I shall soon come for you... now

One shouldn't restrict their ghost story consumption to the Winter months. All the same, there is something about the darkness, and the lingering quiet of the cold, that turns one's mind so easily towards the more phantasmic. Winter is such a deliciously fertile setting (ironic though that may be) for the spectral, the uncanny, the eerie - perhaps precisely because it is the one season that so sensuously resembles death and the deathly state, emptiness and echoes.

I sometimes suspect it is has much to do with the dark - we are not nocturnal by nature, so prolonged periods of darkness put us at a considerable disadvantage. The night distorts the familiar, and it is sharpest and most oppressive in Winter - shadows may conceal all manner of things, swallowing wide whole swathes of landscape from our view so that we become disorientated, unsure of what we are really looking at, even if we feel we know it oh so well under daylight. I sense that there is a primordial echo of knowing that the creatures of the night are not like us: any animal that is predatory, and has some kind of advantage, is to be feared, and as we fear the dark, so too do we fear the things that awaken in the night, creatures that have adapted their vision and hearing to fit with the darkness, that have mastery over a terrain we are made vulnerable by. The worst of our imagined monsters, the vampires, the werewolves and their kith, usually come at night, of course. But, perhaps far more sinister are the monsters who were birthed in our own communities, those that once walked as we did.

A Scene from Act II, Jane Shore (1876) - John Atkinson Grimshaw

I'm going to deliberately leave that hanging there - a setting the scene, if you like, for a series of explorations into classic and contemporary ghost stories. This is prompted by a very mundane reason - after many, many years of having books in different locations, I now have them all in one place. There are a lot. And I mean... a lot. Too many to house all together in the single bedroom in a shared house, or one bed flat I'd called home for the last twenty years. It's my one true vice I suppose, and as vices go I think it's a reasonably healthy one... though I do need to avoid bookshops before payday. Anyway, I shall be unearthing some half forgotten tomes and several 'ghost story' compilations that have waited in my parent's attic, which will no doubt keep me busy revisiting for the foreseeable future. Grim grist to the mill, of course. One of my favourite kinds of intellectual fodder.

I'm thinking of three stories in particular at present, three stories that linger surreptitiously after the book has been closed, but which seem linked to a parallel corporeal horror: of being tied to someone you cannot escape, of being unable to have your 'no' accepted, of being pulled by the determined lure of the dead. Furthermore, it chimes to the cry of encountering the male gaze as an uninvited, hungry intrusion.

Death and the Maiden (1888) - Richard Bergh

I don't need to say there will be spoilers do I? No? Good (you can always skim through and watch/listen to the tales beforehand). Let's start then with E.F. Benson's The Face (there's a reading of this by Edward E French, who sounds ever so slightly like Vincent Price, which you can listen to here). Benson, best known for his comical Mapp & Lucia series, is almost as well regarded as an accomplished writer of gothic and ghostly fiction, of which he wrote several throughout his lifetime (this collection is a must for any aficionado or novice). Written in the 1920s, The Face tells of the unfortunate fate of one Hester Ward, a woman in the prime of youthful adulthood, who richly appreciates the bounties of good fortune so far bestowed upon her... save for one uncomfortable occurrence: Hester has been plagued in childhood by a duo of dreams which involve a short journey toward a lonely church and graveyard on the edge of a cliff, and culminate in a second venture to this isolated location where appears a terrifying presence - the aforementioned face - that tells her he will come for her when she is older. Now in adulthood, married to Dick with two children, Hester is understandably disturbed when these dreams start anew, although now the ghastly spectral face tells her that he is soon coming for her... now. The location in which this apparition resides, an apparition which she is sure has been waiting a long time for her, has changed. The church has all but crumbled away, and there is a specific grave now near the very edge, awaiting its inevitable descent into the sea below. This metaphor of time as erosion perhaps also mirrors the metamorphoses of cocooned childhood to self-responsible adulthood, the shedding of infancy, and all the new threats that now may entail. The end of childhood is so often recounted as a 'loss', sometimes with the explanation that adulthood brings so many burdens of which the young are spared, or against which they are no longer protected by their older guardians. It is also possible that in The Face there is a theme of how childhood protects one from the consequences of their adult sexuality in the sense of how sexuality is an aspect of self, identified and desired by others; there is, something unsettling about how often we have no control over how others see and orientate towards us. Hester is of no real interest when she is a child, though there is an unpleasant undertone of grooming in her dreams, but largely the childhood dreams, with their awful promise, signify the terror of destiny, of something laying dormant but preparing, which, in childhood, one may not fully understand. 

