Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
Robert Hichens was a queer journalist, satirist, playwright, and novelist who chronicled the 1890s and the early part of the twentieth century. While his career was prolific and saw him rubbing elbows with George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, Hichens was also a gifted writer of psychological and supernatural horror. “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” from Hichens’ collection Tongues of Conscience, is his most enduring work, an unnerving mix of hysterical fiction and supernatural horror suffused with terrors so intimate they could be a precursor to authors like Clive Barker. This tale of intimate invasion and a lack of masculine intimacy seems ever more prescient with the passing of time, adding an unnerving subtext about consent and bodily autonomy to an already wrenching psychological horror story exploring the effects of the patriarchy from a masculine perspective.
Father Murchison, an Anglican priest working in London, makes the acquaintance of Professor Guildea, a prickly and stuffy rationalist whose life is completely devoid of faith. The two strike up an odd yet incredibly cordial friendship over the years, having nightly chats by the fire at the Professor’s house. When Guildea is followed home by a strange spirit that falls obsessively and unconditionally in love with him, Murchison is the first person he asks to help him with his new and unnerving situation. As the all-loving priest and the prickly, repressed professor delve more into the mystery of Guildea’s new lodger, it’s unclear exactly what the spirit is. All that is clear is that it loves Professor Guildea. Whether he wants it to or not.
It’s obvious Guildea is being punished for his toxic masculinity. He’s a misanthrope who eschews all intimacy, has no use for women, and the reason he’s punished specifically by a guileless manifestation of pure affection (one that comes off, while animalistic, as somewhat feminine, given its indistinguishable voice and light caresses) is because he shuts off his full range of emotion. He’s a creature of self-loathing and rationality bolstered by the idea that he has no need for “softer” emotions. The ironic punishment, then, is to be pursued by a creature who is the spiritual embodiment of all the things he lacks—an irrational, unseen avatar of desire and affection, the polar opposite of his cold rationality. He has relationships—his parrot Napoleon, his butler Pitting, and of course Father Murchison are all examples of lasting relationships in his life—but he is obstinate in insisting that he’s alone and incapable of feeling anything for the people around him. In the end, his absolute revulsion toward intimacy and self-loathing is what allows the strange presence he encounters to bring about his death, as he finds the entire thing so unbearable that his heart gives out. Guildea even rids himself of Napoleon and Pitting (his constant companions) when they cannot protect him against the spirit and his final monologue is about how he must “be a man again” and face down his spectral intruder with utter hatred.
Father Murchison, by contrast, is every bit the rational skeptic Professor Guildea is, but in a much less toxic fashion. His lack of intimate relationships is driven by his vows of celibacy more than any self-deprivation or a desire to rob himself of softer things. He’s skeptical at first and chalks the Professor’s distress up to simple overwork and being wound too tight until his dear friend (Murchison is perhaps the one healthy relationship Guildea has in the story) proves to him without a doubt that the only rational explanation is in fact a haunting. Despite his rationality, he’s conscientious, gives people space, and offers advice to those who need it. Murchison is genuinely worried about others and tries to find love in his life wherever he can. He’s no less a man than Guildea, but leads a much healthier existence. Once he’s convinced of the supernatural intruder, he even remembers his own unnerving encounters with a spectral woman in white who tried to invade his personal space in the same way Professor Guildea’s intruder invades his. The difference is that Murchison has learned several harsh lessons along the way, and isn’t nearly as violently closed-off as Guildea gets. Murchison’s final play is even to plead with Guildea to learn to love his intruder, to allow himself to express love and kindness somehow.
Hichens reproduces the general structure of hysterical fiction as seen in the previous few entries of this column (such as “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Rose for Emily”), but from a new and masculine perspective. Both Guildea and Murchison are seen as rational people, but Guildea is driven to hysteria by the supernatural presence that senses his aversion to intimacy and shoves itself into the absent space. He is attacked and punished specifically for lacking “softer” emotions, with the invisible creature determined to give him a surplus of the very thing he lacks. While his brain and body might be ravaged by the supernatural, they’re also confronted by the very real psychological idea that his inability to let go of his own toxic attitudes eventually kills him. The isolation is self-imposed, the spirit’s presence is a punishment for Guildea’s desire only for negative emotions and a “facts and logic”-based approach to his social affairs, and in the end, as with most hysterical fiction, the result is his brain self-destructing while the creature finishes off his body.
From a modern context, it’s possibilities to see more similarities with hysterical fiction than the author, perhaps, intended. While Murchison certainly means well and understands more than the average gothic fiction protagonist, his approach puts Guildea at the mercy of something he very much doesn’t consent to. Guildea is molested, his boundaries invaded, and the spirit makes intimate contact with him. Murchison might be correct about the thing being an ironic punishment for Guildea’s intense rejection of intimacy, but the solution for rigidly blocking everyone out is not to let a ghostly lover feel you up. In fact, that’s exactly how someone dies in It Follows. The advice he offers at the end—to love the creature who’s tormenting Guildea—even sounds like something every trauma survivor dreads their friends and family saying: “give them what they want, and they will go away.” For all his healthier attitudes, Murchison still believes that being intimately harassed by a ghost is something that Guildea somehow deserves for blocking out all intimate connection and emotion.
“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” uses the framework of hysterical fiction as a darker satire to devastating effect. In Guildea, Hichens illustrates the horrors of toxic masculinity and the tendency to cut oneself off from anything deemed “soft,” most of the time to one’s detriment, and even to the point of self-annihilation. In Father Murchison, Hichens depicts a non-toxic masculine figure, but one still bound by the patriarchal ties of hysterical fiction to the point of encouraging his friend to abandon his bodily and sexual autonomy. In both cases, the story offers an unnerving portrait of exactly how inadequate modern masculinity (in both toxic and non-toxic versions) is at addressing feelings of intimacy.
And now to turn it over to you. Does Murchison’s encouragement to let the spirit love Guildea read like he’s ignoring Guildea’s bodily autonomy? Did Hichens’ queer perspective and command of intimate horror act as a precursor to later, more visceral works?
Please join us in two weeks for horror legend Richard Matheson and his first professionally published story, the disturbing “Born of Man and Woman.”
