![]() Or rather of perception (Noël Carroll refers to ‘the magnification of entities’ as one key ‘recurring symbolic structure for generating horrific monsters’). ![]() Whether something is monstrous and threatening, or commonplace and harmless, is simply a matter of perspective it seems. While the narrator fears that the sudden vision of a monster is the ‘omen of my death’ or the ‘forerunner of an attack of mania’, his more scientific friend is able to deduce from the detailed description given to him of the fiend, and with the aid of a nearby handbook on Natural History, that the creature is nothing more than a Death’s-Head Hawkmoth ‘of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia, of the order Lepidoptera’, which far from thundering down the far-away hillside, was simply crawling across the surface of the intervening window. This is the scenario of the startlingly contemporary tale of horror, The Sphinx, written by the American author Edgar Allan Poe in 1850. Just as ‘a sentiment of forthcoming evil’ irresistibly seizes the man, the monster’s jaws, situated at the end of a long proboscis like an elephant’s trunk, emit ‘a sound so loud and so expressive of woe’ that he collapses in fright. Hurtling down from the summit is a creature the size of a ship, tusks protruding from a head covered in shaggy hair, with two sets of wings spread over with enormous metal scales, and on its torso the representation of a hideous skull. One day, pausing in his reading to look out of the window at a distant hill whose covering of trees had recently been removed by a landslide, the melancholic suddenly sees something that makes him doubt his sanity: a monster. One is anxiously following the daily news of deaths from the city with ‘abnormal gloom’, his mind grasping at omens the other, a rational type, is aware of the ‘substances of terror’ but ‘of its shadows’ he has ‘no apprehension’. Two men take refuge from an outbreak of cholera in New York in a remote cottage on the banks of the Hudson River. This is the text for a catalogue essay accompanying the forthcoming online exhibition ‘Fascinating Fears’ curated by Kent students taking the undergraduate Art History module Print Collecting and Curating. ![]()
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May 2023
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