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Gothic Lit & Writing for the Major
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Here Craik writes us a story about the different perspectives that both the young and the old have on love. Youth, having only briefly experienced all the nuances of romantic love, tend to idealize the feeling. The old, having lived through the struggles of love over time, have a better understanding of the different forms that love takes in different times in our lives and with different people. Young people expect love to be perfect, never changing, always remaining a soppy, mushy constant. Like the little girl, “virgin” youth expects first love to be the best love, the most pure, and therefore strong and never-ending. In contrast, people who have already loved and lost can recognize the differences between love and lust and the value of the more mature and lasting “second-loves”- the (mostly) better relationships we have later in our lives, when love has had time to grow and develop. Mixing the story in with the supernatural perhaps highlights the need for faith one must have- both in the subjects of ghosts and of love.
The story “The Last House” written by Mrs. Craik (Dinah Mulock) is one that focuses on the paranormal and unexplained. It is a tale spun by an older woman to a younger girl, detailing personal experience with phantom noises, extrasensory perceptions, and corporeal apparitions. As exciting and riveting as this short story sounds, its main subject is merely a façade meant to distract the reader from its hidden content. As the older woman ends her tale, she notices the girl has started crying, and when she addresses the matter, the narrator (the younger girl) states, “Ay, I was — but scarcely at the ghost story.” The reader can only ask “then, what was the child crying about?” And an answer to that particular question, we have to look at the motif of love that hides between the lines of the story. The older woman begins her story with a description of her first love. The younger girl assumes it is the woman’s current husband, but is corrected and told it was not the same man. The narrator informs the readers that she “was so astonished, so completely dumb-foundered,” that this man was not the man she has seen with the old woman all her life, the man she had expected. The older woman has to tell the younger girl that we hardly ever marry our first love. Here lies the story’s main theme. We see how this younger girl’s perception of the world is shattered. Her fairytale expectation of love is not what reality has to offer us. So now, the reader can see that the paranormal is a veneer meant to hide the author and narrator’s intent to communicate how her naïve understanding of how the world should work was shattered and how she was introduced to the real world.
“A lot o’ people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch o’ unconnected incidents ‘n things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice o’ coincidence that lays on top o’ everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconciousness.” – Miller (Tracey Walter). Repo Man (1984)
Why a quote from a cult film that was made before many of you were born? Because that’s exactly how I felt when reading Craik’s story. Why? Because in my Intro to Shakespeare class, we are reading “Hamlet,” and in my History of novel class, we read Moll Flanders and Humphry Clinker – both books had scenes that took place in Bath, and Clinker talked about Ranelagh. “Plate o’ shrimp,” indeed! And yes, I know some of those words should have been italicized, I just don’t know how to do that in this format (the old cut n’ paste didn’t work).
Anyway . . .
With regard to Craik’s story – I looked at it as more of a love story than a ghost story. It was a wonderful tale about the different ways in which people perceive love at different times of their lives. It also had a nifty unrequited love, with Dolly and Edmod; theirs is a love that, because of circumstance, became a tender, platonic love as opposed to a fiery, passionate love. I like that their love has lasted all the years in the form of friendship. The quality of the friendship, occassioned as it was by the tragedy, is probably more satisfying for the two of them.
Craik’s story was most certainly more heartbreaking than thrilling, although it dealt with the supernatural. The supernatural aspects were almost minor details in comparison to what the woman’s story was really about: the real love that her and Mr. Everest shared that never amounted to more than a great friendship later in life. Though the tale seems to be a somber one because two people who loved each other so dearly at an early stage in life were not able to continue developing that love, I am more happy reading the ending than I was upset. I agree with Darrell in liking the platonic love they shared as friends. I feel that their friendship was the strongest bond that really helped Dolly cope with the loss of her mother.
I did not find Craik’s story to be that of changing love, though that would seem to be the direct message of the story. By the time I reached the somber conclusion of the tale, I found myself disbelieving the older woman about her relationship with Mr. Everest. I think that she had never fallen out of love with him, even through the supernatural events that surround them. I believe the repeated proclamations of not putting too much hope into being with your first love for the rest of your life support this. She still loves him, and it hurts her that they did not wind up together. Following this, the purpose of the entire story changes to a warning to the narrator, cautioning her about love. The old woman does not want her to love someone so deeply that she might not end up with.
