Halloween is only just behind us
and, since last week when I recommended his A
Terribly Strange Bed (1852), I’ve been diving deeper into some unsettling
and atmospheric short stories penned by Wilkie Collins.
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| The Ghost Story, R. Graves (1874) |
This week I’ll be talking about
two 1855 stories — Mad Monkton and The Ostler, the latter of which was the
first piece of Collins I ever read as part of the English Literature GCSE
syllabus.
These two stories share several
similarities. Both revolve around the idea of warnings, alerting men to the
circumstances of their own deaths but ultimately unable to save them. Each
story is narrated by a male character who stands apart from the central action
and is, especially in Mad Monkton,
sceptical about the possibility of ghostly apparitions. And in both cases,
while the most obvious explanation for the plot is supernatural, there are
other possible interpretations.
In Mad Monkton there may be no ghost at all. Alfred could simply be
suffering from a madness that runs in his family:
It was equally clear that [Alfred Monkton’s] delusions had been
produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led, acting on a
naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral
disease by an hereditary taint of insanity.
And Isaac, the eponymous ostler
in the second tale is discredited as a witness to the possibly demonic forces
that seem to pursue him through Collins’s focus on his lack of natural
intelligence:
Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility
and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men with
sluggishly-working mental powers.
Our desire to attribute these
stories to ghostly interference then could be because this is the less
terrifying option. For Collins, the fact that there could be something innate
inside us, something passed on by our bloodlines, something we are unable to
change, is more horrific than the idea that we could be a victim of
circumstance or supernatural forces.
Monkton’s end is all the more
tragic if his quest to find his uncle’s body was ill-informed and unnecessary
all along. It is possible that Isaac could have had a happy marriage had he and
his mother not drawn parallels between his bride and a single nightmare. And maybe
Rebecca Murdoch the real life drunken wife is more terrifying than a murderous ‘dream
woman’.
Collins’s most terrifying
proposition to us is that the scariest stories are part of our nature — not dictated
by something external to it.
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| Illustration by F.S. Coburn (19th-century) |
What would you like to see the
Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know — here, on Facebook or
by tweeting @SVictorianist.
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