Gothic Tales Read online

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  There is one notable exception to these stories of murderous fathers, however, and this is ‘The Crooked Branch’. In this story it is the son Benjamin who, as the title suggests, embodies the murderous urge; having been away in London to make his fortune – at which he fails – he returns to his pastoral home with a few of his criminal cronies to rob from his parents and, if need be, to murder them in the process.

  Although Benjamin may be the exception to the rule, in the sense that it is the son who is the Gothic villain, ‘The Crooked Branch’ is representative of the genre by virtue of the fact that the plot revolves around the return of the repressed, the haunting of the Gothic family by some potentially deadly – usually masculine – secret. One of the most chilling fears that informs these stories is the threat of ancestral repetition. In ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, for example, the widowed Squire is initially seen to be ‘tender, and almost feminine’, calling forth from his infant son ‘the same earnest cooing that happier children make use of to their mother alone’. Interestingly, however, this tender closeness between father and son is nurtured in the absence of any maternal figure; more typically in this genre, the father-figure is so cruel precisely because he lacks – or will not admit to – any maternal guidance or ‘feminine’ feeling, usually because the mothers and wives are dead. In this story, however, Owen enjoys an almost incestuous closeness with his father, even to the extent that they sleep in the same bed until, that is, the Squire remarries, and under the malignant influence of his new wife, the Squire becomes selfish and violent.29 The death of his son Owen’s baby, which the Squire has indirectly caused while under the stepmother’s influence, sets in motion the ancient curse of Owen Glendower. The repetition of the names Owen Glendower, Owen Griffith and his son Owen points to the demonic force of the continual return. Like his literary ‘father’ Oedipus, who suffered because of his parents’ sin of attempting to defy the gods, Owen Griffith must bear the burden of the crime his ancestor attempted nine generations before. Like Oedipus, Owen contemplates leaving town to avoid fulfilling the ancient prophecy, and of course, in a complex series of events, like Oedipus, Owen fulfils the prophecy after all through the very act of leaving town. In striving to avoid a repetition of his father’s crime of murder, Owen ends up, no matter how unintentionally, just like him.

  This fear of the son doubling the father is most movingly expressed in ‘The Grey Woman’, where Anna, escaping from her murderous husband, the aristocrat-cum-bandit, M. de la Tourelle, is consumed with the fear that her unborn child will be a boy and grow up to resemble uncannily his father. Happily for her, ‘It was a girl, as I had prayed for. I had feared lest a boy might have something of the tiger nature of its father, but a girl seemed all my own.’ Sadly, however, the child’s future happiness is nonetheless compromised by the legacy of her father. Again, in this story, like so many others in the Gothic genre, it is impossible to escape the ghost of the past.

  This ghost of the past is most clearly realized in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, which concludes with the otherworldly shades of the long-dead Lord Furnivall and his still-living daughter, Grace, who are doomed to repeat the spectacle of the past when the lordly father struck his granddaughter on the shoulder while Grace looked on ‘with a look of relentless hate and triumphant scorn’. Spurned by her older sister’s husband, the father of the murdered little girl, Grace Furnivall had revealed all to her father about her sister’s pregnancy and had thus been responsible for the father’s wrath which led him to expel his elder daughter, Grace’s sister, and her baby from the home. In her old age, however, Grace is fated to witness the repetition of herself and her father in this melodramatic scene, the shock of which strikes her with palsy so that ‘she was carried to her bed that night never to rise again’. Thus in this story the daughter and the father conspire together to ruin the lives of an unhappy mother and her daughter.

  Gaskell again describes the woman who turns against another in complicity with an inflexibly self-righteous father in ‘Lois the Witch’. Lois’s father, a Barford minister, refuses to come to the aid of a woman who is being stoned and drowned for a witch; in response the witch turns her curse on Lois, rather than the father, crying, ‘Parson’s wench, parson’s wench, yonder, in thy nurse’s arms, thy dad hath never tried for to save me, and none shall save thee when thou art brought up for a witch.’ Lois goes on to tell her New England audience, ‘I used to dream that I was in that pond, all men hating me with their eyes because I was a witch.’ The woman’s curse comes true and Lois must be punished for the sin of her father in an uncanny doubling of women’s fates.

