Imperial Echoes:
The Haunting of Sound, Space, and Imperialism in Bithia Mary Croker’s “To Let”
Editorial Team: Brooke Armeni, Maddie Baldwin, Riley Bransford, Liv Searle
Additional editorial support by Dr. Heidi L. Pennington
Narrative Summary
Bithia Mary Croker’s short story, “To Let,” published in 1893, focuses on two English women and their families who, while living in India during British colonial rule in the late 1800s, have to move and rent a house because of the change of seasons. However, the house they rent and the land where it is located exemplify elements of the larger story of British imperialism. This project not only explains and examines “To Let” but also dives into themes of empire and colonization, noting how Croker’s version haunting engages these themes. To the readers, Croker describes the haunting of the rented summer house as strictly sonic. The ghosts of past actions on colonized land in India are the source of this unique haunting. We argue that “To Let” by Bithia Mary Croker uses haunting sounds in a time and place marked by colonialism to encourage readers to see that the imperial attempts to possess and impose upon the land is actually the cause of what haunts the imperialists themselves.
The story starts with the English characters searching for a place in the mountains as a retreat from the hot summer in the city of Lucknow. This leads them to find a bungalow in the town called Simla in the mountains, where the cooler climate proves much more suitable for the summer months. Contemporary readers might notice how the English characters make their servants, mainly ethnically Indian individuals, do the most laborious tasks associated with daily life and with their travels, signaling the British belief in their innate superiority to the populations of India. The two main characters become suspicious of the beautiful bungalow to which they travel due to the cheap rent, and they wonder if there is a problem with the structure before joking about it being haunted by a ghost. Many pets are brought with them on their travels. However, the most interesting pet of their vacation household is an African Grey Parrot, which has resided in the house for many years. The parrot confuses the new residents by calling out for a girl named Lucy, and they come to the conclusion that she must have formerly resided in the house. During the monsoon season, the haunting begins as strange sounds are heard throughout the home: namely, a man’s voice calling out for Lucy, the sound of a horse and rider crashing down the wet mountainside, and a woman’s scream. After many weeks of these nightly hauntings, the residents learn of the fate of the previous owner’s niece (believed to be Lucy). Lucy’s uncle was a retired officer in the army and the owner of the bungalow. Lucy’s betrothed died in a riding accident down the moutainside, and she is said to have died of a broken heart not long after. These deaths all took place during a previous monsoon season, and it is made clear that the stormy weather was blamed for the young man’s accident. The story concludes with the sonic traumatic haunting driving the renters out, existing only as a memory for them, while the house is left empty of all people but the chowkidar, or caretaker. The house sits marked with the sign that reads “To Let.”
Introduction
In this paper, we will focus on Bithia Mary Croker’s short narrative “To Let”. This story explores the assumptions and practices of imperialism and empirical ideology by addressing the way these beliefs manifest in questions of gender, wealth, and status in British-run colonial India. Imperialism refers to empire, while empirical ideology refers to the belief that knowledge can be attained through understanding of the material world through observable and measurable phenomena. Croker uses these mindsets, which characterized many late-Victorian ideals of Britishness, to develop her version of a Victorian haunting. Simon Hay’s writings about ghost stories during the Victorian era give reason and evidence for why Croker would link imperialism and empirical ideology. Hay states that there are three types of narratives in the genre of imperial ghost stories. One of these includes when a story contains “native superstition” and is “contrasted with white rationalism, demonstrating either foolishness of the native, for believing such nonsense, or the foolishness of the white settler, for imagining that rationalism can account for life outside of European urban centers” (Hay). Hay explains how the underlying assumption behind this narrative patterning is that “only European and white settlers have history” (Hay) when compared to indigenous people, as the histories and traditions of native cultures were often overlooked, misunderstood, or erased by imperial actions and systems. This is the type of narrative into which Croker’s short story might fall, as it specifically seems to dramatize “the foolishness of the white settler” who assumes they know all in an imperially possessed land (Hay).
The Haunting
The way Croker uses strictly sound to convey the haunting in her narrative stands out. The visual elements of the haunting are much less prominent, represented by two objects that move; the people witnessing the haunting mainly experience it through their sense of hearing. The first time the readers are introduced to this haunting is when Miss Shandon hears the sound of horses outside during the evening. She originally believes it to be a man of whom she seems to have matrimonial hopes. However, as the sounds start to get louder, she hears a man call the name “Lucy”. The loud sound of rain and thunder begins to startle Miss Shandon, but she has yet to see anything until “The door opened audibly, and a cold, icy blast swept in, that seemed to freeze my very heart, and made me shiver from head to foot.” (Croker). When she tries to actually open the door, Aggie—her sister-in-law—stops her. At this moment, Miss Shandon realizes Aggie has already experienced the haunting for the past few nights. Through the sounds, it can be understood that the haunting is playing out the event where the fiancé of the previous owner’s niece fell to his death over the edge of the mountain into which the house was built. The geological features of the imperially settled land are blamed, with the narrator describing the “treacherous shale” (Croker) as the cause for the reckless young man’s death during an intense storm. The horrific death of her betrothed leads Lucy, the niece, to have a mental breakdown that is alluded to have caused her to take her own life. Despite witnessing the events through the perspective of the narrator, readers never find out straightforwardly what the haunting truly is. Are there spirits here? Are these merely spatiotemporal memories of past trauma? Because our narrator is unsure, so are the readers. The readers are left to put everything together by picking up on the clues given. But the metaphorical cause of haunting can be explained, as our thesis argues, through the ways in which the narration suggests that the imperialists are haunted by their own colonizing actions—for instance, building a house on a shale foundation, off the side of a sheer rock face, in a region known for its strong rains in monsoon season. In this way, the imperial belief in their own superior ways and knowledge lead them to cause the tragedies that haunt them.
Location
The location of the narrative portrays the haunting as directly due to an imperialist ignorance of regional climate, geology, and weather. This story takes place partly in Lucknow, India, and then in Simla, under the rule of the British Crown—a state of affairs that came to be official in 1858. The setting of this story is infused with imperialist practices and assumptions. The two English women, Miss Shandon and Mrs. Aggie Shandon, first go to stay in the Shandons home in Lucknow, India, which is a center for the British military and education. The women go there, thinking the weather is “delightful” (Croker); however, they are not fully prepared for the drastic change in seasons common to this area. This ignorance leads to their failure to know how to manage the hot Indian summer weather. Through this, Croker portrays how appropriation of land without deference to indigenous ways can harm individuals employed in the imperial project. The discomfort of the protagonists, and their worries for the health of the young children in the family, signal their own ignorance of native knowledge as a cause of their suffering. Even once they move the domestic elements of the household into the mountains, their refusal to refer to local knowledge and customs as a guide for how to live in these spaces “haunts” them. Whenever the characters are at ease or are enjoying time together, the weather switches to weather they are not equipped to handle properly due to the climate differences between India and Britain. The weather is also a feature of the haunting that is experienced in the story later on, with the rain being a key point in what Miss Shandon hears when experiencing the haunting. She hears the loud sound of rain paired with other noises, which wakes her up and causes her to go through a roller coaster of emotions, all just through sounds. The location of the narrative, as well as the impact of the climate, serve as elements of haunting for the readers to understand the why and how of imperialist assumptions and practices as the cause of what haunts the settlers themselves.
Social Class
The examination of imperialist values and actions in this narrative illuminates how settler colonialism haunts the characters in various ways, including through the individual resources the family must expend to live in “British” ways while in very different lands and climates. Croker dramatizes and satirizes some of the ways in which status is achieved or contested among the British settlers. One way she accomplishes this is through the use of pets as a social symbol. Aggie’s despair over the fact that her family owned only four dogs suggests that they possess fewer pets than most families customarily would suggest, and this shortcoming impacts their social standing (Croker). Pets, in Victorian Era Britain, were indeed a symbol of wealth and power (Ritvo 237). Since Britain colonized India, it brought their traditions regarding pets along with it, influencing and forcing the settler-colonists—families of the agents of the British Raj—to follow their ideas to fit into the British-centered “high” society.
Similarly, Croker uses the piano as a symbol of past wealth and status haunting imperialist agents through the rigid social expectations they maintained. Pianos were first brought to India by the British East India Company during the 18th century (“The Piano in India - a Brief History”). Although introduced by the British, the Indian upper class spread the popularity of the piano throughout the country, making it a symbol of wealth and power across many cultural groups inhabiting the Indian subcontinent. Essentially, those of high status and who possessed enough wealth to make their status conspicuous drove the culture shift and imposed new economic requirements to show belonging in the social hierarchies.
Gender & Identity
This is one of many Victorian ghost stories that seems to portray a highly gender-segregated world, particularly among those British people of high status. In Croker’s narrative, the protagonists and main actors are all women; men are rarely “on the scene” and seem to make few decisions—even though the narrative also makes it clear that these women’s autonomy is only due to the haunting being decidedly domestic in nature. The home was supposed to be the genteel woman’s usual (or only) domain. The narrative features two prominent female characters, Aggie and Susan, and one absent but often mentioned female figure: Lucy. Aggie Shandon seems to be aligned with stereotypes of women who are mainly concerned with issues of the domestic sphere, including elements of the family and household that portray a specific familial and British identity. However, each woman’s portrayal as a protector of familial identity works differently to prove the faultiness of imperialism.