But there is also the terror here of not being believed, or of a serious threat not being taken seriously, because Hester's dreams meet dismissal from the people she tells (and even she tries desperately to dispel them). That particular terror, and loneliness, runs through many ghost stories. In his analysis of supernatural fiction, David Hess (1993) notes that supernatural sceptics are often punished for their scepticism, and as we see a little in this tale, the punishment is often mete out upon a loved one, rather than on the sceptic themselves (for they must bare the living after of it); the horror is how scepticism robs protagonists from their ability to protect the ones they love, due in part to their refusal to engage with the supernatural's demands. We, as the audience, see this happening, frustrated as we are, because we know the supernatural is real here, and dangerous.

The scenery of Hester's later dream is very evocative of Dunwich, with its ghostly monastery ruins, and that one last gravestone waiting to fall into the sea as erosion continues her slow, steady, gnaw upon the cliffs. There were many graves there once, but a storm in 1911 violently delivered most of them into the open maw of the sea, which has had almost all of Dunwich now. Listen carefully - maybe you'll hear the ghostly bells from a long drowned church. I adore Dunwich, its a fantastic place to wander around, and, as Atlas Obscura so beautifully put "...most affecting is the palpable sense of absence to the village, and the realization that within another century, it may well disappear for good." I'd be curious to know if Benson had this in mind, particularly as the latter scenes of this story take place on the 'East coast' in Rushton (there's an East Rushton in East Anglia near Norfolk), but it's a little too late to ask him. 

You can probably already guess how this story ends. It turns out that Hester is being plagued by one Sir Roger Wyburn ("...what a brute!" her friend remarks), which she comes to realise after a chance gallery visit where his portrait happens to be on display (dangerous places, art galleries). After confiding in her husband, he suggests she visit a doctor, doctors being of course "...wonderful people for curing nonsense." The doctor in turn suggests a vacation for complete rest, but the place in which she goes to is the penultimate catalyst for confirming that her dream location is in fact a real place. The supernatural will not be denied, and here we again see destiny as a source of terror, the sense in which unforeseen forces are at work that will dictate our fate, and that their intentions are far from benevolent.

The Face concerns that particular horror trope of being stalked by something unseen. The initial location of Wyburn as a dream figure works to blur his authenticity (indeed, even when she recalls seeing his portrait, the doctor presumes she must have seen it as a child, and that it became imprinted on her unconscious), because of course dreams are supposed to be separate from reality. But supernatural fiction often challenges these kind of familiar notions of certainty and reality, takes great delight in exploring how often fragments of reality are refitted in dreams, and much of their ability for inducing a feeling of the eerie, or uncanny, is in part due to their breaking or manipulating physical norms - it's not so much always a complete up-ending, rather a tipping over of an upright chair by unseen means. For example, writers like Stephen King have seen horror as something dangerous that disrupts the otherwise safe, secure nuclear family setting. Dreams can be useful tools for introducing a feeling of dis-ease, but one that is suitably amorphous so an audience may not always be sure if they will later be exposed as 'just dreams' after all, which means the events and suggestions remain questionable until their legitimacy is confirmed, and this confusion for the audience often reflects a character's own confusion over what exactly they have been experiencing. Supernatural experiences may work more generally in this way also, as in the case of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, in which the narrative unfolds with such ambiguity (and is restricted to just one character) that, even at the end, the audience are not entirely sure if they've read a genuine ghost story, or a psychological examination of a woman's descent into madness; indeed, I think James intended it to thus open ended. In The Face's case, alternative explanations are removed - slowly eroded with building clarity and factual discoveries - via the physicality of Wyburn's portrait, and of Hester's discovering the church by the cliff in waking life. It is important that Hester encounters these physical signposts in this way, as it sweeps away the uncertainty of her dreams so we are pulled right with her, our wanderings brushed away as hers come crashing down, forced to accept and await the approaching horror. It gives a sense of movement, as alternative explanations for her dreams rise but are ultimately dashed, until only a supernatural explanation remains (Robin Wooffitt (1992) has explored how people tend to first talk through all possible rational explanations when recalling supernatural experiences). Her visit to Rushton also suggests her entering into an in-between place; it is noted that, after a while there, she has started to forget her husband and children, that the distinctiveness of their faces are blurring in her mind. She is perhaps becoming unpeeled from her life, pulled towards death in a purgatorial state of dying. 

But my main interest in this story concerns its depiction of a powerful, monstrous 'groom', who literally plucks his chosen female 'bride' out of existence, or rather, out of the world of the living - it's worth noting that the tale ends with the discovery of Wyburn's body, which has somehow been untainted by the corruption of decay (even after two hundred years post burial) and fallen to the ground below after a storm, and yet, there is no sign of Hester. How like the fates of those doomed women who have fallen prey to living monstrous suitors, whose bodies may never be found. There are old folk tales about malicious spirits or demons claiming mortal brides and taking them into the land of the dead, often having courted them using the initial disguise of their more familiar beloveds, but revealed as such too late (in fact, this happens in The Face). One possible reading is how this mirrors the association of obsessive desire and consumption, of how we long to 'have' that which we crave. When I first read this story, the voices of the #MeToo movement were at their zenith in Western media, and there was something about Hester's fate that felt strangely in sync; a woman at the mercy of male desire, which she experiences as a persistent malevolent haunting. The description of Wyburn's face is perhaps of particular interest; it is his mouth, the facial feature most associated with sexual acts and love speak, that is particularly repulsive: "... and last of all the mouth took shape and colour, and there lay the crowning horror. On one side of it, soft-curved and beautiful, trembled into a smile, the other side, thick and gathered together as by some physical deformity, sneered and lusted." So, we see some evidence of an attractive potential, a kind smile on a beautiful mouth, but it is countered by deformity, and a sneering lust that frightens her, seems to regard her with contempt as much as want; this is suggestive of intentions for rape, not romance. Here, then, the lustful male gaze is something monstrous, relentless in its pursuit of what it wants, and the terror of one being unable to say no, or find protection and support because other's will not believe her. The issue of disbelief correlates all too well with real experience, as rape victims often describe the agony of being disbelieved, and often suffer terribly from this if they try to hold their rapists to account through the judicial system. 

There is a grand radio adaptation by Michael Bakewell of The Face by the BBC, which was part of one of several Fear on Four series (it's now running, or was until recently - I think - as The Man in Black with Mark Gatiss at the helm). It was part narrated by Edward de Souza, a man who I could listen to for hours on end. It modernises the tale, and introduces some new plot dynamics, such as Hester being related to a woman Wyburn had been engaged to (and on his way back to before drowning at sea), by sharing the same first and maiden name. Here is a relentless commitment by a spirit, to have that which was denied them in death, no matter how long it takes. Ghosts, particularly malevolent ones, often seem fixated on such endeavours. 

    

