Reconstructing Masculinity in Charlotte

Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’ and Rudyard

Kipling’s ‘They’
Sarah Bissell, University of Glasgow

Abstract
This essay examines how two much-anthologised ghost stories from
the long nineteenth century – Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’
and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘They’ – challenge the perceived idea that the
experience of witnessing a spectre has a shattering or feminising effect
on men. Instead, ghostly encounters enable the male protagonists
to develop a form of spiritual awareness which bolsters rather than
undermines their embodiment of traditionally masculine traits. The
concept of manliness was continually being contested and redefined
during the period in which these tales were published. Its perceived
links with rationalist materialism were also being eroded as various
male-orientated groups sought to synthesise the ghost within scientific
discourse. ‘The Open Door’ intriguingly promotes a supernaturalised
form of masculine identity through an interrogation of class: the
spectral encounter is crucial in the development of the middle-class
protagonist into a model of hardworking Victorian masculinity. ‘They’
reworks the motif of the manly but spiritually sensitive central
character via a focus on paternity, suggesting that trauma and loss
can be adequately incorporated into this rehabilitated form of British
masculinity. Both tales thus utilise the experience of ghost-seeing to

Victoriographies 4.1 (2014): 62–78

DOI: 10.3366/vic.2014.0151
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/vic
 Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’ and Kipling’s ‘They’

highlight the importance of emotion and sensitivity to masculine

identity at the end of the long nineteenth century.
Keywords: class, manliness, work, emotion, ghost-seeing, sensitivity

The experience of witnessing a spectre in late nineteenth-century

literature is sometimes considered to have a shattering or feminising
effect on male protagonists. Jennifer Uglow, for example, suggests that
spectral encounters can push ‘men into conventional female roles’
insofar as they become ‘timid, nervous, helpless, [. . .] oppressed,
doubtful, [. . .] vulnerable’ (xvii). I argue, however, that in Charlotte
Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’ (1882) and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘They’
(1904) this concept is subtly undermined: ghostly encounters enable
the male protagonists to develop a form of spiritual sensitivity which
strengthens rather than undermines their embodiment of traditionally
masculine traits, thus implicitly challenging the association between
rationalist materialism and manliness.
‘The Open Door’ – which revolves around an inheritance plot, an
unsolved murder, and a door which will not remain closed – frames
this through its presentation of several class-marked men. Significantly,
the experience of ghost-seeing enables the middle-class protagonist’s
development into a model of hardworking Victorian masculinity.
The motif of the manly but spiritually sensitive male protagonist
resurfaces in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘They’, but is reconfigured via
a focus on paternity and the parent-child bond. Critics such as
Vanessa D. Dickerson have argued that the supernatural acted as a
useful vehicle through which nineteenth-century women writers
could explore their own liminal and complex cultural status. This
essay, however, argues that ‘The Open Door’ and ‘They’ are more
preoccupied with different forms of supernaturalised masculinity,
particularly the ways in which spectral encounters might supplement
the traits perceived as central to late Victorian and early Edwardian
masculine identity. In focussing on the three central male characters
within Riddell’s tale – the aristocrat Lord Ladlow, the self-made
businessman Robert Dorland, and the middle-class protagonist
and narrator Theophilus (nicknamed ‘Phil’) – this essay will
demonstrate that the story pits a traditional style of upper-class
masculinity against that of the bourgeois, self-made man. Though the
former is depicted as somewhat insipid and ineffectual in comparison
to the latter, the protagonist ironically seems to be valued primarily

