Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  The Storys were the first to arrive, Mr Story uncharacteristically serious, Mrs Story sweet and distracted as ever, glancing around as though she was visiting for the first time, commenting on the lovely furnishings, the beautiful artwork on the walls, although she had breakfasted there just last week.

  ‘You look beautiful, Harriet, dear,’ she said, and reached out a hand to stroke one of Harriet’s curls.

  Harriet, normally annoyed when Mrs Story flirted, felt warm to her then, grateful for the reassurance.

  ‘Is he here?’ asked Mr Story.

  He could have meant Mr Powers, or Mr Hawthorne, who was also expected, or the medium, Mr Home, but before Harriet could clarify which, Emma arrived, still dusty from a day’s work in her studio, and Mr Story began at once to ask her about the bust of Charlotte she had been working on all spring. By the time Charlotte herself came down from her bedroom, stretching after a nap and full of cat-like yawns, Mr Powers had arrived, and so had Mr Hawthorne and, unexpectedly, Mrs Hawthorne, too. The room felt overcrowded, and Harriet hovered at the edge, watching, listening.

  There was an oddly severe air to the gathering, even once they were seated in the parlour and taking refreshments, even after Charlotte had valiantly filled the silence with a recitation from Richard II. It was a consequence, perhaps, of the mix of personalities and moods present: Charlotte was sad though pretending not to be, Emma was tired and unsmiling, and Mr Story, who always smiled, seemed not to be smiling tonight. Mrs Story and Mr Powers were talking in low voices, glancing at the door, and the Hawthornes both seemed shy, murmuring only to each other.

  People were wary, Harriet knew, of the medium she had invited: he had earned himself a reputation as either the greatest spiritualist of the age, or the greatest charlatan on the Continent, depending on who you asked. Mr Browning insisted on the latter, while Mrs Browning professed herself utterly charmed and convinced by him. Harriet had not mentioned to either of them that she had invited him to her house.

  ‘He’s late,’ said Mr Story.

  Harriet had met Mr Home in Florence, where he had held a séance for Hiram Powers. He was a slight, sickly looking American with a childlike manner and high-pitched voice. She had noticed the way he sat timidly on the edge of his seat, how his hand, when she reached out to shake it, was limp in hers and prickly with rings. He seemed afraid of taking up space, afraid to fill out the edges of his own body. If she were to make a statue of him, she thought, it would only be in clay, never marble: he was too diffident to be made permanent in stone.

  Perhaps it was this living ghostliness of his that drew the spirits to him. Over the course of that evening in Florence, he had successfully channelled the spirit of his own mother, of Mr Powers’ childhood maid, and, most triumphantly, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  He had told her that he was coming to Rome to learn the art of sculpture, and she had suggested that while he was there he might teach her a little about communicating with the dead. Who, after all, did not miss somebody? Who, if given the slightest chance, the smallest hope, would not attempt to reach the people who were gone?

  When he finally arrived, Home refused food and drink, and instead hovered palely at the edge of the group, saying almost nothing and stifling the already subdued attempts at conversation, until Harriet suggested they go through to the drawing room. Home went first, and she watched him moving around the corners, inspecting the window frames, prodding the table to check it didn’t rock. He was like a curious dog, she thought, sniffing new surroundings, unable to settle.

  ‘The curtains are thick,’ she said. ‘They don’t let through any light. And I had the maid bring this to lay along the floor beneath the door.’ She gestured at a bolster, taken from one of the guest rooms, ready by the threshold.

  ‘This is acceptable,’ said Home, after a long silence. ‘This is sufficient. We will speak to the spirits tonight.’ He eased himself lightly down onto the chair at the head of the table. ‘Please,’ he said, gesturing at the other seats, and Harriet sat meekly, feeling suddenly that she was no longer in her own house, but in Home’s.

  Emma was beside her, reaching for her hand, and they held each other tightly as the other guests took their places.

