‘Her rippling flaxen hair:’ How R. Murray Gilchrist uses the figure of Lilith to represent anti-heteronormative transgression in ‘My Friend’

Kaya Purchase has just graduated with an English Literature MA from the University of Liverpool. She is currently applying to do a PhD in creative writing. She loves writing both creative pieces and literary journalism. Her words have been featured in Aurelia Magazine, Tribune and World Literature Today and she regularly contributes book reviews and author interviews to nb. magazine. You can find her on Instagram @kayaebony and you can read her writing at kayapurchase.blogspot.com.

‘Her rippling flaxen hair:’ How R. Murray Gilchrist uses the figure of Lilith to represent anti-heteronormative transgression in ‘My Friend’

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 short stories –  morbid, hallucinogenic and opulent –  have been praised for the manner in which they blend together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange fiction that critic and Gilchrist editor, Dan Pieterson believes preceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] His short story, ‘My Friend’ stands apart from his other tales, most of which focus on a femme fatale. Rather than centring a deadly woman, ‘My Friend’ follows two men, Gabriel and an unnamed male narrator, as they go on a mysterious rain-swept journey across the wild moors of the Peak District, symbolic of their exile from orthodox society. The tale is permeated with homosexual guilt and yet it is also a profound love story, as Gilchrist depicts the companionship between the men with great tenderness and vulnerability. Whilst ‘My Friend’ is undeniably a tale about men, its one female character, a supernatural inn-keeper who appears to be connected to Satan, reveals much about the interconnectedness between feminist re-workings of Victorian archetypes and queer writing. Throughout his oeuvre, Gilchrist features women who defy patriarchy, follow their desires and invert gendered power dynamics. This inversion suggests that Gilchrist does not subscribe to the moral binary of good and bad, chaste and sinful, sacred and profane, hinting at his potential solidarity with those who transgress from conservative norms. In ‘My Friend’ Gilchrist uses the biblio-mythical figure of Lilith to present the innkeeper as a witch-like advocate of sexual transgression.

The innkeeper’s establishment is depicted as a sort of last pit-stop before the afterlife, indicated by the inn-keeper’s claim that, ‘he who sleeps here needs no more sleep on earth’ (p.139). It is evident that the abode is far from celestial. A sign hanging outside the inn reveals its name to be ‘Ye Gabbleratch’ (p.140), derived from Gabriel Ratchets, mythical devil-hounds believed to haunt the Peaks at night. In his 1849 poem, P. G. Hamerton dispels this myth, stating that the phantoms are simply swans, their honking mistaken on dark nights for the braying of dogs.[2] Nevertheless, this reference presents the inn as a devilish place. On its wall there hangs an image of Jesus ‘descending a ladder into flames’ (p.134). Whilst this image is a reflection of the narrator’s fear of being punished in the afterlife for his transgressions, it is also a blasphemous inversion of Jesus as destined for Hell rather than Heaven, presenting him in the role of Satan during his fall. Perhaps most telling, there is an engraving of ‘Lilith, wife of Adam’ (p.136) on the mantelpiece, surrounded by ‘clustering and grotesque’ ‘angels and fiends’ (p.136). In Jewish mythology, Lilith was Adam’s wife before Eve[3] who later became sexually involved with ‘the Great Demon’ Samael.[4] Her association with the demon came to be interpreted, in European culture, as a marriage to the devil, inspiring many fin de siècle paintings of her as an evil seductress, for example Kenyon Cox’s Lilith (1892)[5] and John Collier’s Lilith (1887)[6], both of which depict their subject voluptuously entwined with a snake. On its own, this reference might not be significant, but it is coupled with a strange sight the men witness upon leaving the inn. As they walk away across the moors, they notice the woman peering at them through the window and looking over her shoulder, a handsome man ‘but so sinister withal that his gaze seemed as petrifying as a cockatrice’s’ (p.140). Cockatrices, in the bible, were creatures which poisoned men, symbolic of the venomous influence of Satan. Upon seeing them, Gabriel, ‘half in earnest’ (p.140) calls them, ‘The Devil and his Dam,’ (p.140) a quote from Othello. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Dam’ as either a derogatory term for mother or a variation of the word Dame.[7] This observation, coupled with the engraving of Lilith, presents the inn-keeper as a wife of Satan.

