UBC (partial): The Beckoning Fair One
Mar. 28th, 2009 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyOnions, Oliver. "The Beckoning Fair One." The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. 1935. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. 3-70.
ETA: added discussion of the exceptionally clever psychosexual bait-and-switch
This is one of those ghost stories that has been so influential that, reading it now, it has almost no punch left. Stephen King in particular--although he's far from the only one--uses the trick of ghosts or haunted spaces influencing the living, persuading them that a terrible idea is (a.) good and (b.) entirely their own. He does it in The Shining and in Christine, and I imagine if I put my mind to it, I could rattle off a whole laundry list. Onions uses this technique masterfully as poor stupid self-absorbed Oleron becomes complicit in his own destruction and that of Elsie Bengough's, but I've seen it before, because I read authors influenced by Onions before I ever heard of the man himself. I was ready for it, and so it lost the greater part of its force. Nothing surprised me; I could see the whole thing coming from the first page. Which, in a way, is always true of ghost stories, but there is or should be or can be tension regardless--M. R. James's stories like "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" or "Casting the Runes," and Lovecraft's stories like "Pickman's Model," still create tension (at least for me), even on the umpteenth reread. I'm not quite sure why that is, and it's a post for another time.
This is still an excellent example of the genre, though. I like the fact that we never learn anything at all about the ghost, and I like the way that this story, like Neil Gaiman's "Calliope," is a critique of the idea of the (always female because always imagined by a male author) Muse and the appalling, unforgivable narcissism inherent in it. Oleron falls because he can't see either Elsie or the ghost except in the context of his own art; he falls because it never occurs to him, in his solipsism, that, to the ghost, he doesn't matter. Oh, she needs a victim, and she needs that victim to be vulnerable in particular ways, but the very aptly named prior tenant Madley attests to the fact that Oleron isn't special; he's just convenient. Like the male black widow spider.
This story is also remarkable for the economy of its supernatural manifestations. The only thing we ever witness is a comb combing invisible hair. Everything else, and there isn't very much, takes place in the kitchen (and I knew that powder cupboard was trouble the instant it was introduced) when Oleron isn't there. And Onions knows, as M. R. James knew, and as H. P. Lovecraft sometimes forgot, that you get the best effect by letting the reader do most of the work. Elsie Bengough's fate does, in fact, send the cold frisson down my spine, exactly because Onions tells us only the barest of bare minimums of what we need to know.
It would be interesting, if one were teaching the history of the ghost story, to pair this with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," because they seem to be examining much the same idea from opposite sides of the gender divide. Gilman's protagonist is haunted/driven mad because she is shut in a room by her husband; Oleron is haunted/driven mad because he shuts himself in a room. She can't get out; he won't.
ETA: I was thinking more as I was getting ready for bed last night, and I realized that Onions had done something so intensely clever that I'd nearly missed it. I was wondering what the point of the odious Barrett was--we need his wife to identify the tune of "The Beckoning Fair One" and to tell us that it was for harp-accompaniment, and we need SOME reason that she stops coming, but we don't need Barrett to be as awful as he is, and then I realized that we do need Barrett to be as awful as he is, because we need him to voice the suspicion of immoral goings-on between Oleron and Elsie. Oleron seizes on this as an excuse to keep Elsie from calling on him (which Elsie very rightly sees through), but there's another level to the story, a level on which Oleron, like Elinor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, is not merely complicit in, but responsible for his own haunting, and on that level, the possibility of immoral goings-on isn't an excuse. It's the reason.
Elsie is fleshly. I can't think of a better word. She is of-the-body. Physical, material, earthly, overwhelming. And Oleron, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, is repulsed by her. His new residence is specifically opposed to Elsie, being pale and delicate and possibly (he admits very early on) somewhat lacking in vigor. Its feminine genius loci is even more so, being not merely lacking in vigor but actually literally incorporeal. Where Elsie is all body, she is no body. The progress of the story is the progress of Oleron turning away from Elsie and the flesh and becoming obsessed with a woman entirely of the spirit--hence also his inattention to his own body, the dying flowers, etc. And the hostility toward Elsie, which Oleron ascribes to his new home and the Beckoning Fair One, is--on this level--a projection. His desperate need to defend himself from Elsie's love--and the narrative awareness of Elsie's adoration of him makes his own blindness to it ever so slightly suspect--is the engine that powers the house's hostility. Oleron can't admit, either to Elsie or himself, that he wants her to go away, so the house does it for him. So this story is also about Oleron's fear of female sexuality and how that fear, which he cannot admit to himself, plays out through the plastic medium of a haunted house.
