Elizabeth Gaskell (1865 watercolor)
Elizabeth Spencer (1921-)
Dear friends and readers,
My listserv community (mailing list) WWTTA has embarked on a four month “Elizabeth Gaskell festival.” A group of us propose to read two short stories by Gaskell each week alternating occasionally with a novella over two to three weeks, at the end of which a few of us will read her historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers and a few others, her powerful biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte. What enabled this was most of her works are online.
What prompted this? Her fame, we like 19th century women novelists. Some of the people on WWTTA have read Gaskell with other people on line on this and my other list before, _viz_, Cousin Phillis, Cranford (twice), Wives and Daughters (twice), North and South, two ghosts or gothics, “The Old Nurse’s Tale,” and “The Grey Woman.” Recently I had read Jenny Uglow’s wonderful biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, many of us had seen and loved both Cranford mini-series (Cranford Chronicles,
Lisa Dillon as Mary Smith, a stand-in for Gaskell herself from first series
and Return to Cranford)
The community of women from the second
I set up the order for reading by using my books, anthologies and individually published books. For the stories and novellas: Cousin Phillis and other tales, ed. Angus Easson, The Moorland Cottage and other stories, and A Dark Night’s Work and other Stories, both edited by Suzanne Lewis Lewis, Lady Ludlow, Mr Harrison’s Confessions, Cranford (numerous editions), to be followed by either the novel or biography (depending on what the person wanted to read).
Well, we have begun and I’ve now read three masterpieces in the short story genre, and one at least telling or candid story about illegitimacy and unwed mothers in the Victorian period. “The Old Nurse’s Tale” is one of these and I’ve written about it before (and taught twice too), but I’ve never before read or written about “Half a Life Time Ago” or “Lois the Witch.” These two, together with (more briefly) “Lizzie Leigh” and Elizabeth Spener’s “Light in the Piazza” are my subject tonight.
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“Half a Life Time Ago”
Whistler, “Reading by Lamplight” (1858)
I compare “Half a Life Time Ago” with Elizabeth Spencer’s great novella, “Light in the Piazza,” a modern masterpiece about how a mother to provide her beloved mildly disabled daughter with what’s called a normal life sacrifices much in her life and then her mildly daughter herself by giving her up to a young Italian husband embedded in a traditional family — though we have enough evidence to suspect it will go hard with this girl when her mother had to leave her to a new husband and his family. There’s a popular musical adapted from it nowadays. (For more on this one see the comments)
To the story:
“Half a Life Time Ago” is intensely moving story. It differs from Light in the Piazza” because the young boy, Will is not mildly disabled. Clara in “Light in the Piazza” seems to many people just fine; it takes time to see she is not quite like others. Will is mentally feeble gentle and sensitive and a target for ridicule, worse yet, a target for beatings by Michael Hurst, the young male apprentice betrothed to our heroine, Susan Dixon, before the story opened. The story centers on Susan Dixon’s consciousness. Her mother dies and asks her to care for this boy, specifically not to put him in an asylum.
The descriptions of the asylum are really mind-pausing. The people there know how to stop these disabled people from giving them trouble. I’ll bet.
I was at first bothered by what seemed to be Susan Dixon, the heroine’s acceptance or ignoring the cruelty of Michael Hurst, her suitor (how he enjoys triumphing over her too) and for me part of the anxiety of reading the tale was the worry lest she marry this man, Michael Hurst.
She didn’t: slowly he begins to want to marry her for her money and property and not herself. In reality he never appreciated her character at all and would probably have been much less happy with her than he was with much more ordinary, stupider woman he marries in the end. Michael stands for more than the world’s view: he is cruel. We are to believe this cruel or hard character of his attracts Susan. I wonder about this. I read a piece by Sade yesterday where he argues for masochism and sadism as central to sexual experience. I think Trollope is closer to the mark when he presents a more prosaic dominating-submissive interaction between people and I have not known anyone who likes to be hurt, bossed, or used.
Susan was lucky in that Michael brought his hard tactless mean sister to see her. They make a demand that he won’t marry Susan (they think she’s desperate) unless she puts Will in the asylum. In reaction to this ugliness, she refuses.
I can’t say she was better off herself being faithful to her disabled brother but she was doing right and until her servant-friend dies and he does become more violent she had the love and comfort of his presence. I can imagine Michael would have beaten and destroyed her brother if she had not allowed him to put the boy in an asylum.
At the same time I really admired the hardness of the tale. Will does become violent and hard to deal with later in life. In the 19th century they had no calming medicines and such a person would be so frustrated with his life as he grew older and take it out on those nearby. Susan’s servant-friend had died long ago and when Will dies young (as happens with severely disabled), Susan is left alone. One night she can’t bear not to look once more at Michael and follows him home drunken from a pub. We are told she watches him beat his horse and act as mean as usual. We are not told she is relieved not to have married him. I can’t understand this. Surely she would see how miserable in a different way she would have been.
We are told this is a community where women accept men’s drunkenness. But Susan has differed from others in refusing to put her brother away.
The story closes with Michael once more coming to Susan’s house — perhaps he too hankered after her, but so drunken in the cold, he falls hard and dies. She goes to Micheal’s wife and tells of his death, and in her own trauma over her long desolate existence, has a heart attack. The wife at first put off by her feels for her, and in the end Susan takes the broke widow and her children in so she is no longer alone.
We are to think she is now better off not being so alone.
