Ellen Glasgow's short story "Dare's Gift" deals with a lawyer and his wife Mildred, who after spending several months at Dare's Gift, a house in Virginia, suffers a nervous breakdown while her husband is away on business in Washington, D.C. The story opens with Mildred's husband, the first person narrator, asking himself what exactly it was that happened a year ago at Dare's Gift. Mildred did not just suffer a nervous breakdown but she also "betrayed" him, by sharing confidential information about one of his cases with the press.
The first person narrator attributes Mildred's strange behavior to the fact that Dare's gift is haunted. Through the account of Dr. Lakeby who looks after Mildred and who has been familiar with the house and its inhabitants for over fifty years, the first-person narrator learns that Dare's Gift is a house with "memories." Dr. Lakeby declares "they [the people who come to live at Dare's Gift] all succumb to it - the neurotic temperament soonest, the phlegmatic one later - but they all succumb in the end. [...] They surrender to the thought of the house - to the psychic forces of its memories." Beckwith (Mildred's husband) learns that the house once belonged to Lucy Dare and her father. During the Civil War, Lucy betrayed her ex-fiancé, who escaped after being captured by Confederates, and came to her to hide. Being a devout supporter of the Confederates, she claims to have had no choice but to betray him. The memory of this betrayal has ever since haunted the inhabitants of Dare's Gift and led to Mildred's betrayal and her nervous breakdown.
Glasgow's story signifies on two themes. The story takes up elements of gothic literature and thus alludes to the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Mary E. Wilkins (Andrew Weinstock, 2010). Secondly, the story negotiates cultural sentiments of Southern society during the Civil War (Taylor & Longest, 2001). These seemi...