6 - No Go the Bogeyman and The Leto Bundle

Summary

From the Beast to the Blonde concentrated on female experience, explaining the function of characters by reference to the anxieties of the female teller of the fairy tale. Managing Monsters surveyed representations of both male and female demons, arguing that they equally reflect the ambivalence of contemporary culture. Warner's next non-fictional work is an ambitious volume that seems designed to comprehend and go beyond both those previous works. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), ostensibly a history of the male demon, manages to explore more or less every conceivable aspect of fear, whether evident in song or story, in myth or ritual, in painting or film.

Curiously, however, Warner's ambitiousness of scope seems to sit at odds with her willingness to espouse a thesis that is essentially a confirmation of one particular theorization of fear, namely the psychoanalytic. We have noted how she sought to challenge the Freudian reading of fairy tale by querying its focus on the child and by stressing the domestic context of adult anxiety which lay behind the original narration. She used history to counter the more facile assumptions of psychoanalysis. Here, though, she seems content to elaborate one of the most familiar of Freudian notions, that of projection. Psychoanalysis explains the nature of horror by seeing both individuals and whole communities as projecting their secret fears onto an external figure, which they then demonize. Certainly, this tactic of the psyche makes perfect sense of the ‘bogeyman’. But No Go the Bogeyman is not meant to be read as a straightforward documentation of this process. We might note, for example, that Warner makes it clear in the introduction that she has in mind at least two other authorities besides Freud on the way the human mind treats terror. One is Aristotle, who distinguished between art and life in terms of representation and experience – between, we might say, the safe and the scary. In particular, he argued that tragic drama was an art that allowed its audience to find pleasure – or, more accurately, relief – in witnessing extreme and disturbing events on stage.