“Half a Life-time Ago” is as good as “Old Nurse’s Story” because it is not a neurotic dream and breaks through censorship. Gaskell doesn’t quite break through to reject the sadomasochistic patterns still inculcated today but she does show the hardship and misery of isolated existence. Susan’s real lack was she never had a chance to meet anyone like her. All she ever had a chance for was Michael.
This reality lies behind not just stories like Jane Eyre but many other women’s stories until say the early 20th century when they could for the first time break away from a local community — if they were lucky find people they could have a bearable existence with.
But of course the real burning center is is the disabled child and what it takes from a mother. I know of a third: Elsa Morante’s Storia (History) where the last quarter is about her and her elliptic son and how he’s treated by the world (horrible) and his dog killed and he dies of the heart attack at 7 and she is taken to an asylum for 9 more years when her body finally dies. her soul did upon the death of the boy and dog. Funny Gaskell in comparison is much more realistic.
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“Lois the Witch”
Emigration
“Lois the Witch” anticipates our journey into Sylvia’s Lovers for its a historical fiction: set in the later 17th century in the US among American puritans. I find it just rich, embedded with knowledge of the era, especially a feel for recreating the US and the scary fanaticisms of the religious types who dominated early Massachusetts. Lois has the misfortune to be not just an orphan (no one to protect her for real) but to have been born to those who fought for the king — high church.
The story is a study of the impulse to and acting out of great cruelty religious fanaticism masks. Gothic here becomes an issue of vital life for women: witch accusations arise from the worst impulses of human nature directed towards women who are unprotected. When it comes to the enlightenment, Gaskell is on the side of secularism from her background.
I got beyond the first chapter of this story and by this time had become so anxious for the heroine I had to peek ahead. This is a terrifying tale centering on the heartlessness, cruelty and stupidity of human beings, and especially how risky fanatical religion is to anyone who is powerless, particularly a woman.
The center as the previous tales have been is women. In the first half of the tale when Lois arrives in America she listens in on a tale told in a censored way but sufficiently clearly that we realize a woman was allowed to be tortured, raped and murdered by a band of her fellow men rather than their risk their lives to save her. The hard stupid (for he probably doesn’t quite see that he’s justifying the women’s friends’ cowardice) older man who listens immediately begins to justify the men for doing nothing and among other things he comes up with the idea the whole thing was a vision sent by Satan. The obvious evidence that the woman existed and this all happened is put in front of him, and he pauses for a moment, but (like many people in juries) only long enough to dismiss this and come back to insist on his theory. What poor Lois doesn’t realize is she has awakened his ire by contradicting him.
As she arrives at her uncle’s — her mother has died and she has no relatives to live with and she is sent by the mother to the uncle for him to take her in — she sees a child whose beauty strikes her. The child see her and slips on a stump; the mother sees this. Ominous. This reader (me) knows what Gaskell is suggesting. I had a grandmother who believed in the “evil eye.” She would get it into her head that he neighbors had “poxed” her plants if they didn’t grow or sent an evil spell on her if something she wanted didn’t work out. My knowledge of this woman and what she would have been capable of if she had lived in a village with people like her has ever prevented me from sentimentalizing peasants or traditional cultures or rituals/superstitions. They are not pretty.
Her aunt is hard and mean, and immediately dislikes her for being a relation of a family which stayed loyal to Charles I. Again Lois makes the mistake of sticking up for her parents when she sees them bad-mouthed. They are after all recently dead. And we see a son is sexually hankering after her almost immediately
Of course the parallel is the woman tortured, raped and murdered and then dismissed as a vision of Satan with Lois accused of being a witch and then being murdered in some horrible way. It’s brilliant of Gaskell to align them.
Oh how I wish that sea captain who first brought Lois to the US and this biological family of hers had removed her from these people and taken her back to the US to starve. This is a hard story to read. It’s the remorseless terrifying story of a cruelty to a young woman with no one whose interest it is to help her.
As I read to the end, I found myself remembering what I’d read about people facing the cruel death penality, from Victor Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man to descriptions of people waiting to be guillotined en masse. It’s the latter this story is about: a mass delusion which overtakes an ignorant fearful community. Lois dies because she gets caught up in the jealousies of the household she was placed in where no one had any feeling for her at all; she is loved and wanted by two men who her female relatives wanted for themselves. Her cousin goes mad and her aunt loathes her in order to have someone to blame. So when in a hysterical mass meeting Cotton Mather lights on her, she is lost.
Lois herself believes in witches and our narrator says when she finds herself in jail she half-believes others may be witches in other jails. When she sees them, she knows better. She finds herself chained and in quiet powerful moment is brought back to sense because she realizes how ludicrous and cruel this is. She lives on because she is so young and has a urge to survive.
A number of scenes where she refuses to confess to being a witch; she is helped to die because the old Indian woman who lived in the house with her ends up in her cell. In her impulse to control and cope for herself, she acts as if she’s doing this for the Indian woman. Only when the woman is taken from her and hung first, does she go mad, lost it and scream a horrified “Mother!” a call our narrator tells us went through people. (As other calls did).
It was the next autumn before the Captain returned with a young man who had loved Lois to bring her back to England. Too late. The young man when others present mass apologies, prayers, and the graveyard as comfort can only say, she is dead, cannot be brought back and there is no retrieval.
For myself I am bothered this far by the tale: Gaskell seems to me to ask that I understand and thus (implied) forgive. No better misanthropy than accept this with quietude.