  ‘Have your maid take out the lamps,’ said Home, softly, and Harriet repeated the instruction at a regular volume to the girl. In the darkness, Harriet focused on Emma’s hand in hers, the throbbing pulse transmitted from the base of the thumb.

  They placed their palms flat on the table and waited. Mr Home let his eyes close and his head drop to his chest. Harriet listened for the ticking of the clock, then remembered she had taken it out of the room that morning. She couldn’t tell how much time was passing, was only aware of her breath sliding in and out of her nostrils, and of the grain of the wood beneath her fingertips. Once, Mr Story shifted in his chair and exhaled loudly, and Harriet jumped. And then – after how long? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? – the table leaped.

  Charlotte shrieked and there was a moment of confusion while everyone readjusted their seats, and then Home’s reedy voice drifted over them all, as though he was not at the table but somewhere above them: ‘If any of our spirit friends are here will they signify it by tilting the table again?’

  Harriet waited, and then the wood beneath her hands jerked.

  ‘Will the spirits give a communication tonight?’ Another tilt. ‘To which of us will the spirits give a communication? Let us go around the table and ask.’

  She listened to her friends’ uneasy voices as they said, one after the other, ‘Is it with me that the spirits wish to speak?’ and then she said it herself, and was filled with a certainty that it was indeed her, that her little dead brothers, her sister, her mother, and another face, Margaret, a girl from Harriet’s childhood, whom she had loved in a way she had loved nobody since, that all of them were clustered together in the room. The space felt pregnant with news and messages and tender advice.

  ‘Is it with me that the spirits wish to speak?’ she asked, and the table jolted so violently that she was almost knocked from her seat.

  ‘Will the spirits indicate by the alphabet the message they wish to relay to Miss Hosmer?’ said Home.

  A twitch.

  Home said, ‘A,’ and paused. Nothing. Then, almost before he had shaped the letter ‘B’ in his fluttering, singsong voice, the table moved.

  ‘So, B,’ Emma said.

  Home began again from the beginning, reaching, this time, ‘E’ before the table tilted.

  ‘Be,’ said Emma.

  In this way the message progressed, painfully, gaspingly slowly, while Harriet’s heart thudded so sturdily in her chest she thought the sound filled the whole room, until the letters L, O, V, E and D were selected, and Emma said, warmly, ‘Be Loved,’ and Charlotte said, ‘No, no, beloved,’ and looked triumphant.

  For a moment, Harriet took her hands from the table and looked up at the dark ceiling.

  ‘Margaret? My love?’ she said. ‘Are you there?’

  That night, once Home and the guests were gone, and she was lying in bed next to Emma, Harriet was still smiling.

  ‘I really felt her there,’ she said. ‘I felt her in the room.’

  Emma reached out a hand to touch Harriet’s face, moving hair back behind her ear. They were silent while they looked at each other. In the candlelight, Emma’s face seemed older; she looked tense. Harriet could hear Charlotte moving around in her room next door, the floorboards shifting against each other. Then Emma rolled onto her back.

  ‘I saw him tilt the table,’ Emma said. ‘Home. I saw him with my own eyes. He did it with his knee.’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet, ‘you’re mistaken.’

  ‘I’m not mistaken, Harriet.’

  ‘It was dark in the room,’ Harriet said. ‘How could you possibly be sure of what you saw?’

  ‘There was light enough to see him fool you.’

  ‘I know that Margaret was there,’ Harriet said.

  She turn
ed to face the wall, breathing heavily. She couldn’t look at Emma, at Emma’s eyes catching the candle’s flickering, and at the world as Emma’s eyes saw it. How bleak to think that nothing had happened that night but charlatanry and artifice, to think that the people who had left were truly gone, to hear no answer when you called.

  2015

  Pig–Human Relations in Jude the Obscure

  The rest of the world has not stopped. My friends continue to go to work, and come home again, and make plans for drinks on Friday nights. I can still hear my neighbours having sex on the other side of my bedroom wall. The King’s library sends me weekly reminders to return overdue books. It all seems strange, and cold, and unfamiliar. When I was with Max, I loved the certainty of love, and now that that is gone, the other, ongoing regularities of life seem jarring.

