by Jane Harris
It's just about impossible to talk about "Gillespie and I" without ***SPOILERS*** so beware. Anyhow, I remember a cool summer night when I was 14 reading Daphne duMaurier's classic thriller "Rebecca." It was late at night, there was a pleasant breeze coming through the window, when suddenly, the room got deadly cold and the hair stood up on my arms, for I'd just gotten to the part where I realized that Mrs. Danvers (click the pic to see a very scary montage of Judith Anderson in the Hitchcock film version of the story) wasn't just a sullen servant but a dangerous nut job. There may be a similar moment for you when you read "Gillespie and I," a psychological study of self-deception, and a damn creepy one, too.
The book's protagonist is Harriet Baxter --useful, efficient, officious, critical, and surprisingly tolerant of the eccentricities of others. In 1880s Glasgow, Harriet, through a series of seemingly random events, becomes entangled in the life of artist Ned Gillespie's family. This narrative, told in first person by Harriet, gradually unfolds as a self-defense of her connection with the Gillespies. It is intercut with a related sub-plot, a kind of diary of current events in the elderly Harriet's life in 1933.
Harris subtly, almost imperceptibly, adds touches to Harriet's narrative that reveal her unreliability as a narrator of the events in the story. It is clear that Harriet's m.o. is to admit freely to small faults while passing over the larger ones of deviousness and even cruelty. While some of Harriet's own history seems to be pitiful, she understands that, while revealing some of that history could make her a more sympathetic character, it would also explain the enormity of the crimes she is eventually charged with--and those with which she is not, which may be even worse. How much of Harriet's narrative is self-deception and how much of it is outright lies and purposeful omissions is difficult to say, and therein lies the chief mystery of the book.
At one point, Harriet is described as a "spinster" by the press, and she says that the reporter might as well have used the word "witch." She bemoans the fact that single women were often viewed at the time as repressed, easily roused to jealousy, and unstable. Ironically, this is exactly what Harriet is. And it may actually add to the horror quotient of the book. In our post-feminist Western society; we are less likely to make judgments based on her spinsterhood, more likely to sympathize with her past ... and so perhaps we are slower in cottoning on to what Harriet is doing ... and what she truly is.
What Harris means presenting us with a twisted spinster like Harriet is open to interpretation, but I think it serves to show just how cagey Harriet is--to claim that she has been railroaded by prejudice against women is a subterfuge she knows many women will buy by the 1930s. Certainly, Harris knows it's one we'll buy even more readily nearly a century later.
But Harriet is a new kind of twisted spinster. She is not like the self-destructive Mrs. Danvers, who self immolates (literally) on the altar of her love for Rebecca. She is a self-directed and empowered twisted spinster, more like Zoe Heller's Barbara Covett in "Notes on a Scandal"--she is smart, has strong self-preservation skills, is endlessly patient, and has a good chance of getting away with murder.
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