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“Lizzie Leigh”
London Woman, Street Seller, Gustave Dore, from London: A Pilgrimage
I did find “Lizzie Leigh” a demoralizing one to start with I admit — from its outlook where it seemed to buy into the making a pariah of someone who has had a child out of wedlock to its morbidity (so many die) but can see it as revealing tellingly the same kind of tones and impulses we find in Bronte’s Shirley where there’s a story of an unwed mother now a governess whose daughter died when she was finally able to be near her, having been parted from her at birth, a kind of neurotic compensation daydream where the intense sadness allows the person to experience what she is really experiencing and validate it without breaking through censorship and telling the truth.
“Lizzie Leigh” breaks through the censorship. I’d argue it does so more than Susan Hill’s Woman in Black which allows readers and viewers to blame Jennet Humphrys. I’m aware the story turns her into a monstrous witch and only through careful reading of the text does the inner story come out. All three Wharton tales are far more feminist in structure than even the written Women in Black. Given our period’s misogyny I fear to think what a film feature might make of Hill’s work today.
For Light in the Piazza, see comment.
Photo from Lincoln Center performance of musical adaptation of Spencer’s story
Ellen
In “The Light in the Piazza,” Spencer tells the story of a Margaret Johnson, a woman who has led a frustrated, lonely, unsatisfying life, married to a man with whom she has nothing in common when it comes to values which spring from character and things of the mind. She was sensitive, imaginative, not philistine and narrow; her husband a coarse successful tactless narrow businessman. Mr Johnson (Noel) doesn’t come in time to ruin her plans as he’s working in DC trying to distance his cigarette company from a doctor they had used in their ads who the House Un-American activities committee is hounding as a communist. They had a daughter, Clara, who became retarded after an accident at age 8, and she has devoted much of her life to this girl who barely reciprocates because she is so childish. At one point the mother tried to put the daughter in a school to give her a chance to lead a more independent socializing life, but the child was ruthlessly dismissed once it was discovered she couldn’t do the academic work. This incident is at the center of the story’s narrative.
Now she and the girl encounter an apparently wholly unintellectual Italian young man who falling in love at first sight with the girl wants to marry her want to take the isolated girl in. Against her own emotional needs, after at first removing the girl, she maneuvers to enable the girl to be won by the young man. This includes a large bribe to, and perhaps some superficial sex with the father—it’s hard to tell how far she is forced to go to satisfy him.
If I’m remembering the story correctly, it ends with our heroine getting into the father’s car. She’s in for yet more of him, and if she is not pressured into going so far as to fuck, she can be pressured into other humiliating acts. As I wrote yesterday, I’ve just been reading (finished I’m relieved to say) the most powerful profound and indeed only book to fully show what it is to live with an abusive man: for the girl-wife in Retif de Bretonne’s Ingenue Saxancour, a mere fuck is not to what he wants when it comes to sex.
didn’t pay that much attention to Fabrizio’s mother except as the betrayed long-suffering wife in the house, with the parallel being her angry daughter-in-law who does not accept this same behavior. We may hope her husband leaves our heroine’s daughter alone. Probably he will or his male relatives will punish him severely and he knows it.
I thought the center of the story — was Margaret, the mother and what she gave up and did in handing her daughter over. It was a rare story empathizing utterly with a mother who the world outside might blame a great deal for pushiness, for being “unreal,” and we are to see painful as this is the one solace of her life, her daughter, is what she has just given up and who she can no longer protect.
Much of the text is her memories of all the times she has been thwarted. But she did not give up. Now she will be excluded.
IN other words, I didn’t see the story as about hope for Clara’s future but an indictment of how women and disabled people are treated, quiet, implicit. Clara was not offered another choice no matter what her mother did. One fears for such a person as they are susceptible to bullying.
I thought perhaps the name of the daughter was an allusion to Heidi where the young woman Heidi is supposed to befriend is a Clara. That Clara is apparently sick when we first see her, a sort of invalid who gets better because (forsooth) Heidi comes to live with her. It’s a fairy tale and Spencer’s story is not.
Reading it in the 21st century instead of the 1950s we might think to ourselves that marriage is not forever either, even in a traditional family, but Clara is so child-like it’s hard to see her asserting herself.
It’s a story about how people with a disability are treated less than humanly, are not valued as human beings; about the price of mothering; about cultural differences (a partly ironic celebration of Italy); and—most of all—about how silence can be at once a protection and weapon. I can’t convey the power of one of the closing lines: “She would miss her forever.”
Ellen
Lois the Witch sounds a lot like The Witch at Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witch_of_Blackbird_Pond). I wonder if it is a reaction to Lois the Witch. In Speare’s book, though the
heroine is accused of being a witch by the members of the Puritan community in which she is forced to live following the death of her grandmother, she is able to prove her innocence.
Marjorie
I don’t know Elizabeth George Speare’s work. Glancing briefly at who Speare was (American, author of children’s books of historical fiction, I’d offer the idea (to generalize out) that as with Graham’s Poldark novels, serious historical fiction grapples with issues of importance to the author’s milieu and vision. Catherine’s historical novel, Mistress of the Revolution, reflects 1990s and 21st century feminist concerns; so too Emma Donohgue’s lesbian Life Mask.
Gaskell’s story fits in with Graham’s type 2: all fictional characters; it’s also her personal vision.
Speare is of course not the only American author to deal with witch burnings politically: there’s Arthur Miller’s famous Crucible. American evangelical fanaticism still fuels politics in the US today (probably the tea-baggers more frightening images of Obama as somehow voodoo-ish in looks).
