Types of fear, ethics and aesthetics of terror, and the politics of emotions in The Album of Female Prisoners by Milutin A. Popovic

Abstract

Eventhough the number of neurosience studies has grown from the late 20th century, the topic of fear in Serbian literature of the second half of the 19th century has rarely been separately researched. For this analisys, the author has chosen an unusual book in which, unlikely to Serbian novels of the time, fear was often described. It is the first book of the stories about Serbian female convicts of the 19th century The Album of the Women?s Ward of Prison in Pozarevac with Statistics (1898) by Milutin A. Popovic. Contrary to some Serbian, Swedish (1861) and American (1886) albuma of the time, Popovic narrated crimes and sometimes wrote confessions derived directly from the female prisoners. The purpose of this paper is to analyse fear, conditioned by time and space, its vocal, facial and body expressions, as well as personal reactions. In this interdisciplanary research the author has integrated perspectives and methods from the Theory of Literature and Affective Narratology, Comparative Literature, History of Serbian Society and Literature, Psychology, Political Psychology, Philosophy and to some extent Linguistics (Cognitive Semantics). It is argued that the author's insistence on truth was the part of terrorethics, of causing fear and shock. It establishes the triumph of truth without beautifying, calling for sensibility, compassion and responsibility, in order to improve society. The results of the investigation show that in Album fear is presented as a complex emotion. It appears as an act of defense, but also as a form of manipulation. Fear is often connected to women and it turned to courage. The fear of death and the fear of a dead human body are the most frequently described fears. The author also described gender-specific fear of pregnancy, abortion, and rape. The Album breaks stereotypes of the past Serbian society and reveals different cases of women?s political resistance and sexual freedom. In the Album, fear is rarely vocally expressed, rather it manifests through different bodily symptoms, their intensity and spectrum. In describing one of the cruelest crimes, the author included humor as a mean of defense and fear control. Emotional geography reveals a paradox: a home is a place of terror and life threat, while a prison emerges as an area of joy and security. Moreover, the book describes two key generators of the politics of emotions. One is made by the systematic violence of a patriarcharchal society toward women, and the other one by inadequate institutions which ignore serious social problems. The language of fear, shock, horror, provocation and perversion and the aesthetics of the genre is interpreted as a part of the author's efforts for readers to feel terror of psycho-physiological mechanisms of pain, and to make new connections with the society and its culture. The creation of a complex and multimedia genre of the album is in accordance with the author's multuple efforts to deconstruct the layers of real life and its different dangers, calling for counteractions, and showing the tragic link between inhumane and unordered society.