Sarah Blake, the author of Grange House (2000), is a Victorianist, and this neo-Victorian novel might well be taken as a rethinking of all those debates over the meaning of both literary foremothers and female authorship. Grange House does not rewrite Victorian texts per se, although the novel alludes (explicitly and otherwise) to Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Lord Tennyson, among others. Similarly, while the novel harps on a number of Gothic themes and structures--ghosts, incest, repetition--it cannot be pinned down to any Gothic precursor in particular.
As in most Gothic novels, Grange House's residents appear doomed to repeat events from the past. But what are those events? Near the beginning of the novel, the cook's daughter, Halcy Ames, and her young lover are found drowned under mysterious circumstances, although it seems clear from Halcy's note that they are eloping on account of her pregnancy. To make matters worse, our narrator, Maisie, sees Halcy's ghost (more than once, in fact). The real Gothic repetition, however, lies not in the drowning but in the death of one and, perhaps, two children--namely, Halcy and her unborn (or born?) child. Maisie soon discovers that her mysterious friend Nell Grange, who occupies the attic (intentional shades of Jane Eyre), has also lost an illegitimate daughter; moreover, between Maisie's readings in Nell's accumulated diaries and her fraught conversation with the equally mysterious cook, Maisie soon makes a startling discovery that, in effect, leads her own mother to "lose" her daughter. Behind all this drama lies the story of the Widow Grange, an Irish emigrant whose obsession with the son she left behind to die inadvertently destroys her remaining family.
All of the women in this novel are storytellers, deliberately or otherwise, but not all forms of storytelling prove equal. In fact, far from heroically appropriating "the Author" for feminist purposes, female authors frequently become destructive, whether self- or otherwise. After Halcy's death, Maisie becomes furious when another adolescent, Ruth, takes a "greedy delight" in fashioning a grand romantic tale to explain the drowning (27), while much later, Maisie's mother tries to write through her husband's death in a different but no less problematic way, posting the dead man letter after letter (189). Even the beautiful but supposedly conventional Susannah Granger horns in on her sister Nell's text, inserting a love story designed (mistakenly) to provoke Nell into acknowledging that they are competing for the same man (256). These three very different instances all converge on authorship as self-centered desire: a desire which turns sordid events into cliched romance, the better to consume it (Ruth); a desire which replicates the author's real-life fiction of an ideal relationship with a man who actually loves someone else (Maisie's mother); a desire which casts sisterly love as erotic competition (Susannah). In particular, the mother's "dead letters" manifest an unwilling, although increasingly less concealed, recognition
that her communications never quite reached their intended object, even when he was alive.
But these examples of authorship gone awry pale before the threat of imagining revenants. Nell Grange first tells Maisie the story of her childhood as a Gothic narrative, complete with ghosts, mysterious handprints, and a gruesome death by fire. As the rest of this discussion will give away the plot, I'm going to stick it beneath the fold.
When Maisie reads Nell's diaries to discover the "true" story, however, she finds what looks like another Gothic tale: the Widow Grange believes that her visiting cousin, Hayden Gilroy, is really her supposedly dead son, and that Susannah's love for him is therefore incestuous. And when Nell feels obligated to retell this story to her family, she precipitates a crackup that results in the deaths of both Hayden and her brother George, along with Susannah's psychological collapse. Nell's earlier Gothic tale thus translates "realistic" sexual and domestic horrors into a fantastic vein, incidentally dramatizing the twentieth-century theory that the Gothic is a mode of experimenting with representations of deviance. But the real horror here is that the Widow's tale has no referent: as they discover much too belatedly, her son did die, and Hayden was just a cousin. Far from creating an alternative, motherly tradition of storytelling, Nell's decision to repeat her mother's story promptly wrecks the possibility of connection within and across generations--and, eventually, wrecks Nell's own potential career as a novelist as well.
Nell Grange's charge to Maisie, not surprisingly, is a charge to write:
"Seek the answer to what happened to cause Perdita's death. Close in the gap and the grave and then"--she smiled--"begin at the beginning and write us anew, all of us--my mother, my sister, Halcy Ames. Start up the story, Maisie; start it up again and carry us forward. Begin it again and finish it--so it will not repeat." (225)
Perdita is Nell's supposedly dead daughter, the fruit of her affair with Maisie's father, Ludlow Thomas. (While this novel's sexual shenanigans are relatively tame, it nevertheless throws some sideways glances at Henry James' What Maisie Knew.) But, like the Widow Grange's tale, Nell's also lacks a referent, for the grave literally conceals nothing: Perdita is Maisie, handed off to Ludlow by Susannah (later the cook, Mrs. Ames) and "reborn" in the aftermath of Mrs. Thomas' false pregnancy. Nell's belief in the healing power of narrative, which will lay the figurative (and/or literal) ghosts of Grange House to rest, takes a harsh drubbing once Maisie realizes that her very identity is a fiction. The grave must be opened, not closed, to reveal that the name "Perdita," carved over an empty space, signifies emptiness. "Maisie" itself, though, is only an accident. What Maisie must learn is that putting an end to the Grange House narrative means accepting that the fiction has become lived reality, that the sum total of a life trumps the incidental name. As Susannah warns her, "a name means nothing" (371). Narrative trumps biology; what makes Mrs. Thomas "Mama," not Nell, is her affective embodiment of Maisie's history: "For there, before me on the bed, lay all my past--suspired within her bosom, the gentle casing of my own heart" (373). While Maisie accepts Nell's charge to rewrite the family narrative, she must do so by refusing Nell as her "true" mother. Daughters, in other words, do not simply have mothers, but must also choose them.
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