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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING
Legacies and Lifespans

in Contemporary
Women’s Writing
Edited by Gina Wisker
Leanne Bibby · Heidi Yeandle
Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Series Editors
Gina Wisker
International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt
University of Bath
Cambridge, UK
Denise deCaires Narain

University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first
century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in
literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically
on women’s writing in a world of cultural and critical production that can
still too easily slide into patriarchal criteria for what constitutes ‘worthy’
literature. This vision for the series is avowedly feminist although we do
not require submissions to identify as such and we actively encourage
submissions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’.
Our series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote
work by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space
for this body of literary criticism. Further, our series makes a claim that
serious inquiry on late twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing
contributes to a necessary, emerging and exciting research area in literary
studies.
Gina Wisker • Leanne Bibby
Heidi Yeandle
Editors
Legacies and Lifespans

in Contemporary
Women’s Writing
Editors
Gina Wisker Leanne Bibby
University of Bath School of Social Sciences
Bath, UK Humanities and Law
Teesside University
University of Brighton Middlesbrough, UK
Brighton, UK
Heidi Yeandle
Swansea University
Swansea, UK
ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
ISBN 978-3-031-28092-4 ISBN 978-3-031-28093-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is for Leanne’s daughter April Rose and Heidi’s son Arthur, both
of whom were born as we prepared this collection. As Gina once said, we
created a nursery as well as a book, and we’re prouder of them all than we
can ever express.
Contents
1 Introduction:
Writing Back and Looking Forward 1
Gina Wisker and Leanne Bibby
2 Haunting
Relationships, Dark Visions, Personal Dangers
and Encounters with Strangers in Gothic Short Stories by
Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946),
Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012) 11
Gina Wisker
3 (Dis)continuing
the Mother-daughter Dyad in Alison
Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our
Mothers 47
Caleb Sivyer
4 ‘You’ll
be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at
all.’ Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in
Contemporary Women’s Historical Novels 73
Leanne Bibby
5 A
Feminist Genealogy: L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest
Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers 93
Melissa R. Sande
vii
viii Contents
6 The
Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and
Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters111
Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne
7 “They
are not only one; they’re two, and three, and four”:
Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing139
Laura Dawkins
8 ‘Ageing
and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing:
Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and
Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ 165
Katsura Sako
9 (Re)Writing
the Future/Disavowing the Past: Reading
Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale189
Adele Jones
Index215
Notes on Contributors
Leanne Bibby is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University.

Her research examines the intersections between literary writing and his-
torical narrative. She has served as Secretary on the Executive Committee
of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association. Her book A. S. Byatt
and Intellectual Women – Fictions, Histories, Myths was published in 2022
by Palgrave.
Laura Dawkins is Professor of English at Murray State University. Her
articles on American literature have appeared in Callaloo, South Atlantic
Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and 49th Parallel, among
other journals, as well as in seven edited collections, including Modernist
Women Writers and American Social Engagement, Emmett Till in Literary
Memory and Imagination, and The American Child: A Cultural
Studies Reader.
Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne is an Honorary Research Associate at
Swansea University and was a Research Fellow with the Florence
Mockeridge Fellowship Group. She has taught English in Malaysia, Iran,
and the UK. Her book entitled Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of
Desire: Rethinking Fetishism was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
Adele Jones is a tutor at Swansea University in English Literature and at
the Centre for Academic Success. Her research interests include neo-
Victorianism, hauntedness, the work of Sarah Waters, and psychoana-
lytic theory.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Katsura Sako is an Associate Professor of English at Keio University, Japan.

She has research interests in post-war/contemporary British literature, gen-
der and literary/cultural gerontology. She is a co-author of Contemporary
Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (Routledge, 2019) and a
co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness and Care (Routledge,
2021). She has published in journals such as Contemporary Women’s
Writing, Women: A Cultural Review and Feminist Review.
Melissa R. Sande is the Dean of Humanities at Union County College,
New Jersey. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Quarterly
Horse, The Researcher, and Papers on Language and Literature. She is the
co-editor of Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-
Right, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Caleb Sivyer is Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England,
Bristol, where he teaches undergraduate and foundation year modules on a
wide range of subjects including myths and fairy tales, political and cultural
theory, and contemporary literature. He holds a PhD in English Literature
from Cardiff University, with a thesis on the intersection of gender and
visuality in selected works by Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter. He also has
a background in philosophy, holding a BA in philosophy from the University
of Kent. His research interests include contemporary literature, women’s
writing, gender and sexuality, literary and cultural theory, fairy tales, and
philosophy. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on
Angela Carter, as well as articles on other writers, including J.G. Ballard
and Alison Bechdel. He is the co-founder (along with Marie Mulvey-
Roberts and Charlotte Crofts) of the Angela Carter Society and he runs a
website devoted to the life and works of Angela Carter (www.angelacart-
eronline.com) which has a thriving online community.
Gina Wisker is an Associate professor in the International Centre for
Higher Education Management, University of Bath and Emeritus
Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education University
of Brighton. Gina also teaches literature for the Open University. Her
research and teaching interests are in contemporary women’s writing,
Gothic writing, horror and postcolonial writing and she has published
prolifically on these topics.
Heidi Yeandle is based at Swansea University, and has numerous publi-
cations related to Angela Carter including Angela Carter and Western
Philosophy (2017).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Writing Back and Looking

Forward
Gina Wisker and Leanne Bibby
This book is one of the first to examine the connections and conversations
between women writers from the twentieth century and the twenty-first
century. The essays here consider the ways in which twenty-first-century
women writers look back and respond to their predecessors within the
field of contemporary women’s writing. In addition to looking back to the
foundations of contemporary women’s writing, the book looks forward
and considers how this category may be defined in future decades. When
approaching the literary writing of the twenty-first century and its rela-
tionship to that of the twentieth century, of course we are confronted with
the moving target that is ‘the contemporary’ itself. This concept takes on
new significance when we focus on women’s writing because of the
G. Wisker
University of Bath, Bath, UK
University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
L. Bibby (*)
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University,
Middlesbrough, UK
e-mail: l.bibby@tees.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary
Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s
Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_1
2 G. WISKER AND L. BIBBY
crucial, late-twentieth-century feminist critical project of establishing,

describing and celebrating, to borrow Elaine Showalter’s resonant title of
her 1999 study, ‘a literature of their own’1 for women. Writing about the
relationships between women’s writings is an always-vital political project
with a rich history, and it is ongoing. We contend that establishing and
delineating the contemporary is, for women writers, another ongoing
political project to which this collection of essays aims, in part, to
contribute.
The very notion of ‘the contemporary’ has its own lifespan. The
Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, whose 10th anniversary
conference in 2015 provided a starting point for some of the thinking and
work published in this book, defines ‘contemporary’ writing as that pub-
lished after the 1970s.2 Other, previous definitions of contemporary writ-
ing have begun variously in 1945, the 1970s, the 1990s, after the
September 11 2001 terror attacks and after the 2008 global financial cri-
sis.3 There are compelling cases to make for all of these, although chang-
ing definitions of the contemporary and their evident relationship to
periodisation remind us of those definitions’ political nature. The very
existence of the contemporary indicates a perceived need to establish each
cultural product’s proximity to the present moment and its distance from
certain historical events. Definitions of the contemporary, then, do indeed
have a lifespan, and are also intrinsically concerned with the legacies of
certain pasts—and a variety of understandings is, we feel, a positive thing.
In summarising changing definitions of the contemporary, Emily Hyde
and Sarah Wasserman recognise the need, confirmed in the literature on
the topic (in which there is little consensus), to ‘dispel any neat sense of
period’: ‘Rather than focusing on how the period is defined, our sense is
that the term marks not only the objects scholars elect to study but also
the methods they deem most effective in studying them. Together, the
objects critics select and how they read them define the period as it
unfolds.’4 This attitude is in keeping with the sentiments expressed in this
collection, which seeks to look at the different ways in which women
authors have understood the influences and pressures on the contempo-
rary moment.
In their 2008 introduction to a special issue of the journal Women: A
Cultural Review on contemporary women’s writing, feminist scholars
Lucie Armitt, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer reflect on the meanings
of the contemporary for women authors specifically, and in terms of the
‘objects’ studied and the methods determined most appropriate to study
1 INTRODUCTION: WRITING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD 3
them. They note the ‘symbiosis between women’s writing and academia’,5
a symbiosis we might imagine to be under some strain at the present
moment of politicised pressures on the arts and humanities in universities.
These authors also point out that certain feminist writers, such as Michèle
Roberts, were employed as academics following experience in feminist
publishing and activism, and brought an awareness of ‘the politicised
impact of writing within the marketplace’ to complement awareness of its
role in the academy.6 In recent decades and especially since the expansion
of higher education in the UK, women authors have certainly become
simultaneously involved both in defining what contemporary literature is
as academics and commentators, and in producing it, while women’s nov-
els populate both bestseller lists and university reading lists in large num-
bers. This situation, in which literary writing often makes clear its
reflections on past works and the porous relationships between academia
and literary and popular culture, is certainly part of what characterises
contemporary women’s writing. This range of complex relationships is,
again, something to be embraced, in our view.
This collection provides occasion to re-evaluate what the contemporary
means for women writers because many of the twentieth-century texts
studied in these essays, including the work of Toni Morrison, Margaret
Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Rosario Ferre have been and still are
considered decidedly contemporary. Furthermore, it is far from correct or
fair to frame these works as being surpassed by those of a ‘new’ generation
of writers, and that is not what this collection seeks to do. Again, these
essays instead draw out some of the various forms of relationship and con-
versation between texts. Women authors do not necessarily seek to join a
‘lineage’ of their predecessors, but can speak back to other women’s writ-
ing in many more lateral ways. The works discussed here engage, directly
or metafictionally, with non-literary forms, popular literature, and the cul-
tural forms of activism. There is a need to think in entirely new ways about
periodisation as new ways of understanding feminist history emerge along
with new global perspectives, as environmental pressures intensify and as
renewed attacks on women’s rights are mounted around the world; these
are all reasons to question conventional ideas about literary lineages, net-
works and influences beyond patriarchal or otherwise narrow models.
For example, when we consider the ‘legacies’ of twentieth-century
women’s writing, there is a need to reconsider the familial metaphors such
as ‘lineage’ often used to characterise these and which hark back partly to
Virginia Woolf’s suggestion in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that ‘we
think back through our mothers if we are women’.7 Literary criticism of

women’s writing often makes reference to its place in perceived lineages of
writers and their work. The matrilineal metaphor is compelling, but no
longer adequate. Contemporary women’s writing, as the essays in this col-
lection suggest, take a view of the contemporary moment that looks for-
ward as well as back. To be a woman author, it seems, is to contemplate
different forms of time and the in-between spaces of history and culture.
Julia Kristeva, in her essay ‘Women’s Time,’ describes ‘the response that
human groupings, united in space and time, have given not to the prob-
lems of the PRODUCTION of material goods (i.e., the domain of the
economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but,
rather, to those of REPRODUCTION, survival of the species, life and
death, the body, sex, and symbol.’8 A feminist ‘inquiry on time’, Kristeva’s
essay contends presciently, is useful because of ‘that time which the femi-
nist movement both inherits and modifies.’ Kristeva’s analysis of different
types of temporality, taking into account the particular status of feminine
subjectivity, is only one way in which feminist thinking has acknowledged
that such subjectivity is itself ‘a problem with respect to a certain concep-
tion of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding;
time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of
history.’9 Seen through a feminist lens, it is possible to see the legacies and
lifespans of women’s writing as much more multifarious. The ‘lifespans’ of
women’s writing are as complex to study as its legacies. Here, we confront
another measure of time, and a disarmingly physical one: a life. Our deci-
sion to invite work for this book that examines the continuities between
twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing is a reminder of the length of
a human lifespan and that, sooner than we perhaps think, legacies are all
that we have left. A lifespan is a substantial period of history and at the
same time, can be seen in starkly human terms. Contemporary women’s
writing is not ‘newness’ in isolation; nor is it separable from its own recent
and human past.
Gina Wisker’s chapter ‘Haunting relationships, dark visions, personal
dangers and encounters with strangers in Gothic short stories by Katherine
Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952),
and Alice Munro (2012)’ considers some of the key Gothic writings of
these four authors precisely in terms of their confrontation with woman-
hood, subjectivity, life, death and time itself. Wisker draws out the star-
tling conversations between their Gothic short stories, in terms of their
use of defamiliarization and the figure of the often male, ambivalent or
dangerous stranger. The chapter situates these four women authors, more
commonly read in separate contexts and categories such as Modernism
(Mansfield) and the Gothic generally (Jackson and du Maurier), in the
development of a vital, feminist ‘everyday Gothic.’ Despite the seeming
temptation to read the short stories’ vulnerable, compromised women
protagonists as culpable somehow in their own danger, Wisker’s readings
view the women as embracing the possibilities and hope inherent in
moments of uncertainty, only to find that their societies’ patriarchal prom-
ises of romantic, domestic or otherwise personal fulfilment are mere masks
upon the emptiness and perils of daily life. The legacies of Mansfield, du
Maurier and Jackson in the twentieth century for Munro in the twenty-
first are ones that makes new critical space for consideration of, as Wisker
explains, the ‘everyday’ horror of patriarchal culture and its literary fea-
tures of ‘displacement, undermining of comfortable narratives, compla-
cencies, relationships, certainties about self, reality, time, place, and
particularly identity.’
Caleb Sivyer’s chapter ‘(Dis)continuing the mother-daughter dyad in
Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our
Mothers’ offers crucial new responses to matrilineal metaphors in feminist
criticism through the work of an important author. Sivyer poses the title
of Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic (that is, ‘auto-bio-graphic’) novel in
different forms to consider biological, literary and therapeutic forms of
‘mother’-hood. This book is, Sivyer argues, ‘about continuity and differ-
ence, lineage and innovation’—a text that manages the complexities of
time, memory and meaning-making through the familiar metaphor of
motherhood. A highlight of this chapter is its compelling reading of liter-
ary mothers, providing evidence of the deliberateness with which women
writers respond both to literary predecessors and the idea itself of literary
mothers. Sivyer finds that the women writers referenced in the book func-
tion in several ways: by representing to Bechdel previous generations of
women writers who were successful in the face of patriarchal constraints,
by demonstrating the ways in which writing can be therapeutic, and by
embodying a concern with distinctly female voices in the context of mas-
culine literary conventions. By looking back at this multiplicity of mother
figures and writing back to them, Bechdel, in Sivyer’s reading, is able to
move forward through her writing.
In ‘“You will be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.”
Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in Contemporary Women’s
Historical Novels’, Leanne Bibby looks at the hugely popular genre of
historical romance and its critical marginalisation. Specifically, Bibby con-