Having ‘sinned monstrously’[8], the woman has been punished with a mix of old and young features, rendering her ‘a frightful anomaly’ (p.134). She is both beautiful and ugly: ‘There were remains of marvellous beauty; unparalleled eyes, pure and light and unfathomably deep, under white, knotted, bushy brows’ (p.134). Her paradoxical face is an emblem of her hidden sin. The narrator questions whether she might be a witch, marking her dry cackle as ‘a sound that better suggested wickedness than the most insidious speech’ (p.139). Her ‘rippling flaxen hair’ that falls ‘in great locks over her shoulders’ (p.134) has connotations of the most famous artistic impression of Lilith,  Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1886-1888)[9] and its descriptive poem, ‘Body’s Beauty’ (1870). Rossetti portrays Lilith as a femme fatale who strangles men with her long curly hair. Faxneld notes that Lilith’s hair is also portrayed as especially captivating in Goethe’s Faust (1808) when Mephistopheles warns Faust to beware of her beautiful hair which she uses to ensnare men.[10] 

Gilchrist’s suggestion that the inn-keeper has some sort of resemblance to Lilith – or at least, that she is in some way connected to the devil –  is significant because Lilith’s defiance and rejection of Adam in favour of the devil means that she is sometimes viewed as an anti-patriarchal, anti-hetero-normative icon. The Jewish Woman’s Archive states that Lilith ‘represents a woman whom society cannot control – a woman who determines her own sexual partners, who is wild and unkempt, and who does not have the natural consequences of sexual activity, children.[11] For this reason, the inn-keeper can be read as a manifestation of what woman could be like if she ceased to conform to male ideals, if she embraced her inner witchcraft fully. It is not necessarily a pleasant liberation. Situated so far from conventional society, amongst the wild heather of the moors, exposed to thunderstorms and wind that ‘cried like a beaten child’ (p.135), this inn-keeper appears to be an outcast. However, she is also hospitable towards the narrator and Gabriel, providing them with supper and a warm hearth and even obliging their request for directions upon leaving. She is there to offer shelter to others who transgress from the expectations of a hetero-normative patriarchal society.

To be clear, the inn-keeper is not a celebrated figure in ‘My Friend.’ She actually evokes fear in the narrator, who displays aversion to her wickedness.  It could be that the narrator’s fear of her is rooted in his fear of accepting a place alongside someone associated with an anti-heteronoramative, anti-patriarchal existence. When she presents the narrator with a mirror, she appears to be asking him to fully regard his true nature: ‘[She] led me to a great mirror between the windows. There she pointed to the reflection of my face […] I turned half-angrily away, aghast’ (p.139). Still conflicted in his feelings regarding his sexuality, the witch-Lilith figure is too painful a reminder of the narrator’s fear of being ostracised in this life and condemned in the after-life. However by presenting both the liberated, outwardly sinful inn-keeper and the homosexual narrator as in exile together, Gilchrist suggests that transgressive women and homosexual men are fighting the same battle, and are united in their secret desires and their violation of conservative values. In this sense, Gilchrist’s writing could be classed as feminist, the witch figure acting as a subtle avatar for expressing his true views.

By incorporating the witch into his fiction, R. Murray Gilchrist portrays women who prioritise solidarity with society’s outcasts over loyalty to patriarchal contracts, such as heterosexual marriage. The inn-keeper’s resemblance to Lilith evokes the feminist spirit that Lilith as a figure came to represent by the end of the nineteenth century, and emphasises the anti-patriarchal rebellion of the majority of Gilchrist’s female characters. Her inclusion in a tale that is clearly about homosexuality displays the interconnectedness between feminism and queer writing.

[1] Dan Pieterson, ‘Robert Murray Gilchrist and the Gothic Weird,’ Romancing the Gothic https://youtu.be/Giq35piDfsQ?si=7AlBsYJZcwBDBCg5 [last accessed 24^th September 2024]

[2] P. G. Hamerton, ‘Gabriel Ratchets’ in The isles of loch awe and other poems of my youth, with sixteen illustrations, ed.  by Philip Gilbert Hamerton (London: 1855) pp. 201-202

[3] Faxneld, Satanic Feminism, p.82

[4] Faxneld, Satanic Feminism, p.84

[5] Kenyon Cox, Lilith, oil on canvas, measurements unknown (1892)

[6] John Collier, Lilith, Oil on Canvas, 194cm x 104cm (1887)

[7]  ‘Dam, N. (2), Oxford English Dictionary, July 2023 <https://www.oed.com/dictionary/dam_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#7404976 > [last accessed 24^th September, 2024]

[8] Gilchrist, ‘My Friend’ in A Night on the Moor, pp.130 – 141 (p.134) All references to this story are from this edition are to this edition and will be given in parenthesis in the text.

[9] Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, oil on canvas, 97×84 cm (1886-1888)

[10] Faxneld, Satanic Feminism, p.85

[11] Rebecca Lesses, ‘Lilith’, Jewish Women’s Archive: The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women  <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lilith#pid-13703 > [Last accessed 24^th September, 2024]