‘I wear men’s lives’: The Maternal Femme Fatale in R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Crimson Weaver’

Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868-1917) was a prolific writer who, over the course of his career, produced 22 novels and nearly 100 short stories. His fiction is notable for the way in which he blends together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange stories that, according to critic and Gilchrist editor Dan Pieterson, anteceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] He was certainly recognised and praised to a certain degree by his literary contemporaries. H.G. Wells ranked him among such successful writers as George Gissing, Joseph Conrad and George Moore, including him in what he called ‘a mixed handful of jewels.’[2] Despite this, it is probable that you will not have heard of Gilchrist, unless you have encountered the recent reprint of his stories, I Am Stone (2021) for the British Library ‘Tales of the Weird’ series, edited by Pieterson. Sadly, he never gained enough lasting popularity to make his mark on the canon, and was often considered by his friends and fellow writers an overlooked talent.

Thomas Moult writes in a 1926 issue of The Bookman that Gilchrist is ‘perhaps substantial proof that the world sometimes allows good work to go unrewarded’[3] and concludes that ‘his mastery, with all its limitations, ought to have been and still should be more generally acclaimed.’[4] Gilchrist does not appear to have benefited much from the revival in Decadent studies of the 1990s and 2000s, either. Apart from the work of Pieterson and a Master’s thesis by scholar Laurence C. Bush, very little attention has been given to Gilchrist’s work in an academic sense. This is a shame, as I believe that his representation of women in particular was uniquely complex compared to that of his fellow Decadents. In my MA dissertation I explored Gilchrist’s merging of two popular fin de siècle tropes, the femme fatale and the mother figure. I argued that Gilchrist successfully subverts both archetypes, rooting his female characters in a matriarchal power that transcends the objectification of the male gaze and haunts his male protagonists. This is most apparent in his short story, ‘The Crimson Weaver’, where two men, wandering amidst a phantasmagorical landscape, encounter a beautiful, siren-like woman in a red dress. Helplessly drawn to her maternal embrace, the men fall prey to her parasitic devices. Ensnaring the men in the folds of her torn dress, she harvests their hearts and uses them as thread to repair her garment. The image is a striking analogy of a woman who commodifies men to fulfil her materialistic desires.

According to Bram Dijkstra, the attempt to sanitise the rediscovery of the female sex drive in the 1860s led to a trend of paintings depicting women as the personification of fertile nature.[5] Paintings like William Adolphe Bouguereau’s Alma Parens[6] of 1883, which features a woman, breasts bared, surrounded by a host of infants, who clutch her bosom, climb in her lap and hang from her neck (see fig. 1). Or Leon Frederic’s 1894 piece, Nature[7], in which a woman made almost entirely of flowers shelters several children in the leaves of her body (see fig. 2). Both paintings equate woman with abundance, solace, and self-sacrifice. She is fertile as the soil, as passive as flowers and has an infinite amount to give. These images spoke to persistent male ideals about the function of women. Not only were women valued for their ability to procreate and raise children, they were also expected to function as figurative wombs, passive providers of quiet support and comfort, their main objective to sustain the lives of their children and husband. The domestic space itself can be viewed as an extension of the womb. If cared for well by the woman of the house, it would be perpetually cosy and warm, a solace from the harsh capitalist, imperial arena of the working man. However, these ideals were threatened by the lived reality of a new generation of assertive and autonomous women. Middle class fin de siècle men, having inherited from their mothers – and art – an image of woman as wholly self-sacrificial, were discomfited by their female contemporaries’ ‘perfidious unwillingness to continue to exist passively as the yielding soil from which the male could grow.’[8] ‘The Crimson Weaver’ explores conflicted male attitudes towards the mother figure. Reworking the trope of the femme fatale to represent a sexual, selfish mother, Gilchrist reveals anxiety about the potential of the mother to rediscover repressed desires and ambitions that could disrupt her passive dedication to men.