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because he vindicates the old order. I argue, however, that ‘The Open
Door’ ultimately favours middle-class versions of masculinity over
those exemplified by the aristocracy, in suggesting that opportunities
for hard work and self-improvement – more readily available
to middle-class men – are crucial to the development of Victorian
masculine identity. Intriguingly, the tale intimates that the true
rewards that emerge from the spectral experience are not prestige
and wealth – which are fragile, constraining, and potentially very
dangerous – but the development of such Victorian ‘masculine’ traits
as a good work ethic, a detachment from social hypocrisies, honesty,
and a recognition of family values. ‘The Open Door’ thus works against
readings which posit ghost-seeing as hysterical or effeminate, insofar
as the protagonist’s spectral encounter gifts him with an appreciation
of how the spiritual world influences and intersects with the
material one. This, in turn, enables him to embody a more robust
and sensitive form of masculinity than the staunchly materialist one he
represents at the beginning of the tale.
The final part of this essay will trace how this rehabilitated version
of masculinity also emerges in an early Edwardian ghost story –
Kipling’s ‘They’ – in that the protagonist, rather than being feminised
by his spectral encounter, experiences a poignant and placid revelation
that the elusive children he enjoys visiting are actually ghosts. ‘They’ is
haunted by images of loss; it is implied in the conclusion that the
narrator has suffered the bereavement of his own children, and
some critics suggest that Kipling used the tale to express his own grief
about the death of his daughter, Josephine.1 And yet this loss is,
crucially, never exacerbated by a sense of failure. Bret E. Carroll
argues that nineteenth-century Spiritualism provided a route
through which masculinity could be redefined to accommodate
emotion (especially that related to bereavement). He claims that
‘male Spiritualists used grief as a didactic rhetorical and emotional
device to stimulate Victorian men, and through them the wider middle
class culture, to a reorientation of manhood’ (7). ‘They’ engages in a
similar quest to rescue the expression of grief from the realm of the
‘unmanly’. The protagonist comes to represent a revitalised version of
supernaturalised manliness, which allowed men to express their
ghostly experiences and frustrated emotive wishes without being
demasculinised in the process.
Although separated by twenty-two years, ‘The Open Door’ and
‘They’ were both published during a period in which masculine
identity was being subtly recoded in British culture. Masculinity, in the
early nineteenth century, was traditionally associated with rationality

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and materialism, as opposed to the ‘feminine’ notions of spirituality

and emotion; John Tosh suggests that the ‘association of masculinity
with reason, authority and resolve’ worked to establish the ‘masculine
world’ as a place of ‘restless energy and rationality’ (47). Victorian
masculinity was thus also linked to action, and a frank and forthright
manner of speech and decorum, as James Eli Adams acknowledges:
‘in England by mid-century a norm of “manliness” was identified
above all with honest, straightforward speech and action, shorn of
any hint of subtlety or equivocation’ (13–14). In addition to plain
speaking, labour and discipline were also perceived as ‘manly’ in
Victorian culture, as evidenced by the growth of the Muscular
Christianity movement during the second half of the century. Martin
A. Danahay, in an excellent study of work and masculinity during
the nineteenth century, discusses the centrality of the Protestant work
ethic to Victorian formations of manliness, promoted by renowned
nineteenth-century thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel
Smiles. He argues that
the ‘work ethic’ assumed that all people, especially men, were
constrained to labour by the will of God, and that thrift and sobriety
were necessary for salvation. These ideals find their expression in the
Victorian period in an emphasis upon self-discipline, self-denial and hard
work [. . .]. The compulsion to labour was thus made an integral part of
normative masculinity. (Danahay 7)

This focus on hard work (tacitly written as physical labour or drudgery)

has obvious implications in terms of class, in potentially excluding and
thus de-masculinising the aristocracy. This partially explains why, as
Philip Holden has argued, the latter part of the nineteenth century saw
the traditional masculine model of the ‘gentleman’ reinvented as
‘a bourgeois figure’ as opposed to the traditional aristocratic one, as
the middle classes had a more direct relationship with the world
of employment (Holden 42). This reinvention process cast dubious
light on the traditional aristocratic gentleman, as Alexandra Warwick
claims, ‘a model of upper-class masculinity became a source of
suspicion, since the upper classes were associated with leisure and
idleness’ (Warwick 153). In literature, from the eighteenth century
onwards, the vacuity and potential corruptness of aristocratic men had
been explored and exposed.2 As Danahay acknowledges, however, it is
oversimplifying the case to say that middle-class masculine identity
wholeheartedly detached itself from that of the upper classes in the
mid- to late-nineteenth century; instead, there seems to be a far more
ambiguous and interdependent relationship between the two.3

