Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost – Initial Reaction

Full disclosure, this was the second time I read this story, but my memories of it were vague at best. I had an image of the diabolical ghost from the end of the story in my mind but I remember feeling rather nonplussed by the story as a whole.

So why read it a second time? I think because I felt nonplussed and that didn’t make sense to me. Le Fanu entered my consciousness when I read Carmilla while studying vampires in my Honours year and he blew me away. If you haven’t read Carmilla, do it, the prose is beautiful. I then read the next story in the anthology I was using, Schalken the Painter. For the life of me I can’t remember what happens but I know I enjoyed it immensely; I must reread it too.

It was probably a year or two after that that I read Madam Crowl’s Ghost and I was quite surprised to be so disappointed. Having forgotten the details I couldn’t remember why such a master of 19th century supernatural thrillers would disappoint me. So I reread it to see if it was as drab as I recalled. It wasn’t.

I think the problem I had was it’s written in first person, which I love if it’s done well, and in the dialect of the narrator, which makes sense but in this case I think it probably threw me. The narrator is an old woman relating events from the first time she worked as a servant and her language is of the English working class from a century and a half ago. This kind of language is not conducive to feats of ‘high’ prose. Combine that with the late reveal which seems low key in modern terms and I think that was why I failed to be impressed.

Reading it again I appreciate the skill Le Fanu displayed in using the language of this elderly maid to build the sense of mystery around Madam Crowl. The story shows her in glimpses and through gossip, before a late scene where she scares the daylights out of the narrator. All that before she’s died, so the ghost only comes in right at the end, more as a way to reveal the answer to the mystery of the woman than anything else. Le Fanu builds the mystery through intimation and subtle hints which leaves us needing answers to solve the disquiet building in our minds and the narrator’s as she remembers the events of her youth.

By modern standards the story is a bit too anticlimactic and is paced rather slowly, but in the end that’s neither here nor there. It’s a strong suspense story of its day and demonstrates Le Fanu’s writing powers could match the dialectical challenges. It’s also interesting in the manner of its telling.

Most first-person narrations are given by people who only recently experienced the events they’re describing, at least in the last few years. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say there’s no discernable age difference or at least that age has nothing to do with story. Sometimes it will be an adult referring to events in childhood but I can’t think of any examples of that predating Madam Crowl’s Ghost (not that I’m an expert so that could be total rubbish). Having the story of an old woman told through the eyes of another old woman who is remembering meeting the first woman as a young girl changes things slightly.

That she was young at the time, and a maid where the titular character is aristocracy, gives us the mode of the story – fleeting encounters, gossip and innuendo. We’re also given her perspective which cannot help but have a heightened sense of fear due to her inexperience and the new surroundings.

But Le Fanu doesn’t spoon-feed us her terror with a close report of events; rather he shows it to us through the memories of an old woman. This costs him a certain immediacy in the key scenes but their vividness is now coming to us from years hence. These events have marked this woman for life and remained with her as fresh as yesterday. Even with her decades of experience since then the events of that time have lingered in her mind as a terrible mystery. It’s a tricky line but Le Fanu walks it skilfully.

The dénouement does wrap things up rather too neatly and the suspense is lost in the last couple of pages. Instead it shifts to the scandalous truth behind the mysterious old woman – a common enough ending for the time but it’s hard to read its efficacy these days when we’re much harder to be shocked. And that is likely the biggest reason for me not liking the story initially. I guess I’ve encountered the type enough now to enjoy the build of the story and not worry too much about the ending.

Keep dreaming!

Random Thesis Musing No 1

In her essay, On Ghosts, Mary Shelley laments the way the world is changing to a more rational, more understood and more linear place. The way the sun is known to be a star filled with gas as opposed to a mysterious orb that might be the chariot of a god, for instance. In this she neatly summarises a general feeling within the Romantic movement and with the Gothics in particular – that the new ways following the various revolutions at the end of the 18th century were potentially robbing us of our sense of wonder; hence the romanticising of the past and the insistence (at times) in the existence of the supernatural.

As progress has not slowed since that time it is little wonder these feelings have lingered and the rebellious medievalist spirit of the Gothics has continued in many forms of storytelling as well. But while mad monks, ghosts, mouldering castles and star-crossed lovers gave escape from the modernising of the world, Shelly went further and commented on the very progress she lamented in her essay.
In Frankenstein she inverts the supernatural threat by having the devils and monsters made by humans overstepping their mortal bounds as opposed to things beyond our mortal ken. In so doing she of course established an archetype and moved us closer to a genre which would become science fiction. Taking the novel with On Ghosts and her other major work, The Last Man, however we see a different tradition arise.

Shelley gives us a world we think we understand but do not. Her works threaten us with destruction because of this assumed knowledge and the failure to understand the greater mystery.

Taking this view, a new tradition can be seen to have risen from Shelley, one of a shrinking, rationalised world left at the mercy of the forgotten things, or inversely, the tragic lingering of the old ways against the rise of the new. The first half of this is best represented in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu and Dream Quest stories, while the latter is seen in Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. More recently, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods combine both sides of the tradition.

Worthwhile Procrastination

Sometimes as a means of procrastinating I go to certain sites and look at free ebooks. I've downloaded a heap of books and short stories in the process many of which I'll never read but when the only cost is a click of the mouse and they take up no physical room and very little room in terms of file space I don't see the harm and those I do read are a bonus in many more ways than one.

I started off getting things by authors I knew or knew of and wanted to know - Wells, Verne, Lovecraft, Howard etc. But I found it took more time and was therefore a better form of procrastination to look into authors I'd never heard of before. As such I downloaded books that 'might be interesting'. Since doing that I've forgotten what most of them were and who the authors were too.

I have made some great discoveries this way though. Through a link I followed and a snippet someone had written about it I discovered Thomas Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, for instance. It's not what you might think, in fact it's open satire and quite droll at that. It's not even satirising Gothic fiction so much as society in Victorian England.

Currently I'm discovering The Lancashire Witches by Ainsworth. I'd forgotten this download entirely aside from the title being in my e-library. I didn't even know if it was a novel or some treatise on witchcraft in Lancashire. It's the former. A historical romance not unlike a Gothic romance, in fact very much like one.

So if you're going to procrastinate, make it worthwhile and get some books you never knew you wanted - or write a blog about doing it.

Keep dreaming.