In order to enslave men, the weaver must first ensnare them. Like a spider catching a fly in her web, the weaver tempts her prey. In femme fatale tradition, this is achieved through seduction. It would be easy to read the weaver as a prostitute or mistress, her sexuality emblazoned on her body through her torn red dress. With her strutting ‘gait of a peacock’, (p.11) dress embroidered with glossy eyes (p.11) and clawed ‘feet shapen as those of a vulture,’ (p.14) she is a combination of peacock and harpy, the classic femme fatale. However, rather than seducing men, she shrouds them in the comforting pull of the womb. When she kneels before a man he is rejuvenated: ‘Youth came back in a flood to my Master. His shrivelled skin filled out; the dying sunlight turned to gold the whiteness of his hair’ (p.11). Upon encountering the weaver, the man experiences a nostalgic return to boyhood, her comforting presence restoring a sense of vulnerability and innocence. The restoration of his youth evokes the revitalising power of blood in Dracula, but is also reminiscent of the primary mother-son dynamic. In her book about Vernon Lee, Patricia Pulham posits that vampirism can serve as a model for how an infant in the womb feeds on the mother’s blood-enriched placenta.[9] Taking this into consideration, the ‘bloody clew’ (p.14) that the weaver draws from the hearts of her victims, described elsewhere in the text as a ‘crimson cord’ (p.11) can be said to resemble an umbilical cord. However, once the men are connected to the weaver by this cord, it is she who draws regenerative power from them. The bloody clew is a thread of flesh gathered from the hearts of her victims that the weaver uses in her loom to repair her tattered dress. After feeding on the Master, she changes ‘her tattered robe for one new and lustrous as freshly-drawn blood’ (p.13) and her youth and beauty are replenished, their wonder ‘now increased a hundredfold’ (p.13). In this deft inversion of roles, the embodiment of maternity rejects motherhood and instead becomes its antithesis, feeding parasitically on the male. The weaver claims that she ‘wears men’s lives’ (p.14). On the one hand a predatory commodification of male desire, this also connotes how a woman carries a baby in her womb, reminding the reader that the mother is the origin of all mankind. In fact, she herself states, ‘I – who have existed from the beginning’ (p.14). Additionally, this claim suggests that as a woman and mother, she adorns herself with the successes, ambitions and pursuits of the men in her household, rather than pursuing her own life. Here, however, rather than carrying men inside her, nurtured, she harvests them and then displays their blood externally, as a dress; a means of serving her own vanity. This ostentatious display of her ability to bear children converts the significance of foetus from innocent to a monstrous indication of conception. In a haunting revelation, motherhood becomes reunited with sex.

The inversion of a nurturing image to a threatening one encapsulates the ambiguity of the maternal voice, which Pulham calls the ‘umbilical net’,[10] because it is both soothing and constricting. The thread that the weaver spins, keeping the protagonist eternally tethered, no matter his physical distance from her, ‘watching hour by hour the bloody clew ever unwinding […] and passing over the western hills to the Palace of the Siren’ (p.14) works like this umbilical net. Initially, he is captivated by her beauty and so soothed by the kiss he receives from her that he feels he is in paradise. However, his surrender to the care of the mother figure results in his infinite ensnarement and the castration of his friend, whose ‘head, ugly and cadaverous’ (p.14) the weaver keeps close inside the ‘web’ (p.14) of her dress, just as one keeps a foetus when pregnant. This transformation of what should be the place of ultimate solace, the womb, into a deadly spider’s web, presents the mother as uncanny. The central space of domestic comfort, the origin of all life, becomes a trap.