For Gaskell, the analogy was the evangelical milieu she was brought up in.
But the accent is on the vulnerability of woman to this and the parallel is made emphatically with the tortured, raped and murdered woman at the opening of the story. Lois is pursued by the older son of her aunt who is forced to take her in. Her uncle has died, and she refuses this lout (which he is): this gains her another enemy. Hell hath no powerful revenge motif like a man scorned.
Speare’s story also ends happily. Gaskell’s is so quiet somber that it’s even harder to bear because this is a happening not so horrifically out of a norm of behavior.
Ellen
Something I find rather odd about ‘Lois the Witch’, which I suppose gives it its Gothic twist, is that it is written to show up the cruelty of the witch trials and how outsiders were picked on with no evidence – yet, in the incident which happens before Lois leaves England, it seems that the woman being persecuted and killed is actually a witch after all. Her curse on Lois is borne out by the rest of the story, giving it a Gothic and supernatural flavour. I’m
not sure if she is supposed to have gained the power to curse because of her ill-treatment. I’ve also read another short story by Gaskell where a curse is central to the plot – I think this was ‘The Poor Clare’.
On the historical background to the story, one of the footnotes in the Penguin edition of Gaskell’s ‘Gothic
Tales’ says it is “most probably patterned after Rebecca
Nurse”, whose trial and execution are described in a book which Gaskell had read, Charles W Upham’s ‘Lectures on Witchcraft, Comprising a History of the Delusions in Salem, in 1692′, which was published in 1831.
I had a quick search via Google and found a page on the story of Rebecca Nurse, who unlike Lois was elderly, 71. However there are other similarities between the real and fictional cases. Here’s the link:
http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/witch.htm
This is part of a bigger site about the witch trials – here’s the home page link:
http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/salem_witch_trials.htm
It’s also mentioned in the introduction to this edition that the statement of the Salem jurors made in real life is included in the story word for word.
According to another footnote, Gaskell also had an incident in her own life which sparked her interest in persecution of women accused of witchcraft. The note says she made a visit to a country magistrate in Essex in the early 1850s “when her host was hastily summoned to prevent an attempt to bring to her death an old woman in a neighbouring village, who was suspected by the inhabitants of being a witch. The incident… made a deep impression on Mrs Gaskell, who frequently made mention of it in her family.
I’ve also read somewhere that ‘The Scarlet Letter’ was an
influence on the story, but am not sure now where I read this – sorry to be vague.
Judy
I thank Judy for finding the information and sharing the material in her edition (as shown up by her notes). I have an old used edition with sparse notes: all that is offered are a few glosses of words.
I finished the story last night and it was a hard book to read. I wrote about it on my blog and what Judy said confirmed to me why it was harder to read than say Ingenue Saxancour. In Retif and his daughter, Agnes’s account of the horrific humiliating painful abuse she was subject to at no point does anyone buy into the man’s account of things. It is true that Agnes’s staying with this man is motivated by her having no where to go and no one to help her and the community saying how shameful that she should leave, and it’s her duty to stay with him, but that is obviously and meant to be seen as wholly wrong.
Gaskell at some points buys into these witch beliefs. The story of the woman who believes herself a witch is clearly (to me) nonsense and yet more hysteria. In fact Lois looks into her heart to see if she’s a witch. When a community tells you you are X, and everyone says, and everyone hates you, it’s hard to avoid the idea you are X. For herself Lois avoids this. I did look to see if the narrator indicated to us any irony or place to suggest she did she this old woman was no witch. But nothing is there.
Further at some places in the story there is if not sympathy then a kind of implied forgiving. This is unacceptable on any level — especially given what she shows of these people. At the last the night before this girl is to be hung (or near it) comes the aunt asking her to confess so the aunt can feel good about herself. The aunt is a horror of the first rank.
It’s the same flaw as “Lizzie Leigh” where Gaskell more than buys into the community attitudes towards sex and women.
It’s not good enough to say this was a common attitude towards sex and women at the time. Many did not hold it and earlier than this period. We are not to judge this author by inferior stupid dense and cruel punitive minds. I might say even more so for the witch belief. But I know that in the year 2010 I have come across people who can behave in cruel ways with rationale of crazy delusion and we see it in the newspaper about religious fanaticism across the world
Ellen Moody
From Linda:
“Although still a sobering story, I found this one not to be quite as sad as the earlier two by Gaskell discussed here.
I liked the description of Susan’s parents that the author give us early on. It sets the tone and tells us clearly about what kind of old-fashioned, rural people we are dealing with:
“William and Margaret Dixon were rather superior people, of a character belonging – as far as I have seen – exclusively to the class of Westmoreland and Cumberland statesmen – just, independent, upright; not given to much speaking; kind-hearted, but not demonstrative; disliking change, and new ways, and new people; sensible and shrewd; each household self-contained, and its members
having little curiosity as to their neighbours, with whom they rarely met for any social intercourse, save at the stated times of sheep-shearing and Christmas; having a certain kind of sober pleasure in amassing money, which
occasionally made them miserable (as they call miserly people up in the north) in their old age; reading no light or ephemeral literature; but the grave, solid books brought round by the pedlars (such as the ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Regained,’ ‘The Death of Abel,’ ‘The Spiritual Quixote,’ and ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’) were to be found in nearly every house: the men occasionally going off laking, i.e. playing, i.e. drinking for days together, and having to be hunted up by anxious wives…”
Susan’s role toward her disabled brother, Will, after the death of her parents is really much more that of a mother than sister. It is pretty clear early on that Susan will choose Will over Michael, her fiance– another instance of the old adage “that blood is thicker than water.”
