APPROACHESTO APPROACHES TO MYSTERY:
THE NUMINOUS IN LE FANU’S UNCLE SILAS AND ROBERT AICKMAN’S THE LATE BREAKFASTERS
By Gary William Crawford
(ISSN 1932-9598)
The eras of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given rise to questions about many things believed by Western civilization. Religion, or, what Rudolf Otto calls the “numinous,” has been lessened in importance in the face of modern science and technology. As Todd A. Gooch, in his study of Rudolf Otto’s writings, has written, at the time of Otto’s works:
. . . the progress of critical historical research had succeeded in undermining the dogmatic self-understanding of Christianity by placing in doubt the historical reliability of its most sacred and time-honored scriptures. The authority of those texts and the religious institutions with which they have traditionally been associated was undermined by the advent of historical consciousness, the disenchanting tide of modern scientific reason, and sweeping socio-economic and cultural transformations that mitigated against the influence of religion in public life and the claim to absoluteness of the Christian tradition (211).
Interestingly, in the years of Otto’s writing, the ghost story was flourishing. Beginning with Sheridan Le Fanu in the nineteenth century and moving up to Robert Aickman in the mid-twentieth century, the ghost story looked long and hard at the world from which it emerged. This literature of “the numinous” presented questions about the nature of reality and the reality of the supernatural, and brought us to the brink of the sublime.
I choose two novels by these writers as prime examples of “the numinous,” which take two different stances. In Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, the notion of sin and evil is explored and shows a crisis of faith. In Aickman’s The Late Breakfasters, the central character undergoes an existential crisis in the face of changes in society brought about by the modern technological and industrial age. Finally, I approach these novels from a gender perspective. Both of the female protagonists define their own identity as women as a result of experiencing the numinous.
Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy (1917) sets forth the contents of “numinous” experience. This experience is related to the mental concept of intuition. S.L. Varnado, in his study, Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction, analyzes Otto’s ideas and applies them to supernatural or Gothic fiction:
It is with this second category of mental experience—intuition—that the work of Rudolf Otto (1860-1937) is concerned. In his years as a professor of theology at Marburg University, Otto’s studies of Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher turned his interest toward what we would today term the “psychology of religious experience.” The subject has been illuminated since Otto’s time by the work of Henri Bergson, Mircea Eliade, and others; but when Otto began his studies it was virtual terra incognita (9).
As Otto found in his book, “the holy includes ethical and rational concepts but also contains a specific element or ‘moment,’ which sets it aside from the purely intellectual. This ineffable, or nonrational, element in the holy ‘eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.’” Otto invented the new term “numinous” to describe this element. As he wrote, he needed
to find a word to stand for this element of isolation, this “extra” in the meaning of “holy” above and beyond the meaning of goodness. For this purpose I adopt a word coined from the Latin numen. Omen has given us “ominous,” and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word “numinous.” I shall speak, then, of a unique “numinous” category of value and of a definitely “numinous” state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied (Otto 6-7).
Otto said that the numinous can be understood by rational concepts, but also contains an element of emotional terror and awe. He used the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans—“a frightening yet fascinating mystery.” He related this term to the ghost stories that were written during his lifetime. He made a distinction between rational emotion and numinous emotion. In the numinous there is an element of what he called “creature consciousness”—the sense of being nothing in the face of the majestic or awe-inspiring tremendum. Before it the human is insignificant, feeling a sense of stupor in the face of it.
Varnado points out Otto’s relation of this to the ghost story:
The real attraction of a ghost, he says “consists in this, that of itself and in an uncommon degree it entices the imagination, awakening strong interest and curiosity: it is the weird thing in itself that allures the fancy . . . [It] is a thing which doesn’t really exist at all’, the ‘wholly other’. Something which has no place in our scheme of reality.”
He said that the mysterium tremendum leads to a positive bliss, a sense of the holy and the sublime, the most mature expression of it. It was a “harmony of contrasts”:
These two qualities, the daunting and the fascinating, now combine in a strange harmony of contrasts, and the resultant dual character of the numinous consciousness . . . is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion. The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it his own. The “mystery” is for him not merely something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen (Otto 27-29).
Otto does not say that this feeling is wholly subjective: there really is something out there before which the creature trembles. This is the gist of Otto’s philosophy.
Utilizing the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, I show that Le Fanu’s approach to the numinous is expressed as a crisis of faith, a questioning of the goodness of God; and utilizing the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, I show how Aickman approached the numinous in terms of an existential crisis of identity and the place of the individual in society.
The writings of Immanel Kant influenced Otto in forming the concept of the numinous. A basic concept in Kant’s philosophy is that “time as well as space is subjective, not a thing, but a form of sense—not a condition under which things exist, but a condition under which we become cognizant of their existence” (qtd. in Walton 7). Otto’s frequent references to Kant in The Idea of the Holy show that the numinous was, in part, subjective. It was a kind of thinking that brought us closer to the idea of the sublime and holy, the idea of God. Notions of the sublime arise in the views of many philosophers, from Longinus to Edmund Burke and Kant. Notions of the sublime are partly based on Kant, and Otto is quite aware of this. Vijay Mishra writes:
The sublime has now become a trope that is somehow antianalytic, suprasensible, and beyond the grasp of our cognitive faculties. Rereading it in the light of religious philosophers such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto (who preferred to use terms such as “hierophanic vision” and “the numinous”) one begins to sense the “sublime” (here in quotation marks) as a kind of a radical Other, the perennial underside, of materialist politics and sociology. In many ways, then, the postmodern (mis) appropriations of this term signal also a remarkable disenchantment with scientific paradigms and theories of knowledge, in that the sublime allows us a freedom (in both the intellectual and interpersonal spheres) from the highly organized world that, increasingly, we inhabit (25).
Ideas about God permeate much of Le Fanu’s fiction. Especially in the work I discuss, Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, questions about the goodness and even the existence of God arise. Le Fanu was of Huguenot descent, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman. He was very religious, but his fiction reflects an unorthodox stance towards matters of faith, which was doubtless reinforced by the crises brought about through doubt in the existence of God in both his sister and his wife shortly before their premature death.
Of course the tension between doubt and faith runs through much of Gothic fiction, a generic form that was a profound influence on Le Fanu. But another influence is significant, the theological work of the scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (see my previous essay in Le Fanu Studies). Swedenborg was a well-respected scientist, but in mid life he went through a crisis that he relates in his Journal of Dreams (1743-44). After having a vision of Christ he abandoned science and began writing long exegeses of the Bible and it is said communicated with spirits (see Kant’s book on Swedenborg).
Evidence has been presented that suggests that he was indeed mentally ill. In psychologist Wilson van Dusen’s book The Presence of Other Worlds he studies Swedenborg’s writings and relates them to the thought processes of schizophrenics. In his writing, Swedenborg explored his own mental illness, even though he did not regard it as such, and he was one of the first writers to explore these territories. Swedenborg’s ideas appear in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. Maud Ruthyn’s father Austin Ruthyn is a member of the Swedenborgian Church, most often called The New Church.
Supernaturalism, specifically the occult, influenced Robert Aickman. Aickman’s friend and literary executor, Felice Pearson, told me that Aickman did believe in some form of God, but he was much more interested in the serious study of the occult, especially ghosts. With his wife Ray, he spent a night in the famous supposedly haunted Borley Rectory, hoping to experience the genuine supernatural. And there is enough evidence in the characterization of the central character in Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters to show the influence of Existentialism, a twentieth century philosophy whose most famous exponent is Jean Paul Sartre. Aickman was very much a product of the twentieth century. He acutely felt the twentieth century anxiety over the developments in science that subverted what Aickman saw in the idyllic past. Le Fanu’s fiction, as demonstrated by Walton is very much a reflection of and a reaction to life during the Victorian era. Both of these writers approach the numinous in different ways, brought about by the eras in which they lived. The female protagonists in these works show a maturation of their own sexual identity as women that also reflects the time in which the novels are set.
