Fear, Honour and Shame. Horror Fictions of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The article analyses horror stories and legends about a sausage factories and about a woman who killed her children at her lover's insistence, told in a small Estonian town in the 1950s and 1960s. Presenting one's self and memories is often a strategy for altering data. Certain events or stereotypic stories of fear, dishonouring or shame can be told as first-person narratives on the condition that these do not damage the person's honour. Fear, hon- our and shame are terms openly or implicitly discussed in many forms of verbal art, and are also present in personal narratives. Fear, honour and shame are terms openly or implicitly discussed in many forms of verbal art and can be also met in personal narratives. These same terms are related to stereotypic beliefs and attitudes, some of which we still meet in everyday expres- sions today. Honour and shame, and also fear, are related to un- written and written legal norms in a community, while the first two are simultaneously important bonds linking the individual to the community, shaping his image and thus influencing his career. In the 1990s I became interested in children's horror stories. Some of these stories had left a deep impression on me in my childhood, comparable to the impression their childhood mon- sters had left on the characters of the short story Ghost no. 5. At the time I was interested in the structure and characters of chil- dren's stories, how stable or labile the stories were, but the sto- ries also enchanted me with their playfulness and the profound way in which they differed from adults' horror stories of similar content - though the adults' stories were based on profound be- lief (Koiva 1998, see also Pakalns 1995, 2004). Later, having stud- ied urban legends, personal narratives, memoirs from Soviet Es- tonia, I have come to realise that presenting one's self and memo-