After the dramatic scene
at the end of chapter six in Driven Home,
George succumbs to brain-fever. He recovers, but although he can remember
everything up to the moment when he and Carlos set of for Longman’s Drift, he
cannot recall the events that took place there:
“Then utter forgetfulness, and not only forgetfulness;
for with it came that painful sensation that I have experienced when
endeavouring to grasp the idea of Eternity— a conception of vast space that has
no beginning and no end. Superadded to this was a persuasion that some horror
lurked underneath the partial and temporary veil which had clouded my memory,
and which it would be folly to uplift.” (Driven
Home, Chapter 7)
For the sake of
the plot as much as for his own peace of mind, George does not seek to find out
what happened that fateful night. Instead, “I became an enthusiastic farmer. …
drinking and high play were completely abandoned.” (Ibid.). Time passes, but one day George again feels the
irresistible power of some supernatural agent in his life: “it was absolutely
necessary for me to return to London. … ” (Ibid.):
“Day and night,
waking or sleeping, this irresistible power drove me on. No occupation, however
absorbing, could at last, even for a moment, enable me to withdraw my mind from
this one subject. The pressure on my brain became intolerable; and at last,
perforce, I was obliged to subordinate my own volition to that of the unseen power,
and I determined to start for England as soon as I could make the necessary
arrangements.” (Ibid.)
An attentive
reader will have an idea what might be driving George home. George might have
an idea too, if he did not suffer from amnesia. Because he has already
experienced the force of the supernatural agency in his life twice before (Driven Home, Chapters 4 and 6), he does
not question the reason for experiencing it once more or link it to the events
at Longman’s Drift (Driven Home,
Chapter 7). The two earlier occasions are a pair of red herrings to mask the
significance of the third experience, which now has some kind of a logical
explanation.
George’s amnesia
is a good example of the awkward tricks Victorian authors had to use in order
to deal with the gradual unravelling of a mystery. In order for the following
events to appear mysterious and frightening to George, in order for him to
slowly make sense of them and piece the solution together, George has to start
in a state of cluelessness. George’s amnesia is a distant (poor?) relative to
Franklin Blake’s somnambulism in The
Moonstone or John Jasper’s opium dream in The
Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Once back in
England, George continues to be haunted by strange spirits and the plot
advances through a series of fortuitous coincidences. George meets Mrs
Blythswood on the train. When he then suffers from nightmares, the doctor
diagnoses “over-excited nerves” and sends him to the seaside town of
Shelterbourne to recover (Driven Home, Chapter 8). This town is by coincidence where Mrs Blythswood
resides, as well as the villain of the story, and the villain’s victim and her
son. It is handy that Shelterbourne should be so popular.
Mrs Blythswood is a young widow;
she was an abused wife: “the malignity and ingenuity of the persecution to
which she had been subjected at the hands of her husband were almost incredible.”
(Driven Home, Chapter 9) This abominable
abuse took the somewhat suspect form of forbidding her to dress in mourning
when her mother died on her way to America, or “to receive any newspapers which
could have given her any details of the event.” (Ibid.)
In Shelterbourne, George joins a
pleasant “whist coterie” at a club (Ibid.).
Here, one afternoon, Doctor Erbach, the villain of the piece makes his appearance:
“Arriving at the
club one afternoon, I observed among the intending players a stranger, whose appearance
exercised at once an extraordinary effect over me. ... There was nothing really
repulsive or alarming in the tall and active figure, and dark and somewhat handsome
face, to account for the horror and repugnance which his presence caused me. It
was the expression of his dark and deep-set eyes that so instantly and
peremptorily commanded attention. There was a look of power, of unscrupulousness,
in them,— a look which seemed to say, "No pity can restrain me in the
pursuit of any object I may have in view,"— a look such as a successful necromancer
might have worn, who, by the sacrifice of human victims, had acquired a familiarity
with the secrets and powers of an unseen and supernatural world ; and yet, with
this expression there seemed mingled a look of terror and anxiety, such as a commonplace
murderer might have worn in the interval between the deed of blood and
apprehended moment of discovery." (Driven Home, Chapter 9)
George assigns Dr Erbach typical
qualities of a sensational villain. The first quality is the stranger’s
immediate “extraordinary effect.” He does not impress with
his physique or bodily strength; there is “nothing really repulsive or alarming”
in his figure. Instead, his uncanny power is psychological and it is concentrated
in his “dark and deep-set eyes.” The portrait of the villain is built up from
the impression he makes on George. George imagines him to be an evil master of supernatural
forces like “a successful necromancer.” He is also like “a commonplace murderer”
on the run. The first image is magnificent and frightening, the second is
despicable and doomed. This villain, by first impressions, is both a formidable
opponent and one that can, and will, be vanquished.