ETA: added discussion of the exceptionally clever psychosexual bait-and-switch
This is one of those ghost stories that has been so influential that, reading it now, it has almost no punch left. Stephen King in particular--although he's far from the only one--uses the trick of ghosts or haunted spaces influencing the living, persuading them that a terrible idea is (a.) good and (b.) entirely their own. He does it in The Shining and in Christine, and I imagine if I put my mind to it, I could rattle off a whole laundry list. Onions uses this technique masterfully as poor stupid self-absorbed Oleron becomes complicit in his own destruction and that of Elsie Bengough's, but I've seen it before, because I read authors influenced by Onions before I ever heard of the man himself. I was ready for it, and so it lost the greater part of its force. Nothing surprised me; I could see the whole thing coming from the first page. Which, in a way, is always true of ghost stories, but there is or should be or can be tension regardless--M. R. James's stories like "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" or "Casting the Runes," and Lovecraft's stories like "Pickman's Model," still create tension (at least for me), even on the umpteenth reread. I'm not quite sure why that is, and it's a post for another time.
This is still an excellent example of the genre, though. I like the fact that we never learn anything at all about the ghost, and I like the way that this story, like Neil Gaiman's "Calliope," is a critique of the idea of the (always female because always imagined by a male author) Muse and the appalling, unforgivable narcissism inherent in it. Oleron falls because he can't see either Elsie or the ghost except in the context of his own art; he falls because it never occurs to him, in his solipsism, that, to the ghost, he doesn't matter. Oh, she needs a victim, and she needs that victim to be vulnerable in particular ways, but the very aptly named prior tenant Madley attests to the fact that Oleron isn't special; he's just convenient. Like the male black widow spider.
This story is also remarkable for the economy of its supernatural manifestations. The only thing we ever witness is a comb combing invisible hair. Everything else, and there isn't very much, takes place in the kitchen (and I knew that powder cupboard was trouble the instant it was introduced) when Oleron isn't there. And Onions knows, as M. R. James knew, and as H. P. Lovecraft sometimes forgot, that you get the best effect by letting the reader do most of the work. Elsie Bengough's fate does, in fact, send the cold frisson down my spine, exactly because Onions tells us only the barest of bare minimums of what we need to know.
It would be interesting, if one were teaching the history of the ghost story, to pair this with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," because they seem to be examining much the same idea from opposite sides of the gender divide. Gilman's protagonist is haunted/driven mad because she is shut in a room by her husband; Oleron is haunted/driven mad because he shuts himself in a room. She can't get out; he won't.
ETA: I was thinking more as I was getting ready for bed last night, and I realized that Onions had done something so intensely clever that I'd nearly missed it. I was wondering what the point of the odious Barrett was--we need his wife to identify the tune of "The Beckoning Fair One" and to tell us that it was for harp-accompaniment, and we need SOME reason that she stops coming, but we don't need Barrett to be as awful as he is, and then I realized that we do need Barrett to be as awful as he is, because we need him to voice the suspicion of immoral goings-on between Oleron and Elsie. Oleron seizes on this as an excuse to keep Elsie from calling on him (which Elsie very rightly sees through), but there's another level to the story, a level on which Oleron, like Elinor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, is not merely complicit in, but responsible for his own haunting, and on that level, the possibility of immoral goings-on isn't an excuse. It's the reason.
Elsie is fleshly. I can't think of a better word. She is of-the-body. Physical, material, earthly, overwhelming. And Oleron, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, is repulsed by her. His new residence is specifically opposed to Elsie, being pale and delicate and possibly (he admits very early on) somewhat lacking in vigor. Its feminine genius loci is even more so, being not merely lacking in vigor but actually literally incorporeal. Where Elsie is all body, she is no body. The progress of the story is the progress of Oleron turning away from Elsie and the flesh and becoming obsessed with a woman entirely of the spirit--hence also his inattention to his own body, the dying flowers, etc. And the hostility toward Elsie, which Oleron ascribes to his new home and the Beckoning Fair One, is--on this level--a projection. His desperate need to defend himself from Elsie's love--and the narrative awareness of Elsie's adoration of him makes his own blindness to it ever so slightly suspect--is the engine that powers the house's hostility. Oleron can't admit, either to Elsie or himself, that he wants her to go away, so the house does it for him. So this story is also about Oleron's fear of female sexuality and how that fear, which he cannot admit to himself, plays out through the plastic medium of a haunted house.
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Date: 2009-03-29 04:09 am (UTC)