Gothic Tales

GOTHIC TALES

ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester. For the first sixteen years of her marriage, she combined the activities of motherhood, the management of a busy household and parish work in an area notorious for its poverty and appalling living conditions. She also travelled and started to write. Mary Barton, her first full-length fiction, published in 1848 and set in industrial Manchester, was an instant success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years; her most notable work being another novel of Manchester industrial life, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend until the latter's death in 1855. Soon after this, Gaskell was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a carefully researched and sympathetic account of this probing and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Gaskell's position as a minister's wife and as a successful writer gave her a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and the larger literary world. She was a committed and uncompromising artist, as Dickens discovered when, as editor of Household Words, he unsuccessfully tried to impose his views on her. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866), are usually considered to be her finest, revealing developments in narrative technique and subtleties of character portrayal. Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865 at Alton, Hampshire, in the house that she had bought with her literary eatnings.

LAURA KRANZLER received her D.Phil. on Gothic Fiction from Hertford College, Oxford. She has written articles on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the literary theory of Virginia Woolf, and is the author of two novels.

ELIZABETH GASKELL

Gothic Tales

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
LAURA KRANZLER

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Published in Penguin Classics 2000
Reprinted 2004
5

Introduction and Notes copyright © Laura Kranzler, 2000
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

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CONTENTS

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

(Readers are advised that this Introduction makes some of the plots explicit.)

In a letter to Eliza ‘Tottie’ Fox dated 29 May 1849, Elizabeth Gaskell triumphantly proclaims, ‘I SAW a ghost! Yes I did; though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St I should not wonder if you are sceptical.’1 This juxtaposition of the ghastly and the everyday suggests one of the defining characteristics of the Gothic genre, that of the uncanny double, the shadowy world that is the complex underbelly of familiar experience. Gaskell can be seen to exploit the idea of mirror opposites in the very form of her fiction; it could be suggested that her pleasurably eerie short stories and novellas collected here represent the darkly surreal depths of her more overtly political and realistic novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855).2 Gaskell’s interest in ghosts and Gothic fiction is well documented.3 One of her first pieces of published work was ‘Clopton Hall’, a reworking of an atmospheric essay she had written while at Avonbank School in Stratford-upon-Avon, published in 1840 by her friend William Howitt in his collection Visits to Remarkable Places.4 This short piece, like the stories collected here, indicates Gaskell’s playful exploration not just of the supernatural, but of other Gothic themes and motifs such as the doubled identity, the discovered manuscript, and the conflict with history and forms of authority. In Gaskell’s Gothic scenarios, it is usually the female characters who are victimized by the males, and it is this investment in exposing the conflict between the powerful and the powerless that links these stories and novellas most explicitly with the themes of her better-known full-length works. However, although Gaskell may be said to be most fully engaged in exposing social and political injustice, as the pieces collected here demonstrate, there is a marked tension between the categories of factual sources and fictionalized narratives, between stories which empower the self and stories which oppress the Other. Part of what constitutes the Gothic experience in these stories is the split between different forms of identity and between different forms of authority – in terms of gender, history and textuality – and how those boundaries are themselves transgressed. In Gaskell’s stories and novellas, what has been repressed continues to return, fact continually merges into fiction, and it is these shifts between what is real and what is imagined – seeing that ghost in the everyday street – that makes these stories so compelling.

One of the fundamental contradictions inherent in these stories is, of course, the character of the writer herself. All of the pieces collected here, except for ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, were originally published anonymously, all but two in Charles Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round. Her first three stories, however – ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ (1847), ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ (1847) and ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ (1848) – first appeared in Howitt’s Journal and were published under the name ‘Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.’, a provocative and witty pseudonym.5 It links her commitment to contemporary Manchester industry (the cotton mill) with the New England clergyman, scholar and, most notoriously, witch-hunter. One of Cotton Mather’s most influential works was Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1685), and he himself makes a notable appearance in Gaskell’s story ‘Lois the Witch’, when he arrives in Salem to assist in the purging and judging of ‘witches’. Gaskell’s identity as writer under this name is thus a curious hybrid of Unitarian and Puritan, English and American, Victorian and seventeenth century, and crucially calls into question the relationship between fiction and history, female and male identities, and a sense of the comic within more serious concerns.

In her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell explicitly refers to her ambivalence about the differences between the freedom with which men can pursue a career in writing, and the oppressive weight of responsibilities that interferes with the same pursuit for women:

When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit… and another… steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she… must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others.6

There is a melancholic realization here, it seems, in Gaskell’s recognition of the near-impossibility of compromise between women’s responsibilities to others and to themselves and their talents; whereas men, according to Gaskell, are virtually interchangeable in the world of work, and therefore can step out of it at will to pursue their own interests, women, it seems, are inevitably bound to their domestic and social obligations. How, then, can a woman reconcile these with the necessity that she find time to write, though this writing must still be in the ‘service of others’?

In a letter to Eliza Fox written in 1850, Gaskell stresses the point that ‘Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount.’7 She then goes on to stress in the same letter the need for a ‘refuge of the hidden world of Art’, which women can ‘shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares’.