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Various critics have identified a crisis in masculinity as the century

advanced towards the fin de siècle, citing factors such as the loss
of confidence in imperialism, and the dismantling of the ‘separate
spheres’ ideology which saw many women reject traditional Victorian
marriage and enter the world of work.4 Andrew Smith argues
that the apparent destabilisation of masculine identity, troubling
to some, was frequently associated with pathological or Gothicised
rhetoric in literary and medical contexts, but this reconfiguration also
opened up opportunities for the development of alternate forms of
masculinity less hostile to spiritual or emotional sensitivity. Groups
such as the Society of Psychical Research sought to disentangle the
experience of ghost-seeing from the ‘feminine’ realm (as the product
of emotion or hysteria) by conducting empirical research on ‘haunted’
places, envisioning that spectres might eventually be synthesised within
scientific discourse. Additionally, developments in late Victorian
mental science increasingly posited the mind as an intrinsically
haunted site (McCorristine 4–5), further complicating the perceived
links between masculinity and rationalism.5 Both ‘The Open Door’
and ‘They’ were published during the crucial late nineteenth- to early
twentieth-century period in which the ‘crisis’ in masculinity was
seemingly exacerbated. Riddell’s narrative, however, appears
optimistic about the necessity of establishing and maintaining a
cohesive masculine identity grounded on specific middle-class values,
in its depiction of the ghostly encounter as an important stage in the
protagonist’s development. ‘They’ similarly privileges a sensitive form
of masculine identity associated with care and emotion: the spectral
experience provides a means through which the protagonist can come
to terms with his paternal loss. The use of the supernatural as the
vehicle through which these new masculinities are forged hints at
the potential inefficacy – even flimsiness – of ‘traditional’ accounts
of gender.6 More importantly, these texts also pay tribute to the ways in
which scientific and cultural developments were replacing traditional
masculine models with more varied and complex forms.
‘The Open Door’ is narrated by a young clerk called Phil, who
loses his job in an auctioneer’s office because of his greed, and so,
to make money, undertakes an assignment to solve the mystery of a
haunted house, Ladlow Hall, in which an open door will not remain
closed. After arriving at the Hall, Phil makes the acquaintance of its
owner, Lord Ladlow, who is popularly but not legally suspected of
the murder of his uncle and illicit inheritance of his property and title.
The ghost that haunts Ladlow Hall is assumed to be that of the
previous lord (the current lord’s uncle), which indeed turns out to be

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the case; however, Phil soon realises that there is a human presence in
the Hall as well as a supernatural one. In a final dramatic showdown,
Phil violently fights with the previous lord’s wife over a hidden will,
during which episode the ghost appears briefly and Phil is non-fatally
shot. The previous lord’s wife is thus revealed as the true murderer.
She flees abroad, while the ghost no longer haunts the hall after
Phil’s exposure of the will (and expulsion of the wayward woman)
enables the current lord to access his rightful inheritance. The matter
is hushed up, but Lord Ladlow’s reputation is salvaged, and Phil gets
married and goes on to manage a farm.
In its combination of a real spectre and a devious human con
woman who impersonates a ghost, ‘The Open Door’ conflates two
distinct traditions of supernatural writing: the anti-rationalist form, in
which the supernatural is reified, and the Radcliffean explained
supernatural, in which hauntings are revealed to be illusions or human
machinations. This layering seems to symbolise a split or ambivalent
attitude towards the rationality supposed as central to masculinity in
the tale, while simultaneously creating two characters who invade and
disrupt the domestic space of Ladlow Hall: the male ghost, who returns
to correct a past wrong and prevent his murderer from gaining his
fortune, and the female murderer, who attempts to kill Phil twice.
Interestingly, it is not the supernatural force which is the malevolent
and threatening one, but the real, female human; as Lara Baker
Whelan argues, ‘she [. . .] rather than the ghost [. . .] is the invader,
both physically and socially’ (82). Thus, the story spends most of its
time detailing Phil’s fight with the woman and likening her to a wild
animal, while it grants the spectre’s appearance only a scant half-
sentence. Jarlath Killeen, in a useful analysis which challenges critical
assumptions about female-authored ghost stories, claims that ‘it is clear
that the male ghost [in “The Open Door”] has only one function and
that is not to articulate the marginalised nature of Victorian femininity,
but to defend male rights of inheritance’ (94).7 ‘The Open Door’ of
the title is thus a layered concept, in that it refers to both the physical
site of haunting and the threshold between the material and spiritual
worlds, while also depicting the domestic space as one which is
vulnerable to invasion, in this case by a transgressive female and a
seemingly benevolent ghost. Various critical analyses of the story have
understandably chosen to focus on the figure of the defiant female,
but my argument is more concerned with the tale’s male characters.
While ‘The Open Door’ demonises a certain kind of socially ambitious
and mercenary femininity, it also presents and ranks different forms
of class-marked masculinity through three central male figures, placing