siders the novels of Deryn Lake and Suzannah Dunn, and their portrayals
of doomed Tudor queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Following
the romantic historical novels of the late twentieth-century, Bibby argues,
Dunn’s more self-conscious Tudor fictions intensify Lake’s deliberately
inventive, provocative but always knowledgeable use of historical facts,
myths and legends side-by-side. This demands re-consideration of twenty-
first-century historical fictions such as Dunn’s that bridge many assumed
gaps between popular and literary fictions, with important implications for
novels marketed and perceived in limiting terms as ‘women’s fiction.’
Bibby uses Hayden White’s notion of ‘the practical past’ to contend that
Lake, Dunn and other women authors including Hilary Mantel help to
question the boundaries between professional historiography and literary
appropriations of historical narrative. In her chapter ‘A Feminist Genealogy:
L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican
Women Writers’, Melissa Sande argues against progressive narratives of
literary history in favour of ‘forged space’ for new writing and identities
with a focus on the woman authors of Puerto Rico. As part of this compel-
ling reading, Sande embraces French feminist theorisations of women’s
language, desire, and mother-daughter genealogies as part of understand-
ing the complex relationships between the past and present. L’écriture
féminine, Sande argues, makes women the possessors of their own dis-
course, a reminder of the persistent power of this late twentieth-century
framework for reading women’s cultural production. This chapter breaks
vital ground in reading conversations between women’s writing across
geographical distances.
Shareena Hamzah contributes to studies of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette
Winterson in her chapter ‘The Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia
Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters’ by arguing that both
are, in comparable ways, writers at the forefront of shifts in thinking about
women’s writing itself. Hamzah’s critique provides parameters for think-
ing of Woolf and Winterson as part of the same literary lifespan between
modernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism. At its most funda-
mental, Hamzah suggests, writing is the exercise of a type of freedom, and
this chapter points back to some of the many ways in which Woolf indi-
cated feminist concerns that were then addressed more directly by
Winterson, taking as a starting point the ‘places of refuge’ for reading and
writing that these authors described—‘a room of one’s own’ for Woolf
and the outdoor toilet for Winterson. The ‘close quarters’ of the chapter’s
title refers in part to these spaces of refuge and also to the linguistic spaces
that make up these authors’ works’ close and ambivalent relationship to
each other. Hamzah’s chapter contributes to ongoing debates about these
authors and literary feminism by emphasising their uneasy yet key relation-
ships to literary movements in general, and indicating the parameters of
wider debates on ‘influence, inheritance and (dis)continuity’ between
authors. Conventional understandings of such movements and categories,
as at other points in this collection, do not map easily onto women’s writ-
ings when these writings speak to each other as intimately as Winterson’s
speak to Woolf’s.
Laura Dawkins, in her chapter ‘“They are not only one; they’re two,
and three, and four”: Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing’, carries out an insightful new reading
of Morrison’s peerless neo-slave novel by reading its legacies and parallels
in Gyasi’s acclaimed historical novel. Here, Dawkins frames both books as
commentaries on the intergenerational and transatlantic trauma caused by
slavery and colonialism. Gyasi’s character Akua is read as a counterpart of
Morrison’s Sethe to demonstrate this intergenerational impact on African
as well as African American mothers. Especially striking in this chapter is
Dawkins’s use of the notion of ‘rememory’ and the various ways in which
these texts make it possible to remember the almost unimaginable horrors
of slavery. As Dawkins explains, ‘In Homegoing, as in Beloved, “passing
on” traumatic memory through storytelling both strengthens communal
bonds and enables survivors to gain narrative control over an “unspeak-
able” past.’ Legacies between stories as between historical narratives are
never simply about lineage and inheritance, as women’s neo-slave narra-
tives remind us.
Katsura Sako’s chapter ‘Ageing and Care in Contemporary Women’s
Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret
Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ approaches the question of lifespans directly
in its consideration of ageing and care in these novels. Lessing and Drabble,
as Sako explains, are representative of writers publishing into the twenty-
first century who started writing ‘in the post-war period or in the sixties
and seventies.’ Lessing, Sako argues, broke new ground by writing about
ageing and care in the 1980s, a project in which Drabble then participated
in the 2010s. Thus, the chapter address literal legacies and lifespans,
human and literary, while at the same time critiquing ‘the linear progres-
sive model of time that marginalises women’s care, and those older and
less able’ in the first place. This chapter addresses time itself in vital ways
for the study of contemporary women’s writing, gathering together key

feminist scholarship on the ways in which hegemonic clock time margin-
alises women, their lives and their work. Sako argues compellingly that
clock time cannot capture certain important forms of feminine experience.
Sako offers new readings of intergenerational relationships and the ethics
of care in the work of Lessing and Drabble, and speaks to the concerns of
this whole volume by suggesting that life ‘is an ongoing search for, and
revision of, meanings and stories.’ In the context of resisting narratives
that rely on linear, progressive understandings of time, such revision can
be powerful indeed.
Adele Jones’s chapter ‘(Re)Writing the Future/Disavowing the Past:
Reading Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale’ offers a
timely reading of two feminist visions of the future in order to examine
notions of ‘friendship, mentorship and collaboration’ between Margaret
Atwood and Naomi Alderman, in the case of some of their most popular
and critically contentious works. Like Hamzah, Jones refreshes discussions
of canonically feminist works and feminist theory by arguing that the rela-
tionship between these texts has ‘converged to both mirror and inform a
particular moment within feminism and within contemporary women’s
writing’, a moment that is about questioning contemporary discomfort
with certain aspects of feminist history, and confronting anxieties about
feminism’s future. Jones reads the The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power in
view of the contemporary feminist movements such as #MeToo and
#TimesUp, in the context of which The Power has been read and The
Handmaid’s Tale adapted into a hugely popular TV series. Importantly,
Jones expands on these authors’ own complex, self-confessed relationship
to feminism, like Hamzah in her discussion of Woolf and Winterson, and
the sometimes ironic conversations between their texts. As women’s writ-
ing speaks as directly as ever to feminist activism, looking in imaginative
ways backwards as well as forwards, Jones’s chapter provides a welcome
reassessment of the meanings of feminist ‘waves’ now through these nov-
elists’ work.
Current debates around women’s writing, as these chapters demon-
strate, move quickly and are entrenched in popular discourses around, for
example, sexual violence, structural inequalities and the perceived value of
cultural products by women. Furthermore, such debates have the power
to respond to and lead change in thinking and expression. Meanwhile,
publishing of women’s writing and the study of these works are vibrant
and energising, and this is reflected in the themes of the texts covered in
the following chapters. This collection demonstrates and underlines the

idea that the contemporary, the ‘now’ of women’s writing, is also about its
recent pasts—the legacies left to it by other texts and authors—and its
already-unfolding futures. There is also a need to continually remake these
pasts and futures. Both the legacies of past forms of women’s writing and
the lifespans of current ones are about understanding the limitations of
patriarchal understandings of time, kinship, literary canons, political
movements and relationships between subjects. In this way, women’s liter-
ary writing can formulate productive new ways to discuss identities, poli-
tics and power in all its forms. These essays clarify the vibrant legacies of
women’s writing and underline the idea that contemporary women’s writ-
ings’ lifespans are, finally and hopefully, what we make them.
Notes
1. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From
Brontë to Lessing (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).
2. ‘About the CWWA,’ The Contemporary Women’s Writing Association,
accessed September 21 2021, http://thecwwa.org
3. Emily Hyde and Sarah Wasserman, ‘The Contemporary,’ Literature Compass
14, no. 9 (2017): 2.
4. Hyde and Wasserman, ‘The Contemporary,’ 3.
5. Lucie Armitt, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer, ‘Introduction:
Contemporary Women’s Writing,’ Women: A Cultural Review 19, no. 1
(2008): 2.
6. Armitt, Joannou and Palmer, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Women’s
Writing,’ 1.
7. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, in A Room of One’s Own/Three
Guineas, ed. Michele Barrett (London: Penguin, 2000), 69.
8. Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ Signs 7, no.
1 (Autumn 1981): 14.
9. Kristeva, Jardine and Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ 17.
Works Cited
Armitt, Lucie, Mary Joannou and Paulina Palmer ‘Introduction: Contemporary
Women’s Writing.’ Women: A Cultural Review 19, no. 1 (2008): 1-4.
Hyde, Emily and Sarah Wasserman. ‘The Contemporary.’ Literature Compass 14,
no. 9 (2017): 1-19.
Kristeva, Julia, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, ‘Women’s Time,’ Signs 7, no. 1
(1981): 13-35.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë
to Lessing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Edited by Michele Barrett.
London: Penguin, 2000.
CHAPTER 2
Haunting Relationships, Dark Visions,

Personal Dangers and Encounters
with Strangers in Gothic Short Stories
by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley
Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952),
and Alice Munro (2012)
Gina Wisker
Katherine Mansfield’s sharply observed, hypersensitive, cruel, often dark

versions and visions of women’s interior lives reveal first a tentative, misin-
terpreted, dissociated hold on a version of “reality” and the self, and then
expose the duplicity of relationships. These are both ideal/ised ostensibly
romantic connections (“Poison,” 1920)1 and seemingly everyday encoun-
ters (“The Little Governess,” 1915),2 which can turn sour, threatening,
undermining dreams about women’s lives, youth, and relationships, as in
“Her First Ball” (1921).3 Caught up in their own fantasies, reveries,
G. Wisker (*)
University of Bath, Bath, UK
University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Switzerland AG 2023
G. Wisker et al. (eds.), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary
Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s
Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28093-1_2
12 G. WISKER
self-delusion, her often young, female, characters are hyper-sensitive, mis-

taken and vulnerable. This chapter argues that defamiliarization, a favou-
rite function of the Gothic, is central to the literary legacies and lifespans
of Mansfield’s writing through the work of other women writers of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Defamiliarization, in Mansfield’s
short stories, is the means through which complacency is punctured, the
comfortable everyday threatened, and the often romanticised stories by
which people direct and cushion their lives emptied out4,5. Strangers who
introduce the dangerous and exciting unknown are often catalysts in this
process of undermining dreams, threatening women’s ontological security.
Misreading of interactions, misinterpretation of relationships and dan-
gerous liaisons are familiar traits in the work of women writers who con-
sciously or less consciously form part of Mansfield’s literary legacy. Daphne
du Maurier’s short stories regularly feature problematic or endangered,
distracted, sometimes obsessional women, for example in “Fairy Tale”
(1980),6 “The Lover” (1961),7 “The Blue Lenses” (1960),8 “Escape”
(2011),9 “The Limpet” (2011)10 and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger, 1953).11
Many of Shirley Jackson’s women, Like Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s, also
inhabit confused, liminal unstable worlds. They feel trapped and unreal,
victims of the actual insecure fickleness of their investment in fixities of
narratives, place and identity. For one, in “The Pillar of Salt” (1948),12
staying in a New York apartment disorients her sense of location and real-
ity; for another in “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),13 her own home and
husband become confused with those belonging to other people. Easily
fooled, another woman fruitlessly awaits her supposed husband to be and
the planned wedding in “The Daemon Lover” (1949)14 only to realise he
has lied and left her. Jackson’s women like Mansfield’s, du Maurier’s and
also Alice Munro’s, are often self-delusional, their investments in certain
comfortable or romantic narratives undercut, revealed as social fictions,
and their seeming securities emptied out by deceitful men or their own
unreliable fantasies.
The fourth woman author of short stories considered here, Nobel Prize
winning (2013) Alice Munro, combines the domestic everyday and the
uncanny in her work. Her women characters are usually stuck in small
rural towns around Lake Huron in Ontario, and are likely to invest in
fragile relationships, unrealisable hopes and dreams. Some challenge con-
ventions and then suffer, most frequently from the actions of men who
betray or abandon them at their most vulnerable as in “Leaving Maverley”
(2012),15 “Amundsen” (2012),16 “Corrie” (2012)17 and “Train” (2012).18
2 HAUNTING RELATIONSHIPS, DARK VISIONS, PERSONAL DANGERS… 13
Munro’s stories emphasise life’s emptiness, loss, misinterpretations, and

for women, a social entrapment in bleak, small towns, suffering restricted
lives, cut off by the cold and distance, let down by their own hopes and
fantasies. The relationship between the everyday lives of women, and the
disturbances and dismay expressed through Gothic defamiliarisation in the
short stories of these four influential women writers is explored here
through their tales of encounters with strangers, focusing mainly on:
Katherine Mansfield’s “Her First Ball” (1921);19 Shirley Jackson’s “The
Beautiful Stranger” (1946)20 and “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”21
(2010); Daphne du Maurier’s “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” (1952)22 and
“The Alibi” (1959)23 and Alice Munro’s “To Reach Japan” (2012).24
The entry of a stranger into a seemingly calm place or ordinary life is a
moment of potential, of desire. It offers an opportunity for excitement,
change, romance, escape. However, the stranger and the moment can also
defamiliarize the seemingly reliable if mundane everyday, and open up an
existential abyss of the strange, disorientating, destabilising, ultimately
destroying everything one believes one knows about oneself, about oth-
ers, and the world.
Women’s Gothic
When considering women’s Gothic, Susanne Becker sees the “writing and
re-writing of female texts haunting one another: around the interrogative
texture of romantic love and female desire, of gender construction between
le propre and the monstrous-feminine, of the (contextualising) dynamics
of domestic horror”.25 Gothic texts by women leave traces in the works of
those influenced by them, who follow them, undermining conventional
fictions of romance, marriage and domesticity. Katy Shaw’s Hauntology
(2018)26 also explores the ways in which earlier influential texts haunt and
repeat in newer work. This haunting and questioning lie at the heart of the
Gothic fiction of twentieth and twenty first century women writers
Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro and lurk in influences that
overtly or silently leak between them. Each works with the social stabilities
and values perpetuated in women’s fictions and, as we move on through
the writing lives of the four women considered here, with the ways in
which these notional stabilities have already been problematised and
exposed as socially constructed fictions, which Angela Carter labels “the
fictions of my femininity” (1983, 122).27 Readings of these four authors as
comfortably conformist, nostalgic, or as somehow rewarding with a
14 G. WISKER
conventional ending found in popular romances with a smattering of

