Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 13: The Nature of the Evidence
Suffragette. Modernist innovator. Paddler in the turbulent "stream of consciousness" (a phrase she allegedly coined). May Sinclair was once "one of the most successful and widely known of British women novelists". And then? Disappearance down that well-trodden path into obscurity. And then? Semi-revival by crusading Feminist scholars. And then? A starring role in this, the thirteenth (shriek!) meeting of our Dreadful Thoughts Story Club.
A 7 day discussion of her steamy & pulsating supernatural bonkbuster1 – "The Nature of the Evidence" – starts here and starts now.
Well? Off ye go.
Footnotes
- Warning: Description may not be remotely accurate. [back]
August 20, 2009
17 responses to Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 13: The Nature of the Evidence
Evening. The baba has been washed, fed and popped into her comfy cot. Now for beer and reflection on a provocative, odd and nasty (?) little tale.
Occurred to me, reading this, that I never question the sex of the narrator (in such tales) when the author is male – and when the sex isn’t explicitly stated. What’s the sex of the narrator here? Male – you’d think. A colleague or old pal of Marston. But there’s something about the voice…
Does it matter? Does it change anything?
heya fustar,
mixed feelings about this one. main issue i had was it lacked the creepy factor for me. found ghostie rosamund a bit too pious and ethereal for my liking. an attempt is made to establish her as mysterious and other but ultimately she is more angel of the house than demon under the floorboards.
was surprised too that this was written by a female author given the fairly obvious demonization of female sexuality – lascivious Pauline writhing wormlike on the floor in her lustful advances (quite enjoyed that description though!) – though it did strike me that this might be more of a way of establishing the distance between the views of the author and the narrator&protagonist. After all, their world views are inadaquate in explaining events.
ultimately though, i have to say boo to boring rosamund, blah to insipid edward and nuts to the pathetic pauline.
It’s very peculiar, isn’t it? I was sort of expecting something like ‘Widower marries again but ghost of ex-wife tricks him into killng new wife and he ends up facing the noose’. Instead it just sort of peters out.
It’s a bit like a very flat, humourless version of Blithe Spirit. There are laughs, but they are of the unintentional kind. When Wife#2 gets clouted in the gob by the ghostly hair it smacks of slapstick. And it may just be me, but when #2 starts feeling the body of the late Mrs Marston, you feel that the latter might turn round and say (rather pointedly) ‘Excuse me, but I don’t believe that we’ve been formally introduced!’
It really needs to be nastier. At the end of the tale the eminent KC is actually better off than he was at the beginning. It’s as if an M R James revenant turned out just to want to buy its victim a drink. You can imagine that if it was written today it would be in some magazine like FULL HOUSE, would have a title like ‘I SNOGGED A GHOST!’ and end with the husband saying ‘Well, I thought that relations with my wife were over when she died. But now that she’s returned as a ghost my sex-life is better than ever.’
maeve,
Just moved your comment over from d’other post. I’ve very mixed feelings too, but, when it comes to such tales, mixed feelings can be good!
I’ve been wanting to do (for example) a Bram Stoker story for a while but there’s a sort of a “Does exactly what it says on the tin” quality to Stoker’s short fiction that makes it hard to feel like saying much about it. Other than, “That was pretty horrible”, or, “That was vaguely spooky”.
This (like the few other Sinclair tales I’ve read) is clearly aiming at something other than simple ghost story functionality! There’s sexual politics dripping from every second sentence, but it’s pretty tough to puzzle out (or at least it is for me) what precisely is being said. Not necessarily a bad thing of course.
The lasciviousness of Pauline would, in the hands of a male writer, seem pretty standard “demonization of female sexuality” alright. In the hands of a suffragette modernist it more than muddies the waters. Though I’m with you on the writhing, worm-like, grasping naked Pauline. It’s a nasty but totally memorable image.
Hardly. Unless you call a bodiless, transcendental soul-orgasm climax “petering out”! But seriously, know what you mean. The EC comics/Tales of the Unexpected type grisly twist is noticeably absent.
