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Online text of Chantry House
(Many thanks to Sandra Laythorpe and others)
Publication details, summary
and further reading
(Kindly supplied by Amy de Gruchy)
Publication
1886 by Macmillan
Contents
Chantry House is a family chronicle narrated in his old age in
the 1880s by Edward Winslow, a crippled semi-invalid. It commences with
his recollections of his early childhood and that of his brothers Grif
and Clarence.
The novel has two plots, linked by the theme of restoration. This theme
also appears in the effect on the lives and actions of the characters
of the Oxford Movement, which saw as its aim the restoration of the Church
of England to its former dignity and influence.
In the first plot the second son, Clarence is court-martialled and dismissed
from the Navy for petty offences when a sixteen year old midshipman. He
atones for his wrong-doing by many years of uncongenial work, struggles
against temptation and at length regains the love and esteem of his parents,
finally becoming a merchant prince renowned for good works
and the head of his family. This is his moral restoration.
He is also instrumental in restoring the Chantry House Estate to its
rightful owners, the second plot. When his father inherits the estate
from a distant relative, the family are unaware that a hundred years earlier
there had been a grave miscarriage of justice. Early in the 18th century
Margaret Fordyce, the heiress of the estate married a Mr Winslow, and
had been coerced into leaving it to her stepson rather than to her Fordyce
relatives, and had then died in suspicious circumstances. Her ghost haunts
the house, but apart from vague traditions these events and the subsequent
feud between the two families have been forgotten. When the 19th century
Winslow family take possession the Fordyce family consist of a father
and son, both squarsons on the neighbouring estate and the wife and two
daughters of the latter, Ellen and Anne. Friendship soon springs up between
the families which is cemented when Grif Winslow rescues the Fordyces
from a rioting mob. Grif and Ellen Fordyce fall in love and it would seem
that the ghost is appeased. However Grifs unworthy behaviour causes
the Fordyces to break off the engagement. In pique he marries an
extravagant young widow and Ellen dies of consumption and grief while
the ghost resumes her annual visits.
Clarence, being psychic, has actually seen the ghost and can enter into
her feelings. After Grifs early death and that of his father, Clarence
becomes the owner of the estate, and resolves with his younger brothers
and sister that it must be restored to the Fordyces. To make a fortune
large enough to keep themselves he goes to China for some years and returns
rich but shattered in health, though able to carry out his plan. However
Ellens father, Parson Frank points out that neither family has the
right to the estate as the Fordyces acquired it at the Dissolution of
the Monasteries, and it should be given to the Church. This is done. The
Chapel is restored, and the house becomes an orphanage and convalescent
home. Martin the youngest Winslow brother marries Ellens younger
sister and the ghost is at rest at last.
Clarence, the hero, is constantly contrasted with his elder brother
Grif. Grif is brave and popular, but selfish and shallow, a cheerful extrovert.
Clarence is timid and humble, devout and self effacing. As a child his
parents mistrust him. He is bullied at school and in the Navy and easily
led astray by stronger characters. However his deep religious feelings
overcome his weakness and while remaining gentle, loving and unselfish
he develops into a strong determined man. Grif meanwhile deteriorates
and as his weakness becomes apparent he becomes a burden to his family.
Edward the narrator is highly intelligent and perceptive. His portraits
of his parents, stern and loving, the childrens harsh but loyal
nurse, proud and pious Mrs Fordyce and her jolly and warm-hearted husband,
Parson Frank, are all highly credible. However, as is natural, he has
his blind spots. To him Ellen Fordyce is all that a young girl should
be, purely good, deeply religious and romantic. He sees no fault in her
love for Grif, though it reveals her poor judgement, which contrasts with
that of her friend Emily Fordyce, who is also romantic but gives her love
to a man who is of high moral and religious character. Edwards blindness
is understandable, for while revealing Grifs faults to the reader,
he seems almost unaware of them himself. Thus C M Yonge uses Edwards
pictures of others to reveal his own character.
