Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 12: “The Shadow” & “Man-Size in Marble”
In the build up to this week's E. Nesbit-fest, several punters (childhood Nesbit fans all) have mentioned to me that they were barely aware (if aware at all) of Edith's contribution to the spooky story canon. This is not entirely surprising given that even her biographers have either a) failed to mention the tales at all, or, b) mentioned them only to sniffily dismiss them as "singularly ineffectual and now deservedly forgotten".1
Anyone who's been sensible enough to snap up a copy of Wordsworth's recent(ish) The Power of Darkness – Tales of Terror may well wonder exactly what this neglect/disdain is based on. For at their best Nesbit's stories manage to be simultaneously heart-breaking, genuinely creepy, and unflinchingly (cruelly) bleak. Doomed love, human weakness, and "meaninglessness" saturate the pages – in strange and compelling ways.2 Elevating the tales (well) above much of what the genre usually offers.
But enough from me (for now). Time for you (yes, you. You there.) to clear your throat and have your say. I'm currently juggling babies and cats, but will dive in as soon as time allows.
Proceed.
P.S: Links to the stories below if you're joining us late. Discussion runs till next Monday, so plenty of time to catch up.
a) "The Shadow" (pdf)
b) "Man-Size in Marble" (html), (pdf).
- Mentioned/Quoted by David Stuart Davies, in his introduction to The Power of Darkness – Tales of Terror (Wordsworth Editions, 2006). [back]
- Though I'm reluctant to offer facile biographical "explanations" for the existence of these qualities, it's hard not to see her…er…"unconventional" marriage to Hubert Bland as a contributory factor (see Wikipedia and the usual sources for more on this). [back]
April 27, 2009
42 responses to Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 12: “The Shadow” & “Man-Size in Marble”
I must say I had an overwhelming response of ‘getoutofthehouse!!!-itis’ with these two.
Definitely in the Shadow, but the pigheadedness of the husband in Mansize! GO HOME. Don’t go for a walk, to the CHURCH. Pay attention to the fact that your sweet little wife is frightened and asked you not to stay out too long. GAH!
What were the chances of another affable Irish doctor showing up again so soon? A bit more sceptical than his compatriot in ‘The Upper Berth’ but once again a charmer. There must have been something in the water…even back then!
Both of these stories were tragic but “Man-Size in Marble� edged it for tragic misery: maybe because we got to know the poor Laura before she met her doom. Two delightfully sad tales of terror…thank you once again Fústar!
Cnuimh, Just moved your comment from the other post to this (the discussion post). More in a few minutes!
Ah, sure, tis only a little bit of a haunting you’ve got there, no trouble at all to ya.
I like the curt “Right, no mess, no fuss, just ghosts. Positively no mucking about, here. If you have a problem with that, then I’ve nothing more to say about it. But it happened” vibe of both stories. The self-awareness of the girls and housekeeper in The Shadow is a nice reminder that we as readers had been through the looking glass long before postmodernity.
Yes, the Irish doctor was a nice little (unintentional) connect to session 11. Perhaps we’ve stumbled upon an oft-forgotten staple of “gothic” tales? The Irish doctor side-kick.
Man-Size has a sort of horrible inevitability about the outcome. It’s more or less signaled from the outset that the Laura is the victim of the piece, but that just amplifies the awful feelings of “Ah, please don’t let it happen”-ness! They’re a sympathetic and loving couple, stalked and destroyed. It’s all so unfair! Sniff…
The worst bit though, is how he left her alone, so deliberately, when she’d asked him not to! I’ll have a smoke… no, I’ll go for a walk, no I’ll go to the church, notice the missing statues, and COMPLETELY IGNORE all of my housekeeper’s warning!
NEVER ignore the housekeeper’s warning.
There was certainly an inevitability about Laura’s death, not least the references to her ‘head’ (“dark head”, “little head”) rather than her face or her smile (for example). She’s almost a corpse before they find her in the cottage.
The mention of the candles and the room ablaze, even with even “tallow dips” jammed into the most unlikely places: it’s easy to imagine Laura’s panic and sense of foreboding even before the statues show up, she’s fendign off evil, lighting everything (within reason) that will burn!
I have to agree with Jo though, the men in both stories are apalling! Each of them should have just left the house. I share the ‘getoutofthehouse!!!-itis’. How hard can it be? I mean, there is actually one moment of ‘it’s-behind-you-ness’ or ‘beware-the-evil’ in each tale and both men still plough on ensuring their respective wives fate is sealed. Dreadful men!
And yet,the women are strangely helpless.