As for #2 having a physical encounter with ghostly #1, the language is indeed decidedly strange: “Then she had put out her hands and felt the body. A woman’s body, soft and horrible; her fingers had sunk in the shallow breasts.”
Soft and horrible? Who’s saying the body was “soft and horrible”? Marston? Wife 2? The (presumably male) narrator? Whoever it is, I don’t think it’s Sinclair.
That is scarily (and hilariously) close to the truth!
The big ambiguity here for me (without wanting to labour a point) concerns the author/narrator intersection. I (think I) spy authorly attacks on stolid, manly, Victorian materialism and the reduction of the female to either an angelic child-woman (idolised) or a lusty whore (despised).
As for the narrator, well he/she seems to be both giving Marston a mild kicking for his complete absence of imagination (and his sober reliance on “evidence”) while simultaneously sympathising with him RE: his rejection of lascivious old nudey Pauline.
I agree Fustar. There is room for ambiguity in this gap between author and narrator. Ultimately the world view of Marston is shown to be limited. Even after his mysterious union with Rosamund he cannot begin to give an explanation and tries to conceal it from others. The narrator has to get it out of him and it is implied that this is not an easy task.
I wonder too about the author. We know Sinclair to be a suffragette moving in some fairly avant garde literary circles so we approach the text in a particular fashion- fair enough. But the story has to speak for itself. It is possible we give Sinclair too much credit for her subtle critique of Victorian conventions. While this ghost offers a form of sexual and spiritual fulfilment that is strange and unusual, she is still the very ‘proper’ wifey who insists on getting her proverbial kit off behind closed doors. It reminds me of a strange inversion on DeMaurier’s Rebecca – sexpot Pauline is the definite invader here. ghostie Rosamund champions family values and would even allow Marston to remarry if he had picked a ‘suitable’ wife. it may be a veiled critique of patriachal systems but it lacks the courage of its convictions
What I like is that it foregoes the dreary kind of eek-a-ghost payoff in favour of a more benevolent view of the mystic, which, granted I’m not an expert, but that seems fairly unusual in terms of these old-timey ghost stories. You have an unhappy man who can only see the world in terms of “the evidence,” and who deliberately chooses a wife with whom he won’t have to engage on any level other than the physical – basically, a man just ticking along mechanically in the world – who then has this profound experience that shakes him up, leaves him blinking in the sun and in awe of the mystery around him.
I think it’s significant that he feels the disturbing presence most strongly in the library – a locus of ambiguous and encoded and subjective human meaning against which “the evidence” is pretty damn small beers.
Re: a hypothetical modern version… I think if it was written today it would be very different. Think Robert Anton Wilson or Alan Moore (and in fact the implied climax of this story reminded me of nothing so much as a particular episode in Swamp Thing: Love & Death – Fústar, you know the one I’m thinking of).
Most ghost stories touch me on an emotional level. They succeed or fail depending on whether or not they push the correct buttons. Generally they manage to unnerve or revolt me, but the response is normally at a deep, instinctive level.
To me, the problem with the story is that you are always kept at a distance from the story and the characters. Harking back to M R James again, his stories often begin with some nameless narrator (Presumably MRJ)telling us about some visitation in the manner of an academic reporting an unusual tale he has discovered. However, at some point the distancing effects are quietly dropped and we are allowed to feel things with the haunted individuals as they happen. In this story that never happens. It starts out like some smoking room story, and it ends like a smoking room story. That may be deliberate, but in the end it feels as cold and impersonal as a newspaper article.
Maeve, fair points all. The thing that remains interesting about the story though (taken on its own merits) is that the exact nature of the critique is pretty hard to pin down. This may be the result of some hesitancy or lack of clarity on the author’s part, or it may be subtle and intentional. There’s a perverse oddness to this that makes precise meaning elusive.