Similar themes can be found in John Metcalfe's Mortmain, first published in 1931 in his Judas collection of short stories (but which I finally found in Nightmare Jack and Other Stories, published by Ash-Tree Press in 1998). Salome's first husband, Humphrey Child (a sinister eccentric), has died, and she is now married to John Temple, a childhood friend. The story opens with their boat passing the house Salome lived in with Humphrey, of which she remains fearful. It's a house to rival the likes of Eel Marsh or Hill House, having "... a striding contagion of decay... The woods were rank, the terraces forlorn... through the shrubbery, a single pane had caught the western light, glowed for a moment like a staring, angry eye, then suddenly was gone...The sense of immanent corruption was so strong that from the very river one might seem to draw a carrion breath."(Metcalfe, 2012: 97-8). But the real terror concerns Humphrey's houseboat, a vessel he liked to frequent in order to study a particular species of moth that feed on carrion, which I suspect are the species known as monopis weaverella (this is revealed in a creepy anecdote about a guest who was tricked into opening a cupboard door, only to be besieged by an eclipse of moths which had been feasting on the corpse of a cat). Insects are commonly associated with carcasses and dead things, and as such often feature as harbingers of decay or evil in supernatural fiction. The moth here works as an emblem of the eerie; a night creature that appears in the day, out of nowhere, invading their private space like the spectral presence of the dead husband. Indeed, it does seem to be a kind of subtle manifestation of Humphrey Child, because Mortmain, at it's heart, is a story about grappling with possessiveness, and about the enduring power of memory. It also ponders the issue of second marriages, of how we may be haunted by the bonds our lovers have had with others, which creep into our contemporary togetherness like an uninvited third party. Do they still, in some sense, belong to their previous partner, and if so, can they every truly belong to us? It's useful to note here that the word mortmain can be loosely translated as 'dead hands', and in law parlance refers to certain prohibitions against the owning of land which is deemed to belong to an institution, whose ownership, because it is not tied to a living person, cannot expire. While this principal still exists in some areas (including the United States), it was abolished in Great Britain in 1960. So here is a sense of being owned by something (in this case, someone) that cannot die, whose mastery of you is ongoing and unrelenting and cannot be parted by living design.  

The boat seems to follow John and Salome, and it is decaying, though at first appears to show signs of occupancy via chairs and hanging bathing suits on the deck. There is perhaps something worth mentioning about how Humphrey's boat, and John's boat, act as parallel spaces, with Humphrey's boat being akin to the land of the dead, which follows, though just out of reach; more loosely, it represents the two marriage beds, with the past circling the present, attempting to seduce its former occupant back into itself. Salome is both drawn to and repulsed by it, caught in a strange undulation of desire and disgust. She is rather like a living spectre in the narrative, enigmatic and vague; she says little, and as the story proceeds, becomes more and more withdrawn, preferring the under-surface realm of the cabin to the wider world vista of the deck. This is very much John's story, and it reflects something about the desire for husband's to 'own' their wives, as John and Humphrey effectively battle with each other for her custodianship. In the opening paragraph, Salome is described as the 'rescued child', which sets the tone for her relationship to her husband, from his perspective, though it may be the use of 'child' here is also a reference to her previous surname. At certain points he ponders what could possibly have drawn her to her first husband, an answer to which is never really offered, because we get so little insight into Salome's mind. But drawn she is, though at times fervently she rebels against this, demanding to be locked into her cabin in order to prevent her from jumping over board to swim to the other boat. It's the death drive rearing, chomping at the bit. I have in mind a shade of Hades and Persephone too.

There's also the matter of the respectability of mourning and remarriage. Early in the story, John and Salome have a momentary encounter with the Scrieveners, one of whom is Humphrey's cousin. Their boat literally rams into John's, chipping the paintwork, and Mrs Scrievener greets Salome by referring to her as Mrs Child. There's a clear note of disapproval, with her further commentating on how Humphrey's death was but a month ago. These two appear again, occasionally, bobbing in the distance, and at the end, it's tempting to consider them, like the moths, as Humphrey's psychopomps, over-seeing Salome's return to her previous station. The word scrievener generally refers to a clerk, or scribe, but can also refer to someone who invests money (with interest) for clients, so perhaps here is a literary nod to their role as Humphrey's agents, breaking into the honeymoon situ, planting the seeds of Humphrey's memory more firmly between John and Salome so that it can grow, fester and divide.

