ABSTRACT
Before examining nineteenth-century scientific thought regarding madness and fear, one should scrutinize the concept of horror envisioned by Stephen King in Danse Macabre. This popular contemporary horror writer has formulated a theory which, applied to Edgar Allan Poe's fiction in conjunction with the medical opinions of Benjamin Rush, allows us to understand and appreciate the well-developed fear formula used by Poe in his Gothic fiction. To discover the nature of such fears, one must investigate some nineteenth- century psychological opinions with which Poe was familiar. Rush presents a scientific basis for the theory of fear as anodyne. Such an opinion no doubt strengthened Poe's beliefs relative to the use of fear in his fiction. Poe's use of particular fears in his Gothic tales demonstrates his familiarity with the fears listed by Rush. As an artist conscious of contemporaneous medical opinions, Poe employs the fears present in his reader's mind to produce a popular fiction rooted in aesthetic and scientific theory.