I believe the reference to Hamlet also serves this purpose. In Hamlet, he is deeply in love, and I think this is the message being sent by alluding to that specific play. Also, at the end when she refers to the fact that her and Mr. Everest ended up being ‘not unhappy’ with their partners. She believes that they would have been happy had they married each other, though she would not say this since she herself is married.
The supernatural events that wedge themselves in between their love affair are meant to represent any force that would get in the way of a passionate first love. Craik uses supernatural events because they are out of our control, like things that get in the way of love many times are.
Above all, I believe this story is a tale of squandered love recounted as a warning from an older woman that is unhappy with her life to a younger woman whose love life is yet tainted.
After reading Craik’s ” The Last House” I had not even questioned the fact that the narrator was male. Apparently this is very much so a questionable statement , after discussing this story I decided I wanted to go back and figure out what it was that made me assume this was a young man listening to this old woman’s tale.
Initially it just seemed like a male voice, the first few paragraphs are strong, almost argumentative. Compared to characters that have appeared in the Gothic fiction that I have read , this character just “felt” male.In comparison of the two characters who are paired through out the story, this other character does not seem as lady like as the established female Mrs. MacArthur.At one point our young companion describes Mrs. MacArthur by her tiny hands and feet,and that” if you had walked behind Mrs.MacArthur you might have taken her for a young woman still” (2).These subtle descriptions seemed as though they would be made by a male voice. To be fair ,I had already decided that the young companion was male before I reached this point in the story,I also assume from my modern mind that any superficial descriptions of a female from behind must be coming from the mind of a man.A third detail that confirmed by belief was when Mrs.MacArthur makes reference to her young companion escorting her to see a play.Though I do not claim to understand the social normalcies of this time period, in the rest of the story women were not described going anywhere without a male escort, with the exception of her mother leaving for home ( I assume her coach driver was male).
I can read this story assuming that the young companion is female as well, but it is definitely questionable
The narrator in Craik’s “The Last House in C— Street” is a younger person whether a man or woman, it is unclear, who is telling a tale that was once told to her by an elder woman, Mrs. MacArthur. In a way one could say there are two points of views in this story: the youth and the elderly Mrs. MacArthur. The youth is “not a believer in ghosts in general” unless they have a certain amount of fact attached to the stories. However he/she seems to be interested in Mrs. MacArthur specifically because she was “one who had a large stock of common sense, little wonder, and no ideality.” The perfect person for an evidence driven youth to be drawn to in the supernatural.
The purpose of Mrs. MacArthur’s tale seems to be to convince a skeptical youth that not all ghost stories are without a certain amount of evidence. The older lady begins her tale with an interesting statement. “My dear, I do not like playing at ghosts,” she said. She admits to never seeing one later and then admits that it was very long ago on top of all of that. She seems reluctant to tell the youth because the youth most likely won’t believe her tale and this somehow draws the youth in even more. It is almost a challenge. Mrs. MacArthur is also very precise when she tells her story about the sequence of events and such. She twists her ghost story in with a heartbreaking story of her mother’s death and this somehow makes it more real. The narrator is so distraught at the end that he/she wasn’t even thinking about the ghost story. He/she said, “Ay, I was—but scarcely at the ghost story.”
One of the most interesting things about the “Last House” is the shift that happens between the narrator’s voices- ie, young and old. While she is young there are all the affections of youth, the dreamy eyed love and other such puppyish desires. She spends her time with her young man, and is as earnest about him as she could be.
But the shift to her storytelling, as an older woman, there is a air of practicality and a sort a detachment to this man. The young person that she is telling the story to, is obviously a romantic, wanting a emotional, bittersweet retelling of this tale, as she remembers her lost love. Yet the old woman’s tone is practical and calm, tender but not hysterical. It is this that I think the young person is crying over at the end of the tale. The lack of emotion, the dullness of those romantic sensibilities that comes with age and years is what hurts.
There is an air of the inevitable to this. As a young woman, the old lady had all the emotion that a romantic would require. But he encroachment of the unstoppable, Death on to her life brings about a growing up as she make the practical decision to help take care of her siblings. She goes through a change which is sorrowful to the young person listening.