August Derleth Pages / Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

LAVENDER AND LILAC:
GHOSTS, VISITS, AND OLD LADIES

A look at some old-time American domestic horror

In his introduction to his collection Someone in the Dark (1941), August Derleth stated that several of the stories in the book were primarily influenced by Mary E Wilkins-Freeman, ‘who wrote some of the most perfect ghost stories in the language.' (1)

Freeman (1852-1930) was a prolific writer of stories set in her native New England. These contain well-realised regional settings and character types. Her work has the overall effect of creating and sustaining a home from home, and one that British readers can enjoy. (It is a matter of record that classic English ghost-story writer M R James liked this sort of fiction (2)).

As has been seen above, Freeman did not limit herself to the writing of realistic regional fiction. She wrote several ghost stories, conveniently collected together in the Arkham House volume Collected Ghost Stories (1974).

These display the same regional awareness and knowledge, the same types of New England characters, that occur throughout her regional fiction. Freeman's work typically contains elderly women, usually single through being spinsters or widows, who somehow come into conflict with the expectations of their friends, or established custom. Eventually a problem is resolved, and the elderly female view is vindicated, or its New England stoicism is brought to the fore in what may or may not be defeat.

Freeman's supernatural fiction is very similar in tone and themes. I intend here to examine a selection of Freeman's ghost stories, after first looking at one by August Derleth.

Derleth's Freeman-influenced stories in Someone in the Dark (3) are competent, but to my mind are not as good as a later story, "The Patchwork Quilt". This story, first published in 1964, was reprinted in Derleth's posthumous collection Dwellers in Darkness (1976). The story combines the qualities of Freeman with those of a more mature Derleth, more sure in handling his own regional settings and themes alongside those of the supernatural, and who was also able to rise above the level of pastiche (4).

As is the case with most of Freeman's short fiction, "The Patchwork Quilt" is set in the context of a visit. This is a common device in this sort of fiction, and allows an outsider (and so the reader) to gain access, to be told the background to the situation, or to slowly experience it at first hand, along with the 'outsider' character. This type of story breathes out an old-world feel, a safe world of grandparents, maiden aunts, and old houses: secure, quiet, and wistful. Yet sometimes all this is just a facade. The outsider -- and reader -- finds out, during the course of the story, just what that 'safe' world is really like. The secure everyday world has holes in it. People may fall through them at any time, in any place.

In "The Patchwork Quilt" Ariel Bennett pays a visit to her two aunts. During her first night the weather turns cold, and Ariel gets out of bed to look for some more blankets. Instead she finds a lovely patchwork quilt hidden away in a cupboard, and puts it on her bed. However, the quilt keeps riding up over her shoulders, leaving her feet cold. And while half asleep she sees someone in the room, who tucks the quilt in for her. It turns out that the quilt belonged to a previous owner of the house, one of whose children died in the bedroom used by Ariel. There is unfinished business, and the ghost of the distraught mother, her dead husband and child, are still unquiet because of a stranger being able to find the quilt and use it. The story ends with the quilt being restored to its rightful owner.

While this summary might make the story seem merely banal, "The Patchwork Quilt" is nevertheless a fine one, and worth reading. As Freeman usually does, Derleth in this story, writes sensitively about women, using well-defined female characters in a clearly regional setting. It is what could be called a 'women's' story.

Freeman's fiction, as well as some of Derleth's, could be given this description. But anyone not reading their work because of this label would be missing out on a treat. And there is the bonus of ghostly involvement, too.

Collected Ghost Stories contains eleven stories. While "A Symphony in Lavender" is not the best story in the book, it is, perhaps, one of the most characteristic.  A single lady comes to visit her friend Mrs Leonard. Across the road is the Munson house, inhabited by 'a maiden lady' -- Miss Caroline Munson, and her servant Margaret. The narrator is soon invited to tea -- a visit within a visit:

Indeed, Miss Munson did make me think of a flower, and of one prevalent in her front yard, too -- a lilac: there was that same dull bloom about her, and a shy, antiquated grace. (5)

Everything about Miss Munson and her house is graceful and old. All is calm and quiet and poised -- perfect New England. During the length of her visit, the narrator gets to know Miss Munson as well as it is possible for anyone to. She is invited to the Munson house for tea on many occasions.