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that exemplified by the hardworking and spiritually-receptive middle

classes on top.
In the character of Lord Ladlow, the tale posits aristocratic
masculinity as constrained, ineffective, and ultimately futile. Ladlow
is the good-natured owner of the haunted house – described by Phil
as ‘a simple-spoken nobleman’ who ‘did not seem very different
from anybody else’ (Riddell 85) – but his lack of agency throughout
the narrative writes him as weak and devoid of the ‘masculine’ traits
outlined earlier in this essay. While the middle-class characters have
the potential to climb up or slip down the social ladder, Ladlow is
irrevocably bound to his aristocratic status, one which is rendered
meaningless or obsolete while he remains under suspicion of murder.
The reader is never invited to participate in the neighbourhood’s
mistrust, as Phil believes in Ladlow from the outset, but the town’s
suspicion of him severely impacts upon the form of upper-class
masculinity he represents. For the lord, his social reputation – a
precarious and arbitrary construct – is paramount, and its ruin results
in a loss of health and vigour: ‘When I lost my good name,’ he tells
Phil, ‘I lost my good health, and had to go abroad’ (Riddell 88).
Ladlow’s classed identity – and the possibility that it might be masking
a corrupt and violent man – continually hinders his potential to
participate in the story’s events, so that, like the ghost of his uncle,
he remains locked into a position of severely limited power. Unlike
Phil, Ladlow is excluded from neighbourhood gossip so that he
remains ignorant about the supposedly haunted state of his property
until he has let it to an unsuspecting client, and he lacks both the
freedom and inclination to interrogate the haunting in the way that
Phil, urged on by necessity, does. Ladlow’s want of power is perhaps
best represented by the story’s conclusion, in which he allows the true
murderer (his uncle’s wife) to remain unpunished to avoid a scandal,
and she escapes abroad as an exile: her fate mirrors Ladlow’s while he
was under suspicion of murder. This decision might indicate Ladlow’s
indebtedness to mid-century chivalric masculinity which, as Shani
D’Cruze has acknowledged, was ‘marked by responsibility, restraint
and domestic commitment’ (264). This gallantry, however, seems
misplaced and out-dated as it – rather than ennobling Ladlow –
paralyses his potential for productive action. While Phil grapples with
the murderer and ultimately succeeds in exorcising her from the
house, Ladlow’s enslavement to social convention and chivalry leaves
him unable to intervene.
Despite these limitations, it is Ladlow’s insipid and rather
inadequate upper-class masculinity which ultimately triumphs: he

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reaps the benefits of Phil’s endeavours to lay the ghost, while poor
Phil – though handsomely paid – ends up with a bullet in his shoulder
and a traumatised psyche, which instils him with a horror of solitude. Yet
Ladlow’s apparent victory is severely undermined by the tale’s earlier
exposure of the vulnerability of the two most important trademarks
of his masculinity: his reputation and his title. Although his good name
is restored and his house no longer troubled by the ghost of his uncle,
Ladlow will always be haunted by the possibility that his comfortable
aristocratic world – having been built on extremely insecure and flimsy
foundations – might once again come crashing down. Furthermore,
the tale seems to offer a dismal vision for the afterlife of members of
the aristocracy, in that the spectre of the previous lord, in relentlessly
opening a door, is forced into a dreary position of servitude – almost
like a ghostly butler – in order to maintain his family’s rightful
inheritance. Although the spirited male protagonists that feature in
Riddell’s spectral tales suggest that she is keenly optimistic about
the positive effects of work on masculine identity, the mundane,
post-death routine performed by the ghost is a form of work drained
of all nobility and potential for self-improvement: an enforced,
monotonous imprisonment with no guarantee of any recompense.
Of course, it does eventually pay off for the spectre, but this is
significantly only due to the protagonist’s intervention.
The two middle-class characters in ‘The Open Door’ – Phil’s
uncle Robert Dorland, and Phil himself – represent far more vigorous
and active forms of Victorian masculinity than Ladlow, with Dorland
being an archetypically stolid and straightforward example of the
nineteenth-century self-made man. Unlike Ladlow, who was born into
money, Dorland endeavoured to make his living through trade, and
gradually became prosperous, while remaining entirely untainted by
the social hypocrisies often associated with class mobility elsewhere
in Riddell’s fiction. His wife’s family – that is, Phil’s family, an
unappealing set who almost bankrupt themselves to maintain an
appearance of gentility – shunned Dorland following his marriage as
he was perceived to be beneath them. Phil, however, recognises that
his uncle embodies the most positive attributes of Victorian masculinity
when he states that ‘if ever a gentleman came ready born into the
world it was Robert Dorland, upon whom at our home everyone
seemed to look down’ (Riddell 67–8). The tale itself contradicts the
notion of being ‘born a gentleman’ as Phil seems to be made into a
gentleman by his experiences; however, the claim indicates both Phil’s
recognition of masculine values (his praise of Dorland) and his
emotional immaturity at this point (he believes ‘gentlemanliness’ is

