Till Death Do Us Part:
Violet Hunt's "The Prayer"
& Helen R. Hull's "Clay-Shuttered Doors"
with a portrait of Violet Hunt
commentary by rbadac
Being single has its advantages. I can take out the trash whenever I feel like it. No one fights me for the remote. My medicine cabinet isn't crammed full of girlie stuff. The seat stays up. Best of all, when I die no one will miss me very much, certainly not to the extent of somehow calling me back from Limbo to continue my hidebound existence for their benefit. It can't be recommended, as two instances which come to mind illustrate:
Edward Arne has just passed away. Dr Graham has put down his wrist & shaken his head. But Alice Arne cannot accept that her husband is gone. Left alone with the corpse, she appeals to God that he be returned to her...
..."You know, Doctor," she went on, "I was always afraid of ghosts -- of spirits--things unseen. I couldn't ever read about them. I could not bear the idea of some one in the room with me that I could not see. There was a text that always frightened me that hung up in my room: 'Thou, God, seest me!' It frightened me when I was a child, whether I had been doing wrong or not. But now," shuddering, "I think there are worse things than ghosts"...
Meanwhile on the Brooklyn Bridge, overbearing auto magnate Winchester Corson, a bit tight after highballs & driving his own limo containing his wife Thalia, their two children, & Thalia's friend Helen over wet and treacherous road, has an accident. The car spins & strikes the abutment; no one is hurt but Thalia, who was leaning forward and looking at the lights, & receives a fatal blow to the temple.
Fatal? Winchester will not hear of it. He demands that Thalia come around, & she does, to the amazement of the doctor who is also there, and who pronounced her dead.
Two stories, Violet Hunt's "The Prayer" (Tales of the Uneasy London: Heinemann, 1911) & Helen R. Hull's "Clay-Shuttered Doors" (Harper's Magazine May 1926) that deal with spousal injunction extending to the land of the dead; the issue of the living partner's self-interest is central to both, a summons to which the significantly reluctant Other is compelled to respond.
Hunt's rendering is a dark moral in which God intervenes in answer to Alice's prayer, but withdraws immediately afterward to let the mortals sort out their quandry on their own. Hull creates her version out of human hubris entire, with even more awful results. While Alice's motive is merely misguided, perhaps even inadequately provided for (she wishes her husband back as he was, as she loved & adored him-- it is not precisely what she gets), Winchester's is completely selfish: he does not want an embarrassing death charged to him on the eve of a big business deal. In both instances of course, they get more than they so hastily bargained for. Edward doesn't age or lose his handsomeness, but remains apathetic as a stone, while Thalia becomes a gaunt, malice-charged harpy. These transformations are fittingly in direct proportion to the sympathies that engendered them, while at the same time equating the condition of being dead with two very common marital stereotypes, perhaps wryly commenting that Death cannot improve upon them.
Each story relies upon the same two point-of-view devices: that of the outside female friend of the wife who witnesses the change in the context of each marriage, & that of the doctor acquainted, more or less, with the scientific particulars. Though the sex of the walking corpse alternates, both stories contain a statement of the outside friend to the effect that she fears lest the husband forbid further contact with the wife, a quaint reflection of those sad, male-dominated times. Hunt & Hull were both feminists, the former a mistress of Ford Madox Ford for several years, the latter a lesbian, & both were highly respected & accomplished writers. The employment of the doctor varies interestingly; in Hull's story he remains unnamed & mysteriously offstage, significant only at the beginning & at the end, but appraised of the situation throughout, while Hunt's Dr Graham has a great deal to say & do, but hasn't an inkling of what's really going on.
Besides their original appearances, both stories can also be read in the Dorothy Sayers Omnibus of Crime anthologies ("The Prayer" is in the Second, "Clay-Shuttered Doors" in the Third), & the latter, along with interesting biographical information on Hull, is also in Jessica Salmonson's What Did Miss Darrington See? which you're dead yourself if you don't have.
"Love? That's a strange word," she said, & her laugh in the quiet room was like the shrilling of a grasshopper on a hot afternoon. "One thing I will tell you." (She stood now on the stairway above me.) "Love has no power. It never shouts out across great space. Only fear & self-desire are strong."
See Ambrose Bierce for more examples of what to expect from a soulless corpse. With all due respect to the dear departed, that just sounds like something a dead person would say.
Note from the editor: Helen R(ose) Hull's "Clay-Shuttered Doors" can additionally be found in a half-dozen modern horror anthologies. It was also adapted in 1949 for radio's Hallmark Playhouse. It starred Jane Wyman & Gerald Mohr, available in the old-time radio market. Helen (Isobel) Hunt's "The Prayer," originally in the December 1895 Chapman's Magazine of Fiction as "The Story of a Ghost" is also in Richard Dalby's The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1988) & in David G. Hartwell's Foundations of Fear (1992).