Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke

Bourke begins her cultural history of fear with death-related anxieties in the 19th century, when the terrors of being mistakenly buried alive caused one woman to include in her will the stipulation that her throat was to be cut before she was buried. Bourke ends the book by pointing out that at the start of the 21st century we have circled back to our current but essentially similar fear of being officiously kept alive by technology. We may also have exchanged the terror of Hell for the terror of pain, and shifted our search for palliatives from the clergy to the medical profession, but the change is more of emphasis, not of the nature of the fear.

In between those two disturbing visions of states of death, Bourke takes a roughly chronological approach as she examines instances of fear that range from childhood terrors, nightmares and phobias, through the public panics engendered by the broadcast of Orson Welles’s radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds and real-life threats of theatres burning or bombs falling. She considers the terrors of hand-to-hand combat during the two World Wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. On a different level of social unease Bourke examines the fear of strangers which takes the form of moral panics against immigrants and sexual predators, before coming to the current alarm about worldwide terrorism. But for all the copiousness of her research, the nature and meaning of fear in history and culture remains elusive.

Fear is as close and personal to each of us as life. Life and fear are inextricable. Gifted as we are with a capacity to reason and an imagination, we are doomed to fear what must happen, what might happen and what cannot happen. A historian writing a history of fear has got, at the very least, an organisational problem: where to start, how to define, what to leave out. A single volume is likely to be no more than a broad survey, and this book, with its anecdotal chapters alternating with indecisive methodological afterwords, does not overcome its limitations.

To call the book a cultural history raises the question: is fear socially constructed through time or is it innate? Well both, of course. The heart pumps, adrenalin floods the body, fear demands fight or flight. We would hardly have got beyond the savannahs without fear. But then human culture finds all sorts of uses for it, always building on and adapting what went before. Bourke’s cultural history is confined to examples of fearfulness in Britain and America from the mid-19th-century to the present day. What of fear in classical times, in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment? And what might be the legacy of past fears on present ones?

Nor are cultural productions given the necessary space that a real cultural understanding of fear would require. She decides, Bourke tells us in the introduction, largely to eschew the expression and elicitation of fear in novels, cinema and extreme sports. Nor do folk stories, song or drama get a look-in. And Freud gets short shrift, though his work on the subject, like it or not, is now central to our understanding of the nature of fear. Although there is a Foucauldian glimmer in her final analysis of the role of power relations in the creation and sustaining of public fear, it is not enough to make the book seem to be addressing more than a mere sliver of a subject which, when it isn’t overwhelming us, keeps us so preoccupied.