Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] The Old Nurse's Story: background
Hello all
I do hope that everybody enjoys Gaskell's classic ghost story - possibly her greatest Gothic tale!
The story is included in the Penguin Classics edition of Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, and also in Curious, If True, a collection published by Virago, and I believe it is also in many ghost story compilations.
The tale was first published in "A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire" in Household Words, Extra Christmas No. (December 1852). A footnote in Gothic Tales explains that the tale appeared with 10 others, including two by Dickens, who "also provided the loosest of framing devices by which to link them."
Jenny Uglow writes in her biography of Gaskell:
"This ghost story is one of the finest Victorian examples of the genre. As if the short form and Gothic, aristocratic setting had released her inhibitions almost without her knowing it, Gaskell produced a bold, sweeping treatment of the same themes - unmarried sex and illegitimacy - that she was currently dealing with so cautiously in 'Ruth. Here she makes no play with 'innocence', but exposes stormy passions in lonely women, attacking the jealous, self-righteous sister and violently punishing the cruel, intolerant father."
Despite Uglow's comments, while reading the story it struck me that the child's mother is in fact not "guilty" of unmarried sex at all because she is "secretly married" to the child's father, that favourite Victorian device to avoid the shock storyline of an illegitimate child. Nevertheless, the feelings of guilt and concealment are there very strongly in the text - despite the rather hollow church ceremony, we feel as if a seduction and betrayal have taken place.
There are quite a few similarities between Gaskell and the Brontes, and this story in particular seems to have that haunted Bronte ring to it. Laura Kranzler's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition suggests a link with Wuthering Heights and also a possible source for the story.
Kranzler writes: "Actually, there are many ways in which 'the Old Nurse's Story' can be seen as a 'borrowing' of 'Wuthering Heights', most notably in the scenes where the ghost of the little girl stands beseechingly at the window, trying to incite the real, live Rosamond out into the cold and snowy fells.
Moreover, in an uncanny moment of her own literary doubling, Gaskell recounts a story in 'The Life of Charlotte Bronte' that 'made a deep impression on Charlotte's mind', but which eerily repeats the plot of her own short story, written five years before the biography. It tells of a Haworth woman who had been seduced by her brother-in-law and became pregnant. Her outraged father locked her up in her room 'while her elder sisters flouted at and scorned her'. Haworth legend reveals that the ghosts of the mother and her daughter continue to haunt the area."
I'm not sure if this means the mother and daughter still haunt the area *now* or that they were still supposed to be there when Gaskell was writing. But the landscape round there is certainly fairly wild and bleak, and you'd think that, if ghosts exist anywhere, this would be a good spot!
Bye for now
Judy Geater
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Gaskell's 'Old Nurse's Story': Highly Theatrical yet Real
For those who have read this one: would it not make an effective film? The snow, the organ, the jealous unmarried sisters, the fierce father, the crutch coming down hard, nearly killing the vulnerable? A vision which keeps taking us back to some original primal scene of hideousness where where the young woman and her child are thrown out of the house to starve and freeze to death; the hatred of the sisters. The two fighting over the music teacher; the sex. Then there's the child whose very existence is threatened by another child trying to get it to go out deep into the snowy landscape where it will freeze to death? The story is laden with anxiety on the part of the nurse who stands in for a mother figure. Terror when nurse cannot find the child, looks about, where could she be?
The last thing by Gaskell we read on this list was Cousin Phillis. Before that the often pastoral Cranford stories. Supposedly gentle feminine idylls. But is not this a woman's story too? Can we link Gaskell's socially concerned novels to this ghost story? Mary Barton is about a factory girl; Ruth, about an unwed mother. The difference between this ghost story and the domestic realism is one of theatricality and frankness. Is not 'The Old Nurse's Story' one of female helplessness in the face of male violence. But the villain is not the male sex, for one female loathed another. In these country towns gentlewomen didn't get to meet many males. The story of the musician or male tutor who aspires to the 'young lady' and wins her is not uncommon. As I recall her ghost story, 'The Grey Woman' is based on lurid tale of revenge which really happened within a family at one another's throats over sex and money.
So is this unreal or reality masquerading under the supernatural? The story ends in injustice and cruelty, especially the final vision.