Aickman, in believing in the supernatural and aligning the supernatural and the ghost story with poetry, was very much an existentialist. He wrote that “life is not fact but poetry. . . . I now do not believe but I know that a quality of the imagination is all that matters in life. I can proclaim it from the heart” (The River Runs Uphill). Aickman’s view is very close to the existential philosophy. He felt that life is what you make it because the universe is chaotic. The supernatural is a free choice of the individual. It is a practical thing, like Kant’s view of ghosts or spirits. Kant argued that belief in the supernatural is a practical thing, a personal choice. In both Le Fanu and Aickman, the protagonists go through some sort of crisis. In Le Fanu, it is a crisis of faith in which all accepted ideas about life and the goodness of God are being undermined by irrational forces. In Aickman, it is a crisis of one’s sexual identity and one’s very being in time and space.
In turning first to Le Fanu I choose to label Uncle Silas (1864) as a Swedenborgian Gothic romance. In calling it a Swedenborgian romance, I have already discussed some of the facets of the scientist-turned-mystic and related it to Le Fanu. Devin P. Zuber, in his essay “Swedenborg and the Disintegration of Language in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Sensation Fiction,” says:
Swedenborg is intimately a part of Le Fanu’s creation of complex characters whose identities are bound to the slippages and failures of language. . . . Without Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence or his notion of influx from a spiritual world, Le Fanu cannot have uncannily anticipated post-structural work on linguistics and hybrid identity, nor would Le Fanu’s oeuvre be theorized as critically important for moving the gothic mode away from clanking chains and clichéd ghosts toward a subjectivity of the self, where the true terrors of the night are the uncertainties of one’s own mind (75).
Uncle Silas is suffused with the ideas of Swedenborg. Maud Ruthyn, the heroine, has a widower father who practices the Swedenborgian religion. His minister, Dr. Hans Emmanuel Bryerly, is a ghostly figure who passes in and out of the novel like a wraith. Dressed in a shiny black suit, Dr.Bryerly is regarded by Maud Ruthyn, daughter of Austin Ruthyn, as frightening at first, but he then becomes an enigma to her, and is finally seen as her holy friend.
This idea of fear and evil is an expression of what Rudolf Otto calls the “negative numinous.” The evil and terror that Maud experiences in her consorting with her murderer uncle, Silas Ruthyn, and his spurious Swedenborgianism is an example of the negative numinous. As Otto writes:
The “ferocity” is the origin of Lucifer, in whom the mere potentiality of evil is actualized. It might be said that Lucifer is “fury,” the hypostatized, the mysterium tremendum cut loose from the other elements and intensified to mysterium horrendum. The roots at least of this may be found in the Bible and the early Church. The ideas of propitiation and ransom are not without reference to Satan as well as to the divined wrath. The rationalism of the myth of the “fallen angel” does not render satisfactorily the horror of Satan and of the “depths of satan” (Revelations 2: 24) and the “mystery of iniquity” (Thessalonians 2:7). It is a horror that is in some sort numinous, and we might designate the object of it as the negatively numinous. This also holds good of other religions than that of the Bible. In all religions, “the devilish” plays its part and has its place as that which, opposed to the divine, has yet something in common with it. As such it should be the subject of special inquiry, which must be an analysis of fundamental feelings, and something very different from a mere record of the “evolution of the idea of the devil” (106-107).
What I argue here is that Le Fanu, in making Uncle Silas a romance of good and evil, is utilizing the romance form to express questions about the goodness of God and the nature of Satan. And in making it a Swedenborgian romance, he utilizes concepts from Swedenborg as the symbolic and metaphorical elements that contain his meaning, and present his view of the numinous.
