monster identities

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https://www.360docs.net/doc/c26801560.html,/content/45/1/23The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0021989409359548 2010 45: 23The Journal of Commonwealth Literature Erin Mercer Maurice Gee's The Fire-Raiser Monstrous Identities: Critical Realism and Gothic Fantasy in Published by:

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Monstrous Identities

Monstrous Identities: Critical Realism and Gothic Fantasy in Maurice Gee’s The Fire-Raiser

Erin Mercer

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

Maurice Gee’s children’s novel The Fire-Raiser sits firmly in the social realist tradition, yet also includes some decidedly gothic elements. While children’s literature has displayed an increasing gothicism in recent years, texts such as Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters employ the gothic for the narrative and allegorical possibilities allowed by the supernatural. The Fire-Raiser in contrast has no supernatural elements. Gee’s novel shows how genre motifs can be employed by a realist text, since rather than mitigating the social critique characteristically implied by the critical realist stance, the use of gothic’s concern with the monstrous actually reinforces it. While certainly not a part of the “high” gothic tradition or a schlock-horror gothic fiction in the pulp tradition of Stephen King, The Fire-Raiser utilizes gothic motifs as a kind of window-dressing, investing social critique and didacticism with the titillating thrills of popular fantasy. Keywords

Maurice Gee, The Fire-Raiser, gothic, critical realism, children’s literature, New Zealand literature, national identity

Maurice Gee’s children’s novel The Fire-Raiser (1986) is a realistic depiction of life in small-town New Zealand circa 1915 and follows the actions of a group of children who band together in order to protect their town, Jessop, from a mysterious arsonist. The pyromaniac Marwick, whose actions adhere to a clearly delineated psychological pattern, is a

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Vol 45(1): 23–35. DOI: 10.1177/0021989409359548

24 Journal of Commonwealth Literature real threat and Jessop is a realistically portrayed town whose inhabitants are threatened not just by arson, but by escalating war and the tensions it provokes regarding national identity. Historical detail, psychological character portrayal and the use of local setting and idiom clearly place the novel in the tradition of literary realism, which makes the text’s insistent gothic motifs especially strange. While one review suggests that what makes The Fire-Raiser special is its “combination of terror and dailiness”,1 what makes it unusual is that the dailiness of terror is so heavily supernaturalized. Alongside the novel’s realistic psychological portraits and social mapping are some decidedly gothic elements: a decrepit mansion housing an old Miss Havisham-like woman and her insane son; persecuted innocents; pursuit; entrapment; live burial; the lingering presence of the dead; even a strangely animate skeleton residing in a belfry tower. While children’s literature has displayed an increasing gothicism in recent years, texts such as Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters and the hugely popular Harry Potter series utilize gothic motifs, because their subject-matter calls for it. Magic has always been a part of stories for children, but what are we to make of a novel with no supernatural element which nevertheless insists on spooky descriptions?

If one understands realism as a practice that depicts a “truth”, what Mark Williams identifies as “critical realism” reveals a greater truth hidden beneath a lesser one.2 Texts employing the conventions of critical realism, a dominant mode in New Zealand writing, attempt to recreate and represent social reality while criticizing that reality, thus presenting a reality “more true” than the reader’s perception of the real. Gee’s critical realism depicts a specific social reality in order to skewer class pretensions and crude nationalist sentiments, establishing a paradigm in which the working- and middle-class characters are an antidote to upper-class pretension. The stance taken by critical realism is obviously anathema to that of the gothic, which relies for its effects on the inauthentic, the “camp” and the unreal. Yet, while the gothic might seem to sit uneasily alongside critical realism, these seemingly antagonistic strategies are used by Gee to support the same aim. Since Gee leeches his gothic elements of any occult power, the reification of the sins of the past and its eventual vanquishing by a group of young New Zealanders support the nationalist aims of Gee’s realistic novel by aligning colonialism with real threat and New Zealand identity with real power.

The question of why Gee uses gothic motifs still remains, however, since the narrative does not require them. The fire-raiser is frightening because he is big, strong and capable of burning down buildings and hurting children; there is no real need to cloak him in a flowing black garment, have him live in a decrepit mansion or align him with wolves. Furthermore, had Gee included the occult aspect of the gothic and

Monstrous Identities25 actually invested the fire-raiser with magical power, the story could still meaningfully engage with social reality. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a dark fantasy about vampires, which also depicts a feudal lord living (quite literally) off his peasantry and plotting to siphon off the life-blood of a developing industrial nation. This awful aristocratic threat from the past is conquered by a young professional, a woman coming into possession of her own independence and agency, and two representatives of rational science, clearly illustrating the novel’s engagement with a particular social context.

The threat in Gee’s novel similarly involves remnants of the past who attempt to control the livelihood and freedom of Jessop’s working-class population. The Marwick family try to deny townspeople access to the river and the son embarks on a burning campaign that sees him target the community’s vital economic and social sites. His penultimate attempt is on the school, the very place which will facilitate the future independence and vitality of the children Phil and Kitty, whose natural intelligence is hindered by class and gender restrictions. In true gothic fashion, the threat which terrorizes the people of Jessop is vanquished by native forces wielding rationalism and Gee’s novel further reinforces the rational by denying threat any real magical power. The Fire-Raiser is a sort of “gothic-lite” which dresses threat up in the funereal robes of the irrational, but which insists on the inability of the irrational to pose any real threat to Enlightenment values. Gee’s novel is remarkably canny in that it appears to be the sort of “gross and violent”3 stimulant Wordsworth despaired of, while actually adhering to the Enlightenment project which positioned children’s literature as a genre in opposition to the gothic and which was deemed capable of inculcating rational values in children.

The novel’s villain is a man with “fire in his head”,4 whom Gee depicts realistically by using familiar psychological concepts and whom he also surrounds with gothic motifs that align him with the irrational. “Outrage, power, pleasure” (p. 8) are essential elements of the arsonist’s desire to set things alight, but matches are also “magical to him and full of secret whispers, promises” (p. 9). Like a bogeyman, the fire-raiser creeps through the lanes and alleys of Jessop, “by hedges and board fences, by park and riverbank, sack on his shoulder, black baggy coat lapping his ankles, and red balaclava tight on his head”. The threat posed to the town by the fire-raiser is mitigated by his lack of magical ability, but increased by the fact that he comes from within the town itself. He threads his way through the streets “as though on tracks only he knew” (p. 7), and remains amongst the crowd to watch his fires and “taste” his community’s fear. Nestled within his community but desiring to destroy it, he is a parasite eating away at Jessop from within. As buildings succumb to fire, the

26 Journal of Commonwealth Literature light and flame of their destruction bathe him like water and make him “newborn” (p. 7).

The novel opens with Marwick’s first attempt to burn a building “with some live thing inside” (p. 7). This attempt, on the stables, involves an external conflagration that also plays out in internal spaces. Flame fills the “inside of his head. It ran along his arteries. It licked around his bones.” Arson is external and internal, rendering Marwick perpetrator and victim. The fire threatens the lives of the horses, but it is the arsonist who gives “a whinnying scream, like a horse” (p. 9) and who capers in the red and yellow light. Marwick’s desire to destroy a building with life inside seems related to a desire for self-destruction, an ambiguity which positions the fire-raiser as a controller of fire who is somehow fire himself. He seizes a torch of hay and leaps with it down to the hay pile “and rolled in it, setting it on fire, and ran along the wall, touching things as though with a wand, waking them up” (p. 9).

