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Post by andydecker on Jun 2, 2021 13:06:43 GMT
WHERE THEIR FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED by May Sinclair “Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next.” From elder flowers to electric dynamos, this is probably the most powerful ghost story ever written. No exaggeration. It tells of Harriott, who effectively becomes a recurrent widow without ever getting married. A story of unrequited love with one or more men and forbidden sex with another man who was married with children, so not a completely celibate audit trail for her, but certainly in an apotheosised resonance with this book so far…and she fails to confess in “solemn holiness” the forbidden aspects of her love life when upon her death bed. The religious lockdown from the Clarimonde syndrome onward into an eternal timeless stalking by that forbidden lover through an attritional Null-Immortalis (wherein each man morphs into another of the men), a brand of “Immortality” for which I had this ready name, one that is intensely shocking and nightmarish to all sinners who read this story, their guilts never to be shaken off because vibrations of them last into shadows of infinity that ever stalk us. That fateful cracking of fate in Sorworth is now forever and yours! And threaded through all these experiences are the earthly hotels and houses (“grey columns”, “great grey-carpeted staircase”, “grey house pricked up”, “high, grey garden”) where they happened. Those dynamos, you ask? Well, think about it… when comparing the forbidden lover’s essence at the end, the sight of “his long bulk stood before her” and feeling the “vibrations of its power”, yes, compare that with an earlier almost ludicrously salacious concept of Harriott wanting to be shown his “great dynamos”… however innocent the root. I had to read this story for some reviews, and I have to say that I came to really hate it. It begins so promising. An interesting portrait of a woman being oppressed by her society. No love or fulfilment for Harriott, she has to ignore all her normal desires. So she is bold and takes a lover regardless. So far I was with Sinclair, whom, as I gathered, was a feminist or proto-feminist writer who did a lot for the cause. But at the end her protagonist gets her punishment for this behavior. And not an earthly punishment, no, a supernatural one. The universe decided that Harriott did wrong. And even a truly gruesome punishment for the sin of freely chosen sex. Just for living a free life, which maybe was not fulfilled or happy, but at least she did decide what to do. Not her father, not her husband, not her lover.
What Sinclair takes to task in the first half, she does a 180 and outright condemns it at the end. I read some other of her stories, and they had a similar puritanical moral. Woman should be free to decide what to do with their life, but if they decide to act upon this, especially if it is sex, they get punished. Some feminist message, even for 1922, when it was published first.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jun 2, 2021 13:57:54 GMT
I somewhat agree with you in my own opinion on such gender issues and their history.
But authorial intention is a murky field to try to plumb, I find.
And I still consider WHERE THEIR FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED by May Sinclair probably the most powerful ghost story ever written.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 2, 2021 16:31:26 GMT
I somewhat agree with you in my own opinion on such gender issues and their history. But authorial intention is a murky field to try to plumb, I find. And I still consider WHERE THEIR FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED by May Sinclair probably the most powerful ghost story ever written. No doubt about that. Regardless of the writer's intentions or message, which I thought contradictory, it is ahead of its time. Which makes it frustrating :-) |
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