of the baby-boomers' children and the sources of parental guilt, see Abrahams, Sally, Children in the Crossfire (New York: Atheneum, 1983)Google Scholar; Francke, Linda Bird, Growing Up Divorced (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983)Google Scholar; Gelles, Richard J., “Child Abuse as Psychopathology: A Sociological Critique and Reformulation,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 43 (07 1978), 611–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inglis, Ruth, Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Physical and Emotional Abuse of Children (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Packard, Vance, Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1983)Google Scholar; Prescott, Peter S., The Child Savers: Juvenile Justice Observed (New York: Knopf, 1981)Google Scholar; Schrag, Peter and Divoky, Diane, The Myth of the Hyperactive Child (New York: Pantheon, 1975)Google Scholar; Straus, Murray A., Geller, Richard J., and Steinmetz, Suzanne K., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980)Google Scholar; Winn, Marie, Children Without Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 1983)Google Scholar. For troubled fictive explorations of “tough love,” a major theme of this genre, see particularly Holmes, Beth, The Whipping Boy (New York: Jove, 1978)Google Scholar and Johnstone, William, The Nursery.Google Scholar

47. To my mind, the most frightening product of the “third stage” feminism is the much-praised McMillan, Carol, Women, Reason and Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).Google Scholar

48. For a brilliant discussion of this phenomenon, see Ehrenreich, Barbara, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and The Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1983).Google Scholar

49. For absentee fathers, see Blatty, Peter, The ExorcistGoogle Scholar and Rickett, Frances, Stalked (New York: Avon, 1983)Google Scholar; for abusive fathers, see Holmes, Beth, The Whipping Boy (New York: Jove, 1978)Google Scholar, Saul, John, Comes the Blind Fury (New York: Dell, 1980)Google Scholar, King, Stephen, The ShiningGoogle Scholar, Lewis, S., Buried Blossoms (New York: Jove, 1982)Google Scholar, Andrews, V. C., My Sweet Audrina (New York: Pocket, 1982).Google Scholar

50. For a fine study on psychoanalysis and Greek myth, see Simon, Bennett, M.D., Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

51. Freud, , The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, p. 135.Google Scholar

52. For an intelligent discussion of this subject and of relevant scholarship, see Sheleff, Leon Shaskolsky, Generations Apart: Adult Hostility to Youth (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981)Google Scholar, and Balmary, , Psychoanalyzing PsychoanalysisGoogle Scholar. It should be remembered that the baby-boomers passed their youth under the presidencies of two men who were clearly unwitting exempla of the Laius complex: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Interestingly, both men bore no sons; their filiophilia and filiophobia inevitably were in large measure displaced to the rebellious young of the nation they purported to head. For analytic insight into the two men, see Kearns, Doris, Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream (New York: New American Library, 1976)Google Scholar; Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar; and Wills, Gary, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (New York: Mentor, 1971).Google Scholar

53. Kojak is specifically referred to in most of the books listed in the appendix under “Sacrificed Child.” See also Miller, Judi, Save the Last Dance for Me (New York: Pocket, 1981), p. 77Google Scholar, and Dunne, H. P., Daughter of Darkness, p. 73.Google Scholar

54. See Ken Auletta's important book, The Underclass (New York: Vintage, 1983)Google Scholar, crucial to understanding the sense of the crumbling, violent city-in-decay omnipresent in this fiction: a deteriorating, closing, frightening world to its middle-aged former devotees.

55. Lewis, Tom, Rooftops (New York: New American Library, 1981), p. 4.Google Scholar

56. Shirley, John, Cellars, p. 205.Google Scholar

57. See Sullivan, , Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, 79ffGoogle Scholar.; see also Block, Dorothy, “So the Witch Won't Eat Me”: Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978)Google Scholar, passim; Mahler, Margaret, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation: Infantile Psychosis (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1968)Google Scholar, passim; Klein, Melanie, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: Delta, 1977), passim.Google Scholar

58. See Freud, , Dora, pp. 34, 35.Google Scholar

59. I am using the Greek myths for the reasons that Freud did. “The instincts are our myths,” he said (see Foucault, Michel, Mental Illness and Psychology [New York: Harper, 1963], p. 82)Google Scholar; Jung, wrote “Myths are the earliest form of science” [Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Jaffe, Amela, trans. Richard, and Winston, Clara [New York: Vintage, 1965], p. 304)Google Scholar. Chesler, Phyllis, in Women and Madness (New York: Avon, 1971)Google Scholar, says “mythology may be viewed as the psychology of modern history” (p. 25). I too am proceeding on the premise that the Greek myths are dramatizations of the psyche's secrets, constellations of emotion so powerful and true that they can be used to explain, even predict, other phenomena. For a recent intelligent overview of women in Greek life and art, and scholarship on the subject, see Foley, Helene P., “The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama,” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Foley, Helene P. (New York: 1981)Google Scholar. My discussion of the Greek plays does not consider the important distinctions between the characters as they change in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. I am interested precisely in the palimpsest, the archcharacter of the three heroines I discuss here, drawn from all available Greek sources. Controversial but germane to my interpretation is Slater, Philip E.'s The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon, 1968).Google Scholar

