Gothic Tales Read online

  Gaskell’s comments suggest, then, that her own split between successful woman writer and committed mother, wife and community provider must have been a constant source of tension and anxiety for her, as it doubtless was for so many other women writers of the nineteenth century. Thus the theme of the Gothic doubling of female identity which recurs so often in Gaskell’s fiction – most strikingly represented in ‘The Poor Clare’ – could be seen to have its source in Gaskell’s own compartmentalized life. Indeed, in yet another letter to Eliza Fox, written in 1850, Gaskell bemoans her multiplicity of selves – Christian, wife, mother and lover of ‘beauty and convenience’ – and cries, ‘How am I to reconcile all these warring members?’9 For Gaskell, at least in these letters, a plurality of identities proves to be neither liberating nor productive, but rather fragmenting and disabling.

  Another primary tension in Gaskell’s Gothic stories is the way in which they problematize the distinction between history and literature, fact and fiction. One of her early pieces written for Dickens’s magazine was actually not a story at all but an article entitled ‘Disappearances’, a series of anecdotes about people who have vanished under mysterious circumstances. Gaskell’s interest in this phenomenon was prompted, some suspect, by her distress at the disappearance at sea of her brother, John Stevenson, on his way to India.10 ‘Disappearances’ is an odd mix of gossip, rumour, local legend and apparent fact, written partly as a response to Dickens’s articles on detectives and policework. In fact, it opens with a reference to William Godwin’s Gothic tale of disguise and detection, Caleb Williams (1794); ‘Disappearances’ thus stakes its claim to truth by virtue of its distance from Godwin’s fictional account of persecution, though the subtitle ‘Things as They Are’ indicates Godwin’s serious political intentions. However, Gaskell’s utilization of gossip and rumour as the ‘factual’ sources of her text undermines her authoritative stance by the very nature of the source material.11

  One of these stories, told to her when she was a young girl, is about a paralysed man who apparently vanished one day while sitting outside in his chair as ‘all the village turned out to the hay-fields’. This story id="page_xv" has been traced to an event in 1768, involving one Owen Parfitt, by William Maskell in his book Odds and Ends. Maskell irritably argues, however, that Gaskell’s version is ‘distorted and untrue, but apparently resting on the most trustworthy proof of actual knowledge of particular details’.12 Maskell suggests that the source of Gaskell’s story was Dr Samuel Butler, the Bishop of Lichfield, whose position as headmaster of Shrewsbury School was taken over by Maskell’s father. In Butler’s account, the disappearance takes place in Shropshire, rather than Somerset, one of the discrepancies which leads Maskell to conclude that Gaskell took inappropriate authorial liberties with refashioning the story.13

  Gaskell borrows from history again in the second sketch in ‘Disappearances’, where she retells the story of a rent-collection agent who was apparently murdered when he stopped at an inn while carrying the money from the tenants. Years later the innkeeper who had stabbed him confessed on his deathbed, and the police were able to locate the body based on his information. Gaskell’s friend Henry Green confirms the factual basis of her story (with a few incidental differences), locating its source in the grim history of Knutsford, the town where Gaskell grew up.14

  Sometimes Gaskell’s interest in local legend led her into trouble, however, as in the penultimate story in ‘Disappearances’, involving a physician’s apprentice who was out dispensing medicine one night then mysteriously disappeared, rumoured to have been carried off by the infamous Burke and Hare for the purposes of dissection. Gaskell’s macabre speculations provoked an angry response published in Household Words a fortnight later, and another eight months after that; the second article in ‘Chips’ confirms that the youth had actually not disappeared at all, but had enlisted in the East India Company, in whose service he had, unfortunately, died of cholera.15 They also vindicate the family of John Gaunt who, thanks to Gaskell’s article, had been assumed by his neighbours to have murdered the unfortunate youth. The responses were followed seven years later by a third, even more damning, entitled ‘Character-Murder’; this notice brings up the story again with the news that some bones had recently been found which were rumoured to belong to the unfortunate medical student, and goes on to castigate those scandal-mongers in general who persist in defaming the Gaunt family, and Gaskell’s article in particular, by which means the story ‘lived and spread, and even found its way into our pages’.16 ‘Character-Murder’ so enraged Gaskell that she considered refusing to write any more stories for Household Words.17 Thus her playful transgression of the boundaries between fiction and fact proved to have consequences which went far beyond her authorial control.

  Further evidence of Gaskell’s overlap of the lines separating fiction and history can be seen in ‘The Squire’s Story’, a light-hearted retelling of the Knutsford local legend of the gentleman housebreaker Edward Higgins in the eighteenth century.18 Apparently, the real-life Higgins’s house stands next to the house where Gaskell lived with her aunt prior to her marriage.19 In this story, then, fact and fiction are as closely aligned as the homes of the author and the housebreaker.

