Alice Hartley
Alice Hartley is the main protagonist in this story. She is a maid who works for Mrs. Brympton at Brympton Place. Before beginning her occupation, she suffered from typhoid and stayed in the hospital for three months.
At the beginning of the story when Hartley gets discharged from the hospital, Hartley's appearance is firstly described as “weak and tottery that the two or three ladies [she] applied to were afraid to engage [her]”.1 Her origin is unknown, but she was “brought […] out to the States”2 by a lady. Her age is also not stated.
After being discharged from the hospital, Hartley is desperately looking for a job. One day she meets Mrs. Railton on the way and the two of them get into a conversation. She describes Hartley as a “quiet, well-mannered [person], and educated above [her] station”.3 Mrs. Railton also offers her a position as a lady's maid for her niece, Mrs. Brympton. Moreover, Mrs. Railton adds that Hartley “read[s] aloud well”,4 which is a good thing since Mrs. Brympton likes to be read to. Hartley says about herself that she is not an “impulsive person”5 and a “truthful woman by nature”.6 At first, all in all Hartley appears to have a strong and brave personality. Her strong character is firstly shown through Mrs. Railton's words when they meet for the job interview. Although Hartley is in frail health right now due to the aftermath of the typhoid fever, according to Mrs. Railton, she used to be a “rosy active girl” whom she would “soon have thought of shutting […] into a vault”.7 Later in the interview, Hartley tells her that she is “not afraid of solitude”.8 She is not easily manipulated by other people's words and likes to come to her own conclusions about things or people, and to experience things firsthand.
This is particularly seen in this passage:
“I had no asked no questions of the groom, for I never was one to get my notion of new masters from their other servants: I prefer to wait and see for myself.”9
Hartley's first impression of the house is that of a gloomy one, but as soon as she enters the house, she “could tell by the look of everything that [she has] got into the right kind of house, and that things were done handsomely”.10 However, as soon as Hartley starts to work there, she faces several “queer thing[s] in the house”11
Firstly, when Hartley is shown around the house by Agnes, the housemaid, she sees a pale woman in a dark gown whom Agnes, on the other hand, seems not to notice. Hartley wants to know who the mysterious woman is and, at first, Hartley assumes that she might be the housekeeper or Mrs. Brympton's nurse. However, when she asks Agnes about the woman, the housemaid denies seeing a pale woman that day and Hartley sees that Agnes thinks she must be dreaming, but she is sure of the woman's presence and Hartley has “seen [her] plain enough to know her again if [they] should meet”.12 She does not ask further questions, thinking that the pale woman must have been a servant's friend who stayed overnight, and that all servants might want to keep it a secret since “[s]ome ladies are very stiff about having their servants' friends staying in the house overnight”.13
Secondly, soon after the encounter with the pale woman, Agnes leads Hartley to her room and tells her that the room opposite of hers is “nobody's room”14 and that Mrs. Brympton wants to keep it “locked”.15 Later when Hartley asks Mrs. Blinder about the sewing room for the lady's maid, she eventually finds out that her current room used to be the sewing room, and that the locked room opposite of hers belonged to Mrs. Brympton's former maid, Emma Saxon, which the mistress “has kept […] closed ever since her death”.16
Thirdly, Hartley finds it “certainly strange”17 that, even though there is a bell in her room, Mrs. Brympton does not ring for her but instead rings for Agnes who then has to walk “the whole length of the servants' wing”18 to fetch Hartley if she is needed.
Although Hartley appears to be very curious by nature, it is interesting that throughout the story, she tries to find answers to her questions (“I felt that I must know what she [Emma Saxon] wanted”19), but also decides for herself to not investigate any further or to stop asking more questions (“I made up my mind to ask no more questions”20). She seems to be brave and determined to find out the truth; however, in the end, she is only rudimentarily able to do so. This behavior is especially evident whenever she finds herself in a situation that is related to Emma Saxon. Throughout the story, Hartley encounters Emma three times in total. The first encounter occurs when she sees Emma for the first time in the passageway when Agnes shows her around. Hartley naturally assumes that Emma must be the housekeeper or the nurse, although both assumptions are proven wrong later. She only finds out who Emma truly is when she finds a photograph of a woman that falls out of the drawer of a sewing machine and realizes that the person looks like the pale woman in the passage. The realization sends a chill down her spine and she runs to Mrs. Blinder's room with a “thumping”21 heart. Mrs. Blinder confirms that the woman in the picture is Emma Saxon, but ignores Hartley's comment that she has seen Emma before.
