Now, if you know me, you’ll know that I appreciate Edith Nesbit’s ghost, supernatural and horror stories. We read ‘The House of Silence’ last year (read it here) which is a claustrophobic tale of a labyrinthine house, murder and an increasing sense of desperate entrapment. This year’s story ‘The Ebony Frame’ goes in a much more supernatural direction – talking pictures, demonic deals, immortal loves… You can read it here. Today’s story was first published in Longman’s Magazine in October 1891 (Longmans was the descendent of Frasers Magazine which keeps cropping up in my research at the moment due to its popularity with the Bronte family). Nesbit was a frequent contributor to Longman’s, offering both prose and poetry. This was one of her first solo short stories for adults. She had previously published with her husband under the pseudonym ‘Fabian Bland’. The story was also incorporated into her first ghost-tale collection Grim Tales (1893). It forms part of a long tradition of haunted paintings and demonic deals (such as Nicolai Gogol’s ‘The Portrait’ or Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray). As with these stories, people tend to get more and less than they bargained for in the deals they make. Our heroine (?) probably didn’t expect to get stuck (in her haunted painting) in a box for decades, nor did she expect to get burnt to a tiny crisp one day after finding the possibility of love (and having the chance to suck someone else into her demonic deal). C’est la vie.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably have first encountered Edith Nesbit through her children’s fiction: The Railway Children, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet. She’s credited with being a fairly pioneering and influential children’s author of the time. Her ghost stories often come as a pleasant surprise to readers as they did to me. My favourite is ‘The Shadow’ – it’s a an intricate little story whose apparent simplicity hides shades and shadows of meaning. You can read it here. Her first (as far as I know) independently written adult story ‘Uncle Abraham’s Romance’ appeared in September 1891, one month ahead of ‘The Ebony Frame’. It contains a similar story in terms of outline – a woman returning from the dead, a painting (in the case of Uncle Abraham’s Romance, a miniature which is used to identify a ghostly woman seen in a churchyard), a tragic love story, an witchy background and a irreversible loss. In some ways, ‘The Ebony Frame’ reads as a slightly more worked through version of a very similar story. It, by which I mean a supernatural love lost, was clearly a theme or idea which struck Nesbit and played on her mind – escaping into her fiction in different forms.
What particularly grabbed me this time in reading is the emphasis on dreaming. The narrator’s constant repetition that he’s sure it isn’t a dream goes through various stages: arousing doubt and suggesting it is a dream, reading as a desperate attempt to convince himself, and finally, I’d agree, through sheer force of repetition, it becomes a sort of mantra that infects the reader. It can’t be a dream. It has to be a dream or else the story is meaningless, just like that lost man’s life has become meaningless and he has turned life into nothing but a dream for the sake, not a greater reality, but of a passing delusion.
I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty; but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness? ah, no? it is the rest of life that is the dream.
But, if I think that, why have I married Mildred and grown stout, and dull, and prosperous?
I tell you, it is all this that is the dream; my dear lady only is the reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream?
Of course, the insistent repetition never quite convinces. As readers, we read half-credulous, reading it as a plain supernatural tale. We may be beset with doubt but those doubts are bludgeoned into quiescence by repetition. They don’t quite fade away though. The statement that dreams can’t be like this broke the trance a little for me. Dreams, in fact, are the only place where such things happen. Where longing and love, pure and untainted or untrammelled by reality and mundanity exist.
As with so many of our stories this month, the last line catches your eye, turns your understanding of the story, subtly punches you in the gut. To draw out the metaphor, when you turn to it with narrowed eyes, it looks back with innocence in every feature but the damage is done. It pretends to be a homage to an immortal love but reveals the real tragedy here. Whether or not a love has been lost (which, as it saved a soul, might be considered a good!), the tale is haunted by the spectre of a life lived as a dream, as meaningless, given meaning only by a delusion or by the flickering spark of one brief day of hope.
I feel like I’ve been waxing lyrical the last few days. I hope you’ll forgive me! I’m sharing my reflections as I read. Do let me know what you’d like me to write about!
Romancing the Gothic 