When Kitty Wix witnesses the fire-raiser fleeing the scene, she has “no time to understand that the thing that flapped and loomed like a huge black bird was a man, running on the road, and his vulture skull a red balaclava” (pp. 12-13). She watches this weirdly supernatural figure run away “with a long, wolfish, loping” stride, with one arm raised sideways, “crooked, black, and the fist on it shining like an egg”. The fire-raiser’s coat writhes and flaps as if alive, he seems eight or nine feet tall to the frightened Kitty and his balaclava gives him “a round inhuman head” (p. 13). The emphasis on the red balaclava obviously reinforces the fire-raiser’s association with flame, but it also recalls Stoker’s emphasis on the red eyes and lips of the inhuman Count Dracula. Dracula’s ability to shape-shift and take the form of wolf or bat is parallelled by the fire-raiser’s ability to go unnoticed once he removes his voluminous coat and balaclava. He stands “in the crowd, a citizen of Jessop, watching the fire”, and Kitty, “if she had seen him, would not have recognised him as the man who had bowled her over” (p. 15).

While Marwick’s aim in lighting fires is clearly to arouse the fear necessary for his own psychological satisfaction, his actions have economic implications. Flames destroy property and livelihood, and Marwick calls the fear inspired by his actions “a tribute” (p. 15). Fear is thus aligned with a tax traditionally paid in acknowledgement of submission: fear is the town’s rent or homage to a figure who identifies himself as sovereign or lord. The overtone of superiority suggested by Marwick’s use of the phrase “tribute” is reinforced by the fact that he and his mother attempt to deny public access to the river, despite the fact that the court upholds the right of the children to swim there. The Marwick house is a suitably decrepit mansion with gables, fretwork, finials and a corner tower. Its roof has faded to a washed-out pink with patches of rust, but it still manages

Monstrous Identities27 to look “like a faery castle – though its denizens were anything but faery” (p. 34). This reference recalls Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where the poem’s intention, as stated in the Preface, is to help “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”.5 Gee’s novel presents a clear shift away from the historical privilege of the landed gentry and implies that far from representing noble qualities of strength and virtue, the upper class are in fact feeble and degenerate. Marwick makes the schoolteacher Hedges nervous because of the “burning in his eyes” which reveals “a rage in him not held down properly” (p. 35) and Hedges decides he is “damaged in ways that could not be repaired” (p. 39). Mrs Marwick’s stateliness is “ravaged” (p. 39) and she gives the impression of “witch and spider, disturbing to Hedges – although he was fond of spiders and liked the idea of witches too. It was the way she sat at the centre of things he found disturbing. It seemed to give her power, and secret knowledge” (p. 35). A subterranean creature, her eyes blink against the sudden light when she emerges from the house. When she returns to her parlour, Hedges feels he has seen “the ancient lizard withdraw. His sense of fear returned. She seemed to have come out for a look at the world and returned to the dark where she lived” (p. 41).

Hedges is the educated working-class antidote to the threat posed by an irrational past. He does not belong in the “foreign country” of Mrs Chalmers’ gentrified parlour and realizes that to “that English lady in her chair – that lady being English in her chair – he was a tradesman”. This is no bad thing, however, and he proudly acknowledges that he is the one “who’s got a job to do” (p. 47). Although he is oppressed by knowledge of meanness, cruelty and pain, he never lets this bother him “more than a mild headache or a bit of heartburn would have. He believed one must carry on as though life were the happy thing it could be. Children deserved no less” (p. 21). Hedges is committed to the rational education of his class and stresses anatomy, psychology and astronomy against superstitious belief in phrenology and religion. His strict scientific approach sees him keep a skeleton in the belfry tower for anatomy lessons, a figure he nicknames Miss Perez. Phil and Noel are both nervous to open the cupboard that looks “like a coffin standing on end” and when they do, Miss Perez glimmers at them “with her head bent in a regal way” (p. 23). When they bring the skeleton into the class, the children “sighed, and groaned, and gave a hiss of fear”. Hedges, though, will not have any “nonsense” and insists that if Miss Perez is going to cause awe, “he meant it to be as a fine piece of engineering. His first job was to demystify her” (p. 23). His attempt at demystification involves not just erroneous beliefs regarding death, but also Empire. In the tale about Miss Perez that he invents, she has been a Spanish woman he met on the Amazon, which, combined with her “regal” aspect, suggests a history of colonization. Hedges also

28 Journal of Commonwealth Literature attempts to demystify the arsonist by explaining his mania in rational psychological terms. He suggests that whoever lights those fires has got “dark things on his mind. Or perhaps his mind is full of flames. Now that’s a science, a brand new science called psychology” (p. 25).

In stark contrast to Hedges’ rationality, which is clearly aligned with his identity as a New Zealander free of British pretension, the priggish female teacher Mrs Bolton sees herself as “fighting for Christian behaviour” and insists on strict rules adhering to traditional hierarchies. She believes herself to be the “appointed saviour” (p. 25) of Jessop’s children and admonishes the girls not to swim freestyle, not to get their hair wet and not to show gums whilst smiling. Her religious doctrines see her shocked by Hedges’ criticism of creationism and his radical suggestion that the children must not believe everything they read in the Bible. Mrs Bolton’s stuffiness is combined with elitism and she stages what she refers to as a “patriotic pageant” (p. 26), in which each child takes the role of a country fighting in World War I. She longs for Phil Miller, who is playing New Zealand, to pronounce “white” in the British way rather than his “navvy” way of saying “whoite” (p. 59), but Noel points out that “Mr Hedges reckons New Zealanders should talk like New Zealanders and not be little mock-Englishmen” (p. 59). Mrs Bolton’s view is clearly colonial, however, and she insists, “We need a big strong boy with shoulders back and nice clean teeth” to play New Zealand. She rejects Wipaki in favour of “someone white” (p. 27), relegating the Maori boy to wearing a grass skirt and clutching a spear.

The vitality of practical tradespeople like Hedges and Mr Wix the baker (who are the only ones to stand up to Marwick and the mob who threaten the German piano teacher) is set against characters like Mrs Bolton, Mrs Chalmers and Jobling the politician, whose old-fashioned mores and British pretensions render them highly unsympathetic. Similarly, part of Marwick’s threat to the town relies on his link to the legacy of a colonial past. A vampiric figure who depends for sustenance on the people of Jessop, Marwick wears “a full, fat smile on his face” following the stables fire. He “would not need another fire for a while now. This one sat inside him like a meal, he would lie in his bed and digest it” (p. 16). The fire-raiser demands constant tribute and is soon subsumed by a need for consumption that is instinctual and animalistic. He makes no conscious decision to set another fire, but simply finds himself putting tools in a sack and readying his jacket and balaclava. He does not choose a building but simply finds it “ready in his mind” (p. 66). An unhomely figure in the most homely spaces of the town, he takes “secret ways” through the park where children’s swings creak in the breeze and seesaw and slides “climbed to nowhere” (p. 66).

The menace the fire-raiser poses is related to the way the children of the novel are at the mercy of various authoritative powers, such as school,

Monstrous Identities29 parents, teachers and the police. He comes to embody all such threat and takes on mythical status. When Kitty and Irene write an anonymous note to the police suggesting Marwick’s involvement in the fires, there is “a bareness in it that made them shiver. They felt that Marwick must know and was lurking round the house” (p. 63). Even the letter itself takes on supernatural qualities and seems “to bulge as though something inside was trying to get out” (p. 64). When they discover him standing amidst the flames with his arms raised, fiery-headed, red and black, he “screeches like an owl” and is “like the devil”. His eyes are “like cat eyes in the night; they were tunnels deep into his head” (p. 69). Gee’s similes here are important; the fire-raiser is “like” an irrational threat but one that remains real and therefore manageable. What the children see inside this devil-like head is their first glimpse of a world of pain and cruelty which Hedges longs to protect them from. When Irene watches Marwick approach, she remembers him from her father’s office and from when he knocked Kitty over:

Then he had seemed wild and dangerous, but now, as he grew taller crossing the paddock, as his boots ate up the land, he was like someone from a nightmare. He was magical, terrifying; she felt he could strip the bushes away with his eyes and uncover her, and reach out with an arm and pick her up. She almost felt his hand squeezing her. She imagined she could hear his boots and feel the ground trembling. Irene was used to managing adults, but knew that here was one she would never control. It was like being shown that beyond grownups was another group of beings, magical and powerful and not to be approached. (p. 82) As the boys cower in the hay which Marwick viciously forks, they realize that everything has changed: “Adults were brutal, and the game had turned to death. A step had been taken that changed the nature of things” (p. 85). Marwick’s pursuit reifies a world with deadly and destructive consequences, one in which Irene’s petty ability to control her parents by making herself faint is rendered useless. While the children might be subject to the vagaries of their parents and teachers, particularly Phil who is left to fend for himself, none of them has had to deal with the level of abuse the fire-raiser has suffered. His damaged psyche is a result of childhood trauma and abuse meted out by his mother; his need for fire stems from being locked in a cupboard (we are not told for how long) as punishment for failing to prevent his sister Lucy’s death by drowning. Despite the fact that this accident occurred nearly four decades ago, both Marwick and his mother continue to be ruled by it. In fact, the antipathy they show towards the children using the river is influenced by the fact that Lucy drowned in that very swimming hole. The legacy of this accident is Marwick’s hatred of the dark and his continual resentment

30 Journal of Commonwealth Literature of his mother’s refusal to let him “come out in the light”. For Marwick, his punishment has been “like locking up my eyes. It was being buried” (p. 75). Live burial effectively puts to rest the child Marwick was prior to his sister’s death and disinters a monster. He attempts to cope with this trauma by insisting that he “beat” his mother by lighting fires “In here. In my head” (p. 75).

This awful history of loss, grief, haunting and hate makes clear that what was once a faery-castle is really “big and ugly and threatening”. Whatever appeal the house’s gables and pink roof once had is transformed by its malevolent ability to render windows “bulbous eyes” (p. 79) watching the children. During their attempt to discover conclusive evidence linking Marwick to the arsons, Kitty is forced into the “big old silent house” (p. 71) and into a site of repressed trauma that causes her to utter “a little breath of fear” (p. 89). Seeking a hiding place in the parlour, she unintentionally enters the specific place where Lucy’s ghost lingers through Mrs Marwick’s obsessive reveries and relics. Lucy’s sheet music still lies on the piano, as does a photograph of the dead girl, and Kitty presses down a piano key only to discover the sound strangely muffled, which makes her feel “as though someone had stuffed a cloth into her mouth”. The red balaclava is hidden in the middle of the piano “like a liver or heart” (p. 90), a reification of buried trauma. Kitty thus becomes fully implicated in the events of the past, and when Mrs Marwick discovers her at the piano, it is only fitting that the old woman thinks she is Lucy. Mrs Marwick’s face is luminous and she seems to hum faintly, “as though she were making changes in her head, lifting a kind of music up in pitch”. To Kitty, she seems “to go out of focus, and come back sharp and black, longer in her bones. She felt like screaming” (p. 91). For a short while Kitty attempts to control the fear provoked by the unhomely house and its ghastly inhabitant, but Mrs Marwick’s glazed trance is broken by Kitty’s poor performance on the piano and she locks her in the cupboard, saying “That’s where the naughty children go. […] And they never come out” (p. 94).