A considerable amount of travel takes place in the novel, giving variety
of scene, but the chief setting is the Chantry House itself with its haunted
chamber and ruined chapel. The early part of the novel is set in the period
of C M Yongs early youth, and that of her parents, so there is much
authentic detail. Historical events such as the battle of Navarino and
the Captain Swing riots play a part in the narrative. Even more central
is the role of the Oxford movement from its infancy onwards. Clarence
is deeply moved by its teaching and influences his family. Parson Frank
is also affected by it and in consequence leaves his comfortable country
parish for a demanding one inn a seaside town in the north east, and as
has been seen, restores Chantry House to the church.
The religious element in the novel is however well balanced. The Winslows
were originally of the old High Church persuasion, but their children
had a gentle Evangelical governess who greatly influenced Clarence and
in her old age saved him from a grave temptation.
The moral teaching is implicit, not explicit. Religion can make the
weak strong and turn the coward into a hero. Past wrongdoing can be atoned
for, and its effects reversed, even if it takes many years or even centuries.
Further Reading
For contemporary reviews see L Madden J B
Shorthouse and C M Yonge, unpublished thesis, University of London
Diploma in Librarianship 1964.
Katherine M Briggs Folklore in the works of Charlotte Yonge,
Occasional papers of the K B Club, No 1, 1990.
Charlotte Yonge's Gothic
Murder
Ruth Bienstock Anolik
Haverford College
Professor Anolik has since kindly provided us
with the abstract and full text of this paper.
Both are reproduced below.
Gothic Murder: Containment of Horror in Charlotte
Yonges Chantry House
Charlotte Yonge is generally considered by critics to
be the exemplar of conservative Victorian domestic fiction, representative
of the middle class reaction to nineteenth century upheavals. Yet, it
is possible to see in Yonge's seemingly settled and staid position the
kind of paradoxical thinking that finds expression in the tense and unsettled
Gothic mode. And indeed, Yonge does seem very much at home writing in
the genre. Her immensely popular novel, The Heir of Redclyffe (1855),
though largely a novel of middle class domestic life, the story of a noble,
Christ-like character and his influence on a Victorian family, reveals
a debt to the Gothic tradition.
An even more striking and sustained invocation of the Gothic narrative,
still couched within a conventional Victorian narrative of domestic life,
may be found in Yonge's later novel Chantry House (1886), less well-known
today than Redclyffe. In this Gothic text, Yonge constructs a vehicle
suited to her reconciliation of conflicting narrative strategies and,
a text that evokes the typical Gothic struggles in order to settle them.
In faithfully evoking all the Gothic conventions (murder, appropriated
property, the besieged woman, dark family history, feuding families) in
Chantry House, Yonge paradoxically constructs a safe, comfortably familiar,
re-enactment of the mode, that allows her to endorse her conservative
world view. Yonge thus succeeds in appropriating a typically unstable
mode, a mode whose power derives from its instability, for stable ends.
In this, Yonge taps into a central paradox of the Gothic: the essential
narrative strategy of this shocking and suspenseful mode is internal and
external repetition. Horrifying and excessive though the tropes may be,
the very nature of their unchanging repetition contains and dissipates
their impact. One of the great pleasures of reading the Gothic derives
from the paradox that Burke uncovers when he points out that sensations
of pain and danger, when distanced by art, result in the pure delights
of the sublime. Yet Yonge's narrative demonstrates that the comforts of
the Gothic, providing the reader with safe frissons of horror in a comfortably
familiar setting, can be taken to the extreme of denaturing the sublime.
The disabling of the conventions in Chantry House renders this Gothic
text susceptible to the totalizing stability of the moral plane, the plane,
upon which all dynamic struggles are deconstructed. In this, then, Yonge
adds a new dimension to the Gothic text. While conventional Gothic texts
struggle between the demands of reason, articulated through the imperatives
of law, and the demands of imagination, articulated through the subversions
of fantasy, Yonge's text subsumes the two poles on the moral plane. Rather
than struggling to resolve the question of whether possession of Chantry
House will be legally effected or dispossession imaginatively accomplished,
Yonge's text posits the moral synthesis that will erase all questions
of possession or dispossession, of reason or imagination.