At the whist
table, partnered with Dr Erbach, George has the
most horrifying experiences yet of the ghosts that haunt him. There are now
two of them: a man and a child; and they are pointing a finger at the doctor. George
is overwhelmed with terror:
“A sudden unreasoning horror of
the doctor, who seemed to be the centre of such mysterious revelations, took
possession of me, and I resolved that I would not lose consciousness in his presence,
if by any effort I could retain it.” (Ibid.)
But as soon as the doctor leaves
the club, George’s nerves get the better of him: “I heard his footsteps on the pavement
outside, I fell fainting to the floor.” (Ibid.)
George Wardour
is no Bruce Willis. Much could be said about the masculinity of sensational
heroes. They are young, professional or at least educated men (like
Robert Audley, Franklin Blake, Walter Hartright or even John Jasper) well in
touch with their feminine sides. They may be athletic and fond of field sports,
but they are not strangers to tingling nerves, palpitations and fainting. Much
has been written about heroines of sensation fiction, but so far less of heroes. In “Sensation Fiction, Gender, Identity,” Tara McDonald first identifies
flamboyant villains and easily duped husbands as typical men featured in
sensation novels, but she goes on to suggest “Yet perhaps the most significant
development in male characterization in the sensation genre is a third type:
the amateur detective.” (in The Cambridge
Companion to Sensation Fiction, Ed . by Andrew Mangham. [2013], p136).
MacDonald argues
that “Playing detective, then, offers these characters tools that are vital for
personal and professional fulfilment.” (Ibid.). Men who take on the role of detective in sensational narratives, do
not just get the girl and, often, the country house, but they come of age
through the process of detection. Sensation novels, then, can be seen as a kind
of Bildungsroman for their young male
protagonists.
It is essential that George faints.
Throughout Driven Home, it is
imperative that the hero goes through states of emotional turmoil: brain-fever,
fainting, incapacitating fear, hallucinations or hauntings (depending on
whether you believe in ghosts). George, like a good sensational hero, is teetering
on the verge of madness. First, it is essential for the narrative that its
protagonist experiences all the horror and excitement of the events vividly in
order to transmit the same sensations to the reader more effectively through
sympathetic osmosis. Secondly, it is also essential for the plot, so that
information can be withheld (here through selective amnesia) or given (here through
ghostly visitation); or to enable events to take place (here George can be
moved unconscious to the mysterious doctor’s house in order to wake up to experience
new horrors there).
Once awake, the unknown power
leads George to open the doctor’s notebook and discover a whole career of evil in them. He comes across a series of hideous
images of medical experimentation on animals. It concludes with a
picture of a child, hinting at a possible continuation of the series (Driven Home, Chapter 9). In a
state of terror, George flees from Doctor Erbach’s house, which “now seemed to
me a den of murder and mystery.” (Driven
Home, Chapter 10). At this point in the narrative, the mystery it at its
most entangled: George is labouring under some supernatural curse, Doctor
Erbach is clearly evil and up to no good, the identity of Mrs Blythswood’s
abusive husband is still in question, and there is a child in danger somewhere.
How will George resolve all these questions? He listens to an old wife’s tale.
Mrs Trewalney, whom George meets by coincidence in the woods after his mad
flight (Driven Home, Chapter 10), has
all the answers, it seems. In chapters eleven and twelve, we hear Mrs
Trelawney’s story. Now George is certain that Doctor Erbach is evil and must be
stopped. When George finds unidentified (possibly human) remains near the doctor’s house, he is
convinced a crime has taken place.
The police are of no assistance
to George. They laugh at him. George has no other
way but to try to catch the villain himself and he sets off in pursuit. On a
train he encounters an agitated young man, who tells him a story that could
have come from “one of the sensational periodicals of the day” (Driven Home, Chapter 14): Doctor Erbach
has had a most abrupt and brutal end. It is unexpected but, in a way, quite modern.
George experiences a great sense of
relief, his ghosts depart and leave him to marry Mrs Blythswood. The remains of
Doctor Erbach’s (assumed) victim disappear when a building
site is cleared for a new housing estate. Sensational crimes by monstrous villains are
hidden beneath modern domestic life.
Despite the clumsy supernatural
elements and the bundle coincidences that provide the plot, Arkwright’s novel
is clever. It remains true to its initial proclamation: in the end, there is no
actual evidence to support George’s story. He cannot prove that the ghosts ever
existed. Neither is there any evidence of Dr Erbach’s crime – the remains George
discovers are never examined by anyone else than George. This is the metafictional
twist at the end of the tale: Arkwright, the barrister, has constructed his
novel in a way that all the sensational events, except for the incident at
Longman’s Drift, which does have witnesses, may be wild, mad imaginings resulting
from brain fever brought on by a traumatic experience. The sensational story of Driven
Home may have taken place only in the narrator’s fevered imagination.
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