[In the following excerpt, Middlebro' claims that Haliburton's “The Witch of Inky Dell” is a successful short story because its combination of gothic conventions, a morally ambiguous hero, and the theme of madness results in compassion for the characters and an “unsettling awareness of the unintelligible on the frontiers of reason.”]

Plot in the short story may lead the reader's mind to an illumination of intelligibility, but sometimes it works to shatter the reader's comforting teleological expectations with evidence of irredeemable pointless waste. “I am not fond of expecting catastrophes,” wrote the Reverend Sidney Smith, “but there are cracks in the world.” The cracks in the design must be undetermined, gratuitous; the imaginatively corrigible does not disorientate, nor strip the reader's mind of all save bewildered compassion. The unwanted death of a character of felt value may arouse this response, but the effect can only be partial, not the what but only the when. Better is madness, for it attacks the existence-justifying mechanism, reason, itself.

One can draw a chart of decreasing intensity from complete madness (raging, sulking, or oscillating between the two) to temporary possession (as lengthy as Don Quixote's, who recovered to die, as brief as a nightmare) to the everyday irrationalities of sexual desire. The frontiers are not fixed, the charts keep changing. Unlike physical illness, the consequence of the intrusion of an alien organism from without, madness flowers from the soil within—the same soil that nourishes much of what we treasure, including the arts. Can anyone conceive of Lord Euclid reading fiction?

Madness is both malleable and intractable: malleable, in that the content, like a hall of distorting mirrors, bears some relationships to the ideals, beliefs, conventions, and institutions of the society within which it appears; intractable, in that it always does appear. Because of its problematic nature, the social conventions by which it is defined and understood are both strong and shifting. So, too, are the conventions of literary narrative available to the writer who would deal with the topic.

It might appear that the writer of realistic short stories, having replaced the sequential happenings of narrative with the illusions of causality required by plot, is at a disadvantage when madness, in essence undetermined, is the theme. I mean of course the genuine theme, not a device for initiating or resolving a puzzle or crime. But writers have considered the risk worth taking, for no other topic reveals so bleakly the unalterable sadness of human lives.

I shall approach the subject of literary madness by looking at two short stories which have little in common other than the theme, for they treat the subject with quite different literary conventions: T. C. Haliburton's “The Witch Of Inky Dell” and Margaret Laurence's “Horses of the Night.”

“The Witch Of Inky Dell” was published in The Old Judge: or Life in a Colony, 1849.¹The Old Judge is a collection of framed short stories recorded by an unnamed English visitor to Nova Scotia. Stories of earlier days, including “The Witch Of Inky Dell,” have been related to him by a retired judge, Mr. Justice Sandford; contemporary stories came in the company of the judge's nephew, Lawyer Barclay, who accompanied him on his travels in the province. The collection contains sketches and short stories of a wide variety of types—social satire, domestic comedy, sentiment, and adventure—not all successful. “The Witch Of Inky Dell” uses the conventions of the gothic story, conventions with which the tough-minded Haliburton was often not at ease: several other stories are costume gothic, using gothic trimmings but providing adequate natural explanations for the seemingly irrational occurrences. The type takes its name from the subtitle of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), and was from the beginning somewhat exotic, stilted, and theatrical, these elements providing the aesthetic distancing necessary for the treatment of madness, incest, sadism, murder—that cluster of human attributes and actions thought of as beyond reason's pale. Haliburton in “The Witch Of Inky Dell” was treating a subject he felt justified the use of the gothic, with its moral ambiguities: the state of mind of an American loyalist who had served the king in Tarleton's cavalry during the American revolutionary war and then settled in Nova Scotia. Walter Tygart, known as “Watt the Tiger,” has a nature akin to that of his former military commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton. Tarleton served in both the northern and southern campaigns, and published a record of the latter, A History of The Campaigns Of 1780 and 1781, In The Southern Provinces of North America (London, 1787).² As the History reflects Tarleton's temperament, it is worth examining. On Earl Cornwallis's policy of moderation after the capture of Charlestown, Tarleton comments, “This moderation produced not the intended effect: It did not reconcile the enemies, but it discouraged the friends.” Tarleton's own attitude to the king's enemies comes out in his description of imposing exemplary punishment on the rebellious natives about sixty miles northwest of Charles-town.

With the assistance of Major Hanger, who was lately appointed to the cavalry, thirty dragoons and forty mounted militia were assembled: With this force Lieutenant-colonel Tarleton crossed the Santee at Lenew's ferry on the 6th of August: He moved from thence to the Black river, which he passed, in order to punish the inhabitants in that quarter for their late breach of paroles and perfidious revolt. A necessary service was concealed under this disagreeable exertion of authority: The vicinity of the rivers Santee and Wateree, and of all the Charles-town communications with the royal army, rendered it highly proper to strike terror into the inhabitants of that district. This point of duty being effected, …

Lieutenant-Colonel Tarleton was a brave, cruel man, regarded by his American opponents as a war criminal. His career does raise the question, how much evil is one permitted to do in the service of a good cause? In the case of Captain Walter Tygart of Tarleton's Legion, guilt was the trigger for his obsession. The human agent for his punishment was Mrs. Nelly Edwards, the witch of Inky Dell. “Edwards” was an appropriate name, recalling the memory of the New England Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards, whose preachings of terror at Northampton in 1734-35 prefigured the Great Awakening inspired by John Wesley's colleague George Whitefield.

Since the disappearance of her husband, Mrs. Nelly Edwards has been known as, and traded upon her reputation as a witch in the credulous community of Cumberland. Walter Tygart's fantasy is an intensification of but not unrelated to the superstitions of his society.

The main part of “The Witch Of Inky Dell” is set at the Cornwallis Arms on an afternoon of early June 1790. There has been a thunderstorm, and the drinkers of the Loyalist club can see smoke from the direction of Inky Dell. Walter Tygart arrives with the news that the witch has been burned to death, then relates his story to explain his three years' life in seclusion under suspicion of being mentally deranged. As he is the only witness to his tale, the reader can assume that its substance is the subjective world of Tygart's hallucinations.

According to Walter Tygart, on three successive occasions, meeting Mother Edwards at night after an evening's drinking, he was transformed into a black horse and ridden by her across the Tantramar marshes to a witches' congress at Fort Lawrence. In each of the three confrontations Tygart's behaviour was increasingly frantic and cruel. On the first, on horseback, he attempted to ride her down but Old Tarleton reared, throwing him off. The reader desiring a medical explanation for Tygart's delusions can assume concussion. On the second, on foot and armed with a club, he threatened to murder her. On the third, carrying a brace of pistols, he shot at her while being taunted—“your hand is out; it's some time now since you killed women and children, and besides, it's dark.” Guilt for past cruelties has triggered Tygart's obsession, which takes the form of symbolic recapitulation and retribution. The cavalryman is now a horse, hag-ridden. The destination of the witch's ride, Fort Lawrence, built to oppose Britain's enemies in an earlier war (with the French, at Fort Beausejour), gives the regression a historical dimension. The latent sexual element, Tygart's ambivalent attitude to women, becomes overt at the end of his third ride with the witch turning herself into a beautiful girl when offering herself to him as wife, and his own assuming female attire to reach home after being left naked in the swamp where young colts were drowned. And finally, Tygart's lack of self-knowledge comes out in the scene when, in the presence of the witch as a simultaneously desirable woman and forbidden hag, his mind is turned to buried treasure, the quest for which will take him to his death.

“The Witch Of Inky Dell” is a successful short story because Haliburton, in taking as subject the guilt-haunted loyalist Walter Tygart, is aided by the gothic conventions, the morally ambiguous hero and the use of the irrational. Even the convention of distancing in time works to the final effect—“Poor Watt, the tiger, is long since dead”—for judgement is suspended to leave only pity at what Haliburton finds more inexplicable than witches, the dark dell in the mind of man. …

Both Haliburton's “The Witch Of Inky Dell” and [Margaret] Laurence's “Horses of the Night” [in her collection A Bird in the House, 1970] are successful literary treatments, within the narrative conventions chosen, of the theme of madness. In both the final effect is compassion and an unsettling awareness of the unintelligible on the frontiers of reason.

Notes

1. T. C. Haliburton, The Old Judge: or Life in a Colony. London: Colburn, 1849; rpr. Ottawa: The Tecumseh Press, 1978.

2. Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, A History Of The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, In The Southern Provinces Of North America. London: Cadell, 1787; rpr. New York Times and Arno Press, 1968.