In 1992 Rebecca Wilmshurst adapted Mortmain into a 45 minute radio play, which starred Robert Glenister as John and the marvellous David March as Humphrey (March is particularly terrific as M R James in the radio adaptations of Sheila Hodgson's Stories I Have Tried To Write, and as Count Dracula in the radio adaption of Loren D Estleman's entertaining, and surprisingly convincing, Dracula vs Sherlock Holmes). Wilmshurst's adaption fleshes the characters out considerably, and adds some plot changes and extensions, emphasising a distinctly severe and sinister nature to the marriage troth between Humphrey and Salome, with a post wedding declaration by Humphrey of a bond that will endure even after death. Later, in a houseboat dinner party scene, Humphrey, who has been invited to make a toast, proclaims: "...I finally caught my beautiful Salome... but before you all tonight, I make this solemn vow. My house I hold most dear, my estate I hold most dear, and my wife - my most valuable possession - I also hold most dear. I have her, and in time honoured fashion, I will keep her." We see here the power of promises made in public, of how having witnesses to a declaration gives its a deeper gravitas, anchors it in multiple memories, makes it lasting, and binding. Wilmshurst's adaptation is very much focused on this notion of ownership, and as she charters Humphrey's descent into madness and cruelty in more detail than Metcalfe, we get an awful foreboding of how a toxic marriage might retain it's stranglehold via supernatural means, and how terrible a prospect that is. Wilmshurst's Salome is more adamantly desiring of escape from Humphrey, more achingly tormented and terrified by him, so her fate becomes even more tragic. Again, there is the sense that horror is in part, conveyed in the uncanny, of the shadow side of romantic notions, when they loose their rose tinted potency and delicious, sweet vibrancy with words uttered in a certain manner, when the breath upon the neck feels fetid and the embrace coarse and constrictive... there is, perhaps, the point of when love is not really love, not in a caring, empathic, fulfilling sense, but simply hunger, want, desire that is psychopathic. When a suitor cares not for who you are, but what; when they seek not a companion but an object, when the mechanics of trade, of buying and having, snuff out the soulful elixir of reciprocal intimacy. This is individualism at it's most bestial, utterly stripped of respect and tenderness, the brutish, nightmare hinterland encroaching into neon lit urban space. How awful, to find yourself married to such a person.

 

Metcalfe's writing is, at times, most exquisite - his description of landscape, and of all the textures and hues imbued by the meeting points of atmospheric conditions is sublime, and at times lulls the reader into a sense of natural wonder, and a desire to leave this hectic land for a while and board the nearest narrowboat. But equally, his maintenance of spectral presence and foreboding, which repeatedly rises like the tide, of an ongoing sense of being watched and carefully pursued, means you never surrender to the rhythm of the rivers John and Salome traverse. It's a shame he isn't more widely read and recognised, because his descriptive powers really are first rate. Nevertheless, I found myself haunted more by Wilmshurst's telling, though appreciative of the layers of mystery Metcalfe leaves in tact which Wilmshurst more thoroughly excavates. Metcalfe's story feels rather more masculine, and Salome's liminality means that the issue of possessiveness is not as obviously seen as an object of terror as it is in Wilmshurst's - indeed, at the end of Metcalfe's story, we leave with a slight feeling of John's resentment and resignation at Salome's eventual departure, and that this is a story first and foremost about a man trying to hold onto his wife, about his horror as he tries to wrestle her loyalty and fidelity from out of their ambiguity, whereas in Wilmshurst's version it feels more about the reach of the dead, of trauma, and of the desperate drive to escape a spectral evil, and Salome's exit is more clearly an abduction. I think this story most unsettled - and interested - me, because it explored both obsessive desire, as we see in The Face, but also the notion of memory as something vivid and interactive and yet at the same time intangible, something that can be malevolent and corrupting, that literally prevents the living from moving forward. While this story doesn't really bring this notion to the foreground as obviously as some (although Wilmshurst does seem to orientate to this), there is something also about trauma, about the legacy of abuse as a haunting, about how traumatic memories can often feel like a cage for those who carry them, keeping one in-cased in these moments of pain and torment. And of course, there is the matter that ghosts exist outside of change, and there is much to say about how ghosts can echo both a rage against time, and change, and the melancholy of being denied it, of being excommunicated from their living kith and kin. In Mortmain we have a woman who should be free of a man who has died, but whose gluttonous ownership drags her into the world of the dead with him. Salome is, like Hester Ward, plucked out of existence by a monstrous suitor, dragged to a netherworld and beyond assistance. 

