‘I wear men’s lives’: The Maternal Femme Fatale in R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Crimson Weaver’

Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868-1917) was a prolific writer who, over the course of his career, produced 22 novels and nearly 100 short stories. His fiction is notable for the way in which he blends together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange stories that, according to critic and Gilchrist editor Dan Pieterson, anteceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] He was certainly recognised and praised to a certain degree by his literary contemporaries. H.G. Wells ranked him among such successful writers as George Gissing, Joseph Conrad and George Moore, including him in what he called ‘a mixed handful of jewels.’[2] Despite this, it is probable that you will not have heard of Gilchrist, unless you have encountered the recent reprint of his stories, I Am Stone (2021) for the British Library ‘Tales of the Weird’ series, edited by Pieterson. Sadly, he never gained enough lasting popularity to make his mark on the canon, and was often considered by his friends and fellow writers an overlooked talent.

Figure 1. William Adolphe Bouguereau, ‘Alma Parens’, 1883. Taken from Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in fin de siècle Culture (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1986), p. 84.

Thomas Moult writes in a 1926 issue of The Bookman that Gilchrist is ‘perhaps substantial proof that the world sometimes allows good work to go unrewarded’[3] and concludes that ‘his mastery, with all its limitations, ought to have been and still should be more generally acclaimed.’[4] Gilchrist does not appear to have benefited much from the revival in Decadent studies of the 1990s and 2000s, either. Apart from the work of Pieterson and a Master’s thesis by scholar Laurence C. Bush, very little attention has been given to Gilchrist’s work in an academic sense. This is a shame, as I believe that his representation of women in particular was uniquely complex compared to that of his fellow Decadents. In my MA dissertation I explored Gilchrist’s merging of two popular fin de siècle tropes, the femme fatale and the mother figure. I argued that Gilchrist successfully subverts both archetypes, rooting his female characters in a matriarchal power that transcends the objectification of the male gaze and haunts his male protagonists. This is most apparent in his short story, ‘The Crimson Weaver’, where two men, wandering amidst a phantasmagorical landscape, encounter a beautiful, siren-like woman in a red dress. Helplessly drawn to her maternal embrace, the men fall prey to her parasitic devices. Ensnaring the men in the folds of her torn dress, she harvests their hearts and uses them as thread to repair her garment. The image is a striking analogy of a woman who commodifies men to fulfil her materialistic desires.

Robert Murray Gilchrist

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