  Perhaps the text which is most overtly devoted to the representation of women’s investment in the domestic sphere and the pull of the id="page_xxiv" maternal bond is ‘The Poor Clare’. In a letter dated 2 January 1856, Charles Dickens impatiently beseeched Elizabeth Gaskell to end her delay and complete her manuscript so he could publish the conclusion in Household Words: ‘I have been going on, hoping to see the end of the story you could not finish (which was not your fault or anybody’s) in time for Christmas. When will it be forthcoming, I wonder! You have not deserted it. You cannot be such an unnatural mother.’30 Dickens’s jocular reference to Gaskell as the ‘unnatural mother’ could not be more ironically apposite in the context of ‘The Poor Clare’, for this is a story, like so many of Gaskell’s works, about surrogate, non-biological mothers, frequently servants, who are somehow more ‘natural’ parents than the upper-class biological fathers.31 ‘The Poor Clare’ pits the nurturing, protective and self-sacrificing love of the servant Bridget Fitzgerald for her granddaughter Lucy against the cruel and selfish neglect of Lucy’s father, Squire Gisborne, who rejects his daughter once her ‘demonic’ personality – which he has indirectly ‘sired’ into being – begins to assert itself.

  Bridget’s love for Lucy is echoed by Mrs Clarke, Lucy’s ‘official’ guardian, who seeks to protect her tormented charge from malicious outsiders. In this sense Mrs Clarke is strikingly similar to Hester in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, whose enfolding arms shield the child Rosamund from her ghostly seducer, the little dead girl who is beckoning to Rosamund to join her outside in the snow. Similarly, Amante in ‘The Grey Woman’ takes charge as surrogate mother, husband and, most intriguingly, lover, as her name suggests, when the suicidally docile Anna is too weak to take control over her own life. It is Amante, the lady’s maid, who devises the scheme by which Anna and she can escape Anna’s murderous husband, by posing as wife and husband. Anna is pregnant, and is therefore unable to pass as a man; it is Amante who enacts the role of Anna’s male guide, and thus it is the female servant in male disguise who outwits the dangerously frustrated wealthy bandit, and who acts as adoptive ‘father’ as well as mother to Anna’s newly born child. It seems therefore appropriate that Gaskell, who once wrote under a man’s name, and can so convincingly impersonate a male narrative voice, should write about a female servant acting as a man in order to protect the woman who is in her care.

  Mother-love in ‘The Poor Clare’, however, is also seen as dangerous when it turns inward on itself in pain and despair; Bridget’s agonized grief for her missing daughter Mary finds expression in the curse she hurls at Gisborne once he has shot Mary’s dog, which is all Bridget had left to love: ‘You shall live to see the creature you love best, and who alone loves you… become a terror and a loathing for all, for this blood’s sake.’ ‘This blood’ is, of course, a patently ironic reference not merely to the blood of the murdered dog, but to the blood-ties that link Lucy Gisborne, the unintended victim of this curse, with her grandmother who, in striking out at the aristocratic man, ends up sacrificing her yet-unborn granddaughter. In this way the mother’s curse doubles back on itself to inflict pain on the curser and the cursed.

  Moreover the mother–daughter bond, which can be seen to encode danger as well as comfort and nurturance, can also be seen as the manifestation of two identities acting as one; the uncanny echoing between Bridget
and her daughter Mary, almost lover-like in its intensity, suggests the dual nature of female identity which is a dominant theme in the Gothic. Bridget and Mary, we are told, ‘were too much alike to agree. There were wild quarrels between them, and wilder reconciliations. There were times when, in the heat of passion, they could have stabbed each other. At all other times they both – Bridget especially – would have willingly laid down their lives for one another.’ However, whereas mother and daughter mirror each other’s rage as well as devotion, Bridget and her granddaughter Lucy also manifest that most fundamental split between the two sides of feminine identity so central to Victorian ideology: the split between the ‘pure’, asexual ideal and monstrous, sexual voraciousness.