Gothic daring are, on closer scrutiny, proved to be partial, rather lazy
readings.
A significant feminist journal long ago sent me a six page rejection let-
ter for commenting that Katherine Mansfield pointed out women’s collu-
sion in their own entrapment and limited worldviews when she wrote:
I feel that I do not realise what women in the future will be capable of
achieving—They truly, as yet, have never had their chance. Talk of our
enlightened days and our emancipated country—pure nonsense. We are
firmly held in self-fashioned chains of slavery yet. Now I see that they are
self-fashioned and must be self-removed.28
These self-fashioned chains are evident in the often dangerous, collu-

sive delusions in which women engage in the work of all four writers,
where they subsequently are cheated, let down, led on (and in some other
stories, even murdered). The Gothic in the work of these four writers is
not that of bodice-rippers or Hollywood romance; rather, it exposes the
socially-engineered, uncritically-ingested promises of being rescued from
one’s mundane self, and uncritically loved and cared for. We are reminded,
perhaps, of the (deadly) irony of Shirley Jackson’s Eleanor Vance’s fantasy
“journeys end in lovers’ meeting” (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959).29
Earlier, I commented that “Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (1998)30 revived
the appreciation of Daphne du Maurier as a Gothic writer and in so doing
overturned the established version of female Gothic as offering resolutions
and a happy ending”.31 Du Maurier’s women’s Gothic also undercuts rela-
tionships and domestic securities but unlike Angela Carter’s carnivalesque,
ultimately celebratory work, she makes no suggestions about ways out or
ways forward.
Alice Munro’s “accessible, moving stories explore human relationships
through ordinary, everyday events”32, as described by the British Council’s
Literature website. However, the Gothic qualities of Munro’s work also sit
alongside the everyday, undercutting its complacent comforts. The women
in her stories often have split-selves, are imprisoned in fantasy views of
situations which are ultimately undermined and proven to be unreward-
ing. Escapes into potential relationships or from the bleak isolation and
small-mindedness of small town life dissipate into nothing. Her women
are stuck. Munro acknowledges the influence of Gothic writer Joyce Carol
Oates and while her work leans less towards the fantastic than that of
Oates, her stories are equally painful, finely-observed tales of obsessions
and frustrated passions, the stuff of rural and domestic life with a sour,
Gothic turn.
All four women use the tight, taut world of the short story, the influ-
ence of locations and a single (probably) delusional point of view to
explore ontological insecurities, duplicitous relationships, misread situa-
tions and personal dangers. Each deals with a form of Gothic horror and
danger in the everyday lives of women, expressed either through the ways
in which the selfish, single-minded tunnel vision of controlling men delin-
eates, undermines, destroys the lives of and worth of these women, or
through their inhabiting their own dissociated vision and version of life. In
the short stories of each writer we see movement in and out of unstable,
often dangerous world views based in fixation and misinterpretation. The
women in their stories are often trapped in social narratives of what women
should be, need and want. They suffer increasing ontological insecurities,
delusions, fear of being alone, ignored and unseen, and fear of being in
social spaces with others. Theirs are terrifying, disorienting experiences of
moving through the everyday, testifying to the huge gulf they feel between
what’s defined as normal behaviour and what is experienced, whether
understood, managed, or not.
Each is a writer of their age and location(s). Katherine Mansfield and
Du Maurier travelled a great deal, Mansfield around Europe, between
New Zealand and the UK; Du Maurier in Europe, the UK, and the Middle
East. Shirley Jackson travelled only within the US, and wrote from home
where she was considered a housewife, while Alice Munro mostly focuses
on the vast areas of Canada, and particularly her native Ontario with its
remote small towns. All four writers destabilise what seems dependable:
connections between self and the shared world, and any security, comfort
and fixities in relationships. In the hands of Katherine Mansfield, Daphne
du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro, no norms can be relied
upon. Each displays the destabilisation which is a characteristic of what
Chris Baldick defines as the traditional Gothic:
for the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a sense of a fearful
inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these
two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an effect of sickening
descent into disintegration.33
16 G. WISKER
Baldick’s understanding of the effects produced by the Gothic reminds

us of philosophical questionings concerning the stability and security of
identity, time, space, and everyday shared reality as explored through the
philosophical work of early twentieth century phenomenologists Husserl
(1913)34 and Merleau Ponty (1945)35 and also existentialist Jean-Paul
Sartre (La Nausée, 1938)36. In each iteration of these explorations of the
relationship between the self, the world and the sense impressions which we
receive from our interactions with the world and other living beings, shared
markers such as gestures and words either are or become unfixed, unstable.
As a result, misinterpretation of the intentions of others, and one’s own
secure identity and position in the (now unstable) world are all called into
question. As I noted when considering Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
(1938- as is Sartre’s novel)37 and several short stories, everything is insecure:
Feeling disorientated and terrified, the self can force interpretations on the
versions of the world it receives with a view to making sense of it and to
constructing stories about the relationship between self and world, things,
or words. Delusions can follow, such as are suffered by several of Du
Maurier’s characters.”38
Freud, Existentialism and Phenomenology

In an important illumination of defamiliarization as a process, Freud’s
1919 essay Das Unheimliche,39 definitions of the uncanny emphasise the
psychological experience of something as strangely familiar (the opposite
of homely or heimlich), rather than simply mysterious. Interest in
Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816)40 introduces the issues of doubles,
objects which come to life/are seen as human (Olympia), the vulnerability
and unreliability of your eyes, a relationship between eyes and castration,
and the link between the uncanny and taboo. For Freud, the uncanny
locates strangeness in the ordinary. This aligns a sense of the uncanny with
disorientation made up of the variously constructed relationship between
words and things, labels and things/people, notions of self and world, a
lack of clear categories, ‘norms’, the everyday, the stories by which we
interpret the world and people, events, creatures, ourselves—all are con-
structed, transient, invested in the real but not of themselves solidly real.
This disturbance of the everyday casts us into a liminal space of insecurity
and existential doubt about self and the real, and the potential for
disruption.
The influence of the varying ways in which phenomenologists, includ-

ing Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and then existentialism as developed by
Sartre (peaking for me in Nausea, 1938)41 variously disturb and make
claims for the relationships between the world, the word and the self, sub-
ject and object, names of things and experience of them and the narratives
by which we make sense of them, to my mind informs the destabilisation
of comfortable, fixed reality in the work of all four but particularly in the
cases of Jackson’s wives stuck in New York apartments and Daphne du
Maurier’s predatory men who lack insight or care in “The Alibi” (1959)42,
as well as her women who inhabit unreal worlds. The sense of defamiliar-
ization, disorientation, and the gap between words and things, lived expe-
rience, subjectivity and the world of labels and interactions runs throughout
these works—as does the disturbance of the Gothic, which punctures
familiarity and complacency and renders its experience dangerous and
unstable. The characteristics of the Gothic and the disorientations and
instabilities of words and identities which I earlier applied to the work of
du Maurier can equally illuminate that of Mansfield, Jackson and Munro
when we explore the ways in which the catalyst of the strange, and particu-
larly of the behaviour of a stranger, destabilises the ontological securities
of their women characters. Outsiders and strangers are disruptive to osten-
sible order, whether they seem to blend in or deliberately question, under-
mine and expose that often dull routine or that comfortable complacency.
In writing of the disruption and questioning of the Beat poets (contempo-
raries of Jackson, and Munro and on the edge of du Maurier’s period of
writing), Colin Wilson notes:
“What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or

unreality. […] the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable […]
world of the bourgeois […]. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not
orderly. … The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos […]; in spite
of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.”43
Albert Camus, contemporary of Sartre, wrote in L’ Étranger (1942)44

(commonly referred to as ‘The Outsider’) of the absurdity of a murder
charge leading to punishment of death for Merseult, a stranger or outsider
unable to read a community and misread by them, and Jian Farmouhand
(2021)45 in identifying as outsiders both the Beat poets. Charles Bukowski,
himself, like Jackson, influenced by Hollywood films, notes of Beat writing
that it is driven by “This idea of facing chaos and making sense of it, and
18 G. WISKER
of the truth being told at all costs.”46 The kind of truth exposed by the
intrusion of an outsider, a stranger into the lives of the women in Mansfield,
du Maurier, Jackson and Munro reveals a dangerous emptiness at the
heart of their dull or naively fanciful lives. This is women’s Gothic, in
which the house, home and marriage offer promise but are also perhaps
only filled with instability, the unsafe, and empty or controlling, deadly
relationships.
Each author undermines what they reveal to be the tentative securities
of felt, lived, everyday reality, and women’s interior lives, revealing any
relationship to a shared reality, any version of a safe story to be a tenuous,
deceitful and often dangerous gap or trap. They each intermix a form of
existential insecurity, the revelation of inner, only constructed and
tentatively-shared links between self and objects, self and any shared world.
Freud’s “the unheimlich”47 thus underlines the importance of defamiliar-
ization along with the disturbances of complacency and security of iden-
tity, reality, relationships, particularly the domestic and romantic, which
are key characteristics of the Gothic. Shirley Jackson’s work is distinctly
more Gothic than that of the other three writers, although each shares
similar concerns. She uses the language, narrative trajectory, imagery of
Gothic and Gothic Horror, while she expresses everyday delusions, impris-
onments, infringements, inner disturbance and the unreality of any rela-
tionship or life-guiding narrative, as well as doubts about the solidity of
identity and relationships within a shared, definable world. In both fiction
and life, change triggers potentially exciting or threatening disruption and
both strange surroundings and the stranger are catalysts for new opportu-
nities. Change of surroundings offers exciting new perspectives, or dan-
gerous disorientation, and the entrance of a stranger into the assuredly
safe and familiar, taken-for-granted routine within the complacent every-
day is a moment of potential. For each writer considered here, entering a
strange place and meeting a stranger opens up a liminal space, acting as
catalyst for transformative experiences which, more often than not, are
negative and destructive.
Katherine Mansfield (1921)

The teenage years are perhaps especially vulnerable ones since all is in flux.
In “Her First Ball” (1921)48 the first story I ever read by Mansfield, young
Leila goes with friends to her first ball. Her exuberance and naivete leave
her excited and overwhelmed with the people, the music, whirled round
with dancing and endearingly awkward in her social interactions, and

intrigued that all conversations start with discussing the floor and offering
silly responses such as ‘it’s slippery’. Leila is giddy with the joy and poten-
tial of the dance and with her own youth. However, this delight in the
liminality of the new place and new moment is undermined. Her next
partner appears, a stranger, a wheezing, small, fat, old man with the odd
button missing, and she takes pity on him, agreeing to dance. He is a regu-
lar, and says has been doing this for thirty years, i.e. twelve years before she
was born. She’s kindly, innocent, tolerant, safe in her youth and beauty
and then he punctures it all:
Leila looked at his bald head, and she felt quite sorry for him. ‘I think it’s
marvellous to be still going on,’ she said kindly. ‘Kind little lady,’ said the fat
man, and he pressed her a little closer, and hummed a bar of the waltz. ‘Of
course,’ he said, ‘you can’t hope to last anything like as long as that. No-o,’
said the fat man, ‘long before that you’ll be sitting up there on the stage,
looking on, in your nice black velvet. And these pretty arms will have turned
into little short fat ones, and you’ll beat time with such a different kind of
fan—a black bony one.49
All her beauty and youth are stripped away. This cruel stranger punc-
tures her self confidence and her sense of the value of her own youth. His
role resembles that of the mean, old, uninvited fairy in “Sleeping Beauty”
(1812)50 who curses the baby princess to prick her finger and die (con-
verted by the fairy godmother into sleeping for 100 years). As he points
out, women have a short shelf life.
Mansfield’s young women are often almost giddy with their childlike
trust and desire for everything to be wonderful. Like Bertha in “Bliss”
(1918),51 highly strung (compared to a fine fiddle) and hyper-sensitive
(but largely naively unaware of infidelities and disappointments), these
women are excited, blinkered, believing themselves safe, unaware of cold
realities and deliberate cruelties, their vulnerability threatened by intru-
sions into their personal envelope of youth and joy but equally somehow
culpable in their naivety. Lone traveller in a foreign land, the girl in “The
Little Governess” (1915),52 is delusional in refusing or being unable to
recognise the predatory old man on the train as just that. Rather naïve,
unused to travelling and over sensitive as she is, she is constantly projecting
versions of him as a friendly old uncle, unable to see the parallel storyline
reading which can be sensed in traces, hesitancies, words out of place and
20 G. WISKER
in the imagery. This predatory stranger flatters her and appears friendly
but the reader picks up the danger signals she misses. She invests in his
friendly attention, and agrees to get off the train with him. In so doing,
she puts herself in great danger of physical attack of some sort, but the real
loss is of her once possible job, her reputation, and her sense of self-
control, self-preservation, security. This recalls Leila’s (“Her First Ball”,
1921)53 naïve bubble of her own influence and safety, produced from
nothing more than her female youthfulness, and lost when revealed as
only a tentative, temporary delusion. Much later, Alice Munro’s ‘To Reach
Japan’ (2012)54 similarly uses the liminal space, time and place of a train
journey, here as an adventure for a wayward wife seeking the unknown,
but bringing real danger to her child, and playing out the excitement of
the unfamiliar and transitory, the comfort and threat of strangers. For
Katherine Mansfield’s characters, the lone young governess travelling on a
train, Bertha, and Leila, with their childlike inabilities to read a new situa-
tion, the intentions of a stranger renders them vulnerable, their fanciful
and unrealistic versions of their own position and of life around them
makes them prey to manipulative men (or women), who know how to
encourage fantasies, feed and then destroy them. Bertha misunderstands
her beautiful friend Pearl’s relationship with her own husband until she
observes them together while the sexual flowering of Pearl set against
Bertha’s self-absorbed hyper-sensitivity is embodied in the fabulous full
flowering of the cherry tree outside in the moonlight. Leila’s youthful joy
and generosity are cut off, deadened, and the little governess misreads the
old man’s intentions, wandering off with him and ruining her reputation.
Each woman’s safe fantasy world is punctured, devalued, emptied out by
the deceit of an ostensible friend (or a husband) and by the damage of a
real stranger.
These women are caught up in their own worlds and in some cases the
disorientation and gap between perceived reality, self and the world, inter-
nalised, insouciance and a parallel reading of what is going on makes them
physically, socially and psychologically vulnerable. Perhaps their versions
of shared and communicative reality is a next step on from the largely
male, authorised and authored versions of (women’s) hysteria, especially
as depicted in the 19th century, but it also builds on Woolf’s women char-
acters: Mrs Dalloway (1925)55 and Mrs Ramsay (To the Lighthouse, 1927),56
whose rich inner lives enable them to think on multiple levels and experi-
ence multiple realities while attempting to behave in a fashion which will
draw little attention to the dominance of their inner over their outer
worlds . What is unseen, the inner subjective world, is for them the real,
authentic, lived world. There is a gulf between the two, nonetheless. Links
and missed links between inner and outer worlds are enabled in Woolf
through stream of consciousness and through a mix of dissociation, fan-
tasy and doubts about shared reality in the work of Katherine Mansfield,
du Maurier, Jackson and Munro in whose writing these dissociations and
gaps are indicators of (sometimes culpable) vulnerability.
Mansfield, Women’s Gothic and Gothic Horror

