Gothic Tales Read Online Free PDF

order to protect the woman who is in her care.
    Mother-love in ‘The Poor Clare’, however, is also seen as dangerous when it turns inward on itself in pain and despair; Bridget’s agonized grief for her missing daughter Mary finds expression in the curse she hurls at Gisborne once he has shot Mary’s dog, which is all Bridget had left to love: ‘You shall live to see the creature you love best, and who alone loves you… become a terror and a loathing for all, for this blood’s sake.’ ‘This blood’ is, of course, a patently ironic reference not merely to the blood of the murdered dog, but to the blood-ties that link Lucy Gisborne, the unintended victim of this curse, with her grandmother who, in striking out at the aristocratic man, ends up sacrificing her yet-unborn granddaughter. In this way the mother’s curse doubles back on itself to inflict pain on the curser and the cursed.
    Moreover the mother–daughter bond, which can be seen to encode danger as well as comfort and nurturance, can also be seen as the manifestation of two identities acting as one; the uncanny echoing between Bridget and her daughter Mary, almost lover-like in its intensity, suggests the dual nature of female identity which is a dominant theme in the Gothic. Bridget and Mary, we are told, ‘were too much alike to agree. There were wild quarrels between them, and wilder reconciliations. There were times when, in the heat of passion, they could have stabbed each other. At all other times they both – Bridget especially – would have willingly laid down their lives for one another.’ However, whereas mother and daughter mirror each other’s rage as well as devotion, Bridget and her granddaughter Lucy also manifest that most fundamental split between the two sides of feminine identity so central to Victorian ideology: the split between the ‘pure’, asexual ideal and monstrous, sexual voraciousness.
    Bridget’s curse thus results in the demonic manifestation of her granddaughter Lucy, who is doomed to be continually shadowed by her fearsome, seductive Other, a common theme of many Gothic novels including
Caleb Williams
, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818), James Hogg’s
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) and, nearly contemporary with ‘The Poor Clare’, Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White
(1860). In ‘The Poor Clare’, however, the double is specifically sexual, as is apparent in the narrator’s description of Lucy’s shadow.
    I saw behind her another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness, so far as form and feature and minutest touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous. My heart stood still within me; every hair rose up erect; my flesh crept with horror.
    The monstrosity of this sexually assertive woman is here made abundantly clear, and yet the narrator is candid enough to admit that it is precisely this ‘loathsome’ eroticism of Lucy’s double which so attracts him to her: ‘I never loved her more fondly than now when – and that was the unspeakable misery – the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT .’
    Interestingly, in yet another instance of Gaskell’s use of mirror opposites, Lucy’s split into two is reflected in her grandmother Bridget’s identification with the iconized examples of the contrasting sides of woman as virgin and whore in Western Christian thought. Bridget, a devout Catholic, is initially seen by the narrator ‘praying to the Virgin in a kind of ecstasy’, yet by the end of the story, when she has entered the severely ascetic order of the Poor Clares in Antwerp, she has taken on the name of Sister Magdalen. Thus it appears that part of the grandmother’s penance involves a partial re-enactment of