Elizabeth Gaskell: Gothic Tales

I picked up Gothic Tales thinking it would be a suitably spooky read for Halloween. Even though I read it in the middle of the night, however, I didn’t find much in the book to frighten me; but I did find an abundance of that splendid characterisation and smooth narration that I’ve always enjoyed in Gaskell’s writing.

This Penguin edition contains an assortment of Gaskell’s Gothic short fiction from the 1850s and early 1860s. I’m not sure on what basis the selection has been made, as it’s something of a mish-mash when it comes to both quality and subject matter. Only one of the tales – ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ – is a genuinely chilling ghost story; another, ‘The Poor Clare’, concerns an evil doppelgänger, and in yet another, ‘Curious, if True’, a confused traveller meets characters from familiar fairy-tales. The rest of these Gothic tales had generally a realistic, everyday setting with some threatening elements (mostly not supernatural ones) woven in them; some of the stories are playful, others tragic, but the characters tend to find unexpected evil in each other – or themselves – rather than in any otherworldly creatures. In ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, for instance, an ancient family curse is lived out with surprising psychological realism.

‘Lois the Witch’ - a fictionalised account of the Salem witch hunt – is the longest of the stories, and a fine example of Gaskell’s Gothic ‘method’. Lois Barclay, an orphaned young woman, comes to New England in search of her sole living relations, the Puritanical Hickson family; with tragic inevitability, she arouses suspicion in the community simply by being an outsider. The author positions herself and her audience as enlightened and modern, but her characters’ belief in the reality of witchcraft allows her to make use of a sense of the supernatural. In a similar fashion, she condemns the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and its mouthpiece in the story – the troubled young man, Manasseh Hickson - clearly suffers from mental illness, but at the same time Manasseh’s prophecies have a knack of coming eerily true. The other stories take place in more or less well-defined past as well, and many of them are reported as hear-say; all of which gives Gaskell the freedom to have her cake and eat it too, creating a curious sub-genre of ‘realistic Gothic’.

My favourite story by far was ‘The Grey Woman’ – not, as the title would imply, a ghost story, but a retelling of the Bluebeard myth: Anna, a miller’s young daughter in eighteenth-century Germany, marries the handsome, rich, and seemingly aristocratic M. de Tourvelle, but her husband isn’t quite what he seems. The oppressive atmosphere of her grand, isolated new home is brilliantly rendered; and the last part, which covers her flight with her heroic lady’s maid, Amante, is even better. Not only is the story a gripping thriller, but it brings to the fore a feminist subtext present in the background of several of the other stories, and contains an interesting depiction of friendship between women (hinting even at romantic love: ‘amante’, after all, stands for ‘lover’). Indeed, I’m surprised if this story (alongside ‘Lois the Witch’) hasn’t given rise to many essays of literary criticism.

Final Verdict: The quality of this collection was a bit uneven: the best stories were brilliant, the worst so-so. There was something in each of them to intrigue me, but those who aren’t devotees of Victorian literature to begin with might want to sample them first before buying the book, so take a look at these e-texts of ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ and ‘The Grey Woman’. (‘Lois the Witch’ has also been published separately as a pretty Hesperus edition.) Gaskell has a very curious take on the Gothic, and I’m definitely going to look for more of these tales.

Penguin, 2000, 367 pp., ISBN: 014043741X