Dorothy MacArdle: The Uninvited
May. 3rd, 2018 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaMore Retro Hugo reading - this time, it’s Best Novel finalist The Uninvited, by Irish novelist, playwright, journalist and historian Dorothy MacArdle. MacArdle herself was an Irish nationalist, feminist, labour organiser, and revolutionary colleague of Eamon de Valera.
The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.
The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.
MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).
They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”
Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.
Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.
Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.
In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.
MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.
The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.
The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.
MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).
They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”
Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.
Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.
Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.
In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.
MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.