Dialogic Fiction of the Supernatural: "Lucas Malet"

Dialogic Fiction of the Supernatural: "Lucas Malet" Patricia Lorimer Lundberg Indiana University Northwest MARY ST. LEGER [KINGSLEY] HARRISON (1852-1931), the younger daughter of Charles Kingsley, wrote highly acclaimed fiction from the 1880s through the 1920s under the pseudonym "Lucas Malet." Some of her novels received even more favorable critical notice in London literary circles than those of her friends Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Mrs. Humphry Ward.1 Three are novels of the supernatural that elaborate the tradition first constructed by gothic writers of the eighteenth century. The "masculine" or "horror-gothic" deriving from Monk Lewis's The Monk established the convention of the alienated and exiled hero who channels his misery into a lustful revenge on a virtuous heroine imprisoned and destroyed in her own home. The "feminine" or "terror-gothic" deriving from Lewis's literary foremother Ann Radcliffe and her Mysteries of Udolpho employs the home as a site for the assaulted heroine to initiate her own rescue from the clutches of the villain , working through her terror to establish control over her body and her home.2 The three "Lucas Malet" novels of the supernatural complicate these two traditions with tales that explore an understanding beyond the natural but which are grounded in the complex and sad realities of late Victorian, modernist, and wartime British concerns. Malet in The Carissima:A Modern Grotesque (1896)3 employs conventions of Lewisite gothic even as she interrogates them with feminized and dialogic strategies. More firmly centered in the Radcliffean tradition are The Gateless Barrier (1900)4 and The Tall Villa ( 1920),5 in which Malet analyzes the violent domestic politics that feature heroines em389 ELT 41: 4 1998 battled in their own homes, their homes eventually destroyed even as they prevail. These three novels exemplify the literary riches and range of social concerns found in supernatural literature by Anglo-American women, a tradition recent feminist studies have distinguished from that of maleauthored ghost stories.6 Ghost stories have always been a suspect genre because they disrupt cultural complacencies that privilege reason along with plausibility, realism and a scientific materialism. Until recently, women's ghost stories in particular, Lynette Carpenter and Wendy KoImar have demonstrated, were "measured against definitions and standards based on men's stories and... found anomalous" because they did not conform to the dichotomous world view of both the men's stories and the criticism of them. Indeed, women's ghost stories rewrite that world view by relishing ambiguity in, as Carpenter and Kolmar assert, "conscious antithesis to men's stories."7 The three Malet novels interrogate the gothic tradition and challenge conventional hierarchies that dualistic reasoning promotes. They complicate such oppositional concepts as captivity and freedom, self and other, supernatural and natural, disempowerment and empowerment. They leap beyond the bounds of ordinary discourse to communicate across boundaries of living and spirit worlds. Of Malet's three ghost novels, The Carissima, with its destroyed hero and horrible ghost of a dog, demonstrates the characteristics of the "masculine" or Lewisite genre. Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it encapsulates Lewisite horror-gothic even as it constructs a subversive critique of stereotypical masculine reasoning. In contrast, The Gateless Barrier and The Tall Villa place Malet firmly in the "feminine" Radcliffean tradition. They form an intertextual pair—a dialogue of texts on extra-normal love relationships. The Gateless Barrier gives us the ghost of an early nineteenth-century maiden unable to cross onto The Other Side, because she cannot transcend her grief for a lost lover. He becomes reincarnated as his own descendent, her living lover, in a renewed romance ignoring boundaries of time, life and death. The Tall Villa complicates this extraordinary love relationship between the reincarnated lover and the ghostly beloved by setting The Gateless Barrier in dialogue with The Tall Villa, in a gender reversal that empowers the living woman to "save" the ghostly lover as well as herself. In The Tall Villa Malet constructs a psychologically complex story of ghostly tortured hero. This spirit, a suicide for unrequited love, restlessly roams the tall 390 LUNDBERG : MALET villa, finally requiting love in the shape of a long-suffering and abandoned wife of another man. Both novels employ feminized...