Yonge's morality, in incorpating conflicting planes within the totalizing
plane of Christian morality, lends an atypical solidity to the closure
of her Gothic narrative. The moral plane becomes the totalizing plane
on which all struggles and tensions are synthesized and subdued. This
results in a closure that, while perhaps more pleasantly comfortable and
more morally satisfying, is ultimately less dynamic than that of the typically
disruptive Gothic text. Yonge discovers a way to successfully subdue all
Gothic struggles and, in doing so constructs a narrative that fixes and
kills the power of the genre. The Gothic is defined by the failure or
refusal of the Gothic narrative to sustain the stability that most narratives
endorse. In positing a plane where all struggles end, Yonge drains her
Gothic narrative of its essential tension. Her Gothic narrative is, ultimately,
Gothic in form only and, as Ruskin says of Gothic architecture, "It
is not enough that it has the Form, if it have not also the power and
life." (159) Yonge succeeds, then, in producing a text that heralds
the death of the vibrant and complex Gothic mode, a death that is, ultimately,
more horrifying than anything found in Walpole or Reeve.
Notes
[1] Later echoed in the bleak hope of Guys
grandfather that his sins would not be visitd on the head of his
only descendant (79).
[2] Another branch of church reform promoted
by mid-centiury Tractarians was the restoring of ancient religious buildings
to functions appropriate to the present day (Dennis 151).
[3] Recalling the site of Austens Gothic parody.
[4] That is, the law of 1707 when Margaret Fordyce
writes her will and the law of the 1830s when the action of Chantry
House occurs. By the time of the writing of Chantry House, the Married
Womans Property Act, which secured to a woman
as her
separate property all real and personal property which shall belong
to her at the time of the marriage
had been enacted
in 1882 (Perkin 305).
[5] There is also a biographical explanation for
Yonges preference for female property transmission: Yonges
family inherited her beloved childhood home Otterbourne from her maternal
grandmother; Yonge herself was displaced from the line of inheritance
because of her gender.
Charlotte Yonge is generally considered by critics to
be the exemplar of conservative Victorian domestic fiction, representative
of the middle class reaction to nineteenth century upheavals: the political
upheavals that swept Europe in 1848, outbreak of the Crimean War, the
Indian Mutiny of 1857, the crisis in the cotton mills of Northern England
as a consequence of the American civil war, the publication in 1859 of
Darwin's Origin of Species and the
ongoing problem of Ireland and beginning in mid-century the movement for
women's rights (Boas). Yonge, who was an enormously popular influence
on middle class women readers, writes novels driven by virtue and morality.
In writing of her politics, Sturrock states, "Yonge was no feminist;
her response to the possibility of social change is invariably conservative"
(15)
"Her novels show an endless engagement with the subject
of proper femininity" (27). As Sturrock notes Yonge's strong religious
convictions, based on her association with the Oxford Movement, through
her "quasi-filial relationship with John Keble who was vicar of Otterbourne"
(21) were a clear source of her conventional world view, including the
traditional role of women; Yonge was never associated with the early waves
of feminism of the nineteenth century. And yet, as Sturrock also notes,
Yonge's "religious convictions, formed, first by her father's High
Church teachings and later by John Keble's Tractarianism, drove her to
reject certain 'worldly' values"
(16); her conservative religion
paradoxically led her to discard certain Victorian conventions, for example,
"to see that respectabiltiy was not the supreme moral virtue"
(25).
So it is possible to see in Yonge's seemingly settled
and staid position, the kind of paradoxical thinking that finds expression
in the eternally tense and unsettled Gothic mode. And indeed, Yonge does
seem very much at home writing in the genre. Her immensely popular novel
(one of Yonge's few novels still in print today), The Heir
of Redclyffe (1855), though largely a novel of middle class domestic
life, the story of a noble, Christ-like character and his influence on
a Victorian family, reveals a debt to the Gothic tradition. Among the
Gothic motifs to be found in Redclyffe
are the massive ancestral home, the ancestral curse, contested property,
questions of inheritance, suspicions of ghosts, conflation of marriage
and death, as well as an invocation of the lines that might well be the
mantra of the Gothic (cited by both Walpole and Hawthorne in the prefaces
to their Gothic texts and by Collins in The
Woman in White): "the sins of the fathers shall be visited
on the children" (71)().
