I know this post isn't going to be of great interest to most people, but the ghost story I read by Edith Wharton last weekend, "The Lady's Maid's Bell" has been on my mind and I had to do a little more research on it. I came across an article in the periodical Literature Interpretation Theory, called "Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature" by Holly Blackford. It is a long article and discusses several novels and short stories, but I was mostly interested in the Edith Wharton story. There will be spoilers here, so beware if you plan on reading the story.
I gave a brief summary of the story here, but if you'll recall a lady's maid took employment in the country home of a youngish, unhappily married woman. Hartley, the new lady's maid, has encounters with a ghost, which turns out to be the previous lady's maid. Mrs. Brympton was very fond of Emma Saxton, who was more of a companion than maid. I'm not sure under what circumstances that she died. The encounters eventually lead to tragedy. I was very confused by the turn of events at the end of the story. I thought Blackford's inpterpretation of the story was an interesting one. Hopefully I won't be taking the quotes out of context, but this is what she writes about the story in her article.
"In 'The Lady's Maid's Bell,' two female servants, one of whom is actually a ghost, compete for possession of the mistress and the privilege of serving Mrs. Brympton, the victim of 'an unhappy match from the beginning', who, Mrs. Railton reports, 'wants a maid who can be something of a companion: her last was'. The narrator Hartley, the newcomer servant, continues to see the apparition of the former maid Emma Saxon lingering around her bedroom at night, suggesting that Emma is a projection of Hartley's erotic desires for her mistress. Emma's former room, kept locked is symbolically located just across from her own room. The ghost, who constantly looks but cannot act or tell her secrets (Fedorko), seems to suggest a locked part of Hartley that she cannot openly admit, a part of her that seems to have a sexual secret to tell. On the level of plot, that secret seems to have something to do with a suspected love affair between Mrs. Brympton and a gentleman neighbor, yet the secret is never revealed. The greater horror is the continued visitation of Emma to her mistress, summoned by the ringing bell, which Mrs. Brympton will not use to summon Hartley, although Hartley wishes it eagerly and answers to it when it rings. It rings to announce the presence of the dead Emma and an illicit relationship between women occurring despite the appearance of a respectable household."
"The title of the story alludes to the significance of the bell, which Kathy Fedorko interprets as a symbol of female sexuality, and the ambiguity of who possesses it given the social roles of lady and maid. During the course of one night, Hartley awakens to the ringing bell and assumes it is for her, asserting that her bell rung. 'I jumped awake to the furious ringing of my bell. Before my head was clear I had spring out of bed, and was dragging on my clothes. It is going to happen now, I heard myself saying; but what I meant I had no notion. My hands seemed covered in glue'. However keen the anticipation, she is disappointed to find Emma has already answered it, an affair easy enough to conduct under the ignorant eyes of Mr. Brympton, who views women as interchangeable: 'How many of you are there, in God's name?'. In this exclamation, we see a strict boundary between women's business and what men can comprehend, for men are largely inconveniences or disruptive presences in female-dominated household complexities. In what I read as the final showdown between Hartley and Emma, the lady dies and Emma Saxon seems to have won eternity with her mistress. Yet the living servants seem to get the house: 'I heard [Mr. Brympton] call out, 'To the station,' and we servants went back alone to the house'. In the end, then, both servants cannot share the mistress and house, but together they exorcise Mr. Brympton and settle their competition. Emma Saxon gets Mrs. Brympton, and Hartley gets the house."
I thought that was all quite interesting. Obviously I am going to have to reread the story in light of this explanation as I don't think I saw any of it. Is it just me or does it all seem to come down to sex in literature? It certainly explains why Mrs. Brympton dies at the end, and it gives a much more sinister twist to the story. I still don't understand that stick Mr. Ranford was using at the funeral. What do you think? (And by the way, many thanks to those who read the story along with me!).
I hope my next story will be a bit more straightforward, but sometimes you just don't know what you're getting into when you make that selection!