At a Funeral in September ...

“It was now the stormy equinoctial weather that sounds the wild dirge of autumn, and marches the winter in. I love, and always did, that grand undefinable music, threatening and bewailing, with its strange soul of liberty and desolation.”

I’ve been reading “Uncle Silas” online; it’s a gothic sensation novel by Sheridan LeFanu, who wrote “Carmilla” (often famed as the first lesbian vampire, and a precursor to Stoker).

This novel focuses rather bizarrely on Swedenborgians, peering at them as some sort of morbid deviants.  The heroine is, inevitably, a dainty little heiress to vast estates – who would be insufferable, if only we weren’t supposed to be invested in her, whose point of view orchestrates the action.  Her dislike of foreigners, and ugly and fat people, are all of course supposed to fill us with dread – but I keep playing alternate-fiction author and writing/seeing scenes from the perspective of everyone she describes, which is actually pretty fun.  She’s not a dumb bunny, this character – though ignorant, to be sure.  If it weren’t for her narration, we’d be treated without doubt to paens to her delicacy, her pale and trembling beauty, her immense and exquisite weakness in the face of every last breath of air (actually, we do get quite a bit of that last one, from the MC herself).

Even so, it’s intriguing reading – and, as Victorian Gothics sometimes can be, REALLY funny in some stretches, between all the portent and melodrama over minutiae.

The Swedenborgian angle brings to mind the Bostonian church where some people I knew got married many years ago.  And there is the fact that, in yesterday’s reading, I ran across “Great Woburn Street” (hee), clearly being used as an evocative name (the address follows the equally pointed name of a law firm – Gaunt, Hogg, and Hatchett, Solicitors).  Woburn rather begs the idea of woebegotten, all circumstances in the scene given, so it gave me a little grin - yet I have been to Woburn, the town outside (again) of Boston.  That place is pronounced "WOO-ben", not, as many American eyes might read it, as "WOE-burn."

The quote at the top of the post captures one of those things I love about this sort of literature, something I’ll never write (nor want to), but is kind of wonderful.  Its Englishness, its precision and syncopation – it’s kind fo wonderful stuff.  Particularly when read … with storms gamboling about!