An even more striking and sustained invocation of the
Gothic narrative, still couched within a conventional Victorian narrative
of domestic life, may be found in Yonge's later novel Chantry
House (1886), less well-known today than Redclyffe.
Yonge's affinity for the belated, nostalgic, Gothic text, that yearns
to return to the idylls of the past, can be partially explained by her
stance as as a conservative novelist. Yonge, too, is driven by nostalgia,
the desire to return to simpler, better times. In Chantry
House, Yonge personalizes Gothic nostalgia, revisiting her own
childhood experience of Otterbourne, the site of the Yonge family home
in the 1820's before the time when "church restoration was settling
in" (Chantry House 2.120).(). Battiscombe writes
In Chantrey House,
a story of rural England in the days of George IV, she recaptured
for a moment the atmosphere of that lotus-eating time before steam-engines
ruined the peace of the country-side or The
Tracts for the Times blew a blast loud enough to wake even
the Church of England from slumber
The years preceding the publication
of Chantry House saw changes at
Otterbourne [that] must have recalled her childhood to her with peculiar
and rather bitter vividness. In 1884, a year before the publication
of Chantrey House, Julian Yonge
[Charlotte's brother] sold Otterbourne House and moved away from the
neighborhood, and Charlotte knew that after her death there would
be no member of her family to carry on the tradition of public service
and private piety. (154)
But Chantry House is not only an outburst
of nostalgia for a lost past; in the Gothic text, always susceptible to
tense struggle, Yonge discovers a vehicle suited to her attempt to reconcile
conflicting narrative strategies and ideologies, resulting in a text that
evokes the typical Gothic struggles in order to settle them.
Chantry House is quite firmly located
within the Gothic tradition, evincing all the familiar, and by the late
nineteenth century, clichéd trappings, that began as eighteenth
century conventions. Chantry House, the home of the Winslows, is clearly
located in the Gothic landscape. Built upon an ancient abbey, erected
in 1434 (), the
house reveals an interesting blend of modern and Gothic architecture.
Although built in Queen Anne style, it features a "Gothic porch
and
a flagrantly modern Gothic porch it was, flanked by two comical little
turrets
there was [a] modern addition
in Gothic taste, i.e.with
pointed arches filled up with glass over the sash-windows"(1.73).
In this early description of the house, it is possible to see an emblem
for the strategy of Yonge's narrative; her tactic for balancing the competing
demands of conservative domestic realism and the subversiveness of the
Gothic mode. For, rather than present a dark, tension between conflicting
styles, she negotiates them with humor: the porch, in which Gothicism
is tempered by the influence of Victorian architecture, becomes a comical
image of synthesis rather than a tragic image of struggle.
Chantry House reveals itself to be an appropriately Gothic structure
in being suitably haunted. The mullion rooms in the older end of the house,
with "deep mullioned windows
and very handsome groined ceilings"
(1.74) are regularly visited by the ghost of a previously dispossessed
inhabitant, Margaret Fordyce. Margaret, as the Winslows discover, had
lived at the turn of the eighteenth century and had been the second wife
of a Winslow ancestor. After the death of her husband, her stepsons imprisoned
and killed her. Margaret makes a series of appearances, generally to Clarence,
the second son of the Winslows, who is himself displaced by virtue of
birth order and family events, a subtle critique of the dispossessing
effects of primogeniture. These appearances culminate in the ghostly re-enactement
of Margaret's imprisonment and death. But here too, Gothic excess and
tension is mitigated by Yonge's text. Margaret's appearances are goverened
by the rule of order: her ghost appears in a regular, predictable way,
always around the New Year.