Aggie’s role as the supposedly more dominant domestic partner is undercut, ultimately, by her failed attempt to protect her family from the consequences of imperialism. Readers are set up with the idea that “she [Aggie] is the ruling member of the family, and turns her lord and master round her little finger” (Croker). Already, feminine power (represented as an anomaly) is at play to show her supposed level of control over her husband. This illuminates the control over the household, which is a reinforcement of stereotypical constructs expected of women during that time. A woman’s power, it was believed, resided within the household to maintain both its physical and its moral qualities. Traditionally, depending on the status, men would take care of the land, but in wealthy families, the woman would most likely connect with servants to organize land maintenance, as it pertained to the household responsibilities. But Aggie nearly fails to protect her children from the intensive summer heat, refusing to leave her husband behind in Lucknow to go to the hills. The Shandons even ask Susan, Tom Shandon’s sister and Aggie’s sister-in-law, to take the Shandon’s two children to the hills during the hottest summer weather, to which Susan replies that she “refused to undertake the responsibility- [she], who could scarcely speak a word to the servants- who had no experience!” (Croker). Only after one of the children falls ill from the heat (supposedly), does Aggie belatedly fulfill her domestic duty to maintain a “safe” home for her children by moving them into the mountains where most of the other British settlers have gone. The English children are implicitly portrayed as too delicate to survive a Lucknow summer. (It should be noted that plenty of children lived year-round in Lucknow: but they were the children of the native Indian inhabitants and go unmentioned in this narrative.)
As a foil to Aggie’s failed domestic caretaking, the idea of “Lucy” is portrayed as a haunting absence, signaling other failures of imperial homemaking on colonized land. Despite Aggie’s attempts to ignore the haunting reminders of Lucy from the parrot crying “‘Lucy, where are you, pretty Lucy’” constantly, her presence hangs over her and eventually destroys the ability of the house to serve as a livable “home” to any of the British settlers. The remains of the broken family in the form of their valued but abandoned family heirlooms and possessions foreshadow the failure of this imposed house in an inappropriate location to become a home to any imperialist. At the conclusion of the narrative, Aggie is described as “a mere hollow-eyed spectre” and that “[they] had scarcely a servant left”, which leads to their eventual flight from Briarwood (Croker). In this way, Lucy’s haunting absence works as a sort of protection against further imperial impositions. By ridding the manor of the settler colonists, the fate of Lucy allos the house to begin to return to its natural state, characterized by disrepair with a “grass-grown avenue” and decay (Croker).
Concluding Overview
Although imperialism by nature is domineering and controlling, Croker’s narrative allows readers to see how colonization fails to completely erase the identity and significance of indigenous places. This is shown continuously throughout the narrative through specific qualities of the land, such as the shale the home is built on, and the parrot the narrative utilises to communicate the haunting through sound. Croker uses wealth as a catalyst for social change to illustrate how imperialism dislodges people from their social status. The African Grey Parrot is a direct example of Croker using wealth as a catalyst, specifically due to the fact that the parrot is constantly mimicking the same sounds, haunting Susan and Aggie. However, the mimicking of sounds is also deeply representative of colonization failing to erase the identity of the lands and cultures they claim to dominate. Another direct example would include the geological details about the shale and the material traces of the broken family left in the bungalow within this narrative. Shale is a sedimentary rock that is composed of mud and clay, which absorbs water, making the rock extremely fragile. Shale is incredibly unstable, which is interesting because within the narrative, the bungalow Miss Shandon and Aggie stay at is entirely built on shale, which is common in that region. The bungalow is described as containing many expensive items, including portraits, china, the parrot, and other items that signal the past presence of another British family, one in a similar social position to the Shandons. This, too, is a type of haunting, which is also supported by the home being preserved for twenty years without change, as requested by the previous owner of the house: “They died within a short time of one another, and the old man left a queer will, to say that the house was to remain precisely as they left it for twenty years, and at the end of that time, it was to be sold and all the property dispersed” (Croker).
Another notable example of imperialism haunting the narrative in material ways would be the punkahs that the text mentions. A punkah is a type of fan that an individual would have to physically turn in order to generate a small breeze. However, the individuals within the narrative who are controlling the punkahs are the unmentioned Indian servants of the English women. While Susan complains of the heat and the inefficiency of the punkahs, readers might consider that some of the local people are actually outside—powering the punkahs.
All of these factors showcase an imperial haunting by allowing readers to see just how the colonization of the land doesn’t erase the identity of the people, cultures, and spaces that imperialism seeks to dominate. Imperialism and its failure to erase that which it does not fully understand causes it to haunt itself. The constant reminder of the past haunts Aggie and prevents her from forgetting what and who she tried to colonize and erase. In Lucy’s case, the past might be gone, but it will never be forgotten.
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