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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 04:09 am (UTC)I love that story
Date: 2009-03-29 05:03 am (UTC)I'm always terribly frustrated when I read The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, because I was convinced I read a Complete Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions with one more story, but I can't seem to find any evidence that the edition ever existed. I think I read a phantom book. Sigh.
Re: I love that story
Date: 2009-03-29 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 11:54 am (UTC)Re: I love that story
Date: 2009-03-29 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 03:40 pm (UTC)A modern take on muses, and a suggestion that artists are better off thinking of themselves as having geniuses rather than being or not being geniuses.
Thanks
Date: 2009-03-29 05:02 pm (UTC)I will mourn for my ghostly book, which probably was shelved for a while at St. Louis County Library by some librarian from a dimension in which that book actually exists.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 05:13 pm (UTC)--although I cannot express strongly enough how much I disagree with Hand--in particular with her acceptance of the idea that it's all right for artists to treat real persons as Muses. And I do think there's a problem with her argument, in that, while she adduces cases counter to the profoundly phallocentric, heteronormative idea of the Muse as expressed by Graves, Fowles, etc., she doesn't actually wade in and divorce the Muse from specifically female sexuality, which you have to do if either gay men or heterosexual women are to have Muses. Nor does she examine how male sexuality might relate to Muse-dom.
But the point of an essay is to provoke thought, and that she most certainly has done. And it's a remarkable synthesis of a great many and greatly diverse sources.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 08:59 pm (UTC)The Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen springs to mind as someone who explicitly explored the relation of male sexuality to Muse-dom (and Margaret Atwood wrote an essay on that aspect of her work, too, I believe).
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 09:33 pm (UTC)Yes. Which is exactly the problem: the idea of the Muse as a person/entity who inspires and ministers to the creativity of the artist has been, up until very recently, only available to men (Gilbert and Gubar talk about this some in The Madwoman in the Attic). It's an idea constructed by male artists for male artists and projected upon either an individual real woman or an imaginary idea of woman as Other (as that Graves quote Hand uses very tellingly demonstrates)--which is to say that there is no subject position for a Muse, and a Muse that has a subject position is someone like Laura Riding and thus the relationship is inherently destructive. Either your subject position or hers has got to give way. (This isn't necessarily the case with an imaginary Muse--but I still have trouble with imagining someone only to expressly deny them subjectivity.) For me as a woman artist, the entire concept is so compromised by its gender politics that I can't imagine using it seriously as a metaphor for my own creativity. (Much less applying it literally by appointing some real person to be a Muse.)
(I also think that part of Onions' point in "The Beckoning Fair One" is that the Muse isn't a viable rubric for producing art. Oleron starts Romilly Bishop with one Muse--Elsie--and that Muse is supplanted by the ghost-Muse of his house, leading to the destruction of both Oleron and Elsie, but the trouble with the Muse is there even before the haunting hits its stride. Elsie only works as a Muse so long as she remains tidily in the role Oleron has chosen for her: inspiring him (and there's something a little vampiric about Oleron using Elsie in that way, just as there's something extremely vampiric about the reversal that takes place when he succumbs to the ghost) and admiring his work. ("Nothing must interfere with the expansion of my friend the genius," as someone characterizes the attitude of Philip Boyes' best friend in Strong Poison--and there's another good comparison. Harriet Vane, like Elsie, is a professional woman, but she has the self-respect to refuse to be a Muse at all.). Once Elsie starts disagreeing with Oleron and insisting on expressing her own opinions, she is toppled from her pedestal--which drives Oleron further into the embrace of the ghost-Muse who reflects Oleron's unacknowledged angers and desires back at him and traps him in a narcissistic downward spiral. But Oleron's problem isn't that he chooses a "bad" Muse over a "good" Muse; it's that he's trying to force two women (Elsie and the ghost) into the role of Muse when neither of them actually belongs there. Notice that, as far as we know, Oleron never actually writes any of the "new" Romilly Bishop: the only action he takes in regard to his writing after he moves in is to burn the old one. The ghost doesn't inspire creativity; she drains it away.)
I don't disagree with Hand's quest for the numinous; I think that is an important part of creativity, and it is certainly true that we need metaphors to be able to talk about it, since the numinous is, by its nature, inarticulatable as direct experience. Her metaphor makes me uncomfortable--and I do think the unexamined subtextual lumber in her essay is a problem--but that doesn't mean it isn't the right metaphor for her. Or for others. Just, you know, not for me.
I've gotten kind of impassioned about this; I feel more strongly about it than I realized. I hope you don't feel like I'm browbeating you--or that my argument is with you, because it isn't. I disagreed with Hand's essay, but I'm glad I read it. And thank you for the reference to Gwendolyn MacEwen, who I don't believe I've heard of before.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 09:57 pm (UTC)No, not at all! It's also something I've been thinking about for years -- I read The White Goddess when I was fifteen, and I think I'm still recovering from it.
I'm glad I've given you something to think about, in any case.
Nazis
Date: 2009-03-30 03:44 pm (UTC)The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood, by Ursula Mahlendorf (Penn State Press, 2009)
I've seen a lot of books *about* ordinary Germans (etc), but very few first-person accounts of what it was like to actually be a believing Nazi.
"...almost no punch left."
Date: 2009-03-31 01:56 pm (UTC)