The course of Yonge's narrative follows the typical narrative pattern
of the Gothic text, tracing the Winslow family's discovery of Margaret's
buried story. Not until the conclusion of the novel is the last piece
of evidence, Margaret's body, uncovered. In the course of preparing for
one of the weddings with which the novel conventionally concludes, workers,
digging in the foundations of the house discover, "an old chest,
and within lay a skeleton, together with a few fragments of female clothing,
a wedding ring
ghastly confirmation
to connect the bones with
Margaret" (2.224). On "the ensuing night there was a strange,
quiet funeral service at Earlscombe church" (2.225); the narrative
is safely laid to rest with the burial of Margaret's bones. This unburial
and reburial, indeed, any kind of burial, is typical of the Gothic. It
recalls scenes in Reeve's eighteenth century The
Old English Baron, Wuthering Heights,
and countless other Gothic texts. This trope is frequently given a psychological
interpretation, as representing the return of the repressed; and, indeed,
that reading is quite satisfactory. However, Yonge's Christian context
allows for another way to read this trope, one that may be applied to
its appearance in Gothic texts by other writers as well. This focus reveals
the Christological roots of the trope of the restored and reburied body
in which the restoration of the dead body leads to the establishment of
a new order.
Margaret's history demonstrates the deployment of another Gothic convention:
the misappropriated property. The Winslow brothers killed Margaret to
steal her property (inherited by her from her family), Chantry House.
Suppressing a will that bequeaths the estate out of the Winslow family,
they renew an earlier, invalidated, will to legitimize their claims. Immediately,
we can see in this narrative the typical Gothic conflation of fantasy
and law. The two brothers, who have no problem murdering their stepmother,
resort to legal (though invalid) documents to support their property claims.
The resulting suspicion on the part of the Fordyce family regarding their
relative and property leads to a feud between the two competing families,
representing another conventional motif. Additionally, the Winslows learn
from an old witch-like woman that there is "a course on you all!
The poor lady as was murdered won't let you be!
It's well known as
how the curse is on the first-born. The Lady Margaret don't let none of
'em live to come after his father" (1.153 -4). This instance of supernatural
is also contained and rationalized by the legal written word; the Winslows
consult "the registers" (1.154) and discover that in every recorded
branch of the Winslow family, including their own, the first born has
died. Subsequent discussions lead to another opportunity to contain disorder
through words. A family friend, Henderson, "had some very interesting
talks with us two over ancestral sin and its possible effects." However,
his context is not the Gothic; Henderson evokes "the 18th of Ezekial
as a comment on the Second Commandment" (1.155). Henderson counters
the words of the Second Commandment, the threat to visit "the iniquity
of the father upon the children
" (Ex. 20. 5) with the more
temperate words of Ezekial: "The son shall not bear the iniquity
of the father with him" (18.20). Yonge thus evokes the Bible, her
primary text and influence to reconcile two ideologies that compete within
the Bible as well as within the Gothic text: irrational vengeance and
rational justice. Here too Yonge reveals her faith in the organizing,
rationalizing powers of the written word, and most particularly, the Word.
Yonge works to expand the context of disrupted inheritance in her Gothic
narrative, once again reverting to the conventions of the Gothic. Margaret's
curse is directly responsible for the Winslow's surprising inheritance
of Chantry House, having eliminated family members more directly in the
line of inheritance. But this is just the last in a long line of disruptions
that have broken the line of orderly property transmission. The original
abbey built as a chapel in 1434, "was granted to Sir Harry Power"
(1.65). This neutral "granting" suppresses the true meanings
of this event: the appropriation of Catholic property during the Reformation.
As Edward, the son of the family who narrates the story acknowledges,
the family cherishes "the broken bits of wall and stumps of columns,
remnants of the chapel" as charming garden elements, never "troubl[ing]
ourselves about the desecration" (1.75). The retrospective awareness
of Edward, who tells the story as an old man, that neutral "granting"
was accompanied by destructive "desecration" discloses Yonge's
endorsement of the passage of time to balance two competing views: the
placid conservative acceptance of the young Edward and the more skeptical
awareness of the abuses of power of the older, wiser Edward. Yet another
disruption in transmission occurs as the property passes "through
two heiresses" the last of whom, Margaret Fordyce dies "childless,
leaving the estate to her stepson, Philip Winslow, our ancestor"
(1.65).