The second time is when she is sitting down on her work and Emma suddenly appears in the door. In that moment, Hartley realizes that Emma is trying to tell her something that she cannot figure out, and starts to follow her outside the house in the snow to Mr. Ranford's place. Arriving there, she knows she “ought to say or do”22 something, but in the end, she is unable to find out why Emma Saxon led her to Mr. Ranford, and now she feels like Emma has left her “all alone to carry the weight of the secret [Hartley] couldn't guess”.23
Hartley meets Emma two times more after her disappearance at Mr. Ranford's place. It is when she is on her way to Mrs. Brympton's room after being woken up by her ringing bell. She sees Emma at the head of the stairs who is just staring into the dark, but she disappears again when Hartley accidentally shuts the baize door behind her.
The last time Hartley sees her is when Mr. Brympton furiously opens the door to the dressing room after suddenly returning back home. They see Emma standing there in the door while everything behind her is dark, and Mr. Brympton holds up his hands as some mean of self-protection, although she does not do anything. Hartley, holding unconscious Mrs. Brympton in her arms, cannot do anything but watch everything happen.
In opposition to her goals that Hartley has at the beginning of the plot, she does not achieve or find out anything in the end that could explain the strange events that had happened in the house.
Hartley meets Mr. Brympton, the master of the house, after a week of staying at Brympton Place. Their first meeting is unspectacular and Mr. Brympton does not show much interest in her, which Hartley immediately makes note of. Before that, she already notices how unpopular he is among the servants, seeing how the atmosphere changes whenever their master arrives. Their first meeting is unspectacular and Mr. Brympton does not show much interest in her or any kind of positive reaction, which Hartley does not miss. Blaming her illness for her current looks, she knows she is not “the kind of morsel he [is] after”24 when she sees him turning his back on her rather quickly after giving her a swift look because she has “experienced it once or twice in [her] former places”25 before. This scene indicates that she does not like or trust him because he seems to be the superficial type who changes his behavior based on people's physical looks. She even feels disgust for him upon encountering him in a drunken state.
In opposition to that, while Hartley does not have a good impression of Mr. Brympton, she thinks of Mrs. Brympton very highly: She describes her as a quiet, kind mistress who is “wonderfully forbearing”26, especially towards her “loud and pleasure-loving”27 husband. She genuinely cares for Mrs. Brympton, although she does not exactly know what ails her mistress, and guesses that it must be her heart, “from a waxy look she [has] now and then of a morning”.28 When the two of them meet for the first time and Hartley sees her smile, she feels “there was nothing [she] wouldn't do for her”.29 Hartley and Mrs. Brympton have a good and considerate relationship with each other. Not only does Hartley carry out her duties diligently and conscientiously for her mistress, she also sincerely cares about her well-being. Right after arriving at Brympton Place, Hartley is happy to hear that Mrs. Brympton has a guest over because she did not think that her mistress would have many visitors30 after hearing about her situation from Mrs. Railton. However, in other situations, for example when the bell in Hartley's room rings for the first time and she hears someone else opening and closing the door of the room that is supposed to be locked, Hartley stops for a moment as she feels a rush of fear spread throughout her body. She talks to herself into rushing to her mistress anyway despite feeling scared – in which she succeeds – and it appears that she has come at the right moment. Hartley is surprised to see that Mr. Brympton is the one who opens the door for her with his face looking “red and savage”.31 He leaves Mrs. Brympton's room shortly after and Hartley sees her mistress “lying very weak and still”,32 but then asking Hartley to “pour out some drops for her”.33 One could come to the assumption that Mr. Brympton is abusing his wife, and Hartley might have come just in time to stop anything what was happening or was about to happen. A similar situation occurs when the married couple argue with each other about Mrs. Brympton's relationship to Mr. Ranford, and right before Mr. Brympton could continue yelling at his wife, Hartley rattles the toilet things “to give [her] mistress warning”34 and Mrs. Brympton calls her in. This protective behavior is further shown when Hartley overthinks and rushes to the chemist Mr. Limmel to ask him whether the prescription that she has received from Mrs. Brympton is life-threatening or not, thinking the mistress might want to end her life with it.
Although it seems like Hartley is only doing her job as a lady's maid and is fulfilling her duties, it does not change the fact that Hartley sincerely cares for her mistress.
Even though Hartley does not have anything to complain about, she still feels a little uneasy, though she cannot pinpoint the exact reason. She notices that as soon as she goes outside of the house, her spirits rise, and when she comes back, she feels gloom hovering over her just at the sight of the house.
Hartley becomes especially depressed when she is forced to stay at home because of the heavy rain in January. Not only that, but she becomes paranoid as well on the nights when she thinks about the locked door because she “fancied [she] heard noises there”.35 She grows so nervous that “the least sound [makes her] jump”.36
As the story progresses, there are a few points that call the reliability of Hartley's narration into question.
