Adventure classics -- Love, time after time

The Portent

by George MacDonald

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"If you see anything in it, take it and I am glad you have it: but I wrote it for the tale," George MacDonald told his wife when she asked him what the meaning was of his 1864 ghostly romance, The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders Commonly Called the Second Sight (to give its full title).

You can’t blame Mrs. MacDonald for being curious. The story’s hero had more than a passing resemblance to her husband. And, probably, if you consider yourself happily married but your husband’s writing a romantic story about a reincarnated lover from a past life, well, you’ve got to wonder¼

After all, MacDonald could get heavily into “meaning” at times. As a failed preacher (his conservative Calvinist congregations weren’t enthusiastic about his leanings toward a doctrine of universal salvation), he all too often turned to writing sermons in the form of books when no one would pay him to speak them.

But over a long and prolific life, he wrote a handful of short stories and several novels¾ and one of these is The Portent¾ that still endure. And in these best of MacDonald’s stories, “the deeper meanings came there almost by accident, for they were part of himself,” Oxford don Roger Lancelyn Green wrote in his introduction to The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald. “If we could explain the story it would not be there any more¾ just as if we tried to cut up a soap-bubble to see how the lovely colours were put into it.”

So, what is The Portent? A love story? A ghost story? An allegory (although not a heavy-handed one) about the transformative power of love between poor but proud Scottish tutor Duncan Campbell and the lovely, fey Lady Alice?

After finishing university but failing to obtain the military commission he longs for,
Duncan accepts a post as tutor in an English earl’s household. There he meets the earl’s ward, Lady Alice. Although the family considers Alice mentally deficient, her highly original remarks strike Duncan as “closely allied to genius.” He sympathizes with her position as a fellow outsider, but Alice shuns him.

One night, while exploring an uninhabited wing of the mansion, Duncan happens upon Alice sleepwalking. Startled, she faints. As he tries to bring her back to consciousness, he hears the sound which has been a portent of doom in his family, the sound of a galloping phantom horse, always distinguishable by the clanking of the loose shoe that caused it to fall to the death of its rider, Duncan’s long-ago ancestor.

Believing that only members of his family can hear the phantom, Duncan is amazed when Alice also admits to hearing the portent of disaster. As an attachment grows between them, he wonders if she is a distant relation of his. Or, as he begins to believe, is she the reincarnation of the beloved whose beauty doomed his jealous ancestor? And are he and she fated to repeat the tragedy or can love finally defeat the forces of darkness?

As an introduction to MacDonald’s writing, this is the story I recommend. His language is at both its most beautiful and most approachable, with no metaphysics heavier than a deliciously creepy legend of tragic love. And it’s short. Having read the book several years ago, I promised myself just to give it a quick scan to refresh my memory. Instead, I reread my 1979 edition from
www.abebooks.com cover to cover. It’s also readily available at Amazon or free at www.gutenberg.org/. And enjoy this post’s illustration of an eerily brooding MacDonald, 1870, found at wikimedia.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a December of spirited adventures with Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe.)

Adventure classics -- Haunted by a love that killed

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

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The year is 1873, and at a former station on the underground railroad, the ghost of a vengeful slain baby shatters mirrors, strews food on the floor and leaves tiny handprints in the icing of cakes. Seemingly exorcised after years of haunting, the baby disappears. But now a mysterious young woman waits at the door for the family’s return. Calling herself only “Beloved,” she insists she doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. But she’s has an ominous scar under her chin. And she’s strangely familiar with the secrets of the woman of the house, Sethe, from the earrings she never wears to the songs she sang only to her children. And who has been ostracized from the colony of former slaves in Cincinnati, Ohio, for killing her young daughter eighteen years earlier.

While still recovering from the birth of her youngest child, escaped slave Sethe and her four children were tracked down by her former owner. She managed to cut the throat of one child before being caught. attempted to kill all her children, but only succeeded in cutting the throat of one daughter, a children just learning to crawl.

“I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was,” Sethe tells her lover, Paul D, when he confronts her.

But though Sethe believes her action was the only way to protect her child, how could she explain that to her tiny dead daughter?

While researching an earlier book, Toni Morrison came across an 1856 newspaper clipping that provided the real life inspiration for the story of Sethe and her family. Entitled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” it quoted escaped slave Margaret Garner saying she “would much rather kill (her children) at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piecemeal.”