Finally, we come to Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover, written in 1945, which I first found in this collection from 1999 by Vintage. Of these three stories this is the best known, and has received the most academic interest. It concerns Kathleen Drover, who is visiting the house in London she and her family were forced to evacuate during the Blitz. On the table in the hallway is a letter, written by a fiancée she had many years before, who had been reported as missing, presumed dead during WWI. It is to remind her that this day is their anniversary, and that he is expecting her to keep her promise. She should therefore expect him, at the hour arranged. You may well, as I did, hear an echo of Hester's dream: "I am soon coming for you... now."

The letter sends Kathleen into a spiral; the memories of this fiancée resurface and disturb her, and she tries to calm herself with rational alternatives, but never quite gets rid of the sense that he must be near (her initial assessment is that he must have somehow survived the war). We catch a brief fug of old memories that have been laying under silt in the mind, undisturbed for years and now awoken, emerging bleary eyed and confused, and yet, quickly crystallise and become clear. A long past encounter feels particularly alien when she meets her forty four year old self in the mirror, but she remembers it. This long ago fiancée was both liminal and sinister, a shadow at the edge of Summer. In the beginning, she cannot remember his face, and they last parted at dusk - one of the most potent of liminal times - and while he is promising to return to her, it feels cold and loveless, aggressive, and he presses one of his buttons into her palm so harshly that it leaves a permanent scar, a physical marker of his claim to her. There's again, something uncanny about this - a promise for a sweetheart before a solider goes to war that yet bares no tenderness, feeling more like a condemnation than a hope, something one hopes will be broken rather than kept.

Much has been made of Kathleen Drover. Hughes (1973) saw the story as depicting 'cracks in the psyche', and his assessment feels rather in keeping with those who opt for the psychological reading of The Turn of the Screw. He writes that the "...air war in Britain has the devastating psychological effect of depriving Mrs Drover from her recent past... war, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms the rueful woman." (Hughes, 1973: 411). Certainly, the chaos and rupturing of war, which is anchored keenly by her experience of being in London after the Blitz, is apparent in this tale, but Hughes' attention seems more drawn to the period between Kathleen's fiancée's presumed death, and her later marriage thirteen years later, as a precursor to the time in which the story itself takes place. Indeed, this is an interesting part of the narrative - like Hester's stay in Rushton, Kathleen found herself somehow outside of everyday society in her 20s. She did not reject suitors, because no suitors arrived until her future husband when she was in her early 30s. But it is the now, this visit to her former abode in a near deserted neighbourhood once richly frequented, that sees her lose "...her way on the path leading from a crumbling present to a permanent but terrifying past (Hughes, 1943: 411). Is she, somehow, unwilling to submit to the future, which has become so disordered, uncertain, infected by the aura of death that war brings to the present? This is an uncanny London, a capital city near deserted, almost like a simulacrum London on the outskirts of the land of the death, because her visit to this house almost certainly ensures that she will die. By entering into the house and picking up the note she becomes bound to it's destiny; perhaps there is some message here about entering into unsafe places. At the end, though she struggles to save herself via the familiarity of a waiting taxi cab, to re-orientate herself to the world, she finds she is still on the path of death, for the taxi-cab is eventually revealed a contemporary version of the infamous black carriages that bore those soul away who were destined for hell.

