Introduction
The horror literature of the Victorian era contains references to class relations, women’s roles in society, and the family and often deals with the psychological aspects of fear. An example of such work is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Old Nurse’s Story, which raises questions about family relations, class relations, hypocrisy and prohibitions, morality, and stiffness of people. In this work, the characters are faced with living projections of fears in the form of ghosts.
These fears are caused by the unresolved trauma of Miss Furnivall, who cannot forget what happened to this day. The phenomenon of motherhood is involved here, the father’s figure, his cruelty, and betrayal, making readers think about the Freudian symbols depicted in the text. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Old Nurse’s Story tells how strong the shackles of class relations were for people, and the author uses the atmosphere of a large family estate to increase the feeling of fear.
The Division of Classes
To talk about classes as a social phenomenon, readers should turn to how Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory rests on the narrative, relates society and prohibitions. A developed society in psychoanalysis is a civilization, that is, the personification of the Super-Ego. The superego is about etiquette, cultural norms, social approval, and blame (Davidoff). Such phenomena can once and for all exclude a person from society as marginal.
The obligations sewn into the foundation of the social class of the aristocracy, which is the main character throughout the text, destroy people from the inside and make them suffer guilt. These obligations are contrary to inner human desires. In the text, the characters often sublimate their secret desires into work, social life, and service to God. The latter, in particular, was often cited by Sigmund Freud as an example among the lives of his contemporaries (Davidoff). Currently, the most relevant examples of sublimation are sports, art, and charity. Sublimation is served not only sexual feelings and the forbidden thirst for tenderness but also any unacceptable feelings and emotions in society. For example, aggressive behavior, hysterical behavior, and narcissistic seizures can cause an actively developed sublimation system in the personality.
Miss Furnivall is not afraid of the ghosts but of her past, in which she “defamed” her father and his aristocratic affiliation. Being an aristocrat, she had a severe burden that she could not bear, her cruel father did not forgive her for this. Subsequently, the already changed and aged Miss Furnivall was similarly tormented by guilt: “’I hear voices!’ said she, ‘I hear terrible screams, I hear my father’s voice!” (Gaskell). It can be said that in the voice of her father she uttered accusations for herself.
She looked at herself through her father’s eyes, and her mind fixated on the memory of his figure swinging a crutch at a child. She wanted to save her child: “’Hester! I must go! My little girl is there; I hear her; she is coming! Hester, I must go!” (Gaskell). Her pleading eventually drove her to recklessness, madness, and loss of consciousness when the main character, the maid, along with other servants and family members, laid her on the bed, exhausted and twisted in suffering.
Another focus on the problem of class division is not the aristocracy and its duties but the servant’s figure. Fernandez states: “As a literate surrogate maternal parent, Hester, the celibate servant narrator, offers a model of familiarity and class amity more palatable to the bourgeois reader than that of her subaltern counterpart, the biological paternal parent” (81). Elizabeth Gaskell emphasizes how time and social transformation change relationships within a large and close-knit family.
The text begins with a detailed description of the family’s genealogical tree that the main character has served since her youth. This description is complicated that, at first glance, it seems confusing. Names, kinship, marriage, the birth of children, the transition of a family from generation to generation – all this is far from the class relations of the Victorian era, but they invade the family idyll.
The work of a servant for a large family is always challenging to overestimate. That is because, being lower in class than their masters, at the same time, they had access to all the rooms on the estates, and this was their power. Victorian England thus created the phenomenon of the authoritative servant, who was allowed a great deal, protected, and cherished (Fernandez). Young gentlemen, children, and adolescents sometimes feared their servants and quietly respected them. The maids got the unconditional trust of their mistress, and they often informed them of problems.
Another problem of class division is already the connection between gender and class. Yet the most protected member of society in Victorian England remained a white man of the middle class. A woman’s belonging to one class or another became an additional obligation, a burden, while a man could more often enjoy the pleasures bestowed by this class. The society of Victorian England reveled in segregation, which then concerned all aspects of a person’s life: profession, origin, appearance and, skin color, gender, sexual orientation.
Elizabeth Gaskell shows that a woman acquires much more significant power without harm to the psyche, being in the socially dependent position of a servant. The role of an aristocrat for a woman can be too burdensome, not because she is complex in itself, but because this role is primarily male (Fernandez). This role was created for men and their comfort, and speaking of the aristocracy as a class, it made sense to talk about the male elite in the Victorian era. The woman remained in a subordinate role, which, in addition to kin (figure of a father, patriarch), could be easily ridiculed in society.
Role of Haunted Manors in Victorian Horror
Architecture and spaces are essential in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Old Nurse’s Story. The description of the estate is initially colorful, and the reader can understand from the replicas of Hester how impressed she is with the vegetation and gardens near the estate and its size in general (Gaskell). Subsequently, Elizabeth Gaskell pays special attention to the subjects of the interior: paintings, beautiful old furniture, decorations, high ceilings and doors (their importance in women’s liberation), and wide corridors.
A large and warm house, where a friendly family lives, symbolizes peace and security, where people relax. In a place where children are usually born, big holidays are celebrated, a lot of guests are invited, and with the arrival of ghosts, everything seems cold and scary. Such a kind shelter is nevertheless a gender prison: “the trope of the opening door seems particularly appealing to the woman writer, linked to women’s anguished confinement by the rules and rituals of gendered space” (Liggins, “The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ghost Stories”, 58). Women are often associated with closed spaces, which is why they lose their minds in literature.
The natural phenomena Hester encounters, strange noises, are heard to her like wind, sometimes like an organ. It is noteworthy, that Elizabeth Gaskell uses the organ melody as a comparison to the wind. The organ is a specific musical instrument associated with the figure of death, loss, and sadness. It is a church musical instrument that accompanies the choir. It is the sounds of the organ that the heroes of the work hear before seeing the ghosts.
A shelter for a large family with the arrival of ghosts becomes a place of madness based on fear of the past. Images from the past haunt Ms. Furnivall as the events of the child beating and her father’s abuse are tied to the space of the house. In connection of gender and place, Liggins (“Introduction: Women in the Haunted House” 18) states, that “forbidden spaces might (re)appropriate spaces which have previously been patriarchal, allows for a rethinking of the positioning of women within the “spatial world” of the ghost story”. Until Miss Furnivall gets rid of the house, she will be unable to free herself from memories and obsessions.
Conclusion
Elizabeth Gaskell describes class inequalities regarding gender discrimination using the specific story of Ms. Furnivall’s horrific trauma. The strict society of the Victorian era suppressed the desires of people who were forbidden by stereotypes from being involved in certain relationships. A broken class tradition leads not only to public condemnation but to deep suffering, witnessed by the servants, including Hester, who has serious power, being a subordinate.
Works Cited
Davidoff, Leonore. “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick.” Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1979, pp. 86–141. Crossref.
Fernandez, Jean. Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy. Routledge, 2009.
Gaskell, E. “Old Nurse’s Story.” Web English, Web.
Liggins, Emma. “Introduction: Women in the Haunted House.” The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1 July 2020, pp. 1-39. Crossref.
“The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ghost Stories.” The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1 July 2020, pp. 41–79. Crossref.