All that I could think of sometimes, when with her, was a person walking in a garden and getting continuously delicious sniffs of violets, so that he certainly knew they were near him, although they were hidden somewhere under the leaves, and he could not see them. (6)

Then, the day before she is due to leave, the narrator is told of a dream that Miss Munson has had. She is walking down a street carrying a basket of lilies and roses, when a young man asks her for a lily.  She begins to hand him the flower, when she begins to sense something at once repulsive as well as beautiful in him:

I wanted at once to give him the lily and would have died rather than give it to him, and I turned and fled, with my basket of flowers, and my dove on my shoulder, and a great horror of something, I did not know what, in my heart. (7)

The sexual symbolism -- surely intended by Freeman -- is unmistakable. A year later, Miss Munson continues, she really met the man she had dreamed about, in the street. She walked on past, very disturbed. She soon finds out that the stranger is an artist staying in the locality. They meet, and fall in love. When he asks Miss Munson to marry him, she looks into his face, and experiences the same horror that she felt in her dream. She decides not to give him her life, let alone a flower.

A year later, when the narrator returned for another visit, she learns that Caroline Munson had died during the winter, and was laid to rest dressed in lilac, as she had requested.

Amongst all the lavender and lilac, in this story there is a woman who was confronted by a stark choice. She could marry -- presumably the expected thing. Or she could remain single. The power of love and attraction is revealed as being decidedly ambiguous. Should she choose certainty (spinsterhood) or adventure within normality (marriage)? Either way her life could be seen as being diminished. She would be a no-sayer. And yet...

Freeman turns the categories of certainty and uncertainty and adventure on their heads. Like the heroine of one of Freeman's best-known stories, "A New England Nun" (8) Miss Munson makes up her mind, and decides to take whatever the future will bring, on her own terms, and not anyone else's. But in this case with the possibility of supernatural intervention!

"A Far-Away Melody" concerns the twin sisters Priscilla and Mary Brown. Now over fifty, these plain, hard-working, independent women are hanging out washing on a fine spring morning. Suddenly Priscilla starts musing out loud about death:

I wonder... if it would seem so very queer to die a mornin' like this, say.  Don't you believe there's apple branches a-hangin' over them walls made out of precious stones ... An' I wonder if it would seem such an awful change to go from this air into the air of the New Jerusalem. (9)

Although they are religious women, and 'knew almost as much about the Old Testament prophets as they did about their neighbors' (10), they never talked about such things, and certainly not about death and the next world.

Later, in the evening, Priscilla hears beautiful music wafting in through the window. No-one else can hear it, not even Miss Moore, who is paying the sisters a visit.

Priscilla Brown dies suddenly that night.  Mary now feels guilty for not believing what Priscilla said she had heard, and determines to wait to hear the ethereal music herself, so she can die and join her sister. Over the following months Mary grows weaker. Finally, nearly a year after Priscilla's death, she dies.  Not long before, she tells her niece:

I've heard it! I've heard it! ... A faint sound o' music, like the dyin' away of a bell. (11)

Perhaps Freeman's best, and most famous, ghost story, isn't actually quite a ghost story at all. This is "Luella Miller". The memory of Luella Miller still haunts the village, even years after her death. For fifty years her house lies empty, and is avoided. only one person survives who really knew Luella Miller -- Lydia Anderson. She tells her story.

Luella was an attractive woman, who had no difficulty in making friends. Shortly after her arrival in the village, where she had come to be schoolteacher, one of her older pupils, Lottie Henderson, began to help Luella out with her teaching duties. Soon she was doing most of the work. Despite being in excellent health, after helping Luella for about a year, Lottie 'just faded away and died' (12).

Luella also attracted a husband, Erastus Miller, who began to get 'consumption of the blood' (13) after their marriage, despite having always been strong and healthy before. He waited on Luella hand and foot until he died. Then the 'robust' Lily Miller, Erastus' sister, moves in. She, too, gradually grew feeble, and died.