Still, because Susan chooses, in a sense, the role she plays–she is not an object of pity. She is a strong young woman of upright character. She meets life’s challenges head on–and accepts the fate handed out to her. Unlike Lizzie Leigh, Susan is not cast out of society.
She is alone and lonely after everyone passes on, but she has known love in her lifetime.
It is interesting to compare her to the modern mother in Light in the Piazza. Both were intimately bound to their charges–both weighed down by the responsibility. Clara’s mother let her go, but Will’s sister held on tight.
Susan didn’t have as many options as Clara’s mother.
Susan’s dilemma is one that still rings true in modern times. Women are still urged to put hopelessly handicapped children–Mongoloid, for instance–in
institutions, and they still refuse, knowing their child will get care but not love in these places. Being brought up as she was, Susan essentially had no choice but to give up her life to serve her brother.
One doesn’t get the sense, however, that this was really tragic. It is simply the way things were.
Linda”
I’d agree it wasn’t as drenchingly melancholy as “Lizzie Leigh,” nor filled with scarifying hatred, seething revenge, a profound sense of evil done and suffused in the world somehow. Tragic may not be the word, but it’s not I think at any rate meant as cheering in any sense. When Gaskell wants to give us a fable of acceptance, she can do this — say “Cousin Phillis” where we are made to see the uplift at the end. I do not agree here. So some reasons:
We never see Susan with this new family and as with Margaret, there is much to suggest it will be yet more endurance.
For me this is a story meant to expose and admit. The awarneness of the darkness of life is its point. That others could know this is not to my mind — and in another level of life they would not, or had Susan been luckier in who she met claer to her.
The darknesses of existence include intense hardship, so intense I feel Gaskell does not accept it — on the same grounds as one might argue she doesn’t accept that witch trial, only there she goes over the hanging so swiftly. The long passages where Will becomes violent out of frustration, the long passages of her alone – the loneliness is terrible — her sitting by that fence and watching this vicious man kick his horse.
I find some irony in the title too: it had not changed that much, asylums. She did write for Dickens’s newspapers and journals and these were meant as social criticism seeking reform. Railways were there but they would not help this kind of thing.
It’s a woman’s condition story too — as have the three previous been. Feminist in their way.
We turn from the fable sombre and wanting to do something.
Ellen
I thought I’d start with, ‘Lois the Witch’, as it sounded as if it would fit in with well with the ongoing discussion of Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ I’d be picking up again next week, but I was still surprised to see how much the one seemed to have influenced the other. Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather, Justice Hathorn, even makes a direct appearance as one of the sentencing judges in Lois’ farce of a trial, while aspects of Prudence’s character recall the more negative characteristics of Hester Prynne’s daughter Pearl, with none of the redeeming ones. Gaskell also plants the name Hester itself in the story, even if it’s only given to one of the more minor characters.
What the stories share, too, is the complicity of
women in the detriment and destruction of their own kind, if anything, it’s far stronger in Gaskell’s story, where the so-called witch curses Lois the young girl, not the father, for his omission to save her, and Faith, Prudence and
Grace are directly instrumental in Lois’ arraignment and thus also in her subsequent execution.
Listing the names like this also highlights the inherent ironies invested in them as their holders behave in ways diametrically opposed to their meaning.
A further irony lies in the fact that the only one who actually tries to save her in his own mad way is Manasseh, whose obsessive attraction to her was one of the first nails in her coffin, as far as the other women in his family were concerned.
His attempt at her defence involves prophecy and predestination carried ad absurdam and I can’t help wondering if one of the subtexts of the story is
Gaskell’s critical, unitarian issues with these subjects and a consideration of just how self-fulfilling prophecies and the like can be.
I was also struck by how modern Gaskell’s take on the psychology and motivations of those involved in such witchhunts seemed to be, with its emphasis on the dire
effects of mass hysteria and the power of suggestion, when manipulated through material self-interest in many cases.
I’ve just read Judy’s mention of the notes in her edition, which seems to be the same as mine, and it’s there she probably also first saw confirmation of the Hawthorne link.
One of the notes that is of particular interest to me is a mention of Uglow’s discussion of the ways in which Hawthorne and Gaskell shadowed each other in their social and literary lives, which is apparently to be found on p.310 of ‘A Habit of Stories’.
Fran
In response to Fran’s query:
I do have the book and p. 310 presents a shadowy interchange between Gaskell and Hawthorne, so shadowy, Fran, it does seem to me socially non-existent. It may be that The Scarlett Letter (published 1851) influenced “Lois the Witch” (1859), but what Uglow puts together is a skein on non-contacts. She has this idea in her book that what partly makes Gaskell’s fiction so rich is this intertwined embedded social life. This morning I’m feeling this is a myth of our time about social life’s real effect on the private mind (myth is a word that finally for me is negative, false). Here’s the paragraphs:
SPEAKING OUT: 1848-56 From Uglow, p 310:
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Gaskell never met: he will not enter her ‘life’ in person, but The Scarlet Letter appeared in early 1851, when she was beginning Ruth. Both novels deal with a sexual fall, social hypocrisy and humiliation, a woman’s struggle for autonomy. Gaskell’s seducer even bears the name of Hawthorne’s governor, Bellingham. Both heroines sew for a living, but Hester Prynne makes her needlework subversive, carrying her scarlet letter openly, while Ruth keeps her transgression secret. Hester is defiant, Ruth penitent, but each woman has a child, the ‘badge of her shame’, as Faith Benson puts it in Ruth, who is also the means of her spiritual self-discovery.
