Issue 17: Two Classics, Both Alike in Dignity
Hey there!
Alex’s October offering is a classic of the horror genre, and Claudia’s is one of a classic author's lesser-known novels. At first we figured that was the only thread tying this issue together, but it turns out that Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill share a few more similarities: they both feature dark pasts and family secrets, and they’re both about girls fighting their way through imperfect, dangerous worlds.
Alex on A Nightmare on Elm Street
When I finally sat down to watch the 1984 slasher that birthed Freddy Krueger, I wasn’t expecting a heartwarming mother-daughter story. And A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t a heartwarming mother-daughter story. But at heart it is a story about mothers and daughters and the nastiness of growing up, a coming-of-age tragedy oozing blood and guts.
Most anybody with a pulse is at least vaguely familiar with the plot, but to recap: high schooler Nancy Thompson and her friends are being haunted by terrible nightmares and a razor-fingered ghoul, Freddy Krueger. As the friends die off, Nancy digs into her neighborhood’s dark secrets. Eventually, she pushes her mom to reveal that years ago Krueger escaped murder charges on a technicality, and Elm Street’s parents banded together for some vigilante justice. “He’s dead, honey,” Marge Thompson pleads. “Mommy killed him.”
Yeah, right.
Nancy’s battle with Krueger is straightforward—he wants to kill her, she’d rather stay alive—but her relationship with Marge is complex and painful. Nancy, young, driven, and dating a nice suburban boy, knows there’s a monster out to get her while Marge, fortyish, helpless, and unhappily divorced, insists that the monster’s long gone and the only things out to get Nancy are sleeplessness and paranoia. They’re set against each other as complete opposites, and in a different movie, Marge would make a fantastic second-tier villain, resentful of Nancy and dismissive of her fears.
But Elm Street finds tragedy in the pair’s tense relationship. Marge doesn’t dismiss Nancy’s fears. She’s just convinced herself that the monster’s dead and that her past can’t come back to bite her, much less her daughter. The movie doesn’t exactly plumb great psychological depths in its adult characters, but it is clear that Marge is haunted, too. Krueger isn’t really a ghost, but he functions like one—a symbol of an ugly past that won’t stay buried. And like a ghost, he only gets stronger the more he’s denied. Marge never reckoned with her past, so Nancy has to face it. In the final act, she fights to save them both.
The movie’s last few minutes don’t focus on Nancy’s well-earned resentment or Marge’s inability to keep Nancy safe. Instead, Nancy accepts that she’ll have to protect Marge and for the first time seems at peace with their relationship. Their positions reversed, Nancy tells her mom to get some sleep and confronts Krueger a final time, taking a piece of Marge’s advice and turning her back on him: “I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing.”
These are some fantastic lines, and what makes the end of Elm Street unbearable is that they don’t work. Krueger is animated by much more than just Nancy’s fear. He’s Marge’s fear, too, her buried secrets and guilt and lies and complicity. Like her mom, Nancy makes the mistake of believing she’s killed him, and she ends the movie helplessly watching as Marge is dragged to her death.
I knew going in that Elm Street was about generational violence and guilt, but its vision of adulthood is so grim, it still stings like a fresh cut: hauntings are passed down, and whether you love your mom or can’t stand her, one day you’ll end up just like her, watching the person you love most disappear.
Claudia on Jane of Lantern Hill
Like her Emily trilogy (which I covered for Hey, Kid! earlier this year), L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill is obsessed with place and its effect on people. Lantern Hill is one of her final novels, and it’s a shade darker than some of her more famous books. The two places it jumps between—the grim Toronto mansion where Jane Stuart and her mother live with her controlling grandmother and Lantern Hill, the tiny cottage her estranged father buys during their first summer together—embody the novel’s preoccupation with estrangement, jealousy, and possessiveness, and make a convincing argument for reading Jane of Lantern Hill as a middle-grade reworking of a gothic romance.
The love story is between Robin and Kenneth, Jane’s father and mother, but Jane’s journey shows the corrosive effects of bitterness and the work of forgiveness. While the book is sometimes cited as one of the first children’s books to deal with divorce, divorce is only mentioned (Kenneth and Robin are separated but still married), and the focus is on reconciliation, not coming to terms with the separation. Once Jane starts to spend summers with Kenneth, she begins to untangle the circumstances that made Robin leave, and must decide whether she will repeat her family’s mistakes or bring them together again.
All good gothic romances have at least one poisonous family member, and Grandmother Victoria is Jane’s most significant foe when it comes to understanding her history. There are many possessive mothers in Montgomery’s fiction, but Grandmother is the worst one I’ve come across, shaming Robin for “lov[ing] that child . . . better than you love me” and assuming that monetary support, without any understanding or compassion, entitles her to Jane’s respect. Kenneth’s side of the family isn’t exempt either, with Jane quickly realizing that her sickly-sweet Aunt Irene chipped away at Robin’s confidence in her abilities as a wife and mother. More significantly, she comes to understand her parents’ own foibles, realizing that Robin’s sensitivity and Kenneth’s obliviousness played as damaging a part in the break-up of the marriage as scheming relatives.
Grandmother’s gloomy Toronto home is the purest distillation of her malice, with secrets and blame haunting every corner. By contrast, Lantern Hill clings to the optimistic realism Montgomery is best known for. Grandmother’s house is frozen in a gothic fantasy of decades-long grudges and suffocating mother love, but on Prince Edward Island Jane can learn to use the compromise and mercy necessary to form any kind of enduring bond. The future she engineers for Robin, Kenneth, and herself may be idealized, but it is also dynamic and evolving instead of petrified by bitterness.
It's no wonder then that the novel ends—after fleeing Toronto in the middle of the night and a confession of love at a sickbed, of course—with the purchase of another house. A monument to the compromise necessary to repair the damaged marriage, the new house is located in Toronto, but is as far from the resentment of Grandmother’s mansion as it’s possible to be. It “shine[s] with welcoming lights,” and in it Jane can know both of her parents and “interpret them to each other.” This thought doesn’t conform to modern standards of healthy parent-child relationships, (Parents, please don’t expect your kids to fix your marriage) but it reveals a final gothic twist: only through forgiveness and keen sensibility can obstacles be conquered and a happy ending achieved.
As always thank you so very much for reading–we wish you the happiest and spookiest of seasons. Hey, Kid! Will be back in November.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia