The Waking Spell: A Novel

by Carol Dawson

When Sarah Grissom is seven years old, her brother adn her cousins--the Northgates--play a trick on her. They pretend there's a ghost in the attic of their grandmother's big, rambling East Texas house, and they take Sarah up to meet it. It's just a game for the others, but Sarah senses a frightening thing there, a presence. Is it a ghost? Without a doubt there is something--something cold, something deadly--lurking in the Northgate attic. Carol Dawson's "The Waking Spell" is a penetrating look at the specter that has haunted the women of this East Texas family since the late 1890s, when Sarah's vain, well-bred great-grandmother found herself plunged suddenly into a raw, rough-edged wilderness across the Red River from civilization. It was a place where no one understood manners, or proper sentiments, or refinement--where the only thing a proper lady could do was retreat into silence and secrets. Over the years, silnce and secrets have become an unspoken rule, an invisible bond of repression and frustration passed down from mother to daughter. In Carol Dawson's first novel, we follow Sarah's long journey hope through her family's history to confront the malignant silence that has haunted the lives of the Northgate women for nearly a century. Like Josephine Humphreys in "Dreams of Sleep," Carol Dawson writes of women struggling to find their own voices and identities in a male-dominated world of convention that punishes daring, stifles initiative, and encourages silence.

Genres: Fiction

300 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1992

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange

Amazed this book was actually published. The writing was poor and story was weak....painstakingly slow at times. I would not recommend.

[Cat. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The South is another country. On the other hand, I'm related to women like the women in this book: unable to talk properly about things, they talk around them, elliptically, so that no one really knows what anyone else is talking about. Here's an example midway through the book, while several women are working on drapes for the library (in the 1880s):

"Well, they say he --um! At least one full bottle a day. Keeps it hidden behind the harness rack in the barn. When he feels thirsty he just up and takes a--tch tch! in front of customers or not."
"And his poor wife, with all those children," a lady chimed in, "is--mmm! another. She can't seem to fend him off or forbid him his--" The speech trailed away, while they shared the inference with a downcast glance and tiny headshakes.
"It's a pity and a shame!" Eugenia observed. ... "She gave up an honest, useful profession in order to marry Mr. Frankenheimer. Now all she does is feed and wash the babies, waiting in dread for his next--ahem."
"Well, we are all familiar with that kind of experience," Mrs. Porter declared.
"Sue Ida! My stars--" The others blushed, smiling and discomposed; their "experiences" could be permuted, up to a point, in a mutual sigh. But they were discovering that experience, when not sufficiently defined, shrivels and pines away. They had no tokens left for true sharing.
...
"Did you ever hear," she asked the assembled ladies, "of the catch phrase 'Gone to Texas'?"
"That's funny," Sue Ida Porter said. "I seem to recall hearing that phrase. But I could not tell you where or why."
"Once upon a time men used to paint it on their doors went they [left for Texas]."
...
"But--I've only now remembered it and grasped a fact."
"What fact?"
Eugenia took a breath. "This is where they came to. This is where they meant. ... This is it."
The silence fell once more. She had startled a deep grief in them with her words. Now it ached, awakened, and they must remain guarded; they dare not acknowledge it. They went back to stitching the drape loops with their lips pressed firmly shut.
...
They must preserve what little civilization they still owned. ... Their invention took the form of dumbness, which holds a different, more sinister power.
In a short while, Eugenia Princess Poule Burnham bore three daughters. One by one she taught them not to speak.

But the power of dumbness comes at a startlingly high price. It is the price of never being able to have an honest reaction to anything in life. It is the power of talking without saying anything, and the price of closing off one's central self. It is the power of surviving alone, and the price of having no one with whom to share one's burdens.

Eugenia's great-granddaughter finally is able to cut through and bring light to the power of dumbness, by giving it the words the women in her family never knew how to use.

It's telling that the word "dumbness" can be taken two ways. It is clearly meant mean "muteness." But by blocking the ability to interact with the world, these women have consigned themselves to dumbness of another kind: the complete lack of knowlege, intentional, of what is really going on around them.

This would be a wonderful book to read with other female family members. It would also be enlightening for men. These characters are finely drawn in all their frustrating mistakenness.

[Jennifer Berner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful book. It spoke so eloquently about what becomes of beautiful, intelligent, passionate women when their voices are silenced by a male-dominated society. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come.