The husband in the shadow seemed far less of a worthwhile person than Miss Thingy (apologies, all names have left me), he’d clearly comported himself terribly in their past and then run away from the problem. And then he seemed strangely weak, not communicating with his wife, staying there passively, dragging Miss Thingy back in to – well, to what? Save him? Forgive him and make his shadow go away?
Also, he didn’t give his wife much credit. Surely she was party to the shadow thing as well, and that would account for her nerves etc. It is nasty, alright.
Jo,
I think that’s why I preferred The Shadow – that nauseous, quotidian unspokenness pervading everything really got under my skin. And that the shadow does its terrible business on Miss Thingy’s watch! Eek.
I mean, what does that tell us about Miss Thingy?
Yes, it’s all the more horrible for its unexplained randomness.
And the fact that is somehow tracks the daughter and strikes – why then?
She was a sympathetic character, Miss Thingy, wasn’t she? Good set up.
Oo! She brought the shadow??
You’re right Jo, just because the men are useless it doesn’t mean that the women are any great shakes either. They probably deserve eachother, especially in ‘The Shadow’. I can’t help but feel sorry for Laura though…I can imagine her being told for her entire life that her sixth sense and premonitions were no more than female debility and that she should turn to the males in her life for sense and reason. She found out all-too late that she was right.
And, what kind of idiot, I don’t care where he lives or in what era, goes for a night-walk in a churchyard on Halloween unless he actually believes in the tale a little bit and wants to confront his fears? Worse still, he’d have been better off staying at home to do that! Frustrating but very appealing in the ‘look behind you’ tradition.
I’m jumping in and out to follow the already nicely simmering discussion. Will return properly sometime before bed.
Heh, Fustar has a baby now…
“I can’t help but feel sorry for Laura though…I can imagine her being told for her entire life that her sixth sense and premonitions were no more than female debility and that she should turn to the males in her life for sense and reason. She found out all-too late that she was right.”
This is key really. The narrator wants to protect her from Mrs. Dorman’s “superstitions” (I love the fact that he goes to look at the statues on the night in question to prove “how vain her fancies were”) because Laura’s allegedly “highly strung” and “impressionable”.
Of course these are but pejorative terms for being “sensitive” and having what is scornfully referred to as “woman’s intuition”! Turns out that his attempt to keep this lore from her is (in a way) what leads to her death. If she’d been allowed to follow her instincts and “presentiments of evil” then they would, most likely, have (as Jo put it) “gotoutofthehouse”!
Having said all that, they do love each other. The night scene spent (at the church) gazing out over the meadows and “feeling in
every fibre of [their] being the peace of the night and of [their] happiness” is quite moving, particularly given what you fear is coming next. If he’d merely been an unfeeling ogre then the story would have been stripped of much of its power.
I’ll get to “The Shadow” (which I love) in a bit, but there’s also an interesting (and cynical) God/The Church angle in Man-Size. First of all the marble figures have been granted pride of place in the church – despite all of their foul wickedness – through their heirs’ money and privilege. Secondly, there’s a hideous “happiness before the fall” moment on that last night when the narrator looks through the window of the cottage and sees Laura asleep:
“My heart reached out to her, as I went on. There must be a God, I thought, and a God who was good. How otherwise could anything so sweet and dear as she have ever been imagined?”
And yet that very night she’s taken from him, by figures of evil that came from God’s own house!
“If he’d merely been an unfeeling ogre then the story would have been stripped of much of its power.”
Well said, He-Man. Still, the tone of the introductory paragraph seems jarring; perhaps I just expected a more dolorous affect, like one would find in Poe’s exposition, eg.
Arg. Poe. Where’s the edit button, hi?
Edit button missing since change over to new look. We’ll stick it back in when we’ve time (i.e in about 18 years). Anyway, I like “Pod”. His contributions to the genre are neglected and under-appreciated.
Also, there seems to be an issue with the quote button. In some versions of IE the text box goes a bit…er…mad. If anyone notices any problems let me know. Safer to use the ol’ quotation marks ‘n’ italics format for now.
Off to bed (to re-re-read “The Shadow”). More on the morrow.
One of the most memorable things about “The Shadow” (for me) is the contrast between the intimacy & warmth of the scene where the story’s being told and the cold miserableness of the tale itself. I loved the image of the “steps and voices of the men” going along the corridor. They’re excluded from this intimacy. Its a very, for want of a better word. “feminine” scene – just as the loud, bullish, “calling for cigars” atmosphere of “The Upper Berth” was pure beefy testosterone. The final penetration (ooer) of the shadow is all the more unpleasant given that it invades a cosy haven of calm.
I wonder what will happen to the youngest girl, someday.
