American Gothic, page 80
“Bart,” she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed toward the great black hollow of the west, “who lives over there in that shack?”
She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then, her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that she might easily have been mistaken.
“I say, Bart, why don’t you speak? If there’s any one around to associate with, I should think you’d let me have the benefit of their company. It isn’t as funny as you think, staying here alone days and days.”
“You ain’t gettin’ homesick, be you, sweetheart?” cried Bart, putting his arms around her. “You ain’t gettin’ tired of my society, be yeh?”
It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner, but at length Flora was able to return to her original topic.
“But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?”
“I’m not acquainted with ’em,” said Bart, sharply. “Ain’t them biscuits done, Flora?”
Then, of course, she grew obstinate.
“Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that house, and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down the road from there. Some one lives there I know, for in the mornings and at night I see the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
“Do you now?” cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her with unfeigned interest. “Well, do you know, sometimes I’ve fancied I seen that too?”
“Well, why not,” cried Flora, in half anger. “Why shouldn’t you?”
“See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an’ listen to me. There ain’t no house there. Hello! I didn’t know you’d go for to drop the biscuits. Wait, I’ll help you pick ’em up. By cracky, they’re hot, ain’t they? What you puttin’ a towel over ’em for? Well, you set down here on my knee, so. Now you look over at that there house. You see it, don’t yeh? Well, it ain’t there! No! I saw it the first week I was out here. I was jus’ half dyin’, thinkin’ of you an’ wonderin’ why you didn’t write. That was the time you was mad at me. So I rode over there one day – lookin’ up company, so t’ speak – and there wa’n’t no house there. I spent all one Sunday lookin’ for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary about it. He laughed an’ got a little white about th’ gills, an’ he said he guessed I’d have to look a good while before I found it. He said that there shack was an ole joke.”
“Why – what – ”
“Well, this here is th’ story he tol’ me. He said a man an’ his wife come out here t’ live an’ put up that there little place. An’ she was young, you know, an’ kind o’ skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on her an’ worked on her, an’ one day she up an’ killed the baby an’ her husband an’ herself. Th’ folks found ’em and buried ’em right there on their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th’ house was burned down. Don’t know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I guess it burned!”
“You guess it burned!”
“Well, it ain’t there, you know.”
“But if it burned the ashes are there.”
“All right, girlie, they’re there then. Now let’s have tea.”
This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening, but that didn’t keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the little house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger’s back – Ginger being her own yellow broncho – and set off at a hard pace for the house. It didn’t appear to come any nearer, but the objects which had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Flora pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approached the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the little shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her eyes.
She slapped Ginger’s flanks and kept him going, and she at last got him up to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall and rank and in the midst of it lay a baby’s shoe. Flora thought of picking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she grew angry, and set Ginger’s head toward the place and tried to drive him over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered himself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home as only a broncho can.
Note
THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
1 Living as bachelors.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
Edith Wharton’s career was one of the most distinguished among American writers. Long considered a disciple of Henry James, she is now recognized as a strong and independent talent, with major achievement in fiction, travel writing, and autobiography, sustained over several decades. Gothic elements appear in a number of her works. Hints of witchcraft run through her popular novella Ethan Frome, for example, as Wharton draws on the history and folk traditions of its rural New England setting, and on her predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“The Eyes” (1910) is a conventional-seeming ghost story with surprisingly complex implications. One thread worth considering is the autobiographical dimension of the piece, since Wharton clearly has written herself into the figure of the girl in the “Gothic library,” Alice Nowell. Libraries are a potent recurring motif in Wharton’s fiction (see, for example, the village library in which Charity Royall is librarian in Summer). They are a place of refuge but also of danger: young Edith Jones (Wharton was the name of her husband, whom she divorced) spent a lonely childhood reading in her father’s library; recently critic Gloria Erlich has speculated that she may have endured some sort of childhood trauma there, possibly involving her father.
What does one read in a “Gothic library”? Another way to consider “The Eyes” is as a “meta-Gothic” tale, a story about Gothic fiction. We enter a safe world of masculine privilege in the narrative frame, a tradition defined in American literature by Washington Irving, who is mentioned in the story (and who was a friend of Wharton’s father, by the way). The framed narrator, Culwin, thinks that he has scored a triumph as a Gothic storyteller. Yet the story ends with Culwin, and the clubby storytelling world he presides over, discredited. Is this a triumph of the girl in the library, and of female Gothic over its masculine counterpart?
Text: Scribner’s Magazine 47 (June 1910), 671–80.
The Eyes
We had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s – the narrative of a strange personal visitation.
Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfill the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham – whose story was the slightest of the lot – had the habit of sending our souls into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.
Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his armchair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be favored with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”
Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution of his physiognomy.
“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,” Murchard had once said of him. “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” someone else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky. Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because someone had to do the cooking. On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the only science which he revered as a dogma. It must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in favor of this view, besides being a reason – though not the main one – for the fidelity of his friends.
Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting place for the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and drafty, but light, spacious and orderly – a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves have fallen. In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two neophytes were now and then added to our band.
Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend “liked ’em juicy.” It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a good subject for experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a fine glaze. Culwin had fished him out of a fog of family dullness, and pulled him up to a peak in Darien;1 and the adventure hadn’t hurt him a bit. Indeed, the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities without robbing them of their bloom of awe seemed to me a sufficient answer to Murchard’s ogreish metaphor. There was nothing hectic in Frenham’s efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even a finger tip on the sacred stupidities. One wanted no better proof of that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.
“There’s a side of him you fellows don’t see. I believe that story about the duel!” he declared; and it was of the very essence of this belief that it should impel him – just as our little party was dispersing – to turn back to our host with the joking demand: “And now you’ve got to tell us about your ghost!”
The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham and I remained; and the devoted servant who presided over Culwin’s destinies, having brought a fresh supply of soda water, had been laconically ordered to bed.
Culwin’s sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that he expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight. But Frenham’s appeal seemed to disconcert him comically, and he rose from the chair in which he had just reseated himself after his farewells in the hall.
“My ghost? Do you suppose I’m fool enough to go to the expense of keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my friends’ closets? Take another cigar,” he said, revolving toward me with a laugh.
Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the chimney piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.
“Oh,” he said, “you’d never be content to share if you met one you really liked.”
Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded in the hollow of worn leather, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar.
“Liked – liked? Good Lord!” he growled.
“Ah, you have, then!” Frenham pounced on him in the same instant, with a side glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered gnomelike among his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke.
“What’s the use of denying it? You’ve seen everything, so of course you’ve seen a ghost!” his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly into the cloud. “Or, if you haven’t seen one, it’s only because you’ve seen two!”
The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host. He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.
“That’s it,” he flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; “it’s only because I’ve seen two!”
The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a deep silence, while we continued to stare at each other over Culwin’s head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts. At length Frenham, without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of the hearth and leaned forward with his listening smile….
II
“Oh, of course they’re not show ghosts – a collector wouldn’t think anything of them…. Don’t let me raise your hopes … their one merit is their numerical strength: the exceptional fact of their being two. But, as against this, I’m bound to admit that at any moment I could probably have exorcised them both by asking my doctor for a prescription, or my oculist for a pair of spectacles. Only, as I never could make up my mind whether to go to the doctor or the oculist – whether I was afflicted by an optical or a digestive delusion – I left them to pursue their interesting double life, though at times they made mine exceedingly uncomfortable….
“Yes – uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable! But it was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to admit that I could be disturbed by the trifling matter of seeing two.
“And then I’d no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew I was simply bored – horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom – I remember – that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and didn’t know how on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long journey – down in South America and Mexico – and had settled down for the winter near New York with an old aunt who had known Washington Irving and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She lived, not far from Irvington, in a damp Gothic villa overhung by Norway spruces and looking exactly like a memorial emblem done in hair. Her personal appearance was in keeping with this image, and her own hair – of which there was little left – might have been sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.
“I had just reached the end of an agitated year, with considerable arrears to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed as though my aunt’s mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my nerves as to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I felt myself safe and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how was I to work it off inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that time, the illusion that sustained intellectual effort could engage a man’s whole activity; and I decided to write a great book – I forget about what. My aunt, impressed by my plan, gave up to me her Gothic library, filled with classics bound in black cloth and daguerreotypes of faded celebrities; and I sat down at my desk to win myself a place among their number. And to facilitate my task she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.
“The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was just what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and principally in myself. She was neither beautiful nor intelligent – poor Alice Nowell! – but it interested me to see any woman content to be so uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the secret of her content. In doing this I handled it rather rashly, and put it out of joint – oh, just for a moment! There’s no fatuity in telling you this, for the poor girl had never seen anyone but cousins….
“Well, I was sorry for what I’d done, of course, and confoundedly bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to the library to fetch a book she’d mislaid, like any artless heroine, on the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered, and it suddenly occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty, would look exactly like my aunt’s when she grew older. I was glad I had noticed this, for it made it easier for me to decide to do what was right; and when I had found the book she hadn’t lost I told her I was leaving for Europe that week.
“Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what I meant. She didn’t take it in the least as I’d expected – it would have been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and turned away a moment to wind up the lamp on my desk – it had a ground-glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember. Then she came back, held out her hand, and said: ‘Good-bye.’ And as she said it she looked straight at me and kissed me. I had never felt anything as fresh and shy and brave as her kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: ‘I’ll marry her, and when my aunt dies she’ll leave us this house, and I’ll sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over there with her embroidery and look at me as she’s looking now. And life will go on like that for any number of years.’ The prospect frightened me a little, but at the time it didn’t frighten me as much as doing anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on her finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.
