The ‘Scare a Day’ challenge – First Week Round Up

Last year, I did a blog for every single day of the challenge and I have learned from that so that now I am only doing a weekly round-up!

I’d also like to open the discussion up to you as well. You can follow along with the hashtag (#AScareADay) on Blue Sky or Twitter and join in the discussion. You can answer here. You can send me an email. Or you can just mull over the questions on your own. (Or ignore them completely!)

As a reminder, this week we read:

October 1st – Matthew Lewis – ‘A Night at Baptiste’s’ (an extract from The Monk) – Read it here

October 2nd – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – The Erl King – Read it here

October 3rd – Charlotte Dacre – The Murderer – Read it here

October 4th – Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson – Albert of Werdendorff, or, The Midnight Embrace – Read it here

October 5th – Lord Byron – Oscar of Alva – Read it here

October 6th – Richard Thomson – The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin – Read it here

There was an even number of poems and prose pieces which was a deliberate choice (apologies to the poetry haters!) I don’t often talk that much about how I make up these lists each year and they may not appear planned at all, but I try to get a mix of forms, a mix of different authors (with some new and some familiar each year), and, of course, I try to get stories from lots of different eras.

What’s your favourite part of the challenge? The older tales or the modern? Finding new authors or rereading old favourites?

What I rarely plan is any sense of overall theme. I’m not trying to connect the stories particularly but I’m always intrigued at how themes crop up. It might be a reflection of what I’m reading or thinking about, absolute coincidence, or perhaps just the human mind’s constant desire to find patterns and logic in chaos and absurdity!

A few themes have popped up for me already this year, the main one being betrayal. ‘A Night at Baptiste’s’ is the story of an inn and its keeper who are set on killing you with a smile; Sarah Wilkinson’s ‘Albert of Werdendorff’ has a traitorous lover; ‘Oscar of Alva’ has some fratricide mixed in with its betrayal; and the Wehr-Wolf has a man outcast because of a court betrayal. I’d even argue that the Erl King has a hint of betrayal to it – the father who won’t listen to his child and Charlotte Dacre’s ‘The Murderer’ has a man tormented by his conscience for an act in which betrayal almost certainly played a part.

I’m intrigued by how differently these stories depict and punish these betrayals. In ‘Night at Baptiste’s’ the betrayal isn’t personal; it’s just business. Quite literally. Baptiste seems to survive entirely by luring travellers to his cottage (with the help of traitorous positillions) and murdering them for money. His smiling face and jovial manner is a classic case of gothic dichotomies between outer and inner selves and the oft repeated lesson that we shouldn’t trust pleasant appearances. Baptiste’s punishment is as impersonal as his motives – the hand of the law crushing him and his associates so that rich travellers can wander the woods in peace again. The story pits mercenary values against ‘heroic’ ones and has those ‘heroic’ values, aligned with state justice, triumph. There are, of course, a few uncomfortable notes in this tidy denouement. Raymond’s servant is slaughtered by Baptiste’s confederates; Raymond did, of course, leave him to die. The lives of the few rich were more precious than the whole host of servants who forewarned or forearmed actually stood a chance of defending themselves. Then there’s Marguerite, the woman who, effectively, saves them. The story casts her as a heroine of sorts, one who rebels against the life she’s forced to lead and helps our hero into the bargain. And what is her reward? Well, she gets to spend the rest of her life self-exiled in a convent, of course, full of repentance and regret! Yay… There are all sorts of holes in the story’s ‘justice’ when you start poking. The question of the economic conditions under which any of this occurs are side-lined. Don’t look! The fact that justice rolls out on the orders of a count looking for his wife and not for the countless other victims is … suggestive. The way in which Marguerite gets treated as property, passed between bandits and alive only at their whim, is (the text suggests) ironed out by her husband’s death with no space to ask any untidy questions about the other women in the bandit camp or her own, or any woman’s, restricted right to agency. Not to get all radical on you, but by the end of the story, I’m not entirely sure who’s betrayed whom when a bunch of the wealthy ride off into the sunset, the woman who rescued them disappears into a convent, her children become servants, the servants are left to die and slaughtered, and everyone else is dead or about to be.

In ‘Albert of Werdendorff, or The Midnight Embrace’ we have another classic Gothic betrayal. A young rich man preying on a young poor woman, seducing her, abandoning her for a richer wife, and then going back to murder her. Sarah Wilkinson had an entirely different background to Matthew Lewis – she was often in difficult monetary circumstances and struggled with ill health throughout much of her life while supporting a child. Lewis may have been unusually sympathetic to Marguerite in ‘Night at Baptiste’s’ but Sarah Wilkinson lets her wronged woman get her own revenge. It’s not so much case of Divine retribution at work as it is a case of woman coming back and embracing a man to death. Her version of justice is replayed every single year.