Hawthorne was American consul in Liverpool in 1853 and knew the Martineaus, Henry Bright and other Gaskell friends. Introductions were planned, but not fulfilled, although in 1856 anecdotes about Hawthorne enter Elizabeth’s flow of chatter to Marianne. They seem to shadow each other. In 1858 he is in Rome with William Whetmore Story, with whom Elizabeth had stayed the previous year. Later he stays at Redcar in Yorkshire; a few weeks afterwards Elizabeth stays twenty miles away at Whitby. Whetmore’s sculpture of Cleopatra, which Elizabeth had admired in Rome, and her own ‘stolen’ story of the face, which Dickens had told to Emelyn Story and she to Hawthorne, both find a place in The Marble Faun in 1860. In 1862 the circle is complete when Gaskell enters Hawthorne’s native territory, and the ground of The Scarlet Letter, with her Salem story, ‘Lois the Witch’.24
This kind of close yet indirect exchange is typical. But if we think again of the overlapping spheres, another point emerges. Elizabeth’s place within them is always slightly off-centre. She keeps her own perspective, both involved and detached. She is a devoted wife, but her life is separate from her husband’s and her writing scandalizes some of his congregation. She is a Unitarian drawn to Christian Socialism and the Anglican liturgy; a Manchester resident who spends most of her time elsewhere; a woman of moderate income who enters the homes of rich and poor but belongs to neither world; a writer who enjoys but is suspicious of the London literary scene. Most relevant to Ruth, she holds the same tangential position with regard to the women’s movement and to philanthropy, the two ‘circles’ which bear most closely on her writing at the start of the 18 50S.
Both Cranford and Ruth can be read, with qualifications, as feminist texts. Elizabeth’s friends included the older mentors of the emerging …
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It seems to me Uglow has identified how both people deal with the same issues, but unless one has a direct source one can prove or some documentary evidence one of them read the other, it’s all alignment that we make to help us read. That’s fine. It casts light on their states of mind and their culture. I don’t quite understand the sentence “she to Hawthorne.” Does it mean she spoke to him or told him about “a stolen story of the face …”
Ellen
I see Fran has had more generous assessment of “Lois the Witch” and in her reading Gaskell emerges as just about absolved from on any level offering any sense of sympathy towards the matter of what happened in the story. We are agreed on the darkness and pain of this story, its sheer horribleness. I can now report that Uglow also sees not only this story in this light but confirms this sense I’m beginning to get these stories as a group are dark and absolutely put out of court any sense that Gaskell falsifies life’s experience by justifynig what is or sentimentalizing. Reading some of Uglow’s passages on the stories, I find she too wrote a narrative of the Marquise of Ganges’ life — it seems to have had hooks that sank into people’s hearts in the 17th through 19th century. Why it doesn’t in our time is a puzzle.
Uglow says of the “Crooked Branch” what is so hurtful is the young man is casually willing to murder his mother to suit the convenience of his fellow robbers but she cannot get herself to say he did this and she knows it.
Here is how Uglow describes much of the fiction we are about to or are reading (pp. 474-75):
Even in the gossipy article “French she tells the true story of the Marquise de Ganges (again immured in a castle), who was hounded to death for her property by her husband and his two brothers. The Marquise was offered death by fire, steel or poison and, Gaskell writes, the poison was forced down her throat until ‘her skin was blackened by the burning drops that fell upon it, and her mouth was horribly burnt’. Although she fled, dishevelled and in agony, to the women of the village who fought ‘like lionesses’, she was followed, stabbed repeatedly until the weapon broke in her shoulder and then viciously beaten by the worst of the brothers, the priestly abbe. After her inevitable lingering death, all the women of the town wear mourning.
There are, however, routes to survival – of the spirit if not of the body: the support of other women, servants, friends, mothers, and the shelter of nurturing men. Speech can be regained, authority challenged: Mary Barton speaks out in court in defence of Jem; Jemima challenges her father in defence of Ruth; Ellinor Wilkins braves the lover who abandoned her, now the judge in the case against her old servant; the mother of the Marquise de Ganges writes a pamphlet which brings her daughter’s murderers to justice, speaking out for her child’s burnt, silenced mouth. Defiance, as well as sympathy, is a central message of Gaskell’s writing.
In the darker fiction the current of the past sweeping into the present does not flow gradually, gently, between banks of benign progress as it does in My Lady Ludlow. It surges and swirls and is full of menace, carrying the consequences, often literally, of ‘the sins of the fathers’ like the murder in ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ or the forgery in ‘Right at Last’. Comforting images are overturned: the prodigal son, who is a life-giving figure in Cranford, comes back in ‘The Crooked Branch’ to rob his parents. In ‘The Manchester Marriage’ the longed-for wandering sailor returns as a dreaded revenant to find his wife peacefully married to another. Knowing that recognition would destroy her life and that of his child, he has no recourse but suicide.
Lives are controlled, Gaskell implies, not only by ‘rational’ institutions but through irrational structures of emotion. In many of Gaskell’s short stories women themselves create misery through the very strength of their feelings, whether it be vengeful jealousy like Faith’s in ‘Lois the Witch’ or possessive love like the servant Victorine’s in ‘Crowley Castle’. This female chain of consequence is
expressed in the witch’s curse. The law imposes retribution while the curse cries for pure revenge – in the words of Francis Bacon, ‘Nay, rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they unfortunate.’15 True, men can curse, as in the Celtic ‘Doom of the Griffiths’, but the female witch is the classic embodiment of this terrible power, a different brand of women’s language. Gaskell shows that it may be a last response of the powerless, but it is the wrong response, and inevitably rebounds on the innocent. Thus Bridget Fitzgerald in ‘The Poor Clare’ unwittingly punishes her own granddaughter: before the curse can be lifted, Bridget must immolate herself, joining a silent order of nuns and starving to death, her last act being to nurse the man who harmed her.
The greatest of these dark stories is ‘Lois the Witch’, in which communal hysteria is suggestively fused with private sexual persecution and jealousy. Lois is the victim of public ignorance and fear of the unknown, but also of men’s desire and women’s vindictiveness; the heavy powers of Church and law collude with the witch’s curse.
History provides the plot – a retelling of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692, with its terrible denouement and repentant coda. It provides models for the characters and details of the action and setting. It even hands down the words of the men involved, statements which stand like tablets of stone in the flight of the text.16 The third-person narration contains cool authorial interventions reminding readers that they are looking back from an enlightened age to a benighted epoch of superstition and hysteria. In all these ways the story follows the rationalist analysis of witchcraft trials as examples of medical and priestly obscurantism that had engaged Unitarians in the I830S – an approach evident, for instance, in Gaskell’s chief source, Lectures on Witchcraft (183 I) by Charles Upham, the Unitarian minister in Salem, in William Howitt’s popular history of priestcraft (1833) and in Harriet Martineau’s lucid article on Salem (1834).
Gaskell had long been fascinated by witch-hunts: she had borrowed Cotton Mather’s name for her 1847 Howitt’s articles and had mentioned the persecuted Lancashire witches in ‘The Heart of John Middleton’ in 1850, and in June 1856 we find an American correspondent promising to send information on the New England witch trials.17 It may be that her interest was revived at this time by her her friendship with William Wetmore … and her reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne, both natives of Salem (Hawthoren’s ancestor John Hathorne appears in “Lois the Witch”.
End of Uglow quotation
Ellen
This is on my reading (such as it was) of “Lois the Witch” I know I didn’t do justice to it partly because (as ever) I read it at night and was tired. But in the case of this story there was something else. I found it so horrible I couldn’t get myself to focus closely on some of it; I averted my eyes — I couldn’t stand the stern male judgements or the vicious women.
I found I could get on a little (as I couldn’t that African novel, Question of Power, which was so distressing I had to put it down) if I breezed past the worst here and there. What was the worst? The cruelty and spite of these people combined with an utter madness that frightens me — one of the reasons I am myself so distrustful of any religion whatsoever and maintain my stalwart atheism: nothing that is not experienced in nature and can be demonstrated through evidence (which may be speech of experiences themselves documentable) exists. Period. I found myself remember Polanski’s uncanny repulsive movie, Repulsion, about a young girls’s total breakdown under sexual neurotic pressure.
Uglow can read steadily enough that she (importantly) half-faults Lois. Lois’s half-fault was to obey her mother’s injunction so implicitly; she could have stayed in her safe nook in England. She ought to have thought for herself and not chanced this on the strength of some injunction (I’d put t about biology). Uglow has Gaskell showing us women making mistakes (like the mother in “Crooked Branch” by obeying norms that make women not think and act in conformity). It is in fact very dangerous to allow yourself to become embroiled in a world of women without distance — just as dangerous mixed gender communities (so to speak).
Uglow captures the parts of the story where I was unable to read properly, pp 477-79:
The first half of the story brews a mixture of lust, superstition, racist fear and religion. Manasseh’s trust in God is little different from Faith’s trust in her potions; desire distorts his texts. Months before Lois came, he claims, he was reading in the ‘old godly books’:
‘I saw no letter of printer’s ink marked on the page, but I saw a gold and ruddy type of some unknown language, the meaning whereof was whispered unto my soul; it was “Marry Lois! marry Lois!” … It is the Lord’s will Lois, and thou canst not escape from it.’ (Ch. 2)
THE SOUNDS OF TIME: 1857-65
Inner and outer landscapes merge as superstition spreads in the winter months and Salem is ‘snowed up and left to prey on itself’. Manasseh waits, muttering of ‘submission’. At Christmas he tells Lois that in the woods, between sleeping and waking, he saw a spirit offer her two lots, or garments:
‘and the colour of the one was white, like a bride’s, and the other was black and red, which is, being interpreted, a violent death. And, when thou didst choose the latter, the spirit said unto me, “Come!” and I came, and did as I was bidden. I put it on thee with mine own hands, as it is pre-ordained, if thou wilt not hearken to me and be my wife. And when the black and red dress fell to the ground, thou wert even as a corpse three day old.’ (Ch. 2)
This truly horrible, necrophiliac vision presages disaster. When the ice thaws in spring, disturbances begin. Pastor Tappau’s children are convulsed and their Indian nurse Hota is tried as a witch. In the shadow of Hota’s gallows, Lois carries a letter from Faith to Pastor Nolan, who is troubled by the delirium around him. Touched by her grave innocence, Gaskell says, ‘Faith in earthly goodness came over his soul in that instant “and he blessed her unawares”.’ The allusion to the ‘Ancient Mariner’, who blesses the ‘slimy things’ that ‘crawl with legs upon the slimy sea’, is curiously disturbing, recalling the submerged monster imagery of sex in Ruth and North-and South. It suggests that although Lois is innocent, there is some ‘wild’ element in women that both attracts and frightens men, some force that links them with dangerous depths, with the untamed and the primitive – with the Indians and the forest. Nolan’s blessing, his touch on Lois’s shoulder, is interpreted (rightly) by the jealous, watching Faith as an expression of unconscious desire.