60. Aeschylus, , Oresteia, trans. Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1933), p. 86Google Scholar. I have drawn my portraits of Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Medea, Ion, Iphigenia, Electra, and Orestes from the following plays: Aeschylus, , OresteiaGoogle Scholar, Sophocles, , Oedipus the King, Oedipus at ColonusGoogle Scholar, in Sophocles I, eds. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago, 1954)Google Scholar; Sophocles, , Electra and Other Plays, trans. Watling, E. F. (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1953)Google Scholar; Euripides, Medea, in Three Great Plays of Euripides, trans. Warner, Rex (New York: Mentor, 1958)Google Scholar; Euripides, Ion and The Women of Troy, in The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Vellacot, Philip (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1954)Google Scholar; Euripides, Electra and The Phoenician Women in Euripides V, eds. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Euripides, Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis, in Euripides IV, eds. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).Google Scholar

61. Blatty is drawn to the metaphor of guilt as hemophilia; see Blatty, Peter, Legion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 44.Google Scholar

62. Popular and high cultures' ongoing linkage of female Greek characters with current figures is marked. Rossner, Judith's Emmaline (New York: Pocket, 1980)Google Scholar can be read as the Oedipal story from Jocasta's viewpoint. The affinities between the Clytemnestra story and Crawford, Christina's Mommie Dearest (New York: Berkley, 1982)Google Scholar, a study of Joan Crawford's pathology, are evident. The movie version, directed by Frank Perry in 1981, unwittingly brings the two bodies of material closer. Faye Dunaway as Crawford, hacking down her garden in rage at her Agamemnonlike boss, commands her children, in an echo of Clytemnestra's greatest line, “Bring me an axe!” Dunaway, interviewed about the part, spoke of the “horrendous scenes in every family, when you have the blood feeling … it's where all that Greek stuff comes from — that unspeakable torment” (New York Times, 09 13, 1981Google Scholar, Arts and Leisure section, p. 27). Andrews, V. C.'s best-selling trilogy, Flowers in the Attic (New York: Pocket, 1979)Google Scholar, Petals on the Wind (New York: Pocket, 1980)Google Scholar, If There Be Thorns (New York: Pocket, 1981)Google Scholar, is another reworking of the Atreus material. The kidnapped girl in Judi Miller's Save the Last Waltz For Me dances the role of Iphigenia. Such examples could be multiplied. The House of Atreus, fraught with protofeminist dramas, child abuse, and a sense of bellicose passivity before historical crisis, may be more useful in understanding current culture than the House of Thebes.

63. This phrase, crucial to third-stage feminism, turns up constantly in television soap operas and the pop sociology of women's magazines. See Vogue's symposium on “Career vs. Family” (06 1981), pp. 184 ff.Google Scholar

64. Here the terror heroine is closest to Pynchon's Oedipa Maas, the Oedipus of modern American literature, who understands the perhaps self-cancelling nature of the “work” involved in “sorting” the details of the male plot (The Crying of Lot 49 [New York: Bantam, 1966], pp. 76–9Google Scholar), and tries in vain to perform the task. The idea of motives in search of a psyche, or, in Blatty's phrase, “a thought in search of its maker” (Legion, p. 13Google Scholar), is often explicit in these texts.

65. Outside of the “supernatural birth” subgenre (see appendix), family-horror fiction has, since its inception in the late sixties, become less supernatural, more frankly [post]psychological. Contrast The Exorcist with its superb sequel, Legion: Blatty has moved demonic possession to the wings.

66. For a discussion of psychotic memory in children, see Mahler, , On Human Symbiosis, pp. 83, 92, 104, 105, 108Google Scholar. Its essential characteristic is that it functions in place of an ongoing continuous sense of reality: pictures saved from, and distorted by, an earthquake.

67. In Dora, Dora repeats her governess' words: “She could not bear living like that anymore” (p. 127). Dora herself writes: “She could no longer endure her life” (p. 38). The Wolfman's mother stated “I can't go on living like this anymore” (The Wolfman by the Wolfman, ed. Gardiner, Muriel [New York: Basic Books, 1971], p. 265Google Scholar). Freud did not pick up on the note of desperate stoicism in these women's comments or consider their effect on their charges and children. In a sense, these women already sound like incarcerated, mentally ill patients, embarked on what Phylis Chesler would call their hopeless “careers” as analysands in an “interminable” process (Chesler, , Women and Madness, p. xxiiGoogle Scholar). Nina Auerbach has written perceptively, if in a misleadingly romanticized vein, about woman's power as professional patient, subject, and victim, in Women and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For a study of a real-life woman inpatient (a baby-boomer), see Sheehan, Susan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? (New York: Vintage, 1983)Google Scholar. This book has been central to my own thinking about current fascination with incarceration, claustrophobia, and “right-to-life” attitudes. Freud interpreted children's inquiries about their origins as curiosity about the sexual activity that produced them. In reading the evidence of Little Hans in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, this modern reader feels Hans is at least as anxious to learn whether he is wanted in a world that can be comprehensible to him, as he is interested in sexuality. Children in family-horror literature, like Jill Whitney in Stalked, voice their anger unmistakably at being unplanned and unwanted. Freud perhaps saw his patients as more devious than they were. Possibly he underestimated what I call their truth instinct in order to highlight his own — a character trait he valued above all others in himself. I am sometimes amazed at the complexities of interpretation Freud brought to the evidence he reports, “secrets” that seem buried in transparent ground.

