Unconscious
Bodies in Suspense: How Writers' Words Can Influence the Body
Writers engage readers in ways of which they're unaware.
Updated December 26, 2023 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- Writers create suspense by appealing to sensory systems deep in readers' bodies.
- Readers may not be conscious of all the ways a gripping story affects them.
- Using surface touch to hint at deeper sensations helps readers imagine a tense situation.
Recently, I put my life on pause to read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, whose suspense works as powerfully today as it did in 1938. I hadn’t planned to stop living to read the book, but once I started, the lives of the characters mattered more to me than anything I was doing. If you have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 film version, you may remember this story of a young woman working as a paid companion who marries a little-known man to escape her obnoxious employer. When she moves with him to his Cornwall estate, she finds it haunted by his first wife, Rebecca. The story’s suspense builds as the unnamed protagonist discovers secrets about her dead rival. I have never lived in a British manor house, but I sensed the sounds, sights, and tastes of Manderley more intensely than any stimuli in my own home. How did du Maurier build suspense so keen, it created a compulsion in me to read on? In addressing my imagination, she gave my senses a workout, but she appealed above all to my body.
Our current scheme of five sensory modalities excludes the somatosensory work of proprioception (which detects a body’s positions and movements), temperature and pain detection, and interoception (which monitors bodily organs). These somatosensory systems might be understood as deep layers of touch extending from the skin’s surface to the body’s core. Unless somatosensory reports warn of distress, they don’t usually get much attention. If a writer wants a reader to feel a story, s/he must somehow find words to convey this somatosensory humming, whether or not the characters or readers sense its operation.
My interview-based research for Rethinking Thought revealed how greatly readers vary in their responses to stories. Consciously, readers may experience detailed, mobile visual images or no perceptible imagery at all. Visually detected, words first affect brains, but their influence can extend far beyond readers’ heads.
In a reader’s response, unconscious effects may matter more than those experienced consciously. Interdisciplinary scholar Ellen Esrock has long investigated how fiction engages readers’ bodies even if they don’t consciously imagine a character’s perceptions. Esrock has proposed that “readers might use their own bodily processes—those of the somato-viscero-motor system (SVM) for a non-imitative activity … [which] might make a distinctive contribution to the reading process” (Esrock 2004, 79-80). Based on her recent research, Esrock has developed the concept of transomatization, which describes bodily responses in readers that don't directly correspond to anything characters feel (Esrock 2019, 272-73). Changes in readers' pulse, for example, might convey their sense of "being the scene" rather than "being in the scene" (Esrock 2019, 284). Through transomatization, readers might react to a suspenseful situation through alterations of their breathing even if an author never mentions a character’s breath.
I suspect that is du Maurier’s strategy in Rebecca. She gives readers plenty to see and hear, even smell and taste if their imaginations are so inclined. But to build suspense, she aims at bodily responses of which readers may not be aware. Her story takes place between May and August in a wet, stormy summer. The rain affects the plot in several ways, and the pressure builds with the heat and humidity. Close to the pounding sea, the world du Maurier creates has a dampness one can feel on one’s skin.
In some of the novel’s most suspenseful scenes, du Maurier uses surface touch to elicit bodily responses that go deeper. On one occasion, the protagonist breaches the forbidden wing of the house and is exploring Rebecca’s bedroom. As she handles Rebecca’s most intimate possessions, she and the reader know she may get caught at any moment:
“I got up from the stool and went and touched the dressing-gown on the chair. I picked up the slippers and held them in my hand. I was aware of a growing sense of horror, of horror turning to despair. I touched the quilt on the bed, traced with my fingers the monogram on the nightdress case, R de W, interwoven and interlaced. The letters were corded and strong against the golden satin material. The nightdress was inside the case, thin as gossamer, apricot in color. I touched it, drew it out from the case, put it against my face. It was cold, quite cold. … I noticed with a sick dull aching in my heart that there were creases in the night-dress, the texture was ruffled, it had not been touched or laundered since it was last worn” (du Maurier 187).
As the protagonist gropes her way through Rebecca’s things, Du Maurier refers to “horror,” “despair” and a “sick dull aching in my heart.” She doesn’t say, however, how fast that heart is beating or how quickly the character must be breathing. Instead of telling what is happening in the character’s core, she describes the feel of silk against her skin. The protagonist is about to be busted, and in this context, the soft coolness may have the effect of a snake sliding over one’s skin. Readers who jump when the housekeeper’s step sounds behind the character aren’t imagining her terror. Their bodies are recreating it in ways they may not have realized.
As I learned in my research for Rethinking Thought, we need to be open-minded and cautious in learning how readers respond to literature. Readers come from different cultures and react to stories based on the divergent experiences they have had. If we want to know how human minds and bodies make sense of literature, we need to believe what readers tell us—no matter how radically their reported responses differ from our own or from those we’ve heard described before. Simultaneously, we must bear in mind that readers aren’t conscious of all the ways in which their bodies respond to stories. Above all, we should avoid generalizing, proposing generic readers who respond in particular ways.
As a fiction writer, I know that the joy of creation lies in making something happen in readers, without knowing for sure what that something will be. Du Maurier may have wanted to write a novel no one could stop reading, but probably, she would have been pleased if none of her readers imagined wet Manderley the same way.
References
Du Maurier, D. (2015). Rebecca. London: Virago Press.
Esrock, E J. (2004). “Embodying Literature.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 11, no. 5-6, pp. 79-89.
Esrock, E J. (2019). “Body Forth in Narrative.” In Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, pp. 270-292, edited by Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki. University of Nebraska Press.