Katherine Mansfield uses characteristics of the literary Gothic rather than
of Gothic horror. She will defamiliarise, disrupt and reduce complacency
and calm, but there are only a few elements of the supernatural e.g. in “A
Suburban Fairy Tale” (1924),57 a changeling story as argued in an issue of
the Katherine Mansfield journal which focused on her use of the Gothic.58
The strangeness is likely to be located in one’s perception of the world
rather than the invasion and concrete actions of others, objects and places
around them. In all four authors’ work, some of the women characters are
innocent, misled, or deliberately ignorant, or else they are confused,
unable to see what is happening around and to them. At the heart of these
tales there is constant misinterpretation, a gap between words and mean-
ings, between the shared world and interpretations of it. Katherine
Mansfield’s work is either a sensed or an acknowledged influence on the
three writers who followed her and are considered here. The link between
her work and that of Daphne du Maurier’s, however, is more recognised,
and begins with contiguity.
Influences—Mansfield and du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier was born in a grand house in Regent’s Park, London,
and from her comments, and the memory of Mansfield observing her and
her sisters playing when they all lived in London, we know she was influ-
enced by Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield watched the du Maurier children
at play in Hampstead, and du Maurier wishes she’d spoken with her and
her sisters since she sensed a direct influence of Mansfield’s on her own
work. This influence on du Maurier’s writing is clear from comments in du
Maurier’s letters:
22 G. WISKER
I’ve been reading ‘Bliss’ etc, by Katherine Mansfield. The stories are too
wonderful […] and some of them leave one with a kind of hopeless feeling.
[A] sort of feeling that life is merely repetition, and love monotony. Oh, it’s
not really that but a kind of helpless pity for the dreariness of other people’s
lives. […] There is one story called ‘The Dill Pickle’. Oh God! and another—
I’ve forgotten the name—about a poor woman—So dreary, hopeless,
pathetic, But wonderful, and wonderfully written.59
While she sees Mansfield’s focus on dreary lives and lives less written
about, often also a concern of du Maurier’s, there are also similarities in
their treatment of that gap between inner experience and the outer world
of people, objects, things, names, the demarcations of and the manage-
ment and labelling of life as experienced in the often dreary, and actually
quite liminal and even dangerous worlds their women inhabit. There is a
common expression of this instability, and of the threat in the everyday,
across the work of Mansfield and du Maurier.
In “Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s
‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’”60 Setara Pracha rein-
forces the link we know a little of between Mansfield and du Maurier:
Mansfield died in 1923 when du Maurier was only sixteen, but she was a
significant influence on du Maurier, who commented that ‘[s]urely Katherine
Mansfield would not have been so easily discouraged?’, when trying to over-
come the difficulties of living as a writer.61
In this we sense that du Maurier is not only taking literary inspiration

from Mansfield, but also using her as a model for living. Aged twenty-one,
du Maurier writes to her governess Maud Whaddell (known in the du
Maurier family as Tod) that:
I met someone who used to know Katherine Mansfield very well, and appar-
ently K.M. used to live at Hampstead at one time and told this friend how
terribly interested she was in the du Maurier children and that she longed to
talk to us, and used to watch us for hours playing about on the heath. […]
Isn’t it wonderful Tod? Probably when Madam and I used to dash about
as Red Indians and schoolboys, Katherine Mansfield watched us. If only
she’d spoken to us. It’s so odd because she honestly is quite my favourite
writer, and I’ve always felt how sympathetic she must have been. I’m sure I
should never have started writing stories if I hadn’t her example before me.62
Pracha notes that in the current du Maurier revival “Mansfield’s influ-

ence on style and symbolism in du Maurier’s writing is crucial,” mention-
ing “the importance of the liminal in modernist texts.”63 We easily sense
Mansfield’s influence in du Maurier’s stories, since both writers, like the
US author Edith Wharton (for example in The Custom of the Country,
1913),64 equally satirise the pretentious rich and would-be bourgeoisie,
some of whom have a misplaced sense of their own brilliance or artistic
gifts, such as the embarrassingly bad artist and would-be murderer in du
Maurier’s “The Alibi” (1959).65 Claire Drewery recognizes this as an
example of the modernist focus on the “inner life, fragmentation, ambigu-
ity, epiphany, and the relationship between the individual and society”.66
More generally, Dominic Head’s67 work on the modernist short story sees
constraints on women’s lives as characteristics of representations of women
in this period. This liminality, misreading of social experiences and the
position of the self within them, the marginalization and accompanying
dissociation in processing experience continues into the short stories of
Shirley Jackson and Alice Munro. None of the four considered here are
writers of successful escapist fantasies; rather, as Pracha characterizes du
Maurier, each is “a writer of failed escape attempts. Like Mansfield, du
Maurier recognises marriage as a potentially dangerous trap rather than an
escape to greater freedoms.”68 Specifically regarding marriage, Head
notes: “[m]arriage, far from being the promised state of fulfilment, is pre-
sented as destructive of the female”.69
Later, Jackson’s Hollywood influenced characters also seek romantic
interludes, true love and marriage, but fantasise about potential lovers’
meetings (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959),70 are tricked by unscrupu-
lous men, confused by potential husbands or lovers (“The Daemon
Lover”, 1949)71 and equally confused about who their husbands are and
where their homes might be (“Stranger”,1946).72 The promises of secure
places which confer safety and romance, and secure relationships which
also confer safety and identity are undermined as the women become
knocked off course in following traditional narrative trajectories from the
haunting romances of the nineteenth century and from their popular cul-
tural replays in Hollywood films. Alice Munro’s women also live stuck
lives in stuck places but some invest in fantasies of escape, and some in the
hope of a lover taking them away from all of this. Short stories by all four
authors undermine conventional romantic fantasies and fictions, the safe-
loved-secure parallel universes these women imagine they live in or will
live in. This undermining is both a characteristic of women’s lives as Head
24 G. WISKER
notes of modernist work73, but it is also a familiar characteristic of the liter-

ary Gothic in which for women safe places, relationship identities and
securities (family, home, money, respectability) are shown as dangerously
complacent fictions. These fictions are then emptied out so that their
instability and outdatedness are enacted in and vehicled by the instabilities
of their sense of reality and identity, the dislocations and the defamiliariza-
tions of their worldviews and their lived experiences, the puncturing of
their socially-inherited narratives of secure identity and happy ever afters
with the love of their lives who might (especially with Munro’s tales) have
taken them away from all this.
My main interest in Mansfield, du Maurier, Jackson and Munro is in
their everyday Gothic, in the insidious undermining of the security of both
the seeming normality of life, the narratives by which we construct and
interpret our worlds, and the security in what is defined and labelled as real
and trustworthy. In this third thought, du Maurier’s work takes us into a
world which reminds us of existentialism and phenomenology in its fun-
damental questioning of the relationships between categories, words,
proxies, and felt, lived, seen, perceived reality. Familiar faces, behaviours,
places, the trustworthiness of continuities between time and place are all
undermined. Furthermore, some of her stories cast us into parallel times
where events can be perceived but not fully engaged with in historical
moments, for example in The House on the Strand (1969).74 The defamil-
iarization of time and place and a parallel world are an exciting lure, a
promise but also a threat. Both the stories with which people make sense
of their everyday lives and events and the exciting disruptive strangeness
which they seek are revealed as dangerous. Each is fuelled by self-deception.
In du Maurier’s work, words, seemingly solid identity, dependable behav-
iours, are all upset. Trusted relationships dissolve into doubt, boredom
and ontological insecurity. On deliberately or accidentally entering the
unknown, the liminal, her characters slip off ties and habits and bring dan-
ger to others and to themselves.
In “The Alibi” (1959)75 the perspective is not that of the object or vic-
tim but of the stranger themselves. Here is a self-absorbed dull manager
with delusions of talent and power, who fancies himself as an exciting out-
sider and randomly enters the life and influences the deaths of an unsus-
pecting impoverished woman and her children. Vacuous self-absorption is
accompanied by amoral reification of others, seen initially when, crossing
the Embankment, he looks at his wife and other people and sees them
as merely:
minute, dangling puppets manipulated by a string. The very steps they took
were jerking, lopsided, a horrible imitation of the real thing (“The
Alibi”, 1959)76
This moment of existential disorientation (even dread) is a catalyst for

his sudden change from a seemingly dull, ordinary husband, to a potential
killer. He disrupts his own mundane life by semi-planning a random mur-
der and becomes the dangerous stranger in the subsistence existence of a
near-destitute young Eastern European immigrant woman and her child
when he enters their lives on a whim, turning randomly into number 8
Boulting Street, a drab house in a poor quarter of London. Here he
responds to her assumption about his reasons for seeking lodgings by col-
luding in the fiction that he needs somewhere to be his artist’s studio, and
he then deludes himself he is an artist. This investment in the fiction of his
talent embroils him further and further in the lives of the young woman
and her son, and increasingly removes him from respectable, dull routines
in his job in the office and his respectable, dull routines at home, which in
turn sets up suspicion among those who ‘know’ him that he has an alter-
native life. The young woman gives him a bundle to dispose of, but so
bound up is he in his fictive life and his new decision to leave the ‘studio’
and move on, he neither cares that the removal of his rent will leave her
destitute, nor does he think to check on the contents of the bundle before
he finally finds somewhere to throw it away. It is a dead baby, and the
woman then kills herself and her son. Seeing his paintings, near the end of
the story, his wife comments that they are worthless, talentless, just
‘daubs’. He is a destructive stranger to himself and more so to those whose
lives he unwittingly wrecks. Not complicated enough to suffer real exis-
tential angst, estrangement from himself, others and the world, rather he
fancies himself dangerous, interesting, talented and ends up unwittingly
culpable in the deaths of both the mother and her young son, embracing
a label of murderer to make his life meaningful.
Less direct is the influence of Mansfield and du Maurier on US Shirley
Jackson, Gothic writer of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)77 and many
short stories including “Louisa Please Come Home” (1960),78 and “The
Beautiful Stranger” (1946),79 whose women characters are caught in their
own dissociated fictionalised worlds, involved in theft and identity theft,
or misreading signals and questioning reality, often to dangerous effects
and outcomes. I do not know now of direct influence of Mansfield or du
Maurier on Shirley Jackson but I examine them now because the affinities
26 G. WISKER
are too clear to be accidents. Jackson’s stories are more overtly Gothic
than either Mansfield’s or du Maurier’s, more likely to shift that contin-
uum towards potential ghostly presences (usually projections from insecu-
rities or obsessions) but each engage folklore, the supernatural or the
insecure natural, the understandable real and the naively-invented normal.
Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson,

