Review of Frazier's "Nightwoods"

What Fear Provokes: Fight or Flight Response

Review of Nightwoods By Charles Frazier

“People start doing all kinds of interesting things when they’re scared” (83).

Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods chronicles the metamorphosis of Luce, an isolated woman who believes that she is contented with a solitary life spent in the nature of the North Carolinian mountains as she is forced to confront her fears head-on when she takes in two children after her sister falls victim to uxoricide. These painfully silent, violently rash children not only interrupt the ebb and flow of Luce’s life alone but their presence embodies something more important. It reconnects Luce with the world around her, pulling her into her dismal familial past, rekindling a lost love, and compelling her to unfreeze herself from her numbing fear. 

Now, briefly, for some science. The "fight or flight response" is a physiological reaction in humans which occurs when the body or mind is put under strain. It is characterized by the release of predominately the hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline, which increase heart and breathing rates and blood pressure and result in the person either fleeing the situation at hand or making a desperate attempt to fight against the forces at hand. It is one of our most primal and essential survival mechanisms and the characters Frazier forms all seem to fit into one of the two categories: fight or flight. 

Exploring the secluded woods near her house, an out-of-use Lodge of olden times, the recluse Luce is confronted with her own staggering fear. Through her isolation further into her own mind, Luce takes the "flight" response, fleeing the world and avoiding her fears. Luce’s fear is largely symbolized by a gaping “black hole” in the woods, that is “before life and beyond life” (Frazier 71). The black hole stands for our inability to fall into our fears, our resistance to understand what seems incomprehensible, and our rash response to the insurmountable hurdle of fear itself.

The victim children and their murderous father both take the “fight” response to deal with their fears. Rather than fall victim to forces greater than themselves, they take on the role of God controlling what burns and what bleeds. The children are fire-obsessed and singe Stubblefield’s family house for entertainment. Bud, the primary antagonist of the work, controls through bloodshed primarily. Quite obviously, fire and blood, respectively, are symbolic of concepts larger than their basic definitions. For Bud, blood is connected to an extremely warped spirituality, formed from a childhood of church-going. Tampering with violence and blood, to Bud, is analogous to confronting God and, even, following God’s example: “If God wanted things to be different, he’d have coated us in armor. Or made us pray to a face pulled apart by pain, screaming. But he wanted us to bleed. The flow of blood, a red bleeding heart. That is beautiful” (246). In blood, according to Bud, lies the root of all human folly: our quivering vulnerability. In Bud's eyes, to determine the fate of blood is to master that vulnerability: to beat your own fear.

The fact is, we can't beat our fears. It's our fears that horrify us, but it's also our fears than define us, demonstrating where proper boundary lines exist and placing us in our proper roles as human-beings. Fear, Frazier posits, must neither be beaten or fled from. No, fear, must be soaked in and then we must become stronger because of it.