  And yet I am still expected to participate in the world. I drag myself to meet Joyce, who takes one look at my swollen eyes and blotchy face and says, ‘What’s happened? Is it the American?’

  There are other obligations. Second and third years in the English department no longer attend the doctoral seminar; instead, we are divided into groups by period of specialization, and attend ‘Work in Progress’ seminars. The Medievalists are put with the other Medievalists, the Early Modernists with other Early Modernists. The doorsteps-in-Dickens girl and I are siphoned off into the Victorianist group. We gather once a month to read and review each other’s chapters and conference papers. The work is circulated in advance, and for each meeting, a student is nominated to provide a formal response. Two weeks after Max does not get on the plane, I am due to respond to a paper entitled ‘Pig–Human Relations in Jude the Obscure’.

  This paper addresses the urgent and intricate power dynamics at play in portrayals of pig–human interactions in Victorian literature. I will focus in this instance on depictions of the two species in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Analysis of pig–human relations in this novel reveals a complex dynamic of mastery and sympathy that echoes and illuminates the writer–reader relationship.

  I have glanced at the document, but haven’t fully taken on board its subject matter, nor engaged with the idea that I need to formulate a coherent response to it. Instead, I have been focusing on a plan to persuade Max to let me come to Boston. I have spent my Skype-free, empty evenings alternately howling on the kitchen floor and crafting an email.

  I would like to come to Boston. Just for a few days. I would sort out my own place to stay, and I wouldn’t expect you to spend all your time with me while I’m there. I wouldn’t come demanding anything, or expecting any specific answers from you. I don’t want to disrupt your life or upset you. I just want to see you. I need to talk to you, in person, in the same room. I need to have a real conversation with you. What do you think? Would you meet me? Please tell me honestly. I hope you are OK.

  The subtext here, which Max will understand, is: I don’t believe you have it in you to break up with me to my face. I think the reason you didn’t get on the plane is that you wouldn’t be able to do it in person. And if you can’t do it person, then maybe you shouldn’t do it at all.

  After I press send, I jump every time my phone buzzes. When I check to find that the notification is in fact a message from a retailer announcing a sale, or from the bank telling me my online statement is ready to view, or from anybody who isn’t Max saying anything that isn’t ‘yes, get on a plane to Boston’, I am crushed. I refresh and refresh my inbox. Then, seventy-nine hours after I write to him, as I am trying and failing to focus on reading ‘Pig–Human Relations in Jude the Obscure’ for the seminar the next day, the reply comes.

  Thank you for writing. I’m OK. It won’t stop snowing, but I’m OK. Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I wanted to think through everything before I wrote back. I’ve been agonizing over it, and I still don’t have the perfect response, but I didn’t want to wait any longer before writing. Of course I want to talk to you and do whatever I can to make this easier. But I’m not sure that visiting would be a good idea. First, it would be very expensive. I’d feel guilty about you putting all that money on a credit card just to come to Boston for a couple days. Second, all this feels as if it just happened. I’m still trying to understand it and adjust to it. I worry that I won’t be able to say the right things or to make you feel any better.

  It has not occurred to me, since I first thought of sending my email, or in the hours I’ve spent waiting for Max’s response, that he would say I should not come. I thought he might be reluctant, I thought he might try to dissuade me, but I did not think he would say no.

  I am a new inhabitant of this upside-down world in which Max’s role is to do and say the opposite of what I want. So recently, he was the person who could most reliably delight me, the person I turned to when I had desires to be fulfilled.

  And now he says I should not come. He does not want to see me.

  I argue that farmyard animals, and pigs in particular, are overlooked in contemporary critical discussion of nineteenth-century fiction. The dismissal of pigs as a meaningful focus of critical attention risks limiting and distorting our understanding of how power, violence, care and husbandry operate in Victorian literature.