Notice how we go back into time. A layered memory: an old nurse named Hester remembers that when she was young, she was hired to take care of a young girl, a Miss Rosamund whose parents died. Both come to live in Westmoreland (far away, rural) with an elderly female relation, Grace Furnival. So we go back in time to when the mother of the children to whom the story is addressed was a child. Hence we know from the beginning that Miss Rosamund survived.
Elements: elderly silent women, ancient house, lonely and strange. An East wing from which comes wild organ music. Great deal of care in building up of atmosphere. Frozen snowed in atmosphere: snow as death. Dead bodies are cold. Minds imprisoned.
When the nurse checks on the organ and finds it impossible such a crumbled instrument could have produced music, this produces a shudder.
Then there's the meanness, the mischief. Why should Miss Rosamund pay for the cruelty? What did she do? The supposedly innocent child who lures another to her certain death an eruption of something in the universe which is playfully malign, mischievous?
Any thoughts about this one in relation to other ghost stories you've read, its relation to Christmas, superstition and the supernatural, to woman's literature (lots of women have written ghost stories), to Gaskell?
As Judy wrote, this one's available in an anthology of Gaskell's stories, in Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, J. A. Cuddon, and, I add, Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert from which I take my signature quotations for this evening
Ellen
---
O, tell us a tale of a ghost! now do!
It's a capital time, for the fire burns blue.
Anon, 'The Vicarage Ghost',
Tinsleys' Magazine
(Christmas Number, 1868).
And she harbours a silent wrath against Providence for
allowing the dead to walk and to molest the living.
--- Sabine Baring-Gould, 'The Leaden Ring',
from A Book of Ghosts (1904)
Re: "Old Nurse's Story:" A full-length movie
There's really enough here for a full-length movie. And, I agree, a really good one! Trying to cast it now in my mind.
Also struck me that we have a Miss Havisham wannabe here in the jilted, malevolent, vengeful, haunted (and ultimately pathetic) ancient virgin. I too wondered why the innocent child should be sucked up by the evil ghosts. And why were they evil? Why vengeful toward the child rather than toward the elderly sister?
-Karen-
Subject: [trollope-l] Gaskell's 'Old Nurse's Story': Highly Theatrical yet Real
From: Ellen Moody Hello, Ellen and all:
Yes, I agree this would make a wonderful movie. All the elements are here,
and it's a very chilling sort of tale.
I was thinking of Regan and Goneril while reading this story. How very
terrible it all was, seeing the coldness of the sisters toward each other.
I do have to wonder, though, why coldhearted women are so often depicted as
flawlessly beautiful. I suppose to show you cannot be beautiful and kind,
though there are examples of that in literature, as well (Ann Radcliffe's
heroines, among others). In any event, I did like the passages about the
paintings, and how lovely fine the sisters were, yet how haughty and cold at
the same time.
As a mother myself, I felt especially chilled when thinking what terrible
things could happen should the nurse turn her back on the child.. When she
left the child sleeping in the nursery I wanted to shake her!
Yes, in this case it's female rivalry that's at the crux of the matter. And
how shameful it's between two sisters. It's a sort of Dorian Gray,
really, when you think about it. It starts with the lovely portraits,
degenerates into the death of one and the aging of the other, then to the fi
nal revenge.. I can see some similarity here.
I knew that was coming but still did have to shudder! It was a frightening
discovery.
I've not read a lot of ghost stories at all, I must say. They've never
appealed to me very much, though I've not pursued Victorian ghost stories
before. I do like the gothic very much, so now that I've read this story
I'll likely pursue more of the same genre.
I have read at least three Gaskell novels, and I'm trying to think what may
be a common link. I can name Wives and Daughters as having the
cold-hearted beauty, in the guise of the step-sister, but she was wonderful
to her step-sister and awful and manipulative mostly to men. I'll have to
think further.
Lisa Guidarini
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 From: Karen Irland Shields I'd not thought of that, Karen, but that is true.
I too wondered why the innocent child should be sucked up by the evil
ghosts.And why were they evil? Why vengeful toward the child rather than toward
the elderly sister?
That's a good question. Perhaps because the child was the easier target and
would be far more horrifying? After all, how much more the child would be
mourned than the older lady, who hadn't too many friends and wasn't as
beloved.
Lisa Guidarini
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 Dear Ellen and everyone
Whether intentionally or not, Gaskell's story links with the common idea
that young children are often 'linked' with poltergeist activity, one theory
being that the natural innocence linked with the exuberance of a young child
can create a 'channel' for the poltergeist (literally translated as a
'scatter ghost' - due to the amount of 'physical' upheaval a poltergeist is
said to cause) However, the haunting in this story does not seem to be that
of poltergeist activity, but 'straightforward' restless spritis. Yet for
some reason, although the haunting is said to have been taking place before
the arrival of the nurse and child, once Miss Rosamund arrives the ghostly
child focuses on her as if out for revenge. so are we to infer that because,
in her way, Miss Furnival 'takes' to Rosamund, the ghostly child is jealous
of the earthly one? Does this parallel the jealousy of the two sisters that
ultimately led to the first child's death? (Grace 'telling on' her sister to
their father prompts the scene where Mother and child are expelled from the
house) Or is the ghostly child out for revenge on her aunt and the only way
the child can hasten her aunt's death is by reducing her to such a state of
fear that she will succomb to a stroke? And why does the 'ghostly mother'
take Rosamund on her knee and lull her to sleep (one supposes it would have
been the sleep of death) - is this too as a revenge against the (living)
child that is now favoured by the (living) sister?
Ellen suggests that the jealousy between the two sisters was based on sexual
jealousy, but if jealousy exists between the ghostly and earthly children,
it is one sided and *not* sexual. Rosamund desperately wants to help her
'friend', calling her 'my little girl'.
One last 'psychological' question. Since this story is only narrated by one
person, the old nurse, do the readers have any reason to think it may have
come from *her* disordered mind? Does Gaskell, like Henry James many years
later, want the reader to decide whether the ghosts were 'real' or
'figments' of the nurse's disordered brain?
Love, Gwyn.
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 Hello all
Gwyn wrote
One last 'psychological' question. Since this story is only narrated by one
person, the old nurse, do the readers have any reason to think it may have
come from *her* disordered mind? Does Gaskell, like Henry James many years
later, want the reader to decide whether the ghosts were 'real' or
'figments' of the nurse's disordered brain?
I was also reminded of the later Henry James story "The Turn of the Screw"
in the way in which the ghosts cling to the child and the adult in charge
has to try to protect her from them. A passage near the ending, where the
nurse holds the child "tighter and tighter, till I feared I should do her a
hurt" also strikingly foreshadows events in the Henry James tale - I'm
wondering if the Gaskell story may have been an influence on him.
I suppose there is a certain ambiguity in the fact that the story is told by
the old nurse, whose voice as storyteller is quite distinctive, and who, as
you say, could have imagined the whole thing.
However, within the ghost story itself as told by the nurse, Gaskell
interestingly makes all the characters see the ghosts - not just the child -
making it seem that they do really exist.
Dickens, as editor of the magazine where the story was originally published,
Household Words, wanted a stronger element of ambiguity, and wrote a series
of letters to Gaskell asking her to change the ending so that only little
Rosamond would see the ghostly figures, although everybody would see the
phantom child. He even went as far as changing the ending himself - clearly
overstepping the mark!
Jenny Uglow tells the story in her book "Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of
Stories":
'I have no doubt, according to every principle of art that is known to me
from Shakespeare downwards, that you weaken the terror of the story by
making them all see the phantoms at the end. And I feel a perfect conviction
that the best readers will be the most certain to make the discovery. Nous
verrons.'
Having won, Elizabeth was overcome by nerves at that 'Nous verrons'. Dickens
condescended to soothe her. He still thought his ending best, though, and
brought out an unanswerable argument: 'All I can urge in its behalf is, that
it is what I should have done myself.' " As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, the story was written at around
the same time as Gaskell's "fallen woman" novel, Ruth, (I know this is one
of your favourites, Gwyn!) and I think there is a strong feeling of the same
theme in the ghost story. Although the mother is secretly married (possibly
a device to avoid offending Household Words readers by showing a woman
giving birth outside marriage, I suspect), her father does not know this and
takes it that her child has been born in sin.
He takes out his anger against the mother on the child, striking the little
girl to leave that terrible wound and then casting her out to die in the
cold. This whole tragedy expresses the idea of the "sin" being avenged on
the next generation - as indeed illegitimate children were victimised for
centuries. I think the idea of the indelible wound also somehow has a
religious flavour, although I'm finding it hard to explain why - it's late
at night as I write this. No snow in sight, though!
Cheers To Trollope-l
December 14, 2000
RE: 'Old Nurse's Story:' A Winter's Tale
This certainly is a wintry tale: the imagery of snow, its
coldness and the fear this engenders is central. I find
the idea that the narrative is a product of the nurse's
mind intriguing, and there is this folding back in time
as the nurse tells the story many years after it happened.
Still it's not uncommon for ghost stories to be
written in the first person, and first person
narratives are by definition products of the
speaker's mind. The subjective feel is strong.
However, as Judy says the story is written in a way
that insists the other characters really see the ghosts;
there is a drive towards punishment, some terrible
harm has been wreaked and the forces of this
tale erupt in terrible harms to match it in return.
The Christian language is a thin overlay or
rationale, a way of expressing something more
fundamental or primtive: a fierce animism.
This story projects terrible hatred and to expunge
it, it seems one needs obsessively to reenact
that. The suddenness of the ending is like
some eruption.
Ellen Moody
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com I've just finished reading The Old Nurse's Story and the posts about it. I
enjoyed it very much and can see why Jenny Uglow made those connections with
Wuthering Heights. Ellen commented that it would make a good film and I was
reminded of the way that horror films proceed, gradually showing glimpses
before the full terror is burst upon us. I liked the way there were little
false trails, and when the child was lost all sorts of possible frightening
places in the house were there in our minds : the picture turned to one
side, the broken organ, the east wing. It was a surprise to find that the
child was not in the house at all.
I like Judy's link to The Turn of the Screw :
We know that the child lives but there is an ambiguous hint about her. The
nurse says after the ordeal in the snow : "She wakened up bright and clear -
or so I thought at first - and, my dears, so I think now." I could be over
reading but the last clause might be put in to reassure the listener.
Angela
From my class lectures:
Elizabeth Gaskell: brief biography
She married a Unitarian minister, Reverend William Glaskell and they
moved North to industrial towns where she saw much abysmal poverty,
terrible working conditions for factory and agricultural workers. She
had apparently always loved to make up stories, and between 1837 and
her death she wrote a number of novels and many short stories. The
ghost story is structurally speaking a short story. She added much to
her husband's income; she gave birth a number of times and there were
tragedies: a stillborn girl, the death of a one year old son. She
was successful; Dickens published her work in his All the Year
Round and Household Words. She became friendly with
other literary people, close to Charlotte Bronte who wrote Jane
Eyre. Some people think Gaskell's finest book is her biography of
Charlotte Bronte.
She apparently had heart trouble, perhaps today something
could have been done to help her, but there was no effective medicine
then. She died of a heart attack before she finished a very fine
novel, Wives and Daughters (1865). She used to be most admired for her socially concerned novels -- and
her ghost stories fit into these from the angle of a woman's point of
view.
Yet she wrote a number of ghost stories which turn these gifts
to theatrical account. orphaned when very young, and began to write
stories as a girl. In these she again and again explores female
helplessness in the face of male violence: how did these erupt, and
they usually do in families.
She is unusual for presenting working and genuinely lower
middle class women (though we don't have them in 'Old Nurse's Story'
except for old nurse herself. I told of her quarrel with Dickens who
wanted her to change the ending of 'Old Nurse's Story' and suggested
Gaskell wanted the emphasis to be on the injustice and cruelty of the
original incident.
She uses Gothic mode to challenge conventional ideas about women and
marriage and sex. This fits with her interest in social justice in her
realistic fiction which is woman centered too. She often sets the
ghost stories in earlier era of the French revolution; often in far-
away places -- as in this one the Westmoreland and Northumberland
countryside. Story itself.
Elements: elderly silent women, ancient house, lonely and
strange. An East wing from which comes wild organ music. Great deal
of care in building up of atmosphere.
Her checking up on organ and finding it impossible creates
shudder.
Why have it told by the nurse? She is comfy and prosaic
person; she is frightened and young; she is attached to young child,
yet vulnerable. Memoir form. Flashback in little
Use of normal kinds of incidents where same anxiety aroused:
you have a small child, it disappears. Where is it?
