Unit 4
Early Twentieth-Century Fantasy
Arthur Machen, 1863–1947
Welsh author, journalist, actor. Wrote the fiction he is remembered for in the 1890s, was rediscovered in the 1920s, and has been rediscovered roughly every generation since.
Machen’s childhood environments
- The rectory at Llanddewi Fach, where his father was the clergyman
- The Welsh countryside of Monmouthshire — hill forts, Roman ruins, and Celtic remains in the fields
Later influences
- The Decadence movement of the 1890s — Wilde, Beardsley, the Yellow Book
- The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the occult society Machen joined in 1899
Machen’s literary legacies
- H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction — Lovecraft acknowledged the debt directly
- Folk horror — the twentieth- and twenty-first-century mode of rural landscape, buried ritual, and the old religion surfacing
On ecstasy, in magic and literature
From “The White People”:
“Sorcery and sanctity,” said Ambrose, “these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.” (387)
From Hieroglyphics (1902), Machen names the capacity to produce ecstasy in the reader as the touchstone of all great writing.
Stories inside stories
The story’s structure, outermost to innermost:
- Prologue — dialogue between Ambrose and Cotgrave
- The Green Book — memoirs of an unnamed young woman, including her early memories; her first journey to “the most wonderful sight” (397); the “little clay man” (400–01); her second journey to “the secret place” (406)
- The Nurse’s stories, told inside the Green Book:
- the girl who comes back from the pit (395–96)
- the hunting prince and the fairy princess (398–99)
- the old pagan rituals on the hill in summer (399–400, 403)
- the tale of Lady Avelin (401–03)
- Epilogue — another dialogue between Ambrose and Cotgrave
Reading notes: “The White People”
- This challenging and creepy story — which anticipates the contemporary subgenres of folk horror and weird fiction — begins with a lengthy prologue in which Ambrose and Cotgrave debate the true meaning of good and evil.
- Ambrose’s moral unorthodoxy sets the tone for the tale of the Green Book that follows.
- The narrator of the Green Book is never named. Though we come to know her relatively well across her weird adventures in the Welsh countryside, she remains somewhat mysterious — as does the Nurse, who may or may not be a “White Person” herself.
- Magic here does not exist separately from the everyday world. It is the zone of the fantastical lying just below the surface of the ordinary, constantly threatening to break through and corrupt it. Notice how many of the interpolated stories carry that theme.
- Magic in this story is also bound up with the pre-Christian past — never entirely gone — and with a kind of dark femininity that counters the usual Victorian idealization of women.
- What do we learn in the epilogue about what the girl may actually have seen in the clearing? And what does Ambrose mean by “She had poisoned herself — in time” (407)?
For Thursday
- “The Aunt and Amabel” by E. Nesbit (BBCF 426)
- “Through the Dragon Glass” by A. Merritt (BBCF 523)
- “Friend Island” by Francis Stevens (BBCF 565)