As the woman ceases to be passive, she becomes manipulator instead, ‘deftly passing crimson thread over crimson thread,’ (p.14) weaving a net to catch and control her victims. Her position as manipulator is emphasised when the protagonist, about to encounter the weaver for the second time, feels ‘pain, as though giant spiders had woven’ (p.12) about his body, signifying his ensnarement in her net. This thread-like imagery not only connotes an umbilical cord, but also puppetry. In controlling her victims through manipulation, the weaver plays God, as foreshadowed by the gentleman’s earlier prayer to ‘Mother’. This playing God is coupled with the weaver’s commodification of the male, reaping his blood for her dress, similarly to how land is tilled for cotton, an inversion of woman’s role as fertile earth. Combined, these two roles, commodifier and manipulator, position the weaver as a child playing with a toy, manipulating a smaller inanimate commodity in the image of man, to do with as she wills. In this way, the images in ‘The Crimson Weaver’ resemble the work of French fin de siècle artist, Henry Somm. Several of Somm’s pieces depict men enslaved by women, particularly his piece entitled Jouets,[11] which captures a woman walking past a shop window. In one hand she holds a string, or rope, at the other end of which is attached a miniature man. In her other hand, she holds a second miniature man, whilst a third is squashed into her pocket. The difference in scale and the toys depicted in the shop window, emphasise the men’s resemblance to puppets. Elizabeth K. Menon notes how the connotations of control and their link to the commercial setting are not subtle: men have become puppets to women who, more interested in fashion and consumerism than romance, manipulate them for money.[12] What Somm failed to notice was that his scathing satire of female vanity was simply a reversal of the existing gender dynamic: one in which women, for generations, had been enslaved to the will of father and husband. Like Henrik Ibsen before her, Vernon Lee also believed a similar toy, the doll, to be an appropriate metaphor for the Victorian woman, powerless to patriarchal control. Handed from Father to husband, the Victorian woman was ‘amalgamated with the man’s property,’[13] and treated as a ‘possession.’[14] Dolls were also good analogues for the male-perpetuated ideal of what Pulham calls the ‘seamless purity’[15] of the female body. They were identical, statuesque, their smooth bodies unthreatening, with their lack of sexual organs. Their pliable limbs made them as susceptible to manipulation as a puppet. Lee also believed the relationship between man and woman to be asymmetrical, ‘a big man, as in certain archaic statues, holding in his hand a little woman; a god … protecting a human creature; or… a human being playing with a doll.’[16] ‘The Crimson Weaver’s’ closing image of a prostrate man connected to a larger-than-life woman via a chord, ‘watching hour by hour the bloody clew ever unwinding’ (p.14), sees Gilchrist transposing this dynamic, highlighting how even a mocking critique of the new consumerist woman, like Somm’s, actually conceals an anxiety over the reversal of power dynamics.

‘The Crimson Weaver’ is just one example of how R. Murray Gilchrist sensitively subverts the tropes which dominated fin de siècle cultural representations of women. By infusing the femme fatale with maternal characteristics, Gilchrist explores male anxieties about women’s deprioritisation of motherhood due to the rediscovery of their suppressed desires and ambitions. He applies the well-trodden tropes of the vampire and the doll in an original way to depict a woman who, through the commodification of men and the expression of her own individuality, sexual actualisation and self-fashioning, is able to revitalise herself. In doing so, she is able to become an autonomous being rather than simply an object onto which male fantasies are projected.

Kaya Purchase has just graduated with an English Literature MA from the University of Liverpool. She is currently applying to do a PhD in creative writing. She loves to write both creative pieces and literary journalism. Her words have been featured in Aurelia Magazine, Tribune and World Literature Today and she regularly contributes book reviews and author interviews to nb. magazine. You can find her on Instagram @kayaebony and you can read her writing at kayapurchase.blogspot.com.

Notes & references

[1] Dan Pieterson, ‘Robert Murray Gilchrist and the Gothic Weird,’ Romancing the Gothic https://youtu.be/Giq35piDfsQ?si=7AlBsYJZcwBDBCg5 [last accessed 24^th September 2024]

[2] H.G Wells, ‘The Country of the Blind’ in The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (UK: The Project Gutenburg, 1980)  < The Country of the Blind, by H. G. Wells (gutenberg.org) > [last accessed 22^nd September 2024]

[3] Thomas Moult, ‘The Case of Murray Gilchrist,’ The Bookman, 71:421 (1926) pp.7-8 (p.8)

[4] Moult,  p.8

[5]  Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in fin de siècle Culture (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1986), p.83

[6] Dijkstra, p.84

[7] Dijkstra, p.84

[8] Dijkstra, p.206

[9] Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Portsmouth, UK: Ashgate, 2008) p.135

[10] Pulham, p.133

[11] Henry Somm, Jouets, Ink Drawing (1879) – featured in Elizabeth K. Menon, Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme fatale(US: University of Illinois Press, 2006) p.164-167 (p.165)

[12] Menon, p.164-167

[13]  Vernon Lee, ‘The Economic Dependence of Women,’ The North American Review, 175 (1902) pp.71- 90 (p.75)

[14] Lee, p.75

[15] Pulham, p.71

[16] Lee, p.75