The Supernatural in Modern English FictionScarborough, Dorothy
History
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Scarborough, Dorothy
English fiction -- History and criticism; Supernatural in literature
We even have the humorous and satiric witch, to correspond to similar
representations of the ghost and the devil in modern fiction. The
instance in Burns's _Tam O'Shanter_ needs only to be recalled, with the
ludicrous description of the wild race at night to escape the dread
powers. _Bones, Sanders, and Another_, by Edgar Wallace, introduces a
witch with comic qualities, a woman whose husband has been a magician,
and the reputed familiar of a devil. She cures people by laying her
hands on them, once causing a bone that was choking a child to fly
out with "a cry terrible to hear, such a cry as a leopard makes when
pursued by ghosts." When this witch with a sense of humor is arrested
as a trouble-maker by an army officer, she "eradicates" her clothes,
causing very comic complications. The best example of the satiric witch
is Hawthorne's Mother Rigby, in _Feathertop_, who constructs a man
from a broomstick and other materials for a scarecrow. In this satiric
sermon upon the shams and hypocrisies of life, Mother Rigby, with her
sardonic humor, her cynical comments, parodies society, holds the
mirror up to human life and shows more than one poor painted scarecrow,
simulacrum of humanity, masquerading as a man. The figure that she
creates, with his yearnings and his pride, his horror when he realizes
his own falsity and emptiness, is more human, more a man, than many a
being we meet in literature or in life.
Barry Pain has several witch stories that do not fall readily into any
category, curious stories of scientific dream-supernaturalism, in the
realm of the unreal. _Exchange_ is the account of a supernatural woman,
whether a witch or one of the Fates, one does not know, who comes,
clad in scarlet rags, to show human souls their destinies. She permits
an exchange of fate, if one is willing to pay her price, which is in
each case terrible enough. One young girl gives up her pictured future
of life and love, and surrenders her mind for the purpose of saving her
baby brother from his destined fate of suicide in manhood. The crone
appears to an old man that loves the child, who takes upon himself her
fate of being turned into a bird to be tortured after human death, so
that the young girl may have his future, to be turned into a white lamb
that dies after an hour, then be a soul set free. _The Glass of Supreme
Moments_ is another story of prophetic witchery, of revealed fate seen
in supernatural dreams. A young man in his college study sees the
fireplace turn into a silver stairway down which a lovely gray-robed
woman comes to him. She shows him a mirror, the glass of supreme
moments, in which the highest instants of each man's life are shown.
She says of it, "All the ecstasy of the world lies there. The supreme
moments of each man's life, the scene, the spoken words--all lie there.
Past and present and future--all are there." She shows an emotion
meter that measures the thrill of joy. After he has seen the climactic
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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