(Margaret Garner was not tried for murder or attempted murder, but for what the courts of the time believed to be her real crime, escaping from slavery.)

The story seared Morrison. Ultimately, she decided to concentrate on the emotional life of Sethe and her fellow slaves instead of reconstructing the historical mother’s situation. The result was her 1987 novel and Pulitzer Prize winner, Beloved, followed by a 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.

Whatever Margaret Garner may have finally felt, the family of Beloved was shattered, both by Sethe’s actions and devastation of slavery, separating Sethe from her own mother and her children’s father, Halle, who she believes died during a failed escape attempt; deadening her will, her initiative, her ability to love.

“I got us all out. Without Halle, too.” Sethe tells Paul D. “Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. . . Maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.”

And he understands. “To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom.”
The threat of losing that freedom terrified Sethe enough to kill. And would terrify her again and again, until the ghost of Beloved is finally--but is it finally?--exorcised.

In both book and movie versions, Beloved is widely available. And for Morrison’s own thoughts about the writing of her book, see “Toni Morrison: Beloved” at
www.youtube.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a November of fantasy with Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.)

Adventure classics -- Many masks of the Brontes

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

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When Emily Bronte was about six years old, her father, as he reported after her death, gave his children masks to wear while answering a list of question he posed. His reason, quoted in Richard Benvenuto’s study, Emily Bronte, was to receive more truthful answers by giving the children a form of anonymity.

In many ways, his second youngest -- and most enigmatical child, Emily, never removed her mask.

The work which made her reputation, Wuthering Heights, was published under the assumed name of Ellis Bell. Critics at first assumed the author was a man -- the sexuality and violence seeming too passionate to be the work of a woman. Unknown to readers at the time, the writer was a young unmarried woman, so shy she seldom spoke outside the circle of her family, or could even bear to look outsiders in the face.

Some facts behind the story of Wuthering Heights are hinted at from what little is known of Emily’s life. The setting is the rural Yorkshire countryside she knew, loved, and never willingly left. “‘Wuthering’ being a significant adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather,” reports the book’s ostensible narrator, Mr. Lockwood, near the story’s beginning. And the meteorological storms are only metaphors for the even more stormy emotions of the characters.

It’s easy to picture the dour servant Joseph, who provides the book’s rare humor, as a member of the congregation of her father Patrick Bronte. Or that the numerous orphaned children in the narrative are based on the situation of Emily herself, and her sisters and brother, left motherless in childhood.

But what mask was Emily wearing when she conjured the character of Heathcliff, a boy whose origins are never explained? Or the tumult his entry makes in the families of the Earnshaws and Lintons, whose isolated, repressed lives are blasted open by this mysterious foundling with a soul “made of lightning”?


Heathcliff runs away from his adopted Earnshaw family after overhearing his childhood sweetheart Catherine Earnshaw renounce him for marriage to the local magistrate’s son, Edgar Linton. But his return, and Catherine’s awakening to her own sexuality in marriage, will destroy and blight two generations. Only Heathcliff’s strange failure of will, which he attributes to Catherine’s ghostly manifestation, brings the story to an end.

Emily Bronte encases this story within a rigid framework, as if there were danger in approaching it too nearly. Lockwood’s narrative opens and closes the book, but his direct knowledge of the characters is slight. For most of the story, he relies on the gossip of his housekeeper Ellen Dean (Nelly), a former servant of both Earnshaws and Lintons. But Nelly often fleshes out her own narrative with reports by other characters, leaving the truth about Heathcliff and Catherine forever doubtful. As doubtful, perhaps, as anything we know about Emily Bronte herself.

For more than a century after her death in 1848, no original portraits were known. (Charlotte’s widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, destroyed the then-only known painting, by Charlotte’s and Emily’s brother Branwell Bronte). But in 1989, a photograph of the painting appeared, copied from an earlier daguerrotype. The resulting picture, dating from Emily’s teens, illustrates this post. For more images of the Bronte family, see
http://wuthering-heights.co.uk/emily-portraits.htm./

 (Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an October of Halloween horror with another take of ghosts and strange passion, in Henry James’ A Turn of the Screw.)