Gothic Horror
Daphne du Maurier’s and Shirley Jackson’s Gothic horror is not that of
the weird and monstrous (Lovecraft, Stoker—vampires, werewolves, zom-
bies); instead, it is of the human and the natural world and of dissociation
and defamiliarization in the everyday. Du Maurier’s work is socially, his-
torically and politically situated (around World War II, the thirties, forties,
fifties and their concerns)—partying in the face of impending war (Rebecca,
1938),80 social deprivation and immigration (“The Alibi” 195981) fear of
invasion (“The Birds,” 1952).82 As women’s Gothic horror, it focuses on
relationships, families, couples, power, self-delusions, the body, and
entrapping narratives, especially of romance and domestic security. It
expresses the uncanny in the everyday: the unheimleich—horror as disrup-
tion of the everyday. Du Maurier’s characters live in liminal spaces where
relationships, norms and everyday experiences between individuals, the
world, creatures, events and time are all tentative, transient and untrust-
worthy, about to dissolve. So her characters (women in particular) often
seem, like Woolf’s and some of Mansfield’s and Shirley Jackson’s, to be
hyper sensitive, dissociated from solid realities, narratives, interpretations
of what is real and trustworthy. Du Maurier also undermines grand narra-
tives, defamiliarizing the trajectory and the matched beliefs in which we
invest, so with Rebecca (1938)83 the narrative begins at the end—and the
narrative of romance, leading to domestic security and bliss dissolves into
the instability of homelessness, a life of mutual pretence with a murderer.
Alison Light notes that “Daphne du Maurier’s writing is not powerful
because it successfully conveys a conservative vision but because of the
pleasure it takes in undermining its own beliefs. Du Maurier’s writing sug-
gests that conservatism has its own divisions, its own buried desires, and
that it has its own unconscious, its craving which cannot be satisfied and
its conflicts which cannot be resolved”.84 In my own previous writing on
du Maurier, I concurred with Light as follows:
I find her constantly undermining securities of family, romance, consistent

identity, time and place, safety, civilised behaviour, the expected. There is
always a dialectic between the safe and explicable, and the wayward and
inexplicable.85
Du Maurier’s Gothic horror builds on destabilised established narra-

tives, domestic harmony, everyday normality and the stability of named
things, presences, time, place—it is Freudian and existential at its core.
Names and naming, meaning, narrative ways of pinning down and sense
making float away from the people, events and places, the objects, the
trajectories. Du Maurier wishes both to confirm to conventional beliefs
and behaviours and to deconstruct them, testing their limits, questioning
received interpretations and securities whether of behaviour in the natural
world, or of the stability of body, time and space. The strength of what
lingers beyond any restoration of order is deeply disturbing, but attests to
the tenuousness of all boundaries and natural laws. Clairvoyance, spirit
transfer, animals and nature unleashing uncontrollable powers, transgres-
sive sexuality influencing beyond the grave, these troubling existences
refuse the comforting closure of conventional popular fictional narrative
forms. The confirmation of fissures in what we consider trustworthy, sta-
ble and ordinary links Daphne du Maurier’s horror very clearly with the
interventions and underminings of the status quo found in contemporary
women’s horror writing.86
Short stories by Katherine Mansfield, du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and
Alice Munro all scrutinise and utterly undermine any beliefs about harmo-
nious coupledom, the security of relationships, betrothal, marriages, the
dependability of family members, the trustworthiness of everyday rela-
tionships and domestic securities, revealing investment in these to be
whimsical, short-sighted, and potentially destructive of stability and thus
dangerous. Each uses the figure of a stranger to act as catalyst in this
undermining, and such a guise lures or jolts others into a sense of false
security concerning identity, normality and safety. While the figure of the
stranger is usually not the focaliser, but the catalyst for disorientation and
vulnerability, in du Mauriers’ “The Alibi” he is the focaliser and so as read-
ers, like the victims, we are trapped inside his warped fictionalising. If these
were straightforward crime authors, there would be an expectation of
invasion, physical violence, of murder and then of detection. Instead, they
show the insidious and interminable damage couples do to each other,
children to parents to children, and people do become ill and even die as
28 G. WISKER
a consequence, but without a murder, detection or capture, there is no

restitution and peace, just the sense in the end of destabilisation and
dissolution.
Shirley Jackson
Self-delusion operates in Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s stories as it does in
tales by Jackson. Marriages in Jackson’s work are delusional and self-
destructive, her woman characters hyper-sensitive and yet unable to read
the intentions and meanings in the actions of others, rendering them, like
so many of Katherine Mansfield’s and du Maurier’s characters, somewhat
at sea, floating, untethered to names, spaces, values, narrative trajectories,
connections of words and norms to things and relationships. These are
tales of dissolution and tentative unsatisfied approaches to a form of
involvement in the real, with fear of engagements, of going out, loss of the
relationships and stabilities of time and place. Many of Shirley Jackson’s
women also inhabit confused, liminal, unstable worlds. They feel trapped
and unreal, victims of the actual insecure fickleness of their investment in
fixities of narratives, place and identity. Some are disoriented when staying
in New York apartments (“The Pillar of Salt”, 1948),87 some easily fooled,
emptied out by deceitful men (“The Daemon Lover”); or, just as destabi-
lising, but not as victims, they are instead agents of disturbance, and inter-
fere with a sense of security in identity and home when they use their
social skills to ignore barriers of place, identity and ownership, in taking
over others’ apartments and possessions.
Shirley Jackson, long underestimated as a writer of the everyday Gothic
of married life and families, described as a housewife and criticised for
publishing in women’s magazines, in fact exposes the inner disorientated
lives of the trapped wives of the 1950s. As Angela Hague comments:
By focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting

identities, their simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside them-
selves or to function autonomously, and their confrontation with an inner
emptiness that often results in mental illness, Jackson displays in pathologi-
cal terms the position of many women in the 1950s.88
Mrs Ellis in du Maurier’s “Split Second” (1952),89 dies crossing the

road, hit by a van, but in the seconds after that split second, returns as a
ghostly presence to her own home, years ahead. She is of course displaced
in the family who only half sense her. A similar displacement and disorien-
tation of the house, home and family is seen in Jackson’s tale “The
Beautiful Stranger”90 of a wife expecting her husband coming home and
contemplating greeting him but instead considers that she is in fact greet-
ing a total stranger while another wife goes out but cannot re-find her
home. These dissociated moments undermine any relationship between
self and the world, between words and things, the sensed and the imag-
ined, the relived interior state, the gap between these on the one hand,
rendering them floating—they can question and escape, it is exhilarating,
and on the other hand vulnerable because nothing is fixed, reconcilable or
behaving normally.
In Shirley Jackson’s story “Louisa, Please Come Home” (1960)91 a
young woman leaves home. Her identity is initially tied up with her suit-
case and her coat. Each year her mother pleads for her return on the radio,
so she plans to return and even re-meets her brother, but over the years he
has brought several potential Louisas back home. The family refuse to
recognise her or take notice of her (correct) answers to their wicked, spe-
cific questions about bridesmaid’s dress colour, etc and insist she was
younger. Returned, she is unrecognised, and this produces a bizarre sense
of displacement:
“‘You look like a nice girl; try to imagine your own mother –’ I tried to
imagine my own mother; I looked straight at her.”92
In “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),93 a wife picking up her husband

from the train station after a business trip suddenly realises or imagines
that he is in fact a stranger—but decides to collude in this façade or delu-
sion, believing he joins in the game of adopting her husband John’s tics
and behavioural traits but avoiding other habits for example mixing her a
cocktail. It’s amusing, flirty, scary. When she goes out and returns to the
house the disorientation is complete—having felt her husband was some-
one colluding, pretending to be him, and quite enjoying this, she now
cannot recognise the house:
She turned and started for the house, and then hesitated; surely she had
come too far? This is not possible, she thought, this cannot be; surely our
house was white? The evening was very dark, and she could see only the
houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond
that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger
inside, and she lost out here.94
30 G. WISKER
Whether in constrained New Hampshire or constrained New York,

Shirley Jackson’s characters—her women—are defined by their social posi-
tion and the fantasies and restrictions of their lives as wives or spinsters.
There is a focus on women and their attempts or not at lives around,
beyond, and instead of that with their husbands.
In “The Pillar of Salt” (1948),95 the couple Brad and Margaret go for
two weeks to the apartment in New York that belongs to their friends
from New Hampshire, who have gone away. This is a tale of disintegration
and defamiliarization, of the essential crisis we find in Sartre, and the slip-
ping away from a firm reality we have in the world. They race about in a
taxi and are overwhelmed by the tall buildings and the bustling street.
Their apartment, that of a friend, is initially reassuringly filled with the
furniture and pictures of their life back home. All is well but also not well,
as increasingly, even over such a short period, Margaret becomes utterly
disorientated, lacking time and space. The first major issue is the party tak-
ing place at the top of the apartment block, described as a little rickety. In
a constrained dance with strangers, Margaret feels hemmed in, and the
open and shut window emphasises the constraint. When she leans out of
this window she sees someone below telling her the house is on fire. There
is chaos in New York City, it seems, imminent danger of drinks, fights and
fires and breakdowns, which are ignored by its partying, purchasing inhab-
itants. It seems that no one can be warned—Margaret is in a different
space, and whether the fire is not in that house itself, it was a danger.
Danger, imminent and always there, then begins to define her, as she
becomes more hesitant about everyday things.
The layout of things, places and safety which are never usually ques-
tioned are undermined by the constant numbers of people, the bustle and
the defamiliarization of everything. In the day, Margaret chooses to stay
alone in the apartment. This leads to breakdown: going out, she is unable
to cross the road, as the lights seem to change constantly, the markers of
normality and definition, i.e. ‘walk/don’t walk’, are muddled and too fast,
and decisions too close. She keeps retreating to the coffee shop and then
eventually calls her husband to come and get her, as crossing the road is
impossible. The norms of time, space, control and understanding have
been dissolved. Anything is possible but mostly it is bad, unstable things,
and this is not that unfamiliar to women stuck, then, in the captive house-
wife role going a little mad without reason, but also to anyone who has
stepped outside the roller coaster of behaviours deemed normal. Men are
often absent, or somewhat removed even when actually present, spoken
of, but rarely speaking, going in and out of a house where the wife is at
home with dinner on the way, or with children to sort out. Meeting others
is essential but a bit of a trial.
We only hear of rather than meet the romantic stranger who approached,
wooed, won and lives with the lonely, recently bereaved spinster now ‘Mrs
Smith’ in “The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”96. This is a troubling tale of
two newly-wed middle aged strangers among strangers. The ill-matched
couple move into a poorer neighbourhood after a brief courtship and
wedding but ‘Mrs Smith’ is clearly a pseudonym and she is only ever seen
on her own. Even the short-lived honeymoon seems to be hers alone. As
she hesitantly buys some small amounts of food, she tells a tale that she
might be going away for the weekend, as if she was the one inventing a
cover story for an inevitable ending, of which she will actually be the vic-
tim. The shopkeepers look at her with concern and it emerges they and the
neighbours, including one Mrs Jones, think ‘Mr Smith’ is a serial killer,
not least because Mrs Smith admits that they married and immediately
made wills. Although Mrs Jones warns her that his face is in the newspaper
and they even seem to be circling a discussion about his usual disposal of
previous wives, ‘Mrs Smith’s’ response is a kind of lethargy. After her
father’s death, she had no one and no future plans. Nothing. Mrs Smith is
a timorous fatality waiting to happen, covering up her own impending
demise. But we never know the inevitable ending. The tale, like her life, is
emptied out. In many of the stories by all four authors, women’s lives are
directionless, null, disposable. Like life itself, nothing is explicit, every-
thing a confusion of threatening and unstable, the dull, the emptied out.
The people, mostly the women, are used, confused, side-lined, under-
mined, tricked and endangered in all of these tales. There are potential
deaths or threats of death. In du Maurier’s “The Alibi” (1959)97 the
impoverished young European and possibly Jewish immigrant woman,
Ana Kaufman, and her children die. The title of Jackson’s “The
Honeymoon of Mrs Smith”98 emphasises that it is just one person’s hon-
eymoon, and the others? Their endings could just as soon be a poisoning
or complete dissolution of self and the sense of a shared reality.
Alice Munro
Alice Munro’s short stories are rich with the claustrophobia and deceit,
the lost opportunities and the dull emptiness of the everyday familiar
world of small town, rural Ontario. Women age as they maintain various
32 G. WISKER
unexciting, seemingly stable relationships or possible relationships, until

the man leaves—and then there is nothing. There are no future opportu-
nities for change since so little that is unusual occurs. Everyday routine
and complacency are a wad of numbing dullness while, alternatively, the
opportunity of a stranger or an escape is something rich with potential and
hope. In Lives of Girls and Women (1971)99 and Who Do You Think You
Are? (1978)100 women in small towns are dominated by outdated beliefs
and limited visions. As Ron Hansen notes of Munro’s work:
there is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confu-
sions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be
revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. Reckless passion and
impulsiveness are as common in these stories as hopelessness or a vague
discontent.101
In talking of “Canadian Gothic” Le Drew identifies characteristics that

“include the concept of ‘North,’ or ‘Northernness’, the binary opposition
of wilderness/civilization, monstrous histories, post-colonial hauntings,
and a permeating sense of spatial and cultural disorientation”. Faye
Hammill (2003,102 2013103) defines several characteristics and I noted ear-
lier that for Hammill, and other critics
modern Canadian Gothic texts are regional, prairie Gothic beginning 1920s
with Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) followed by episodes in the work
of Margaret Laurence, tales of small town incarceration in vast open spaces,
cut off, where isolation, and limited mind-sets threaten women in particular
given their dependency.104
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson defined “Southern Ontario

