Shapes that Haunt the Dusk

Reconstituting alternate psychological states, male hysteria or irrational male behavior as forms of strenuous masculinity was not limited to the literature of psychology The “primitive” self that the subconscious revealed, or was made to reveal, had a broad cultural usefulness, speaking—as physical education and many naturalist novels did—to concerns of over-civilization, the consequences of increased leisure, new forms of labor, heightened consumption in an urban environment and, attendant to all these things, a perceived feminization of men and culture. In this chapter, I discuss the use of new theories of the subconscious and alternate psychological states in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century supernatural fiction. I argue first that the psychological frame around the supernatural experience provided a space for white men to evaluate homosocial bonds and, in some cases, sort through anxiety over romantic attachments. ² In the second half of the chapter, I discuss more specifically how the construction of a primitive subconscious was instrumental in mapping the “other” both in and for white men, establishing a comforting but complicated way for them to enact and, at times, embody different forms of masculinity.