Arthur Machen’s short story “The White People” remains a masterpiece and perhaps his most difficult work of fiction — what Absalom, Absalom! is for Faulkner, what Finnegans Wake is for Joyce, “The White People” is for Machen. Though Machen wrote the story when Joyce was a teenager and Faulkner a toddler, its challenges are cousins to those of high Modernism: the mingling and destabilizing of narrative voices, use of symbolism not easily accessible to the ordinary reader, elision of key details, etc. While the differences between Machen and the famous Modernists are perhaps greater than their similarities, the reading strategies we use to make sense of works like Absalom, Absalom! and Finnegans Wake are more useful for “The White People” than the strategies we use to make sense of, say, writings by Charles Dickens or Stephen King.
It took me a long time to warm to Machen, and especially to be able to see the rich wonders available in “The White People”. While some elements of personality and experience probably kept me at a distance from Machen for a while, it seems to me now that my biggest obstacle was that I lacked any key to opening up what was in the text.
Ultimately, that key came from Per Faxneld’s book Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth Century Culture — a book that does not mention Machen, but nonetheless would lead me to see some of what I hadn’t noticed in “The White People”. Faxneld’s insights into the use of Satanic figures in 19th century art and literature allowed me an interpretation that made Machen’s story truly exciting, even as that interpretation stands in opposition to the traditional way of reading the story, and the way I assume Machen himself intended. What I had lacked was a way to understand why the central section of “The White People” is as long, dense, and strange as it is; its length seemed to far exceed its necessity for understanding what I thought the story was about, and so the central section felt interminable, almost unreadable. This was not the fault of the story, but rather of my interpretation of the story. Once I had a way to understand what the central section was doing, and how it related to the story overall, reading “The White People” became vastly more pleasurable.
What I will propose here is that “The White People” can be read as a story of a young woman’s liberation, and of the men who seek to dominate and oppress the paths to and stories of such liberation. In “The White People”, men speak much of sin and wickedness and horror and Evil. We can choose to join them in that — or we can choose a different way and seek a liberation from the imprecations of the patriarchs.
Once upon a time, a young girl with a green notebook had a vision…
Satanic Feminism and Decadence
The idea of women as connected to Satan goes back to the beginning of the Bible and the story of Eve. Faxneld’s book studies the way reformers in the 19th century used the idea of God as the dominant social force and Satan is a counter-force. In a society that, for instance, associates God with the dominant social position and considers women inferior to men, anyone who wants to argue otherwise is inevitably going to be on the side of Satan. Faxneld writes:
Many left-wing thinkers felt that Christianity was a pillar of this social order. Historically, the figure of the Devil had functioned as a tool for patrolling social borders, since he symbolized lust, hedonism, pride, et cetera. Freethinkers, such as libertines or Romantic and Decadent writers, were naturally quite attracted to some of these supposed vices. Satan thus came to be employed by some as a titillating emblem of various “forbidden” pleasures and urges, alongside socialist use of the figure as the prototypical altruistic rebel. Satanic feminism … reflects this spectrum of radicalism and is … intertwined with prominent anticlerical, left-wing, artistic, and esoteric currents of its time. In all these discourses, Satan was occasionally used as a positive symbol. (2)
Faxneld’s study is immense (more than 500 pages with narrow margins and small typeface) and so I could not possibly do justice to its argument and evidence here, but there are a few insights worth bringing up before we plunge into Machen.
Among the literary traditions Machen was familiar with, if not drawing directly on, were the Gothic and Decadence. Faxneld writes about both movements in great detail. Some of the most prominent Gothic novels, he says, “are all quite indecisive in their vaguely hinted sympathy for the Devil, and for the women empowered by allying themselves with him.” This indecisiveness will carry forward through many other literary and artistic movements, including most of the ones influenced by the Gothic (if they are not outright Christian propaganda such as The Exorcist). Faxneld is particularly good on the complexities and contradictions of Satanic representation among the Decadents, a discussion that has a lot of bearing on Machen’s work, since he was associated with the movement (sometimes to his annoyance) and much of his best writing was done in London in the 1890s, the center of English-language Decadence.
Decadent work is filled with misogyny — but there are also, Faxneld notes, “several instances of Decadents explicitly hymning and celebrating the demonic feminine or the femme fatale as laudable, desirable, or positive in some sense” (283). The femme fatale was a common concept in Decadence, and even when used as a figure of terror to men, which it commonly was (cf. Helen Vaughan in Machen’s “The Great God Pan”), it remains nonetheless a figure of female power.
While many Decadent men were at best skeptical of women (and often dismissive and contemptuous), their perceptions could be conflicted because Decadence tended to venerate femininity. Faxneld writes:
In Great Britain, conservative critics linked the so-called New Woman authors to the Decadent writers, since both were enemies of hegemonic culture and perceived as products of the corrupting influence of French literature, which threatened to dissolve proper gender roles. There is some support in the documented self-image of Decadents for this claim about the genre (and its associated subculture) subverting gender constructions. … For all his occasional (and in some cases quite sustained and pronounced) misogyny, the male Decadent certainly did appropriate various traits and metaphors traditionally coded as feminine: flower symbolism, passivity, vanity, hypersensitivity, enthusiasm for fashion and ornamentation, renunciation of the struggle for self-realization in the outside world (which was replaced with a private and domestic life, not unlike that deemed appropriate for women). (270)
Faxneld notes that the male embrace of femininity is not in itself feminist — a man can choose to embody femininity out of a supremacist sense that men can do femininity better than women can, or even from a sense that a feminine male makes women unnecessary. (You see this in the misogyny lurking in some gay male culture.) Still, most Decadent male writers were, at least occasionally, unreflective or confused in their presentation and opinions about women, femininity, and feminism. Very few were ideologically misogynistic or feminist. Their deepest convictions lay elsewhere, even as they employed the trappings of femininity.
What Decadents were committed to were ideas of inversion (sometimes including “sexual inversion”) — good as bad, bad as good, ugliness as beauty, beauty as ugliness, etc. Faxneld writes:
Decadence is a genre intensely concerned with negotiating inversions and counter-readings. As a self-designation, it represented an appropriation of a pejorative term turned on its head. This happened gradually, with authors like Baudelaire and Gautier shifting its signification in essays they wrote in the 1850s and 1860s. Satanism, an inversion of Christianity, naturally fit well with such a project of counter-discourse. Even so, the genre is less Satanic than is commonly assumed, and many Decadents were ambivalent rather than wholeheartedly positive towards Satan. As an object of aesthetic pleasure and transgressive titillation, he was clearly popular among them, but he did not in any large-scale manner play the role of a symbolic freedom fighter observable in Romanticism. An explicit Satanist like Przybyszewski is hence an aberration rather than a representative example. Nonetheless, Decadence was closely connected to Satanism in the public mind, and in the critique formulated by its conservative enemies, like Max Nordau. (325)
Inversions and dualities are important to “The White People”, but before moving on to the story itself, we should say something about Decadence, Christianity, and Satanism, since Machen’s father was a clergyman and he himself was an avowed Anglican who, in the later decades of his life, faithfully attended church. Yet his was not a straightforward, churchbound Christianity. Instead, it was more akin to Christian mysticism. He also possessed great interest in the history of paganism and had more knowledge of occultism and occult literature than most writers of weird fiction, having early in his career made some money preparing a bibliography of occult books, and then in the late 1890s briefly joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Machen’s attraction to occultism seems to have been mostly aesthetic (he liked rituals and traditions), and he often disparaged Theosophy and Spiritualism, but he was perpetually fascinated by alchemy, a topic we will return to regarding “The White People”.
Though he remained an Anglican, Machen was attracted to elements of Roman Catholicism, and in this he was similar to a number of Decadent writers. For some Decadents, Catholicism may have been a simple path to heresy — to be able to blaspheme, they needed to, in some way or another, believe in what they were blaspheming. Faxneld puts it this way:
Satanism, which comes in many varieties, is not necessarily a confirmation of Christianity as somehow valid, and—as we have seen with Bakunin, for example—certainly does not automatically entail that the person who utilizes a Satanic discourse is somehow a crypto-Christian. Yet, it is undoubtedly titillating in a special way for oneself if some vestiges of belief in the sanctity of the church remain. The Decadent fascination with Catholicism can to a certain degree also be seen in this light: proclaiming oneself a Catholic, or even trying to convince oneself this is the case, makes it more exciting to blaspheme and sin. (268)
For all their love of shock values and inversions, a number of Decadents were conservatives, even proto-fascists. Few, if any, were atheists. Faxneld writes:
Aside from the equality of all, another favourite enemy of the Decadents was secularism. The proposed alternative was, however, seldom anything along the lines of, let us say, a mild, mellow, and well-adjusted Christian belief. Instead, Decadents were typically anticlerical and highly idiosyncratic in their religious convictions. …Catholicism was still the religion of choice for most of them, even those from Protestant countries and families. Their approach to it, though, was usually more or less unconventional and outrageous, with the extravagant ritualism and perceived “anachronism” (which they found poetical and appealing as an antidote to the deplorably vulgar present) of Catholicism being among the most attractive aspects to them. Religious terminology often framed the recurring Decadent tirades condemning the decay of propriety and culture in general, a rhetoric where they emphasized they were not libertines and destructive revolutionaries relishing this development, but reactionaries weeping over it. …Many of them tend to be quite ambivalent about libertinism, liberalism, epicureanism, immoderate refinement, and unconventional bohemian lifestyles—both allured by such things and denouncing them, or embracing some elements of this kind (we can here note that homo- or bisexuality was not uncommon among Decadents, with Lorrain and Verlaine as well-known examples) and simultaneously championing many old-fashioned values. (256-257)
Though his relationship to the Decadent movement is far from straightforward, it is not difficult to recognize a lot of Machen in Faxneld’s description there. The complexities and contradictions will appear between the lines of “The White People”, which brings both drama and dialectical force to them.
The Structures of “The White People”
Before readers can find anything meaningful in “The White People”, they must attend to the story’s structures: the structure of the text as a whole, the structure of its sentences and paragraphs, as well as its symbolic structure.
What we notice most easily is that the story is separated into three parts, the first labeled as “Prologue”, the second as “The Green Book”, and the third as “Epilogue”. Paging through the story, we notice that the first and third parts are relatively short, the middle part quite long. Perhaps even more obviously, we notice that the first and third parts are composed of short paragraphs (mostly dialogue) and the second part, despite its length, has very few paragraphs. The visual effect of the middle section is of intimidating density, a wall of text. In the Oxford World’s Classics edition I have at hand, the longest paragraph runs for 14 pages. We might think of the famous final section of Joyce’s Ulysses, “Molly Bloom’s soliloquy”, with its long paragraphs of unpunctuated stream of consciousness. That would get us onto a wrong path, though. Despite what some critics have said, “The Green Book” section is not stream of consciousness, even if we recognize that stream of consciousness has various definitions, and plenty of stream of consciousness is less overtly experimental than what Joyce wrote. The problem with calling “The Green Book” stream of consciousness is that it obscures what that section of the story is doing within “The White People” as a whole. It is not attempting to give us a representation of the girl’s unmediated thinking; rather, it is presenting the conceit that the Green Book is her own written narrative, with that narrative framed by the conversations of Ambrose and Cotgrave.
Here is a crux of the difficulty of interpreting “The White People” — we must begin by being absolutely clear about the levels of narrative at play. Too many readers seem to think the structure is obvious and therefore doesn’t deserve close analysis. But this is where, I think, interpretations can go off the rails. So we must state the obvious, lest it escape us. Here is a simple summary:
- Prologue: A conversation between “Ambrose the recluse” (who dominates), a man named Cotgrave, and an unnamed friend who, having introduced Cotgrave to Ambrose, eventually leaves the two men to their conversation. At the end of the Prologue, Ambrose gives Cotgrave a green pocket notebook to read.
- The Green Book: After an introductory paragraph, we have the contents of the notebook, which, according to its own narrative, was discovered by an unnamed girl in a drawer in a bureau she was exploring while bored on a rainy day. From the description in the prologue and at the beginning of this section, the notebook seems to be older than the girl, who is 16 years old at the time she is writing the narrative, though it tells of many things from when she was younger, particularly when she was 13 years old. She writes with simple words, few paragraphs, and her sentences often sprint along with and, and, and, making the rhythms and syntax similar to those Gertrude Stein used when writing about children in The Making of Americans. The girl describes her nurse, who initiated her into experiences of magic and something like the land of faerie. To try to understand her strange experiences, she retells folktales originally told to her by the nurse, tales that, by the end of her narrative, the girl has come to believe are true. The progress of this section is from a kind of ignorance to a kind of knowledge, from innocence to experience, from naivety to maturity, from doubt to belief.
- Epilogue: A return to third-person narrative, mostly dialogue, with short paragraphs. The epilogue is brief and describes Cotgrave’s conversation with Ambrose after reading the notebook. It ends with Ambrose describing the girl’s death — she had, he says, “poisoned herself” while sprawled in front of a white statue “of Roman workmanship” which “in the Middle Ages the followers of a very old tradition had known how to use … for their own purposes. In fact it had been incorporated into the monstrous mythology of the Sabbath.” On Ambrose’s command, the statue was “hammered … into dust and fragments”. And so it ends.
Here is what seems obvious to me, yet few critics I’ve read have ever commented on it: It is the girl’s own story that dominates “The White People”. Her story is directly accessible to us, the readers. Ambrose’s interpretation of the girl’s writing is a single interpretation, and we need not take it as authoritative. We have the evidence before us. We can assess Ambrose’s reading.
The great length of the middle section far exceeds any need for it to illustrate Ambrose’s ideas of evil and sin, which is what he uses the Green Book for. Prologues and epilogues are ancillary materials. The body and matter of “The White People” is the girl’s own story, told via her own writing of it in an old notebook.
The prologue and epilogue are like parodies of Platonic dialogues, with Ambrose in the role of Socrates and Cotgrave as the hapless interlocutor. Platonism and Neo-Platonism (a somewhat inaccurate and controversial term) are important philosophies for occultism, Decadence, and Christianity. In its deconstructive tendencies, “The White People” moves beyond the duality of reality/shadow and toward something more integrated and mystical, putting it into the realm of neoplatonic monism.
Jeffrey Michael Renye’s 2013 dissertation, Panic on the British Borderlands: The Great God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur Machen, proposes an oppressive power dynamic between Ambrose and the Green Book, which Renye sees as a kind of preservation of the girl as a possession of the older man. Ambrose’s name itself provides some clues:
As the mouthpiece for his society, Ambrose is a man whose name derives from one of the early fathers and original doctors of the Christian Church, and who takes upon himself the work of safeguarding information that he deems to be heresy and to be a threat to the entrenched power structure. That name refers to a pagan legend, too, because another one of his namesakes is what is referred to in Celtic literature as a wonder child, in this case a male named Ambrosius. In Machen’s story, the wonder child is female, and, in another shift, the narrative does not recognize as worthy her miraculous knowledge and abilities since she acts out of the range of the bounds drawn for her by church and state authorities. (59)
It is worth adding a small clarification, or at least emphasis, to Renye’s analysis: it is the prologue and epilogue narrative that does not recognize the girl as worthy, not the narrative of “The White People” as a whole, since the vast majority of the story is devoted to presenting the girl as becoming worthy. We do not lack her interpretation of her experiences; her interpretation takes up three times as many pages as the conversations between Ambrose and Cotgrave. If you believe that Ambrose is correct in his interpretation, that is your choice as a reader, but it is a choice you have made, not one the story has forced you into.
Renye is clear about what Ambrose stands for. Though he may parallel the tarot figure of The Hermit, Ambrose is, in truth, a “false, modern hermit, who is really popular orthodoxy cloaked in the seeming form of the independent-minded individual removed to the wilderness” (59). Ambrose is a dyspeptic, curmudgeonly old man who thinks of himself as an iconoclast. He rails against modern life and the vulgarity of kids these days, and, like so many self-satisfied curmudgeons, is at heart a reactionary traditionalist authoritarian.
Renye makes the vitally important point that despite “Ambrose’s belief that the girl’s journal is an example of esoteric sin, the allegations of the sinister nature of the girl’s enchantment, her use of innate gifts, and her meetings with the white people and the nymphs are unfounded” (65). If you accept Ambrose’s idea of sin and Evil, then yes, the girl is sinful and Evil — but nothing in the story forces us to agree with him. It is just as easy, and perhaps even easier, to see the girl in all sorts of other ways, separate from Ambrose’s interpretation and prejudices.
Consider Michael Cisco’s insightful summary of the story in Weird Fiction: A Genre Study:
This is a story about a teenaged girl, who is coming to a crossroads in her life—an illicit one, that isn’t supposed to be there. It should be her destiny to become a Victorian matron, to marry a Victorian man of her own or better class, keep a Victorian home commensurate with their station, entertain her family’s Victorian allies, and raise Victorian children. However, this unnamed girl does not really want to become a Victorian matron; the idea doesn’t seem real to her, and while she is not defiant, not determined to thwart society, this is because she is not a part of society, but only tenuously linked to it. The stories she tells herself over the course of this remarkable narrative are all the same: they’re all about people, mostly women, who don’t want to (or cannot) get conventionally married, because they are already married or promised to some other. This character is in a singular position; her circumstances allow her to believe she has a choice that is not supposed to be possible, which is the choice not to choose, to remain a child, and therefore to stay undefined, a denizen of faerieland. … The horror then, in part, is that she cannot avoid being compelled to choose. Ambrose and the narrator, it stands to reason, would not find her story so arresting if they had no share at all in a similar desire for release from the constraints of this ordinary world. (169)
Sin, Sanctity, and Sorcery
In an essay on Machen’s “curious Christianity” (collected in The Secret Ceremonies: Critical Essays on Arthur Machen, eds. Valentine & Jarvis, 2019), Iain Smith notes that references to “core Christian beliefs such as the Nicene Creed and the doctrine of atonement”, as well as any reference to Jesus Christ, are “conspicuous by their rarity”. Machen seems much more interested in stories of the Holy Grail than in the life of Christ. From Machen’s writing about religion, Smith concludes that “he has very little interest in the subject of Jesus at all, but is more focused upon the idea of an infinite and transcendent God, ecstasy, and religious idealism” (216). Though his religion was that of the Church of England, his religiosity was fundamentally mystical. (In this, at least, he was not much different from many occultists. Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, etc. are all versions of esoteric and mystical Christianity. They mostly indulge in medieval nostalgia, about which Michael Cisco has the best response: “Some might say that Machen’s mysticism is largely just nostalgia for a fantastic middle ages, but who is nostalgic for the middle ages? The exploited peasants? Their descendants? Perhaps the nobility misses those days, but it seems that nostalgia for the middle ages is largely a middle-class ailment” [Weird Fiction 173].)
Other writers have analyzed Ambrose’s ideas of sanctity and sorcery, stated in the first paragraph of “The White People”, and I don’t want to spend much time on that here — virtually anything you read about “The White People” will go through it in one way or another. I like Michael Cisco’s succinct discussion in Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, though I think he falls into some traps by equating Ambrose and Machen. Undoubtedly, Ambrose is close to Machen’s own beliefs, but Ambrose as a character serves a function in the story that requires him to be less flexible in his thinking than Machen seems to have been. Certainly, Ambrose is less flexible and more dogmatic than Machen’s fiction is. Though Ambrose see sanctity and sorcery as an unbridgeable binary, it seems to me that the Green Book section offers a different and nondualistic view.
For Ambrose, sin — or, at least, Great Sin — is not “doing bad things” but rather a violation of nature. In his discussion of great sinners as people who can be charming and a delight to be around, even as they defy God-approved nature, I can’t help but think of Oscar Wilde, whom Machen had dined with, and who was only recently released from prison during the writing of “The White People”. If Ambrose considered WIlde’s sexual behavior (and love of paradox) to in some way or another be against nature (shades of Huysmans there), then Wilde would fit Ambrose’s peculiar definition of a sinner. Horror and sin are, for Ambrose, inversions of the natural order — talking animals, singing roses, “stones in the road [that] swell and grow before your eyes”, blossoming pebbles. (Though Ambrose names Gilles de Rais as a prime example of a Great Sinner, it is not hard to extrapolate most Decadent artists and writers as such, given the constitutive role of inversion in Decadence.)
Evil to Ambrose is not about lack, but about the wrong presence: “Evil, of course, is wholly positive—only it is on the wrong side.” He defines the essence of sin as “simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner.” Who forbids? God, from the moment of the Fall. Trying to return to paradise is sinful for mortals and only allowed of angels. “Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort [as sin]; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels and in making this effort man becomes a demon.“ Seeking the ecstasy is allowed and holy, but seeking the knowledge (whatever that may be) is not. Mortals who attempt to be angels are like dogs attempting to speak or stones attempting to move.
Of course, to Ambrose the girl who wrote the narrative in the green notebook is a truly great sinner, a perfect example of unwitting Evil. Her gender damns her — her sinful form is female, even if, like Helen Vaughan at the end of “The Great God Pan”, she manages to escape gender and return to the prima materia. Ambrose seems to take pleasure is controlling Cotsgrave’s and our understanding of the girl, of branding her with sin. Given the oddity of his view of sin, we might begin to suspect that he built his ideas to condemn the girl rather than that the girl happened to fit into his ideas. He seems to be driven at least as much by fear of the girl and her narrative as he is driven by careful theological thinking.
Ambrose sees the Green Book as possessing tempting power, its words enchanting the reader into sympathy — he illustrates this with the story of the little girl whose fingers are injured by a heavy window-sash and whose mother’s fingers become swollen, inflamed, and purulent in sympathy. (It’s telling that his example is of a little girl and a mother, not a little boy and a father. Fathers are less sympathetic, less vulnerable. Perhaps he feels confident sharing the green notebook with Cotsgrave because he assumes a man is less likely to be taken in by its pagan evil than a woman would be.)
Ambrose makes what I take to be an important biblical reference, though it is not one I have seen noted by anyone else. It is in this passage:
‘But are you a Catholic?’ said Cotgrave.
‘Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.’
‘Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?’
‘Yes; but in one place the word “sorcerers” comes in the same sentence, doesn’t it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man’s life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is, above all, the “sorcerers” who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends.
There is much there, but I want to focus on the “one place” that Ambrose mentions. I take this to be Revelation 21:8:
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
Now remember the end of the Green Book:
It was a day or two after I had come home from the secret place that I first really knew the nymphs. Nurse had shown me how to call them, and I had tried, but I did not know what she meant, and so I thought it was all nonsense. But I made up my mind I would try again, so I went to the wood where the pool was, where I saw the white people, and I tried again. The dark nymph, Alanna, came, and she turned the pool of water into a pool of fire. . . .
Ambrose, from his Christian perch, would likely read the end of the Green Book as confirmation of his belief that the girl is Evil, a Great Sinner, and that she has plunged into the lake of fire toward a second death of eternal damnation with Satan by her side.
I wonder, though: Do we need to accept Ambrose’s interpretation of the girl’s fate? Why would we even want to?
The only knowledge we have of what happened to the girl is what Ambrose tells Cotsgrave in the Epilogue: she poisoned herself in front of a pagan statue. The nature of the poison is unknown, and, indeed, to Ambrose it could be her beliefs that were the poison. The Green Book itself is, to him, poisonous. His hatred for the old ways (and the girl) is such that he provides the tools for the destruction of the statue.
Perhaps, though, the girl’s fate isn’t so sinful. Perhaps she has not ended up in eternal damnation but has, instead, found transcendence out of an oppressive reality. Perhaps her physical death is a transmutation of her being.
Alchemy
Of all esoteric practices, it was alchemy that held Machen’s most sustained interest throughout his life. The symbolic structure that dominates the Green Book (and, more subtly, “The White People” overall) is that of alchemy.
In an essay written shortly before “The White People” titled “The Literature of Occultism”, Machen wrote:
…no one could look into the alchemical writings of the Middle Ages and deny them the name of literature. Alchemy, in spite of all confident pronouncements on the subject, remains still a mystery, the very nature and object of the quest are unknown. The baser alchemists — there were quacks and impostors and dupes then as now — no doubt sought or pretended to seek some method of making gold artificially, but the sages, those who practiced the true spagyric art, were engaged in some infinitely more mysterious adventure. … The theory has been advanced that the true alchemists were, in fact, the successors of the hierophants of Eleusis, that their transmutation was a transmutation of man, not of metal, that their “first matter” was “that hermaphrodite, the son of Adam, who, though in the form of a man, ever bears about him in his body and the body of Eve, his wife”, that their fine gold, glistening and glorious as the sun, symbolized the soul, freed from the bonds of matter, in communion with the source of all things, initiated in the perfect mysteries. (Hieroglyphics and Other Essays, 257-258)
Mystery always attracted Machen, and the mystery he perceived in alchemy held his fascination as long as any other. Alchemy provides potent metaphors for anyone interested in creativity and the arts, regardless of whether they find alchemy itself to offer any mystery still. Those metaphors, too, captured Machen’s imagination.
The importance of alchemy to “The White People” is not hidden. In the Epilogue, Ambrose says to Cotgrave, “I am afraid you have neglected the study of alchemy? It is a pity, for the symbolism, at all events, is very beautiful, and moreover if you were acquainted with certain books on the subject, I could recall to your mind phrases which might explain a good deal in the manuscript that you have been reading.”
You don’t have to be a particularly attentive reader to note the repetition of colors throughout the Green Book section of “The White People”, starting with the titles. The most frequent colors named in the girl’s narrative are white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue. What it all means, though, is obscure — unless you know something about alchemy.
White, black, red, and yellow are all colors associated with the process and phases of the Magnum Opus (creating the Philosopher’s Stone). Blue and green are less specific, but green is often associated with a powerful solvent, and there are many alchemical images of a green lion (or, sometimes, dragon) devouring the sun, often taken to represent vitriol or another solution dissolving gold. Of course, green can also represent organic growth, fertility, fecundity, life; similarly, blue obviously represents water, but can also be air, purity, the breath of life.
The colors in ‘The White People” do not have a single meaning that carries through from beginning to end. The reader cannot play a simple game of substitution, with red always equalling one thing, white another, etc. There is meaning, though. The colors are hints of pattern (the recognition — or not — of patterns is an important component of the story). The colors assure us that we are seeing threads, even if we don’t have the perspective to perceive the whole fabric. Thus, the colors function as landmarks and reminders of a coherence that may not be apparent, but can be felt.
Part of that coherence is what we might call the transmutation of the girl from the prima materia and base metal of her formless early life to the exalted gold of her transcendence. This is why Machen’s statement in “The Literature of Occultism” is important — the ultimate goal of alchemy, for him, is not to transform literal base metal into literal gold, but rather to render “the soul, freed from the bonds of matter, in communion with the source of all things, initiated in the perfect mysteries” — and this is the journey the girl takes. The alchemical structure of the story is not tacked on; it’s the core of the plot.
Alchemy transmutes, but it also melds. The movement of “The White People” is away from separation and duality and toward a monad and transcendence. In addition to anything else they do, the colors offer a sense of dualism: white/black is the most common throughout the story, but there’s also some sense that red/green are a binary, or red/blue (fire/water). Though individual colors may dominate at different times, what we get is a sense of flux and flow, appearance and disappearance, with the colors not as oppositions but as different parts of a monad. This is another reason why I think we must be skeptical of Ambrose as an authority.
When, in the Prologue, Cotgrave says to Ambrose, “’I can’t stand it, you know … your paradoxes are too monstrous,” Ambrose replies, “I never make paradoxes; I wish I could.” Paradoxes require the ability to think of two or more contradictory things at once. Ambrose’s inability to make paradoxes traps him in dualistic thinking (or vice versa). He reveals himself to be something of a Platonist when he says, “’Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals,” but his is not the Platonism of The One, it is a Platonism where copies and originals remain separate, unmelded, unmeldable. In some ways, this is not even Platonism so much as proto-Platonism, half-Platonism. Ambrose has no tool to see beyond the shadows, and the shadows beguile him. Robbed of paradox, he will find no path to the eternal, immutable reality that is the all. For Ambrose, there must be binaries. He cannot think in any other way, and it is what limits him and why we must remain skeptical of his interpretations. He does not practice the true spagyric art. He is not an alchemist.
The work of alchemy is for us. The magic of “The White People” is to insist not only that readers must be awake and aware to textual patterns and implications, but that this work is alchemical. To be a good reader is to be an alchemist.
Liberation
Per Faxneld ends Satanic Feminism with a chapter devoted to the novel Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Arthur Machen’s niece (via his second marriage to Warner’s aunt). Of the protagonist’s relationship to Satan, Faxneld concludes:
Christian civilization … is the confinement Laura must escape from, and the refuge is the Devil’s church, nature itself, where this gentle figure offers freedom from the aforementioned system. Reflecting moods in the British feminism of the time, this is hardly a collectivist solution to the problems women face. The narrative instead depicts the attainment of individual emancipation, “a life of one’s own” in an almost solipsistic sense. Laura does not attempt to change society, but turns away from it. In place of acting as a feminist revolutionary, then, Satan represents a refuge for women from patriarchy’s demands. (493)
In “The White People”, the girl escapes to a realm — of death or faerie — where she is free of the restrictive demands of mundane Victorian England. She escapes to possibility, away from confinement, boredom, drudgery, domestication, oppression. She does not know of a path toward such escape in the world of her father; she finds it through the stories and revelations of the nurse.
Of the girl, Michael Cisco writes:
The imperative to die comes from a world that depends for its existence on a general suppression of desire, on the replacement of what is desired with substitutions and on a consistency of self that cannot allow one to deviate too far, since this means there can be no way back. The witchy women in the narrator’s stories replace real men with demon lovers specifically where and when the world demands that they replace the demons of their desire with ordinary, limited men they don’t desire. (Weird Fiction 171)
Cisco sums up the view of various readers (including H.P. Lovecraft) that the girl has described a process of impregnation, one implied by the evidence of the Green Book and Ambrose’s statements, all of which suggest
that the events described involve her becoming pregnant in a supernatural manner, and that she returned to the image specifically in order to commit suicide in its presence, possibly as the time to deliver drew near. The horror for Machen might have been encompassed in the idea of an innocent girl becoming a dark counterpart to the Virgin Mary, but beyond this there is the depressing idea that the girl is as much an instrument, rather than an end in herself, for the other side as she is for the ordinary side. (185)
This is a legitimate interpretation, but it is one I resist — mostly, I suppose, because I want better for the girl. The story is undoubtedly one of some sort of sexual awakening, but I don’t know that we need to read it quite so literally that we hold onto the idea that she is carrying the child of a supernatural being from a realm beyond the veil. There is nothing in the story requiring a physical pregnancy between worlds, even though, of course, such events are common to many mythologies, including Christianity, which is founded on one of those events.
I hope we might hold open a space in our interpretation for liberation. I don’t mean that we should jettison the Prologue and Epilogue. They are essential to any understanding of the story, less because of Ambrose’s ideas about sin and sanctity than because they vividly demonstrate the constrictive, smothering world the girl left. We cannot fully feel her need to escape unless we feel the frame closing in around us.
However, I hope that we, unlike Ambrose, can wish the girl the best. She saw no path for freedom and light in the world of her father, but she found another realm, and she went to it, abandoning her earthly body and entering an older world of wonder. “The White People” wraps the girl’s story in the patriarchal pontifications of possessive men — but we as the readers can perform the imaginative, ecstatic work of freedom her story seeks.
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Images: 1. Lynd Ward, from The Haunted Omnibus (1935); 2. Victoria Woodhull caricatured as Mrs. Satan by Thomas Nast, 1872; 3. Alfred Kubin, “The Best Doctor” (1901); 4. pages from the first publication of “The White People”, Horlick’s magazine; 5. illustration for “The White People” by John Coulthart (1990); 6. William Blake, Expulsion of Adam & Eve from the Garden (illustration for Milton, Paradise Lost); 7. David Teniers the Younger, The Alchemist (c.1640/1650); 8. The lion devouring the sun, illustration from the Rosarium Philosophorum via University of Glasgow Library; 9. Cover of first edition of Lolly Willowes; 10. Lynd Ward, illustration for “The White People” from The Haunted Omnibus
