If you’ve ever read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818, rev. 1831), you probably learned at least two things: 1) the movies have never done it justice, and 2) it presents a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. Catherine Crowe ups the narrative frames by one in “A Story for a Winter Fireside” (1847), later retitled “The Monk’s Story.” The piece is easier to follow than this chart might suggest, but humor me here:
- The outer frame is a third-person narration about Charles Lisle, who is visiting the Grahams at their Christmas gathering. He asks his host to give him a room with a good, working lock. This seems a bit unfriendly, if not downright paranoid, so Mr. Graham and the other guests say such a room will be provided on the condition that Charles explain the reason.
- Charles does so at the fireside that evening, creating another narrative frame. This one is first-person, and it takes us back to Charles’s travels through France.
- Early in his tale, Charles repeats an anecdote told to him by Père Jolivet, the prior of the monastery of Pierre Châtel. This first-person story concerns a monk known as Fra Dominique, who calls himself Brother Lazarus. Dominque has the bad habit of walking in his sleep and, while so entranced, attempting to stab people in their beds! Jolivet narrowly escaped such a fate, and afterward, he interrogated Dominique to grasp what happened. (It seems safe to say that Crowe’s inspiration for this part of her tale is the strikingly similar anecdote attributed to Dom Duhaget, “once prior of the Chartreuse convent of Pierre Chatel,” in Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste: Or, Transcendental Gastronomy. This popular book — revealing the deep roots of the “foodie” movement — was first published in France in 1826.)
- At this interrogation, Dominique relates a terrible incident from his childhood to Jolivet, creating the core first-person narration. He had been sharing his mother’s bed when he witnessed her murder by stabbing. (And couldn’t a Freudian have a field day with that?) Thereafter, Dominique became plagued by nightmares and sleepwalking.
Now, Dominique tells Jolivet that the killer was his ne’er-do-well, hotheaded brother-in-law. But this begs the question of why the monk assumes the role of the murderer in his sleeping reenactments of the traumatic experience. Is he extracting revenge? Is he misremembering who killed his mother? Psychologically denying his own horrible deed? Flat-out lying about it? We can’t really answer that question, but Crowe’s use of these multiple first-person narrators certainly raises the possibility of an unreliable one. It’s along the lines of what Shelley does when the creature, who we know has murdered a child and shrewdly framed a nanny for the crime, still somehow stirs readers’ sympathy by presenting himself as the real victim when narrating his sad story to Dr. Frankenstein. Should we trust the creature? Should we believe the monk?
Ambiguity: thy name is nineteenth-century authors.
We then bounce back to Charles’s frame to learn he next journeyed to Spain. And it’s there that Dominique, now thought to be dead, rises again. “Brother Lazarus,” indeed! With Charles as his target now, the monk yet again reenacts his childhood trauma, ending with another narrow escape. Crowe ends the fireside tale by briefly returning to that third-person frame. SPOILER: Charles is granted a room with a working lock.
But this is more than just a tidy ending. The chances are very, very slim that Dominique would invade Charles’s bedroom back home in England. But Charles, like the beleaguered monk himself, has suffered a trauma — and that’s something that haunts a person deeply and irrationally. Interestingly, even Dominique’s return from “death” mirrors how the effects of trauma resurface relentlessly and can’t be buried. This idea runs throughout “The Monk’s Story,” and it shows an understanding of the human psyche that would come to be diagnosed and treated by psychoanalysts in the two centuries to follow. We might say Crowe was ahead of her time — if not for the similar psychological insights being made by her contemporaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Crowe is working on the same level as these better-remembered authors here.
To be sure, “The Monk’s Story” is one of Crowe’s most powerful and thought-provoking pieces of short fiction.
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