Ching-Jo (Zoe) Lu

Greg McClure

WR 39B

6 February 2018

Rhetorical Analysis in the Horror Genre—The Other Place

According to an American horror fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft, once states in his fiction

The Shunned House, “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.”, the horror

genre consists of irony and contrasts that were not only created for recreation but also for the

emotional repression disguising as normal social standards. Horror fictions and films attract to

audience by spreading them an irony that helps release the devil deep inside. Based on an article,

Why We Are Drawn to True Crime Shows, from TIME, “It [true crimes] allow us to experience

fear and horror in a controlled environment where the threat is exciting but not real” (Bonn). The

irony that people are fearful of real crimes but love being exposed to terror explains why Mary

Gaitskill’s story, The Other Place, connects the readers to the negative personality of the

protagonist. The story, The Other Place, represents an art-horror story by contradictorily

revealing a conflict of a person between the authority of modern social norms and the inner

disobedience, which contrasts the expectation readers deem traditional horror stories.

In the passage of the narrator talking about his background, Gaitskill shows the

contradiction between the nightmare and the reality of the protagonist to appeal readers to the

art-horror genre. In the sentence, “I believe I had a normal childhood. But you have to go pretty

far afield to find something people would call abnormal these days” (Gaitskill), the narrator uses

ironic language displaying a possibly killer with Antisocial Personality Disorder stating that the

public has to reach far enough to find things abnormal. People pay close attention to obvious
unusual scenes, but they cannot see the disguised “abnormal”, especially the speaker who

considers himself normal. Irony is a crucial element in The Other Place for establishing an art-

horror story. In a scholarly essay, The Nature of Horror, written by Noël Carroll, Carroll states,

“An object or being is impure if it is categorical interstitial, categorical contradictory” (Carroll,

55). The monster, who is the protagonist, represents a categorical contradictory being by not

knowing himself is abnormal to the readers. The expectation of readers changes subtly with the

protagonist’s statement since it shows a strong contradiction in this short passage.

Besides the irony between words, the perception and tone used in the passage unveils

another kind of contrast that well presented the horror in the story. In the scene that the speaker

indicates the fights between his mother and father are understandable, his indifferent tone shows

the mixture of his love for his family and his distorted personality toward the women he targets.

The protagonist deems the fights between his parents and the nightmare he has about him being

chased by a murderer as understandable and normal. People’s expectation on fights and

nightmares is unbearable and horrifying, but the narrator once again employs the categorical

contradiction of the public’s actual expectation and the protagonist’s plain tone to provide

readers another art-horror element. According to Magistrale and Morrison, in the book A Dark

Night’s Dreaming, they mention, “The best horror fiction must be viewed as contemporary social

satire that reveals the collective cultural fears and personal anxieties of everyday life”

(Magistrale and Morrison, 3). The collective cultural fear of confronting fights and nightmares of

people successfully relates to the contrast Gaitskill creates. She exposes readers to the disguised

social anxiety. While the protagonist acts like a normal person, under the skin hides the

indiscernible personality that attracts the modern readers.

 In another short passage which the protagonist introduces “the other place” by wandering

in the neighborhood, Gaitskill emphasized on the reaction of realizing the moment of “the other

place”, which brings disjunctive connections to modern art-horror fictions. In the sentence, “A

world where I could sit and feel the power of nature come up through my feet, and be near other

people without them being near me” (Gaitskill), the speaker rationalizes the abnormal late night

wander and persuade himself to normalize the existence of “the other place”. According to

Magistrale and Morrison’s book, A Dark Night’s Dreaming, they state, “The monster represents

some aspect of a repressed self transformed into the Other” (Magistrale and Morrison, 4). ***

Although the speaker has rarer walks during the night and has changed his attention from getting

drunk to feeling the power of nature, at the end of the passage he still watches the girl sleeping

soundly. The negative and positive sides of his action represent his repression of his willingness

of normalizing all abnormal actions so the actions can be seen normal for others, who live in “the

other place”. The struggle of the protagonist causes tension for readers, which Carroll implies in

The Nature of Horror, “Art-horror is an occurrent emotional state; it has both physical and

cognitive dimension” (Carroll, 54). The art-horror in The Other Place creates physical

dimension, such as tension and shuddering by enhancing the protagonist’s self comforting of his

behaviors. The contrast between the speaker’s actions and readers’ anxiety brings the story

perfectly to the art-horror genre.

 Works Cited

Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1924]. "The Shunned House". In S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon

(eds.). More Annotated Lovecraft (1st ed.). New York City, NY: Dell.

Bonn, Scott. “Why We Are Drawn to True Crime Shows”. TIME, January 8, 2016.

Gaitskill, Mary. “The Other Place.” The New Yorker, February 14 & 21, 2011.

Magistrale, Tony and Morrison, Michael A. A Dark Night’s Dreaming. University of South

Carolina Press, March 31, 1996.

Carroll, N. "The Nature of Horror"The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 46, No.1

(Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59