The Supernatural in Modern English FictionScarborough, Dorothy
History
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Scarborough, Dorothy
English fiction -- History and criticism; Supernatural in literature
Other stories of life after death, given from the spirit-angle rather
than from the mortal point of view as in most ghost stories, are among
the recent types of supernaturalism. Alice Brown has several stories of
the kind, in one showing a woman who comes to tell her friend not to be
afraid of dying, because There is much like Here, and another symbolic
of the power of love to come back even from the pit of blackness after
death. Olivia Howard Dunbar's _The Shell of Sense_ gives the psychosis
of a woman who cannot go to heaven because she is jealous of her
husband. She _sees_ the form of the wind, _hears_ the roses open in the
garden, and senses many things unknown to human beings, yet is actuated
by very human motives. Katherine Butler[178] suggests that death must
be a painless process and the after life much like mortality, since
the man doesn't realize that he is dead but attempts to go about his
affairs as usual.
[178] In _In No Strange Land._
The symbolic treatment of the theme of life after death is more
effective and shows more literary art than the conventional pictures
of Mrs. Ward's and Mrs. Oliphant's. No human vocabulary is able to
describe immortality of glory or despair, hence it is more effective
merely to suggest the thought by allegory or symbolism. Hawthorne
gives us a symbolic morality in _The Celestial Railroad_, where he
pictures the road between heaven and hell, drawing on Bunyan's imagery
to describe the landscape and characters. Apollyon is engineer and
emits realistic blasts of smoke. Eugene Field[179] tells of a mother
just entering heaven who asks an angel where she may find her little
baby, dead long ago, to whom the angel whispers that she is the babe,
grown to maturity in Paradise. Julian Hawthorne's _Lovers in Heaven_
is a symbolic picture of the after life, where a man just dead goes
in search of the beloved he lost long before. He sees her on the far
slope of a heavenly hill, but before he can reach her the devil appears
to him in his own double, "the Satan of mine own self, the part of me
wherein God had no share." This is a quite modern concept of diabolism.
But love struggles to save him, and he resists his evil self.
[179] In _The Mother in Paradise_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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