Firstly, it seems rather odd that Hartley does not question Emma Saxon's ghostly existence, but rather just accepts it. Even after encountering her several times, she never runs away. Perhaps she might have questioned Emma more if she had not been ill. It does seem like she was a more adventurous person before her illness because at the beginning of the story, Mrs. Railton said that she was not “brisk [herself] just now”,37 so maybe she was so in the past and now she is too tired and exhausted to question anything further.
Secondly, she does not really try to find answers or explanations for the odd events happening in the Brympton house, but tries to find rational explanations herself and decides what the reasons might be. “I decided that she must have been a friend of the cook's, or of one of the other servants”,38 “I made up my mind to ask no more questions”39 and “[...] but I said to myself that he had been drinking”40 or she just does not investigate further: “That struck me as peculiar, but I went on as if I hadn't noticed”41 and “[...] and concluded that I was still disturbed by the strange events of the night”42 show it in particular.
Thirdly, at the beginning of the story, Hartley says herself that when she was discharged from the hospital, she looked “so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies [she] applied to were afraid to engage [her]”.43 Typhoid is the kind of disease that causes someone to have high fever, accompanied by fatigue, feverish delirium, and small red spots on the chest. Moreover, the Greek term for typhoid is typhos which can be translated into “smog”, “fog”, or “stupor caused by fever”;44 this implies that Hartley seeing Emma Saxon's ghost might have been just her imagination, and she has been hallucinating the entire time. And if Hartley had to stay at the hospital for three months, her illness must have been pretty severe. For further information on typhoid, see “8.1 Typhoid fever”. Although Mr. Brympton does fall back when he opens the door to the dressing room, he just might have been scared of something else and Hartley only thinks that he has seen Emma, too.
Hartley is an Anglo-Saxon name that comes from that time when the family lived in a village called Hartley. It originally derives from the Old English words "hart" and "lea". "Hart" describes an adult male deer, a stag, whereas "lea" stands for wood or clearing.4546 All three words seem very fitting in this story since Hartley passes through the Brympton woods several times and whenever she goes to town or the village; clearing is “an area in a wood or forest from which trees and bushes have been removed”,47 it is an open space where light shines into the woods or forest. One could also interpret clearing as a way of “clearing up”, which Hartley is trying to do in the story. Furthermore, stag symbolism seems to appear in a number of different cultures. They appear in the Celtic Mythology, for example. According to the Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, the stag is described as a “[m]ythical animal” that “held a significant place in the iconography of the god CERNUNNOS”.48 Among other meanings in some Celtic traditions, the Cernunnos is seen “as a god of death and dying”,49 who comforts “the dead by singing to them on their way to the spirit world”.50 This matches with the spiritual belief that white stags are said to be animals associated with the Otherworld or at least the presence of it.51
It is interesting to see that the name “Hartley” includes two genders, male and female. While the male part represents the stag, the main protagonist in “The Lady's Maid's Bell” is a female and, therefore, also represents the female version of a stag, the doe or deer. In Celtic Mythology, the deer was associated with the goddess FLIDAIS who “symbolized maternal love and abundance”.52
The story closes with many questions left unanswered, for example, why Hartley thinks that nurses are not easy to get along with or why Mrs. Blinder keeps leaving Emma Saxon's door open; this is where readers must flex the muscles of their imagination and come to their own conclusions.
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1 Lewis, R. W. B. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. (Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. 457-474, Print.), 457.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 458.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 459.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 457.
8 Ibid., 458.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 460.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 459.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 461.
17 Ibid., 460.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 470.
20 Ibid., 460.
21 Ibid., 468.
22 Ibid., 471.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 461.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 463.
27 Ibid., 462.
28 Ibid., 463.
29 Ibid., 459.
30 Ibid., 458.
31 Ibid., 466.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 465.
35 Ibid., 463.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 457.
38 Ibid., 460.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 466.
41 Ibid., 460.
42 Ibid., 467.
43 Ibid., 457.
44 Online Etymology Dictionary, “Typhus”, https://www.etymonline.com/word/typhus. Accessed December 7, 2019.
45 House of Names, “Hartley History”, https://www.houseofnames.com/hartley-family-crest Accessed December 7, 2019.
46 Lexico Dictionary, “Hart”, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hart. Accessed December 7, 2019.
47 Cambridge Dictionary, “Clearing”, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/clearing. Accessed December 7, 2019.
48 Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore. (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2004, Print.), 425.
49 Learn Religions, “Cernunnos – Wild God of the Forest”, https://www.learnreligions.com/cernunnos-wild-god-of-the-forest-2561959. Accessed December 10, 2019.
50 Ibid.
51 Sherman, Josepha. Chapter 13: “Cernunnos: Master of the Hunt.” Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore. (Volumes One - Three. New York: Tayler & Francis, 2008, Print.)
52 Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore. (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2004, Print.), 122.