Kitty has effectively gone back in time to relive Marwick’s childhood trauma. The house might not be haunted by real ghosts, but it is certainly redolent with remnants of psychic distress. Although imprisonment has rendered Marwick “something springing out of nightmares into life” (p. 94), Kitty emerges undamaged from her live burial due to her reliance on the rational. Hedges finds it particularly amusing that Kitty identifies her Britannia speeches from the patriotic pageant as what facilitates her psychic survival, but it is in fact his teaching that encourages her strategy, since she remembers his tale of a man who survived years in prison by reciting long poems. Furthermore, Kitty’s recitation gives voice to what has been repressed and counters the balaclava’s stifling power. The implications of this live burial are not just psychological but also

Monstrous Identities31 nationalistic. Kitty survives a period of isolation and darkness by taking refuge in the traditions of Empire, a strategy which, combined with her defiance of conventions regarding female scholastic achievement and sporting prowess, render her an example of old and new, past and future, combined. Her imprisonment facilitates rebirth not as fire but as water, a suitable trope for an island nation. Once free, the breeze touches Kitty’s skin

as though a layer was gone, the sound of the river, bubbling on its stones, ran into the inside of her head as though water itself were running there.

Mrs Marwick, the dusty room, the child in the photographs, thinned and slipped away until she could hardly recall them. (p. 100)

Kitty uses the positive aspects of a colonial past to counter its destructive elements, a reassuring act for children seeking signs of agency, as well as for a postcolonial nation negotiating the unsavoury effects of political power.

When Kitty’s mother tells the girls about Lucy Marwick, the moral of the story is clearly aimed at Irene, whose cultured demeanour, posh accent, pretentious mother and politician father align her with an upper-class British tradition strikingly similar to that represented by the Marwicks. Mrs Wix suggests Lucy was very spoiled and could often be seen in town with her mother, “always sucking sweets, and dressed up to the nines”. Mrs Wix looks at Irene “as though there were a lesson for her in this” and explains,

Still, it wasn’t her fault. Her mother was a very social woman. And her father now, he ran for mayor. They had garden parties out here. And a duke and duchess to stay, and they had that bridge built specially for the carriage. That all stopped though, after Lucy drowned. No one saw Mrs Marwick again. She turned all her friends away. And her husband, he was just a sort of shadow of himself, my mother said. He gave up his business, gave up everything, and he soon died. (p. 102).

Given the parallels between the Marwicks and the Chalmers it is surprising that it should be Kitty who is mistaken for Lucy rather than Irene. A true gothic would almost certainly cast Irene in the role of persecuted maiden and probably have her repeat the events of the haunting past by threatening her with death by drowning. Gee’s novel adheres to the conventions of realism by suggesting that although the past does affect the present, there is nothing supernatural about this process. The Fire-Raiser optimistically suggests that individual agency does counter destiny and, like Kitty, Irene can meld seemingly disparate traditions to create one of strength rather than weakness. When she is teased because of her posh accent and teacher’s pet status, particular delight is taken in pairing her with Phil, the scavenging son of a gin-soaked peddler. For

32 Journal of Commonwealth Literature the children of the playground, there is “something especially exciting in imagining Irene with Phil Miller. It was a game they often played” (p. 30). Gee seems to suggest that the creation of “something especially exciting” relies on mixing old with new, and the classically cultured with a strength based on a life lived close to the land.

After Mrs Wix’s tale of the past, Kitty daydreams about Mrs Marwick in fine dresses and at garden parties and compares that with her present life in the dark parlour with the old photographs and the yellowed sheet music on the piano. This comparison makes her feel “very sad, and frightened too, at the danger and dreadfulness of life, and the mystery of time passing by and making things old, and things that happened long ago staying alive and turning people into different shapes” (p. 102). The past is both idyllic and a threat: once beautiful but now corrupt, it can never be relived and never truly escaped. Marwick especially resents his mother’s journeys “into the past where he was at fault” and responds by completely repressing that past. “Lucy? Who was Lucy?” he asks. He no longer remembers her face; all he remembers is “being locked in the dark” (p. 113). Being deprived of light is equated with being trapped in the past, and Mrs Marwick cries “No light!” in “a terrible voice” (p. 114) as part of her attempt to escape the knowledge of what she has lost.