Gothic” as “a subgenre marked by a focus on the repressions and claustro-
phobic terrors of small towns surrounded by bleak landscapes”.105 It does
seem that “Atwood was thinking here of, among others, the whole lives
are condensed into a handful of pages”.106 Women who challenge conven-
tions suffer as a result. However, amongst the dull, the limited and denied,
the strange is never faraway:
While tea party guests listen to children playing the piano inside , outside
parents make pacts with wild people in coming of age tales e.g. ‘Images’ in
which a young girl and her father meet an axe wielding recluse in the woods,
sometimes replaying adult versions of fairy stories showing threats, promises
and the strange are all around.107
In the work of all four writers considered in this chapter, the arrival of
a stranger is a moment of excitement, fantasy, promise, a catalyst for
change perhaps, but then is frequently no more than a moment for disori-
entation and potential dissolution. For Greta, the newly successful but
little-known writer in Alice Munro’s ‘To Reach Japan’ (2012)108 strangers
at a party, and others on a long cross-continental train journey offer and
represent the excitement of being recognised, being seen as different, the
opportunity to speak about different interests and conjure up possible
futures.
Greta is invited to a party in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and, disori-
entated, she is intrigued by and vulnerable to those she meets there. It was
not at all the kind of neighborhood she had expected. She was beginning to
wonder if she had got the street wrong, and was not unhappy to think that.
She could go back to the bus stop where there was a bench. She could slip
off her shoes and settle down for the long solitary ride home. […] She was
greeted by a woman who seemed to have been expecting somebody else.
Greeted was the wrong word—the woman opened the door and Greta said
that this must be where they were having the party.
“What does it look like?” the woman said, and leaned on the doorframe.
The way was barred till she—Greta—said, “May I come in?” and then there
was a movement that seemed to cause considerable pain. She didn’t ask
Greta to follow her but Greta did anyway.
Nobody spoke to her or noticed her.109
The location is strange, the people strange and her responses both
socially adventurous and hesitant. Everything is disorientating. At this
party she meets a journalist and once back in her quiet home, becomes
fixated on thoughts of him, constantly reminded of him: “there was hardly
a day when she didn’t think of him. It was like having the very same dream
the minute you fell asleep.”110 When she decides to travel across the vast-
ness of Canada from Vancouver to Toronto, Greta becomes adventurous
and takes this travel opportunity as one for an illicit meeting at the jour-
ney’s end, recalling, for me at least, Shirley Jackson’s Eleanor and her
“journeys end in lovers meeting”111, a journey which for Eleanor ends in
death. The end of this train journey offers a multitude of possibilities for
other futures for Greta and her daughter, Katy.
They meet many exciting, transient, temporary companions on this
long train journey. As the landscape goes by and home recedes, new
people enter and leave the train, getting onto and then out of their lives,
34 G. WISKER
speaking and singing, presenting fleeting examples of different life

options, some exciting, restless, unfixed. In this constantly moving con-
text, the destabilisation, adventure, excitement and danger of the new
dominate and they listen excitedly to the tales of lively, exciting tempo-
rary fellow travellers and ‘reading readiness’ actors, Laurie and Greg,
their free, young lives contrasting with Greta’s life of responsibilities
(particularly, for the safety of her daughter). Still, as it emerges, this
safety is the last thing on her mind. The two young strangers are like an
unfixed part of the speeding train with its potential for difference, for
constant newness and change:
Greg was loose, and stopping off in Saskatoon. His family was there. They
were both quite beautiful, Greta thought. Tall, limber, almost unnaturally
lean, he with crinkly dark hair, she black-haired and sleek as a Madonna.112
Swept up in the new freedom which Greg represents, Greta forgets

where her daughter is, panics and searches frantically for her, imagining
the worst:
She got control of herself and tried to think where the train had stopped, or
whether it had been stopped, during the time she had been with Greg.
While it was stopped, if it had been stopped, could a kidnapper have got on
the train and somehow made off with Katy? #
She stood in the aisle, trying to think what she had to do to stop
the train.113
Greta, panicking, feeling guilty, both exonerates herself and blames

herself, dramatically presenting a mixed picture of devotion to motherly
duty and neglect fuelled by careless excitement, by her heady embrace of
the excitingly strange. Her personal testimony is a contradictory mix of
guilt, defensiveness and honesty:
All of her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy.
She knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It
was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her,
during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But
Greta had other things to do around the house then, and her attention had
been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical.
And not just because of the housework. Other thoughts had crowded the
child out. Even before the useless, exhausting, idiotic preoccupation with
the man in Toronto, there was the other work, the work of poetry that it
seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.114
She feels both guilty and hard done by. These are the contradictions of
the housewife who tries to balance the creative with the responsibly mun-
dane. Housework and her own poetry have taken all her time and atten-
tion and yet, although she does not mention it, this adventurous journey,
this leap of freedom into the strange is what really makes her excited, fear-
ful, guilty. For Greta this is a personal turmoil and for readers it indicates
the terror of choosing the strange or the stranger, because anything can
happen, perhaps something wonderful, but often it seems, as suggested by
all four authors covered here, what does happen instead is often some-
thing dull or terrible. The journey and the plan Greta barely mentions
have dominated her, she has thought little of Katy, and now her child
seems in peril, in the context of the strange, at the hands of strangers,
perhaps. But she is found.
Greta steps off the train into the arms of the man she met at the party
and who she had secretly arranged to be there as she arrived in Toronto.
Her moment of excitement is realised at the end of a journey of newness,
difference, the exciting and the frightening strange. However, the exhila-
ration and the potential of the new with this near stranger are undercut by
her rather careless link with Greg and her dangerous lack of responsibility
for Katy which led up to the new man greeting her in Toronto. Munro
leaves the story’s ending blank:
someone…took hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a deter-
mined and celebratory way.
Harris.
First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling.
She was trying to hang on to Katy but at this moment the child pulled
away and got her hand free.
She didn’t try to escape. She just stood waiting for whatever had to
come next.115
Munro’s story demonstrates that strangers are part of the opportunity

within an escape fantasy. They can be transient and undependable, or rep-
resent real escape, real potential for change laced with the piquancies of
the unknown and danger.
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no related content on Scribd:
Major Elliott, the senior officer participating in the pursuit, called
out to the deserters to halt and surrender. This command was
several times repeated, but without effect. Finally, seeing the
hopelessness of further flight, the deserters came to bay, and to
Major Elliott’s renewed demand to throw down their arms and
surrender, the ringleader drew up his carbine to fire upon his
pursuers. This was the signal for the latter to open fire, which they
did successfully, bringing down three of the deserters, although two
of them were worse frightened than hurt.
Rejoining the command with their six captive deserters, the
pursuing party reported their inability to overtake those who had
deserted on horseback. The march was resumed and continued until
near nightfall, by which time we had placed thirty miles between us
and our last camp on the Platte. While on the march during the day,
a trusty sergeant, one who had served as a soldier long and
faithfully, imparted the first information which could be relied upon as
to the plot which had been formed by the malcontents to desert in a
body. The following night had been selected as the time for making
the attempt. The best horses and arms in the command were to be
seized and taken away. I believed that the summary action adopted
during the day would intimidate any who might still be contemplating
desertion, and was confident that another day’s march would place
us so far in a hostile and dangerous country, that the risk of
encountering war parties of Indians would of itself serve to deter any
but large numbers from attempting to make their way back to the
settlements. To bridge the following night in safety was the next
problem. While there was undoubtedly a large proportion of the men
who could be fully relied upon to remain true to their obligations and
to render any support to their officers which might be demanded, yet
the great difficulty at this time, owing to the sudden development of
the plot, was to determine who could be trusted.
This difficulty was solved by placing every officer in the
command on guard during the entire night. The men were
assembled as usual for roll-call at tattoo, and then notified that every
man must be in his tent at the signal “taps,” which would be sounded
half an hour later; that their company officers, fully armed, would
walk the company streets during the entire night, and any man
appearing outside the limits of his tent between the hours of “taps”
and reveille would do so at the risk of being fired upon after being
once hailed.
The night passed without disturbance, and daylight found us in
the saddle and pursuing our line of march toward Fort Wallace. It is
proper to here record the fact that from that date onward desertion
from that command during the continuance of the expedition was
never attempted. It may become necessary in order “to perfect the
record,” borrowing a term from the War Department, to refer in a
subsequent chapter to certain personal and official events which
resulted partially from the foregoing occurrences.
Let us now turn our attention to Lieutenant Kidder and his
detachment. The third night after leaving the Platte my command
encamped in the vicinity of our former camp near the forks of the
Republican. So far, nothing had been learned which would enable us
to form any conclusion regarding the route taken by Kidder.
Comstock, the guide, was frequently appealed to for an opinion
which, from his great experience on the Plains, might give us some
encouragement regarding Kidder’s safety. But he was too cautious
and careful a man, both in word and deed, to excite hopes which his
reasoning could not justify. When thus appealed to he would usually
give an ominous shake of the head and avoid a direct answer.
On the evening just referred to the officers and Comstock were
grouped near headquarters discussing the subject which was then
uppermost in the mind of every one in camp. Comstock had been
quietly listening to the various theories and surmises advanced by
different members of the group, but was finally pressed to state his
ideas as to Kidder’s chances of escaping harm.
“Well, gentlemen,” emphasizing the last syllable as was his
manner, “before a man kin form any ijee as to how this thing is likely
to end, thar are several things he ort to be acquainted with. For
instance, now, no man need tell me any p’ints about Injuns. Ef I
know anything, it’s Injuns. I know jest how they’ll do anything and
when they’ll take to do it; but that don’t settle the question, and I’ll tell
you why. Ef I knowed this young lootenint—I mean Lootenint Kidder
—ef I knowed what for sort of a man he is, I could tell you mighty
near to a sartainty all you want to know; for you see Injun huntin’ and
Injun fightin’ is a trade all by itself, and like any other bizness a man
has to know what he’s about, or ef he don’t he can’t make a livin’ at
it. I have lots uv confidence in the fightin’ sense of Red Bead the
Sioux chief, who is guidin’ the lootenint and his men, and ef that
Injun kin have his own way thar is a fair show for his guidin’ ’em
through all right; but as I sed before, there lays the difficulty. Is this
lootenint the kind of a man who is willin’ to take advice, even ef it
does cum from an Injun? My experience with you army folks has
allus bin that the youngsters among ye think they know the most,
and this is particularly true ef they hev just cum from West P’int. Ef
some of them young fellars knowed half as much as they b’lieve they
do, you couldn’t tell them nothin’. As to rale book-larnin’, why I
’spose they’ve got it all; but the fact uv the matter is, they couldn’t tell
the difference twixt the trail of a war party and one made by a huntin’
party to save their necks. Half uv ’em when they first cum here can’t
tell a squaw from a buck, just because both ride straddle; but they
soon larn. But that’s neither here nor thar. I’m told that the lootenint
we’re talkin’ about is a new-comer, and that this is his first scout. Ef
that be the case, it puts a mighty onsartain look on the whole thing,
and twixt you and me, gentlemen, he’ll be mighty lucky ef he gits
through all right. To-morrow we’ll strike the Wallace trail, and I kin
mighty soon tell ef he has gone that way.”
But little encouragement was to be derived from these
expressions. The morrow would undoubtedly enable us, as
Comstock had predicted, to determine whether or not the lieutenant
and his party had missed our trail and taken that leading to Fort
Wallace.
At daylight our column could have been seen stretching out in
the direction of the Wallace trail. A march of a few miles brought us
to the point of intersection. Comstock and the Delawares had
galloped in advance, and were about concluding a thorough
examination of the various tracks to be seen in the trail, when the
head of the column overtook them. “Well, what do you find,
Comstock?” was my first inquiry. “They’ve gone toward Fort Wallace,
sure,” was the reply; and in support of this opinion he added, “The
trail shows that twelve American horses, shod all round, have
passed at a walk, goin’ in the direction of the fort; and when they
went by this p’int they were all right, because their horses were
movin’ along easy, and there are no pony tracks behind ’em, as
wouldn’t be the case ef the Injuns had got an eye on ’em.” He then
remarked, as if in parenthesis, “It would be astonishin’ ef that
lootenint and his lay-out gits into the fort without a scrimmage. He
may; but ef he does, it will be a scratch ef ever there was one, and
I’ll lose my confidence in Injuns.”
The opinion expressed by Comstock as to the chances of
Lieutenant Kidder and party making their way to the fort across
eighty miles of danger unmolested, was the concurrent opinion of all
the officers. And now that we had discovered their trail, our interest
and anxiety became immeasurably increased as to their fate. The
latter could not remain in doubt much longer, as two days’ marching
would take us to the fort. Alas! we were to solve the mystery without
waiting so long.
Pursuing our way along the plain, heavy trail made by Robbins
and Cook, and directing Comstock and the Delawares to watch
closely that we did not lose that of Kidder and his party, we patiently
but hopefully awaited further developments. How many miles we had
thus passed over without incident worthy of mention, I do not now
recall. The sun was high in the heavens, showing that our day’s
march was about half completed, when those of us who were riding
at the head of the column discovered a strange-looking object lying
directly in our path, and more than a mile distant. It was too large for
a human being, yet in color and appearance, at that distance,
resembled no animal frequenting the Plains with which any of us
were familiar. Eager to determine its character, a dozen or more of
our party, including Comstock and some of the Delawares, galloped
in front.
Before riding the full distance the question was determined. The
object seen was the body of a white horse. A closer examination
showed that it had been shot within the past few days, while the
brand, U. S., proved that it was a government animal. Major Elliott
then remembered that while at Fort Sedgwick he had seen one
company of cavalry mounted upon white horses. These and other
circumstances went far to convince us that this was one of the
horses belonging to Lieutenant Kidder’s party. In fact there was no
room to doubt that this was the case.
Almost the unanimous opinion of the command was that there
had been a contest with Indians, and this only the first evidence we
should have proving it. When the column reached the point where
the slain horse lay, a halt was ordered, to enable Comstock and the
Indian scouts to thoroughly examine the surrounding ground to
discover, if possible, any additional evidence, such as empty
cartridge shells, arrows, or articles of Indian equipment, showing that
a fight had taken place. All the horse equipments, saddle, bridle,
etc., had been carried away, but whether by friend or foe could not
then be determined. While the preponderance of circumstances
favored the belief that the horse had been killed by Indians, there
was still room to hope that he had been killed by Kidder’s party and
the equipments taken away by them; for it frequently happens on a
march that a horse will be suddenly taken ill and be unable for the
time being to proceed further. In such a case, rather than abandon
him alive, with a prospect of his recovering and falling into the hands
of the Indians to be employed against us, orders are given to kill him,
and this might be the true way of accounting for the one referred to.
The scouts being unable to throw any additional light upon the
question, we continued our march, closely observing the ground as
we passed along. Comstock noticed that instead of the trail showing
that Kidder’s party was moving in regular order, as when at first
discovered, there were but two or three tracks to be seen in the
beaten trail, the rest being found on the grass on either side.
We had marched two miles perhaps from the point where the
body of the slain horse had been discovered, when we came upon a
second, this one, like the first, having been killed by a bullet, and all
of his equipments taken away. Comstock’s quick eyes were not long
in detecting pony tracks in the vicinity, and we had no longer any but
the one frightful solution to offer: Kidder and his party had been
discovered by the Indians, probably the same powerful and
bloodthirsty band which had been resisted so gallantly by the men
under Robbins and Cook; and against such overwhelming odds the
issue could not be doubtful.
We were then moving over a high and level plateau, unbroken
either by ravines or divides, and just such a locality as would be
usually chosen by the Indians for attacking a party of the strength of
Kidder’s. The Indians could here ride unobstructed and encircle their
victims with a continuous line of armed and painted warriors, while
the beleaguered party, from the even character of the surface of the
plain, would be unable to find any break or depression from behind
which they might make a successful defence. It was probably this
relative condition of affairs which had induced Kidder and his
doomed comrades to endeavor to push on in the hope of finding
ground favorable to their making a stand against their barbarous
foes.
The main trail no longer showed the footprints of Kidder’s party,
but instead Comstock discovered the tracks of shod horses on the
grass, with here and there numerous tracks of ponies, all by their
appearance proving that both horses and ponies had been moving at
full speed. Kidder’s party must have trusted their lives temporarily to
the speed of their horses—a dangerous venture when contending
with Indians. However, this fearful race for life must have been most
gallantly contested, because we continued our march several miles
further without discovering any evidence of the savages having
gained any advantage.
How painfully, almost despairingly exciting must have been this
ride for life! A mere handful of brave men struggling to escape the
bloody clutches of the hundreds of red-visaged demons, who,
mounted on their well-trained war ponies, were straining every nerve
and muscle to reek their hands in the life-blood of their victims. It
was not death alone that threatened this little band. They were not
riding simply to preserve life. They rode, and doubtless prayed as
they rode, that they might escape the savage tortures, the worse
than death which threatened them. Would that their prayer had been
granted!
THE KIDDER MURDER.
We began leaving the high plateau and to descend into a valley,