Some scholars have critiqued Hughes, who seems to offer a somewhat bias interpretation of Kathleen that seeps into his analysis (I'm not sure I'd see her as a 'rueful' woman). Other examinations have offered alternatives about her psychological complexes, her resistance to the sobriety and sensibility of her life, her dissatisfaction in her marriage as well as the supernatural significance of the past fiancée (there's a good review of this in Thompson, 2010, who offers a suggestion that Kathleen is in fact meeting her shadow, or doppelganger, and that the face that makes her scream at the end of the story, as she gazes through the screen toward the taxi driver, is her own). Towheed (2009) looks to how the violence and destruction of the Blitz ruptured space and time in individual consciousness, and ponders the friction that arose from trying to repair or make sense of this. A more thorough look at these readings will make this post far too long, but there's some lovely stuff well worth investing in if you have an interest in this area. While it is a relatively short story, yet, it has offered many different doorways via that London house that in turn have led back to well thumbed principalities in the readers' locales; our eyes are so often drawn to particular details or nuances that resonate with our other interests or investigative concerns. But Kathleen, for me, appears like Hester, with the promise of arrival by a suitor not wanted, and like Salome in that terrible binding that death will not part. Personally, I was struck by the significance of Kathleen's unease about her former fiancée, and the aggressiveness of his pressing the button into her palm, his lack of affection in their parting. There is something again about change, that which so characterises the experience of living, and yet that which is so denied the dead. Who of us have not, at one time or other, looked into the face of a lover and whispered dedications of forever-ness, have felt, in that moment, that this person was to be beloved by us always, only to find later that such feelings have cooled, or dissolved, or been wrenched away, so that you cannot remember what it was to have thought, let alone believe, that this one particular person was an eternal companion.  

There's a dramatization of The Demon Lover, again with significant embellishments and new characters, but it holds well to the atmosphere of Bowen's short story, with Dorothy Tutin delivering an excellent performance as the unfortunate Mrs Drover, and a young but as ever foppish Hugh Grant appears, whose role as her son courting his own sweetheart provides the antithesis to his mother's unpleasant exchanges with her former lover (it also features Arabella Weir, Robert Hardy and Miranda Richardson). It was part of the British series Shades of Darkness, that ran in 1983 and 1986. It particularly emphasises the malevolence of the fiancée, and so makes this story feel very much like The Face and Mortmain in the shadow of an unwanted suitor that brings shudders and demise.

It has not escaped my notice that I have been considering three woman born of the imaginations of three writers, some 80-100 years ago. That two of those writers were men has some bearing, undoubtedly, but that's a matter for another time. Likewise, the significance of the demon lover as an archetype, which Jung explored as a negative animus, also warrants further discussion. It's worth mentioning that the title of Bowen's story seems to have been in reference to an old ballad in which a woman abandons her husband and children to return to a former lover who had been presumed dead, only to find that he was, in fact, the devil. Again, let's leave that on the outside of the window pane for now.

Whenever one visits the ghosts of those long dead, whether in artefacts or in imagination, through the legacies of those who lived and loved in a different cultural environment, we may feel a sense of dissonance, perhaps even relief, and though we are far from alien to each other, still, we may find we are ultimately haunted by different expectations, both regarding conditions of worth (to slip in some Carl Rogers) and the socially sensitive aspects of experience. Women are seldom seen as property these days, and divorce and remarriage is so common as to feature in the life histories of around 50% of our fellows, though marriage vows are still wound around the chorus of 'till death us do part.' And yet, there are still women trapped in marriages with fierce husbands (and vice versa of course - I make this point purely because this particular post is concerned with women), still drawn to characters who offer more harm then health, and still those at the mercy of another's lust which is neither invited nor desired. There are still those who suffer from being disbelieved, when to be taken seriously is so painfully necessary. What crept out from these stories is the horror of powerlessness; the horror of being at the mercy of someone who intends to have you, no matter how long it takes; the horror of being seen by the wrong eyes. I do not wish to suggest that the male gaze is inevitably malevolent, nor that there is something about male desire that is intrinsically destructive, because such an assertion is not just dubious but offensive; rather, it is the occasion of when it is, and the fear of it's potential that these stories seem to encapsulate, and it's something being dissected in contemporary popular culture as the being of womanhood becomes more thoroughly explored, reconceptualised and reclaimed. It is also the horror of being denied change, of being unable to fall out of love as well as in to it. And it is the power of memory, that sometimes we would wish to leave far behind us, but which follows us, relentless, fixing us to a past self we have long since outgrown.