  Bridget’s curse thus results in the demonic manifestation of her granddaughter Lucy, who is doomed to be continually shadowed by her fearsome, seductive Other, a common theme of many Gothic novels including Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and, nearly contemporary with ‘The Poor Clare’, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). In ‘The Poor Clare’, however, the double is specifically sexual, as is apparent in the narrator’s description of Lucy’s shadow.

  I saw behind her another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness, so far as form and feature and minutest touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous. My heart stood still within me; every hair rose up erect; my flesh crept with horror.

  The monstrosity of this sexually assertive woman is here made abundantly clear, and yet the narrator is candid enough to admit that it is precisely this ‘loathsome’ eroticism of Lucy’s double which so attracts him to her: ‘I never loved her more fondly than now when – and that was the unspeakable misery – the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT.’

  Interestingly, in yet another instance of Gaskell’s use of mirror opposites, Lucy’s split into two is reflected in her grandmother Bridget’s identification with the iconized examples of the contrasting sides of woman as virgin and whore in Western Christian thought. Bridget, a devout Catholic, is initially seen by the narrator ‘praying to the Virgin in a kind of ecstasy’, yet by the end of the story, when she has entered the severely ascetic order of the Poor Clares in Antwerp, she has taken on the name of Sister Magdalen. Thus it appears that part of the grandmother’s penance involves a partial re-enactment of the psychic division manifested in physical form by the granddaughter she has cursed with her own words. It is surely ironic, though, that Bridget atones for the sexual doubling of her granddaughter by taking on the name of the most famous reformed prostitute in Western culture.

  Moreover, Lucy’s psychic split is re-enacted at the level of the narrative itself. Although the nameless lawyer is the ostensible narrator of the story, parts of the narrative are taken over by other characters directly involved in the events they retell: Lucy’s guardian, Mrs Clarke, takes up some of the story, as does the priest, Father Bernard, who is the confessor to the Starkey family for whom Bridget worked. Most significant, perhaps, are the events that are narrated by Lucy herself, including her description of her double whom we almost immediately witness as the object of the male narrator’s gaze. When Lucy tells her story, however, she describes seeing her dual images reflected in the mirror, highlighting the difference between Lucy outside the mirror and the demonic ‘Lucy’ reflected back at her:

  In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged… I suddenly swooned away… even while I lay [in my sickbed] my double was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always about some mischievous or detestable work.

  Thus the fragmented narrative, its various components narrated by different voices, suggests perhaps the loss of authority of the text, just as the above quotation demonstrates Lucy’s loss of authority over her own consciousness. The unstable narrative voice is thus repeated in the instability of the speaking subject at the heart of the text, and here ‘The Poor Clare’ resembles ‘The Grey Woman’, another story of a tale-within-a-tale, where a woman, Anna Scherer, also looks in the mirror, only to be confronted with her sinister, eerily multiple reflections: ‘I caught my own face and figure reflected in all the mirrors, which showed only a mysterious background… I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up.’

  Thus Gaskell here represents the power of consciousness which cannot be controlled, with its multiplicity of reflected images which seem to deny a single source of origin, just as she represents the uncontrollable power of the Word, manifested in the woman’s curse which doubles back on itself. ‘The Poor Clare’ is in this way associated with ‘Lois the Witch’, where language, curse and story-telling rebound back on the otherwise powerless female who curses others in a doomed attempt to stake some sort of authority. Just as in ‘The Poor Clare’ the very intensity of Bridget’s love led her to curse her own granddaughter through the male medium of Squire Gisborne, so too does the mother in ‘Lois the Witch’ unintentionally curse her own daughter when she cries, ‘Oh, Lois, would that thou wert dying with me!’ Like Lucy, Lois is cursed by her beauty and female attractiveness; her accusation as witch is in part motivated by Faith Hickson’s jealousy that Mr Nolan prefers her rival, as well as by Manasseh’s sexual desire which is distorted by his Calvinist fanaticism into a kind of manic persecution. Thus the Barford witch who cursed Lois as a revenge on Lois’s father is complicitous with the witch-hunters of Salem in damning Lois to death, as does Lois’s own mother with her dying wish. Yet Lois’s last word is the single cry of ‘Mother!’, rather than a cry for her father, suggesting perhaps the same kind of indissoluble bond that so enthralls and torments Bridget Fitzgerald and her lost daughter Mary.