Ah yes. The youngest is now living with Miss Eastwich, isn’t she? Strangely convinced that Miss Eastwich offers protection from the shadow rather than being some sort of conduit for it!
Returning to a point made previously, both stories share a female victim whose husband seeks to protect/shield her from knowledge of a possible supernatural threat. They’re kept in the dark, allegedly for their own good (due to their fragile natures!) but the results are disastrous in both cases.
In “The Shadow” it’s not just the husband doing this either. While Miss Eastwich sensibly urges the husband to leave the house (advice ignored, of course) she stays on to try and comfort them both. In fact just before she realises that Mabel is dead she prays that she (Mabel) “might never know the terror that he and I had known. That those little ears might never hear any but pretty sounds, those little eyes never see any but pretty sights”. Her prayers, of course, are immediately answered in horrible and twisted fashion.
I think what makes “The Shadow” stand out for me (sorry for coming into this so late!) is the narrator, this older girl simultaneously feeling awkward and inadequate around the youngest girl and trying to dismiss her as “young, crude, ill-balanced” (and there’s a class thing going on with the tallow-chandler ancestry, I think?) and jealous of her success with Miss Eastwich while trying to convince herself that she understands Miss E better. I see her growing very like Miss E in a few years.
I’m also fascinated by the fact that we know so little about both of the Shadow’s victims. both spend almost the whole of the story outside the action – in bed or unconscious, yet the actions of all the others revolve around these two passive women.
Aishwarya,
The status of the narrator is interesting and I think you’re onto something about “class” (a Victorian obsession!). She completely misreads Miss Eastwich (and has done for several years), failing to see that a bit of human warmth would soften and engage her. It’s left to the youngest (though her “naivety” is ridiculed) to reach out to Eastwich – offering her companionship, and encouraging her to tell her tale.
She (the narrator) also makes a point of saying (as Eastwich sits before the fire warming her hands) that she’s unaware if servants have any source of heat in their quarters. She’s never bothered to think about it before.
Good point too about the victims. Mabel is almost completely invisible (described by others as frail and child-like), while her own child is completely invisible! Unseen but crucial. Living only to die?
Wondering what ye make of the last paragraph where, after we’re told that the doctor ruled the cause of death as heart disease, inherited from the mother – the narrator says “But I have sometimes wondered whether she may not have inherited something from her father”.
What’s implied there?
Forgive me if I don’t address the previous point right now. I had been thinking about the idea of class as brought up by Aishwarya. In both stories, it is the ‘help’ or the person from the lower classes that, in fact, possesses true knowledge of the world. Miss Eastwich and Mrs. Dorman live completely separate lives to those of the people they work for and yet the knowledge they possess has great implications for those they serve even if it is dismissed out of hand by the same people. Is Nesbit expressing the fear that the yearning for progress has caused us to forget some essential truths? Baby, bathwater…have I gone too far?
Well, I think it’s more to do with science and education. The superior, trained mind has no truck with supertition, leaving the upper classes vulnerable to it.
The husband in Mansize really acted like a duffer, and his intellectual superiorities were his downfall. It might be a warning about not dismissing too much. Similarly the narrator is so removed from the life ofher housekeeper that she doesn’t even know if she has a fire in her room, and has never thought to care.
Once again I barge in as the chairs and tables are being stacked on this party, but I’d just like to say that I disliked “Man-Size in Marble” a lot: I thought it was rather dull and predictable, and I wished the story was set in a more contemporary time so we could have a bloody description of that appallingly twee couple (especially the guy) being torn to shreds by some Awful Thing.
I think the thing about the lower classes being more aware of the supernatural is one of those conceits that manages to combine both anti-intellectualism and condescension in one. It says “There’s more to this world than can be explained by your logic, Professor!”, even though, to put it bluntly, there isn’t; while at the same time assuming that it’s the more earthy, credulous working-class type who’ll have a inherent fear of such things (which, as the assumedly educated reader knows, genuinely don’t exist in real life). The same way that a dog will pull his master back from a cliff-edge, I suppose.
My favourite line from “Man-Size”: “Laura was, if possible, brighter and gayer than usual, and I began to think that a little domestic toil was really good for her.” Ah, them Victorians!
I don’t know, Doubtful Egg. It was always the Irish maid who got ill first… sensitive to the occult, you know
Doubtful,
With regard to your favourite line from Man-Size – that, surely, is the narrator speaking, not the author! I think you’re doing Nesbit a bit of a disservice by assuming she casually bought into the Victorianism you allude to.
