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.

Gaskell again describes the woman who turns against another in complicity with an inflexibly self-righteous father in ‘Lois the Witch’. Lois’s father, a Barford minister, refuses to come to the aid of a woman who is being stoned and drowned for a witch; in response the witch turns her curse on Lois, rather than the father, crying, ‘Parson’s wench, parson’s wench, yonder, in thy nurse’s arms, thy dad hath never tried for to save me, and none shall save thee when thou art brought up for a witch.’ Lois goes on to tell her New England audience, ‘I used to dream that I was in that pond, all men hating me with their eyes because I was a witch.’ The woman’s curse comes true and Lois must be punished for the sin of her father in an uncanny doubling of women’s fates.

Perhaps the text which is most overtly devoted to the representation of women’s investment in the domestic sphere and the pull of the maternal bond is ‘The Poor Clare’. In a letter dated 2 January 1856, Charles Dickens impatiently beseeched Elizabeth Gaskell to end her delay and complete her manuscript so he could publish the conclusion in Household Words: ‘I have been going on, hoping to see the end of the story you could not finish (which was not your fault or anybody’s) in time for Christmas. When will it be forthcoming, I wonder! You have not deserted it. You cannot be such an unnatural mother.’30 Dickens’s jocular reference to Gaskell as the ‘unnatural mother’ could not be more ironically apposite in the context of ‘The Poor Clare’, for this is a story, like so many of Gaskell’s works, about surrogate, non-biological mothers, frequently servants, who are somehow more ‘natural’ parents than the upper-class biological fathers.31 ‘The Poor Clare’ pits the nurturing, protective and self-sacrificing love of the servant Bridget Fitzgerald for her granddaughter Lucy against the cruel and selfish neglect of Lucy’s father, Squire Gisborne, who rejects his daughter once her ‘demonic’ personality – which he has indirectly ‘sired’ into being – begins to assert itself.

Bridget’s love for Lucy is echoed by Mrs Clarke, Lucy’s ‘official’ guardian, who seeks to protect her tormented charge from malicious outsiders. In this sense Mrs Clarke is strikingly similar to Hester in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, whose enfolding arms shield the child Rosamund from her ghostly seducer, the little dead girl who is beckoning to Rosamund to join her outside in the snow. Similarly, Amante in ‘The Grey Woman’ takes charge as surrogate mother, husband and, most intriguingly, lover, as her name suggests, when the suicidally docile Anna is too weak to take control over her own life. It is Amante, the lady’s maid, who devises the scheme by which Anna and she can escape Anna’s murderous husband, by posing as wife and husband. Anna is pregnant, and is therefore unable to pass as a man; it is Amante who enacts the role of Anna’s male guide, and thus it is the female servant in male disguise who outwits the dangerously frustrated wealthy bandit, and who acts as adoptive ‘father’ as well as mother to Anna’s newly born child. It seems therefore appropriate that Gaskell, who once wrote under a man’s name, and can so convincingly impersonate a male narrative voice, should write about a female servant acting as a man in order to protect the woman who is in her care.

Mother-love in ‘The Poor Clare’, however, is also seen as dangerous when it turns inward on itself in pain and despair; Bridget’s agonized grief for her missing daughter Mary finds expression in the curse she hurls at Gisborne once he has shot Mary’s dog, which is all Bridget had left to love: ‘You shall live to see the creature you love best, and who alone loves you… become a terror and a loathing for all, for this blood’s sake.’ ‘This blood’ is, of course, a patently ironic reference not merely to the blood of the murdered dog, but to the blood-ties that link Lucy Gisborne, the unintended victim of this curse, with her grandmother who, in striking out at the aristocratic man, ends up sacrificing her yet-unborn granddaughter. In this way the mother’s curse doubles back on itself to inflict pain on the curser and the cursed.

Moreover the mother–daughter bond, which can be seen to encode danger as well as comfort and nurturance, can also be seen as the manifestation of two identities acting as one; the uncanny echoing between Bridget and her daughter Mary, almost lover-like in its intensity, suggests the dual nature of female identity which is a dominant theme in the Gothic. Bridget and Mary, we are told, ‘were too much alike to agree. There were wild quarrels between them, and wilder reconciliations. There were times when, in the heat of passion, they could have stabbed each other. At all other times they both – Bridget especially – would have willingly laid down their lives for one another.’ However, whereas mother and daughter mirror each other’s rage as well as devotion, Bridget and her granddaughter Lucy also manifest that most fundamental split between the two sides of feminine identity so central to Victorian ideology: the split between the ‘pure’, asexual ideal and monstrous, sexual voraciousness.

Bridget’s curse thus results in the demonic manifestation of her granddaughter Lucy, who is doomed to be continually shadowed by her fearsome, seductive Other, a common theme of many Gothic novels including Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and, nearly contemporary with ‘The Poor Clare’, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). In ‘The Poor Clare’, however, the double is specifically sexual, as is apparent in the narrator’s description of Lucy’s shadow.

I saw behind her another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness, so far as form and feature and minutest touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous. My heart stood still within me; every hair rose up erect; my flesh crept with horror.

The monstrosity of this sexually assertive woman is here made abundantly clear, and yet the narrator is candid enough to admit that it is precisely this ‘loathsome’ eroticism of Lucy’s double which so attracts him to her: ‘I never loved her more fondly than now when – and that was the unspeakable misery – the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT.’

Interestingly, in yet another instance of Gaskell’s use of mirror opposites, Lucy’s split into two is reflected in her grandmother Bridget’s identification with the iconized examples of the contrasting sides of woman as virgin and whore in Western Christian thought. Bridget, a devout Catholic, is initially seen by the narrator ‘praying to the Virgin in a kind of ecstasy’, yet by the end of the story, when she has entered the severely ascetic order of the Poor Clares in Antwerp, she has taken on the name of Sister Magdalen. Thus it appears that part of the grandmother’s penance involves a partial re-enactment of the psychic division manifested in physical form by the granddaughter she has cursed with her own words. It is surely ironic, though, that Bridget atones for the sexual doubling of her granddaughter by taking on the name of the most famous reformed prostitute in Western culture.

Moreover, Lucy’s psychic split is re-enacted at the level of the narrative itself. Although the nameless lawyer is the ostensible narrator of the story, parts of the narrative are taken over by other characters directly involved in the events they retell: Lucy’s guardian, Mrs Clarke, takes up some of the story, as does the priest, Father Bernard, who is the confessor to the Starkey family for whom Bridget worked.