‘Guimilda, her husband, and his murdered love, traverse the haunted hall which is then illumined with a more than mortal light; and the groans of the spectre lord can be heard afar while he is clasped in the arms of Josephine’s implacable ghost.’

The story ends with a, frankly, irritating ‘moral’: ‘had the lovely maiden preserved her virtue from the snares of a seducer, she had still been happy’. But is the severe moral everything it seems? It’s easy to tack a moral onto the end of a story to diffuse some of that whiff of subversion in a story about a wronged lower class woman who gets her revenge against the rich man who seduced and the woman and man who together planned her murder.

In ‘Oscar of Alva’, it’s another classic Gothic trope: the disappearing bridegroom murdered by the jealous brother. I loved a comment made by one of the participants on twitter about the fact that the poem does throw a bit of a wrench at our expectations by having the villainous brother sport classic blonde handsomeness and the good brother take on the brooding dark-haired role. This betrayal is deeply personal, a crime of passion and personal benefit, but also a crime against greater laws: the murder of a brother. What I find interesting about this poem’s moment of revenge is that it seems to include another party – a greater power at work alongside Oscar to punish his traitorous sibling. Now there’s been some debate about this so

What do you think? Is the mysterious stranger the ghost of Oscar or another?

I read the following verses as suggesting that Oscar’s ghost has an… introducer.

“’Tis he! I hear my murderer’s voice!”
  Loud shrieks a darkly gleaming Form.
“A murderer’s voice!” the roof replies,
  And deeply swells the bursting storm.

The tapers wink, the chieftains shrink,
  The stranger’s gone,—amidst the crew,
A Form was seen, in tartan green,
  And tall the shade terrific grew.

There’s a later verse which offers a little more evidence that there are two supernatural entities in play

And whence the dreadful stranger came,
  Or who, no mortal wight can tell;
But no one doubts the form of flame,
  For Alva’s sons knew Oscar well.

The grim knight who demands justice and recognition of Oscar’s existence and his death disappears when Oscar arrives. But understanding him as another presence opens up some interesting possibilities of a wider justice at play and a more cosmic form of vengeance. Oscar’s cry of revelation is echoed by the roof but the phrase ‘the roof replies’ suggests the building’s own agency. The world around him cries out with him, something further manifested in the raging storm that is stirred up. The revenge that he brings with him is a little more indiscriminate than the previous story’s: Oscar’s father keels over at the same time despite the fact he has mourned for Oscar. Does he die for a crime or simply of the shock?

One of the things I love about this poem is the slight riddle at the end. As another participant noted, there’s a theme of music throughout the poem. The ending offers us a curious conundrum though: the declaration that Allan’s misdeeds will never be sung in the act of singing them.

What minstrel grey, what hoary bard,
  Shall Allan’s deeds on harp-strings raise?
The song is glory’s chief reward,
  But who can strike a murd’rer’s praise?

Unstrung, untouch’d, the harp must stand,
  No minstrel dare the theme awake;
Guilt would benumb his palsied hand,
  His harp in shuddering chords would break.

No lyre of fame, no hallow’d verse,
  Shall sound his glories high in air:
A dying father’s bitter curse,
  A brother’s death-groan echoes there.

Ironically, while Oscar’s ghost and his mysterious supernatural assistants get their vengeance, Oscar himself is reduced to a murder victim. His deeds in life are never sung, but the legend of Allan’s perfidy will last forever.

The final tale of betrayal and revenge is found in Richard Thomson’s ‘The Wehr-Wolf’ where the betrayal is part of the back story. The youthful (and honourable) Count Gaston de Marcanville serves the king and when he hears of treason, even treason planned by the man who sponsored him in court, he has no ears for it. Unfortunately, he is as uncunning as he is noble and the dastardly Count de Saintefleur decides to accuse the innocent Marcanville of treason before his own is revealed. For reasons unknown but labelled as ‘magnanimity’, Marcanville doesn’t defend himself (or, you know, reveal the treasonous plot) but instead disappears with his wife and daughter. For reasons. It takes him decades to get any revenge and it comes at the cost of his own life and that of his daughter (who heroically and pointlessly sacrifices herself).

His vengeance though is something far more indiscriminate than any of the previous cases. We’ve had judicial punishments, personal vengeance and Divine (possibly) punishment up till now but there’s no God and there’s no justice here. The evil Count is killed but Marcanville’s stint as the wehr-wolf sees him indiscriminately killing children:

The locals ‘had lost their children, whose lacerated remains, afterwards discovered in the woods, only half-devoured, plainly denoted them to have fallen the prey of some abandoned wehr-wolf.’

Vengeance overruns its bounds and makes monsters of men.

There are other threads that others have picked up on so my final question for today is:

What themes have you picked up on across stories?

See you next week for another round-up!