"For the use of the magazine morons": Edith Wharton rewrites the tale of the fantastic

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Gianfranca Balestra

The case of "All Souls'" follows a similar pattern but brings different results. The protagonist, Sara Clayburn, is an energetic, rational person who, confronted with terrifying silence and mystery, tries to penetrate it, but finally runs away, abandoning her investigation. On All Souls' Eve she meets a strange woman walking toward her house "to visit one of the girls" (255); she subsequently slips on the ice, injures her ankle and finds herself confined to her bed. After a sleepless and uncomfortable night, she waits in vain for her maid to help her: the bell does not work, the electricity and telephone are cut off, the heat is not functioning. In spite of the pain in her ankle and her prescribed immobility, Mrs. Clayburn decides to get up, look for the servants, and find out what has happened; but her painful exploration of the cold and empty house bring no explanation. The next day everything is back to normal: the house is functioning as usual, the servants arc back at work, and the maid denies ever having deserted her mistress, suggesting that pain and fever might have caused Mrs. Clayburn's confusion. The idea that the whole traumatic experience might have been a hallucination is obviously rejected by the protagonist, but it allows the reader to hesitate. Mrs. Clayburn herself is absolutely certain that something strange has happened in her house, but she cannot prove it and tries to put the whole matter out of her mind. But when, exactly one year later, she again meets the same strange woman going toward the house, the mystery of her presence connected with the past disorienting experience brings back the terror and causes her to flee, abandoning her house forever.

"All Souls'" is thematically, linguistically and structurally founded on hesitation and deferral, undecidability, the impossibility of knowledge. The very first words of the tale define the events as "queer and inexplicable," while the whole first paragraph is, as Ellen Powers Stengel notes, "ceaselessly tentative, punctuated by dashes, parentheses, and ellipses" (87), thus underlining the difficulty of relating what cannot be understood. Though the narrator, a cousin of Sara Clayburn, claims to record the facts as clearly and objectively as possible, their very existence is questioned from the beginning: "I'll efface myself, and tell the tale, not in my cousin's words, for they were too confused and fragmentary but as I built it up gradually out of her half-avowals and nervous reticences. If the thing happened at all--and I must leave you to judge of that--I think it must have happened in this way" (254). This narrative frame foregrounds the problems of discourse, focusing on the role of narrator and reader, while partially invalidating the source of the story itself--that is, Sara's testimony. At the same time the narrator denies the tale the status of ghost story ("this isn't exactly a ghost story" [252]), while defending the genre against the danger of extinction in modern times, and stressing the efficacy of the terror experienced by a modern autonomous woman in a "comfortable suburban house with refrigerator and central heating" (252).