through which, at the distance of nearly two miles, meandered a
small prairie stream known as Beaver Creek. The valley near the
banks of this stream was covered with a dense growth of tall wild
grass intermingled with clumps of osiers. At the point where the trail
crossed the stream, we hoped to obtain more definite information
regarding Kidder’s party and their pursuers, but we were not required
to wait so long. When within a mile of the stream I observed several
large buzzards floating lazily in circles through the air, and but a
short distance to the left of our trail. This, of itself, might not have
attracted my attention seriously but for the rank stench which
pervaded the atmosphere, reminding one of the horrible sensations
experienced upon a battle-field when passing among the decaying
bodies of the dead.
As if impelled by one thought, Comstock, the Delawares, and
half-a-dozen officers, detached themselves from the column and,
separating into squads of one or two, instituted a search for the
cause of our horrible suspicions. After riding in all directions through
the rushes and willows, and when about to relinquish the search as
fruitless, one of the Delawares uttered a shout which attracted the
attention of the entire command; at the same time he was seen to
leap from his horse and assume a stooping posture, as if critically
examining some object of interest. Hastening, in common with many
others of the party, to his side, a sight met our gaze which even at
this remote day makes my very blood curdle. Lying in irregular order,
and within a very limited circle, were the mangled bodies of poor
Kidder and his party, yet so brutally hacked and disfigured as to be
beyond recognition save as human beings.
Every individual of the party had been scalped and his skull
broken—the latter done by some weapon, probably a tomahawk—
except the Sioux chief Red Bead, whose scalp had simply been
removed from his head and then thrown down by his side. This,
Comstock informed us, was in accordance with a custom which
prohibits an Indian from bearing off the scalp of one of his own tribe.
This circumstance, then, told us who the perpetrators of this deed
were. They could be none other than the Sioux, led in all probability
by Pawnee Killer.
Red Bead, being less disfigured and mutilated than the others,
was the only individual capable of being recognized. Even the
clothes of all the party had been carried away; some of the bodies
were lying in beds of ashes, with partly burned fragments of wood
near them, showing that the savages had put some of them to death
by the terrible tortures of fire. The sinews of the arms and legs had
been cut away, the nose of every man hacked off, and the features
otherwise defaced so that it would have been scarcely possible for
even a relative to recognize a single one of the unfortunate victims.
We could not even distinguish the officer from his men. Each body
was pierced by from twenty to fifty arrows, and the arrows were
found as the savage demons had left them, bristling in the bodies.
While the details of that fearful struggle will probably never be
known, telling how long and gallantly this ill-fated little band
contended for their lives, yet the surrounding circumstances of
ground, empty cartridge shells, and distance from where the attack
began, satisfied us that Kidder and his men fought as only brave
men fight when the watchword is victory or death.
As the officer, his men, and his no less faithful Indian guide, had
shared their final dangers together and had met the same dreadful
fate at the hands of the same merciless foe, it was but fitting that
their remains should be consigned to one common grave. This was
accordingly done. A single trench was dug near the spot where they
had rendered up their lives upon the altar of duty. Silently, mournfully,
their comrades of a brother regiment consigned their mangled
remains to mother earth, there to rest undisturbed, as we supposed,
until the great day of final review. But this was not to be so; while the
closest scrutiny on our part had been insufficient to enable us to
detect the slightest evidence which would aid us or others in
identifying the body of Lieutenant Kidder or any of his men, it will be
seen hereafter how the marks of a mother’s thoughtful affection were
to be the means of identifying the remains of her murdered son,
even though months had elapsed after his untimely death.
IX.
ON the evening of the day following that upon which we had
consigned the remains of Lieutenant Kidder and his party to their
humble resting-place, the command reached Fort Wallace on the
Smoky Hill route. From the occupants of the fort we learned much
that was interesting regarding events which had transpired during
our isolation from all points of communication. The Indians had
attacked the fort twice within the past few days, in both of which
engagements men were killed on each side. The fighting on our side
was principally under the command of Colonel Barnitz, whose forces
were composed of detachments of the Seventh Cavalry. The fighting
occurred on the level plain near the fort, where, owing to the
favorable character of the ground, the Indians had ample opportunity
to display their powers both as warriors and horsemen. One incident
of the fight was related, which, its correctness being vouched for, is
worthy of being here repeated. Both parties were mounted, and the
fighting consisted principally of charges and counter-charges, the
combatants of both sides becoming at times mingled with each
other. During one of these attacks a bugler boy belonging to the
cavalry was shot from his horse; before any of his comrades could
reach him, a powerfully built warrior, superbly mounted on a war
pony, was seen to dash at full speed toward the spot where the
dying bugler lay. Scarcely checking the speed of his pony, who
seemed to divine his rider’s wishes, the warrior grasped the pony’s
mane with one hand and, stooping low as he neared the bugler,
seized the latter with the other hand and lifted him from the earth,
placing him across his pony in front of him. Still maintaining the full
speed of his pony, he was seen to retain the body of the bugler but a
moment, then cast it to the earth. The Indians being routed soon
after and driven from the field, our troops, many of whom had
witnessed the strange and daring action of the warrior, recovered
possession of the dead, when the mystery became solved. The
bugler had been scalped.
Our arrival at Fort Wallace was most welcome as well as
opportune. The Indians had become so active and numerous that all
travel over the Smoky Hill route had ceased; stages had been taken
off the route, and many of the stage stations had been abandoned
by the employees, the latter fearing a repetition of the Lookout
Station massacre. No despatches or mail had been received at the
fort for a considerable period, so that the occupants might well have
been considered as undergoing a state of siege. Added to these
embarrassments, which were partly unavoidable, an additional and
under the circumstances a more frightful danger stared the troops in
the face. We were over two hundred miles from the terminus of the
railroad over which our supplies were drawn, and a still greater
distance from the main dépôts of supplies. It was found that the
reserve of stores at the post was well-nigh exhausted, and the
commanding officer reported that he knew of no fresh supplies being
on the way. It is difficult to account for such a condition of affairs.
Some one must surely have been at fault; but it is not important here
to determine who or where the parties were. The officer commanding
the troops in my absence reported officially to headquarters that the
bulk of the provisions issued to his men consisted of “rotten bacon”
and “hard bread” that was “no better.” Cholera made its appearance
among the men, and deaths occurred daily. The same officer, in
officially commenting upon the character of the provisions issued to
the troops, added: “The low state of vitality in the men, resulting from
the long confinement to this scanty and unwholesome food, will, I
think, account for the great mortality among the cholera cases; ...
and I believe that unless we can obtain a more abundant and better
supply of rations than we have had, it will be impossible to check this
fearful epidemic.”
I decided to select upward of a hundred of the best mounted
men in my command, and with this force open a way through to Fort
Harker, a distance of two hundred miles, where I expected to obtain
abundant supplies; from which point the latter could be conducted,
well protected against Indians by my detachment, back to Fort
Wallace. Owing to the severe marching of the past few weeks, the
horses of the command were generally in an unfit condition for
further service without rest. So that after selecting upward of a
hundred of the best, the remainder might for the time be regarded as
unserviceable; such they were in fact. There was no idea or
probability that the portion of the command to remain in camp near
Fort Wallace would be called upon to do anything but rest and
recuperate from their late marches. It was certainly not expected that
they would be molested or called out by Indians; nor were they.
Regarding the duties to be performed by the picked detachment as
being by far the most important, I chose to accompany it.
The immediate command of the detachment was given to
Captain Hamilton, of whom mention has been previously made. He
was assisted by two other officers. My intention was to push through
from Fort Wallace to Fort Hays, a distance of about one hundred and
fifty miles, as rapidly as was practicable; then, being beyond the
most dangerous portion of the route, to make the remainder of the
march to Fort Harker with half a dozen troopers, while Captain
Hamilton with his command should follow leisurely. Under this
arrangement I hoped to have a train loaded with supplies at Harker,
and in readiness to start for Fort Wallace, by the time Captain
Hamilton should arrive.
Leaving Fort Wallace about sunset on the evening of the 15th of
July, we began our ride eastward, following the line of the overland
stage route. At that date the Kansas Pacific Railway was only
completed as far westward as Fort Harker. Between Forts Wallace
and Harker we expected to find the stations of the overland stage
company, at intervals of from ten to fifteen miles. In time of peace
these stations are generally occupied by half a dozen employees of
the route, embracing the stablemen and relays of drivers. They were
well supplied with firearms and ammunition, and every facility for
defending themselves against Indians. The stables were also the
quarters for the men. They were usually built of stone, and one
would naturally think that against Indians no better defensive work
would be required. Yet such was not the case. The hay and other
combustible material usually contained in them enabled the savages,
by shooting prepared arrows, to easily set them on fire, and thus
drive the occupants out to the open plain, where their fate would
soon be settled. To guard against such an emergency, each station
was ordinarily provided with what on the Plains is termed a “dug-
out.” The name implies the character and description of the work.
The “dug-out” was commonly located but a few yards from one of the
corners of the stable, and was prepared by excavating the earth so
as to form an opening not unlike a cellar, which was usually about
four feet in depth, and sufficiently roomy to accommodate at close
quarters half a dozen persons. This opening was then covered with
earth and loopholed on all sides at a height of a few inches above
the original level of the ground. The earth was thrown on top until the
“dug-out” resembled an ordinary mound of earth, some four or five
feet in height. To the outside observer, no means apparently were
provided for egress or ingress; yet such was not the case. If the
entrance had been made above ground, rendering it necessary for
the defenders to pass from the stable unprotected to their citadel, the
Indians would have posted themselves accordingly, and picked them
off one by one as they should emerge from the stable. To provide
against this danger, an underground passage was constructed in
each case, leading from the “dug-out” to the interior of the stable.
With these arrangements for defence a few determined men could
withstand the attacks of an entire tribe of savages. The recent
depredations of the Indians had so demoralized the men at the
various stations that many of the latter were found deserted, their
former occupants having joined their forces with those of other
stations. The Indians generally burned the deserted stations.
Marching by night was found to be attended with some
disadvantages. The men located at the stations which were still
occupied, having no notice of our coming, and having seen no
human beings for several days except the war parties of savages
who had attacked them from time to time, were in a chronic state of
alarm, and held themselves in readiness for defence at a moment’s
notice. The consequence was, that as we pursued our way in the
stillness of the night, and were not familiar with the location of the
various stations, we generally rode into close proximity before
discovering them. The station men, however, were generally on the
alert, and, as they did not wait to challenge us or be challenged, but
took it for granted that we were Indians, our first greeting would be a
bullet whistling over our heads, sometimes followed by a perfect
volley from the “dug-out.” In such a case nothing was left for us to do
but to withdraw the column to a place of security, and then for one of
our number to creep up stealthily in the darkness to a point within
hailing distance. Even this was an undertaking attended by no little
danger, as by this time the little garrison of the “dug-out” would be
thoroughly awake and every man at his post, his finger on the trigger
of his trusty rifle, and straining both eye and ear to discover the
approach of the hateful redskins, who alone were believed to be the
cause of all this ill-timed disturbance of their slumbers. Huddled
together, as they necessarily would be, in the contracted limits of
their subterranean citadel, and all sounds from without being
deadened and rendered indistinct by the heavy roof of earth and the
few apertures leading to the inside, it is not strange that under the
circumstances it would be difficult for the occupants to distinguish
between the voice of an Indian and that of a white man. Such was in
fact the case, and no sooner would the officer sent forward for that
purpose hail the little garrison and endeavor to explain who we were,
than, guided by the first sound of his voice, they would respond
promptly with their rifles. In some instances we were in this manner
put to considerable delay, and although this was at times most
provoking, it was not a little amusing to hear the description given by
the party sent forward of how closely he hugged the ground when
endeavoring to establish friendly relations with the stage people.
Finally, when successful, and in conversation with the latter, we
inquired why they did not recognize us from the fact that we hailed
them in unbroken English. They replied that the Indians resorted to
so many tricks that they had determined not to be caught even by
that one. They were somewhat justified in this idea, as we knew that
among the Indians who were then on the war-path there was at least
one full blood who had been educated within the limits of civilization,
graduated at a popular institution of learning, and only exchanged
his civilized mode of dress for the paint, blanket, and feathers of
savage life after he had reached the years of manhood. Almost at
every station we received intelligence of Indians having been seen in
the vicinity within a few days of our arrival.
We felt satisfied they were watching our movements, although
we saw no fresh signs of Indians until we arrived near Downer’s
station. Here, while stopping to rest our horses for a few minutes, a
small party of our men, who had without authority halted some
distance behind, came dashing into our midst and reported that
twenty-five or thirty Indians had attacked them some five or six miles
in rear, and had killed two of their number. As there was a
detachment of infantry guarding the station, and time being
important, we pushed on toward our destination. The two men
reported killed were left to be buried by the troops on duty at the
station. Frequent halts and brief rests were made along our line of
march; occasionally we would halt long enough to indulge in a few
hour’s sleep. About three o’clock on the morning of the 18th we
reached Fort Hays, having marched about one hundred and fifty
miles in fifty-five hours, including all halts. Some may regard this as
a rapid rate of marching; in fact, a few officers of the army who
themselves have made many and long marches (principally in
ambulances and railroad cars) are of the same opinion. It was far
above the usual rate of a leisurely made march, but during the same
season and with a larger command I marched sixty miles in fifteen
hours. This was officially reported, but occasioned no remark. During
the war, and at the time the enemy’s cavalry under General J. E. B.
Stuart made its famous raid around the Army of the Potomac in
Maryland, a portion of our cavalry, accompanied by horse artillery, in
attempting to overtake them, marched over ninety miles in twenty-
four hours. A year subsequent to the events narrated in this chapter I
marched a small detachment eighty miles in seventeen hours, every
horse accompanying the detachment completing the march in as
fresh condition apparently as when the march began.
Leaving Hamilton and his command to rest one day at Hays and
then to follow on leisurely to Fort Harker, I continued my ride to the
latter post, accompanied by Colonels Cook and Custer and two
troopers. We reached Fort Harker at two o’clock that night, having
made the ride of sixty miles without change of animals in less than
twelve hours. As this was the first telegraph station, I immediately
sent telegrams to headquarters and to Fort Sedgwick, announcing
the fate of Kidder and his party. General A. J. Smith, who was in
command of this military district, had his headquarters at Harker. I at
once reported to him in person, and acquainted him with every
incident worthy of mention which had occurred in connection with my
command since leaving him weeks before. Arrangements were
made for the arrival of Hamilton’s party and for a train containing
supplies to be sent back under their escort. Having made my report
to General Smith as my next superior officer, and there being no
occasion for my presence until the train and escort should be in
readiness to return, I applied for and received authority to visit Fort
Riley, about ninety miles east of Harker by rail, where my family was
then located.
No movements against Indians of any marked importance
occurred in General Hancock’s department during the remainder of
this year. Extensive preparations had been made to chastise the
Indians, both in this department and in that of General Augur’s on
the north; but about the date at which this narrative has arrived, a
determined struggle between the adherents of the Indian ring and
those advocating stringent measures against the hostile tribes,
resulted in the temporary ascendancy of the former. Owing to this
ascendancy, the military authorities were so hampered and restricted
by instructions from Washington as to be practically powerless to
inaugurate or execute any decisive measures against the Indians.
Their orders required them to simply act on the defensive. It may not
be uninteresting to go back to the closing month of the preceding
year. The great event in Indian affairs of that month and year was the
Fort Phil Kearny massacre, which took place within a few miles of
the fort bearing that name, and in which a detachment of troops,
numbering in all ninety-four persons, were slain, and not one
escaped or was spared to tell the tale. The alleged grievance of the
Indians prompting them to this outbreak was the establishment by
the Government of a new road of travel to Montana, and the locating
of military posts along this line. They claimed that the building and
use of this road would drive all the game out of their best hunting-
grounds. When once war was determined upon by them, it was
conducted with astonishing energy and marked success. Between
the 26th of July and the 21st of December of the same year, the
Indians opposing the establishment of this new road were known to
have killed ninety-one enlisted men, five officers, and fifty-eight
citizens, besides wounding twenty more and capturing and driving off
several hundred head of valuable stock. And during this period of
less than six months, they appeared before Fort Phil Kearny in
hostile array on fifty-one separate occasions, and attacked every
train and individual attempting to pass over the Montana road. It has
been stated officially that at the three posts established for the
defence of the Montana road, there were the following reduced
amounts of ammunition: Fort C. F. Smith, ten rounds per man; Fort
Phil Kearny, forty-five rounds per man, and Fort Reno, thirty rounds
per man; and that there were but twelve officers on duty at the three
posts, many of the enlisted men of which were raw recruits. The
force being small, and the amount of labor necessary in building new
posts being very great, but little opportunity could be had for drill or
target practice. The consequence was, the troops were totally
lacking in the necessary preparation to make a successful fight. As
the massacre at Fort Phil Kearny was one of the most complete as
well as terrible butcheries connected with our entire Indian history,
some of the details, as subsequently made evident, are here given.
On the 6th of December the wood train was attacked by Indians
about two miles from the fort. Colonel Fetterman, with about fifty
mounted men, was sent to rescue the train. He succeeded in this,
but only after a severe fight with the Indians and after suffering a loss
of one officer (Lieutenant Bingham of the cavalry) and one sergeant,
who were decoyed from the main body into an ambuscade. This
affair seems to have given the Indians great encouragement, and
induced them to form their plans for the extensive massacre which
was to follow.
On the 21st the wood train was again assailed, and, as before, a
party was sent out from the fort to its relief. The relieving party
consisted of infantry and cavalry, principally the former, numbering in
all ninety-one men with three officers—Captain Brown of the infantry,
Lieutenant Grummond of the cavalry, and Colonel Fetterman of the
infantry in command.
Colonel Fetterman sallied forth promptly with his command to
the rescue of the train. He moved out rapidly, keeping to the right of
the wood road, for the purpose, as is supposed, of getting in rear of
the attacking party. As he advanced across the Piney a few Indians
appeared on his front and flanks, and kept showing themselves just
beyond rifle range until they finally disappeared beyond Lodge Trail
ridge. When Colonel Fetterman reached Lodge Trail ridge the picket
signalled the fort that the Indians had retreated, and that the train
had moved toward the timber. About noon Colonel Fetterman’s
command, having thrown out skirmishers, disappeared over the
crest of Lodge Trail ridge; firing at once commenced and was heard
distinctly at the fort. From a few scattering shots it increased in
rapidity until it became a continuous and rapid fire of musketry. A
medical officer was sent from the post to join the detachment, but
was unable to do so, Indians being encountered on the way. After
the firing had become quite heavy, showing that a severe
engagement was taking place, Colonel Carrington, the commander
of the post, sent an officer and about seventy-five men to reinforce
Colonel Fetterman’s party. These reinforcements moved rapidly
toward the point from which the sound of firing proceeded. The firing
continued to be heard during their advance, diminishing in rapidity
and number of shots until they had reached a high summit
overlooking the battle-field, when one or two shots closed all sound
of conflict. From this summit a full view could be obtained of the
Peno valley beyond, in which Fetterman’s command was known to
be, but not a single individual of this ill-fated band could be seen.
Instead, however, the valley was seen to be overrun by Indians,
estimated to number fully three thousand warriors. Discovering the
approach of the reinforcements, the Indians beckoned them to come
on, but without awaiting their arrival commenced retreating. The
troops then advanced to a point where the savages had been seen
collected in a circle, and there found the dead naked bodies of
Colonel Fetterman, Captain Brown, and about sixty-five of their men.
All the bodies lay in a space not exceeding thirty-five feet in
diameter. A few American horses lay dead near by, all with their
heads toward the fort. This spot was by the roadside and beyond the
summit of a hill rising to the east of Peno creek. The road after
ascending this hill follows the ridge for nearly three-quarters of a
mile, and then descends abruptly to Peno valley. About midway
between the point where these bodies lay and that where the road
begins to descend was the dead body of Lieutenant Grummond; and
at the point where the road leaves the ridge to descend to the Peno
valley were the dead bodies of three citizens and a few of the old,
long-tried, and experienced soldiers. Around this little group were
found a great number of empty cartridge shells; more than fifty were
found near the body of a citizen who had used a Henry rifle; all going
to show how stubbornly these men had fought, and that they had
fought with telling effect on their enemies was evidenced by the fact
that within a few hundred yards in front of their position ten Indian
ponies lay dead, and near by them were sixty-five pools of dark and
clotted blood. Among the records of the Indian Department in
Washington there is on file a report of one of the Peace
Commissioners sent to investigate the circumstances of this frightful
slaughter. Among the conclusions given in this report, it is stated that
the Indians were massed to resist Colonel Fetterman’s advance
along Peno creek on both sides of the road; that Colonel Fetterman
formed his advanced lines on the summit of the hill overlooking the
creek and valley, with a reserve near where the large number of
dead bodies lay; that the Indians in large force attacked him
vigorously in this position, and were successfully resisted for half an
hour or more; that the command then being short of ammunition and
seized with a panic at this event and the great numerical superiority
of the Indians, attempted to retreat toward the fort; that the
mountaineers and old soldiers, who had learned that a movement
from Indians in an engagement was equivalent to death, remained in
their first position and were killed there; that immediately upon the
commencement of the retreat the Indians charged upon and
surrounded the party, who could not now be formed by their officers
and were immediately killed. Only six men of the whole command
were killed by balls, and two of these, Colonel Fetterman and
Captain Brown, no doubt inflicted this death upon themselves, or
each other, by their own hands, for both were shot through the left
temple, and powder was burnt into the skin and flesh about the
wound. These officers had often asserted that they would never be
taken alive by Indians.
The difficulty, as further explained by this commissioner, was that
the officer commanding the Phil Kearny district was furnished no
more troops for a state of war than had been provided for a state of
profound peace. “In regions where all was peace, as at Laramie in
November, twelve companies were stationed; while in regions where
all was war, as at Phil Kearny, there were only five companies
allowed.” The same criticism regarding the distribution of troops
would be just if applied to a much later date.
The Indians invariably endeavored to conceal their exact losses,
but they acknowledged afterwards to have suffered a loss of twelve
killed on the field, sixty severely wounded, several of whom
afterwards died, and many others permanently maimed. They also
lost twelve horses killed outright, and fifty-six so badly wounded that
they died within twenty-four hours.
The intelligence of this massacre was received throughout the
country with universal horror, and awakened a bitter feeling toward
the savage perpetrators. The Government was implored to
inaugurate measures looking to their prompt punishment. This
feeling seemed to be shared by all classes. The following despatch,
sent by General Sherman to General Grant, immediately upon
receipt of the news of the massacre, briefly but characteristically
expresses the views of the Lieutenant-General of the Army.
St. Louis, Dec. 28, 1866.