There’s definitely a “low” carnal physicality vs transcendent spiritual beauty thing going on. And Marston comes across as a prudish wuss for choosing the airy-fairy latter over the fun ‘n’ dirty former!
emordino, The ghost story without shocks or traditional scares (that pushes against genre constraints) is relatively common. At no stage is Marston scared of Roasamund’s phantasm. He’s more nervous and agitated about the approach of night and his sex appointment with Pauline. Which is interesting in itself.
Swamp Thing! Hadn’t thought of that but you’re absolutely right. Although Moore’s version seared itself onto my filthy/mystical brain centres more indelibly.
Agreed. And I do think it’s deliberate. I’ve tried to mix it up with the story choices for DT. As I said before, there are plenty of “button pushing” tales out there that are brilliantly effective but I just don’t feel I’ve that much to say about them. Other than describing how they unnerved/touched me.
On the other hand, you could argue that a ghost/uncanny story should (at the very least) manage to unsettle/scare you on some level. This clearly doesn’t. Perhaps that’s a failing. Perhaps not. I’m generally not a fan of “genre” efforts that don’t respect their generic origins. There’s plenty of that about (in cinema etc) and academics often lap it up with a big spoon. Focusing on themes and images and forgetting that the thing might be disingenous, or pretentious, or snotty about its place in an established genre (or just, not very good). Fuck that!
Whichever way that you read it, the story defies any attempt to glean some meaning from it. It’s not advocating that abstinence is better than sex, as the ending definitely points towards the idea that poking the ectoplasm is as close to ecstasy as you can get. It’s not even anti-male, as it is made clear that Marston and Rosamund are crazy about one another, and that Marston is on the verge of a nervous breakdown after her death. It could be an attack on materialism, but aren’t all ghost stories are about that at some level?
Although it is fiction, the thing reminds me most of something from the Society of Psychical Research. True life ghost stories are, despite being harrowing, often completely pointless. Frequently there seems to be no meaning to the visitation. This lack of obvious meaning, allied to the very flat prose style, make me wonder if that is the sort of approach that she is pastiching.
This is a fascinating story despite the lack of creepiness. Is all of Sinclair’s work like this?
I keep assuming that the narrator is female – possibly partly because Sinclair is, but also things like that description of Rosamund’s beauty at the beginning seem so not-male. But Marston would hardly tell this story to a female friend. (Then again, it’s hard to imagine him telling a male friend about her hair slapping him in the face either – how close are he and the narrator?)
That throwaway sentence about there being “queer stories going about” makes it seem as if Rosamund is protecting Marston from some real, material danger (as opposed to the spiritual damage caused by having sex with a “lascivious” woman). And then it fizzles out and sex with Pauline is just sex after all and she appears genuinely vulnerable when she comes to him.
One thing that does strike me though is for a story that has its main character claiming that “you’d have to get rid of your bodies first”, I’m a bit startled by the power that the descriptions of female bodies have.
I don’t know what to make of it.
Shadow, The “lack of obvious meaning” ghost story seems to have been particularly popular in the 20s. I’m sure this was a conscious rejection of the morality/comeuppance tale, and (as you suggest) some reflection of the upsurge of interest in “real” occult and psychic phenomena.
The superficial “meaning” of a lot of traditional spooky stories can often seem quite conservative: “Steer a sober and steady line through life or look what can happen?”. The “meaningless” tale (see Nesbit et al for details) has far more ambiguous politics…though given that the “unknowable” experiences can shatter established world-views there’s definitely a whiff of subversion.
Indeed. And while Pauline’s (sexual/”vulgar”) body seems to fill space and intrude on Marston’s peace, Rosamund’s earthly body tucked itself discretely away into the corner of Marston’s library (crocheting or whatever). She was all child-like coyness, until she became incorporeal. At which point she became plenty intrusive and plenty erotic!
Nor do any of us it seems!
I’ve just made an interesting discovery. It seems that in 1914, Sinclair joined the SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. That must be one of the reasons that the tale sounds like a case study rather than a ripping yarn. In the early 20s that approach would still have had the value of being fairly fresh and unusual, making a break from the more conservatively literary ghost story.