Hedges’ attempts to enlighten his charges rely on this dichotomy between a dark past of superstition and a bright future of rationalism. It is no coincidence that the teacher spends a great deal of time in the Observatory attempting to pierce the darkness of the heavens. Phil thinks of the inside of the dome as a skull and the thought of spiders in it makes him shiver and his “skin prickle” (p. 103). The children have not yet learnt to put aside superstition in favour of Enlightenment values and the moon seen through the telescope becomes “strange, almost terrifying” (p. 103) rather than clarified. Its size is overwhelming and threatens to crush Phil. He has seen the moon many times, “full, swollen, yellow as a poorman’s orange, rising over the hills, and that had not made him afraid” (pp. 103-4), but the superior view offered by the telescope makes him feel there might be “things up there watching him” (p. 104). When he uses the instrument to spy on the Marwicks having tea, the rational view it offers is combined with the irrational, and he exclaims, “He’s giving her sandwiches. Beetroot, that’s what it is. It looks like blood” (p. 105).

Terry Castle suggests that a paradoxical result of the rationalist imperatives of the Age of Enlightenment was the production of a new experience of strangeness and anxiety. What is inexplicable in scientific or secular terms potentially gains power as it threatens the validity of rationality to explain the world, provoking an anxiety registered as the uncanny.6 Phil must master his fear of the uncanny observatory, which seems “like a buried skull, half out of the ground”, in order to

Monstrous Identities33 use the telescope to monitor the fire-raiser’s movements. He insists he has never been frightened of the dark, but when he enters the strange space in which the telescope rears up on its back legs “like a praying mantis”, he admits to a certain amount of anxiety. Although he reminds himself that Hedges described the telescope as an optic nerve, this seems to “make it less scientific, more spooky” (p. 137). The success of the children’s struggle against the fire-raiser depends on rational forces wielded by New Zealanders against a threat associated with the irrational and the colonial past. Phil’s homelessness and shameful parentage render him the very antithesis of the values represented by Mrs Chalmers and Mrs Bolton, and he soon comes to represent New Zealand agency in real life as well as in the patriotic pageant. With the eyes of his friends upon him waiting for instructions from their new leader, Phil feels as though “he was on the stage again, playing New Zealand – but this time he was sure of himself. He made them lean close, and told his plan” (p. 136).

By overcoming superstitious anxieties, the children manage to catch Marwick red-handed and prevent the destruction of the school, a particularly potent site of rational knowledge which is also a home away from home. The irrational threat that invades the homely and the rational must be fought in a space where the ambiguity of the uncanny and the canny are combined. Phil and Noel lock themselves in the belfry tower while the girls ring the school bell for help and the fire-raiser attempts to break down the door. Noel suddenly cries, “Miss Perez!” as if “she had reached out from her cupboard and plucked the hair on the nape of his neck”. He finds the key hanging on its nail, opens the cupboard door and seems “to feel her fingers reach for him. She was luminous, alive in her coffin. She grinned at him” (p. 145). Phil and Noel embrace the skeleton metaphorically and literally when they put her dry arms round their necks, and she rattles and seems to laugh while the door bulges with Marwick’s blows. They position the skeleton facing the door and when the fire-raiser bursts into the belfry he finds himself confronted with the spectre of death. The bell suddenly stops ringing and to Marwick, the skeleton “came into being with the silence”:

Her bones were bright in the inky blackness. Nothing existed outside her.

Slowly she opened her hands. Jerkily, possessively, raised her arms. She reached for him. Marwick screamed. He covered his face. He left the table leg and shuffled into a corner. The wall stopped him. He squatted there and watched her over his elbow. His eyes leaked tears down his face. (p. 146) Although Marwick is a grown man of impressive size, faced with a demystified object representing Enlightenment values, he suddenly becomes “as small as a child”, his eyes “dark with horror” (p. 146).

