Classics and the Western Canon discussion
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Edith Wharton, "Afterward'
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Spooky! The story immediately brought to mind Tom Gauld’s cartoon riff on Kierkegaard’s maxim that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.The events of the story (and the character of the husband and wife) look very differently at the end of the story than the beginning, and I realized that the wife’s short-sightedness is not only physical but also emotional.
What strikes me about the story is the relationship between husband and wife, specifically their lack of honest communication.He hides his business dealings from her and is flippant about the law suit even though he has learnt it was withdrawn because Elwell had killed himself. He is cavalier about the whole situation:
"It's all right -- it's all right?" she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never was righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.
And for her part, she blindly takes him at his word and dismisses any suspicion she may have had about the possibility he committed a shady business deal. It's as if she suspects his lie but wants to believe it because to do otherwise would shatter her make-believe world. She learns the truth only after his disappearance.
It is a ghost story, but I suspect it is more than that. I suspect what it suggests is that one can never really know another person until long after he/she is gone. The truth about him/her emerges long "afterward."
Tamara wrote: "What strikes me about the story is the relationship between husband and wife, specifically their lack of honest communication.He hides his business dealings from her and is flippant about the law..."
It is strange that he withholds this particular dealing from her when it clearly has been bothering him. Could it be guilt that makes him act this way? She supposes his anxiety might be caused by the house and the "ineffectual demon" that haunts it... and it turns out she's right, but that only makes sense when we find out who the demon is.
I'm reading the story through again, and with knowledge of the ending it takes on another dimension. There are so many fun little ironies and double-meanings to find.
Just wanted to note my appreciation of the writing with some quotes. The internal rhyming and alliteration stands out to me; it's feels poetic.Do or did people really talk like this? I want to say it is mostly literary.
Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife's detachment from her husband's professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne's report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him.
As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches, and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-cars, he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected, and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the recurrences of habit.
...slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the cloudy caldron of human experience.
Tamara wrote: "It is a ghost story, but I suspect it is more than that. I suspect what it suggests is that one can never really know another person until long after he/she is gone. The truth about him/her emerges long 'afterward'."I think I agree, at least partially. Maybe I'd say that it is afterward you realize that maybe you didn't know them as well as you thought you did.
It is interesting that we have Elwell haunting the husband, the husband's past haunting him and eventually her, and a perception on her part of the house as some sort of animistic spirit witnessing everything as time goes by in an "if these walls could talk" kind of way.
What I don't get is why would the husband go chasing after Elwell's ghost? Was it a guilty conscience?Also, all the references to not knowing the ghost until long after it has gone has me wondering if, at some point before his final disappearance, Ned became a ghost.
I'm not sure I trust the narrator. She seems a bit disconnected and prone to quick and erroneous judgements. The visitor at the end seems to think she might be crazy too, because Elwell is dead. If I recall correctly, the husband didn't acknowledge the first sighting as Elwell either. Was it really Elwell that visited on the day he disappeared, or was that her desperately making connections that aren't real?Are we meant to question the actual events like I do when I read The Turning of the Screw?
If we read it trusting the narrator then we need to explain why he would follow Elwell. We don't have an account of what happened in the library, the walls cannot talk like she wishes. So then I think we're left with whatever we might imagine and the idea that the house has a consciousness and a memory but will never share its secrets. Or,... as you (Tamara) suggest "... at some point before his final disappearance, Ned became a ghost." We could imagine that Elwell came to collect him and travel together to some off-stage afterlife or judgement.
Hmm. I just asked Gemini AI about the potential influence of The Turn of the Screw. It seems to think there is something to it. Take it for what it is worth... Thomas already called out the relationship between the two authors in the initial post on this thread and that likely made me think of The Turn of the Screw.
https://g.co/gemini/share/564f459018db
Interesting connections, Michael. Thanks for sharing.
Tamara wrote: "What I don't get is why would the husband go chasing after Elwell's ghost? Was it a guilty conscience?Also, all the references to not knowing the ghost until long after it has gone has me wonderi..."
Elwell isn't even dead when they see him the first time, so how can he be a ghost? Mary supposes that he wasn't quite dead enough, so he was only partially a ghost, which is not very convincing I think.
I also wonder about the legend of the ghost. If other people have had this experience, then the ghost has not always been Elwell. This is Boyne's personal ghost. As he says in the opening pages, "I don't want to drive ten miles to see someone else's ghost. I want one of my own on the premises."
As for what makes Ned follow, only the house knows. The narrator tells us that the stranger speaks a word and Ned rises and follows him. What was the word? Only the house knows, but it isn't "one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets entrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian, of the mysteries it had surprised."
I love that, and I love that almost the entire story is told from the vantage point of the library.
Michael wrote: "I'm not sure I trust the narrator. She seems a bit disconnected and prone to quick and erroneous judgements. The visitor at the end seems to think she might be crazy too, because Elwell is dead. If..."What makes a narrator unreliable? Are there contradictions here that make you suspicious? I don't see any myself, but of course there is missing and vague information. That is what makes it mysterious!
Michael wrote: "Hmm. I just asked Gemini AI about the potential influence of The Turn of the Screw. It seems to think there is something to it. Take it for what it is worth... Thomas already called out the relat..."
Wharton said she was specifically inspired by Turn of the Screw, as well as the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, in the preface to her 1937 collection of ghost stories. So there's definitely a connection.
I'll review it to gather some of the details on why I came to that conclusion, or change my mind :) I've never read Le Fanu.
