Reading Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror

The stories within Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror work together to form a complete whole; they work so well, in fact, that one may even call the collection a spiritual bildungsroman. Throughout The Haunted Mirror, Roberts weaves together tropes connecting life and death: sometimes, she introduces a spiritual death and rebirth; often, she writes of the death of an old self as it makes way for the new. She tackles the very obvious death of the flesh in her story, “Death at Bearwallow,” the tale of Dave Nally, who encounters death both as a boy and a young man. The contrast between the two instances of death helps illuminate Dave’s coming-of-age at the same time that it is used to tell a story of true love and the tragedy of its loss.

“Death at Bearwallow” juxtaposes the death of old Terry Polin and that of a young woman, Valeria. It centers on Dave Nally, who finds himself lost in the dark woods after visiting his grandmother and who then enters the home of Terry Polin, only to find him on his deathbed. Dave sits in a corner on the floor, drifting in and out of sleep, hearing the voices of Mulligan and Scruggs, the two who stand watch over the dying man. When the time finally comes to read the Prayer for the Departing, Dave runs from the house, back into the darkness. The story then switches to that of Valeria’s death years later, when Dave is asked to spend the night watching over her corpse. He does so, but while there, he is reminded of his time spent in Terry Polin’s house. Dave drifts in and out of clarity of thought as he feels he is Terry Polin lying on his deathbed. He then hears the Prayer for the Departing—whether in memory or in actuality—and he leaves the room, heading outside into the darkness. By the end of Valeria’s tale, the darkness, once threatening and unpredictable, is described as simply being complete.

Campbell and Foster aptly describe the counterpoint Roberts employs in her story to “unify the two divisions” of “Death at Bearwallow” (232), suggesting that the experience of being near Terry Polin’s bedside is “so firmly imprinted on [Dave’s] memory that years later, as a grown young man, sitting by the corpse of a girl, Valeria, whom he has loved though she was engaged to another, the early experience becomes mingled (contrapuntally) with his present reverie” (233). While I believe Campbell and Foster misread Dave’s feelings for Valeria, they do correctly imply that the memory of Terry Polin profoundly affects Dave as a young man. McDowell further calls Dave’s dealing with Valeria’s death a “growth in spiritual awareness” (34). Unlike Campbell and Foster, McDowell understands that the feelings Dave harbored for Valeria were not romantic but rather those of a deep understanding of a love between his friend, Bob, and Valeria, Bob’s fiancé. McDowell writes that Valeria “in her short life had developed a fullness of being which Dave has not yet reached; and the dying man … also had known moments of ecstasy as yet denied to the boy” (34). Further, he adds that “The death of these two people matters less than the promise of emotional fulfillment they extend to the living boy” (34). His assessment suggests that while Roberts utilizes the theme of death in her story, it is used only to illuminate Dave’s own ability to one day experience the same emotional fulfillment that both Terry Polin and Valeria enjoyed in their respectively long and short lives.

From the start of “Death at Bearwallow,” one is met immediately with a sense of foreboding. The story begins, “He had been to see his grandmother” (159), which reads, in my estimate, like an in media res version of “Little Red Riding Hood” or perhaps a sequel to the Grimms’ tale. While the word “grandmother” often connotes feelings of comfort and safety, if one were to read this opening line with knowledge of “Little Red Riding Hood,” one might...