The principle doctrine of Swedenborg is called “the doctrine of correspondences.” A passage from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen is a succinct rendering of this vital concept in Swedenborg’s occult writings:
Since man is both a heaven and a world in least form after the image of the greatest . . . there is in him both a spiritual and a natural world. The interior things that belong to his mind, and that have relation to understanding and will constitute his spiritual world; while the exterior things that belong to his body, and that have relation to its senses and activities, constitute his natural world. Consequently every thing in his natural world (that is, in his body and its senses and activities), that has its existence from his spiritual world (that is from his mind and its understanding and will) is called a correspondent (paragraph 90).
This correspondence is very much like the symbolism and metaphor of the romance, which makes settings and characters a “mental landscape” in which the external world corresponds to the interior world of the mind.
Thus, Uncle Silas, narrated from the viewpoint of the young woman, Maud Ruthyn, shows her ordeal at Bartram-Haugh, and her early happy life at Knowl, as a psychosymbolical romance in which Maud descends into hell at Bartram-Haugh, where her Uncle Silas attempts to murder her for the money she inherited after her father’s death. However, Maud is saved, and she returns to the heaven of her home at Knowl and embraces the Swedenborgian religion and the holy.
In Chapter 3, entitled “A New Face,” Maud’s memory of a Swedenborgian minister when she was nine years old just after her mother died, returns to her. She regarded her father’s religion as of having “something unearthly and spectral” (20). The minister, in his metaphorical way, presents the basic elements of the Swedenborgian religion to the child Maud:
I remember feeling a sort of awe of this dark little man; but I was not afraid of him, for he was gentle, though sad—and seemed kind. He led me into the garden—the Dutch garden, we used to call it—with a balustrade, and statues at the farther front, laid out in a carpet-pattern of brilliantly coloured flowers. We came down the broad flight of Caen stone steps into this, and we walked in silence to the balustrade. The base was too high at the spot where we reached it for me to see over, but holding my hand, he said, “Look through that, my child. Well, you can’t; but I can see beyond it—shall I tell you what? I see ever so much. I see a cottage with a steep roof, that looks like gold in the sunlight; there are tall trees throwing soft shadows round it, and flowering shrubs, I can’t say what, only the colours are beautiful, growing by the walls and windows, and two little children are playing among the stems of the trees, and we are on our way there, and in a few minutes shall be under those trees ourselves, and talking to those little children. Yet now to me it is but a picture in my brain, and to you but a story told by me, which you believe. . . . You see now, and hear, and feel for yourself that both the vision and the story were quite true . . . .”
I accompanied the dark mysterious [man] through the woodland glades. We came, to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey, pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained steps, the lonely sepulcher in which I had the morning before seen poor mamma laid (21-22).
The dark man asks the child Maud, if she sees the place. He says to her,
“Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over. But”—
Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what I afterwards knew of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he lived in the wood which surrounded us, and I began to grow frightened as he proceeded.
“But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over, and through it, and has told me all that concerns us to know. He says your Mamma is not there. . . . Your mamma is alive, but too far away to see or hear us; but Swedenborg, standing here, can see and hear her, and tells me all he sees, just as I told you in the garden about the little boys and the cottage, and the trees and flowers which you could not see, but believed in when I told you. So I can tell you now as I did then, and as we are both, I hope, walking on to the same place, just as we did to the trees and cottage, you will surely see with your own eyes how true is the description which I give you” (23).
This passage, with it visual and sensual experience of the numinous, metaphorically presents Swedenborg’s “other life.” The movement from the natural world to the spiritual world is depicted metaphorically by the balustrade over which Maud cannot see, just as Maud cannot comprehend the world of spirits. Later in life, when she goes to Bartram-Haugh, this movement is metaphorically expressed as a descent into hell: she cannot see the truth about her Uncle Silas until the final chapters.
Maud recalls how frightened she was after the event she experienced with the little dark Swedenborgian minister at the age of nine: “for a long time after that ramble with the visionary, I fancied the gate of death, hidden only by a strange glamour, and the dazzling land of ghosts, were situate; and I suppose these early associations gave to my father’s coming visitor a wilder and a sadder tinge” (24).