  But perhaps the most blatant example of Gaskell’s ‘borrowings’ (or even plagiarism) is discovered in her fictionalized account of the witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, in which nineteen people were executed as condemned witches. ‘Lois the Witch’ is about a young English woman who leaves her native town of Barford, in Warwickshire (where Gaskell herself went to school), to travel to New England, a religious and psychological journey as well as a geographical one. Gaskell based her story on the persecution of a New England woman, Rebecca Nurse, whose accusation, trial and death are described in Lectures on Witchcraft, an analysis of the Salem witch trials written by Charles Upham, the Unitarian minister in Salem in the 1830s.20 What especially challenges the authenticity of the narrator and of the text itself is Gaskell’s decision to insert in her story, word for word, the statement of the Salem jurors who made a public declaration of their guilt and remorse for their complicity in persecuting over seventy-five people, as well as two dogs, on the charges of witchcraft.21

  One other story in this collection, ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, also takes history as its point of departure: the story begins with the narrator’s claim that ‘I have always been much interested by the traditions which are scattered up and down North Wales relating to id="page_xvii" Owen Glendower… I fully enter into the feeling which makes the Welsh peasant still look upon him as the hero of his country.’ Yet Gaskell’s appeal to the historical figure of Glendower is immediately compromised by the narrator’s recognition of the oral traditions which proliferated around the popular hero; for these, like Gaskell’s own texts, have an inevitable tendency to embellish and ‘improve’ upon historical fact. Thus, although Gaskell’s short story makes repeated claims to geographical and cultural accuracy,22 the plot itself is sensationalized, recounting the story of the descendants of Rhys ap Gryfydd, the man reputed to have attempted to assassinate Glendower.23 The family is then cursed by Glendower, who vows that in its ninth generation, ‘the last male of thy race shall avenge me. The son shall slay the father.’ Gaskell’s main source of inspiration, then, seems to be Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, more than it does a factual account of the descendants of a Welsh hero. Indeed, the young Owen of the ninth generation, sitting in moody isolation and feeling alienated by the arrival of a beautiful, though malicious, stepmother, opens a book by chance at Sophocles’ very play, the plot of which he must, inevitably, reproduce in his own life. Thus Gaskell utilizes one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse and condemn future generations.24 The idea of ancient themes being repeated in the present is explicit both in Gaskell’s reference to ancient Greek drama, and in the repetition of sin in the life of her fictional character, Owen.

  The story ‘Curious, if True’
further implicates Gaskell’s sly inter-textual devices. This gently comic story rewrites the popular fairy-tales nineteenth-century readers would have known, only in Gaskell’s version the fairy-tale characters are far more ‘real’ than their so-called ‘fictional’ sources; they lead substantial lives that embrace ageing and change. The characters, such as the foot-sore Cinderella, now grown lame and plump, and the newly awakened Sleeping Beauty, reveal that what readers had believed to be ‘true’ about their past is actually the consequence of gossip and misinterpretation. Even the widow of Bluebeardmourns his death, sobbing that he was cruelly misinterpreted in the popular imagination. The emphasis that comma implies – ‘Curious, if True’ – suggests that the story might not be true, surely a mischievous reference to Gaskell’s own complicity in fiction-making, which inverts the more usual convention of fantastic stories, which claim they might be curious, but they are true.

  Of course, the Gothic genre is not the only form of literature that calls attention to its own status as fiction, but its writers often employ strategies that specifically point towards the construction of their narratives as texts, and one of the most popular devices is the discovered manuscript. This convention typically involves the doubled framework of an old story being retold by the narrator, and removed in time – and usually place – from the narrator and her or his audience. ‘The Grey Woman’ is a particularly interesting example of this literary convention, as it begins with the nameless English narrator being handed a yellowed manuscript by an innkeeper she meets in Heidelberg25 after expressing an interest in a mysterious painting of a beautiful woman. Thus the story of ‘The Grey Woman’ is distanced three times from the modern reader: the story is read by a nameless traveller, is written in a foreign language and dates from the previous century. Moreover, the narrator opens the story with her description of how she and her companion are caught in the rain at the Heidelberg inn, seeking shelter and thus finding the painting which leads to the gift of the manuscript, but interestingly, the narrator does not close the story; once she has introduced the manuscript we then read, we do not hear from her again, so there is a curious lack of closure to the narrative framework. This lack is then repeated in the story, for the manuscript is actually a letter written by a despairing mother to her daughter, explaining why her daughter cannot possibly marry the man she loves. We learn in the very beginning of the story that Ursula, the daughter, does not marry her fiancé. However, although the story ends with the chilling explanation of why the marriage can never take place, we never hear the daughter’s response, and so the internal framing device of the story-within-the-story is left hanging open.