At the service which follows Hota’s execution, Lois is late and is forced into prominence. Suddenly, in the silence, Manasseh declares his visions of a fainting woman carried by angels to the land of Beulah:
‘They shall kiss away the black circle of death, and lay her down at the feet of the Lamb. I hear her pleading there for those on earth who consented to her death. 0 Lois! pray also for me, pray for me, miserable!’ (Ch. 3)
Pastor Tappau preaches on the multiple works of the devil. Prudence shrieks, lies in a fit and whispers the name of Lois, who stands as she did in her childish dream, ‘with every eye fixed upon her in hatred and dread’. The crowd pulses around her while she stands ‘quite still in the tight grasp of strange, fierce men’. Faith will not defend her now. Only Manasseh speaks out, passion driving him to the heresy of logic: if all is foredoomed and Lois has no free will, how can she be guilty? His reasoning is defined as unreason: his mother explains that he is mad, and bewitched.
Bound with cords, Lois finds herself in a square dark room with stone walls all around, the claustrophobic pit that lies beneath Gaskell’s fiction from her earliest published writing, ‘Clopton Hall’. Just as Charlotte Clopton devours her own flesh, so Lois becomes ‘a girl thrown inward upon herself’, brought back from the ‘wild, illimitable desert’ of her imagination only by the physical pain of the iron on her legs. Her hesitation before the words of forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer confirms her guilt, but when she is urged to confess and save her life, ‘the truth came once more out of her lips, almost without exercise of her will. “I am not a witch,” she said.’
Helplessly she thinks of Hugh Lucy, who ‘might even now be sailing on the wide blue sea, coming nearer, nearer, every moment; and yet be too late after all’. But no one can save her. That evening Nattee, the Indian servant, is thrust into the cell, and to comfort her before they die together, Lois tells her the story of the crucifixion, the blood of the Lamb spilt to atone for the sins of men. She finds her own version of the Bible which had been used to condemn her; her last cry, before she swings in the air, is not on God or Christ, but ‘Mother!’
When Hugh Lucy, who had indeed come too late, learns of Salem’s recantation and Judge Sewall’s annual day of penitence, he determines to pray for the judge yearly, ‘that his sins may be blotted out and never more had in remembrance. She would have wished it so.’ Salem’s sins are forgiven through the intercession of Lois, the human sacrifice, the female scapegoat. Lois’s father was a minister who would not save a witch; his daughter pays the price. Her story is an appeal against the hypocrisy of those who distort the word of God for their own, illunderstood ends – a prayer on behalf of women, a feminine rereading of the Litany from the Book of Common Prayer, issued in 1662, a generation before Salem:
‘From all evil and mischief, from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil, from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation …,
Uglow ends her reading with “Good Lord Deliver us.”
For myself I see in her explication my objection to the text again. There can be no forgiveness. Some things are not forgivable (I care not how many people do or believe in this evil happenng — the of them the more evil). I remarked in one of my classes today one of the greatness of _Mary Reilly_ is Mary does not forgive her father for the sexual abuse and beatings he inflicts on her.
Ellen
We’re still reading Gaskell on WWTTA and have gone on to “Sexton’s Hero” and other gothics.
Yesterday morning on WWTTA Fran wrote:
“I’ve managed to read the latest Gaskell stories, but while sympathetic to her bravely anti-violent stance (her own pacifism can’t have been all that well received in her often jingoistic times), I can’t say I’m terribly fond of her in
her overtly moralizing mode or of the sentimental religiosity of previous stories like Lizzie Leigh.
Fran, evidently sadly resistant to moral improvement”
to which I replied:
Fran, you make me smile. I don’t think I’m morally improved when I read Gaskell and quite take your point about the (to me) not just cloying but self-destructive veins of moralizing in stories like “Lizzie Leigh.”
My guess is what I do is take away from what Gaskell approves of that I find echoed in my own psyche, and it makes me feel better, less alone. I identified with that Sexton and wish more people in the world were like Dawson. It’d be easier to live on.
Uglow doesn’t emphasize or look at Gaskell’s texts as pacifist, but they certainly are. I like this — we could also call them quietist. At the same time I’ve been reading with my students RLS’s “Ollala” (among other gothic texts) and — very much in the gothic tradition or state of mind — RLS ends that tale with this gnomic utterance:
“pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.”
It’s a kind of intense stoicism, which plays out politically (in the real social world) as conservativism, but it is comforting at least to me, and this kind of stance is one of the reasons I so enjoy the gothic.
The question (I say in my blog on this story) is what are these ethics we are to hold fast to. All RLS’s work manifests a deep bleak pessimism concerning human fallibilities and our animal nature. Gaskell has her Christianity to impose on the worlds she creates and gives us these heroic heroines. Alas, they would not have any real play in the world and that’s what we see in these short stories, many of which are gothic.
Ellen — who goes for sites of resistance like Atwood’s too
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