68. King, Stephen's The ShiningGoogle Scholar dramatizes this role division. The father, Jack Torrance, a failed teacher and author, attempts in vain to write a book; fiveyear-old Danny, one of the kindest of the uncanny children in family-horror fiction, reads his parents' minds and communicates with supernatural forces through nonverbal means; he is frustrated by his inability to help, his involuntary worsening of the little family's desperate situation. He equates his failure with his illiteracy: “I don't understand things! … I do but I don't!… I don't know what I'm feeling! … I wish I could read” (p. 85). Wendy Torrance, the mother, is a battleground for the projected impulses of father, son, and the haunted hotel they are tending. King plays often with the meanings of children's illiteracy. Danny is obsessed with the word REDRUM, unaware that it is the word murder spelled backwards. In Cujo, four-year-old Tad wants his father, Vic Trenton, to print out the “monster words” that should (and don't) keep malign beasts at bay; Vic writes slogans for advertising. In Pet Semetary, much is made of five-year-old Ellie's first day at school. After her little brother's death, she uses magical play with totemic objects to “wish” him back to life (p. 223).

69. Gardiner, , The Wolf-Man, p. 148Google Scholar. On the idea of “motherhood” see Dally, Ann, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken, 1982).Google Scholar

70. This is a word Orestes uses about himself after killing Clytemnestra; “I have been beaten and been taught” (Aeschylus, , Oresteia, p. 145Google Scholar). This line, and Orestes's whole demeanor at this juncture in The Eumenides, suggests Freud's “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Rieff, , Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (pp. 107–32)Google Scholar, and carries a quality of what Julia Kristeva calls the “abject.” See Powers of Horror: A Study in Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982)Google Scholar, a seminal work for understanding the nature of modern terror.

71. Ferenczi, , Final Contributions, p. 82Google Scholar. For the two best studies on children in literature, see Coveney, Peter, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1957)Google Scholar and Kuhn, Reinhard, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1982)Google Scholar. See also Fiedler, Leslie, Collected Essays, I (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 471–511.Google Scholar

72. For striking examples, see Greenhall, Ken, ChildgraveGoogle Scholar, Johnstone, William, The NurseryGoogle Scholar, and Saul, John, Punish the Sinners (New York: Dell, 1978).Google Scholar

73. See Blatty, , Legion, p. 212.Google Scholar

74. See Freud, , “The Uncanny,” in On Creativity and the Unconscious, pp. 122–61Google Scholar. Kristeva, , Powers of HorrorGoogle Scholar, passim, is illuminating on panic and the uncanny.

75. Psychoanalysis cannot help Regan in The Exorcist. The sinister, depraved husband-father, Evan Desmond, of Trachtman, Paula's Disturb Not the Dream (New York: Ballontine, 1981)Google Scholar, underwent analysis at Freud's hands: he considers Freud an “asshole” and believes the history of child abuse in his family was more than a “middle-class Jew” like Freud could possibly “believe” as “reality” (p. 11). Desmond is directly attacking Freud's disavowal of the seduction theory.

76. Rank, Otto, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Tucker, Harry (New York: Meridian, 1979)Google Scholar. Sylvia Plath did her honors thesis on the double in Dostoyevsky at Smith; she did much research in psychoanalytic theory. See Butscher, , Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: Pocket, 1976), p. 165.Google Scholar

77. A small boy, a patient of Dr. Bloch's, inquired if “midgets” had to “go to war”; see Bloch, , So the Witch Won't Eat Me, p. 61.Google Scholar

78. Eulo, Ken, The Bloodstone (New York: Pocket, 1981), p. 310Google Scholar. I would suggest that Eliot's line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with its connotations of passivity, abjection, and anesthetization, is one of the most-resonant lines in modern literature. See Auerbach, , Woman and the DemonGoogle Scholar, passim. See the cover picture for Shobin, David, The Seeding (New York: Bantam, 1984)Google Scholar, which looks like an illustration of Eliot's phrase.

79. See Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage, 1979)Google Scholar; The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1975)Google Scholar. These two works are crucial to this-essay.

80. In a dramatic moment in Friedkin's film The Exorcist, the plea “HELP ME” appears spontaneously in raised letters on Regan's chest from her tormented flesh.

81. Blatty, , Legion, p. 169.Google Scholar