In proper Gothic fashion, the various matches that are proposed to unite
the competing families and consolidate the claim to property are consistently
interrupted. The earlier engagement of Griff, the eldest surviving son
of the Winslows to Ellen, the daughter of the Fordyces, is interrupted
due to Griff's dissipation (the cause of the deferral of the marriage
in Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho);
the match is finally cancelled by Griff's ill-judged marriage and Ellen's
subsequent death. The plan by Clarence, the second Winslow son, to marry
the younger Fordyce daughter, Anne, is deferred by a particularly nineteenth
century obstacle; Clarence goes off to Hong Kong, "which was then
newly ceded to the English and where the firm wished to establish a house
of business" (2. 184). The narrative does manage to end with the
typical Gothic closure of consolidating marriage: the two youngest children
of the Winslow and Fordyce families marry. In arranging her marriages,
Yonge adheres to a convention that appears in the female Gothic from Radcliffe
on: although the marriages effect dynastic goals, they are based on love,
not economics. Although the union of Ellen and Griff would have settle
the property dispute, it was a love-match, made before the dispute was
revealed. Martyn and Anne marry because they realize that "what they
had felt for each other all their lives was love" (2. 221).
Yonge, then, evokes all the Gothic conventions to unfold her story, constructing
an appealing, comfortable and, ultimately, safe re-enactment of the mode.
In this, it is possible to see why the Gothic mode appeals to Yonge, allowing
her to endorse her conservative world-view. Yonge succeeds in appropriating
a typically unstable mode, a mode whose power derives from its instability,
for stable ends. Her text so closely follows Gothic convention that it
lacks any suspense or surprise. In her careful re-enactment of the myriad
conventions of the Gothic mode, a catalog of conventions that are more
than a century old when deployed in Chantry
House, murder and theft become comfortingly familiar. In this,
Yonge taps into a central paradox of the Gothic: the essential narrative
strategy of this shocking and suspenseful mode is internal and external
repetition; the Gothic is defined by a set of recurring conventions. Horrifying
and excessive though these conventions may be, the very nature of their
unchanging repetition serves to contain and dissipate their impact. One
of the great pleasures of reading the Gothic derives from the paradox
that Burke uncovers when he points out that sensations of pain and danger,
when distanced by art, result in the pure delights of the sublime. Yet
Yonge's narrative demonstrates that the comforts of the Gothic, providing
the reader with safe frissons of horror in a comfortably familiar setting,
can be taken to the extreme of denaturing the sublime.
In Yonge's text, the disabling of the conventions renders the Gothic
text susceptible to the totalizing stability of the moral plane, the plane
upon which all dynamic struggles are deconstructed. There are a number
of occasions in Yonge's text in which competing ideologies of possession
are reconciled on the moral plan. These episodes represent the only significant
revisions that Yonge makes in the conventional Gothic narrative. As the
Winslows come to discover the unsavory origins of their inherited property,
Yonge deploys the imperatives of morality to reconcile competing demands
for property and to trump those of law and tradition. Even subversive
feminism can be absorbed by Yonge's totalizing morality. The Winslows
discover that the last rightful owner of the property was Margaret Fordyce
and that it thus belonged by rights to the Fordyce family. Significantly,
Margaret acquired her property by inheriting it from her family, not,
as was more typical of woman in the eighteenth century, though marriage.
Morever, Margaret inherited her property from another woman. It becomes
clear that the real crime of the Winslows is that they have disrupted
a female line of property succession, making Margaret's curse, which blasts
the male line of primogeniture, a particularly apt vengeance and a particularly
horrifying instance of the power of female speech. Yonge's particular
indictment of primogeniture in the instance of Margaret's curse and Clarence's
struggles reflect a historical struggle of her times, a struggle whose
moral undertones would have appealed to Yonge. Primogeniture was identified
as "the root of evil" in the Free Trade in Land literature of
the 1870's because it led to concentrations of large estates held by a
small minority of the population (Offer 40).