Most of the story is told through Mary's eyes, and she is near-sighted, so I think that might give the impression of an unreliable narrator. When the ghost appears the first time she sees a "blurred impression of slightness and greyishness" but can't make it out clearly. Her husband sees it well enough but won't share what he saw, which makes Mary suspicious. In the next scene she sees from the library window a "blot of grey in the greyness," which she thinks may be the ghost, but it turns out to be her husband. The second time she sees the ghost, when she mistakes him for a "traveler", the brim of his hat casts "a shade" (nice touch) on his face, which gives "to her short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness".
The other person who sees the ghost is the kitchen-maid, but she is so intimidated by her new responsibility of answering the door that she barely looks at it. All she remembers is his hat.
I had forgotten that she is short-sighted. It makes me trust her take on things even less. I think she is prone to jump to conclusions and have things fit into the narratives she is comfortable with, e.g. the house is haunted, her husband is an honest businessman.
I stumbled across an old television production of this story from a series made in the 1980s called "Shades of Darkness". The transfer is not great but otherwise it's quite respectable. I watched the first half and it sticks pretty closely to the original. https://youtu.be/FyML_1QEv2A?si=-gzEV...
So, I gave it a reread last night. It is a third-person omniscient narrator that is mostly focalized through Mary but sometimes zooms out. It actually starts by giving a balanced representation of both Mary's and Ned's perspectives and then on the fourth page (paperback copy) shifts completely to Mary for the majority of hte rest of the text. My comment about an unreliable narrator was not accurate, that's a different thing. It is really just the story itself and the way Mary perceives things that I'm not sure we can take at face value. I think we are supposed to question what really happened.Here are a few things that stood out to me.
1. Ned first raised the possibility of ghost in the house they were first hearing about as a kind of joke and later when Mary asks him if he had seen it or given up trying to find it he didn't seem to know what she was talking about and said he had never tried to find it.
2. She thinks she saw a ghost from the top of the house, but is short-sighted. Ned, with better sight, clearly thought it was a specific person, Peters.
3. There isn't really any strong lore about a ghost, when Mary asks neighbors all she gets back is "they du say so."
4. Overall, she seems to lean into the library as a witness and the existence of a ghost as ways to make sense of events. I feel her imagination is feeding a particular interpretation of events. There is also this gem of a quote that I underlined just for the language. The bold emphasis is mine to call attention to Mary's personality trait.
...since Boyne's withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years... he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected, and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the recurrences of habit.
5. Her short-sightedness was called out when describing her observation of the visitor's face that was shaded by the brim of his hat. So I wonder how well she really saw him and if she really could recognize him in a newspaper photograph much later or if she is just conveniently connecting some dots to make a congruent narrative in her mind.
All of that said, there are at least two things that need to be acknowledged, she correctly knew the date of Elwell's accident, the 20th, because that was the date of the observations from the top of the house of a man approaching. That is an extreme coincidence. Second, Ned did disappear.
I think the ghost story comes in Mary's experience and interpretation of the world. She senses the house or library and needs to deal with the disappearance of her husband. Since most of the narration is focalized through her, we experience a reader's version of the character's heightened emotions. Whether it was really a ghost (in this piece of fiction) or the product of an overactive imagination, it doesn't change much.
On first (and second) reading, I appreciated "Miss Mary Pask" and "Pomegranate Seed" more than "Afterward" so I decided to return to this one and see what I missed. In both of the other stories, my appreciation was deepened by applying additional lenses to the stories - katabasis and the "Bride of Corinth" poem to "Mary Pask" and the myth of Persephone to "Pomegranate Seed". So, revisiting this story, I'm finding some additional perspective and depth in focussing on the idea that Ned (and Mary for her purposeful ignorance) committed a great injustice that went unpunished, Maybe what he did wasn't illegal be it wasn't right and had real consequences. The home in Lyng, distant from everything is an attempt to escape that past.
So now, the ghost is an avenging spirit, perhaps similar the Greek goddess Nemesis who balances the scales of justice (https://mythologysource.com/nemesis-g...) and balance can only be achieved with Ned's death - a life for a life. The avenging spirit is has followed and haunted Ned all the way from America. It is not the lore of the house. Maybe the spirit of the place is a second kind of spirt, something that clarifies or elucidates one's nature through either congruity or difference with the historic place? In the end (or afterward), Mary is forced to open her eyes to the injustice of their wealth and to Ned's immoral behavior.
Yes, all of that was there from the start and much of it already present in this thread, maybe just not as explicit as I needed.
Anna Russell's review for the New Yorker of a recently reissued collection of Wharton's ghost stories is a fine introduction:
When Edith Wharton was nine years old she contracted typhoid fever and fell gravely ill. Confined to her bed, week after week, she wished most fervently not for recovery but for books. “During my convalescence, my one prayer was to be allowed to read,” she wrote in “Life & I,” an autobiography that was published posthumously. Her mother was particular about reading material—Wharton had to ask for permission to read novels until her marriage, in 1885—but on this occasion she got the goods. The book she acquired was a “robber-story,” and it sent Wharton into an unexpected panic. “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless,” she wrote. But “with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” She relapsed, and when she woke, “it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors.”
"Afterward" is one of her best known ghost stories.
PDF: https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream...
Online: https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-st...
Audio narration by Tony Walker (from the Classic Ghost Stories podcast; includes a good discussion... afterward) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YL3_...