Elizabeth Bowen, in her introduction to the 1946 edition of Uncle Silas, has described Maud Ruthyn metaphorically as the bride of Death. Ideas and images of death permeate the novel. Maud has a dream of her father in which his ghostly figure appears and simply says the word “Death!” Maud’s wicked governess, Madame de la Rougierre, is described as an apparition, and when she and Maud go to a nearby cemetery, she rattles off a number of funereal phrases and looks quite mad when she calls herself “Madame Deadhouse!” Towards the middle of the novel, Maud’s father Austin talks about receiving a visitor and going on a “journey.” But he dies suddenly and Maud realizes that that visitor is Death.
The journey to Bartram-Haugh and Uncle Silas, who is made Maud’s guardian in her father’s will, is described as a descent after death, and she regards the gypsy woman who reads her palm at a point in the journey to Bartram-Haugh, as a creature in hell. There is an atmosphere of the negative numinous, as Bartram-Haugh is like a ruined castle that is crumbling to its death. Locked away is the house’s great secret, the death of a Mr. Charke at the hands of Maud’s Uncle Silas many years ago. In a sealed room, Mr. Charke was found with his throat cut; it was ruled a suicide, but there was always some suspicion about Silas.
The entire Bartram-Haugh chapters are suffused with ghostly and terrifying imagery. Maud sometimes asks herself if what she is experiencing is the supernatural. Silas’s long white hair and his pale face and phosphoric eyes gradually draw Maud deeper into the negative numinous. In the final scene, “The Hour of Death,” Silas and his son Dudley attempt to kill Maud. But they unknowingly kill Madame de la Rougierre in the very same room that Mr. Charke, the novel shows, was murdered by Silas.
The mystery of Mr. Charke’s death is solved and Maud manages to escape death herself. Silas dies of a self-inflicted overdose of laudanum, and Maud has reached a point in which the negative numinous becomes the positive numinous, the sublime, what Otto calls the truly holy. Maud becomes a Swedenborgian at the close and all of the many threads of deceit and death are joined as symbols of the negative and positive numinous. Maud marries, and the reader learns that Maud’s first child dies. It is somewhat a hollow happy ending, but Maud comes full circle when she writes:
The world is a parable—the habitation of symbols—the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape. May the blessed second-sight be mine—to recognize under these beautiful forms of earth, the ANGELS who wear them; for I am sure we may walk with them if we will, and hear them speak (433).
Thus, Swedenborgianism becomes Le Fanu’s vehicle for the numinous, and these ideas are related to the symbolism and metaphor of the romance, which is what Le Fanu calls the work in his preface to the first book appearance of the novel.
Robert Aickman’s The Late Breakfasters is, like Uncle Silas, centered on the experiences of a young female character. However, unlike the Le Fanu, there is no overlay of Christianity. Aickman’s character goes through an existential crisis about her sexual and social identity. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s depiction of the existential outsider facing nothingness, Griselda de Reptonville faces the emptiness of her life in a number of strange, mysterious, and inexplicable events that are the fabric of the numinous. Ultimately, she forsakes her world (England in the 1950’s) and wholly enters the numinous and achieves a certain joy and the sublime like Maud Ruthyn’s embracing Swedenborgianism.
Like Sartre’s existential man, Griselda is an outsider. She is very much like Aickman’s other female protagonists, who experience the numinous and undergo a profound crisis, and change completely. As Christine Pasanen Morris writes:
Aickman’s stories present extraordinary and unusual insights into what it means to be female. . . . Aickman’s heroines . . . are always close to the edge of society’s boundaries of what is considered normal . . . their lives contain chinks which no person or role label or system can fill or satisfy” (56).
In The Late Breakfasters, Griselda confronts her own homosexuality, and she feels very much an outsider because of it. As Sartre wrote in Existentialism and Human Emotions, he defended humanism and existentialism by saying that by existentialism “we mean a doctrine which makes human life possible and, in addition, declares that every truth and every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity” (Marino ed. Sartre 342). Just as the numinous sprang from intuition and the subjective, existentialism comes from man’s perception of himself in the world. The basic principle of existentialism is “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (345).
