THE DEEP ONES: "Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare

"Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare

Discussion begins February 14, 2018.

First published in the April, 1922 issue of The London Mercury.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Seaton%27s_Aunt
http://www.searchengine.org.uk/ebooks/85/66.pdf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43739

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Century's Best Horror Fiction
The Dark Descent
The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales: The Roots of Modern Horror

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_de_la_Mare
http://www.walterdelamare.co.uk/
https://hellnotes.com/ron-breznay%E2%80%99s-old-masters-of-horror-de-la-mare/
http://tinyurl.com/ycpkgr7c
http://tinyurl.com/yc8stfde
http://tinyurl.com/y9bzmhax

I'll be reading this one out of H. P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales: The Roots of Modern Horror.

The Century's Best Horror Fiction for me.

That was an uncomfortable read. The aunt is outright disturbing, and Seaton's awkward weirdness is painful to "watch".

What's up with the aunt's prodigious appetite?

>4 AndreasJ:

Yes Auntie is really quite monstrous in everything from her obnoxious asides to her big head. I kept picturing her as a Ralph Steadman caricature. There is a haunting here, but on whose part? What does Auntie mean by "All this outside's only make-believe"?

This story is curiously similar to "The Room in the Tower": guest of a schoolmate, menacing older relative/resident, etc.

"This is the room, Withers, my brother William died in when a boy. Admire the view!"

Possible inference: She killed her William? And she later killed Arthur? Although Withers dismissed the idea that Seaton was the heir and his aunt a custodian, that could give her a motive in Seaton's case.

Seaton's portentous monologue starting "I mean I know that what we see and hear is only the smallest fraction of what is" reminded me of Gustav Meyrink.

De la Mare does a wondrous job in evoking the unease, even as the various parts of what he writes (interactions with the Aunt, discussions between Withers and Seaton, the creaking house) don't really account for the final effect. For some readers, I expect it could be all put down to social awkwardness and perhaps the Aunt being completely without compassion.

I was reminded of dear Miss Danvers from Rebecca, but really I can't equate Seaton's Aunt and Danvers at all. With Danvers it was psychological, but this seems different.

You laughed at me that night you came to stay here—about the voices and all that. But I don't mind being laughed at— because I know."
"Know what?" It was the same old system of dull question and evasive answer.
"I mean I know that what we see and hear is only the smallest fraction of what is. I know she lives quite out of this. She talks to you; but it's all make−believe. It's all a 'parlour game.' She's not really with you; only pitting her outside wits against yours and enjoying the fooling. She's living on inside on what you're rotten without.

There really does seem to be more going on. Early on, Seaton also makes a reference that hinted at vampirism, but it got no further than that: "She just sucks you dry."

De la Mare seems quite content to let us wonder rather than have any scene or interaction put it out in the open. As if the real story were happening "inside", as Seaton hinted himself at one point, but we get only the "outside" story.

I found this lecture on de la Mare's supernatural fiction (explicitly including "Seaton's Aunt") satisfying, though the critic doesn't offer anything we've overlooked so much as summed up how it works. I'd be interested in reading the story "Crewe" as well, based on what's relayed here.

(Three stories are discussed, "Seaton's Aunt" is the second and that portion is easily read & understood on its own.)

ETA The Wikipedia entry has some provocative content, as well, given de la Mare's peculiar use of "snail" (by which Seaton's Aunt once addressed Seaton) and also the inside / outside dichotomy. The whole rather suggests there is an allegorical reading to be made:

De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination – although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. (...)

De la Mare claimed that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. He explained in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination" that children "are not bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. ... They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." His biographer Doris Ross McCrosson summarises this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).

The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell". From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type".

By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated for ever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: the mind moulded by the boylike is "logical" and "deductive". That shaped by the childlike becomes "intuitive, inductive". For de la Mare, "The one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Yet another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without – external – in "action, knowledge of things, and experience" (McCrosson's terms).

Finally, there was a television adaption, apparently good:
IMdb entry - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399619/
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE_0qb_VG1c

I enjoyed this one quite a bit and blogged about it (https://wp.me/p4jmub-5FS).

There's nothing overtly supernatural here, as everyone stated. There may be ghosts. There may be psychic vampirism of a sort. There may be murder. Or there may be none of that.

I also thought we were maybe going to go the bodyswitching route with the fiancé, but that didn't happen.

I thought it had quite a sting in that last sentence. Maybe Withers affinity with the aunt is his callous disregard for Seaton, a culpability in his death.

And does "Withers" have a symbolic significance as in the verb "withers"? There are the decaying grounds and unkept garden we see on Withers' second visit. "Withers" echoes the references to dust and the aunt's verbal malignity.

>8 elenchus: That puts me in mind of the Roald Dahl story we read awhile back.

>9 RandyStafford: That puts me in mind of the Roald Dahl story we read awhile back.

Ah, now that you mention it, yes it does. I very much liked that one, too.