  I am in a state of disoriented desolation when I arrive at King’s to attend the Work in Progress seminar on ‘Pig–Human Relations in Jude the Obscure’. The meeting takes place mid-afternoon, and there are some room-temperature bottles of white wine set out on the table, next to a box of grapes and a plate of homemade flapjacks that one of the third years has brought in. By the time I get there, most people have already assembled and are sitting around being extremely polite to each other.

  If there is one defining feature of all the Victorianist Ph.D. students at King’s, it is that they are aggressively nice. They are so nice, in fact, that when they see me, redeyed and tragic-looking, they ask me if I am all right, and the question makes me want to burst into tears. I squeeze my lips together to stop them trembling, and manage to mumble something about being tired.

  The author of ‘Pig–Human Relations’ is wearing a sweater patterned with winged piglets. People are thrilled by this, and point it out to every new arrival in the room. ‘Have you seen Victoria’s sweater? Isn’t it cute?’

  I give Victoria and her sweater a half-hearted smile. I look at my page of notes on her paper. At the top I have written ‘Why pigs?’ This line of enquiry came to me in a moment of desperation, when I recalled my upgrade exam and the flabbergasting question, ‘Why Rome?’ Underneath that, I have made some brief notes about Foucault, and in particular the author’s accusation that Foucault is not only androcentric, Eurocentric and sexist, but speciesist because he focuses so relentlessly on humans rather than animals. I also point out that there are some mentions of pigs at the beginning of Jude the Obscure whose role in the novel the author has neglected to analyse, and that in a paper relying on somewhat scant evidence in the source material, this seems like an oversight.

  The innate violence involved in relations between pig farmer and pig in the novel is entirely ignored in the Foucauldian model of ‘power of care’; Foucault’s inherent speciesism thus complicates our understanding of his formulation of power dynamics between humans. Jude’s violent encounter with a pig forces him to reassess his masculinity and by extension his relationship to other people. Jude the Obscure is a novel in which pigs are slaughtered, dismembered, weaponized and consumed by humans, and yet, following encounters with pigs, the human characters find that they, too, have been transformed.

  I stumble through my notes on the paper. I am neither compelling nor coherent. It is standard to speak for around a quarter of an hour, but after I have gone through each of the points I’ve prepared, I look at the clock and see that only five minutes have passed. I glance around at the assembled group, who are watching and wondering, perhaps, whether I have another page of notes I’m about to produce.

  ‘Those are all the formal comments I have,’ I say. ‘But Vict
oria’s paper has provoked a broader question I’d like to put to the group. To what extent can we hold a writer or a critic accountable for what they do not say?’

  Mercifully, they take the bait. The doorsteps-in-Dickens girl leaps into a discussion about silence and the interpretation of silence across time. By the time people have run out of things to contribute on this topic, attention has shifted well away from me. People begin asking Victoria more specific questions about pig–human relations in Jude the Obscure, and I am free to sit back, and look out of the window, and think of all of the people in the city outside who are doing real things and going to real places, and about Max, on the other side of the Atlantic, not saying things, thinking things that are no longer accessible to me, that I am not allowed to know. What are we doing? I think, when someone points out that Victoria’s analysis could be broadened to include human interactions with pig fat and lard. What are we doing? Victoria notes that the role of the author and the farmer are aligned in their relationship to a flock, herd or drove (of words, of animals) that is both active and submissive. She points to the phrase ‘woolgathering’ (indulgence in fancy or dreamy imagining) as evidence of this and notes that she has begun work on a new chapter focusing specifically on sheep. We are a group of grown adults sitting around drinking wine in the middle of the day and talking about fictional pigs as though it was a reasonable, normal thing to do.

  I slide my phone out of my bag and check it surreptitiously underneath the table. Two new emails. My heart thuds. Max. Perhaps Max has changed his mind about seeing me in Boston.

  I open my inbox. The organizers of a conference on ‘Nineteenth-Century Female Relationships’, which takes place in New York in June, have found funding to fly me there to join them. Next: the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, which holds the archives of William Wetmore Story, has offered me a four-month fellowship to conduct my research there.