Story about "out there:" note that in numbers of the stories,
we are led away from social world and into nature. Forces of nature
beyond the constructions of our existence hold something in them we
cannot control, beyond us. Stiff and cold in the prison of sleep and
snow. Beyond the world of Christianity and safety, beyond life.
hy does the child want to lure the other child? Mischief.
A poltergeist.
A Parallel story is 'Mr Justice Harbottle by Sheridan Le Fanu
(1814-73: it too has same triangle of evil, guilt and justice, same
strange malign ghosts, same sense of ordinariness yet grandeur and
theatricality. For those who have read this one: would it not make an
effective film? The snow, the organ, the jealous unmarried
sisters, the fierce father, the crutch coming down
hard, nearly killing the vulnerable?
A vision
which keeps taking us back to some original primal scene of hideousness where where the
young woman and her child are thrown out of the house
to starve and freeze to death; the hatred of the sisters.
The story is laden with anxiety on
the part of the nurse who stands in for a mother figure.
Terror when nurse cannot find the child, looks about,
where could she be?
Is not 'The Old Nurse's Story' one of female helplessness in the face of male
violence. But the villain is not the male sex, for one female loathed another.
When the nurse checks on the organ and finds it impossible
such a crumbled instrument could have produced music, this produces a shudder.
Any thoughts about this one in relation to other ghost
stories you've read, its relation to Christmas, superstition
and the supernatural, to woman's literature (lots of
women have written ghost stories), to Gaskell?
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: R[trollope-l] Old Nurse's Story
Also struck me that we have a Miss Havisham wannabe here in the jilted,
malevolent, vengeful, haunted (and ultimately pathetic) ancient virgin.
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Gaskell's 'Old Nurse's Story': Highly Theatrical yet Real
Then there's the meanness, the mischief. Why should Miss
Rosamund pay for the cruelty? What did she do? The supposedly
innocent child who lures another to her certain death an
eruption of something in the universe which is playfully malign,
mischievous?
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] The Old Nurse's Story
"Dickens thought it 'a very fine ghost story indeed. Nobly told and
wonderfully managed.' But the ending was the cause of a sharp disagreement
between him and Elizabeth. He felt strongly that only the little girl,
Rosamund, should see the phantoms. Elizabeth... replied by return, adamantly
insisting that Grace must be *visibly* confronted by her guilt. Both were
equally determined. Dickens hung on, proposing to leave the story on one
side, 'then to come to it afresh - alter it myself - and send you the
proof'. Which he did. She sent it straight back, rejecting his alterations
and conceding only that Rosamund should see the ghost-child first. Dickens
gave in, but drew himself up to full editorial height:
Judy
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] The Old Nurse's Story
I was also reminded of the later Henry James story "The Turn of the Screw"
in the way in which the ghosts cling to the child and the adult in charge
has to try to protect her from them. A passage near the ending, where the
nurse holds the child "tighter and tighter, till I feared I should do her a
hurt" also strikingly foreshadows events in the Henry James tale - I'm
wondering if the Gaskell story may have been an influence on him.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810 and
died in 1865. She lost her mother when she was very young and was
brought up by an aunt; her parents were Unitarian so she grew up
somewhat outside the traditional church establishment. Her earliest
years were spent in the countryside of Cheshire; her brother, John
Stevenson, was lost at sea when she was young and the motif of a
brother thought dead who comes back alive repeats itself in her
fiction. When she was 17, her father remarried, and she didn't get
along with the stepmother.
North and South is about industrial unrest,
Mary Barton about a factory girl; Ruth about an unwed
mother. She is most often praised for quiet domestic realism. Superb
psychologist; gift for pictorial detail. People think of her as
writing gentle feminine idylls.
'Old Nurse's Story' 1852. Old nurse named Hester
when young hired to take care of young girl, Miss Rosamund whose
parents die. She is taken to live in Westmoreland with an elderly
female relation, Grace Furnival in Northumberland. So we go back in
time to when the mother of the children addressed was a child. Ask
them to tell story line. Emerges that when young Grace, the elderly
lady, lost her over, a foreign music teacher, to sister Maude; and
betrayed her to ruthless father in revenge. Maud and child cast out
into the snow to die after he wreaks vengeance on child with his
crutch.
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