{"id":3704,"date":"2017-02-18T23:06:19","date_gmt":"2017-02-18T23:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/?p=3704"},"modified":"2017-08-22T12:06:34","modified_gmt":"2017-08-22T12:06:34","slug":"edith-wharton-hears-whooo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/edith-wharton-hears-whooo\/","title":{"rendered":"Edith Wharton hears a Whooo!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female writers are a bit like male ones, really. Some of them are outstanding, and some of them produce tosh. So one of the more sensible things to do during Women in Horror Month<\/em> is to look at the actual works, and point out the many striking dark stories you can find by women. Today, we bring you Edith Wharton<\/strong><\/span>, Katharine Fullerton Gerould<\/strong><\/span>, and Mary E Wilkins Freeman<\/strong><\/span>. And some of what follows includes a serious look at the changing nature of supernatural fiction.<\/p>\n

Yes, here we are with Part Three of The History of Women in Horror<\/strong><\/em>, exploring some scary writing by women in the early Twentieth Century…<\/p>\n

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the history of women in horror<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first decades of the century were a difficult time for women (as opposed to all the laid back, easy times they’d had before). Men were busy making important political and military decisions, and killing each other. Women, meanwhile, idled away their time with such frivolities as keeping their children alive, repopulating devastated countries, nursing wounded men, and working in munitions factories.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefinitions of femininity and of women\u2019s social roles were in flux. During World War I, women had gained jobs that had hitherto been held only by men; afterward, women\u2019s job options again narrowed. England\u2019s two million \u201csurplus women\u201d were newly identified as a social problem, suffragettes were demonstrating, Freud\u2019s works were in the bookshops, and hems were on the rise. \u201c<\/em><\/p>\n

Katherine Bischoping & Riley Olstead, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2013)<\/em><\/p>\n

Some women went all literary, and charged their writing with hidden meanings which could only be decoded by boys who knew the secret handshake. A few broke out in attacks of initials (see also Part 1) and pretended to be men for publishing purposes. But many female writers produced works of distinctive supernatural and weird fiction under their own names. We’ve picked three of the earlier writers, with illustrative stories, to show what you may be missing.<\/p>\n

Mary E Wilkins Freeman<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Mary E Wilkins Freeman<\/strong> is our first pick, because this allows us to mention stories which straddle the boundaries between Victoriana and the weird. The period up to the First World War was a transitional time, as shadows lurked behind those Edwardian summers. Society was changing, and the black crepe was gradually being shed. Gothic had gone, and weird was coming in, though there was still a place for straightforward ghost tales.<\/p>\n

Freeman had an odd enough life. She had a strict religious upbringing, and lost both her parents by the age of 31, leaving her to try and make money by writing. At the age of fifty she married a chap with alcohol and drug problems, who ended up being admitted to a hospital for the insane. On his death she inherited $1.<\/p>\n

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Sidenote:<\/strong> <\/em>There is a detailed biography of Freeman which includes analysis of her writings overall, and which is relevant to the changes going on in writing and society. This is In a Hidden Closet: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman<\/em>, by Leah Blatt Glasser<\/strong> (1996).<\/p>\n

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It \u201cexplores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852-1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England\u2026 Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women’s lives, the complexity of women’s sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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She was a respected and prolific writer, and is still famous in ghostly circles for her story ‘Luella Miller’<\/em>. This is notable for being a sort of vampire story, but more subtle and unusual than the old type (there’s a nice reading by our friend Morgan Scorpion<\/strong> on Librivox).<\/p>\n

‘Shadows on the Wall’<\/em> is another good tale which might almost be called Jamesian (but this is an over-used adjective). Much of the story, seen from the point of view of three women in a household, is concerned with the building tension which follows a man’s death, seemingly from natural causes. It is a simple tale, reminiscent of the old style of ghost story, yet the way in which the women interact and develop their concerns is deftly handled.<\/p>\n

Quite different is ‘The Hall Bedroom’<\/em> (1905), and we mention this one because it enters the weirder zone which was to follow in supernatural fiction. Rooms that are ‘different’, and hints of the fifth dimension, together with the way in which the story unfolds, gives hints of what would come with H P Lovecraft<\/strong> and others \u2013 stories which evoke sensations and suggest the possibility of science beyond our ken, without the standard resolutions. The writer and anthologist Dorothy Scarborough<\/strong> cited ‘The Hall Bedroom’<\/em> as<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)<\/em><\/p>\n

All the above are in The Wind in the Rose Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural<\/em> (1903). Some time after Freeman’s death, Arkham House released a collection of all eleven of her known supernatural stories (Collected Ghost Stories<\/em>, 1974).<\/p>\n

Both of the stories are available on audio:<\/p>\n

Shadows on the Wall<\/span><\/p>\n