Vision and Vacancy: "Schalken the Painter" and Le Fanu's Art of Darkness

The old narrator's setting is described with particular attention to a curtained four-poster within which the audience is invited to "imagine what shadows you please" (48). The fourposter returns in the speaker's account of her first, forbidden glimpse, as a girl, of the figure of Madame Growl:

"So, softly, softly I draws the curtain, and there, sure enough, . . . stretched out like the painted lady on the tomb-stean in Lexhoe Church, the famous Dame Growl of Applewale House. There she was, dressed out. . . . Satin and silk, and scarlet and green, and gold and pint lace. . . . A big powdered wig, half as high as herself, was a-top o' her head, and, wow!-was there ever such wrinkles?-and her old baggy throat all powdered white, and her cheeks rouged, and mouse-skin eyebrows,. . . and . . . wi' a pair of clocked silk hose on, and heels to her shoon as tall as ninepins."

"Well, a corpse," she adds, "is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever sid" (54).

Not yet a ghost, Madame Growl will make a posthumous reappearance to reveal the immured bones of the small stepson whom she murdered for his inheritance.

In this connection the interpolated old nurse's tale acts as a mirror in the text, reflecting the danger that has stalked its principal auditor since birth. As an infant, the orphan-heiress survived poisoning by a distant relation actuated by the same motive as Mme. Growl's. Years later, after having been reported dead, the villainous Captain Torquil returns, with the same intention, in the guise of a white-haired benevolist named Burton. Beneath his disguise, in dim candlelight, Burton resembles a decomposing corpse: "[His] teeth were gone, and his left eye was out, and a deep ugly hole was in the place of that organ"; his mouth is "screwed . . . into a grim grimace," his lips "pursed . . . over toothless gums" ("A Strange Adventure" 178-79.)

A crime story, "Madame Growl's Ghost" throws its shadow across Laura Mildmay's personal history, the history of her family, and, implicitly, the history of her class. Tainted or unstable inheritance, a near-obsession of Le Fanu's, is the theme most commonly conveyed through the medium of a death-in-life apparition or the profane resurrection of a figure from the past. Together with Madame Growl, Mme. de la Rougierre of Uncle Silas counts as an exception (albeit androgynous) to the author's habit of placing spectral males at the center of his darkness. Like Vanderhausen and Growl, the bad French governess presents a dauntingly unnatural appearance-"tall, masculine," grotesquely overdressed, peremptory, vain, hideous (27). The servants take her for a "witch or a ghost" (38). A housekeeper compares her to the wolf in "Red Riding-Hood" (26). She seems a child-devourer. Yet unlike her predatory antecedents she serves only as an instrument (and at last a victim) of the real villain's designs on the heroine.

On occasion, Le Fanu complicates, or completes, his art of illusion by reversing the relationship of spectator and spectacle. In Wylder's Hand (1:119-26), The Wyvern Mystery (2:184-92), "Mr. Justice Harbottle" (85-86), "Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling" (114), and "An Account of Some Strange Occurrences in Aungier Street" (371), it is the haunted character who occupies the "niche" or four-poster, through whose drawn curtains he is perhaps no more haunted by than haunter of his spectral visitant. The most important instance of such reversal occurs in "Carmilla," where the heroine's vampirish double not only appears to Laura in the night at the foot of her bed but recalls having been "haunted" in a dream by her victim (259). Like the episode of the sleeping King, dreaming within a dream, in Through the Looking Glass, the moment introduces a doubt about the existential priority of the subject: