33 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth GaskellThe Old Nurse's Story
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1852A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Organ Music
Gaskell uses the ghostly organ music in the hall to highlight the Gothic elements of the story, but also to suggest the possibility that the arts (including literature and storytelling) offer a path to moral improvement and emotional development.
When Miss Grace laments “in a strange kind of meaning way” that it will be “a terrible winter,” and Mrs. Stark attempts to distract everyone’s attention, the exchange suggests that her father’s lingering brutal presence continues to exert emotional control in the hall (15). The haunting music resounding on winter evenings, and the fear that it inspires in all the inhabitants, demonstrates how Lord Furnivall’s excessive patriarchal control still obliterates domestic happiness in the house.
Hester, as a somewhat homesick young woman in the ghostly manor, tries to accept the music as inspiringly pleasant and a source of enjoyment in her dismal new setting. As long as Hester can imagine any rational explanation for the music, she enjoys it, rather than letting fear overtake her. That initial response demonstrates her bravery and her intellectual capacities. She discerns different tones and styles in the music and finds it “rather pleasant to have that grand music rolling around the house” (14). Rather than relying on household gossip, Hester only becomes frightened when she investigates and discovers for herself that the organ’s workings are broken beyond repair.
Hester’s enjoyment of the music also contrasts her curiosity and attentiveness with the lord’s acquisitional approach to music and his habit of using art for control. The lord wants to buy all the music his money can give him access to, and then plays to the neglect of his daughters’ well-being. However, the story notes that some villagers would say that he became slightly less cruel the more he played, highlighting it as a symbol of redemption and regret. The music is emblematic of a possible better way of living that was open to Lord Furnivall and Grace but which they rejected in favor of cruelty. After their terrible choice, Lord Furnivall “never touched his organ again, and died within the year” (25).
The Specter Child’s Wounded Shoulder
When Hester first sees the dead child in the snow, she notices its bruised shoulder and calls attention to it as “the dark wound on its right shoulder” (36). The symbolic darkness of the wound is highlighted by the juxtaposition of the white snow and the specter child’s pale skin. When Dorothy tells the family tale as she has heard it from neighbors, she also stresses the horror of the child’s wound, noting that it bore “a terrible mark on its right shoulder” (40). The wound is described again in the final scene when the dead mother and child cower as the ghost of Lord Furnivall rages against them and hits the child with his crutch. Maude, who is a loving mother, is filled with “fierce and proud defiance” for herself but “quails piteously to save her child – her little child – from a blow” (39). The story specifically says that the child does not die of the wound but of exposure and so the dark mark is an additional symbol of the Lord’s unrestrained anger and pride, and of the excess brutality and cruelty that patriarchal power allows him to express.
The Holly-Trees
Holly is a complex symbol in English literature. It is cheerfully associated with Christmas festivities and decoration, but its spiky leaves and red berries are also linked in ancient English folk traditions—including popular carols—to Christ’s thorn of crowns and his blood during the crucifixion. Indeed, much of English Christmas imagery makes the birth of Jesus a prefiguring of his death, and Gaskell’s use of the holly thus draws on the Christlike motif of the innocent, sacrificial child, especially for Christian Victorian society.
In the story, “the two old, gnarled holly-trees, which grew about half-way down the east side of the house” highlight the sinister darkness of the Christmas season at Furnivall Manor (15). Holly trees are dark and long-lived and their presence in the landscape is often associated with the past, mystery, and bearing witness; they are also often found in English churchyards. In contrast to the cozy domesticity of the story’s other images that evoke Christmas, these gnarled holly trees seem malevolent, playing a role in the attempt to lure Rosamond to her death and intensifying the gothic themes of the story. The fact that Gaskell chooses a pair of holly trees also gestures to the two antagonists, old Lord Furnivall and Grace. The holly trees which were a scant shelter for Maude and her baby become an early warning in the story, as the perceptive Hester feels their sinister effect the first time she and Rosamond encounter them out on the fells.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Gaskell