As regards the predictability and dullness of the tale, well, that is of course a matter of taste. But for me the point of her “ghost” stories (and the thing makes them as original as they are) is that they’re presented as “real” tales of weirdness that lack easy explanation or logical coherence. They’re not carefully constrcuted morality tales (of the type that was commonplace in the 19th C), nor are they lurid, blood and lust drenched Gothic potboilers.
Their slow pace, bleakness and domesticity mark them as reactions against established (and expected) generic conventions – rather than contributions to an established canon.
Have you read “The Shadow” yet? I think it, in particular, is remarkable – particularly given that she (like many authors of the time) penned these tales mainly to earn a few bob.
Point 1: I’m sorry to say that I don’t know enough about Nesbit to know her particular stance on the matter, but one can imagine a lot of Victorians nodding sagely over their milky tea at the line!
Point 2: Yes, I do like the fact that this story aren’t the standard “wronged spirit bringing murderer to justice” type of the time, although it is a standard “man makes light of the supernatural and pays the price” type, but I still found it dull. Perhaps it’s because I read a lot of EF Benson recently; his slug monsters and vampires make Nesbit look a little tame, and I need to approach her work again. I can understand that her style was a reaction against type, but being innovative doesn’t mean that her tales have lasted as well. That’s just a snap judgement though; I’ll need to toddle off and read some more of her stuff (including “The Shadow” (I’m sorry, I’ve been so scattered this week that I really didn’t have time)) to get a more balanced view of her output.
Jo, is the Irish maid in “The Shadow”? I’ll read it this evening. And have a good Bank Holiday, y’all!
Typo: In the fourth line, “aren’t” should be “isn’t”.
Just a note to say that I just read ‘The Shadow’ and found it absolutely brilliant, streets ahead of ‘Man-Size’ for me. It has a cold, clammy unpleasantness, combined with wonderful psychological acuity, that makes me want to go back and read it again. Which I’ll do later. Damn it, Fustar: my house is falling down with books and you’ve made me want to go out and get the collected ghost stories of E Nesbit!
I do read “Man-Size in Marble” as a very ordinary ghost story (though Fústar’s point about it not being a morality tale or a potboiler is true and something I’d failed to appreciate about Nesbit) – but I suspect Nesbit is having far too much fun with this narrator. Considering the little I know of Nesbit’s own politics, I wonder if she’s really enjoying putting lines like “I began to think that a little domestic toil was really good for her” into his mouth.
What really comes across in “The Shadow” is the detachment between the author and the narrator, which adds greatly to the pleasure of the story (and in retrospect brings a new dimension to “Man-Size”, although I think “The Shadow” does it much better). I’m just not sure if the narrator in “Man-Size” is ridiculous enough to make it a substantial element of the story. Although he’s pretty bloody ridiculous, calling her “my child, my love” and “my little one”, but I wonder if that kind of syrupy drivel wasn’t less incongruous in Victorian writing. I vaguely recall William Hope Hodgson’s stupendous The Night Land being almost ruined by wittery romantic burble that’d makes the average Mills & Boon look like Blue Velvet.
I think the narrator of Mansize is certainly meant to be a Tim Nicebutdim type. It may not matter that she is more aware than he of supernatural creepies, perhaps what’s important is his condescending attitude to her. He insists on his superiority to her to the point of actively acting against her request, ignoring her worries and pleas for protection. The housework comment is indicative of his sheltering, paternal ‘I know what is best for the pretty little thing’ attitude to his wife.
In truth, SHE’s the one who knows what’s going on (albeit intuitively), he’s been TOLD and he still doesn’t get it. And sadly, she her position must be ignored andshe has to die for him to learn anything. Yes, the superstitious element reinforces the rational man/emotional woman idea, but I think it matters more that the story makes him the tragic twit in the end.
Irish maids were psychic barometers of households, I think, there were lots of them in big houses where the ghosts were, I suppose.
I’d love to do some vampire stories. I don’t know any though. The genre is still so popular now, it would be nice to look at its origins.
RE: Nesbit’s politics – she was a founder member of the Fabian Society. What influence her socialism had on her writings (and her ideas on class) are debatable, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
RE: Vampire stories. We’ve done Polidori’s “The Vampyre” already – a real point of origin for the modern vampire tale.
http://www.fustar.info/2008/09/29/dreadful-thoughts-story-club-8-the-vampyre/
Happy to do another, though there aren’t that many great short vampire tales I can think of off the top of my head.
Have you done EF Benson yet? ‘The Room in the Tower’ is a pretty strong vampire story. Or ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ by de la Mare?
We did “The Man Who Went too Far” in session 7. Can’t recall ever reading “The Room in the Tower”. Read “Seaton’s Aunt” alright, but ’twas alongish time ago.
Will investigate.