The labyrinthine library has Jorge Luis Borges to guide us through; Manderley has Mrs Danvers to uphold Rebecca’s memories; here, we have Mr Jones. All are stuck in a place because of love and duty.
Lady Jane has recently inherited an old mansion, Bells, detached from its neighbourhood. Some don’t even know its existence.
One day she attempts to have a look around the house. The maid denies because Mr Jones doesn’t allow.
When Lady Jane lives there, uneasiness haunts her. A novelist and friend, Stammer comes in her request and lives with her. The mystery of Mr Jones gradually reveals.
Jane wants to use the smoke chimney in the blue parlour. Mrs Glemm refuses because Mr Jones says not to use it.
There are moments when Jane sees the shape of Mr Jones and his footprints.
As Jane wants to get into a locked room, Mrs Glemm is so reluctant. She pretends to lose the key. Jane doesn’t subdue; Jane asks for a blacksmith apprentice for help, because the blacksmith doesn’t want to. The asked-for blacksmith apprentice coincidentally forgets his instruments so he leaves and heads back town. At last, Mrs Glemm gives the key to Jane. In there, Jane finds out the family papers that bear traces of Mr Jones.
In another room, as Lady Jane tries to ransack the papers and letters from the drawers, Mrs Glemm is horrified.
She dies soon after. The red marks on the neck reveal that someone has straggled her.
Georgiana, Mrs Glenn’s niece and the other servant, is so scared that she cries. The novelist and Jane are baffled. They impose questions about Mr Jones on her. At the brim of sanity, she reveals the truth about Mr Jones: he has been dead for years; his voice is always at Bells. People only obey his commands. Jane, Georgiana thinks, must have made Mr Jones angry.
Absence as presence is a post modernist idea and significant in ghost stories. The idea of haunting comes from the intangibility of horror. It may be the past (Henry James’s key theme in The Jolly Corner), memory, or a real ghost (as in Wharton’s Mr Jones). In other words, the scary thing can’t be seen or comprehended fully. The lack of a complete picture is horrific. Love and duty, in their own nature, are both present (one can feel them) and absent (they are concepts) at the same time. In Mr Jones, love and duty haunt Bells; for the outsiders, like Jane, it is horror that haunts. Freud is so right when he says ‘work and love’ is the final therapy for his patients. Yes, work and love. It is definitely Mr Jones.