  So, as in ‘The Poor Clare’, ‘Lois the Witch’ demonstrates how female language can endanger the very people it seeks to protect, but it can also be the final resource of the powerless over the powerful, and we see this most clearly in Nattee, the Native American woman who serves in the house of the Hicksons. Like Lois, who frightens the Hickson girls with her stories of Hallowe’en and forms of divination and fortune-telling, Nattee tells ‘wild stories… of the wizards of her race’, and ‘the poor old creature… took a strange, unconscious pleasure in her power over her hearers – young girls of the oppressing race, which had brought her down into a state little differing from slavery’. Just as the inflexible fathers of Salem Puritanism tell their damaging stories about race, gender and sin, so does Nattee counter them with her own stories which privilege the power of the Native American ‘wizards’ over the authority and self-righteous justification of the New England patriarchs. However, Nattee’s – and Lois’s – stories of witchcraft and arcane powers which so frighten their hearers are ultimately, like the witch’s curse, turned against them. Both Nattee and Lois are hanged as witches, victimized by their own stories which were told as a means of empowering the self, but became merely another example of the ‘evidence’ collected by the fathers of the persecution to accuse and condemn them as demonic manifestations of the Other.

  The stories and novellas collected here suggest the subtlety and variety of Gaskell’s own forms of empowerment, both as a means of expressing problems of domesticity otherwise repressed in her novels, and as a means, perhaps, of speaking for all of the silenced women represented within these tales. Her stories could thus be seen to explore the Gothic underside of female identity, domestic relations and the authority of the spoken and written word.

  NOTES

  1 The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997), no. 48, p. 81. All subsequent references to Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters will be to this edition as Letters. For the story in which Gaskell claims to have seen a
ghost, see Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of my Life, 6 vols. (London: George Allen, 1896), vol. 2, pp. 225–7.

  2 Jenny Uglow suggests that ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ deals with similar issues of unmarried mothers and illegitimate babies that Ruth (1853) does, but the Gothic scenario of the short story allows Gaskell to treat such potentially explosive material with greater force and freedom than she does in the more cautious and conservative novel (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 307). See also Ruth, ed. Angus Easson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997). Uglow makes a similar point about Gaskell’s Gothic stories expressing the surreal underside of her more realist novels in her ‘Introduction’ to Elizabeth Gaskell, Curious, if True (London: Virago, 1995), p. ix.

  3 For further discussion of Gaskell’s interest in ghosts and ghost stories, see her letter to Mary Howitt, 18 August 1838, Letters, no. 12, p. 32, which describes a story she heard about the ghost of Lord Willoughby said to be still haunting his house in search of some law papers. Mary Howitt describes the telling of ‘ghost stories and capital tales’ when Gaskell came to visit on Christmas Day 1850 (An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt, 2 vols. (London: Wm. Isbister, 1889), vol. 2, p. 65). Lady Ritchie also reminisces about a friend of hers who recalled with great delight Gaskell entertaining a party in 1864 with stories of ‘Scotch ghosts, historical ghosts, spirited ghosts with faded uniforms and nice old powdered queues’ (Lady [Anne Thackeray] Ritchie, Blackstick Papers (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1908), p. 213). Finally, see also Gaskell’s anecdote about her suggestion that she tell ‘some dismal ghost story’ to Charlotte Brontë ‘Just before bed-time. [Brontë] shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious’ (Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 406). Interestingly, however, Gaskell also appears to have had some reservations about the appropriate audience for her ghost stories; in a letter to an unknown correspondent dated 27 July [1855], she describes the publication of a collection of her stories, but she fears that ‘one or two of the [Household Words] stories might not so well do for young people. One is an unexplained ghost story for instance’ (Letters, no. 260, p. 365). The ‘unexplained story’ she refers to is probably ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, and it may be the depiction of a diabolically seductive phantom-child in the story she is particularly concerned about.