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innate rather than learned). A man who has never forgotten his
roots, Dorland commands the respect of his business associates in a
way that Ladlow cannot, and exemplifies the valuable ‘masculine’
attributes of honesty and hard work. Further, the businessman is
implicitly more courageous and less self-conscious than the aristocrat
in paying little attention to misguided gossip: Ladlow absconds abroad
when his neighbourhood begin to doubt him, but Dorland remains
completely unfazed by his wife’s family’s snobbish rejection of him.
He also, significantly, denigrates Phil’s dismissive attitude to the
haunted house, thus implying that open-mindedness in spiritual
matters is not entirely antithetical to Victorian constructions of
masculinity. Dorland may occupy a minor role in the narrative, but
he crucially provides a model of active, middle-class Victorian male
identity that acts as counterpoint to that exemplified by the passive
aristocrat Ladlow.
The protagonist and narrator Phil is the subject whose masculinity
is to be shaped and disciplined between these two poles. Simon Hay
suggests that Phil originally possesses an ‘unfixed and uncertain social
status’ and that the narrative arc can be read as a ‘process of “fixing”
Phil’s social position to a single name and a single role; no longer a
law-clerk, but a restored landowner’ (Hay 3–4). Though true, I argue
that the material consequences of Phil’s efforts are less important
than his emotional transformation into a hard-working and spiritually-
sensitive middle-class man. Initially a sullen, inefficient, and
presumptuous clerk, Phil is fired by his employer because the latter
has ‘had enough of [his] airs, and [his] indifference, and [his]
indolence’ (Riddell 56). Even at this early stage of the narrative,
however, Phil possesses a number of redeeming features which align
him with the positive form of middle-class masculinity exemplified by
his uncle. Like Dorland, Phil is almost painfully honest: his overtly
frank speech to his employer is what ultimately loses him his job, and,
following his dismissal, he significantly refuses to accept money for
work he has not done. He also volunteers as a soldier, conducts a
loving (and financially realistic) engagement with his cousin, and is
almost entirely devoid of the social snobbery that characterises his
parents. Of course, Phil has a problematic masculinity at this early
stage. He is lazy, greedy, contemptuous of spiritual issues, and indulges
in financial speculation: a form of legal gambling which, as Borislav
Knezevic has argued, goes against the nineteenth-century Protestant
work ethic.
As the story proceeds, however, Phil redeems himself and
improves his masculinity in his quest to restore another man’s

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reputation and to rebuild his own: his experiences with the

otherworldly transform him into a shining example of a hardworking
Victorian middle-class man, in a positive contrast to his former self.
Phil – after receiving financial compensation for his efforts to lay the
ghost to rest8 – ends up living in marital bliss in an idyllic countryside
setting, managing a farm with his wife Patty. The narrative closes on a
mildly disturbing note, reminiscent of many other Victorian ghost
stories, with the protagonist irrevocably altered and humbled by his
spectral experience:
Not in Meadowshire, but in a fairer country still, I have a farm which
I manage, and make both ends meet comfortably.
Patty is the best wife any man ever possessed – and I – well, I am just as
happy, if a trifle more serious than of old; but there are times when a
great horror of darkness seems to fall upon me and at such periods
I cannot endure to be left alone. (Riddell 103)

The fear of solitude is traditionally associated with trauma in

supernatural fiction, for example in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green
Tea’ (1869) and Perceval Landon’s ‘Thurnley Abbey’ (1908). The
experience of seeing a ghost or uncanny being in such tales can leave
male characters shattered, horrified, physically weakened, hysterical,
and/or depressed. The melancholy implication that Phil is similarly
traumatised is, however, counteracted by several important hints that
the encounter with the spectre has changed Phil for the better. The
relocation from an urban to a rural, agricultural setting implies a
detachment from the social obligations that almost bankrupted
his parents; instead of being associated with a family struggling to
retain an appearance of respectability, Phil is now the head of a
household which manages to ‘make both ends meet comfortably’
(103). The fact that Phil performs two different types of industry after
the events of the tale – that of managing the farm, and that of
narrating the tale – implies, not only a heightened compulsion to
work, but an increased awareness of the myriad forms of labour he is
suited to perform. The fact that the story is written and not merely
spoken (Phil mentions the ‘hitherto unpublished’ tale and remarks
that he might ‘lay down his pen’ [48–9]) further distances his mode of
production from the mundane clerical work he grudgingly performed
earlier. Finally, the story also suggests that Phil’s inability to endure
being left alone is not necessarily a negative consequence. Riddell’s
ghost stories – and her longer non-supernatural novels – frequently
feature isolated misers or loners who ultimately repent of (or are
punished for) their detachment from their former families and

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friends, and whose preoccupation with money and inability to sustain

relationships is presented as mean-spirited, shabby, selfish, and
ultimately unfulfilling;9 ‘The Open Door’ peripherally intimates that
both Phil’s parents and the previous lord’s wife suffer similar unhappy
fates in valuing material acquisitions over emotional connections.
Phil’s horror of solitude might then convey a positive recognition
of the importance of family and friends to the type of Victorian
male identity he exemplifies. Ultimately, Phil’s experience of the
supernatural – and of the earthly violence of a disinherited woman –
has implicitly shaped his transformation from a brash and overtly
rational clerk into a hardworking man, whose masculinity is
supplemented by a heightened spiritual awareness.
Rudyard Kipling’s ‘They’ also works to privilege this strengthened,
supernaturalised model of masculinity, but repitches it in a later
context in order to address men’s relationship with children. The story
presents an example of the modern Edwardian man who (like Phil)
possesses both the ability to traverse class boundaries and a spiritual
sensitivity which bolsters rather than challenges his masculine identity.
While Phil’s status as a family man is only briefly signalled, this
man’s masculinity is significantly associated with his fondness of
children, and his later-revealed paternal bereavement. Rather than
being linked to images of virility or British identity, paternity is thus
conveyed as a painful process which finds a subdued kind of comfort
and dignity through the spectral. The tale is narrated by a male
protagonist, who describes his experiences of driving through the
country and encountering an idyllic house. He notices several
apparently shy children, who acknowledge his presence but insist on
keeping their distance, and he discusses them with the house’s blind
female resident. An experience with the doctor in the local village
attending the death of a child foreshadows the story’s conclusion, in
which the narrator has his hand kissed by one of the children, and he
realises that they are ghosts. He covertly expresses his own sense of
paternal loss to the blind woman, who reveals that she makes her home
welcoming to these ghost-children as she loves them, never having had
any offspring of her own.
The narrator’s association with affluence and modernity is
immediately established through his possession of a motor car: he
describes how ‘the snapping forward of a lever’ enables him to ‘let the
county flow under my wheels’ (Kipling 70), indicating the sense of
immediacy and pseudo-colonial possession generated by this device.
He is, however, notably detached from the image of a rich gentleman
(as exemplified by Ladlow) through his prowess with motor mechanics

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and willingness to perform physical labour, combined with a sense of