General: Just arrived in time to attend the funeral of my
Adjutant-General, Sawyer. I have given general instructions to
General Cooke about the Sioux. I do not yet understand how the
massacre of Colonel Fetterman’s party could have been so
complete. We must act with vindictive earnestness against the
Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.
Nothing less will reach the root of the case.
(Signed) W. T. Sherman, Lieutenant-General.

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Legacies and Lifespans in

Contemporary Women s Writing Gina

Contemporary Arab Women s Life Writing and the Politics

Spaces of Women s Cinema Space Place and Genre in

Challenges in Older Women s Health A Guide for

Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary

New Women s Writing Contextualising Fiction Poetry and

Female Philosophers in Contemporary Taiwan and the

Women s Rights in Islam A Critique of Nawal El Saadawi

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic

Legacies and Lifespans

Denise deCaires Narain

Legacies and Lifespans

ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Leanne Bibby is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University.

Katsura Sako is an Associate Professor of English at Keio University, Japan.

Introduction: Writing Back and Looking

Gina Wisker and Leanne Bibby

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

crucial, late-twentieth-century feminist critical project of establishing,

think back through our mothers if we are women’.7 Literary criticism of

historical romance and its critical marginalisation. Specifically, Bibby con-

for the study of contemporary women’s writing, gathering together key

the following chapters. This collection demonstrates and underlines the

Haunting Relationships, Dark Visions,

Katherine Mansfield’s sharply observed, hypersensitive, cruel, often dark

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

self-delusion, her often young, female, characters are hyper-sensitive, mis-

Munro’s stories emphasise life’s emptiness, loss, misinterpretations, and

conventional ending found in popular romances with a smattering of

These self-fashioned chains are evident in the often dangerous, collu-

Baldick’s understanding of the effects produced by the Gothic reminds

Freud, Existentialism and Phenomenology

The influence of the varying ways in which phenomenologists, includ-

“What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or

Albert Camus, contemporary of Sartre, wrote in L’ Étranger (1942)44

Katherine Mansfield (1921)

with dancing and endearingly awkward in her social interactions, and

Mansfield, Women’s Gothic and Gothic Horror

Influences—Mansfield and du Maurier

In this we sense that du Maurier is not only taking literary inspiration

Pracha notes that in the current du Maurier revival “Mansfield’s influ-

notes of modernist work73, but it is also a familiar characteristic of the liter-

This moment of existential disorientation (even dread) is a catalyst for

Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson,

I find her constantly undermining securities of family, romance, consistent

Du Maurier’s Gothic horror builds on destabilised established narra-

a consequence, but without a murder, detection or capture, there is no

By focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting

Mrs Ellis in du Maurier’s “Split Second” (1952),89 dies crossing the

In “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946),93 a wife picking up her husband

Whether in constrained New Hampshire or constrained New York,

unexciting, seemingly stable relationships or possible relationships, until

In talking of “Canadian Gothic” Le Drew identifies characteristics that

Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson defined “Southern Ontario

speaking and singing, presenting fleeting examples of different life

Swept up in the new freedom which Greg represents, Greta forgets

Greta, panicking, feeling guilty, both exonerates herself and blames

Munro’s story demonstrates that strangers are part of the opportunity

We began leaving the high plateau and to descend into a valley,

St. Louis, Dec. 28, 1866.

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