Gothic Tales (3 page)

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 Heidelberg
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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'.
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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.
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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 authority 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.
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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.

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.
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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.