class-neutrality which leads a peasant woman to mistake him for a
chauffeur (Kipling 482). Moreover, his denigration of the patriarchal
Victorian familial values which previously supported traditional
manliness is indicated by his condemnation of the people who laugh
at the blind woman for never having married: he terms them ‘savages’
(478), believing that the ‘inherited [. . .] brutality of the Christian
peoples’ renders ‘the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger [. . .]
clean and restrained’ (479). Colonial masculinity (as it featured in
factual and fictional nineteenth-century narratives) often covertly or
explicitly conveyed indigenous people as morally, physically, or
intellectually inferior to the white man, and worked, as Mrinalini
Sinha has argued, to ‘cement [. . .] relations of power’ (76). This vexed
rhetoric, here, however, is utilised to vilify the English: it is their blind
adherence to tradition which renders them ‘savages’. This suggestive
recoding of societal values as filthy and suffocating further indicates
the protagonist’s position as a modern man determined to escape
the constraining Victorian past, while his implicit (though admittedly
problematic) privileging of non-white ideology posits him as a
relatively progressive figure.10 Most intriguing of all is the fact that
the new model of manliness embodied in the narrator is specifically
linked to ghost-seeing, and to frustrated paternity which can only find
solace in the spiritual.
The narrator’s relationship with the ghost-children is continually
framed through the motif of the car, as he uses this object to attempt
to entice them into visiting him: ‘I made a mighty serious business of
my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit’, he states, describing
it as ‘a trap to catch all childhood’ (Kipling 477). The car in this
period, as Sean O’Connell has acknowledged, was a technology
identified with ‘rugged, down-to-earth and utilitarian masculinity’
(63),11 and the narrator’s interest in the device’s mechanical workings
posits it as a symbol of his manliness. Although the protagonist had
previously downplayed his attachment to children in giving the blind
woman ‘one or two reasons why [he] did not altogether hate them’
(Kipling 472), it soon becomes evident that the car provides a means
through which he might beguile the youngsters into befriending him.
The modern (masculine) technological apparatus is thus recoded as a
desirable object with which one might forge pseudo-parental
relationships.
The protagonist’s final revelation is, however, notably distinct
from the car in taking place indoors, and blends a number of

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gendered constructs in order to hint at the rehabilitated form of

masculinity represented by the protagonist:
I ceased to tap the leather [. . .] when I felt my relaxed hand taken and
turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had
triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with these
quick-footed wanderers [. . .]
The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm – as a gift
on which the fingers were, once, expected to lose: as the all-faithful
half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even
when grown-ups were busiest – a fragment of the mute code devised very
long ago.
Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when
I looked across the lawn at the high window. (Kipling 490)

The language in this passage echoes that of the colonial explorer, but
the ‘triumph’ of the narrator’s capture of the ‘quick-footed wanderers’
is denied: the moment of possession thwarted by the revelatory kiss
from the child.12 The instant of comprehension (unlike in ‘The Open
Door’) privileges tactile experience over visual epistemology, which
both hints at the inefficacy of visual/empirical knowledge as a means
of providing comfort, and opens up possibilities for more sensitive
modes of masculinity promoted by this spectral encounter. The playful
reversal of gender roles (a male character having his hand kissed)
further conveys this reconfiguration, and the fact that his realisation
stems from intuition (more often ascribed to women) implicitly signals
the erosion of the relationship between empiricism and masculinity.
Though the revelation suffuses the narrator with melancholy, it also
instigates a healing process, implied by his statement that he will not
visit the house again in order to glimpse the children. Further, the
poignant denouement does not demasculinise the protagonist, but
rather suggests that the burgeoning Edwardian ideals of masculinity
will not necessarily replicate those of the Victorian period, but will
instead work to accommodate the sense of trauma, fragmentation, and
loss which later became a feature of much twentieth-century fiction.
One might even be tempted to read it as a subtle anticipation of what
Michael Roper terms the tendency, among the middle classes, to
‘reflexively assess [. . .] the codes of “manliness”’ instigated by the
material and psychological effects of the First World War (345).
Despite his sorrow, the protagonist thus mirrors what Carroll describes
as the model of new masculinity promoted by Spiritualism: ‘a well-
rounded man who would leaven individualism and careerism with
spirituality’ through the deployment of ‘ideological, psychological,

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spiritual, and emotional tools’ (22). ‘They’ thus acts as an important

successor to ‘The Open Door’ insofar as the male narrator – as well as
embodying the important traits of tolerance, openness, and class-
neutrality – signals the continual recoding of masculinity at the turn of
the century, in his denigration of traditional patriarchal values and his
admittance of the pain of loss.
The experience of ghost-seeing is crucial to both protagonists,
insofar as it enables Phil to establish his own masculine identity, before
allowing the unnamed narrator of ‘They’ to deal with the trauma
of paternal grief without being feminised in the process. It might
be suggested that ‘The Open Door’ is essentially conservative in its
approach to masculinity, in that the middle-class protagonist is in
service to the aristocratic lord, and Lord Ladlow reaps the benefits of
Phil’s work. This is arguably only true, however, insofar as the narrative
accepts money and prestige as the most valuable rewards of masculine
ambition. Yet these rewards are fraught with difficulties and tensions,
both in ‘The Open Door’ and in Riddell’s fiction more generally.
Prestige and reputation, as we have seen, are troublingly arbitrary and
spectral constructs, while money – or rather, the financial greed it
generates – is the root cause of Phil’s unemployment and the previous
lord’s murder. Lord Ladlow’s status as aristocrat and embodiment
of chivalric masculinity locks him into a position of non-agency
throughout, while Phil – as a middle-class man – is able to buttress his
own masculinity by taking advantage of the opportunities that remain
closed to Ladlow. More importantly, Phil also emerges with an
acute recognition of the world beyond, which (in addition to having
a humbling effect on him) provides an extra incentive for maintaining
the ‘masculine’ traits valued in the Victorian period. Kipling’s ‘They’
similarly privileges a rehabilitated form of masculine identity, which
both challenges traditional patriarchal ideals and recognises
the centrality of emotion to this new mode. Moreover, it goes
beyond Phil’s designation as a ‘family man’ to explore the nuances
of paternity, examining how trauma and loss can be synthesised within
an updated form of masculinity which recognises the value of intuition
and sensitivity.
The protagonists thus represent optimistic examples of the
nuanced forms of masculine identity generated by cultural shifts
in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain. In challenging
constrictively traditional accounts of manliness, these texts privilege
more complex constructions which acknowledge and accommodate
the importance of emotion to the modern man. Both stories work
against readings of spectral fiction which focus on the feminising effect

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of ghost-seeing on male identity, insofar as they imply that masculine

rationality must be supplemented by a certain level of spiritual
awareness (or perhaps merely a recognition of one’s own spiritual
ignorance) in order for characters to fully embody desirable
‘masculine’ traits.

Notes
1. See, for example, David Malcolm 226 and Peter Havholm 152.
2. Examples include the foppish men in the work of Jane Austen, the Byronic anti-
heroes which feature in late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, and the dissolute
aristocrats in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848).
3. This ambivalence is illustrated by the extent to which the affluent middle classes
often attempted to emulate the aristocracy. Many prominent Victorian
industrialists, for example, celebrated their success by acquiring country houses
and commissioning portraits.
4. For a discussion of how this developing distrust of imperialism limited
opportunities for male adventuring, see Brantlinger. As Danahay and Tosh
have acknowledged, the ‘separate spheres’ ideology was a specifically middle-class
construct, which attempted to map an impossibly clear-cut distinction onto
Victorian society; the reality throughout the nineteenth century was far more
complex. Anxieties about both upper- and middle-class masculine identity gained
particular urgency towards the end of the century, with Gothic texts such as Oscar
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)
challenging heteronormative versions of masculinity, and New Woman works such
as Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) depicting Victorian men and their
sexual appetites as degenerate and threatening.
5. Of course, these two brief generalisations do little justice to the nuanced ways in
which nineteenth-century scientific developments influenced the shifting cultural
position of the ghost (and the ghost-seer). For in-depth analyses of this issue, see
Smajić and McCorristine.
6. They also anticipate modernist literature’s move away from realism and empiricist
ontology in favour of suggestion, fragmentation, and indeterminacy, via attempts
to come to terms with the fractured nature of identity.
7. Killeen goes on to suggest that Riddell might actually be sympathetic towards
the disinherited wife, but her furtive and violent description makes such
an interpretation problematic; as Whelan notes, she seems to be ‘an animalistic
opportunist who will stop short of nothing to have her money’ (82). I agree with
Killeen, however, that the figure of the disinherited or financially powerless woman
often haunts the peripheries of Riddell’s ghost stories.
8. These monetary rewards are significantly delivered before Phil’s courageous
nocturnal vigil ultimately accomplishes this end, thus indicating that he was, by
the end of his sojourn in the Hall, no longer solely driven by thoughts of financial
remuneration.
9. Examples include the novels George Geith of Fen Court (1864) and Maxwell Drewitt
(1865), and the supernatural tales ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ and ‘Old
Mrs Jones’ (1882).
10. In fact, we might read him as engaging with fin de siècle constructions of British
manliness and expressing doubt thereof, if we accept Philip Holden’s assertion

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(when discussing the work of Joseph Bristow) that ‘English masculinity was
increasingly constituted in opposition to other racial masculinities’ (42).
11. O’Connell also discusses how this gendered status was problematised, but the
so-called ‘feminisation of the car’ was not significantly felt until long after the
story’s publication.
12. It is never explicitly established that this kiss comes from the protagonist’s own
deceased offspring, but the narrative heavily hints that this is the case.

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