The numinous is expressed in Aickman’s novel as a subjective sense of the ghostly. Terry Castle, in her study of the lesbian in modern culture, compares the plight of the lesbian as ghostly:
It is too easy to think of her as distant and strange and standoffish: as alienated from the real or “everyday” world the rest of us inhabit. The lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind, a wanderer in the dusk, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a pale denizen of the night (2).
The novel is in a sense a ghost story, because like Aickman’s other ghost stories, Griselda experiences the numinous in a number of strange, inexplicable events that seem supernatural. Just as Maud Ruthyn in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas feels that what she experiences is supernatural, Griselda’s search for her own identity is expressed in supernatural terms. I will present the basic plot of the Aickman novel, because copies are very rare, and it will ground my argument in the text, as the strange plot twists and sudden reversals, depict the numinous.
In her frustrated love for a maid she meets at a political rally, Griselda experiences the numinous. However, in Aickman’s novel, unlike Le Fanu’s, Griselda does not experience the negative numinous. There is no sense of good and evil as in Uncle Silas. The numinous that Griselda experiences contains what Otto refers to as the non-rational mingled with the rational. At the conclusion, Griselda realizes that it “cannot truly be defined” (The Late Breakfasters 250).
Griselda is invited to the country house, Beams, of Mrs. Hatch for a weekend political rally. The prime minister is present, along with an assortment of rather odd people. The characters pass in an out of Griselda’s life, like the ghostly characters of Uncle Silas, like wraiths.
As in the Le Fanu, the novel is a series of strange events tied to main character’s inner fears and apprehensions. Early in the novel, Griselda discovers that Beams, Mrs. Hatch’s country house, is haunted (8). The reputed ghost, Stephanie, during her life, occupied to room in which Griselda sleeps. In this room, Griselda has the first of her vivid dreams:
At one moment when she was nearer waking than sleeping, she heard the sound of tears, a high-pitched sobbing, somewhat petulant it seemed but distant and subdued. . . . Several times during the later part of the night, Griselda woke from nightmare; but not a detail could she remember even in the first moments of consciousness. . . . At the last moment before waking, she seemed to have a dream of a different order. The earlier dreams she never remembered; this one she never forgot. She dreamed of a strange perfect love; an impossibly beautiful happiness. The rapture of her dream was something new to her. It stayed with her while she rose to wash and dress; and no longer (28-29).
The next morning two other guests, the Ellensteins, a German couple, come to breakfast late and tell Griselda that their pet dog, Fritzi, has died. Griselda had heard the howling of a dog during the night, and the animal seems connected with her vague dream. It is the first of the strange events.
At Beams, Griselda also meets Geoffrey Kynaston, a foppish poet and dancer who pursues her. But more importantly Griselda meets a maid who says she can talk to the ghost of Stephanie. The maid Louise and Griselda fall in love, and on the night of the All Party dance, they walk outside the house to Stephanie’s grave, which is part of the grounds where there is also a temple to Venus. Here they feel free of the press of the guests and resolve to go away and live together.
Louise seems ghostly, like the characters in Uncle Silas, because she is described with supernatural metaphors; at one point, Aickman writes of Louise as Griselda’s “shadow” (76). After the All Party dance, Louise and Griselda sleep together. During the night, someone abducts Louise. This disappearance is, Aickman writes, the beginning of a “train of events” Griselda “never got to the bottom of” (108).
Part Two of the novel recounts Griselda’s long, frustrating search for Louise. She is suddenly, inexplicably ushered out of Beams by Mrs. Hatch. Unable to deal with her newly discovered homosexuality, Griselda goes to London and takes a job in a small bookshop that, she is pleased to discover, is owned by a homosexual man, Mr. Tamburlane. He tells Griselda, “My eros veers almost entirely toward Adonis” (128).
At Mr. Tamburlane’s shop, she meets his friend, a Miss Otter, who publishes a newsletter called “The Otter.” Griselda never sees the newsletter and never finds anything out about its subscribers. She only hopes that Miss Otter can help her find Louise. In the meantime, Griselda takes a room in a residence for young working women and meets a friend named Peggy.
A few months after Griselda has worked in the bookshop, Mr. Tamburlane discovers that Miss Otter has died. In yet another mysterious event, Mr. Tamburlane suddenly leaves the shop to Griselda and Griselda never hears from him again.
Griselda settles into her new life as a bookshop owner and encounters once again the foppish Geoffrey Kynaston from Mrs. Hatch’s party. He professes his love for her and proposes marriage several times but she turns him down repeatedly. On an outing with Geoffrey, Peggy, and a group of young people, Griselda comes upon quite by accident the home of Travis Raunds. Griselda recalls meeting his son Hugo Raunds at the political rally at Beams, and discovers that Sir Travis has died. Griselda resolves to contact Hugo to help her find Louise. She recalls that Louise had told her that Hugo Raunds “understands people like us” (72-73). She writes a letter to him, but he responds that he cannot help her.
Griselda gets not a single word of encouragement in her quest and she finally agrees to marry Geoffrey Kynaston. This is, in Sartre’s existential philosophy, the negative, or “bad faith.” Griselda lies to herself. As Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness, “We say indifferently of a person that he is guilty of bad faith or that he lies to himself” (Marino 370). She reasoned that “Kynaston was not very much of a man, but life, she felt, was not very much of a life” (201). She does what society expects of her, to marry a man and have children. This is akin to what Otto calls “the negative numinous” as we have seen in the character of Silas Ruthyn in Le Fanu.
Griselda finds her sexual relationship with her new husband unsatisfactory, and as a year passes, Geoffrey becomes involved in a number of shady political dealings and is accidentally killed in South Africa. After Geoffrey is killed, Griselda is visited by Hugo Raunds, and he invites her to visit him at his home in Wales. Hugo’s appearance is again one of the ghostly events of the novel. Hugo rides in a horse-drawn carriage among the automobiles on London streets, and he dresses in Victorian clothing.
Hugo’s castle, Griselda is told when she arrives in Wales, is enchanted. Hugo’s servant Esemplarita remarks that only “suitable people” stay there. “There are very few suitable people,” she tells Griselda. Griselda asks her, “Can you define?” Esemplarita responds, “It cannot truly be defined” (249-50).
When Griselda arrives at the castle, she is awed by the fact that it seems to be outside time:
The big Gothic revival hall was hung with paintings, and lighted with hundreds, possible thousands of candles, in complex candelabra descending from the ceiling, and storied brackets climbing the walls. There was an immense carpet, predominately dark green; and involved painted furniture. At one end of the hall was a fire which really filled the huge grate and soaked all the air with warmth. Round the fire was a group of men and women. They sat or lay on painted chairs and couches and on the predominately green floor. Griselda thought at first that they were in fancy dress. Then she turned and saw Esemplarita was dressed like them. She remembered that she must not be surprised (250-51).
Griselda almost immediately feels at peace there: “She felt as one returned to life. She was relieved of care and accessible to joy” (251). The final passage, “Envoi,” describes Griselda’s feelings: “Before many days Griselda found that happiness unfitted her for the modern world . . . .whenever her thoughts were idle, she knew that if only Louise were there, then indeed would she be whole” (253).
Griselda’s tale is for the twentieth century; Maud Ruthyn’s tale is for the nineteenth. In Le Fanu, the search for the numinous leads to God; and in the Aickman, the search for the numinous leads to a world outside time that is removed from the twentieth century.
Both women go through a crisis: in Le Fanu, it is a crisis of faith; in Aickman, it is a sexual and existential crisis. Thus, these characters experience what Otto calls the numinous, and define their identity as women: Maud as a wife and mother, and Griselda enters the numinous, a place very much like “the other life” of Swedenborg. One should not deny the goodness of God or one’s identity because both, in their way, lead to the holy.
WORKS CITED
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