  Furthermore, even in the stories where we are presented with an active, some might even suggest intrusive, narrator who continually reminds us of her or his presence, we are still left with a degree of interpretative instability. The narrator of ‘Lois the Witch’ is unusual in this respect, for she serves to provide a distancing, rationalist id="page_xix" explanation for and containment of the tragic and cruel story she tells. This narrator is clearly of the enlightened nineteenth century and understands the ways in which the seventeenth-century New Englanders succumbed to superstition, but she recognizes that her contemporary reader is removed from this kind of psychic contagion and can ‘look on it from the outside’, and ‘can afford to smile at [it] now’. However, the narrator does not allow her Victorian readers a completely comforting sense of complacency in their distance from the witch-hunting hysteria; she is also there to remind ‘us’ that ‘our English ancestors entertained superstitions of much the same character at the same period, and with less excuse’.26 Thus the narrator of ‘Lois the Witch’ extends a sense of compassion towards those whose cruelties and persecutions of others she recounts, while she also reminds the English reader that her or his own history is also implicated in this persecution.

  More usual in Gaskell’s stories, however, is the narrator who does not always understand the significance of what she or he retells, or who is in some way distanced from the events and what they mean. In ‘Curious, if True’, despite the resemblance in name of the narrator Richard Whittingham to the Dick Whittington of history and fable, Whittingham is at a loss to understand the fairy-tale origins of the characters he meets. Like Lockwood in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Gaskell’s snobbish, class-obsessed narrator is confused by, and a little uncomfortable with, the stories of the characters he recounts. Even more similar to Brontë’s text is ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, where the narrator, so like Nelly Dean in her pragmatic approach to supernatural happenings, can cheerfully describe hearing ghostly music thundered out on an organ secreted away in the inaccessible West Wing, and she thinks it is ‘rather pleasant to have that grand music rolling about the house’, never mind that it is played by a dead man.27

  Even more compelling is the narrator of ‘The Poor Clare’; here Gaskell successfully impersonates the narrative voice of a male lawyer, interested primarily in facts and accounts of things, whose working life of ledgers and documents contrasts so forcefully with his involvement in the story he tells of curses and doppelgängers, sin and redemption. The nameless narrator, however, is an active participant in these events, as it is he who is directed by his uncle to discover the where-abouts of an Irish woman who is due to inherit some estates. Inevitably, he falls in love with Lucy Fitzgerald, and therefore becomes not only a part of her story, but is actually infected by the supernatural force which haunts his beloved. The narrator’s London life of dry facts and rationality cannot protect him from the Lancashire demon who is the evil double of the woman he loves:

  Something resistless seemed to urge my thoughts on… when I held a book in my hand, and read the words, their sense did not penetrate to my brain. If I slept, I went on with the same ideas, always flowing in the same direction… I had an illness, which, although I was racked with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making before… my life seemed to slip away in delicious languor for two or three months.

  If the narrator is himself infected by the supernatural happenings he is meant to investigate and resolve, how, then, can we trust him to report factually and consistently, and wherein lies the authoritative focal point of the text?

  As readers of her novels are well aware, Gaskell is particularly interested in the struggle for legitimate authority and the conflict this engenders, especially between social and economic classes. In her shorter fiction, it is generally working-class women who are the moral superiors of aristocratic men, as in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, where Hester, the nurse, freely condemns the cruelty of her employers, the Furnivall sisters, as well as their dead father, Lord Furnivall, and it is only her love and nurturance which protect her little charge, Rosamund, from their cruelty. In ‘The Poor Clare’, the text hints at the possibility that Lucy’s mother Mary, once a lady’s maid, killed herself, perhaps out of shame at bearing Squire Gisborne’s illegitimate child, and this same Gisborne shoots and kills Mary’s beloved little dog, now the only thing left for Mary’s mother, Bridget, to cherish. This cruel and selfish action of the careless squire brings a series of horrific consequences called down by the female servant, made powerful and dangerous in her grief.

  More generally, however, powerful men conflict with their disem-powered daughters and, occasionally, their sons. Although Gaskell may have chafed at what she saw as an irreconcilable split between woman writer and woman as domestic manager, much of what she wrote about demonstrates her investment in the domestic sphere. Nearly all of the pieces collected here revolve around the family, though it may not always be the nuclear construction. Mothers are frequently missing or dead in these stories, as is so often the case in Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). It is the father or his substitute, the father-figure, who so frequently is the sole source of a
uthority in these families, and he usually abuses and distorts his patriarchal power in the absence of a restraining or compassionate maternal influence. Gaskell’s difficult fathers often seem modelled on the vengeful Jehovah of the Old Testament, a frequently invoked authoritative source, which is contrasted with the mercy and compassionate love of the Christ of the New Testament.28 The fathers – and sometimes, husbands – in these stories often identify themselves in terms of the typical constructs of masculinity – that is, in terms of aggression, selfishness, greed or even, as in ‘Lois the Witch’ and ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, of a moral self-righteousness in the name of the Old Testament. At their most dangerous these men turn their violence against their wives or children: Lord Furnivall in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ strikes his daughter’s illegitimate child on the shoulder and turns both daughter and granddaughter out of the house and into the cold where, as is only to be expected, they die. Similarly, Squire Griffiths in ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ snatches his son Owen’s baby out of his son’s arms and tosses it to its mother, but the baby hits its head on the dresser and dies. Moreover, M. de la Tourelle in ‘The Grey Woman’ apparently murdered his first wife because, chillingly, she did not know how to keep quiet – and so he silenced her for ever.