Yonge painstakingly constructs a character who explicitly emblemizes
herself to make an explicit pronouncement on the issue. The Winslows are
visited by Miss Selby, a kind "elderly spinster" (1.104), much
like Charlotte Yonge. It is she who declaims to Edward: "Margaret
Fordyce
was the heiress, and had every right to dispose of her property"
(1.105). By the lights of tradition and law () this is patently untrue; by the lights of feminism, couched as
morality, this is indeed correct and this is , in fact, the resolution
that the narrative endorses. () Feminism, law and traditon are all reconciled by the simply
moral statement of a kindly old lady.
The larger claims of morality supersede Margaret's legal and feminist
claims as well; the property, the source of struggle and discord, as is
all Gothic property, is disposed of in a particularly harmonious way.
In her deployment of the trope of destroyed Gothic property, Yonge introduces
an important variation of the theme. The ultimate solution to the conflicts
surrounding Chantry House, is accomplished, not with the conventional
compromise of dynastic marriage, but with a uniquely moral disposal of
the Gothic property. In Yonge's moral formulation, the family is dispossessed
of the House because they willfully give it up to be used as an orphanage,
a cheerfully Victorian version of a tragic Gothic ending. In this, then,
Yonge adds a new dimension to the Gothic text. While conventional texts
struggle between the demands of reason, articulated through the imperatives
of law, and imagination, articulated through the subversions of fantasy,
Yonge reconciles the two on the moral plane.
The central conflict in Chantry House becomes, then, not the question
of who will win, whether possession will be legally effected or dispossession
imaginatively accomplished; Yonge's text considers how to effect the moral
approach that will erase all questions of possession or dispossession.
The Winslows struggle with this question from the time the discovery of
the misappropriation is made. When Clarence Winslow, thinking on the legal
plane, declares that Margaret's newly discovered will "will hardly
invalidate our possession after a hundred and thirty years," Emily,
his sister, rebuts the law with the moral view. The central quandary for
the Winslows becomes how to restore the property to the Fordyce's. Even
imperialism is subsumed under the umbrella of morality. In Hong Kong Clarence's
actions serve to conservatively endorse the appropriating ideology of
empire, or at least empire as practiced with a moral religious sensibility;
he achieves great success and wealth "without soiling his hands with
the miserable opium traffic" (2.192). Moreover, Clarence's enterprises
in Hong Kong are revealed to be inspired by his moral desire to earn enough
money to pay the Fordyce's for the appropriated property.
Yonge's morality, in incorporating conflicting planes within the totalizing
plane of Christian morality, lends an atypical solidity to the closure
of her Gothic narrative. The moral plane becomes the totalizing plane
on which all struggles and tensions are synthesized and subdued. This
results in a closure that, while perhaps more morally satisfying, is ultimately
less dynamic and interestingly tense than that of the typical disruptive
Gothic text. Yonge discovers a way to successfully subdue all Gothic struggles
and, in doing so constructs a narrative that fixes and kills the power
of the genre. The final failure of both the utopian subversive vision
and the conservative vision of restoration is itself the defining moment
of the Gothic mode and is, finally, the source of horror and delight in
the Gothic. The Gothic is defined by the failure or refusal of the Gothic
narrative to sustain the stability that most narratives endorse. In positing
a plane where all struggles end, Yonge drains her Gothic narrative of
its essential tension. Her Gothic narrative is, ultimately, Gothic in
form only and, as Ruskin says of Gothic architecture, "It is not
enough that it has the Form, if it have not also the power and life."
(159) Yonge succeeds, then, in producing a text that heralds the death
of the vibrant and complex Gothic mode, a death that is, ultimately more
horrifying than anything found in Walpole or Radcliffe.
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