Dear Serial Readers,
I am glad Julia is writing about the Gothic, so she can illuminate us on this story! Too bad that the French maid's potential threat hinted about at the close of portion one turns out to be illusory, yet I don't think we're getting "mock Gothic" here as we do with Austen's novel. Still, the story seems more Gothic than contemporary sensation fiction, in part because of the setting on the European Continent, the emphasis on the elaborate chateau with secret passageways, the two women hiding and eavesdropping, the villainous husband and his criminal society of men who seem to murder without much in the way of interesting motivation. And the entire fugitive episode (lots of "wandering") occurs when Anna is pregnant! So much for middle-class Victorian women's "confinement"! There *are* elements--disguise and cross-dressing and bigamy--that populate sensation fiction. Oddly perhaps, this story reminded me of the section of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (a novel Gaskell knew) where Cassie and Emmeline disguise themselves and hide inside and then flee. Only the problem is that there's no Simon Legree here, no compellingly corrupt villain or social evil driving their flight, disguise, wandering. Just a naive (silly?) young woman who tries to do as she's bidden, and ends up with a wicked husband she flees due to the resourcefulness of her French maid.
I wonder if part of the problem is the limited space of the short story, a container too tight for this kind of narrative, at least for Gaskell. Collins's "Miss or Mrs"--even though printed in one number--did have the episodic structure of the twelve dramatic "scenes," and some interesting plot complications and plenty of dialogue and variety. Anna's long prosaic ("grey") letter to her daughter and the telling of her flight from her murdering husband made me sleepy rather than on edge with suspense. I did not care about any of these many murders and deaths, although Gaskell is so skilled with portraying affecting deaths in her novels. I wonder too how Gaskell's foray here into the Gothic might compare with Victorian ghost stories as a subset of the Gothic? "The Grey Woman" seems a kind of ghost, a shadow of a past self, a more haunting presence (although I did not feel haunted).
Next week we'll start another Dickens serial--Little Dorrit--with the first four chapters, published in December 1855. My next post, and three after that one, will be from London, so I'm hoping Dickens supplies some good local scenery!
As for this Gaskell story, I can only sign off as:
Serially soporific,
Susan
1 comment:
Yes, I'll have to agree that "The Grey Woman" is not the most suspenseful Gothic tale I've read! One interesting fact that I did discover while reading about Gaskell's minor Gothic fiction is that she actually compiled many of the stories in a volume called *Round the Sofa,* connecting them with a single narrator. Some have described this as a "composite novel" much like Cranford--although it obviously didn't achieve the same level of success! Thinking of Susan's observations on the limits of the short story form, I wonder if this subsequent frame might have helped to develop Gaskell's stories into something more satisfying?
One thing that I did find interesting about "The Grey Woman" was the way Gaskell shifted the story into the "legitimate" realm of the family. Her Gothic villain is not an outsider, but instead a legitimate husband who obtains Anna with her father's permission (instead of under false pretenses, by abduction, etc.). Here I think Gaskell is doing something rather new, and something that paves the way for "domestic" Gothic in the form of sensation fiction.
On a side note, I've been reading another Gothic tale by Gaskell that is less of a sleeper. It's called "Lois the Witch" and takes place at the time of the Salem witch trials. Susan's mention of the escape passages of *Uncle Tom's Cabin* made me think of this other American connection in Gaskell's short stories.
But now on to Dickens... I'm excited to be reading Little Dorrit!
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