34 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

A realistic threat which has been gothicized is thus conquered by a rationalized gothic motif.

The parameters of the gothic are famously ill-defined and it is often considered a slippery or elusive genre. This is particularly true in the New Zealand literary context, which has no real starting-point from which to consider the gothic. While British gothic has a clear tradition beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and developing through novels such as Stoker’s Dracula and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray and while the American tradition has Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, New Zealand literature displays little evidence of a gothic canon. New Zealand literature has long focussed on the championing of the local and the specific in order to create and reinforce ideas of a national identity and while a consequence of this stance was the critical neglect of particular literary genres such as the gothic and science fiction, Gee’s novel shows how genre motifs can be employed in literature adhering to more “acceptable” modes. The Fire-Raiser clearly adheres to nationalist notions of New Zealand literature by including local idioms and settler anxieties and by repudiating traditional value structures, and its simultaneous use of gothic’s concern with the monstrous, rather than mitigating the social critique implied in the critical realist stance, actually reinforces it. The threat to Jessop is not an irrational vampire or ghost, but the power of socio-political structures based on outmoded systems of knowledge. Conquering this threat involves rejecting the superstitions of the past and championing a rational future for a New Zealand identity free from the influence of Empire-touting pedants with “plummy” (p. 111) accents.

While The Fire-Raiser is clearly a novel influenced by critical realism and gothic fantasy, it is, above all, a novel aimed at children. The uncanny ability of the fire-raiser to remain “close” to the children, his loping run and weirdly upraised arm render him a nightmarish figure familiar to children from fairy tales and fantasy. If gothic has any direct connection to the history of children’s literature as a genre, then this is most likely to be the cautionary tale.7 While the gothic elements of Gee’s novel certainly have a psychoanalytical appeal and adhere to Bruno Bettelheim’s theories regarding the importance of fantasy to children’s psychic development, the novel’s realism remains intent on a social purpose. The more didactic elements of the book, such as Hedges’ thought, “Beethoven was a German, and so was Bismark, and so’s the Kaiser. And Shakespeare was English, but so was Butcher Cumberland” (p. 109), are rather too cerebral for a young audience. The mob violence that erupts in the town might be especially fearful for an adult reader all too aware of its potential repercussions, but Jobling’s provocation, “Who doesn’t want to go out and shoot a Hun right now? For our glorious Empire? For Mother England?” (p. 118) is

Monstrous Identities35 hardly the stuff which children’s fears are made of. It is revealing that when Gee does describe the mob, he does so in gothic terms: a “black wave” of figures advances in the street with eyes and hands and teeth white like foam; with “yellow eyes” and “panting mouths,” the mob are “like wolves in an Arctic night” (p. 120). While certainly not a part of the “high” gothic tradition or a schlock-horror gothic in the pulp tradition of Stephen King, Gee’s novel utilizes gothic motifs as a kind of window-dressing, investing social critique with the titillating thrills of popular fantasy. The Fire-Raiser warns children of the threat contained in the outside world and the home environment, and reassures readers that by banding together and using rational skills and knowledge, such threats, no matter how fearsome, can be identified and conquered. Fires might be raised, the novel tells us, but they are eventually put out.

NOTES

1 Hazel Rochman, The Booklist, 15 October 1992, p. 424.

2 Mark Williams, Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists,

Auckland:Auckland UP, 1990, p. 28.

3 See Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth and Coleridge,

Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones, London: Methuen, 1963, p. 248.

4 Maurice Gee, The Fire-Raiser, Auckland: Penguin, 1986, p. 67. Subsequent page

references are to this edition and are included in the body of the text.

5 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche and C. Patrick

O’Donnell, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1978, p. 15.

6 See the Introduction to Terry Castle’s The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-

Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny,New York: OUP, 1995, pp. 3-20.

7 See the Introduction to The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the

Borders, ed. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis, New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 12.