Then Lily's Aunt Abby comes to look after Luella. She, too, gradually loses her health, and eventually dies. Then Dr Sam Abbot falls for Luella, who after Abby's death acts her most charming and innocent. But Abby's daughter speaks her mind:

There ain't nothin' weak about that woman. She's got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills 'em. Weak? It was my poor mother that was weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her. (14)

But Dr Abbot was too smitten to take notice. Lydia Anderson takes Luella to task: "'I don't know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse."' (15) The doctor dies in turn, as well as two girls who 'did' for Luella. Eventually the village wakes up to Luelia's 'curse', and no-one will go near her. She declines, and grows weaker by the day. Finally, Lydia sees Luella

...and Erastus Miller, and Lily, and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin' out of the door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they were all helpin' her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst of them.  Then it all disappeared.... I knew what had happened.  Luella was layin' real peaceful, dead on her bed. (16)

The vampire as a being living off emotions rather than blood, is now quite a usual theme in the field. Freeman's character is a 'vampire' who lives off its victims. It is a parasite on humanity, who leaves death behind it. That this could occur in a small New England village makes this story special in Freeman's work, and an example of real domestic horror. Luella is a monster, and is depicted as such. There are no illusions, except those of the townspeople that are slowly destroyed by the mounting death-toll amongst Luella's 'friends'. At the end, women unite against another woman, and effectively quarantine her to death, in order to preserve their world and restore it.

The ending of an illusion is a theme in "The Wind in the Rose-Bush". Rebecca Flint comes from Michigan on a visit to Ford Village. She comes to visit her brother's widow, his second wife, in order to collect her niece, the daughter of the brother and his first wife. Rebecca arrives at Mrs Dent's house, only to find that her niece is out. Mrs Dent puts Rebecca off with excuses as to the niece's non-appearance.

Strange things begin to happen. A rose-bush moves, despite there being no wind. The tune 'A Maiden's Prayer' is heard, but there is no-one at the piano. The shadow of a girl crosses the window, but there is no-one to be seen. And Mrs Dent denies any knowledge of these events.

Further excuses are given to Rebecca about her niece's whereabouts. Finally she decides to investigate for herself, but is prevented from doing so by a summons home. She leaves, instructing Mrs Dent to send her niece on to her in due course. She does not appear. Rebecca writes to Mrs Dent, but with no result. She eventually writes to the postmaster of Ford Village, who replies:

...Mrs John Dent said to have neglected stepdaughter. Girl was sick. Medicine not given. Talk of taking action. Not enough evidence. House said to be haunted. Strange sights and sounds. Your niece, Agnes Dent, died a year ago, about this time... (17)

Both August Derleth and Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote stories of domestic horror. The examples that I have discussed or mentioned are far from domestic in the sense of being comfortable or being about pleasant things, however. Both authors are happy to show that life in small communities is often not at all idyllic, as nostalgia for New England or the American Midwest small town, and their positive qualities might sometimes suggest.

Both authors write about people encountering the undomesticated in their own domestic surroundings. Both Derleth and Freeman do so with feeling and understanding (and, especially in Freeman's case, with a sharp edge of dry wit).

There are always victims, in the most attractive or deceptively homely setting. They are victims of conformity, or the risks taken in reacting against it. And some are ghosts. 

NOTES

1. August Derleth, Someone in the Dark, (Jove ed.) p. 8

2. See my piece "M R James's New England Reading" in Ghosts & Scholars 21, which explores James' reasons for enjoying the work of Mary Wilkins Freeman, and, in particular the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs by Freeman's near-contemporary Sarah Orne Jewett.

3. These stories are: "The Shuttered House", "The Sheraton Mirror", "The Wind from the River", "The Telephone in the Library", and "The Panelled Room".

4. Although see my articles "Two Deaths" (All Hallows 12) and "The Ghosts of Sauk County" (All Hallows 18) in which I discuss a selection of Derleth's stories from the 1940's, which are as mature as any of his later work.

5. Freeman, p. 83

6. Freeman, p. 84

7. Freeman, p. 86

8. Reprinted in Barbara H. Solomon, ed., Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman (Signet 1979)

9. Freeman, pp. 72f

10. Freeman, p. 74

11. Freeman, p. 79

12. Freeman, p. 41

13. Freeman, p. 41

14. Freeman, p. 48

15. Freeman, p. 49

16. Freeman, p. 53

17. Freeman, p. 109

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derleth, August Someone in the Dark Arkham House 1941, Jove pb 1978

Freeman, Mary Wilkins Collected Ghost Stories Arkham House 1974

 A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Dark Horizons 38, published by the British Fantasy Society.

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard