Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, With a new Preface 9780823238200

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SCARE TACTICS

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S C A R E TA C T I C S Supernatural Fiction by American Women

 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Fordham University Press New York 2008

Copyright 䉷 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. Scare tactics : supernatural fiction by American women / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-2985-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Supernatural in literature. 3. Gothic revival (Literature)—United States. 4. Ghost stories, American—History and criticism. 5. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. 6. Occultism in literature. I. Title. PS374.W6W38 2008 813⬘.087209—dc22 2008017450 Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Unacknowledged Tradition

vii 1

1. The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton

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2. Queer Haunting Spaces: Madeline Yale Wynne and Elia Wilkinson Peattie

56

3. Ghosts of Progress: Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton

82

4. Familial Ghosts: Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

105

5. Ghosts of Desire: Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull

136

6. Ghostly Returns: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Daskam Bacon

172

Coda: The Decline of the American Female Gothic

194

Works Cited

199

Index

219

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Acknowledgments

I’ve been haunted by this topic for a long time, but this book would never have come to fruition without the support and assistance of a number of wonderful people. Jeffrey Cohen, Elissa Marder, and Marshall Alcorn saw parts of this in a very different form and context and have never stopped influencing my scholarly development. Gretchen Papazian and Jill Ehnenn provided valuable feedback and help. Lenny Cassuto and Charles L. Crow were wonderful press readers for the project and provided extremely helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Helen Tartar and the kind folks at Fordham University Press for taking on this study. Central Michigan University provided a one-course reduction during the spring of 2004, which helped me focus on developing the book. I have great colleagues and friends at Central Michigan University who have taken an interest in my work and kept my spirits from flagging—notably Ari Berk, Kris McDermitt, Heidi Holder, Mark Freed, Brooke Harrison, Stephenie Young, and Matt Roberson. Alan and Madeline Weinstock have offered unconditional love and support for more years than any of us want to admit! But, above all, this book is dedicated to Astrid, Sophie, and the kitty-cat brigade who guard me from supernatural predators and keep the unhappy ghosts at bay.

 An abridged version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘Queer Haunting Spaces: Madeline Yale Wynne’s ‘The Little Room’ and Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘The House That Was Not’ ’’ in American Literature 79.3 (Sept. 2007) and part of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘‘Queer Specters of Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’’ in Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sheri Weinstein and Elizabeth Dill (Cambridge Scholars Press).

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SCARE TACTICS

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Introduction The Unacknowledged Tradition

‘‘The Premonition’’ is a strange little tale of the supernatural published by an American woman named Lurana W. Sheldon in Godey’s Lady’s Magazine in 1896. Within the tale, a new bride, Evelyn, dreams weird and lurid dreams about her artist husband, Armand. As she sleeps, ghostly women visit her and reveal the cause of their demise: they were all models poisoned by Armand so that he could paint scenes of their deaths. Forewarned by these spectral sisters of her own impending fate, Evelyn, upon awaking, questions her husband more closely concerning his past. Armand, however, dismisses her concerns as simply the conjurations of an overly rich meal. The story ends leaving the reader uncertain as to the veracity of Evelyn’s oneiric ‘‘premonition.’’ Taken on its own terms, ‘‘The Premonition’’ is a perfect example of the Female Gothic—that category of literature in which female authors utilize Gothic themes in order to address specifically female concerns. In Evelyn’s dreams, matrimony transforms into a dangerous descent into isolation, disempowerment, and potential death. If her premonition provides a true glimpse of her future, then she will join the ranks of Armand’s dead models, murdered for his art. And even if her premonition turns out to be false, her husband’s withholding of information and dismissive attitude toward her concerns at the end of the story forecast a future together defined by an inequitable distribution of power within the relationship. Regardless of whether she poses for her husband’s death scenes, she will end up being a ‘‘model wife,’’ obedient to her husband’s commands and secondary in relation to his art. While not literally a ghost, she nonetheless will suffer a form of figurative death as she fades from his view, relegated to the margins of his vision. I begin with this brief overview of a sinister tale by an obscure American female author because the idea of a ghostly sisterhood of dead women that warns living women about the dangers of marriage and patriarchy eloquently condenses the primary theme of this study: the use by American 1

2 The Unacknowledged Tradition

women of supernatural conventions as a form of cultural critique. My primary purpose in this book is to establish the existence and argue for the importance of an American literary tradition that has received very little scrutiny—supernatural fiction by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women. In the pages that follow, I will make the case not only that a sizable body of such fiction was produced and widely circulated between roughly 1850 and 1930, but also that this body of fiction needs to be considered as a coherent genre of ‘‘female fiction’’ organized around recurrent themes and tropes that developed out of, responded to, and, in many cases, critiqued the roles of women in Victorian and Edwardian America. As such, what I am calling the unacknowledged tradition of supernatural fiction by American women clearly participated in a broader transatlantic trend of using Gothic tropes and conventions to address gender inequities. While ghost stories by British women and the tradition of the British Female Gothic more generally have received a fair degree of academic scrutiny, however, the American tradition has almost escaped notice entirely.1 My objective here is to engage in the task of recovery of this forgotten literary canon. The implications of acknowledging this tradition of supernatural fiction by American women are significant: recognizing the existence of this body of literature necessitates a reconsideration of both conventional understandings of the development of the American Gothic tradition (analyses of which generally omit women almost entirely), as well as of the American literary tradition more generally.2 Not only can no descriptions or evaluations of the American Gothic or of American literature more broadly be For book-length studies of the British ghost story, see Briggs, Dickerson, and Sullivan. Dorothy Scarborough’s 1917 The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction surveys both British and American supernatural fiction. 2 The extent to which America developed a Gothic tradition at all is a subject of dispute. On the one hand, as Kay Mussell notes, Alexander Cowie observed that America lacked a Gothic tradition due to an absence of convention, tradition, and established social hierarchy (Mussell, Women’s 72). On the other hand, Leslie Fiedler claims that American literature is ‘‘almost essentially gothic’’ (Love and Death 142). Attention to American Gothic literature has centered on a small handful of male practitioners: most notably Brown, Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and, to a certain extent, Bierce in the nineteenth century, and then H. P. Lovecraft in the early part of the twentieth century. Ringe’s study examines a wider array of lesser-known antebellum figures (and provides an important overview of British and Continental influences on American Gothicists), as does Davidson’s Revolution and the Word, but both neglect contributions by women almost entirely. Crow’s 1999 American Gothic anthology takes important steps toward rectifying this overemphasis on the male practitioners. 1

The Unacknowledged Tradition

3

reliable or accurate until the uncharted expanse of supernatural fiction produced by American women is acknowledged, mapped, and considered, but understandings of the American culture out of which it arose and to which it responded are incomplete until the prominence of such fiction is taken into account. Recognizing the existence of this body of literature raises two important questions to which I will now turn: why did American women make use of supernatural themes with such regularity and why hasn’t more notice been taken of the fact that they did? Below, I will first discuss the popularity of supernatural fiction during the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries, along with providing explanations for its popularity. I will then briefly summarize the approaches that have been taken by critics to what has been called the Female Gothic, before turning my attention to the American literary marketplace and the participation of American women in developing their own Female Gothic tradition.

The Rise of Supernatural Fiction In order to appreciate the production of supernatural literature by American women, it is important to recognize that at the same time that women like Susan Warner and Maria Cummins were selling record numbers of ‘‘domestic-sentimental’’ novels, another genre of fiction also prominent in the American literary marketplace (and against which the ‘‘woman’s fiction’’ competed) was the supernatural tale.3 According to Kerr, Crowley, and Crow, the century between 1820 and 1920 was the ‘‘great age of the American ghost story’’ during which ‘‘most major and countless minor writers On ‘‘woman’s fiction,’’ see Baym. In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds offers an important corrective to the conclusion one may draw from Baym, Coultrap-McQuin, Ann Douglas (Feminization), Kelley, Tompkins, and others that ‘‘sentimental-domestic’’ literature by women completely dominated the literary marketplace during the pre– and post–Civil War periods. According to Reynolds, such literature actually was outsold substantially by more sensationalist genres, among which Reynolds includes trial pamphlets, criminal biographies, ‘‘subversive fiction,’’ ‘‘dark adventure’’ fiction, and erotic writings. Reynolds also contests the notion of a monolithic category of ‘‘women’s fiction,’’ noting that male authors also produced sentimental fiction, while some women produced what he terms sensational literature (338). I note Reynolds’s observations here because, as will become apparent in this study, the popular supernatural fiction by American women produced during and after the Civil War can be seen to combine aspects of the sentimental literature produced by Mary Kelley’s ‘‘literary domestics’’ and the popular sensational literature of the period; the result was something that might in part, if not in full, be referred to as ‘‘sensational-domestic’’ fiction. 3

4 The Unacknowledged Tradition

tried their hands at supernatural fiction’’ (Haunted Dusk 1). Alfred Bendixen adds in the introduction to his Haunted Women collection of supernatural fiction that throughout the nineteenth century, the writing of ghost stories was a ‘‘respectable literary enterprise’’ that could enhance the reputation of the successful author and that ghostly tales were welcomed by American periodicals (8).4 Between 1850 and 1930, the ghost story achieved enormous popularity on both sides of the Atlantic and, while few ghost stories were heralded as artistic achievements, its production could be extremely remunerative for the successful author. The general rise to prominence of the ghost story in the nineteenth century has been the subject of a handful of studies focusing primarily on the British tale but with an occasional nod toward ghostly themes in American male Romancers such as Irving and Hawthorne. Explanations proposed in the critical literature for the surge in popularity of supernatural stories can be catalogued as follows: Charles Dickens’s advocacy of supernatural tales in his role as editor and author of Christmas annuals; a religious crisis of faith in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and subsequently Darwinism, biblical criticism, and the rise of science; nostalgia for passing ways of life and a sense of uprootedness or disconnection in the face of modernity; the need for consolation after the devastation of the Civil War; and the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalytic conceptions of the mind.5 According to Bleiler, it was Dickens who forged a link between ghost stories and the Christmas season through the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843 (xxiv); he then went on to reinforce this link through the This view that ghost stories were ‘‘respectable’’ is countered by Jackson, who writes that ‘‘ghost stories have hardly had a respectable place in the literary canon’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ xviii). As I shall develop more fully below, Jackson’s contention is that ghost stories are implicitly subversive to patriarchal logic and, therefore, not amendable to incorporation in the masculine canon. The truth, I think, is halfway between Bendixen and Jackson’s positions: while a handful of ghostly tales have been incorporated into the literary canon—notably Hamlet, A Christmas Carol, The Turn of the Screw, and perhaps ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’’ (which is questionable as a ghost story)—all are works by men who did not make the primary emphasis of their literary production tales of the fantastic. Furthermore, the assertion that supernatural fiction by virtue of its antirationalist incorporation of the supernatural is inherently subversive is not an undisputed contention— see my discussion of the Female Gothic below. 5 Carpenter and Kolmar add to this list of proposed explanatory causes for the rise of the Victorian ghost story that they explored the nature of evil and were ‘‘by-products’’ of literary Romanticism and the public’s demand for sensationalist literature (Ghost Stories xiii). 4

The Unacknowledged Tradition 5

incorporation of Christmas ghost stories into the magazines he edited— especially All the Year Round, which was launched in April 1859 and averaged sales between 185,000 and 250,000 copies.6 By the 1890s, the convention of writing seasonal ghost stories for Christmas had become a British ‘‘national institution’’ (Cox and Gilbert xiii), and December issues of American magazines during the second half of the nineteenth century followed suit. It should be pointed out, however, that the publication of ghost stories in the British and American press was not limited to Christmas editions of magazines—supernatural tales were incorporated into gift books and periodicals throughout the year. Prior to the establishment of international copyright control in 1891, American publishers would frequently pirate and reprint British novels and short stories, including supernatural fiction. And American periodicals, from the literary-minded Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine to the more sensationalistic Frank Leslie’s Popular Magazine and the Overland Monthly, routinely incorporated contributions of supernatural literature from American authors.7 There were occasional novella or book-length contributions to the genre by women, such as Americans Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost: A Romance (1860), E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead and Other Novelties (1860, a work in which there is no real ghost), and Louisa May Alcott’s The Abbot’s Ghost, or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation (1867, published under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard). Supernatural fiction (by both women and men), however, tended to thrive in the short story form—in good measure because, as Poe explains in relation to his prose style overall in his ‘‘The Philosophy of Composition,’’ stories geared toward generating a certain affective response in the reader, such as anxiety or fear, don’t do as well if the reader can’t consume them in one sitting. While Dickens’s promotion of the ghostly tale may have done much to put them before the reading public, his interest in supernatural tales, rather than being viewed as the idiosyncratic preoccupation of one influential editor, should be interpreted as symptomatic of larger cultural anxieties and 6 See Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, xiii. Bleiler notes that it is unclear whether Dickens ‘‘reinflated’’ an existing tradition or pioneered a new one in his yoking together of Christmas and the telling of ghost stories (xxiv). Fisher also attributes the popularity of supernatural fiction in the nineteenth century to Dickens’s advocacy of the genre (15). 7 Lundie also makes the point that supernatural tales were part of mainstream literature and appeared in ‘‘family and ladies’ magazines, high-brow and sensational periodicals alike’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 240).

6 The Unacknowledged Tradition

desires operative on both sides of the Atlantic and as participating in a much broader flirtation with the occult. Commentators on both nineteenthcentury British and American cultures speak in terms of a Victorian ‘‘spiritual crisis’’ experienced in the face of Darwinism, higher criticism of the Bible, and the rise of science and materialist doctrines such as utilitarianism. Bret E. Carroll, in his analysis of nineteenth-century American Spiritualism, notes that this spiritual crisis developed in America in the 1840s and was precipitated by the impact first of Enlightenment rationalism, which encouraged a scientific approach to understanding God and the universe, and then by Romanticism, which emphasized subjective religious insight. This situation, combined with the developing commercial, industrial, and technological revolutions; growing immigration; and the perception that with the disappearance of the generation that had lived through the Revolutionary War, republican values were waning, resulted in a sense of disappointment, despair, and spiritual malaise (Carroll 3).8 The development of Spiritualism and of the ghost story on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1840s and 1850s—and, subsequently, the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain and the American Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s—need to be considered as related phenomena connected to a sense of dislocation and the search for order in the midst of rapid change. In America, Spiritualism, which took as its fundamental premise the possibility of communication between the living and the dead, began in 1848 and was both a popular fad and a religious movement. Moore writes that ‘‘scarcely another cultural phenomenon affected as many people or stimulated as much interest as did spiritualism in the ten years before the Civil War and, for that matter, through the subsequent decades of the nineteenth century’’ (4). What Spiritualism did, according to Carroll, was to construct a well-ordered invisible world that was a logical response both to this crisis of faith in which Protestants were troubled by feelings of divine abstractness, remoteness, and inaccessibility, as well as to a crisis of religious authority in which Protestants doubted the effectiveness of established ministers as spiritual leaders (76, 86). Supernatural fiction, which developed alongside Spiritualism in the United States and England—and likely drew inspiration from it—also can 8 Geoffrey K. Nelson links the growth of Spiritualism to unsettling social conditions prevailing in America in the mid-nineteenth century, noting in particular a high degree of social mobility, a sudden influx of immigrants with different cultural experiences, and an accelerating rate of industrialization (Moore 5).

The Unacknowledged Tradition 7

be viewed as a response to or backlash against nineteenth-century materialism and the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism.9 The ubiquity of Victorian ghost stories in this context can be interpreted as articulating a displaced desire or need for spiritual faith in an era of increasing scientism and skepticism.10 Linking British ghost stories and Spiritualism, Briggs contends that nineteenth-century interest in the supernatural was in part a reaction against rationalist and materialist doctrines (52) and reflects the era’s ‘‘soulsickness.’’ The ghost story, in her estimation, expresses a sense of disorientation in response to the rapidity of cultural transformation (76).11 Ghosts reestablish a form of historical continuity by linking past to present precisely when such a linkage seems threatened; furthermore, in an age of massive social, political, and economic upheaval, ghosts act to anchor the past to an unsettled and chaotic present. An obvious function that ghosts serve is to link the living and the dead in the present. An explanation for the rise of both Spiritualism and ghost stories in America during the Victorian era is the need for consolation following bereavement, especially in the wake of the American Civil War. Although mortality rates fell throughout the nineteenth century, American culture was preoccupied with death and mourning. Spiritualism soothed those who had suffered loss by assuring them that the dead were not really Scarborough suggests, along with Kerr, that Spiritualism affected supernatural fiction in a positive way (75). Taking an opposing viewpoint, Ringe, in his oft-cited American Gothic, comments (taking no note of ghost stories by women) that American Spiritualism trivialized the supernatural and more or less killed the American Gothic (181). Along similar lines, Henry James complained in 1908 that the scientific attitude toward the supernatural adopted by the Society for Psychical Research had resulted in ‘‘the marked sad drop in the general supply, and still more in the general quality’’ of ghostly tales (qtd. in Banta 42). 10 See Dickerson (‘‘Spirit’’ 243–44; Noontide 5, 13–45). Stern connects the rise of the literary ghost story to the waning of superstitious beliefs (xii). Le´vy makes this case for the late-eighteenth-century emergence of the Gothic in general, arguing that Gothic mystery acts as a substitute for discredited religious mystery. See Le´vy (Roman ‘‘Gothique’’) and Porte (‘‘In the Hands’’). Hume presents the broad argument that both Gothic and Romantic writing ‘‘spring alike from a recognition of the insufficiency of reason or religious faith to explain and make comprehensible the complexities of life’’ (290). 11 Day extends this argument to the Gothic in general, arguing that nineteenth-century readers latched onto Gothic fictions because these stories reflected the transformations and tensions of the society in which they lived: ‘‘Middle-class readers were attempting to adjust to life in a radically new environment, an urban, industrialized, technologized, capitalist culture, in which science was replacing religion as the dominant orthodoxy and the pace of change seemed to increase exponentially’’ (81). 9

8 The Unacknowledged Tradition

gone, but ‘‘continued to dwell in a nearby invisible realm, invited communication with the living, and awaited a happy future meeting with those who had mourned them in this life’’ (Castle 133). Ghost stories, like Spiritualism, play out the fantasy that the dead are not really dead. Although the encounter with the ghost can be uncomfortable, if not terrifying, the terror of death itself is diminished because separation from loved ones is shown to be only temporary. Another explanation for the rise of supernatural fiction in the nineteenth century is that supernatural literature develops in conjunction with and gives expression to modern conceptions of human psychology.12 For the most part, this explanation tends not to be particularly compelling because it substitutes a symptom for a cause. For example, the ghost story is frequently discussed as means for repressed material to achieve expression.13 That ghost stories can function as double-voiced or ‘‘bitextual’’ tools to explore and express anxieties and unacceptable desires in disguised form is hard to dispute and will be one of the premises of this study.14 This is to explain, however, one way in which texts function—what they do—not why they were utilized in this way at a particular moment in time. Moreover, the application of Freudian terminology, such as ‘‘repression,’’ ‘‘libido,’’ ‘‘unconscious,’’ and so forth, to Victorian texts needs to be recognized as a contemporary interpretive model that would not have been available to the authors themselves. This is not to say that readings involving the retroactive imposition of Freudian psychoanalytic theories to pre-Freudian literary texts cannot be convincing—I do believe, for instance, that one can discuss repression and unconscious desires in relation to Victorian authors and texts. It is tautological, however, to read 12 Carpenter and Kolmar’s summary of the critical literature frames this argument as the opportunity provided by supernatural literature for the author or reader to explore psychological states and extremes (Ghost Stories xiii). Patrick’s summary of the critical literature argues for an association between interest in the supernatural more generally and ‘‘intimations about the instability of human personality, as Freudian conceptions of the unconscious gained ascendancy’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ 18). 13 Along these lines, Glen Cavaliero asserts that ghost stories express repressed or hard to articulate anxieties (23); Dickerson writes that ghost stories could ‘‘provide a fitting medium for eruptions of female libidinal energy, of thwarted ambitions, and cramped egos’’ (Noontide 8); and Kerr, Crowley, and Crow maintain that nineteenth-century ghost stories allow for the ‘‘covert exploration of forbidden psychosexual themes’’ (Haunted Dusk 5). 14 ‘‘Bitextual’’ is Elaine Showalter’s neologism in A Literature of Their Own, signifying ‘‘a double-voiced discourse influenced by both the dominant masculine literary tradition and the muted feminine one’’ (xvi).

The Unacknowledged Tradition 9

Victorian ghost stories through a psychoanalytic lens and then to assert that the development of contemporary psychoanalytic understandings of the human mind explains the existence of the stories. Although not cited in the literature on the Victorian ghost story, I believe a more compelling psychological explanation for the development and prominence of supernatural literature in the nineteenth century can be found in the work of Terry Castle.15 Castle, drawing on Philippe Arie`s’s analysis of Western culture’s changing understanding of and relationship to death, proposes what she designates as a ‘‘cognitive revolution in Western culture’’ that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and which she sees articulated in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho (Female Thermometer 129). What Udolpho demonstrates is, in Castle’s words, a ‘‘historic shift toward the phantasmatic’’ (125). Briefly, what Castle sees emerging in Radcliffe is a historic inversion in which what was once considered real, the supernatural, has become unreal, and what was once considered unreal, the imagery of the mind, has become the real. A new sensibility develops in which ghosts are internalized— presumed to be the product of the imagination rather than real-world entities. What results from this cognitive transformation of ghosts Castle variously refers to as the ‘‘spectralization,’’ ‘‘supernaturalizing,’’ or ‘‘ghostifying’’ of the mind: ‘‘Human beings continued to see ghosts, only the ghosts were now inside, not outside. This view of the mind as a phantom-scene, or spectropia, deeply influenced romantic writing’’ (174).16 The world of Romantic reverie, according to Castle, is a solipsistic realm dominated by nostalgic mental images. A product of this new sensibility at the end of the eighteenth century, Castle asserts, was a privileging of the phantasmatic and a growing sense of the ghostliness of other people: ‘‘In the moment of romantic self-absorption, the other was indeed reduced to a phantom—a purely mental effect, or image, as it were, on the screen of consciousness itself. The corporeality of the other became strangely insubstantial and indistinct: what mattered was the mental picture, the ghost, the haunting image’’ (125). The consequence of this ‘‘subjective valorization of the phantasmatic’’ (136) in which the dead are more interesting than the 15 As I develop below, Castle’s framework also provides an explanation for the growth of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and for the development of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century. 16 Stern also adopts a similar position when he maintains that people who believe in the reality of ghosts and the supernatural have no need for art to make them into objects of fear (xii).

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living is ultimately a new indeterminacy in interpersonal relationships. Castle concludes that what Radcliffe’s Udolpho makes so evident is ‘‘the denatured state of our own awareness: our antipathy toward the body and its contingencies, our rejection of the present, our fixation on the past, our longing for simulacra and nostalgic fantasies. We are in love with what isn’t there’’ (137). While Castle does discuss Radcliffe and allude to Romantic literature, she does not address Victorian supernatural literature, and her purpose in analyzing Radcliffe is to make the case for ‘‘new structures of feeling, a new model of human relations, a new phenomenology of self and other’’ (125). Castle does address psychoanalysis, however, the development of which she sees as directly related to this supernaturalization of the mind. I think it is also possible to see the rise of supernatural literature in the nineteenth century in both Great Britain and America as broadly related to this shift toward the phantasmatic and the ‘‘ghostifying’’ of mental space. It is precisely out of Castle’s world of Romantic reverie, in which the finality of death is denied, that Victorian supernatural literature can be said to emerge.

The Female Gothic The explanations for the rise of supernatural literature in the nineteenth century that have been elaborated on so far are all broad generalizations that tend to be of the gender-neutral sort and have mainly been promulgated by critics who then attend to British Victorian supernatural literature mainly produced by men. When discussing Dickens’s role in promoting supernatural tales, however, one needs to keep in mind that women were the primary consumers of his literary and editorial output; when discussing Spiritualism, one must remember that Spiritualism and feminism were intertwined from Spiritualism’s inception and that women were prominent leaders within the Spiritualist movement;17 when considering the need for consolation, one should recall that the experience of death is culturally specific, that men and women were affected differently by death in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that mourning itself was a gendered practice;18 On the important roles of women within Spiritualism, see Basham, Bednarowski, Braude, and Moore. 18 Braude notes that death literally occurred within the women’s sphere. Women were expected to feel losses more deeply than men and etiquette prescribed longer mourning periods for women than men (53). 17

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and when considering the psychological motivations for producing fantastic literature, one needs to bear in mind that cultural forces affect different genders, classes, and races differently.19 This last point has been extensively developed by literary critics in relation to (again, almost entirely British) Gothic literature by women, and their insights regarding what is often referred to as the Female Gothic can assist us in analyzing the output of supernatural fiction by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women—the American Female Gothic—that has for the most part escaped similar scrutiny. Since the publication in 1976 of Ellen Moers’s Literary Women in which she proposes straightforwardly that the Female Gothic can be defined as Gothic writing done by women (138)—as well as Margaret Anne Doody’s less frequently noted ‘‘Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’’ (1977) in which she refers to Gothic novels by British women as ‘‘the novel of feminine radical protest’’ (562)—the literature on the Female Gothic has developed into two camps: The first, derived from Moers, reads Gothic literature by women as generally conservative and expressive of internal female division. The second, which also develops out of Moers’s work but more particularly out of Doody’s proposition of feminine radical protest, reads Female Gothic literature as revolutionary in its critique of the oppressiveness of patriarchal constraints and, in some cases, its fantasization of a reordered, more egalitarian cultural distribution of power. The work of Kahane, Radway, DeLamotte, and Kilgour can be situated on what I am calling the conservative side of the debate. For Kahane, the Female Gothic stages a confrontation with the mother. The fear located in the Female Gothic according to Kahane is revealed to be the fear of femaleness itself. For Radway, popular literature in general is inherently conservative and its primary function is to legitimate the existing social order. Gothic literature by women participates in this reaffirmation of the status quo by first staging female dissent before reassuring readers that the heroine’s discontentment was unwarranted. Radway’s approach is essentially shared by DeLamotte and Kilgour. In DeLamotte’s analysis of what she terms ‘‘Women’s Gothic,’’ Gothic literature by women does open up 19 Mary Walker comments in the context of her discussion of female roles in nineteenth-century Spiritualism that in Victorian culture, religion was considered more central to the lives of women than men and, therefore, that women were affected differently by the Victorian crisis of faith (240).

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a space for protest: it articulates the alienation of women from patriarchal culture; it expresses their sense of ‘‘entrapment by and subjection to patriarchal familial, legal, and class structures’’ (161); and it voices the ‘‘hidden, unspeakable reality of women’s lives’’ (165). In DeLamotte’s estimation, however, the female Gothicists ultimately evade the implications of their insights. The happy endings of these texts in which the heroines marry and discover safety in domestic settings reveal the Women’s Gothic to be deeply conservative. DeLamotte’s ironic conclusion is indeed that the Female Gothic is deeply subversive, but only to the extent that it subverts itself (188). Kilgour’s argument follows a similar trajectory—while the Female Gothic presents the home as a prison in which the disempowered female is at the mercy of controlling men, the inevitable reestablishment of domestic life at the end reveals the genre to be simply reactionary rather than revolutionary.20 Critics who interpret the Female Gothic as more subversive or radical in nature deemphasize the conclusions to the novels and are more willing to accept that a text can be ‘‘double-voiced’’ and that a conventional conclusion does not necessarily diminish the radical potential introduced earlier in the novel. Such critics, working from the literary models provided by Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter in A Literature of Their Own, and Harris in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels, among others, present the argument that a formulaic covering or ‘‘overplot’’ allows the female author to express discontent without ostensibly challenging or undermining social definitions of women’s roles. Thus, for example, Coral Ann Howells can make the case that Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian writes in and then masks transgressive views of female sexuality and autonomy. Readings of the Female Gothic as subversive are greater in number than the conservative readings and tend to dominate the debate from the 1990s to the present. Into this camp, one can place the work of Leeuwen, Modleski, 20 It is worth pointing out that all the critics in the conservative camp recognize in Gothic literature by female authors reflections on female concerns. For none of these critics, however, do these reflections rise to the level of explicit critique. Rather, female Gothicists are either demonstrating their internal self-division without calling into question the patriarchal culture that constructs it or are ultimately reifying the status quo through happy endings even as their narratives depict difficulties that women face in patriarchal culture.

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Restuccia, Kate Ellis, Tamar Heller, Williams, Hoeveler, and Becker. Writing in 1982, Leeuwen, in asserting that Female Gothic novels of the lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries ‘‘read like [de Beauvoir’s] The Second Sex in novel form’’ (43), presents among the most vigorous arguments for the radicality of Female Gothic fiction. According to Leeuwen, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and others were all writing about the same thing: women’s oppression. And they used the Gothic mode to express indirectly the isolation and entrapment they felt in their own lives.21 Relatively recent studies by Anne Williams, Becker, and Hoeveler all make powerful claims for the radicality of the Female Gothic. Williams, drawing on Mellor’s proposition that British Romanticism can be divided into male and female versions, makes the same case for the British Gothic and concludes that the Female Gothic is profoundly revolutionary: ‘‘[I]t does not merely protest the conditions and assumptions of patriarchal culture, it unconsciously and spontaneously rewrites them’’ (Williams 138).22 For Becker, early Gothic novels by women constitute a study of the terrors of marriage and draw attention to the ways in which women are confined and isolated. Hoeveler asserts that ‘‘the female gothic writer attempted nothing less than a redefinition of sexuality and power in a gendered, patriarchal society; she fictively reshaped the family, deconstructing both patrimonialism . . . and patrilineality . . . in the process. . . . In the female gothic The other proponents of the Female Gothic as the genre of radical feminine protest all more or less adopt a similar position: in the hands of women, the genre was made to express the nightmares of women oppressed by patriarchal restrictions. For Heller, Gothic novels by women in the Radcliffean vein record female fear of male domination. Modleski argues that the Gothic novels by women express women’s fears of fathers and husbands and explore female psychic conflicts in relation to repressive patriarchal culture. Restuccia also examines Gothic articulations of anxiety concerning fathers and husbands and, contrasting Gothic novels by men and women, observes that what women fear is not the extraordinary, but the ordinary (a pattern that we will see reflected in nineteenth-century supernatural fiction by American women). In Ellis’s oft-cited study The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, she locates the female Gothicists’ preoccupation with the home as a site of imprisonment and of violence performed against women and, despite the happy resolutions of most Gothic novels by women, argues that Female Gothic novels present a deeply subversive impulse in the form of a cogent critique of the ideology of separate spheres for men and women. 22 Organized around the myth of Psyche rather than Oedipus, Williams’s Kristevan interpretation asserts that the Female Gothic suspends or transforms assumptions about 21

14 The Unacknowledged Tradition

work she creates what she thinks are alternative, empowering female-created fantasies’’ (19).23 I have offered this overview of the literature on the Female Gothic because the insights these critics offer in reference to British Gothic novels provide a framework for analysis of American supernatural fiction during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. What I hope to make clear is that America has its own tradition of the Female Gothic—that is, a literary tradition that makes use of Gothic conventions to express specifically female anxieties and desires. All the themes that have become familiar topics in analyses of the British Female Gothic—the fear of husbands and fathers, the quest to recover the mother, the home that becomes a prison, anxiety about female sexuality, and so forth—repeat in generally unexplored American supernatural tales by women that are also in many cases profoundly doublevoiced. It is to the unacknowledged tradition of the American Female Gothic that I now turn.

The Unacknowledged Tradition Contentions like that of Ringe in his American Gothic (1982) that the American supernatural tale ceased to play a role in American literature after Hawthorne and died out after the Civil War, or that of Thompson who claims that American Romanticists wrote few actual ghost stories, fail to take into account the flourishing of women’s ghost stories in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries.24 Between roughly the start of the Civil War and the end of the 1920s, hundreds of gender and exposes the disenfranchisement of and danger to women in patriarchal culture. 23 Hoeveler’s nuanced approach advances what she calls ‘‘gothic feminism.’’ In her estimation, early Female Gothic novels present women who ostensibly appear to be conforming to their expected roles within society but who actually subvert such gender expectations at every turn. Interestingly, Hoeveler sees Gothic feminism as predicated on ‘‘victim feminism,’’ which she defines as a power grab predicated on a posture of weakness. What victim feminism presents is a ‘‘professionalization’’ or ‘‘cultivated pose of femininity’’ (14) in which victimization is masqueraded or parodied. In Hoeveler’s estimation, the results of this professionalization of femininity have radical potential. 24 See Ringe throughout and especially 177–89. Thompson, like most commentators on the American Gothic, restricts his consideration to the established male Romanticists (‘‘The Apparition of This World’’). Horror author H. P. Lovecraft, in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, also neglects female supernatural writers almost entirely in making his claim that America lacks any established tradition of the macabre.

The Unacknowledged Tradition 15

uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books.25 These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Lydia Maria Child, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Austin, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Daskam Bacon, Madeline Yale Wynne, Gertrude Atherton, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, Alice Cary, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. According to Salmonson, nineteenth- and twentieth-century supernatural fiction written in English was predominantly produced by women; her survey of supernatural fiction included in North American Victorian magazines concludes that as much as 70 percent of it was composed by women.26 25 Bendixen, Salmonson, and Lundie each comment on the tradition of supernatural fiction by American women in the introductions to their respective collections of such fiction—Bendixen and Lundie’s collections target specifically American fiction in the nineteenth (Bendixen, Haunted) or nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Lundie, Restless), while Salmonson’s collection of specifically feminist-oriented supernatural fiction ranges widely both across time and geography. Collections of supernatural fiction by American women have also been published by Ryan and A. Susan Williams, the latter of which includes American women among an international sampling. Patrick and Neary each make supernatural fiction by American women the subject of their unpublished doctoral dissertations (Patrick subsequently published an abbreviated chapter from the dissertation [see ‘‘Lady Terrorists’’]). Lundie published a preliminary version of her introduction to her Restless Spirits collection that includes some material not ultimately included in that introduction in 1992 (see ‘‘One Need Not Be a Chamber’’). Carpenter and Kolmar together have penned two important essays on the subject: their introduction to their edited scholarly volume Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, and their introduction to their invaluable Ghost Stories by British and American Women: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, are essential reading on the subject. Dorothy Scarborough’s 1917 study, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, is a near-encyclopedic accounting of such fiction and is notable for recognizing the contributions to the genre of American women such as Josephine Daskam Bacon, Cornelia A. P. Comer, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Mary Horton Vorse, Alice Brown, and others, but offers little in-depth analysis of individual texts. Kathleen Brogan gives attention to supernatural fiction by twentieth-century American females of various ethnic backgrounds. Thomas H. Fick examines American female authors’ use of the supernatural as a way to negotiate cultural expectations about women’s spirituality and physicality, with particular attention to Catherine Sedgwick and Alice Cary. 26 Dalby’s estimate is somewhat less dramatic. He observes that at least 50 percent of the ‘‘quality examples’’ in the ghost story genre were by women (‘‘Preface’’ vii). Briggs in addressing the British supernatural tale simply observes that from 1860 through the 1880s female authors wrote the majority of ghost stories (44).

16 The Unacknowledged Tradition

As I observed at the start of this introduction, recognizing the existence of this body of literature raises two questions: why did American women make use of supernatural themes with such regularity and why hasn’t more notice been taken of the fact that they did? In answering the first question, one must attend both to the demands of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace as well as to the possibilities offered to women by the Gothic mode. In writing ghostly tales, American women between 1849 and 1931 were producing marketable fictions that participated in an established tradition of British and American authorship. Furthermore, beyond being potentially lucrative, laudable, and acceptable outlets for creative energies, Gothic conventions could be used to reflect and comment on the status of (predominantly middle-class white) women in the United States. It is this point that has received the bulk of the attention from critics who have addressed female supernatural literature in the British and American traditions. The claim that the ghost was a ‘‘natural’’ vehicle to express the female sense of disempowerment in Victorian America and Britain recurs with an insistent regularity in the critical literature.27 This assertion that women wrote ghost stories because they felt like ghosts themselves—only half visible, disempowered, not fully alive, and so forth—is certainly borne out in the fiction: as we shall see, many ghost stories by American women published between 1849 and 1931 do emphasize the lack of control women possessed over their own lives and bodies and do present an underlying feminist critique of oppressive gender expectations. One also needs to be wary, however, of essentializing this compelling equation, woman equals ghost, in patriarchal culture. As recent scholarship on nineteenth-century American history has begun to emphasize, it’s impossible to talk about gender without filtering the discussion through other identity parameters such as class, race, region, religion, and sexuality—which is to say that patriarchal gender codes Rosemary Jackson, for instance, asserts that, ‘‘Displaced from their society and history, dislocated from their bodies, minds and marriages, [women] move into another realm, in between things, to a kind of no-man’s land. Feeling that they do not belong socially, they come to occupy the ultimate non-social, asocial position—that of the specter, madwoman, or ghost’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ xx). Patrick contends that ‘‘ghosts’ invisibility, silence, and lack of material power are ideal metaphors for the condition of women in the nineteenth century’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ 6). Neary writes that ‘‘it is not surprising that American women from 1870 to 1925 should identify with ghosts. They themselves occupied a ‘‘ghostly’’ position; they were, in some sense, the living dead’’ (29). And Dickerson concludes, ‘‘Inasmuch as they found themselves and their powers equivocalized, hystericized, and spiritualized, Victorian women were at some more profound level the real ghosts in the Victorian noontide’’ (Noontide 30). 27

The Unacknowledged Tradition 17

and expectations did not affect all women in the same ways or to the same extents.28 It also must be kept in mind that female authors, in choosing to employ supernatural conventions to express themselves, were responding to cultural trends and positioning themselves within the literary marketplace by selecting and privileging one potential trope over others.29 Given that ghost stories were in demand and that, increasingly, women were turning to authorship as a source of income, it is not surprising that women should have supplied supernatural tales. Furthermore, not only do supernatural manifestations vary from story to story (in some cases, the ghosts are of children or men, rather than women), but also claiming that ghosts and women are linked by their disempowered status overlooks the inherent power that ghosts possess. A ghost, by definition, is an entity that defies death itself. Hardly disempowered, the ghost not only generally has a purpose, but also possesses the capacity to inspire fear and awe and to intervene in the course of events in order to effect material change. In some literary works, the ghost functions as an agent of justice that violates ‘‘natural’’ laws in order to ensure that crimes do not go unredressed. In other works, the ghost acts as an admonitory or protective figure. Ghost stories by women and individuals who feel themselves to be in some way or other alienated from their cultures therefore need to be considered as expressions of desire and, as Neary notes, as wish-fulfillment fantasies (24). Brogan observes both dimensions of the ghost—its disempowerment and its potency—when she remarks not only that ‘‘as an absence made present, the ghost can give expression to the ways in which women are rendered invisible in the public sphere’’ (25), but also that ‘‘the uncanny power of the ghost reflects the disruptive force of strong women in societies that restrict the expression of female power’’ (25). The need to nuance discussions about gender is argued for forcefully by Catherine N. Davidson and the contributors to the 1998 special edition of the journal American Literature, entitled ‘‘No More Separate Spheres!’’ The essays included in this volume make the case that, when scrutinized carefully, the ‘‘separate spheres’’ paradigm for understanding nineteenth-century gender relations doesn’t hold. Not only were lived experiences of gender inflected by other identity components, but, as Kaplan asserts, the feminized space of the home and the masculinized space of the marketplace were marked by permeable borders. See Davidson’s ‘‘Preface: No More Separate Spheres!’’ and Kaplan’s ‘‘Manifest Domesticity.’’ 29 Showalter cautions that to de-historicize the Female Gothic and make it a timeless mode ‘‘threatens to reinstate the familiar duality linking women with irrationality, the body, and marginality, while men retain reason, the mind, and authority’’ (‘‘American Female Gothic’’ 129). 28

18 The Unacknowledged Tradition

While guarding against essentialism, it is clear that Gothic and supernatural fiction has been a privileged literary vehicle for the expression of political critique by women. The supernatural provided a strategic means for American female authors to raise questions about marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and sexuality, as well as to frame debates about ‘‘progress’’ and the moral vision of the developing American republic.30 What remains uncertain is the extent to which the allegorical nature of the American ghost story screened or veiled its feminist subtext.31 While we may like to flatter ourselves that we are better or more astute readers than our Victorian forebears, Dock persuasively argues in her attention to ‘‘publication legends’’ surrounding Gilman’s famous ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper’’ that contrary to received wisdom, Victorian readers did appreciate the story’s indictment of marriage and the treatment of women (18–20). And, indeed, in some Victorian supernatural fiction, such as Gilman’s almost unknown ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ (in which the ghost of a daughter abused and possibly murdered by a tyrannical father appears), the political subtext is thinly veiled indeed. Rather, it may be that the expression of such ideas ‘‘under the veil’’ of fiction made for less didactic and, therefore, more palatable reading, which in 30 This is a common theme in the critical literature. Lundie notes that ghost stories ‘‘liberated’’ women to address taboo issues (‘‘One Need Not’’ 240) and speaks of this function in the supernatural writing of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century American women as allegory. In her estimation, the supernatural (in the works of both men and women) has been used as a means through which to address otherwise off-limits topics (Restless 3). The allegorical nature of the ghost story allowed women to ‘‘displace their grievances onto supernatural forces, thereby safely giving voice to the political ‘‘other’’ of their messages’’ (3). Patrick addresses this function of supernatural literature by American women in terms of screens and veils: ‘‘For women writers, the supernatural functioned as a screen behind which they could artistically address subjects that they could not address directly, including female sexuality, alternative views of motherhood, and women’s moral vision’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ 6). Bendixen contends that supernatural fiction provided the means for women to examine ‘‘such unladylike subjects as sexuality, bad marriages, and repression’’ (Haunted 2). Lloyd-Smith observes that ‘‘women’s experiences of male power and brutality’’ (x) are ‘‘enigmatically coded [in uncanny fiction] because women had no vote, and therefore no political existence, and only a partial legal and economic existence in that their rights were largely subsumed on marriage by male prerogatives’’ (134). In the May 2004 special issue of the journal Gothic Studies devoted to the Female Gothic, Diana Wallace asserts that ghost stories have allowed women at times to critique patriarchal oppression in ways more radical or incisive than realist modes (57). 31 Patrick proposes that ‘‘in the nineteenth century, no one expected ghost stories to be feminist documents. Thus women writing ghost stories neatly sidestepped the defensiveness and the attacks that their more openly political sisters provoked’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ 7).

The Unacknowledged Tradition 19

turn translated into greater marketability. One also needs to keep in mind the venues in which the fiction was published—a ghost story with feminist undertones or themes published, for example, in a periodical with a limited circulation and primarily a female readership was far less likely to stir up controversy and debate than one of Fanny Fern’s editorials in Robert Bonner’s Ledger. What attention to the body of supernatural fiction by American women produced from the 1850s to the early 1930s reveals is what Carpenter and Kolmar refer to as a ‘‘distinctive tradition of ghost story writing’’ (Haunting 10) organized around recurrent themes foregrounding specifically female concerns and frequently manifesting a feminist consciousness. Participating in and manipulating the nineteenth century’s fascination with the supernatural, American female authors crafted a coherent body of supernatural literature reflecting their anxieties and desires. As to why this body of literature has been so neglected, Patrick presents several hypotheses: a general resistance to considering women as serious writers of fiction; a resistance within the academy to giving serious consideration to ‘‘popular’’ genres of fiction such as supernatural fiction; a resistance on the part of feminist critics to attending to a genre of fiction that could be construed as reinforcing pejorative associations between femininity and irrationality, superstition, and hysteria;32 and an incommensurability between the supernatural output of American women and generic expectations (‘‘Invisible’’ 7–8). This last point bears more scrutiny. Two important differences that have been suggested between the male and female supernatural story have to do with the nature of the supernatural manifestation. The first major difference is that, unlike in tales by men, ghosts in women’s supernatural fiction are far less frequently sinister or horrific figures. Rather, the sources of anxiety in these stories often derive from misogynistic social practices characteristic of patriarchy. In these ghost stories, the ghost or supernatural manifestation signals something amiss in the natural world—men and oppressive gender codes turn out to be scarier than the ghosts. The second major difference has to do with the relationship between the spiritual and earthly planes of existence. According to Carpenter and Kolmar, women writers were more likely than male writers to represent the relationship of the natural world to the supernatural one as a continuum rather than as a binary opposition: 32 Neary also notes that female interest in the occult can be embarrassing for modern feminists (3).

20 The Unacknowledged Tradition

‘‘Boundaries between the two are not absolute but fluid, so that the supernatural can be accepted, connected with, reclaimed, and can often possess a quality of familiarity’’ (Haunting 12). These distinctive differences between male and female supernatural tales suggest that, assessed according to expectations and standards derived from the male tradition, female supernatural tales will inevitably come up lacking. The differences between the male and female traditions also raise classificatory dilemmas: does the mere presence of a ghost render a story ‘‘Gothic,’’ even if the ghost is not a horrifying figure? Neary asserts that American ghost stories by women ‘‘should be examined as a vital branch of the American realist movement’’ (3) and coins the quasi-oxymoronic rubric ‘‘Gothic realism’’ in the attempt to fuse two genres usually considered antagonistic.33 It is precisely because of this distinctiveness of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century ghost stories by American women, of the ways in which they participate in the rethinking of conventional understandings of genre (Gothic, Romanticism, Realism, Sentimentalism) and periodicity (the grand narrative of Romanticism evolving into Realism and then Modernism by way of Naturalism), that this body of literature demands scrutiny. Tompkins observes that ‘‘literary texts offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment’’ (xi). And we can see in supernatural fiction by American women between roughly the Civil War and the end of the 1920s female authors making use of the tools available to them to make money and to titillate, as well as to communicate important messages about female anxieties and desires.

Inclusions In the six chapters that follow, I try to strike a balance between breadth and depth and between dealing with established authors and introducing (or ‘‘recovering’’) overlooked ones. Although I initially considered organizing each chapter around the work of an individual author, I ultimately decided that the best way to communicate a sense of the shared concerns and the cohesiveness of the American female supernatural tradition is to adopt a thematic approach. Therefore, each of the six chapters to follow will focus on a particular recurring theme in the literature and will juxtapose several primary texts by different authors. 33 Carpenter and Kolmar also observe that both ‘‘local color realism’’ and nineteenthcentury consolation literature are closely related to supernatural fiction (Haunting 8).

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Chapter 1, ‘‘The Ghost in the Parlor,’’ focuses on supernatural fiction that foregrounds the control and abuse of women. In this chapter, I will juxtapose two little-known texts, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s novel Sir Rohan’s Ghost: A Romance (1860) and Anna Hoyt’s ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ (1863), against two works by better-known authors that have received at least some critical attention, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ (1872) and Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Kerfol’’ (1916). In each of these stories, specific supernatural manifestations symbolize more generally the ways in which women in nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury American culture were deprived of personal autonomy and felt themselves to be victimized by men. The stories are representative examples of what I am calling the unacknowledged American Female Gothic tradition, a tradition in which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women, like the British female authors of the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, made use of Gothic conventions as a means to address specifically female anxieties attendant on life in patriarchal culture. Far scarier than the ghosts in these stories are the forms of violence to which women are subject: confinement, loneliness, and varying forms of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Connected to Chapter 1’s emphasis on control of women, Chapter 2, ‘‘Queer Haunting Spaces,’’ focuses on representations of haunted spaces in supernatural fiction by American women, with an emphasis on the home. Highlighted texts will include Madeline Yale Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room’’ (1895) and Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ (1898). In these two unjustly neglected turn-of-the twentieth-century tales of the supernatural, what haunts is space itself—space that is unstable; space that is inconsistent; space that is, as repeatedly emphasized by each of the two stories, ‘‘queer.’’ In each story, a confrontation is staged between a character and a haunting space that has the end result of rendering space itself ‘‘queer’’ in the modern critical sense; that is, these haunting encounters reveal the social construction of particular gendered spaces. More radically than typical ghost stories in which what haunts are ghosts of people, the haunting structures in Wynne and Peattie’s stories highlight the uncanniness of domestic spaces and reveal the complex interplay of social forces that place limitations on both genders and result specifically in the victimization of women. Female authors used supernatural fiction not just to critique constraints on women, but also to comment (not always progressively) on larger social issues, including class and race relations and capitalist expansion. Chapter 3, ‘‘Ghosts of Progress,’’ takes such texts as its focus and emphasizes Alice

22 The Unacknowledged Tradition

Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ (1855), Mary Noailles Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock’’ (1884), Mary Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’’ (1909), and Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Afterwards’’ (1937). Taken together, these ghostly tales demonstrate the ways in which nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century American female authors deployed familiar conventions of the supernatural in order to critique not just the disempowered status of women in American culture, but also the expanding capitalist system that is shown to underlie gender oppression. Two of the most important recurring themes in supernatural fiction by American women are marriage and motherhood, and in ghost stories focused on these themes, the tensions between the idealized expectations surrounding feminine roles and the far-less fulfilling realities of marital life for many women are brought to the fore. Behind the veil of the supernatural tale, women within a culture that expected women to marry and enshrined maternity as a woman’s highest calling could express fears and horrors related to childbirth and motherhood. In Chapter 4, ‘‘Familial Ghosts,’’ I survey a variety of ghostly American tales by Victorian and Edwardian women that attend to the subjects of marriage and motherhood and that reflect differing opinions on the subjects. In some cases, the stories celebrate nineteenth-century expectations concerning women’s roles even as they depict the discrepancies between idealized expectations and lived realities. In other cases, the stories are directly critical of the circumscribed roles permitted for women and the subordination of female autonomy attendant on being defined as caregivers. Spotlighted texts in this chapter will be Louise Stockton’s ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ (1877), Olivia Howard Dunbar’s ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ (1908), Edith Wharton’s ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ (1893), Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Children’’ (1913), Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ (1898), Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass’’ (1911), and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ (1902). In some supernatural fiction by women, rather than the reader having to extrapolate a particular wish or desire based on the negative representation of the status quo, the expression of desire itself is more direct. This is perhaps most apparent in ghost stories by American women that can be interpreted as encoding same-sex desire. Accordingly, Chapter 5, ‘‘Ghosts of Desire,’’ will explore the ways in which female authors used Gothic and supernatural conventions to encode same-sex desire. Important texts here will be Alice Brown’s ‘‘There and Here’’ (1904), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’s ‘‘Since I Died’’ (1879), Rose Terry Cooke’s ‘‘My Visitation’’ (1858), and Helen

The Unacknowledged Tradition 23

Hull’s ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ (1926). In keeping with Terry Castle’s meditations on ‘‘apparitional lesbianism,’’ this chapter emphasizes the ways in which supernatural fiction provided nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women with one means to critique the heterosexual norm and to convey same-sex desire in a muted form. Finally, as this introduction has stressed, American women, in choosing to employ supernatural conventions in their writing, were quite consciously participating in and co-opting an established literary tradition and ‘‘anxieties of authorship,’’ as well as incorporation and rewriting of the work of male authors, as is evident in a number of texts by women that allude to other ghost stories or thematize writing itself. Chapter 6, ‘‘Ghostly Returns,’’ will focus on these texts, with an emphasis on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ (1891), Gertrude Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ (1905), and Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied’’ (1913). In attending to these tales, I will examine the ways in which American women turned the Gothic genre back on itself and used conventions of the supernatural implicitly—and in some cases explicitly—to engage with and in some instances to rewrite the male Gothic tradition in order to highlight its inadequacy for representing female anxieties, including anxieties over authorship itself. To conclude this study, I will offer in a brief coda some speculations on why the tradition of supernatural fiction by American women waned in the 1930s. Just as the rise of the American Female Gothic was the result of a confluence of cultural forces, its purported decline can also be attributed to a combination of factors having to do with changes in the literary marketplace, social attitudes toward women, and general shifts in American attitudes concerning the supernatural and human psychology.

Connections The one last point that needs to be made here before turning to the actual stories themselves is that, in attending to these ghost stories, we are eavesdropping on a conversation of sorts—an exchange among women in dialogue with the larger tradition of American and British supernaturalism more generally. These were women who knew each other’s writing and in some instances corresponded with or knew each other personally.34 Both 34 Fetterley and Pryse develop additional links among nineteenth-century women writers in the introduction to their anthology, American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910. See especially xiii.

24 The Unacknowledged Tradition

Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, for example, wrote appreciatively of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work—they almost certainly would have read her Sir Rohan’s Ghost—and she reciprocated their praise. Ward sought advice on writing from Harriet Beecher Stowe (CoultrapMcQuin 174), whom Mary Austin also cited as an influence (Pryse xv). Spofford was one of the few women invited in July 1859 to a dinner given by the Atlantic for Stowe (Fetterley, Provisions 262). Elia Wilkinson Peattie was a member of the Little Room Club, the Chicago social organization named after Madeline Yale Wynne’s supernatural story of the same name. Alice Brown was a member—and served for a time as president—of the Boston Authors’ Club and included among her friends and correspondents Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields (as well as William Dean Howells, who, as editor of the Atlantic from 1871 to 1881 and in a variety of other capacities, knew personally and was directly or indirectly involved in publishing many of the women mentioned in this study) (Toth, More Than Local Color 265). Brown, Edith Wharton, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—along with Howells and Henry James—all participated during 1907–8 on the collaborative novel The Whole Family. In a few instances, relationships between these women were more competitive and combative than supportive—Gertrude Atherton’s dislike of Edith Wharton is a case in point. Given this web of connections among women authors writing from the 1850s to the 1930s, however, it is one of the premises of this study that the recurrence of particular feminist themes within their work is not simply coincidental. Beyond reflecting the zeitgeist of the era, the American Female Gothic constitutes a discrete body of literature produced by a talented pool of women authors who participated together in using supernatural fiction as a strategic means to articulate anxieties related to the positions, roles, and expectations for women in American culture. The women discussed in this book were educated and literate women who knew the work of their contemporaries, as well as of their literary forebears, and made use of a shared repertoire of literary conventions. The conclusion of this study is that supernatural literature by American women between the late 1840s and the early 1930s constitutes an important body of writing demonstrating the ways in which female authors engaged with the literary marketplace, American literary traditions, and gendered expectations of American culture. Taking account of the haunting presence of this unacknowledged literary tradition and its ‘‘scare tactics’’ is essential for a complete picture of the development of American literature; this process entails a reconsideration of the work of better-known authors, both in

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and out of the Gothic tradition, and of generic classification in general. What we will see now as we bring on the ghosts is the haunting presence of a spectral sisterhood of American female authors. ‘‘The Premonition,’’ the story with which I opened this introduction, in this sense itself serves as a premonitory echo of the lurid dreams and ghostly phenomena to come.

1.

The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton

Murder, incest, bigamy, suicide, child abuse, rape, and revenge from beyond the grave—the American version of the Female Gothic trades in the sensational, uncanny, and grotesque and foregrounds the forms of violence to which women were subject in patriarchal culture as fully as its British counterpart. One wouldn’t know it, however, based on the minimal attention it has received from contemporary scholars. Indeed, the body of literature on the Female Gothic, with its overwhelming emphasis on Radcliffe, Shelley, and the Bronte¨s, might lead one to believe that only British women participated in this tradition—at least until late into the twentieth century.1 One of the primary purposes of this study therefore is to foreground the fact that the United States has its own tradition of the Female Gothic that needs to be acknowledged—a tradition in which American women, like their British counterparts, employed conventions of the Gothic to communicate their discontentment with the restricted opportunities available to them and distress over their disempowerment at the hands of men. This chapter is explicitly about violence. It deals with stories about women, children, and even animals that are confined, murdered, and abused by fathers, husbands, and presumed protectors—and about restless spirits that mutely testify to these transgressions. In Harriet Prescott Spofford’s first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), as well as in short supernatural fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton, Gothic conventions are used as a form of cultural critique. In each of the For example, Moers, who is credited with defining the rubric ‘‘Female Gothic,’’ does so in her analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Kate Ellis focuses on British female authors including Radcliffe, Shelley, Clara Reeve, and Sophia Lee; Anne Williams attends to the Bronte¨s and Radcliffe; DeLamotte’s ‘‘feminist study of nineteenth-century Gothic’’ does attend to American authors, but only male ones! The recent Modern Language Association Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction volume begins to address this problem by including a selection that briefly examines ghostly themes in Jewett, Freeman, Wharton, and Gilman (Gentile). 1

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ghostly tales to be discussed, specific supernatural manifestations symbolize more generally the ways in which women and disempowered others in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture were subject to varying forms of control and abuse. The ghost in the parlor, so to speak, functions in these works as a thinly veiled metaphor for the living woman ‘‘ghosted’’ by a culture that refuses to recognize women as active agents in control of their own destinies and which socially and legally sanctions misogyny. In this chapter, as elsewhere in this study, I divide my attention between well-established authors (in this case, Stowe and Wharton) and lesserknown or virtually unknown figures (Spofford and Hoyt). I do so for three reasons: first, to establish that these concerns about the roles of women in American culture were shared by a range of female authors; second, to reread familiar authors in light of the broader context of supernatural fiction by American women; and third, to direct attention to authors and works that I feel have been unjustly neglected. The stories addressed here arc from Spofford’s pre–Civil War, British Gothic–inspired tale of a haunted English nobleman who abuses women and pays the price to Wharton’s proto-Modernist World War I–era story-within-a-story about a French nobleman who terrorizes his wife and pays the price. The ‘‘through line’’ that links these stories is anxiety over the control men exercise over women. In each tale, women are subjected to varying forms of violence and have no recourse—at least to the living—to redress the situation. Only the dead possess the uncanny potency to confront and remedy these crimes. And, as the chapter progresses, the scope of the critique broadens. Whereas Spofford and Stowe focus specifically on the plight of women, Hoyt includes children, and Wharton, most damningly of all, extends the analysis to animals—which has the ultimate effect of conflating women and animals as less than men and therefore subject to confinement and abuse.

Nowhere to Turn: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost I begin my analysis here with Harriet Prescott Spofford’s first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), because it so clearly demonstrates the ways in which American female authors were influenced by and revised the British Female Gothic tradition. This fascinating work, through a fusion of both sensationalist and classical themes, exemplifies the preoccupation of Female Gothicists with the ways in which men exert control over women. This

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work—the only novel to be included within this study and one of the earliest works to be considered overall—also can be viewed, however, as a transition of sorts from the novel form to the short story and from an emphasis on the terror of the unknown, associated with Gothic works by male writers, to the terror of the known, in which what frightens women the most is not the supernatural, but the dangers of everyday life attendant on being a woman in a male-dominated culture.2 Thanks in large measure to the publication in 1989 of a collection of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short fiction entitled The Amber Gods and Other Stories, Spofford’s star, after having been in eclipse for some eighty years, is starting to shine brightly again.3 In a publishing career that lasted from the mid-1850s until 1921 (almost the entire span covered by this study), Spofford produced hundreds of stories, poems, essays, children’s books, travel books, and novels. In the 1860s, following the inclusion of several of her stories in the Atlantic Monthly,4 the publication of her first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), and the publication of a collection of short fiction entitled The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863), Spofford was one of the most popular women writers in America and was perceived to be one of the most promising authors of Romantic fiction in the United States.5 Although Spofford 2 As commentators on the American ghost story have maintained, the source of terror in such works shifts from the irruption of the supernatural to the ‘‘traditional roles women were expected to fill and fulfill’’ (Bendixen, Haunted 1). See also Carpenter and Kolmar (Haunting and Ghost Stories), Lundie (Restless Spirits and ‘‘One Need Not Be a Chamber’’), Neary, and Patrick (‘‘Lady Terrorists’’ and ‘‘Invisible’’). 3 The republication of Spofford’s short stories has made them more accessible. The bulk of the still sparse criticism on Spofford, however, primarily mines her work for feminist themes. See Bendixen’s introduction to The Amber Gods and Other Stories, as well as Gold and Fick, Logan, Fetterley’s introduction to ‘‘The Amber Gods’’ in Provisions, Opfermann, Gaul, and Dalke. 4 Spofford’s first inclusion in the Atlantic, ‘‘In a Cellar,’’ appeared in February 1859 and so impressed the periodical’s editors that confirmation was needed from Thomas Wentworth Higginson that the author was indeed a twenty-four-year-old American woman and that the story was not a translation from French. As Fetterley observes, the publication of this story introduced her into erudite literary circles, and her invitation to the July 1859 dinner held by the Atlantic in honor of Harriet Beecher Stowe testified to her achievement (Provisions 262). Spofford’s ‘‘The Amber Gods’’ appeared in the Atlantic in January and February of 1860 and was followed by what remains her most famous short story, ‘‘Circumstance,’’ which was published in the Atlantic in May 1860. 5 It should be pointed out that the 1863 and 1989 volumes of Spofford’s short stories, both entitled The Amber Gods and Other Stories, contain different stories. The 1989 version includes material from throughout Spofford’s long career as a writer.

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never quite realized her potential and tarnished her own critical reputation by rapidly publishing works of uneven quality, her best work, in Alfred Bendixen’s estimation, ‘‘represents not only the final flowering of the romantic impulse in nineteenth-century New England, but also the most significant female counterpart to the essentially male tradition of American romantic fiction’’ (‘‘Amber Gods’’ xi).6 For the purposes of this study, it is also important to note that, increasingly during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Spofford, who was originally championed by literary entrepreneur and eventual editor of the Atlantic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was part of and exercised influence over a community of Boston-based female writers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Rose Terry Cooke (who included a glowing appraisal of Spofford in Our Famous Women [1884]), and Alice Brown—all of whom produced their own supernatural tales and will be discussed in Chapter 5.7 Spofford published prolifically in mid-nineteenth-century ‘‘story papers’’— lowbrow vehicles for the dissemination of sensationalist fiction. Even though such publications offered minimal financial compensation—as little as $2.50 per tale toward the end of the 1850s (Bendixen, ‘‘Harriet Prescott Spofford’’ 377), she likely did so (as many authors did) out of pressing financial need. According to her biographer, Elizabeth K. Halbeisen, during a three-year period in the late 1850s, Spofford dashed off over one hundred stories for a single Boston story paper and often put in fifteen-hour days at her writing. Despite the critical esteem generated by her contributions to the Atlantic in the early 1860s, according to Bendixen, she soon became known as a ‘‘magazinist,’’ an entertaining writer, but one whose work lacked real literary merit (‘‘Harriet’’ 378). Both Bendixen and Fetterley add that Spofford’s critical reputation and general popularity also suffered as a result of the shift in literary tastes from Romanticism to Realism in postbellum America. 7 According to Bendixen, Spofford ‘‘won the affection of almost every important woman writer in New England’’ (‘‘Amber Gods’’ xxi). In her entry in Our Famous Women, Cooke writes of Spofford, ‘‘She poured out such luxury of image, such abundant and splendid epithet, such derivative stress, and such lavish color and life, that the stiff old mother-tongue seemed to have been molten and fused in some magic crucible, and turned to liquid gold and gems’’ (qtd. in Bendixen, ‘‘Amber Gods’’ xi–xii). Cooke also recalled the effect on her of reading Spofford’s first publication in the Atlantic Monthly, ‘‘In a Cellar’’: ‘‘This new and brilliant contribution dazzled us all with the splendors, the manners, the political intrigues, the sin-spiced witchery of Parisian life’’ (qtd. in Bendixen, ‘‘Harriet’’ 381). Bendixen reports that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, one of Spofford’s correspondents, regarded Spofford’s ‘‘The Amber Gods’’ as one of the few stories that made a lasting impression on her (‘‘Harriet’’ 381). A number of commentators mention Emily Dickinson’s description of Spofford’s ‘‘Circumstance’’ as ‘‘the only thing that I ever saw in my life that I did not think I could have written myself ’’ (St. Armand 173; see also Rodier) and Bendixen suggests that one can see the influence 6

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Spofford’s first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost, was published in 1860 and was both widely read and praised.8 The story itself is an intriguing mix of sensationalist themes clearly indebted both to the British Female Gothic tradition of Ann Radcliffe, Sophia Lee, and Charlotte Dacre, as well as to the Male Gothic tradition of Matthew ‘‘Monk’’ Lewis, Horace Walpole, and Charles Maturin. The story also can be seen as borrowing from classical sources, including Greek and Shakespearian tragedy—notably the story of Oedipus (Sir Rohan unknowingly pursues an incestuous relationship with his daughter) and Macbeth (Sir Rohan’s ghost, to a certain extent, is the projection of his guilty mind). The tale, which is set in England, concerns a reclusive nobleman, Sir Rohan, who for the past twenty years has been haunted by a female ghost: ‘‘A ghost that, sleeping or waking, never left him, a ghost whose long hair coiled round and stifled the fair creations of his dreams, and whose white garments swept leprously into his sunshine’’ (11). Sir Rohan’s gloom is lifted and his ghost quieted when he is visited by his old friend, St. Denys, and the latter’s young, beautiful ward, Miriam. Predictably, Sir Rohan falls in love with Miriam, who reciprocates his affection, and Sir Rohan appears to be on the verge of matrimonial bliss and a new life free from the torments of his apparition when the presumed villain of the story, Marc Arundel, reveals that Miriam is in fact Sir Rohan’s own natural child—the product of his affair with an alleged gypsy woman whom he refused to marry and whom he may even have tried to murder! In the final pages of the narrative, the reader learns that this cast-off gypsy woman is in fact buried on Sir Rohan’s estate, that it has been her ghost that has been haunting him, and that Sir Rohan’s desire for Miriam is in fact incestuous. As the ghost reemerges in a blaze of triumph upon the revelation of this information, the stunned Sir Rohan drops dead and the story ends. of both Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman on Spofford’s later ‘‘local color’’ work (‘‘Amber Gods’’ xx). 8 James Russel Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, comments in his 1860 review of the book that ‘‘no first volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this’’ (253). Similarly, an anonymous review in the North American Review is extremely laudatory and begins by stating, ‘‘Seldom has a first book by a young writer been so full of promise as this’’ (576). A review in the New Englander observes of the book that ‘‘it is a veritable ghost story, but entirely unlike any others of that description that we have ever read. In the freshness and variety and originality of its conception it will rank among the best of our American novels’’ (266). Bendixen comments that a notable passage in Sir Rohan’s Ghost describing a wine cellar ‘‘drew such admiration that the young author often found herself embarrassed when dining in public by some connoisseur sending over a bottle of wine in tribute’’ (‘‘Harriet’’ 378).

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What is initially most interesting about Sir Rohan’s Ghost is the fact that it begins with a male protagonist who is already haunted. In the very first paragraph of the novel, Sir Rohan is introduced simultaneously with his ghost. After being told that ‘‘there is a ghost in all aristocratic families’’ (11), the reader is told flatly, ‘‘Sir Rohan had a Ghost’’ (11). The rest of the brief first chapter then goes on to describe this ghost and the ways in which Sir Rohan attempted in the past, but failed, to evade this apparition. Neither throwing himself into battle nor submerging himself in social ‘‘dissipation’’ were effective measures to ward off the specter. As a result, Sir Rohan, in the face of this persistent, inescapable haunting, has cut himself off from all social interactions and secreted himself within his country estate. Only in painting does he find some measure of respite from the fury of his supernatural tormentor.9 Curiously, the precise nature of the apparition itself is left in question. Only in the first chapter is some consideration of its ontological status entertained. The omniscient narrator asks, ‘‘Was Sir Rohan hypochondriac? Was his Ghost but the indigestion of numerous rich dinners? Was it some unwhisperable remorse that clothed him, still living, in a pall? Or was it any restless honor that glamoured ceaselessly across his straining sight?’’ (15). The earliest readers of Sir Rohan’s Ghost gravitated toward the ‘‘unwhisperable remorse’’ option. James Russell Lowell, in his February 1860 review of the novel in the Atlantic Monthly, pronounces Sir Rohan to be possessed by his ‘‘diseased memory’’ (253), and the April 1860 review in the North American Review concurs, asserting the ghost to be the product of the ‘‘workings of [the novel’s] prime hero’s horror-stricken conscience’’ (576). This assessment of the nature of Sir Rohan’s ghost is complicated, however, by the facts that the ghost begins to materialize for Miriam while she dozes in Sir Rohan’s conservatory (134–35), that the servants in Sir Rohan’s household claim to have seen fairy lights dancing over the spot that is revealed to be the grave of the woman wronged by Sir Rohan (303–4), and that the initial antagonist, Marc Arundel, reports that, as he investigated the This attempt is only partially effective, however, as the ghost comes to inhabit his canvas. In a characteristically Gothic moment, Sir Rohan discovers that the eyes of the figure he has painted have changed in color to that of his ghost! With its emphasis on Sir Rohan as painter, Sir Rohan’s Ghost, like Spofford’s ‘‘The Amber Gods,’’ can be read as a parable about the nature of art and the artist. To a certain extent, painting does allow Sir Rohan to subdue his past—his ghost departs from his life and inhabits his canvas instead. When Sir Rohan realizes this, he destroys the painting, unleashing the ghost (229). 9

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mysteries surrounding Sir Rohan’s past, he ‘‘felt as if some one were directing [him]; the right thing turned up at the right time, so that not a moment was lost, and [he] almost could swear that [he had] been assisted by some extraordinary and inexplicable agency’’ (339). Ultimately, the story isn’t concerned with the precise nature of Sir Rohan’s apparition, which indeed seems to be a combination of ‘‘diseased memory’’ and external supernatural agency.10 Following the initial consideration of the nature of Sir Rohan’s ghost in the first chapter of the novel, the presence of the ghost is simply accepted within the narrative by both the narrator and Sir Rohan as a given, as a sort of foregone conclusion. The result of this is that the emphasis within the narrative falls not on the nature of the ghost, but on its effect on Sir Rohan. While the reader does wonder why Sir Rohan is being haunted, the narrative attempts to manipulate the reader into sympathizing with friendless, tormented Sir Rohan as he develops his relationship with the young inge´nue, Miriam. This sense of the haunting as a fait accompli and the forced identification with the character who turns out to be the villain is perhaps what is most original about Spofford’s appropriation and revision of the standard Gothic novel. The narrative has all the hallmarks of the conventional Gothic: an underlying story of a woman held captive and victimized, a ghost, a spooky portrait, hallucinatory visions, a missing mother, descents into dark places (including a wine cellar and a mine), ascensions to towers, ancient ruins, a curse, even a literal skeleton in a closet! Yet, by withholding certain crucial information about Sir Rohan’s past, Spofford interestingly reconceives the conventional plot by putting the reader into the position of identifying and sympathizing with the villain. The story presents what might be considered as the haunted afterlife of the reformed rake. The reader knows that Sir Rohan was involved in some tragedy but perceives him to be basically kindhearted and generous—and, it is important to note, incapable of any act of real violence or sadism. He is so dejected and seemingly so virtuous that, in the absence of specific information about his past, the reader is led to regret his haunting and hope for a happy ending in which he marries Miriam and escapes his sorrowful past. 10 In a sense, Sir Rohan’s guilt takes on a life of its own. Given that Miriam, Sir Rohan’s daughter, is the only other person in the story to see the ghost—the ghost of her mother—another reading of this text might productively employ French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s idea of the ‘‘phantom’’ as an ‘‘entombed’’ secret within the unconscious of a parent that is communicated to a child. See Abraham and Torok’s ‘‘Notes on the Phantom.’’

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This positive appraisal of Sir Rohan’s character is assisted by the juxtaposition of Sir Rohan with the ostensible villain of the story, Marc Arundel. At the start of the story, St. Denys and his adopted daughter, Miriam, arrive at Sir Rohan’s estate attempting to escape from the undesired solicitations of the smarmy Arundel. Not only does the reader quickly come to understand that Arundel is only interested in Miriam for the inheritance she will acquire upon the death of St. Denys, but the unscrupulous Arundel actually appears to make an unsuccessful attempt on St. Denys’s life; cajoles Sir Rohan’s aged and faithful servant, Redruth, into getting drunk so as to pry information about Sir Rohan’s life out of him; and seems to be working together with gypsies to extort money from Sir Rohan. When the unscrupulous Arundel starts digging into Sir Rohan’s past, the reader, repelled by Arundel’s deviousness, hopes either that his investigations will be unsuccessful or will confirm the impression developed over the vast majority of the novel that Sir Rohan is innocent of any significant crime. The text clearly contrasts the heroic Sir Rohan with the villainous Arundel. The reader, however, is mislead by Spofford. In the final 15 pages of this 350-page novel, Arundel reveals that, years ago, Sir Rohan entered into a romantic relationship with an elegant young woman, alleged to have been descended from gypsies, whom he carried off, unwed, to his ‘‘residence in the North’’ (341). There he kept her isolated from the world until his passion for her faded and the young woman herself began to fail. While walking alongside a river, the woman revealed to Sir Rohan that she was pregnant by him and, Arundel recounts, ‘‘Harsh words followed,—a blow, perhaps,—I will not say,—for whether fallen, or dashed aside, in a moment more she was sweeping down the tide, with a small penknife, that [Sir Rohan] always carried, fixed in her bosom’’ (348). The woman was fished out of the river and survived only long enough to give birth to the child ultimately adopted by St. Denys and named Miriam. Spofford’s devious novel turns out to contain a conventional Female Gothic plot masked by an unusual point of view, the withholding of information, and a temporal shift in which the tragic act occurred prior to the start of the novel itself. Taken together, these elements tend to make the reader complicit with Sir Rohan in hoping for the consummation of what turns out to be an incestuous relationship. Indeed, all the reader’s expectations are overturned in the final pages of the narrative: Sir Rohan’s crimes are revealed to be greater than ever expected; Miriam is exposed as his illegitimate daughter; and Sir Rohan’s haunting seems to be wholly warranted. As a result of these revelations, his status as hero must be reevaluated entirely

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and the ramifications of this reassessment of Sir Rohan are significant: what is ultimately revealed by the story is that there is no hero. Sir Rohan, with whom the reader has been asked to sympathize and who is presented as the hero, turns out to be the conventional Gothic villain—one who seduced, imprisoned, and ultimately killed (or at least participated in the demise of ) the initial object of his lust. Marc Arundel, while he does expose Sir Rohan’s shameful past, thereby preventing the incestuous marriage, remains a self-serving and unscrupulous cad (who we learn in an aside subsequently gets into legal trouble and is forced to leave England). And St. Denys, Miriam’s father, is shown to be wholly naı¨ve and ineffectual at preventing the final tragedy.11 In some respects, this conclusion, in which the story is stripped of its apparent hero and Miriam is shown to have no true protector, must be seen as an even more forceful critique of the disempowerment of women in patriarchal culture than the typical Female Gothic tale. Miriam’s initial choice was between the man who, unbeknownst to her, seduced, abused, and who, intentionally or not, is connected to the death of her mother, and another who has no true regard for her and only covets her inheritance money. At the end of the story, only Arundel remains as suitor and her adopted father has been shown insufficient at protecting her. In an elaboration on the conventional Female Gothic, Miriam is subject to the predations of guilty and unscrupulous males, with no true protector in sight.12 The reader’s sense of Miriam’s plight is accentuated by his or her own sense of betrayal. In the final pages of the novel, the reader’s position vis-a`vis the narrative shifts from sympathizing with Sir Rohan to identifying with the startled and betrayed Miriam because the reader, too, has been seduced by Sir Rohan’s fac¸ade of victimization and betrayed by the revelation of his Other ghost stories in which women are the victims of explicit violence and return to haunt attackers or the site of their demise include Alice Turner Curtis’s ‘‘To Let’’ (1896), Emma Frances Dawson’s ‘‘A Sworn Statement’’ (1897), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ (1891, discussed in Chapter 6 of this study), Lucy H. Hooper’s ‘‘Glimpses of Ghost-Land’’ (1873), Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Andy Macpherson’s House’’ (1920) and ‘‘The Ghost Flower’’ (1908), Mrs. Romer’s ‘‘Story of a Haunted House’’ (1849), and Lurana W. Sheldon’s ‘‘A Premonition’’ (1896). Spofford’s ‘‘The Black Bess’’ (1868) offers a very interesting twist on this scenario. 12 She even appears to be abandoned by the ghost of her mother who does not warn her of her plight but instead actively seems to use Miriam as a tool to realize her postmortem revenge! If we are to believe Arundel, the ghost supervised his investigation, and Sir Rohan sees her appear in a blaze of triumph at the end, once he realizes the true nature of his relationship with Miriam. 11

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true villainy. By allowing the reader and the heroine to discover the black heart of the villain simultaneously, Spofford revises the typical virtue-undersiege plot of both the conventional Gothic and sentimental novel in which the reader knows more than the naı¨ve heroine. The tragic irony of the conclusion enacts the duplicity of the typical rakish villain as the reader realizes that he or she has been mistaken and manipulated all along. In the end, Spofford’s ghost story is one that revises the familiar Gothic plot of incestuous desire and supernatural revenge in interesting ways, but it culminates with the same realization: that the biggest threats to women in patriarchal culture lie closest to home—in fathers, lovers, and husbands. The rhetoric of haunting in this text ultimately becomes the vehicle for the revelation of Sir Rohan’s disgraceful past. While his past does catch up with him—the presumably reformed rake is unable to conquer the ghost of his earlier sins—the ghost’s revenge is accomplished only at the expense of the well-being of her daughter. Miriam is saved from an incestuous relationship but left with the realization that all the men in her life are false or ineffective.13

Ghost or Prisoner—Is There a Difference? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ The imprisonment and abuse of women and the inability or unwillingness of men to protect them that is at the heart of Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost is also the central theme of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ghostly short story ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ included in her 1872 collection of stories entitled Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories. Unlike Spofford, Stowe never faded from cultural consciousness. The publication in 1852 of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the country’s first best sellers, made Stowe an immediate celebrity whose name has become synonymous with sentimental literature. Stowe, however, in works such as The Mayflower: Or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendents of the Pilgrims (1843), The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), While it plays only a minor role within the story, there is also a more traditional Female Gothic tale embedded within the broader text. While exploring part of Sir Rohan’s estate, Miriam, Sir Rohan, and St. Denys discover an actual skeleton in a locked closet of a remote room. This prompts Sir Rohan to recollect the story of Dame Fanchon. Dame Fanchon was a beautiful young woman compelled by her father to marry against her will. On the day of her wedding, she disappeared and was never seen again. Apparently, attempting to avoid her undesired marriage, she became locked in the closet and was never rescued! 13

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and Sam Lawson, also pioneered the development of what Donovan calls ‘‘local color realism’’ (50) in a body of literature centered around New England village life. Interestingly, several of the stories told in The Pearl of Orr’s Island and Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories feature supernatural elements.14 Rather than being derived from the British Gothic, Stowe’s supernaturalism instead arguably reflects the influence of the American Spiritualist movement and Stowe’s own lifelong interest in the possibility of communicating with the dead.15 Spiritualism, which achieved great popularity in the United States in the 1850s and then again in the 1870s, predicated its beliefs on the possibility of reciprocal communication between the living and the dead. Death, from the Spiritualist perspective, was viewed not as the cessation of or break in consciousness, but as the transition from one stage of consciousness to another, higher stage.16 Although the attractions of Spiritualism—‘‘the desire for empirical evidence of the immortality of the soul; the rejection of Calvinism or evangelicalism in favor of a more liberal theology; and the desire to overcome bereavement through communication with departed ones’’ (Braude 33–34)—were irresistible to thousands, the movement held special attractions for women. Braude notes that the prominence of women within American Spiritualism resulted from its staunchly individualistic form of religious practice—Spiritualism offered women an unusual opportunity to assume religious leadership (6). The extreme individualism underlying Spiritualist religious belief, combined with its opposition to established religious practices, resulted in a progressive political platform that ‘‘denounced Pearl features stories about a dying woman who perceives her dead son coming for her (which may have influenced Sarah Orne Jewett’s story ‘‘The Foreigner’’) and a haunted cradle. In addition to ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ Sam Lawson includes ‘‘The Ghost in the Mill,’’ about the ghost of a murdered man whose body has been walled up in a chimney; ‘‘A Student’s Sea Story,’’ in which the ghost of a ship captain’s father appears and instructs the captain to assist his ailing mother; and ‘‘Tom Toothacre’s Ghost Story,’’ which details a collision between two ships in the fog leading to the appearance of ghostly sailors. 15 Stowe became interested in se´ance communication after the death of her first son in 1857 and, according to Kerr, planned or went so far as to prepare a magazine article about her se´ance communications with the spirits of Charlotte Bronte¨ and the Duchess of Sutherland (Mediums 162). 16 Estimates of the numbers of nineteenth-century Spiritualist adherents vary widely. As Braude reports, the 1890 census reported forty-five thousand Spiritualists in thirtynine states, but this included only those formally affiliated with organized Spiritualist societies. During the nineteenth century, estimates ranged from a few hundred thousand to eleven million (25). 14

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the authority of churches over believers, of governments over citizens, of doctors over patients, of masters over slaves, and, most of all, of men over women’’; and Spiritualism, in Braude’s estimation, functioned as a significant mid-century platform for the dissemination of women’s rights ideas (56–57). In addition to its reformist political agenda emphasizing the emancipation of women, Spiritualism also reflected the Victorian view of the home as the true center of religiosity (Braude 24) and, consistent with nineteenthcentury beliefs concerning female predisposition toward piety and spirituality, privileged women as mediums.17 As a result of the general comfort and consolation that Spiritualism offered, as well as its gender-specific empowerment of women, Spiritualism clearly held broad appeal for American women. As such, Spiritualist ideas can be seen as influencing the supernatural fiction not only of women who actively participated in Spiritualist belief, such as Stowe and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, but of women in general who may have found aspects of Spiritualism attractive, even if they did not embrace the creed fully. Therefore, the ostensibly anomalous presence of supernatural themes in local color realism, and the presentation of occult experience in such fiction as an extension of reality rather than an interruption of it, can be interpreted to a significant extent as the reflection of Spiritualist understandings of a continuum of being connecting natural to supernatural. The relation of the natural to the supernatural is in fact a central concern in Stowe’s ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House.’’ While the question of the ontological status of the ghost in Sir Rohan’s Ghost is never fully entertained, the reality of the ghost in ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ is the primary preoccupation of the story. The story indeed begins with old Sam Lawson, the garrulous, folksy storyteller at the center of Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories, being petitioned by a young male narrator to address the subject of ghosts.18 Sam’s response is to affirm that this is ‘‘jest the question’’ (80) and he readily accedes to the request to tell the narrator and his friends about the Cap’n Brown house. As old Sam prepares to begin his tale, Stowe’s description of the scene itself begins to highlight the intermingling of or continuum between the 17 Mary Walker notes that Victorian assumptions about female passivity explain why women were viewed as natural mediums (231). 18 Page numbers for Stowe will refer to the version of the story included in Bendixen’s Haunted Women.

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natural and supernatural worlds: ‘‘We were sitting on a bank of the Charles River, fishing. The soft melancholy red of evening was fading off in streaks on the glassy water, and the houses of Oldtown were beginning to loom through the gloom, solemn and ghostly. There are times and tones and moods of nature that make all the vulgar, daily real seem shadowy, vague, and supernatural, as if the outlines of this hard material present were fading into the invisible and unknown’’ (81). This interruption of the dialogue that begins the story performs several functions: it first reveals that this interaction with Sam Lawson is the recollection of a more mature narrator, recalling a moment from his youth; secondly, the contrast between the standard English diction of this narration and Sam Lawson’s ‘‘vernacular grammar,’’ as the story puts it, further distances the narrator from this scene, revealing not only that he is more mature, but also the recipient of a more formal education; beyond this, the description of the natural setting establishes the mood for the telling of a ghostly tale; most important, though, it establishes at the start an indeterminacy or instability regarding the nature of reality itself. The supernaturalization of ‘‘all the vulgar, daily real,’’ and the ‘‘fading’’ of the ‘‘material present’’ into ‘‘the invisible and unknown,’’ can be read as suggesting either the imbrication of the natural and supernatural worlds—that one naturally shades into the next—or that it is all just a trick of the light as perceived by an open, creative, and impressionable mind. Unlike Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost, in which the ontological status of the ghost is not a significant preoccupation of the text, this question of whether the supernatural and natural worlds commingle—‘‘jest the question,’’ as Sam puts it—will come to preoccupy the rest of ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House.’’ As Sam Lawson begins his tale, this sense of ontological indeterminacy—a question about the nature of the world itself—shifts into epistemological uncertainty as Sam highlights what can’t be known about sea captains in general and Cap’n Brown in particular: ‘‘Now, there ain’t no knowin’ bout these ’ere old shipmasters, where they’s ben, or what they’s ben a doin’, or how they got their money’’ (81). Sam continues, ‘‘Wal, it didn’t do no good to ask Cap’n Brown questions too close, ’cause you didn’t git no satisfaction. Nobody rightly knew ’bout who his folks was, or where they come from, and, ef a body asked him, he used to say that the very fust he know’d ’bout himself he was a young man walkin’ the streets in London’’ (82). In the close-knit society of Oldtown, Cap’n Brown remains an enigma. His origins are obscure, as is the source of his wealth. Although Sam subsequently maintains that Cap’n Brown was a ‘‘good stout, stocky

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kind of o’ John Bull sort o’ fellow’’ (82) and ‘‘a good-natured critter’’ (85), seeds of mistrust regarding Cap’n Brown have already been sown and the reader’s suspicions are heightened by Sam’s offhand comment that ‘‘there wasn’t no Mis’ Cap’n Brown, and there didn’t seem likely to be none. And whether there ever hed been one, nobody know’d’’ (82). Thus, Cap’n Brown’s indeterminate background here is extended to his relationships with women. Sam calls attention to the fact that, as concerns Cap’n Brown’s mysterious background, what vexes the town most is the inability to determine the source of his wealth and his marital status. Following this introduction of Cap’n Brown, Sam goes on to tell the story of a ghostly encounter in Cap’n Brown’s house. Cap’n Brown had a servant (or slave—the text is unclear on this point) named Quassia, who invited another woman, named Cinthy Pendleton, to spend a week at the Cap’n Brown house to help with the repairing of clothes. Cinthy consented to the proposal and, while staying at the house, had several ghostly encounters in the midst of a snowstorm. First, it was just a ‘‘queer feelin’ come over her as if there was somebody or somethin’ round the house more’n appeared’’ (84). Then, she encountered something on the stairs: ‘‘When she started to go up stairs she see a soft white suthin’ that seemed goin’ up before her, and she stopped with her heart a beatin’ like a trip-hammer, and she sort o’ saw it go up and along the entry to the cap’n’s door, and then it seemed to go right through, ’cause the door didn’t open’’ (84). Finally, these haunting experiences culminated in what Cinthy perceived to be a ghostly visitation in her bedroom: ‘‘there, standin’ right in the moonlight by her bed, was a woman jest as white as a sheet, with black hair hangin’ down to her waist, and the brightest, mourn-fullest black eyes you ever see’’ (85). Cinthy shut her eyes to pray; when she opened them, the figure was gone. Interpretation of these events becomes the central problem in the ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ and three possibilities present themselves: that Cinthy saw a ghost, that Cinthy dreamed the experience, and that Cap’n Brown is keeping a woman—presumably an unwed mistress or concubine—concealed in his home. The women of the town were so disturbed by this final possibility, Sam reports, that they petitioned the minister to call on Cap’n Brown and inquire. While the minister did pay a social call to Cap’n Brown, however, he neglected—or refused—to look into the matter of a concealed woman. According to Sam, ‘‘Folks never does see nothin’ when they aint’ lookin’ where ’tis. Fact is, Parson Lothrop wa’n’t fond o’ interferin’; he was a master hand to slick things over’’ (88). That the women of the town felt themselves to be beholden to an ineffectual parson

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to investigate the situation suggests the ways in which social customs function to obscure private vices, as well as the ways in which gender expectations delimit autonomy for women. Sam explains, ‘‘Somehow or other, there didn’t nobody come to the p’int o’ facin’ on him down, and sayin’ square out, ‘Cap’n Brown, have you got a woman in your house, or hain’t you? or is it a ghost, or what is it?’ Folks somehow never does come to that’’ (89). Presumably, the men in the town, represented here by the parson, didn’t care to investigate the situation and the women felt that they could not because to make such inquiries would have been ‘‘unladylike.’’ Sam himself is uncertain as to the truth of the matter but seems inclined to excuse the Cap’n in the event of his having kept a concealed woman within his home. He is willing to admit that ‘‘Ef ’twas a woman, why that ‘are some kind o’ awful,’’ but then he continues, ‘‘This ’ere might a ben a crazy sister, or some poor critter that he took out o’ the best o’ motives’’ (89). This indeterminacy concerning whether the Cap’n’s house was haunted by a ghostly woman or inhabited by a concealed woman was subsequently heightened by an additional debate. While sitting up and keeping watch over the corpse of a newly deceased townsperson, Aunt Sally Dickerson claimed to have observed the Cap’n steal forth from his home in the dead of night with a woman wrapped in a cloak who was then bundled into a carriage. This account would seem to confirm the theory that the Cap’n had been keeping a woman secreted in his home, except for the fact that questions were raised as to whether Aunt Sally might not herself have fallen asleep and, preoccupied with the possibilities surrounding the Cap’n’s home, dreamed this episode. Thus, as Sam himself acknowledges, the story of the ghost in Cap’n Brown’s house seems to contain two mutually exclusive competing interpretations: ‘‘Aunt Sally’s clear she didn’t dream, and then agin Cinthy’s clear she didn’t dream; but which on ’em was awake, or which on ’em was asleep, is what ain’t settled in Oldtown yet’’ (91). According to Bendixen, both possibilities are unsettling and lead to the conclusion that there may not be much difference between being a mistress and being a ghost (Haunted 4). The implications of the story I think are even more unsettling than Bendixen here allows because, assuming the presence in Cap’n Brown’s house was a living woman and not a ghost, she was not simply a mistress, but, if not actually a captive, wholly reliant on the Cap’n for both sustenance and social interaction. What the town implicitly countenanced through its unwillingness to intervene in the Cap’n’s affairs and to confront him directly

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was not just extramarital sexual relations but also the possibility of sexual slavery. Of the two possible conclusions—real woman or ghost—the more realistic interpretation also turns out to be the more frightening of the two. As Aunt Lois asserts, ‘‘it would be best ef ’twas a ghost’’ because the presence of a ghost would be a fantastic deviation from normalcy and suggest a very specific set of circumstances surrounding the ghost’s origins—circumstances that may or may not have involved the Cap’n. A captive, living woman within the Cap’n’s house would not be exceptional, however, but rather a banal expression of the ways in which men can abuse and exploit women with impunity. Stowe’s story is thus, in keeping with supernatural fiction by nineteenth-century American women in general, an expression of the fear of the known rather than the unknown.19 ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ exemplifies the form of social critique observed by Barbara Patrick in supernatural fiction by American women, in which ‘‘women writers used the ghost story to depict terrors hidden in women’s experience. . . . Beneath the decorous surface of custom exist abuse, exhaustion, stultification, entrapment, abandonment, treachery, and betrayal. Alleged specters signaled real iniquities, as the feminist gothicists used the conventions of ghostly fiction to disguise challenges to the status quo’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ 21–22). Stowe’s tale, in keeping with the broader tradition of the Female Gothic and in fundamental sympathy with Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost, cleverly makes use of the conventions of supernatural fiction to foreground the unsettling realities of women’s lives—the entrapment and subjugation of women to patriarchal, legal, and class structures that systematically confine and disempower them.20 19 It’s worth mentioning that, in keeping with my analysis in the next chapter of the ‘‘queering of space’’ in the American Female Gothic, there is another reading of Stowe’s story lurking beneath the surface—one that reads the town’s curiosity about the Cap’n’s marital status as an interrogation of his sexuality. 20 Stowe’s story is one of many nineteenth-century tales by American women that use Gothic conventions to address the confinement of women. In particular, Stowe’s story has interesting connections to Louisa May Alcott’s ‘‘A Whisper in the Dark’’ (1863), in which a young girl is confined to an asylum for refusing to marry her unscrupulous uncle; Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘‘Her Story’’ (1872), in which a woman is institutionalized after her husband begins a relationship with a cousin; and M. E. M. Davis’s ‘‘The Room on the Roof ’’ (1890), in which a newlywed couple encounter the ghost of a woman who was imprisoned by her evil husband. Stowe’s story also has connections to other uncanny stories in which women are mistaken for ghosts, including Annie Maria Barnes’s ‘‘Spectre Castle’’ (1890), Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘‘Ghost of a

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Child Abuse, Bigamy, Suicide, and Murder: Anna M. Hoyt’s ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ The violence to which women of all castes, but particularly those of the lower class, are subject in patriarchal culture is a primary theme of an intriguing ghost story entitled ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ by Anna M. Hoyt, published in 1863 in the Atlantic Monthly.21 In this story, however, not only women but also children are subject to abuse and death at the hands of men. ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ is a story in two parts narrated by a lowerclass workingwoman named Christine. At the start of the story, Christine is employed by a French couple, Monsieur and Madam C—, in their saloon. As she emerges one morning to open the shutters and begin the day’s work, she encounters the ghost of little Jacques, a young son of Monsieur and Madam C— who had recently passed away. She is so overcome with horror that the hammer she uses to drive back the bolts holding the shutters closed slips from her hand and shatters a large mirror. As a result, she is dismissed from her position, but the appearance of the ghost confirms her suspicion that Madame C— is in fact responsible for the death of little Jacques. In the second half of the story, Christine, who has found work as a shopkeeper, encounters Monsieur C— after not having seen him for over a year. She learns from Monsieur C— that his first wife has passed away and that his children have gone to live with various relatives. They marry and, under her guidance, the saloon prospers. After a period of three years, however, Madame C— reemerges. Christine discovers that her husband was responsible for poisoning little Jacques—as well as two other children—and that, after accusing her husband of murder, Madame C— fled to France rather than face potential jeopardy from her husband. After revealing this information, Madame C— leaves the narrator, who subsequently reads a report in the newspaper about the discovery of the body of an unknown woman who has drowned—a woman Christine sadly recognizes as Madame C—. In the meantime, the return of Madame C— to the saloon was noted by a neighbor and friend who begins to make inquiries; as Christine and Monsieur Rose’’ (1889), Alice Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number 1’’ (1855), Mary Denison’s ‘‘As From the Dead’’ (1878), and Anna Holland’s ‘‘Haunted, or the Third Wife’’ (1860). In Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Gospel’’ (1913), Alice Brown’s ‘‘There and Here’’ (1897), Hildegaard Hawthorne’s ‘‘A Legend of Sonora’’ (1891), and Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘The Substitute’’ (1914), a ghostly woman is mistaken for a living one. 21 Aside from the fact that Hoyt published Gothic fiction in the Atlantic in 1863 and in a publication entitled Beadle’s Monthly, a Magazine of Today in 1867 (‘‘Was It Insanity?’’), I have been unable to recover any information about Hoyt.

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C— prepare to flee the city, Monsieur C— encounters the ghost of little Jacques, which he interprets as a presentiment of his own death, and in the morning he is indeed found dead. ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ is a tale of child abuse, bigamy, and murder. More clearly than either Sir Rohan’s Ghost or ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ it demonstrates and implicitly critiques the control that men exercise over women and children in patriarchal culture. Interestingly, the tale also highlights the negative ramifications of the failure of fathers to participate in child rearing. At the start of the story, neither Monsieur nor Madame C— is presented in a favorable light. Monsieur C— is portrayed as unfeeling and stingy. The reader learns from Christine that ‘‘the death of a child was no very solemn or very uncommon thing in my master’s family. He had many children, and, when death thinned their ranks, took the loss like a philosopher’’ (213)—that is, stoically. In the roughly one-year period during which Christine has been in his employ, three of his children have died. The saloon is not closed during funerals or mourning periods, and, considering little Jacques’s coffin, Christine muses, ‘‘The sleeper within was certainly better cared for now than he ever had been in life. Monsieur’s purse afforded no holiday-dress but a shroud’’ (213). Although Monsieur C— is initially presented as uncaring and miserly, it is his wife, Madame C—, who seems at the start to be the real villain. The reader learns from Christine that when she first arrived, little Jacques was an active, mischievous child. This changed, however, after little Jacques was apprehended in the act of tormenting some goldfish in a fountain by his mother and thrust into it. Christine details, ‘‘In such a frenzy of anger as only unreasonable people are subject to, [Madame C—] caught the child, shivering with terror, and thrust him into the water. The gold-fish splashed and swirled, and the water streamed over the sides of the basin. It was only an instant’s work; snatching up the forlorn fisher, she shook him unmercifully, and set him upon the floor, dripping and breathless’’ (215). Following this event, little Jacques was altered. No longer vivacious, his eyes grew ‘‘vacant of expression’’ (215) and he began to fail. Indeed, Christine suspects that the bonbons with which he was treated by his mother were poisoned and that she is responsible for his death. The appearance of the ghost of little Jacques seems to confirm this suspicion. In the second half of the story, the reader learns that Christine’s assumptions are off base and Monsieur C— (like Sir Rohan) is revealed to be the true villain, while Madame C—’s reputation is at least partially rehabilitated. What we learn of Madame C— is that her abusive act toward little Jacques

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was the lamentable consequence of overwork and the lack of assistance with child care. Madame C— reveals to Christine that she worshipped her husband and loved her children too, but she was tormented by her failure to control them. We also learn that Madame C— suffered the pangs of a guilty conscience after her severity toward little Jacques and regretted her act deeply (221). The implication of Madame C—’s story is that, had her husband taken some interest in his children and participated in governing and caring for them, her physical assault on little Jacques could have been prevented. It is revealed, however, that not only did Monsieur C— have no interest in assisting his wife with parenting, but also he lacked any interest in the children at all outside their potential future income to the family. The reader learns that he is in fact responsible for the deaths of three of his own children: ‘‘He had prescribed attentively for the two children who died before Jacques, thereby rendering them comfortable and quiet, and saving quite an item in the doctor’s bill’’ (221). Monsieur C— murdered his own children to prevent his having to deal with the annoyance of sick children and to save himself money. Beyond this, Madame C— reports that she almost fell victim to her husband’s murderous inclinations as well. Her suspicions concerning her husband’s actions led her to the edge of mental illness. Her husband’s response was to attempt to treat her with the same ‘‘medicine’’ that he had prescribed for little Jacques! When she refused the medication and accused her husband not only of having murdered their children but also of desiring to murder her so as to marry Christine, he readily consented to Madame C—’s removal to Paris. Although Madame C—’s abusive act toward little Jacques is by no means excusable, the narrative does mitigate the severity of the reader’s condemnation by revealing both the circumstances leading up to it and her own sense of guilt. Her abusive act pales in comparison, however, to Monsieur C—’s crimes. In keeping with the patterns established in the tradition of the Female Gothic, what inspires the most horror in this text is not the irruption of the supernatural but the realities of women’s existence. The threat in this story is not the ghost of little Jacques but rather Monsieur C—. The ghost of little Jacques appears twice in the narrative—once at the start, confirming Christine’s suspicions that his death was not of natural causes, and once at the conclusion, as Monsieur C—, together with Christine, prepares to flee from justice. Although the effect that the little ghost inspires first in Christine and then subsequently in Monsieur C— is terror,

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his presence is not horrific but merely mournful. In both instances, the little ghost appears by the fountain in which he was dunked by his mother. He is neither menacing nor gruesome, but solemn and sad. In his first appearance, he leads Christine toward a box containing what we learn are the poisoned bonbons. In his final appearance, he merely sits on the edge of the fountain. Indeed, the manifestation of little Jacques, at least on an abstract level, can be read as comforting. It confirms Christine’s vision of the universe in which evil acts are punished and the truth is revealed. She muses, ‘‘Destiny holds always in store its retribution. God suffers no dropped stitches in the web of His universe, and the smallest truth evaded, the least wretch neglected will surely be picked up again in the unending circle that is winding its certain thread around all beings, connecting by invisible links the most insignificant chances with the most significant events’’ (224). As comforting as this idea of universal justice may be, however, what ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’’ shares with Sir Rohan’s Ghost and ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ is an emphasis on the inequitable distribution of power in nineteenth-century American culture that allowed women and children to be victimized by men. Hoyt’s story, in typical Gothic fashion, portrays a villainous father who terrorizes his wife and children and seduces a young woman while still legally married.22 Supernatural intervention prevents the villain from escaping, but, in the process, it brings to light the ‘‘violence, abandonment, oppression, repression, neglect, and betrayal’’ (Patrick, ‘‘Invisible’’ 6) suffered by women at the hands of men in the nineteenth century. As in both Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost and Stowe’s ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ Hoyt’s story shows that, for women, the status quo could be as terrifying, if not more so, than any supernatural manifestation.

Hounded by Ghosts: Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Kerfol’’ What one may refer to as the terrors of the usual for women living in patriarchal culture becomes the explicit subject of the last story I will consider in this chapter, Edith Wharton’s 1916 supernatural short story ‘‘Kerfol.’’ Wharton of course is best known for her analyses of social life and as being, 22 It is worth pointing out that what also allows Monsieur C— to exploit Christine is her inability as a lower-class woman in nineteenth-century American culture to find satisfying and financially remunerative work. Several times within the course of the narrative, Christine remarks on her poverty and exhaustion. She consents to marry Monsieur C— because she is ‘‘poor and lonely, and has almost overworked [herself] just to keep soul and body together’’ (219).

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in Cynthia Griffin Wolff ’s estimation, ‘‘a profoundly anti-Romantic realist’’ (9). In novels such as The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country, Wharton famously analyzes the stultifying effects of social convention and class stratification. There has also been, however, a growing awareness among literary critics of Wharton’s lifelong fascination with tales of the supernatural and recently critics have begun to examine Wharton’s body of supernatural tales especially in light of their gender politics. According to Allan Gardner Smith, in contrast to her realist fiction, which ‘‘obey[s] the constraints of the visible,’’ her supernatural fiction allowed her to ‘‘penetrate into the realm of the unseen, that is, into the area that her society preferred to be unable to see, or to construe defensively as super (i.e. not) natural’’ (149). Expanding on this point, Kathy A. Fedorko asserts that Gothic conventions provided Wharton with an ideal vehicle to communicate her sense of the violence underlying patriarchal gender expectations: ‘‘Wharton uses the Gothic . . . to portray one ‘secret’ in particular: that traditional society and the traditional home, with their traditional roles, are dangerous places for women’’ (‘‘Haunted Fiction’’ 81). Wharton’s participation in this tradition of the American Female Gothic, in which Gothic conventions are manipulated to express discontentment with inequitable power relations between men and women, is clearly evident in ‘‘Kerfol,’’ a story that in many respects brings together much of the preceding conversation about the use of supernatural themes by American women as allegories for gender oppression. As in Sir Rohan’s Ghost and ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ ‘‘Kerfol’’ involves the isolation and imprisonment of a woman, and, as in ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques,’’ the story also involves revenge from beyond the grave in which a man is punished for his crimes against his family. ‘‘Kerfol’’ arguably goes even a step further in its representation of the cultural sanctioning of misogynistic behavior by showing how women and dogs have the same status to the wealthy lord of Kerfol and that he is free to mistreat both with impunity—at least as far as the living are concerned. The story is structured as a tale in three parts. In the first section, the narrator, a wealthy bachelor, recounts his experience of visiting the deserted mansion, Kerfol, in the Brittany section of France. In particular, he notes his encounters with a pack of dogs. Returning to the home of his host, Herve´ de Lanrivain, he learns that the dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol that only appear on one day each year. In the very brief second section, the narrator is provided with a book, A History of the Assizes of the Duchy of Brittany. Quimper, 1702, that contains the account of the trial of Anne de Cornault,

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wife of the lord of Kerfol, who was tried for the murder of her husband, Yves de Cornault, in the early 1600s. The third section of the story consists of the narrator’s summation of the trial, including Anne’s insistence that her husband was killed by the ghosts of dogs that he had strangled to punish his wife for her supposed infidelity with a young nobleman. Anne, the narrator reports, was ultimately returned to her husband’s family, with whom she lived out the rest of her life in almost complete confinement. The story then concludes with the narrator’s odd pronouncement that he envies the fate of Anne’s presumed lover (who shares the same name with his current host, Herve´ de Lanrivian), for his romantic liaison and, strangely, for the likelihood that he talked with Pascal in Paris. Wharton’s complex tale links present and past through an intuitive and sympathetic—but also unreliable—male narrator who ultimately refuses to acknowledge the underlying story of gender oppression and ghostly retribution that structures the tale. The tale is told in the past tense, beginning with the narrator’s motivations for visiting Kerfol in the first place. What prompted the narrator to visit the isolated mansion, what his friend Lanrivain describes as ‘‘the most romantic house in Brittany,’’ was Lanrivain’s recommendation that ‘‘it’s just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you’’ (92). The otherworldliness of the home becomes apparent to the reader even before the house itself is described. The narrator reports that, as he traversed the ‘‘deserted landscape’’ looking for the home, he stumbled across an avenue ‘‘so unlike any other avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must be the avenue’’ (92). He recalls of this avenue, ‘‘Greytrunked trees sprang up straight to a great height and then interwove their pale grey branches in a long tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly’’ (92–93). What makes this experience even eerier is that the narrator notes, ‘‘I know most trees by name, but I haven’t to this day been able to decide what those trees were’’ (93). He remembers feeling that ‘‘if ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol’’ (93). The narrator’s description of his initial approach to Kerfol is dominated by threshold imagery that signals his transition out of the world of the quotidian and into a world of Gothic romance. In his recollection of his search for the ‘‘most romantic house in Brittany,’’ he responded on an intuitive level to signals around him that pulled him inevitably toward his destination. He simply knew, without knowing how or why, which avenue to take, and he intuited that the lane led to something, even if he was not quite sure

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what that something actually was. The trees that he could not identify despite at least a layman’s background in arbology and the tunnel that their interlocking branches formed constitute a portal removing the narrator from linear time and conveying him into the land of ghosts. This sense of having drifted outside time is further developed by the incongruous juxtaposition of old and new that characterizes the narrator’s descriptions of both the house and its related features. At the end of the avenue, the narrator encountered an overgrown moat filled with weeds and brambles and noted that the drawbridge had been replaced by a stone arch and the portcullis with an iron gate (93). Facing the house itself, the narrator observed, ‘‘One-half was a mere ruined front, with gaping windows through which the wild growths of the moat and the trees of the park were visible. The rest of the house was still in its robust beauty’’ (94). From the rear, the house stuck him as resembling ‘‘a fortress prison’’ (96). Fedorko observes that ‘‘everything about the physical appearance of Kerfol suggests Gothic mystery’’ (Haunted House 140), and, in keeping with this impression of dark history, the narrator responded to the physical presence of Kerfol by—again intuitively—associating it with mortality and suffering. He explains, I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol—I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before—but one couldn’t as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more—a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, likes its own grey avenues into a blur of darkness. (93–94)

The narrator concluded this meditation on the weightiness of the past by asserting that ‘‘certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present’’ and likening the entire place to a tomb (94). He recalls hoping that the home’s guardian would not arrive to accompany him inside because he only desired ‘‘to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence’’ (94). The narrator details that, as he contemplated the tomb-like silence of Kerfol, he recalled his friend Lanrivain’s characterization of the estate as ‘‘the very place’’ for him and was ‘‘overcome by the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that Kerfol was the place for him’’ (94). His thought continued, ‘‘Is it possible that anyone could not see—?’’ (94).

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He could not finish this thought, however, because, as he explains, his meaning was ‘‘undefinable.’’ The secrets of Kerfol were visually inaccessible: ‘‘I was beginning to want to know more; not to see more—I was by now so sure it was not a question of seeing—but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate’’ (94). Yet, despite the narrator’s protestations, Kerfol does seem to be just the place for the narrator, whose intuitive abilities allowed him to appreciate the estate as the materialization of a spectral history of tragedy and sorrow. The narrator’s desire to ‘‘feel all the place had to communicate’’ suggests an awareness on his part that the objective ‘‘facts’’ of vision and sound may obscure rather than communicate truth. It is precisely through silence that Kerfol tells its story of silence, of the ‘‘voicelessness’’ (Waid 177) of Anne de Cornault. It is perhaps this willingness on the part of the narrator to go beyond sound and vision in order to penetrate the underlying Gothic mystery of Kerfol that summoned the guardians of the estate. As the narrator explored the grounds of Kerfol, he reports encountering five dogs. Although the dogs did not look to the narrator to be hungry or ill-treated, he was surprised by their guarded reticence, as if ‘‘they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked at them’’ (97). He resisted his initial inclination to try to play with the dogs, sensing that ‘‘their distance from me was as nothing compared to my remoteness from them,’’ and explains that ‘‘the impression they produced was that of having in common one memory so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth either a growl or a wag’’ (97). Ultimately, he concluded that the dogs looked as though they had ‘‘seen a ghost’’ (98), a realization that prompted him to ponder, ‘‘I wonder if there is a ghost here, and nobody but you left for it to appear to?’’ In keeping with the powers of intuition that the narrator has demonstrated thus far, it turns out that he was not far off the mark in his assessment of the dogs. Returning with Lanrivain to his home with the sense of ‘‘having escaped from the loneliest place in the world’’ (98), the narrator explains that he was informed by Madame de Lanrivain of the legend surrounding Kerfol—that on one day each year, the estate is haunted by a pack of ghostly dogs. The first section of ‘‘Kerfol’’ accomplishes several narrative tasks: it characterizes the story’s narrator as sensitive and intuitive and thereby allows the reader to appreciate his failure of sympathy at the end; it sets the dark mood of the tale and establishes that there is a Gothic mystery connected to Kerfol—one having to do with silence, sorrow, and imprisonment; and it importantly provides the necessary evidence to lend credence to Anne de

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Cornault’s fantastic tale of supernatural revenge in which she claims that her dead dogs killed her husband. In addition to these functions, the first section of the narrative also foregrounds issues of interpretation, narrative, and history. The narrator portrays himself upon his arrival at Kerfol as overwhelmed by the sense of the persistence of the past, by Kerfol’s ‘‘long accumulation of history.’’ This break with the present stimulated on the narrator’s part a desire to know more, to ‘‘feel all the place ha[s] to communicate,’’ and initiated the construction of a romance, one built around ‘‘cruel memories’’ connected to a house that, from the back, resembled a reinforced jail. This imaginative construction of the past summoned and then was arrested, however, by the more immediate and visceral interaction with the dogs. The narrator’s ‘‘undefinable’’ impression of the house, his inability to penetrate the silence and articulate his inchoate intuition, literally materialized before his eyes in the form of ghostly hounds. What he saw before him was a past history of cruelty literally made present in the form of cowed dogs with anger in their eyes (95). And the narrator got it—he experienced a strange pathos in the face of their ‘‘strange passivity,’’ which seemed to him ‘‘sadder than the misery of starved or beaten animals’’ (97). Yet, despite this intuitive understanding of the dogs and indeed this larger movement outside linear time, the narrator could only emphasize their ‘‘remoteness’’ (97). Faced with a real story of cruelty, rather than his romantic speculations, he fled from the ‘‘most romantic house in Brittany,’’ which had become for him ‘‘the loneliest place in the whole world.’’ When romance threatened to become all too real, the narrator’s imaginative and sympathetic engagement with the past came to an abrupt halt. The brief middle section of ‘‘Kerfol’’ (which is less than a page in length) almost seems unnecessary. All that happens in this section is that the narrator details receiving from his host a book containing an account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, mentions that he became so absorbed in it that he stayed awake until near dawn, and explains to the reader that he will now provide a condensed rendering of the trial for the reader without adding anything of his own (100). This section in essence constitutes the hinge, however, that not only links Part 1 with Part 3, but also signals the transition from the narrator’s first-person account of his experience at Kerfol to a more remote retelling of the official historical record. ‘‘Kerfol’’ in essence can be considered as a sort of literary diptych in which two stories of Kerfol are ‘‘careful’’ly juxtaposed in order to raise questions about the limits of representation— that is, about what can and cannot be seen and spoken. In this brief middle

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section, the narrative shifts from an uncanny, ‘‘undefinable’’ encounter with the past made present in the form of ghostly dogs to a more familiar and comfortable encounter with the past made present through narrative. The story that the narrator reconstructs for the reader is precisely the story of cruelty and imprisonment that his active imagination had begun to craft during his visit to Kerfol. The reader learns that the young Anne de Barrigan was basically sold by her father to Yves de Cornault, a man sixtytwo years of age, for the contents of ‘‘coffers laden on a pair of pack mules’’ (101). Even before the introduction of the dogs, Anne has already been equated with animals, transformed into a commodity, and ascribed a value. Although her husband was initially lavish with his gifts, Kerfol was felt by Anne to be a lonely place and she was grieved ‘‘to have no child, and nothing in life to call her own’’ (102). For this reason she was especially delighted to receive from her husband a little brown dog, ‘‘the nearest thing to a child she was to know’’ (104). Things for Anne took a turn for the worse, according to the narrator’s rendering of the court transcript, after she went with her husband’s aunt to Ste. Barbe and struck up a relationship with the young nobleman named Herve´ de Lanrivain, with whom she met four times following their initial encounter. During their penultimate encounter, he requested a keepsake and she gave him a jeweled bracelet given to her by her husband that she had used as a collar for her little dog. She subsequently discovered that little dog strangled on her pillow, the ‘‘necklet’’ she had given to Lanrivain twisted around its neck. Following this event, her husband, incensed at his wife’s presumed infidelity, strangled any dog Anne so much as looked at and left them for her to discover. The strangling of the dogs is clearly a cruel and vindictive act designed to punish his wife for her presumed transgression against his control of her sexuality. Her husband then died under suspicious circumstances, prompting the trial. The prosecution pounced on her relationship with Lanrivain, whom Anne admitted she had asked to take her away from her ‘‘desolate’’ (107) marriage at Kerfol. Her justification for this request was her fear for her own life because her husband ‘‘had strangled her little dog’’ (108). In response to this claim, the narrator surmises, a ‘‘smile must have passed around the courtroom: in days when any nobleman had a right to hang his peasants— and most of them exercised it—pinching a pet animal’s windpipe was nothing to make a fuss about’’ (108). The strangest part of Anne’s testimony is her insistence that her husband was murdered by ghostly dogs. Under interrogation, Anne claimed that,

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having descended to meet Lanrivain at the bottom of stairs, she heard her husband cursing her at the top, followed by a scream, a fall, and then the snarling, panting, gulping, and lapping of dogs (115)—this despite the fact that there were no longer any dogs at Kerfol. When she went to investigate, she insists in the testimony that she found no dogs. When pressed further, she admitted that she recognized the barks of the dogs as those of the dogs her husband had strangled (116). Ultimately, the narrator reports, no final decision could be rendered as to whether Anne was guilty, mad, or whether her husband was subject to diabolical machinations, and Anne ‘‘was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband’s family, who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died many years later, a harmless madwoman’’ (116). Following this recounting of the trial of Anne de Cornault, the story concludes rapidly with a final paragraph in which the narrator summarizes the fate of Herve´ de Lanrivain, who was set free, moved to Paris, and became a Jansenist. The narrator ends his account with the comment, ‘‘I almost found myself envying [Lanrivain’s] fate. After all, in the course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal. . . .’’ (117). Commentators on ‘‘Kerfol’’ are quick to point out that, in keeping with the tradition of the Female Gothic, Wharton uses Gothic conventions in this story to foreground gender inequities and violence against women in patriarchal culture. Dyman, for instance, argues forcefully that the story demonstrates Wharton’s disdain for ‘‘patriarchal habits that confine women to the status of mere objects to be bought and possessed and neglected’’ (77) and concludes that ‘‘Kerfol’’ condemns a morally corrupt social structure (88). Fedorko agrees that the anger in ‘‘Kerfol’’ is intense (Haunted House 147) and is directed at men who use sadistic means to control the sexuality of the women they possess (139). Patrick and Waid both read the story as one that indicts marriage as an institution that ‘‘promulgates the imbalance of power between the sexes’’ (Patrick, ‘‘Invisible’’ 210) and consigns women to lives of ‘‘voicelessness’’ (Waid 188). Indeed, I have opted to focus on ‘‘Kerfol’’ to conclude this chapter precisely because of its clear participation in the Female Gothic tradition generally associated with British women authors and its clear connections to the other stories discussed above. What allows ‘‘Kerfol’’ to function as an even more effective tool of social critique, however, is the complete failure of the narrator at the end of the story to reflect on the story of Anne de Cornault, which indicates that insensitivity to the plight of women is as much a problem in the narrative

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present as it was in the 1600s. Assessments of the narrator in the critical literature vary from viewing him approvingly as sympathetic to Anne’s plight (Waid, Wilson-Jordan) to being harshly critical of his unconscious reification of patriarchal logic (Dyman, Fedorko). What the juxtaposed stories of the narrator’s visit to Kerfol and his rendering of the court papers reveal, however, is that he is, as Fedorko observes, ‘‘a denier’’ who ‘‘ends up blithely ignoring what he has revealed’’ (Haunted House 139). He is, on the one hand, sensitive and intuitive, and yet on the other hand unwilling even to listen, much less to act, on his intuitions concerning the injustices perpetrated by men against women. Rather than reading his abrupt change of topic at the end of his rendering of Anne’s account as a manifestation of a lack of interest or of his finding her story ‘‘irrelevant and trivial’’ (Dyman 86), it instead seems to suggest an active refusal on the part of the narrator—a refusal to engage with history rather than literature, a refusal to contemplate the very real ‘‘facts’’ of Anne’s imprisonment within an unhappy marriage in which she was psychologically abused and terrorized by her husband; and, most important, his absolute refusal to contemplate the persistence of the past into the present and his complicity in the perpetuation of the victimization of women. Perhaps the strangest thing about the conclusion to the story, in which the narrator abruptly shifts his attention to Lanrivain, is the failure of the narrator to return to the subject of the ghostly dogs—dogs that he himself has seen and that seem to confirm Anne’s account of her husband’s murder.23 Dyman interprets this absence of contemplation as evidence that the narrator is a dry intellectual bachelor ‘‘trapped in rationalism,’’ who is ‘‘blind to the rich texture of life’’ and ‘‘unquestioningly accepts the patriarchy’s biases’’ (87). One can also see it, however, as an unwillingness on the narrator’s part to engage with the historical fact of women’s oppression. The narrator, in contemplating Kerfol in Part 1, questions, ‘‘Is it possible that anyone could not see—?’’ At the end, however, he is the one who refuses to see, to acknowledge what on an intuitive level he knows—that Anne’s story is not so much about ghostly dogs or romantic liaisons as it is about the very real forms of sanctioned cruelty. What the narrator wishes to maintain is the ‘‘romance’’; he reads the court transcripts with their account of murder and 23 The narrator’s rendering of the court transcripts does remark that ‘‘at the inquest, there had been long and bitter discussions as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds. One of the surgeons called in had spoken of marks that looked like bites’’ (116). This detail does offer support for Anne’s claims.

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supernatural intervention as one might read Sir Rohan’s Ghost—as a story filled with touching pathos and mystery, but as remote from reality. This distance that he carefully maintains allows him at the end to contemplate with a certain degree of both pleasure and envy Herve´ de Lanrivain’s romantic life. But he can do so only by studiously avoiding consideration of the dark underlying realities lurking beneath the romance of Anne’s mournful tale. At the heart of ‘‘Kerfol’’ is a romance similar to Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost, in which a heartless male aristocrat suffers supernatural retribution for crimes committed against defenseless women. Implicit in Wharton’s tale, however, seems to be a critique of Romanticism itself as a narrative form unable to communicate effective cultural critique due to its distance from ‘‘reality.’’ The narrator’s tendency to privilege romance prevents him from engaging with history. But the narrator’s blindness facilitates the reader’s insight: what the narrator of ‘‘Kerfol’’ does by reading history as romance and thereby accentuating its remoteness is ironically to engage the reader with a real history of women’s oppression that the narrator himself is unable—or unwilling—to see. The uncanny reemergence of ghostly dogs in the beginning of ‘‘Kerfol’’ links past with present and testifies mutely to the continued injustices faced by women contending with cultural forces that consign them to silence. In as much as the narrator refuses to recognize this, he is implicated in supporting patriarchal practice and logic (Dyman 84).

 The four stories addressed in this chapter—and the many others like them— are not happy stories. While they may entertain and console the reader with the prospect of supernatural justice and revenge from beyond the grave, each one has at its heart a tale that is all too mundane and familiar—the control of women’s bodies and lives by men. In Spofford, Sir Rohan is revealed as an unscrupulous seducer and possibly even a murderer and Miriam truly has nowhere to turn for protection; in Stowe, Cap’n Brown may have a ghost in his house or he may have a woman confined there—and the story prompts us to consider which is the more disturbing prospect and, in the end, if there is really any difference between the two; Hoyt’s lurid tale presents a true villain in the figure of Monsieur C—, a bigamist who murders his children and attempts to murder his overworked and overwrought wife who ultimately commits suicide; and in Wharton’s story, we are presented with a man who serially murders his wife’s dogs as a form of psychological torture and with a woman who in the end dies a ‘‘harmless madwoman.’’

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These are stories of confinement, physical and psychological abuse, and murder, and, as such, they are representative examples of an unacknowledged American Female Gothic tradition—a tradition in which nineteenthand early-twentieth-century American women, like their British counterparts of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, made use of Gothic conventions as a means to address specifically female anxieties attendant on life in patriarchal culture. Far scarier than the ghosts in these stories is the terror of the everyday—the forms of violence to which women are subject in a culture that sanctions the male control of female sexuality and circumscribes female autonomy and expression. What these stories each foreground and implicitly contest are larger social structures and ideologies that foster and permit violence against women. In Spofford, Hoyt, and Wharton, it takes supernatural intervention to rescue women from perilous situations, and in Stowe, the community—or rather, the male authority figures who enforce society’s mores—turn a blind eye to the odd goings-on in the Cap’n’s house. In each case, it takes a village, so to speak, to keep a woman confined. As long as such abuse is considered acceptable and supernatural intervention is needed to unmake the status quo, the outlook for women in the real world is bleak. The unhappy ghosts in these stories all mutely testify to the tyranny of patriarchy and the need for a reordered social structure that affords autonomous personhood to women and, in Hoyt’s case, children as well. In the next chapter, I move beyond a consideration of explicit forms of violence and examine supernaturally themed stories by American women that foreground the gendering of space itself. Such stories extend the force of the critique offered by the American Female Gothic through an exploration of the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate cultural inequities. Confinement, murder, and hauntings still play important parts in these stories, but what is emphasized are the social conditions and expectations consigning women to a spectral half-life of muteness and dependence.

2.

Queer Haunting Spaces: Madeline Yale Wynne and Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Given that the nineteenth-century ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood’’ structured a female world bounded by kitchen hearth and nursery (Smith-Rosenberg 13), it is not surprising that, in the writing of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women, the particular setting invested with the most affective energy is the space of the home. As numerous commentators on the Female Gothic have noted—and in keeping with Gilbert and Gubar’s now-canonical analysis of nineteenth-century literature by women more generally— familiar domestic interiors in the Gothic transform into confining sites of mental and psychological peril.1 Ghost stories, perhaps more than any other class of story, are preoccupied with these anxious spaces. Hauntings in literature are almost always associated with particular geographic spaces—frequently houses—and, as Dale Bailey observes, the motif of the haunted house stretches back to Poe’s ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’ (1839) and occupies an important place in the American literary tradition (6).2 Particularly in the hands of Female Kate Ellis, for example, bases her study of the Female Gothic around the theme of the ‘‘failed home,’’ in which women are confined and subject to violence of various kinds. Similarly, DeLamotte proposes that what Gothic romances repeat again and again are tales of women trapped in domestic spaces (157). Kilgour, summarizing the literature on the Female Gothic, concludes that ‘‘cloaking familiar images of domesticity in gothic forms . . . enables us to see that the home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy of ominous patriarchal authorities’’ (9). 2 Bailey’s attention to nineteenth-century American literature in his study of representations of haunted houses repeats the familiar pattern of focusing on Poe and Hawthorne to the exclusion of female authors. The prominent role of the haunted house in supernatural literature by American women, however, starting with Mrs. Romer’s 1849 ‘‘Story of a Haunted House,’’ is readily apparent even in a casual survey of titles. A partial sampling of titles that foreground houses and domestic spaces includes Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘‘The Story of a Shadow’’ (1872); Olivia Howard Dunbar’s ‘‘The Long Chamber’’ (1914); Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Hall Bedroom’’ (1905); ‘‘The Shadows on the Wall’’ (1903), ‘‘The Vacant Lot’’ (1902), and ‘‘The Southwest Chamber’’ (1903); Helen Hull’s ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ (1926); Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘The House 1

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Gothicists, what stories about haunted houses do is to penetrate beneath the fac¸ade of the home as an escape from the ‘‘real world’’ and to reveal domestic space as the ‘‘ideologically weighted ‘product’ ’’ (Chandler 3) of cultural forces that structure and perpetuate the inequitable distribution of power that results in the oppressive disenfranchisement of women in patriarchal culture. This revelatory function of the Female Gothic has generally been discussed in terms of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, in which that which was ‘‘intended to remain secret, hidden away, . . . has come into the open’’ (132) and the ‘‘unhomeliness’’ at the heart of the homely is revealed. The specifically gendered aspect of this ‘‘unhomely’’ revelation, however, is perhaps proleptically signaled in many of these stories by the repeated emphasis on the word ‘‘queer.’’ In his ‘‘Queering ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’: A Pedagogic View,’’ Jonathan Crewe observes in relation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous 1892 short story that the term ‘‘queer’’ (and cognates such as ‘‘strange’’ and ‘‘peculiar’’) recur regularly throughout the text in ways that seem to call attention to the social construction of categories such as normalcy and deviancy and thereby ‘‘queer’’ the text in the contemporary critical sense. I believe that a similar case can be made for two unjustly neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century tales of the supernatural, Madeline Yale Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room’’ (1895) and Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ (1898). In each of these stories, what haunts is space itself—space that is unstable; space that is inconsistent; space that is, as repeatedly emphasized by each of the two stories, ‘‘queer.’’ In each story, a confrontation is staged between a character and a haunting space that has the end result of rendering space itself ‘‘queer’’ in the modern critical sense of making visible ‘‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’’ (Sedgwick, Tendencies 9). The haunting encounters in these stories call attention to the social construction of particular gendered spaces—in Wynne’s case, the space of a New England farmhouse; in Peattie’s case, the space of a Western ranching home—and the ways in which the gendering That Was Not’’ and ‘‘The Room of Evil Thought’’ (1898); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’’ (1872); Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s ‘‘Secret Chambers’’ (1909); M. E. M. Davis’s ‘‘The Room on the Roof ’’ (1900); Mary Denison’s ‘‘A True Story of a Haunted House’’ (1871), ‘‘The Old Chateau’’ (1895), and ‘‘The Ghost in the Chancel’’ (1873); and Sarah Dorr’s ‘‘The Haunted Chamber’’ (1878).

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of space in each case participates in an unbalanced power dynamic that restricts the stories’ protagonists from exercising autonomy and achieving selfactualization. More radically than typical ghost stories in which what haunts are ghosts of people, the haunting structures in Wynne’s and Peattie’s stories highlight the uncanniness of domestic spaces and reveal the complex interplay of social forces that place limitations on both genders and result specifically in the victimization of women. As such, these stories of ‘‘queer haunting spaces’’ not only participate in the generally unacknowledged tradition of the American Female Gothic, but also suggest that what has come to be known as the Female Gothic—and perhaps even the Gothic in general—might fruitfully be analyzed in terms of the production and, at least in some cases, deconstruction of unstable gendered spaces. Avery Gordon asserts in her meditation on haunting in Ghostly Matters that haunting is ‘‘a constitutive feature of social life’’ (22). To write ghost stories, she explains, is to write stories about how that which is invisible, that which is marginal, and that which is excluded still manages, nonetheless, to produce material effects (17). To write ghost stories is thus to reveal ‘‘how that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence’’ (17) and the ways in which following ghosts can ‘‘lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life’’ (8). These stories by Wynne and Peattie, through their treatment of historically specific social spaces, call attention to this ‘‘seething presence’’ of the invisible: they make explicit what usually remains implicit in Gothic tales by foregrounding that space in general is gendered (and, by extension, sexualized and racialized) and that this ‘‘socially and culturally encoded character of space’’ (Bell, ‘‘Hyped’’ 32) participates in the systemic and systematic disenfranchisement of women in patriarchal culture.3 One must keep in mind, however, that there is another side to this conversation concerning literary representations of space: such depictions can express or embody not only anxiety, but also a range of emotions including joy and satisfaction. It is overly reductive to equate the representation of domestic space in literary works by women solely with either imprisonment or freedom, despair or bliss. Rather, domestic spaces should be recognized as sites of desire that incorporate both polarities, often simultaneously. Particularly in the Gothic writing of nineteenth-century women, what is manifested is the discrepancy between the ideal home as a space in which women find comfort, protection, love, and fulfillment and ‘‘failed homes’’ in which women are subject to a range of deficiencies including boredom, exhaustion, confinement, and danger. The anxiety articulated by such texts stems from the realization that the home is not what it is supposed to be. This anxiety therefore is connected to the desire for the home to be something other than what it is, that is, for domestic space to be reordered into an arrange3

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Closeted Space: Madeline Yale Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room’’ What Marilyn Chandler calls the ‘‘ideological weight of space’’ (3) is the primary focus of Madeline Yale Wynne’s remarkable, but little-known, turnof-the-nineteenth-century uncanny short story—what Alfred Bendixen refers to as a ‘‘forgotten masterpiece’’ (Haunted Women 119)—called ‘‘The Little Room.’’ Wynne, whose literary output has received virtually no attention from contemporary critics, is mainly considered notable for having been the daughter of the man who invented the Yale lock (Bendixen, Haunted Women 119) and for her contributions to the art of metalworking—an art form in which she tried to interest other women. Nevertheless, ‘‘The Little Room,’’ which was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1895, was included in Wynne’s first collection of short stories, entitled The Little Room and Other Stories, attracted a great deal of attention and praise upon its initial publication, enjoyed ‘‘widespread celebrity at the end of the nineteenth century’’ (Nagel and Quirk), was often reprinted, and even inspired an earlytwentieth-century Chicago social club called The Little Room that was composed of artists, writers, musicians, and other workers in the arts, who met weekly for tea and conversation (‘‘Inventory’’).4 Called by Alfred Bendixen in the headnote to the story in his Haunted Women: The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women collection ‘‘one of the most effective ‘puzzle stories’ ever written’’ (119), ‘‘The Little Room’’ is a ghost story of sorts, but not in the traditional sense of the spirit of a ment more conducive to personal realization and interpersonal harmony. Or, to put it in other terms, the desire articulated in such texts is to transform what we might refer to as ‘‘anxious space’’ into felicitous space. On literary representations of space, see Gilbert and Gubar, Bachelard, and Chi. 4 According to the Newberry Library ‘‘Inventory of Little Room Records, 1898– 1931,’’ The Little Room club was promoted by novelists Hamlin Garland and Henry B. Fuller and met regularly in Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Fine Arts Building on Friday afternoons from 1898 to 1931 for conversation, as well as ‘‘light music, drama or some kind of clever presentation.’’ Elia Wilkinson Peattie, whose work will be discussed below, was a member and therefore it is more than likely that she was familiar with Wynne’s story. Intriguingly—and resonating with what philosopher Gaston Bachelard discusses in terms of ‘‘felicitous space,’’ among the materials included in the Little Room collection at the Newberry is a proposal for a men’s club to be called The Attic Club. Also speaking to Wynne’s early-twentieth-century popularity is the fact that the foreword to the posthumous 1920 Wynne publication An Ancestral Invasion and Other Stories, is written by Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Ralph, who compares her choice of thematic material to that of Whittier and comments that Wynne was ‘‘strangely gifted’’ with the pen and that many remember her stories fondly (v).

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person who haunts the living. Rather, what haunts in ‘‘The Little Room’’ is a room out of place, a room that refuses to stay in its place and that takes on different forms. In the story, the newlywed female narrator, Margaret Grant, recounts to her husband, Roger, that when her mother was young, the latter had a favorite play space in the Vermont farmhouse of her two unmarried half sisters—a delightful little room with a couch covered in blue chintz, books on the shelves, and a large, pink seashell. After marrying, when her mother returned to the house with her new husband, however, in place of the room they discovered a china closet. Because the two half sisters steadfastly insisted that no changes to the house had been made and that the china closet had always been there, the husband and wife were only able to conclude that the wife, as an imaginative young girl, must have dreamed up the room and, within their family, the expression ‘‘littleroomy’’ was coined to refer to any exaggerated statement. This remained the story within the family until, following the death of Margaret’s father, she and her mother visited the Vermont farm of Aunts Hannah and Maria Keys for the summer. When they arrived, Margaret discovered not a china closet, but the little room, exactly as her mother had described it. Aunts Hannah and Maria insisted that the house had always been the way it appeared, that there had never been a china closet, and could not be made to recall that there had been any prior discussion on the subject. Margaret’s mother was severely affected by the (re)discovery of the little room; grew nervous, pale, and thin; and subsequently died the following autumn. Following this recounting of the history of the odd little room, the scenario repeats in the narrative present. Margaret and her husband, Roger, arrive at the Keys house and discover not the little room that Margaret had seen as a child, but a china closet. Subsequently, two female friends, each visiting the house separately, see something different—one sees the china closet, one sees the little room. In each case, Aunts Hannah and Maria never can be made to recognize that there has ever been any debate on the subject, and, inevitably, at the end of the story the farmhouse burns down, leaving the existence of the little room seemingly shrouded in mystery forever. That the little room should appear in a New England home owned and occupied by two spinster sisters seems in keeping with the general tenor of a tale in which a fragile space for female self-actualization can only exist in the absence of men. The story suggests that it is only by virtue of the fact that no men inhabit the house at all that the little room achieves even its minimal ephemeral existence, and the fact of the two women’s spinsterhood

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adds to the queer overtones of the story (in the modern sense of the term)— the reader learns obliquely in ‘‘The Little Room,’’ and explicitly in Wynne’s follow-up to the story, ‘‘The Sequel to the Little Room’’ (1927), that Aunt Hannah was courted by a sea captain but rejected his proposal. In a social climate that not only assumed marriage to be the inevitable destiny for women and necessary for their personal fulfillment, but also emphasized the moral imperative for women to marry in order to reform wayward men and produce and raise virtuous citizens, spinsterhood can be read either as a failure to meet or as a rejection of patriarchal cultural expectations and what Adrienne Rich has famously termed ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’—in the terms of Wynne’s story, perhaps Aunt Hannah’s spinsterhood can be read as her opting for ‘‘a little room’’ of her own over a china closet. The spinsterhood of the two women in this sense participates in making visible the cultural construction of constraining gender expectations for women in the nineteenth century.5 With this in mind, what is most striking about this intriguing story is the way in which space itself is revealed to be gendered and the impact that this gendering of space has on intersubjective relationships. What haunts in this story, and what women are never able to find in the presences of their husbands, is an intimate feminine space—a space of refuge, healing, and play. What we learn about the ghostly little room is that, to the extent that it exists at all, it exists in the heart of the domestic space of a farmhouse owned by two spinster sisters. The room itself is described in exceptional detail and is clearly gendered feminine. The reader learns through Margaret, who initially learned of it through her mother, of its position in the house and its diminutive size; we learn that the Indian cotton chintz was ‘‘blue stamped chintz, with the peacock figure on it. The head and body of the bird were in profile, while the tail was full front view behind it’’ (122). The chintz, we are told, had been a gift to a young Hannah from a courting sea captain 5 The unmarried status of the sisters may also reflect the general lack of marriageable men in rural New England in the decades after the Civil War. Following the war, which wiped out an entire generation of young men—the North lost 360,000 soldiers and the South lost 260,000 (Clinton 87)—many women found themselves in desperate straits and forced to rely on their own ingenuity to provide for themselves and their families. This difficult situation for women was exacerbated by the migration of young men westward or to urban centers seeking their fortunes. Showalter notes that, after the devastation of the Civil War, many rural sections of New England were populated solely by old men, single women, clergymen, and young children (Scribbling Women xxxix), and John Jackson comments that, during the 1860s, more than ten thousand farms were abandoned in Massachusetts and Rhode Island alone (31).

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whom she ultimately rejected; we learn that the room has books in it, including the Ladies’ Album—a gift annual marketed to women; we are told that Margaret’s mother was captivated by a ‘‘beautiful pink sea-shell, lying on a mat made of balls of red shaded worsted’’ (123) and that the walls were covered with flowered paper, ‘‘roses and morning glories in a wreath on a light blue ground’’ (123). All the details of the room—the flowered wallpaper, the ladies gift annual, the chintz, the worsted, the sexually suggestive pink seashell—confirm that it is a feminine space of refuge and intimacy in the heart of the domestic space of the farmhouse. The books, the exotic chintz brought from across the sea, and Margaret’s mother’s memories of playing in the room characterize it as a place of intellectual stimulation and imaginative expression. It is a place of comfort and healing—not only did Margaret’s mother regard the room as the ‘‘only one that seemed pleasant to her’’ (121), it is also the place where Margaret’s mother remembered having recovered from an illness and, according to Margaret, ‘‘It was one of her pleasant memories of her childhood; it was the first time she had been of importance to anybody, even herself ’’ (123).6 In the presence of men, however, this comfortable and comforting room disappears, along with any sense of personal importance. Margaret’s mother was made to doubt the existence of the room altogether and to think of herself as deluded for remembering it. Margaret reports how her mother told her the story of the little room, ‘‘and how it was all in her own imagination, and how there really was only a china-closet there’’ (122). The situation with Margaret is even worse. When—on their wedding day—she and Roger arrive at the farmhouse, open the door to the little room, and discover not a room but a china closet, the narrator explains, ‘‘Margaret’s husband dropped her hand and looked at her. She was trembling a little, and turned to him for help, for some explanation, but in an instant she knew that something was wrong. A cloud had come between them; he was hurt, he was antagonised [sic]. He paused for an appreciable instant, and then said, kindly enough, but in a voice that cut her deeply: ‘I am glad this ridiculous In light of nineteenth-century codes for representations of sexuality, it is possible to read recovering from an illness here, particularly in conjunction with the detail of the pink seashell, as a veiled allusion to the onset of menarche, which would only further strengthen the depiction of the mysterious little room as a specifically feminine space. My thanks to Gretchen Papazian for this suggestion. 6

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thing is ended; don’t let us speak of it again’ ’’ (127). The narration continues, ‘‘She saw it all now; he didn’t believe her. She felt a chill sense of withering under his glance. . . . He went out; he did not take her hand now—he was vexed, baffled, hurt. Had he not given her his sympathy, his attention, his belief—and his hand?—and she was fooling him’’ (128). The reader subsequently learns that Margaret intended to ask the hired man, Hiram, about the room, but that ‘‘her lips were sealed before her husband’’ (129) and she never put the question to him. While the puzzle in this ‘‘puzzle story’’ presumably concerns whether the little room exists or why it appears sometimes and not others, the impact of this mystery on the married couples represented—and most especially on the wives—is unambiguous. Bendixen writes that ‘‘the enduring power of ‘The Little Room’ stems from both its frightening insistence on the instability of every aspect of reality and its skillful portrayal of the fragility of all human relationships—even those consecrated by marriage and friendship’’ (Haunted Women 5). Beyond this, however, it seems essential that the little room, this flickering space of feminine refuge, can never be experienced by husband and wife together; that Margaret encounters this appalling mystery on her wedding day; and that, most notably, what wives encounter with their husbands in place of the little room and its India chintz is a china closet full of ‘‘gilt-edged china.’’ One way to read the story therefore, as Patrick notes, is as a type of ‘‘initiation’’ story in which the disappearance of the little room functions as a trope ‘‘for the disillusionments attendant upon a woman’s entrance into the world of adulthood and domestic responsibilities’’ (Invisible 62).7 Gender differences and uneasy relationships between men and women are in fact highlighted from the beginning of the story. The very first line of the text, ‘‘How would it do for a smoking-room?’’ (119), has Roger mentally appropriating this fantasy space from Margaret for his own masculine purposes. Margaret admits that it would be ‘‘just the place,’’ but then adds that ‘‘having just a plain, common man around, let alone a smoking man, 7 Patrick actually downplays this particular reading, privileging instead the story as one that ‘‘allegorizes the experience of reading’’ (Invisible Tradition 62) and raises epistemological questions about the nature of what we think we know and the abilities of our senses to provide us with truthful data about the world. I agree that the story raises these questions but see them as directly connected to the issue of gender—the story asserts that men and women understand and interpret the world in different ways based on their experiences as living as men or women.

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will upset Aunt Hannah’’ (119). Spinster Hannah here is opposed to ‘‘plain, common man’’ Roger, whose simple presence within the farmhouse will undermine the sisters’ authority within their own home.8 Margaret herself becomes unsettled by the volume of Roger’s voice on the train, twice requesting that he speak more softly. Tellingly, her concern is that those around them will overhear that they are newlyweds. When Roger asks her why she is reluctant to let others know of their marital status, she responds, ‘‘I want my happiness all to myself ’’ (120). Unfortunately, keeping one’s happiness to oneself—or maintaining a sense of one’s importance as an individual—is presented as difficult, if not impossible, for women in a world in which men treat women as possessions and colonize space simply by entering it. In the presence of their husbands, the little room, this idealized space of fantasy and self-realization, ceases to exist and becomes itself fantasy, a haunting memory of liberty surrendered (or, in the case of Aunt Hannah, of love lost). By replacing the little room with a closet, and the pink seashell with gilt-edged china, in the presence of the husbands, what the story implies is that the convention of marriage constrains women to a reality of circumscribed space and domestic labor. The china closet that replaces the little room clearly symbolizes the forms of domestic labor, such as cooking and cleaning, that were expected from married women during the nineteenth century and suggests as well that women within marriage were numbered among the husband’s possessions. The replacement of the little room by a china closet reveals that even the interior domestic space of the home is constructed and ordered by patriarchal ideology that defines women and their roles in particular ways. That the discrepancy concerning the existence of the little room should reassert itself between two female friends, Margaret’s cousin Nan and her friend Rita Lash, who are the last ones to visit the Vermont farmhouse before it burns down, may appear to complicate this reading of the gendered haunting of space. One way to reconcile this apparent deviation from the rule that women see the little room and men do not, however, is to suggest that patriarchal ideology is so pervasive that some women cannot even dream of ‘‘a room of their own’’ outside of or apart from gendered social conventions. Margaret’s comment is somewhat misleading because it neglects the fact that the spinster sisters do have a hired man, Hiram, who lives on the premises, although likely not in the farmhouse itself. Despite the fact that Roger is described here as a ‘‘simple, common man,’’ he clearly is both less simple and less common than Hiram, the Keys sisters’ hired help, and therefore is a more powerful masculine presence within the home. 8

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What one is left with is a story that is insistently ‘‘queer,’’ in the sense of something odd or strange—the word ‘‘queer’’ is used in relation to the little room six times in the first seven pages of the story. In another sense, however, one can speak in terms of the ‘‘queering’’ of space in ‘‘The Little Room’’ in the contemporary theoretical sense of highlighting the social construction of gender roles and sexual identities. The queer vacillating presences of the little room and china closet foreground the constraints that hegemonic cultural expectations place on individuals, and by ‘‘denaturalizing’’ what usually goes without saying, the story, at least implicitly, suggests a ‘‘horizon of possibility’’ (Halperin 62) with liberatory potential. That is, this queering of space, which reveals the social construction of gender roles and sexual identities, provides a position from which ‘‘to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-construction, and practices of community—for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire’’ (Halperin 62). The queer haunting presence of the little room in Wynne’s story highlights the gendered construction and inhabitation of space itself.9 In ‘‘Women in Space and Time,’’ Claudine Hermann contrasts ‘‘man’s space’’ with ‘‘woman’s space.’’ ‘‘Man’s space,’’ she writes, ‘‘is a space of domination, hierarchy and conquest, a sprawling, showy space, a full space’’ (169). Woman’s space, on the contrary, is an ‘‘empty space’’ (169) and woman’s task is to ‘‘conserve some space for herself, a sort of no man’s land,’’ in order to escape from male control. Similarly, Manuel Castells argues that men historically have tried to dominate space while women generally lacked ‘‘territorial aspirations’’ and have instead attached more importance to interpersonal relationships and social networks (140). While I wish to avoid the essentialist overtones of Hermann’s and, to a somewhat lesser extent, 9 From a contemporary perspective—and particularly in light of my queer reading of this story—there is also a wonderful irony to the little room’s being replaced by a closet; it is almost as though David Halperin is discussing Wynne’s story when he writes in Saint Foucault that ‘‘the closet is nothing . . . if not the product of complex relations of power’’ (29), for the presence of the china closet in Wynne’s story materializes the circumscribed roles and limited autonomy for women in nineteenth-century American culture. In the presence of their husbands, the women in the story can be said to be ‘‘closeted’’—that is, unable to formulate or express their personal aspirations and desires. The contemporary resonances of closet in this respect are only accentuated by the potential pun on ‘‘giltedged china’’ in which ‘‘gilt’’ can be read as its homonym, ‘‘guilt.’’

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Castells’s arguments, space as represented in ‘‘The Little Room’’ clearly conforms to this binary framework. Roger initially attempts to take control of space by speaking loudly on the train and mentally occupying the little room as he transforms it into a smoking closet. Subsequently, the china closet that materializes for him—while hardly ‘‘sprawling’’—is a space in which to store valuable possessions. It is a ‘‘full’’ space not only in the sense that it is full of possessions, but also in the sense that it leaves little room for imaginative possibilities—numbered among the husband’s possessions, the tasks and obligations of the wife will be rigidly defined. In contrast, Margaret’s desire to keep her happiness all to herself resonates with Hermann’s contention that a ‘‘woman’s task’’ is to ‘‘conserve some space for herself.’’ Moreover, it suggests a possible explanation for the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the room: the room is an intimate space of feminine realization that cannot be shared with someone with whom one vies for control or attention—even a loving husband. The little room itself can perhaps be considered ‘‘empty’’ in the sense that, rather than being a space filled with social expectations and obligations, it is a utopian space of potentialities—what we might refer to as a queer space from which to ‘‘devise new ways of relating to oneself and others’’ (Halperin 68). With its books and seashell and exotic fabric, it encourages speculation and imaginative flights of fancy. It is a space for creation and personal realization, in which one does not serve others but instead holds on to one’s own happiness. Wives cannot see the room when with their husbands, nor can siblings each see the room when they are separated. Indeed, the only couple in the story that clearly experiences the room together is Margaret and her mother—which seems to privilege the mother-daughter bond as especially intimate—but even this shared experience is marred because of the fact that Margaret’s mother has come to accept her husband’s interpretation that she imagined or dreamed the room over her own extremely detailed recollections of the space. She does see the room with Margaret, but the result is that her ontological grounding dissolves, leading to her death—in a sense, what she is confronted with when she reencounters the room with Margaret is the ghost of her own surrendered fantasy. The text describes her as terrified by the room’s reemergence, a phenomenon that she cannot explain or rationalize. Among the odd details of this ‘‘puzzle story’’ is the fact that Aunts Hannah and Maria steadfastly maintain that the house has never been altered and that they cannot be made to recall any debate on the subject. Wynne playfully suggests with their surname, ‘‘Keys,’’ that the answer to the story’s

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mystery lies with them. The two sisters cannot—or will not—offer any explanation to the competing, and seemingly mutually exclusive, experiences of their home. When pushed to remember the presence of a china closet, Aunt Hannah states matter-of-factly, ‘‘No, there has never been any chinacloset there; it has always been just as it is now’’ (124). And when asked to remember the presence of a little room, the narrator observes, ‘‘They went on washing dishes and drying them on the spotless towels with methodical exactness; and as they worked they said that there had never been any little room, so far as they knew; the china-closet had always been there’’ (128). The mechanical nature of this response is accentuated by Margaret’s observation that they exhibit ‘‘not a sign of interest, curiosity, or annoyance, not a spark of memory’’ (128). The story itself offers no explanation for the sisters’ inability or unwillingness to recognize the strange mutability of their home. It may be that they themselves change with the changing configuration of the farmhouse—that they really do not remember the house ever being different. Or it may be that they suffer from a sense of shame or guilt connected to the alteration of the little room and china closet—a sense of discomfort or distress related to their own liminal position as elderly spinsters within a culture that emphasizes marriage and maternity as the keys to female fulfillment—that manifests itself in an unwillingness to admit to the instability of their domestic space.10 Interestingly, what the sisters seem to offer in place of knowledge is labor. Hannah and Maria are initially described in the same way: as workers. Margaret explains to Roger, ‘‘They are simply workers. They make me think of the Maine woman who wanted her epitaph to be: ‘She was a hard-working woman’ ’’ (120). Extending on the reference to epitaphs, Margaret continues, ‘‘They will die standing; or, at least, on a Saturday night, after all the The question of whether the sisters are ignorant of the queer nature of their house or are carefully withholding information surfaces explicitly at one crucial moment: when questioned by Rita Lash concerning the India chintz alleged to exist in the little room, Rita thinks she sees Aunt Maria’s cheeks flush a bit, although ‘‘her eyes were like a stone wall’’ (130). Interpretation of Hannah’s and Maria’s roles in this story hinges on the small detail of the flushed cheeks. On the one hand, if the flush is read to signify Maria’s recognition of the chintz, then the posture of ignorance assumed by Hannah and Maria is a fac¸ade and their refusal to acknowledge the changing nature of the little room is deliberate. Beyond this, it also would suggest that Maria does have thoughts of her own, apart from those of her sister. On the other hand, if Rita is in error as to her observation or if the flushed cheeks are due to some cause other than recognition of the chintz, then the interpretation of the story in which Hannah and Maria exist without conscious knowledge of the changing nature of their house is sustained. 10

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housework is done up’’ (120). The two aunts are presented up until the end of the story as working machines devoid of emotion and, where discussions of the little room are concerned, memory. Indeed, there is a sort of obsessional quality related to their constant labor—their work can be interpreted as activity designed to fulfill their obligations as women within patriarchal culture and to distract themselves from the distressing realization that ‘‘reality’’ is not absolute or seamless, but rather a product of social expectations.11 It is almost as though they are attempting to ‘‘make up’’ for being spinsters in a society that enjoins marriage on women as the key to their fulfillment. The connection between death and labor foregrounded in the reference to the epitaph of the Maine woman, however, highlights the unhappy consequences of such a repressive strategy: Margaret suggests both that labor gives her aunts purpose—they will remain alive until their work is done—and that they, like many married women, are working themselves to death. One possible interpretation of the story is that it is precisely the labor of Aunts Hannah and Maria that somehow generates the little room and that the vacillation of oppositional spaces within their home—one symbolic of patriarchy, the other a utopian female refuge from patriarchy—is connected to their simultaneous embodiment and rejection of cultural expectations. Although as elderly spinsters they are marginal and even vaguely deviant figures in relation to mainstream American sexual mores, as nothing but workers they seem firmly embedded within a cultural matrix of forces derived from New England Calvinistic self-denial and the Puritan work ethic. To suggest that their ceaseless labor in fact gives rise to the little room is to suggest that it is the oppressive ideology of the china closet that in fact structures the utopian possibility of the little room and vice versa. The little room and the china closet thus are two sides to the same coin—one structures the (im)possibility of the other. In this sense, what the uncanny mutability of I have in mind here the Lacanian definition of the obsessional subject who works feverishly to avoid realizing the lack or ‘‘castration’’ of the Other, of the Symbolic order. ˇ izˇek writes of the obsessional subject in Looking Awry, ‘‘herein lies the kernel of Slavoj Z the obsessional’s economy? The obsessional participates in frenzied activity, he works feverishly all the time—why? To avoid some uncommon catastrophe that would take place if his activity were to stop; his frenetic activity is based on the ultimatum, ‘If I don’t do this (the compulsive ritual), some unspeakable horrible X will take place.’ In Lacanian terms, this X can be specified as the barred Other, i.e., the lack in the Other, the inconsistency of the symbolic order . . . We must be active all the time so that it does not come to light that ‘the Other does not exist’ (Lacan)’’ (35). 11

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the house ultimately reveals is that the china closet is as much a cultural construct, as much a fantasy space, as the little room.12 In the end, however, no ‘‘key’’ to the puzzle is presented and no answers to the mysteries of the story are proffered. Margaret, in thinking back on her experience with her mother when encountering the little room, finds new meaning in her mother’s statement, ‘‘One thing I am glad of, your father knows now’’ (129). The answers, however, are not for the living because, the story suggests, men and women are not asking the same questions. This is because their very experience of the world—the ways in which they perceive, occupy, and move through space—differs due to the ideological weight of gender. The ultimate unsettling assertion of Wynne’s haunting story is that men and women occupy different—and mutually exclusive— realities. The queer space of the little room reveals the ways in which ideologies of gender construct different worlds for men and women.13

The Space of Domestic Trauma: Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ The different ways that men and women occupy space and thereby experience the world is also the subject of Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s deceptively simple ghostly tale ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ included in her 1898 collection of short stories, The Shape of Fear and Other Ghostly Tales. Although virtually unknown to twenty-first-century readers, Peattie was a prolific turn-of-the-nineteenth-century author of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and plays whose output included thirty-three book publications between 1893 and 1932. Born in 1862 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Peattie is In addition, while ‘‘The Little Room’’ is not ostensibly a story about class relations, the mechanical nature of the aunts’ labor resonates with rapid turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury industrialization and the rise of the factory system. This may suggest that the necessity and desirability of a utopian space of feminine refuge increasingly grew in response to the depersonalization effected by factory labor. 13 Wynne did publish a follow-up to ‘‘The Little Room’’ called ‘‘The Sequel to the Little Room’’ (1895). In this story, which picks up with Cousin Nan and Rita Lash immediately after they learn that the Keys farmhouse has burned down, Margaret Grant has a ghostly vision of Hannah Keys in which Hannah explains to her that the little room was her secret that sometimes would ‘‘get out’’ (176). While many of the questions surrounding the room remain at the end of the story, the nature of the room is tied more firmly to Hannah’s thwarted love affair with the sea captain who gifted her with the chintz and seashell. 12

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notable for becoming in 1884 the first ‘‘girl reporter’’ for the Chicago Tribune and then for the Omaha World Herald. Her work appeared in prestigious journals such as Atlantic, Century, and Harper’s, as well as in newspapers and periodicals that catered to less refined readerships. Because her husband was often ill, Peattie frequently wrote commissioned works and produced stories and essays rapidly to support herself, her husband, and their four children. Also noteworthy about Peattie is the fact that she was a member of the Chicago-based Little Room social club, which, as noted above, was named after Wynne’s story. From 1906 to 1917, she was the Chicago Tribune’s literary critic and published prolifically. Although her tenure at the Chicago Tribune began after the publication of her collection of ghost stories, The Shape of Fear and Other Ghostly Tales, her role as a literary critic and her participation in the Little Room social club make it extremely likely that she was familiar with Wynne’s work, including her 1895 story ‘‘The Little Room,’’ which may have influenced her own uncanny stories.14 Embedded within Peattie’s deceptively simple ghost stories are important reflections on the roles of women in American culture and the abuses faced by the disenfranchised in a capitalist system. The plot of ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ is relatively straightforward: Bart Fleming takes his seventeenyear-old bride to his ranch on the Western plains. Entirely isolated, Flora becomes preoccupied by a home, ‘‘something like her own’’ (58), that she spies off in the distance but of which her husband has never spoken. When she finally questions her husband as to why he has denied her the opportunity to visit with their only neighbors, he reveals that the house is an illusion. There indeed had been a house at that location, but it burned down As with Wynne, Peattie’s fiction was very popular at the time of its publication, and reviews of her work were generally favorable. A glowing 1899 write-up of The Shape of Fear and Other Ghostly Tales in the Bookman gushes, ‘‘Exquisite may seem a singular term to apply to a volume of ghost lore, but no other word could so well convey an idea of the first impression of the work’’ and concludes, ‘‘The stories are works of art; the spirit of the work is of the noblest; the style is of the best and the simplest’’ (‘‘Review’’ 492). A slightly less effusive review in the Atlantic Monthly calls her stories incisive and imaginative. As is also the case with Wynne, however, contemporary literary critics and historians have paid little attention to Peattie. Sidney H. Bremer, in one of the very few reference guides to include Peattie, observes that the best of her short stories question domestic sentimentality (361). Judith Raftery attends to Peattie’s representation of female settlement-house workers in the latter’s 1914 novel, The Precipice: A Novel. Concerning Peattie’s ghost stories, the only reference I have found is in Patrick’s dissertation, in which she comments in a footnote that the stories are ‘‘fabulous,’’ but that they ‘‘do not benefit very much for critical analysis’’ (202)—a comment with which I vigorously disagree. 14

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after a young wife went crazy and killed her husband, their baby, and herself. Flora finally goes to investigate and finds nothing on the site except for a baby’s shoe—an unsettling confirmation of her husband’s account. As in Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room,’’ what haunts in ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ what blinks in and out of existence, is an architectural structure. And, as in Wynne’s story, a young wife is confronted with a spectral domestic space—in this case, an entire house, rather than just a room—that foregrounds gender inequity. Peattie’s story, however, is undergirded by a violence that is merely suggested in Wynne’s tale. Whereas Wynne’s story suggests how men inhibit women’s fulfillment and self-realization, Peattie’s tale of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century frontier wife focuses on the material conditions of survival and the ways in which women are threatened and abused by gender expectations that deprive them of autonomy and community. In keeping with Avery Gordon’s meditations on hauntings in her Ghostly Matters, the ghostly house in ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ appears at the ‘‘dense site where history and subjectivity make social life’’ (8). In the same way that the ghostly little room in Wynne’s story can be interpreted as the uncanny phantasmatic supplement of Aunts Hannah and Maria’s labor, the ghostly house in Peattie’s story is generated out of the social matrix of capitalism, compulsory heterosexuality, and gender relations, of which Bart’s labor on his 320-acre ranch is a part. The story, significantly, does not attend to the rise of factory farming and the corresponding populist movement of the later decades of the 1800s, nor does it address the displacement of native peoples, massive immigration and the related rise of virulent American xenophobia, increasingly prominent American labor disputes that began with the Great Strike of 1877 by railroad workers angry over wage cuts, or the economic downturn of 1892. Peattie, as a newspaper reporter in Nebraska and Chicago, however, clearly would have been aware of these events. Furthermore, as a well-read intellectual and participant in the Chicago-based Little Room social club, Peattie would also have been aware of realist and naturalist literary trends exemplified by Little Room member and promoter Hamlin Garland, among others, with their emphasis on pessimistic determinism and economic reform. Therefore, Flora’s removal from her home and marooning on her husband’s large ranch distant from all social interaction develops out of a network of cultural forces structured by capitalist expansion. The queer haunting space that appears in Peattie’s story is connected to Western development and the space of commerce, production, and economic growth more generally, as well as to the concomitant redefinition of the roles for women in such spaces.

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Although Flora’s relationship with her husband, Bart, is presented as a happy and loving one, a subtle current of ambient danger charges the entire tale. Peattie emphasizes Flora’s youth and powerlessness. The first line of the story reveals that Bart ‘‘took’’ Flora out to his ranch on the plains ‘‘when she was but seventeen years old’’ (55). Revealed in this phrase is Flora’s own lack of control over her situation—her heterosexual union and removal from her family are presented as a fait accompli; whether she desired these events or even had any say in them is not considered by the story. Subsequently, after she expresses some concern about ‘‘queer’’ things that she sees through her window, Peattie writes that Bart ‘‘picked [Flora] up in his arms and jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little girl—but then, to be sure, she wasn’t much more’’ (57). This action and the narrator’s aside call attention both to Bart’s treatment of his wife—treating her as if she were a little girl—and her actual age and inexperience—she in fact is not much more than a little girl. There is a sort of double violence subtly expressed here: while Flora is perhaps too young to have been separated from friends and family, she is too old to be treated like a child. Nature itself, beneath the straightforward and folksy tone of the narration, participates in establishing an undercurrent of danger in the story. Flora, once installed in Bart’s ranch, spends ‘‘a good part of each day’’ looking out her window, across an ‘‘unbroken sea of tossing corn’’ (55). The harvest sun sinks ‘‘all in an angry and sanguinary glow’’ that foreshadows the revelation of the morbid history of the ghostly house. And, most intensely, ‘‘at the coming of a storm, a whip-lash of purple cloud, full of electric agility, snapped along the western horizon’’ (56). In Peattie’s carefully knit tale, the representation of the storm seems to resonate with the actions of the crazed wife and to foreshadow an awful repetition—a prospect heightened by the connection established between Flora’s name and the angry natural setting that surrounds her. What the representations of nature emphasize most, however, are Flora’s isolation, loneliness, and disempowerment. Bart’s ranch on the plains, the reader is informed, consists of 320 acres of corn and rye far removed from any neighbor. Flora’s sewing room window looks out on an ‘‘unbroken sea’’ of corn and this view is ‘‘her picture gallery, her opera, her spectacle’’ (55). Flora’s sense of her situation at times is as if a ‘‘new world had been made for her’’ (56). According to the narrator, Flora, being either sensible or happy, ‘‘made the most of it’’ (55). What is emphasized here is that Flora is far removed from the world and has very few options open to her.

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What Peattie implicitly critiques in ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ is the increasingly commonplace ‘‘traumatic removal’’ of the young nineteenthcentury woman from her mother’s and her own network of female family and friends following marriage. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg observes, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women developed extensive communities of family and female friends and ‘‘geographic separation was borne with difficulty’’ (62). Flora’s situation is extreme, but not uncommon: not only has she been uprooted at age seventeen from her ‘‘mother’s arms’’ (57), she has been barred from virtually all human contact beyond that of her husband. She is, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner within her home. Indeed, Peattie goes out of her way to emphasize Flora’s isolation. Presumably, even given the advances in farming technology of the 1880s and 1890s that facilitated the rise of factory farming, her husband, Bart, cannot work a large ranch entirely by himself. Nowhere in the story, however, is the presence of any other farmhands remarked; Flora’s only human contact in the tale is with her husband. Flora does not complain about this situation—in keeping with cultural expectations, she perhaps accepts it as the inevitable fate of a woman who has chosen to marry a rancher—until she feels that her husband has been neglectful in not mentioning or taking her to visit the house that becomes visible in the distance once the corn has been harvested. She finally broaches the subject ‘‘one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed toward the great black hollow of the west’’ (59). When her husband turns pale but does not answer her inquiry, she prompts him with the following: ‘‘If there’s any one around to associate with, I should think you’d let me have the benefit of their company. It isn’t as funny as you think, staying here alone days and days’’ (59). What is revealed by Flora’s belief that her husband must accompany her to visit her nearest neighbors is a whole network of social forces that render women docile and obedient to the wishes of men. Although Flora can see a home in the distance from her window and craves social interaction, her sense of propriety and her willingness to act in accordance with her husband’s—and, by extension, the larger culture’s—gender expectations prohibit her from taking the initiative to act on her own and go for a visit. In the same way that she was ‘‘taken’’ by Bart when she was seventeen to be his wife and live on his ranch, she must be taken by him to be introduced to their neighbors. Bart tries to make light of his wife’s reproach by accusing her of being homesick and attempts to distract her from the question by demanding biscuits; but he eventually capitulates and shares the awful story that was related

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to him of the ghostly house. The story, as he relates it, is as follows: ‘‘A man an’ his wife come out here t’ live an’ put up that there little place. An’ she was young, you know, an’ kind o’ skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on her an’ worked on her, an’ one day she up an’ killed the baby an’ her husband an’ herself ’’ (61–62). Bart then explains that two weeks after the bodies were buried on the site of the tragedy, the house inexplicably burned down. Bart concludes the discussion by demanding that tea be served. That the revelation of the ghostliness of the house in the distance and the awful acts of violence that presaged its irruption should be bookended by demands for biscuits and tea foregrounds the control exercised over women by men and the anxieties underlying that exercise of control. Bart, having presented an extreme scenario of female discontentment and violent resistance, immediately attempts to avoid and then to foreclose any subversive meditations on his wife’s part by demanding that tea be served, thereby returning her to the sphere of domestic service. Rather than a lost utopian space of feminine refuge like Wynne’s little room, the ghostly house that reappears in the distance is the afterimage of tragedy. But more than this, it is the spectral materialization of specifically female distress. The parallels between Flora’s situation and the mother who went crazy and killed her family are clear—not only does Flora suffer from comparable boredom and isolation, but the cottage viewed in the distance is described as ‘‘something like her own’’ home. Bart is perhaps more correct than he realizes when he playfully diagnoses his wife’s vision of the house in the distance as ‘‘homesickness.’’ What ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ depicts is a sort of sickness of the frontier or farmhouse wife caused by immurement within the home and lack of opportunities for social interaction and personal enjoyment and realization. The fragmentary nature of Peattie’s title for the story invites the reader to complete the thought: the house that was not . . . a home. It is no accident, of course, that the haunting house is visible through the window facing west—the ‘‘great black hollow of the west’’ into which the ‘‘angry and sanguinary’’ sun disappears is also the void that swallows women as they are uprooted by husbands and ensconced within frontier farm houses. What Peattie’s frontier story concisely portrays is precisely the Female Gothic pattern noted by DeLamotte and others in which domestic space is revealed to be a prison for women who are disempowered and at the mercy of husbands and fathers. Peattie, however, adapts this format to represent the specific forms of distress attendant on being the wife of a Western rancher toward the end of the 1800s in which the network of social forces structuring gender expectations naturalized social isolation for women immured on farms.

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For Bart, the fact that the house is visible from a distance but disappears when one gets close to it is simply another manifestation of what he refers to as ‘‘queer’’ things that occur out on the plains. He explains to Flora, ‘‘Some things out here is queer—so queer folks wouldn’t believe ’em unless they saw. An’ some’s so pig-headed they don’t believe their own eyes’’ (57). As with Wynne’s little room, however, what is ‘‘queered’’ in ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ is space itself—the queer space of the haunting house that defies rationalistic understandings of presence and absence and past and present reveals the inequality embedded within constructed codes of gender that disempower Western women and compel them to accept lives of neglect and isolation. The story that surfaces in ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ the tragedy that persists beyond its completion, is the story of a home that was not—of a woman so tortured by loneliness and anxiety and so overwhelmed with the burden of caring for an infant on her own that she destroyed her family and herself. That the house only appears to exist from a distance can be taken as a more general commentary on the ways in which looks can be deceiving. From a distance, one seems to see a home. Up close, one realizes the ‘‘seething presence of the invisible’’—the fact that the house lacked those things commonly associated with a home, including care, love, respect, and safety. The next day, following Bart’s explanation of the house in the distance, Flora sets out on horseback to see for herself. While Flora did not feel herself entitled to visit her presumed living neighbors without her husband’s accompaniment, the assertion that there is nothing there, that there is no house and no family, liberates her to visit the space on her own—what the story suggests is that Flora can only act on her own initiative in relation to what her husband considers nothing. Sure enough, as she nears the site of the tragedy, ‘‘the little shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her eyes’’ (63). When she arrives at the spot where the house had stood, there is no structure there—there is no home. What Flora chillingly finds amid the tall grass, however, is a baby’s shoe, the material remainder of grief and violence. She considers picking it up, but ‘‘something cold in her veins’’ prevents her (63). The narration then records that she grows angry and attempts to force her horse (a bronco) to ride through the site where the house once stood, but the horse resists and, against her direction, gallops fearfully for home. The discovery of the baby’s shoe, combined with the horse’s agitation, seem to confirm the story told by her husband and highlight the uncanniness of this site of tragedy. Beyond this, the poignant detail of the baby’s

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shoe emphasizes the extremity of violence allegedly performed on the site: what the shoe mutely testifies to is that a woman was driven to such lengths of despair and madness as a result of loneliness that she murdered her own child. Such an act of course would have been wholly anathema to nineteenth-century understandings of the nature of femininity. As Degler, Smith-Rosenberg, Welter, and others have convincingly argued, the ‘‘doctrine of separate spheres’’ or ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood’’ that solidified in the first half of the nineteenth century increasingly charged women with maintaining the morality of the home and bearing and rearing virtuous children (Degler 52). For a woman to kill her child within a culture that identifies the bearing and nurturance of children as ‘‘natural’’ female functions is the most extreme gesture of cultural rejection that a woman can make and speaks to what generally went unstated in nineteenth-century literature: the stresses and anxieties attendant on child rearing. The ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of such an act finds its corollary in the impossibility of a house that both does and does not exist. But the thrust of Peattie’s story is that many homes are—or potentially are—similar deceptions in which the appearance of domestic harmony is merely a fac¸ade covering over the inequitable distribution of power. Furthermore, the woman’s horrific act of violence is shown to be the response to a more general structure of violence—the social expectations of heterosexual union and childbearing for women, as well as the accepted confinement of women to the home. The ending of Peattie’s story—like that of Wynne’s—is ambiguous. It is unclear precisely why Flora becomes mad after discovering the shoe and attempts to spur her horse to ride over the vacant site of the house. It may be that she is disgusted by this morbid remainder and the macabre story it seems to confirm—that she becomes angry with the woman who committed this heinous deed. But what the story prompts the reader to consider are the circumstances that inspired the act; it may be that some of Flora’s anger arises from an uncomfortable spark of recognition or understanding. Her attempt to ride over the site perhaps can be read as a failed attempt to suppress her own abhorrent empathy—to repress with a shudder the horrific idea that, with too much staring out the window, day after day, and, significantly, with the birth of a child for which she alone must care, she too could be capable of violence against those who are supposed to protect her and those she is supposed to love and protect. The material remainder of the infant’s shoe is especially important here. One essential difference between Flora and the woman who murdered her family is that Flora is not yet a mother. One can imagine, however, how

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difficult it would be for her as a young woman of seventeen to bear and raise children without a female support network or even any social interaction apart from that with her husband. Not only was the woman in the now-spectral house cut off from social interaction, but presumably she in addition was with her baby day and night. The infant’s shoe that Flora discovers in the rubble of the destroyed home is a potent symbol indeed. It not only materializes in a sense the weighty cultural obligations and demands placed on women regarding motherhood in patriarchal culture, but also prophesizes Flora’s imminently looming future—and thereby instantiates her lack of options for self-actualization. Her anger as she surveys the site of the tragedy then may also be connected to a realization on some level of her own lack of options. Not only will her job be to serve biscuits and tea to Bart for the rest of her life, but presumably soon she will also have to face the demands of motherhood—and the self-sacrifice that they will entail. With this in mind, Peattie’s ghost story can be read as not just a tale that explores the tensions between idealized expectations concerning marriage and the far less fulfilling realities of marital life for many women, but also as a daring revelation of the fears and horrors underlying what was considered during the time to be a woman’s highest calling: motherhood. At least for the woman who murdered her husband and child, one may speculate that there was little romance involved with sleep deprivation and perpetual attention to the child’s needs and biological functions. Rather, for an inexperienced mother, it may have been the constant presence of a needy infant that pushed her over the edge and the story suggests that this could be Flora’s fate as well.

Rooms with Views: Peattie and Melville Although I will discuss female ‘‘rewritings’’ of male stories in Chapter 6, before leaving Peattie’s story and concluding this chapter it may be productive to juxtapose it with a provocatively similar story by a male author: Herman Melville’s 1856 short story ‘‘The Piazza.’’ In Melville’s story, the anonymous first-person bachelor narrator describes how, against the advice and to the amusement of his neighbors, he had a piazza built on the north side of his home. From this piazza, he espies ‘‘some uncertain object’’ away up in the mountains, but the location of this object is ‘‘only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain witching conditions of light and shadow’’ (92). While the narrator’s neighbor speculates that it is just some old barn, the narrator fantasizes that it is the home of fairies. At length, the narrator

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resolves to investigate, conjecturing, ‘‘Fairies there, thought I, once more, the queen of fairies at her fairy-window, at any rate, some glad mountain girl; it will do me good, it will cure this weariness, to look on her. No more; I’ll launch my yawl—ho, cheerly, heart!—and push away for fairyland, for rainbow’s end, in fairyland’’ (95). What the narrator will discover, however, is foreshadowed by Melville’s description of a climbing plant, a ‘‘Chinese creeper,’’ that the narrator has planted by his piazza. Although it has burst into bloom and is initially delightful to look on, closer inspection reveals that it is infested with vermin: ‘‘But now, if you removed the leaves a little, [the plant] showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue as to make it unblessed evermore—worms whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted’’ (94). In keeping with this potent symbol of mistaken perception, the narrator discovers that his impression of the fairyland cottage is similarly incorrect. What he discovers is not the queen of the fairies in her enchanting abode but a ramshackle, rotting house inhabited by a lonely girl. Strongly resonating with Peattie’s representation of frontier farm wives, Melville’s narrator encounters ‘‘a lonely girl, sewing at a lonely window’’ (98). She and her brother live in abject poverty in a crumbling shack, inhabitants of the only house on the mountain. The brother is absent for long periods of time and the girl, Marianna, suffers from the elements, insects, loneliness, and sleeplessness. Indeed, the miserable conditions, among which Marianna includes ‘‘dull woman’s work—sitting, sitting, restless sitting’’ (101), have taken their toll. Marianna explains to the narrator that ‘‘living so lonesome here, knowing nothing, hearing nothing—little, at least, but sound of thunder and the fall of trees—never reading, seldom speaking, yet ever wakeful, this is what gives me strange thoughts’’ (101). Among her ‘‘strange thoughts’’ are her personification of shadows. Loneliness has perhaps resulted in mental illness for Marianna. The parallels here with Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ are intriguing. Both stories contain accounts of isolated women, wholly dependent on men, who slip into or border on mental illness, and in both stories the harmonious face of domesticity is shown to be a fac¸ade, obscuring loneliness and suffering. In addition, both stories are built on ironic misperception. In Peattie’s story, Flora perceives a house that is not there, which calls into question her own understanding of ‘‘home.’’ In Melville’s story—which introduces all the trappings of fantasy without in fact providing for any fantastical interpretation—the narrator finds neither fairy bower nor glad mountain girl, but only loneliness, poverty, and misery.

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Melville’s and Peattie’s stories differ, however, in one important respect: in keeping with Thompson’s contention that supernatural tales by nineteenth-century American men make use of ghosts to foreground the ‘‘apparitional nature of all existence’’ (‘‘Apparition’’ 92), Melville’s story depicts the failure of an inadequate reality to live up to fantasy as the inevitable condition of mankind, whereas Peattie uses the conventions of the Gothic to emphasize the specific disempowerment of women at the hands of men. What the narrator in Melville’s story discovers is that Marianna has been gazing at his own house with the same longing and fascination that he had directed at hers: ‘‘I have often wondered who lives there; but it must be some happy one’’ she says (99). Returning to the subject later, she laments, ‘‘Of, if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon whoever the happy being is that lives there! A foolish thought; why do I think it? Is it that I live so lonesome, and know nothing?’’ (102). Tellingly, the narrator responds, ‘‘I, too, know nothing, and therefore cannot answer; but for your sake, Marianna, well could wish that I were that happy one of the happy house you dream you see; for then you would behold him now, and, as you say, this weariness might leave you’’ (102). Of course, the narrator is the inhabitant of the house at which she gazes, but he realizes that just as he from a great distance had imagined her rotting shack to be a magical fairyland, so too has she fantasized that his own abode is a realm of happiness. Obscuring the wide disparity between their social and economic statuses, Melville, by depicting the reciprocal misperception in ‘‘The Piazza’’ of the narrator and Marianna, suggests that misperception is an inevitable corollary to the mortal condition; humans, by nature incomplete, inevitably will project their desires onto others, turning them into things they are not. When confronted with reality, when one looks beneath the leaves, so to speak, fantasy crumbles in the face of loneliness, economic necessity, and mortality. In contrast, in ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ the queer space of the apparitional house that appears in the distance, although specific to particular sociohistorical moment and situation, prompts an uncanny recognition of the unhomeliness of the home for women in general within patriarchal culture and foregrounds that which usually goes unstated: the social forces that gender the space of the home and compel women to perform certain specific identities, regardless of whether those identities coincide with their personal inclinations and talents. In Peattie’s tale, both the murdering wife and Flora have surrendered control to their farmer husbands and, as the only women on large farms, therefore are subject to confinement, loneliness,

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boredom, and the cultural expectation of maternity. It is the fantasy of domestic space as haven and source of tranquil fulfillment that is interrupted in Peattie’s story and shown to be phantasmatic, and, as a result, the romantic vision of the family farm as the exemplary site of republican values is subject to caustic critique.15 As in Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room,’’ Peattie makes use of Gothic conventions to critique gender expectations that disempower women. Peattie’s story, however, is ultimately much bleaker than Wynne’s because the queer haunting structure Flora encounters does not allow for a fantasy of female self-actualization or escape such as that presented by the little room. Rather, the house posits madness and murder as the only alternatives to a life of social and mental stultification—the only options presented by the narrative for Flora are to ‘‘grin and bear it’’ or to go mad. Flora has no little room to escape to, even in her fantasies. It is almost as though Western ranching and capitalistic expansion have invaded the space of her dreams—she can envision no space of her own apart from that created through the most extreme violence to her family and herself.

 Both Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room’’ and Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ participate in the Female Gothic tradition of revealing the uncanniness of domestic space and the inequitable distribution of power between men and women and then extend this meditation to consider the actual architecture of gender oppression—the ways in which space itself is gendered and produces particular sexed identities. In Wynne’s New England farmhouse, the vacillating china-closet and little room are two sides to the same coin, demonstrating how the material conditions of female existence under patriarchy give rise to fantasies of an impossible elsewhere—a utopian space of female actualization. The dream and the reality seem to coexist within the same space within the same house; the unstable fantasy space is, however, only accessible for women in the absence of men—and even then it does not always appear. What haunts in ‘‘The Little Room’’ is the possibility of a reconfiguration of space that replaces domestic servitude with imaginative expression and play. In contrast, there is no room for playfulness or self-actualization for women in Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ even in their dreams. Confronting the ephemeral house in the distance, the morbid afterimage of 15 For more of the ‘‘myth’’ of the farmer as ‘‘mainstay of the republic,’’ see Summers (219–20).

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past trauma, Flora simultaneously faces her own future of isolation, disempowerment, and stultification. Marooned in the midst of her husband’s 320 acres of farmland, with no apparent company aside from her husband, Flora—too young to be on her own, too old to be treated like a child— must find a way to preserve her sanity and perhaps will end up sublimating her desires for community and personal growth through constant domestic labor, like Wynne’s machinic Keys sisters. There is no little room for Flora—her choices are simply to ‘‘grin and bear it’’ or go mad like the unhappy wife of the spectral house in the distance. The anger she feels at the end perhaps is the manifestation of her recognition of this unhappy choice. In each of these two uncanny fictions, the authors depict queer ghostly spaces that foreground the gendering of space and, in so doing, implicitly critique the terrors of the real world. ‘‘The Little Room’’ depicts a kind of fantasized heavenly escape from the claustrophobic space of domestic labor and marital expectations, while ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ presents a hellish vision of what happens when even the ghostly possibility of a little room disappears. Each of the stories, as noted above, is also rooted in the particular cultural contexts of nineteenth-century American regions and circumstances. The Keys’s farmhouse condenses a network of social forces, including the legacy of New England Puritanism, post–Civil War gender relations, migration to urban centers, and the rise of industrialism, while Flora’s immurement on Bart’s large ranch clearly is situated at the crossroads of gender and economics—it is a small step from Peattie’s regionalist emphasis on the situation of the Midwestern farmer’s wife to the sort of naturalist focus on the disempowerment of small farmers by Peattie’s fellow Little Room social club member Hamlin Garland. In the next chapter, these social conditions will take center stage as I consider a series of ghostly fictions by American women that foreground the imbrication of gender oppression and the expansion of capitalism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. In these ghost stories, the force that produces ghosts—and sometimes renders the living ghostly—is the development of American capitalism and the willingness to make one’s fortune through the exploitation of others.

3.

Ghosts of Progress: Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton

As we have seen so far, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers made frequent use of Gothic conventions as a veiled or double-voiced mode of critique targeting gender codes that disempowered women. The haunting female figures introduced by Spofford, Hoyt, Stowe, and Wharton in Chapter 1 call attention to the ways in which women are subject to various forms of violence in patriarchal culture. The haunting spaces of Wynne and Peattie addressed in Chapter 2 foreground the gendering of space itself and the ways in which women are situated and defined by social expectations that entail the surrendering of autonomy. The political uses of Gothic conventions in the writings of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women, however, are multiple and varied. In addition to highlighting the specific forms of violence to which women were subject, certain ghostly tales extend their critiques more broadly to the imbrication of gender and economics. That ghosts and capitalism should be entwined in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Gothic works by women should come as no surprise. As Halttunen observes, the period between 1820 and 1860 witnessed the fastest rate of urban growth in American history, with the proportion of people living in cities rising by 797 percent, as compared to an increase in the national population of 226 percent. In addition, during the same period, the number of cities with populations of ten thousand or more increased more than eightfold (35). And the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s were marked by the centralization of major industries and the consolidation of wealth by a small number of families (Allen 13). By the 1880s, Smith-Rosenberg explains, the structure of American industry epitomized by large-scale manufacturing, giant corporations, and finance capitalism had concentrated economic power in a handful of larger cities while ‘‘small-town Americans had become the flotsam and jetsam in the ongoing maturation of American capitalism’’ (171). 82

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Obviously, the dramatic expansion of American capitalism connected to the nineteenth-century industrial revolution affected American women in a variety of ways. As noted in Chapter 2 in relation to Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ westward expansion and the development of factory farming resulted in what Smith-Rosenberg calls the ‘‘traumatic removal’’ and marooning of women on large farms (62). The appearance of the ghostly house in Peattie’s story can be traced directly back to the forms of isolation and disempowerment connected to being the wife of a Midwestern frontier farmer. Women in urban centers of course had more opportunities for social interaction but also witnessed or experienced all the social ills that accompanied the development of urban centers, including poverty and unemployment. As Elizabeth Ammons observes, this led to the formation of women’s clubs, temperance societies, antilynching and antiprostitution crusades, the suffrage movement, and organizations dedicated to the social reform of varying stripes (Conflicting Stories 6). And, as detailed in the introduction to this book, following the Civil War, pecuniary pressures led many unmarried women and war widows to become writers out of economic necessity— one thinks here of Ruth’s comment in Fanny Fern’s novel Ruth Hall that ‘‘no happy woman ever writes’’ (175). Indeed, many of the ghost stories addressed in this volume were penned for profit by professional female authors engaging in one of the few sanctioned occupations for women. In the ghostly works of Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton to be discussed in this chapter, capitalism itself is shown to underlie and structure relationships of exploitation and abuse between members of the same and of opposite sexes. These are stories that yoke together the insights of the Female Gothic, in which the supernatural is less scary than the everyday forms of abuse suffered by women, and capitalist horror stories of the type discussed by Annalee Newitz, in which an economic system structured on greed and getting ahead literally at the expense of others fosters all manner of violence and deviance. In Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ we are witness to urban squalor, while in Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ an urban sophisticate makes his fortune off of the death a rural girl—and sacrifices his sense of comfortable entitlement in the process. In Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ the pursuit of wealth and the desire to own women fosters hatred between men so intense that it transcends death, while in Wharton’s ‘‘Afterwards,’’ a shady business deal begets an actual shade and reveals to the protagonist how little she knows about the material foundation of her husband’s success.

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Literally from sea to shining sea in these stories—from Cary’s slum in New York to Murfree’s rural Tennessee farmers to Austin’s frontier mining community in California—and beyond to Wharton’s estate in England, the masculine pursuit of wealth is connected with the objectification of women; the ghosts generated out of this nexus of greed, class conflict, and misogyny return to trouble the project of capitalist expansion. Whether seeking revenge for financial duplicity or promising a future heavenly reunion beyond the chasm of class difference, the ghosts in these stories highlight the underside of America’s nineteenth-century progress narrative as they stage the uncanny spectral returns generated by manifest destiny.

Urban Squalor and Heavenly Reunion: Alice Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ Like Spofford, Wynne, and Peattie, Alice Cary published prolifically and her literary output was well regarded during the nineteenth century. Although Cary was primarily noted as a poet during her lifetime, her output included novels, essays, children’s stories, and various articles on historical and social topics. Cary, whose publication venues included the most popular and influential periodicals of the day, was included in Rufus W. Griswold’s 1848 volume, The Female Poets of America, and both Edgar Allan Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier reviewed her poetry favorably. Judith Fetterley notes that, as early as 1855, the Cincinnati Ladies’ Repository could proclaim that the name Alice Cary ‘‘has become like a household word to our eighty thousand readers’’ (Provisions xi).1 Among Cary’s literary output is a substantial body of short fiction, which Fetterley notes is generally grounded in the developing Realism of the mid-nineteenth century, but she shares the interest of male Romanticists of the period in using fiction to explore the human psyche and depths of emotion (Provisions xxiv). This interesting tension between Cary’s Realist and Romantic tendencies is especially apparent in her handful of supernatural short stories, in which grim realities and realistic details are juxtaposed with mystical or inexplicable phenomena. As is typical for Cary’s short stories, her ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ (1855) is recounted by a first-person female narrator who passively observes and then reports what she has witnessed. After an opening exhortation for readers to enjoy the present, the narrator tells the story of a woman named Peggy Butler and a boy named Frederick whom the narrator initially mistook for Peggy’s son. The narrator explains that she patronized Peggy’s New 1

For a brief survey of Cary’s biography and publication history, see Rogers.

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York City vegetable stall until Frederick was run down by a coach and Peggy abandoned her post. Seeking out Peggy in her home, the narrator learned Peggy’s story: having been thwarted in love by her callous family, she immigrated to the city following the untimely death of her fiance´. Snubbed by rich relations, she took in an orphaned child (who she strongly suspects is the bastard child of one of her rich New York City relatives) and eked out a living with her vegetable stand. As Frederick lies dying, he appears to see the ghost of Peggy’s lover, Joseph. Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ shows her writing at the intersection of the Romantic and Realist traditions noted by Fetterley. The embedded account of Peggy’s thwarted love affair with Joseph Williams and the death of little Frederick are clearly derived from the sentimentalist tradition. Peggy recalls that had it not been for her self-centered and uncaring family, she would have been happy. Her lover, Joseph, was the generous and goodnatured son of a well-to-do planter. Despite being the son of a wealthy farmer, however, Joseph had no land of his own, and his filial piety and good-naturedness were viewed by Peggy’s siblings as signs that he lacked personal ambition. While Peggy recognized Joseph’s manifest talents, her family refused to see any good in him and counseled Peggy against marriage to him. Joseph’s familial situation, the narrator relays to us, was even more discouraging. His father, though rich, was greedy and expected Joseph to marry well. Because Peggy had neither land nor money, Joseph’s father opposed the marriage. He subsequently relented but decreed that he would not give his son a penny. The end result was that Joseph worked himself to death. He collapsed one day in the fields, and, while being tended to by Peggy, her horrible brothers circulated the rumor that ‘‘Jo Williams had caught cold lying on the grass’’ (225). After acknowledging that he had worked himself into an early grave, Joseph died, leaving Peggy bereft. With a broken heart, she resolved—like so many others during the middle part of the nineteenth century—to leave country life behind and relocate to the city, where she had rich relations. We learn, however, that Peggy’s luck in the city was no better. Her city relations were rich and haughty and treated her contemptuously as a country bumpkin. The daughter in the household, Miss Sophia, was the most disdainful of her urban relatives, treating her ‘‘always as though I was made of something else than flesh and blood, never speaking to me unless to order me to wait upon her in some way’’ (225). While at one time Peggy would have chafed against such abusive treatment, her pride had been crushed and

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she had no place else to go, so she consented to work with the other servants in the kitchen. The story takes an interesting turn when Peggy explains that the family let it be known that Miss Sophia was gone from the home, but that Peggy suspected her to be concealed within. Subsequently, a male member of the family, explaining that it grieved him to see Peggy employed as a menial, offered to set her up in some small business and she thus moved out of the house and established a garden and vegetable stand. Less than a fortnight after entering into her new employment, she discovered a baby on her doorstep and then the same male family member offered to provide additional support to assist her in raising the child, more or less confirming her suspicion (and the reader’s) that the baby was that of Miss Sophia. Unfortunately, this gentleman’s visits slowly diminished to the point that she was left to fend for herself. Shifting into the narrative present, Little Frederick, as Peggy calls the child, has just reached the age at which he can assist her when, with tragic irony, he is struck down in the street by the carriage of the same family member who had initially provided for their livelihood, leading Peggy to assert that ‘‘the sins of the father are visited on the children’’ (226).2 Just before dying, Frederick has a clear vision of a young man whom he is able to describe in detail and whom Peggy recognizes as her lost lover, Joseph. No explanation for the appearance of Joseph is given by the story, although ‘‘that it was the ghost of her lost Joseph the dying boy had seen, Peggy had no doubt. It seemed to her, she said, that she had heard from him out of heaven, and from the fancy, if it were a fancy, she derived the greatest satisfaction’’ (226). This narrative framework clearly has connections both to Nina Baym’s notion of ‘‘woman’s fiction’’ and to what Jane Tompkins has famously referred to as ‘‘sentimental power.’’3 As in the novels Baym characterizes as ‘‘woman’s fiction,’’ in ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ domestic values are 2 Peggy’s comment here is especially provocative because it suggests that the same family member who runs over Frederick is also his father. Assuming that Miss Sophia is Frederick’s mother, which clearly seems to be the implication of her being closeted within the house and its being let on that she is abroad, this would then indicate not just that Miss Sophia has gotten pregnant out of wedlock but also that incest had occurred. Nothing else in the story, however, explicitly supports this interpretation. Peggy therefore may be speaking more generally about whatever man got Miss Sophia pregnant out of wedlock and then, presumably, abandoned her. 3 See Baym’s Woman’s Fiction and Tompkins’s chapter ‘‘Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History’’ in Sensational Designs.

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counterpoised against the growing ascendancy of a masculine ethos of consumer capitalism that replaces connections between people with competition among individuals. Initially, it is greed that prevents the happy union of Peggy and Joseph: Peggy’s unfeeling siblings deride her association with the penniless Joseph, and Joseph’s avaricious father causes his own son’s death by refusing to make available the financial support that he is more than capable of providing. Cary saves her true ire, however, for the deplorable conditions developing in the nation’s urban centers. In an extended passage that calls to mind the gritty social realism of someone like Rebecca Harding Davis more than the sentimentalism of Maria Susanna Cummins or Susan Warner, Cary depicts the neighborhood in which the indigent Peggy Butler is forced to live: [Her lodgings] were not in a nice, open street, and entered by a broad flight of steps and ample and well-lighted hall, but access was had to them through crooked and narrow streets, where the gutters were choked with thick, stagnant water, and pots, and barrels, and baskets of decayed and decaying refuse, making all the air heavy and unwholesome. Many carts stood along the sidewalks, and cellars with open windows, partly above ground, neighbored each other, through the apertures and windows of which the noses of cows and horses were thrust; dirty children, to be counted by hundreds, swarmed along the filthy side-walks—some with red gluey eyes, some with crooked legs, some with mouth askew, and some with heads having the appearance of mange dogs—quarreling, crying, paddling in the gutters, or pushing each other to and from in sorry attempts at play. Women that seemed to have lost all gentle attributes of womanhood, screeched or growled their displeasure from over their wash-tubs along the alleys or from stitching benches at the windows. Houses miserably old, and crowded from top to bottom—as appeared by the white-faced men and women who crept up from under ground to see or feel the sunshine, and the many night-caps at the garret windows—leaned against each other, or stood wedged together, and seeming to have sunken half their original dimensions in the ground. (222)

Cary’s representation of this urban ghetto makes clear the financial deprivation of the city’s underclass and the ways in which they are exploited by commercial capitalism. Forced into lives of unfulfilling menial labor, the poor are crowded into unsanitary and unsafe buildings. The dirty children who ‘‘swarm’’ the sidewalks are left to raise themselves as their parents work long hours and, like Frederick who is run down by a carriage on the street

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(presumably without consequences for the carriage driver), are exposed to acts and forms of violence. The squalor of urban life and the inability of its uneducated and exploited inhabitants to care for themselves and their children are emphasized even more graphically in what follows: the narrator enters this depressed neighborhood seeking after Peggy, who, following Frederick’s injury, has not appeared at her vegetable stall. Not knowing her exact address, the narrator knocks on a door bearing the sign ‘‘fashionable dress-making.’’ The sight that greets her is as follows: In the window two or three glass jars, one containing a few sticks of candy, another some spools of coarse cotton, and the third in part filled with cucumber pickles, in the bottom of which the dead flies had settled to the depth of an inch, and over which was a coating of white mold. . . . The door was opened by a young woman with a very slender waist, decayed teeth, thin hair, patched out above either ear and kept so by a quantity of white wadding, and having a greasy silk skirt adorned with flounces of a violently contrasting color. I caught a glimpse of a baby . . . This little creature was amusing itself with a couple of uncooked pigs’ feet, or legs rather; and of an old woman . . . tending a kettle in which was a quantity of meat boiling; and I noticed she worked her mouth in anticipation of the feast, as a pair of calf ’s eyes looked out upon her from the cloud of steam. (222)

These descriptions of the urban slum and its inhabitants are designed to shock and sicken the reader—especially the female readers who would first have encountered the story in the Ladies’ Repository in 1855. The brutal irony embedded here, of course, is the fact that the old woman who salivates over calf ’s eyes and the younger woman with ‘‘decayed’’ teeth and thinning hair make fashionable dresses for the upper class. What these descriptions of the impoverished conditions of city residents also make evident are the ways in which economic deprivation affects gender expectations—particularly as concerns women. Cary emphasizes that poverty strips women of their ‘‘feminine’’ qualities: the women of this neighborhood have ‘‘lost all gentle attributes of womanhood.’’ Also lacking are their maternal instincts: the unhealthy children run wild in the streets or sit by themselves in squalid conditions amusing themselves with unsanitary toys. Cary does not represent all city denizens, however, as rude and slovenly. Following the encounter with the dressmaker, an immediate contrast is introduced into the story through the presence of Caty Smith, a middle-aged mulatto woman. Caty, who appears neither poverty-stricken nor untidy, is

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described by the narrator as possessing ‘‘that inimitable something before education and above education, and without which the highest cultivation is but imitation after all’’ (223). Subsequently, the reader is told that Caty ‘‘proved to be not only an excellent washer and ironer, but also a model of amiability and polite manners’’ (223). This introduction of Caty Smith into Cary’s pre–Civil War ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ highlights the text’s political engagement with contemporary social issues and links it with that most famous of antebellum sentimental novels published three years earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As in Stowe’s text, in which the mulatto characters George and Eliza demonstrate humanity, humility, and what we might refer to, following Cary, as ‘‘natural cultivation’’ even in the midst of the most appalling circumstances, Caty Smith is presented as morally superior to the majority of the white women who inhabit her neighborhood. Significantly, it is also Caty who cares for the distraught Peggy and the dying Frederick. Caty manifests the sympathy and compassion, as well as the religious virtue, that those around her lack. At the end of the story, the narrator leaves Peggy and Caty, white woman and mulatto woman, reading from the Bible together. The passage they read, ‘‘Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid’’ (226), counsels submission to God’s will and faith in his plan.4 In keeping with Tompkins’s notion of ‘‘sentimental power,’’ Frederick’s vision of Peggy’s dead lover and the final image of Peggy and Caty reading the Bible, taken together, offer a powerful critique of the capitalist marketplace and its emphasis on acquisition of wealth. Although, unlike the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the deaths of neither Joseph nor Little Frederick function to redeem or save sinners—neither Joseph nor Frederick is developed as a Christ figure—Frederick’s deathbed vision of Joseph does testify to the reality of the life to come: Peggy feels that she has ‘‘heard from heaven.’’ And this prompts her to pray for the forgiveness of Frederick’s father, who ‘‘added the sin of abandonment to the sin that was before’’ (226). What Cary does with her ghost in ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ (much as the New England regionalists do in their fiction later in the century) is to validate the ‘‘humanized religion’’ of Peggy and Caty—and, to a certain Particularly interesting in this antebellum ghost story is the fact that it is not the mulatto character, but Little Frederick, who sees the ghost. Thus, not only does Cary’s tale present a positive representation of a woman of color in contrast to the uncultivated white residents of her neighborhood, she also avoids reifying the commonplace stereotype of persons of color as superstitious or visionary. 4

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extent, of the narrator who seeks out Peggy when she does not appear at the market—as a counterweight to developing industrial capitalism and the patterns of inequity and alienation that it structures.5 The story advances sympathetic, sentimental, noncommercial values—the ‘‘feminine’’ values Baym has identified as being at the core of women’s fiction—in response to the urban evils of ‘‘the frenetic race for money and status, a new kind of rootlessness, restlessness, and alienation with its potential for casual violence, the specter of frightful poverty and degradation at the bottom of the social scale, the problems caused by overcrowding’’ (Baym 46). As with Little Eva’s vision of heaven in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the dying Little Frederick’s vision of a heavenly messenger consoles the characters within the story and the reader over the death of a child by offering the assurance that heaven will receive the child. Beyond this, the welcome visitation also establishes a spiritual family of Peggy, Joseph, and Frederick—Joseph, after all, is not Freddy’s father, nor is Peggy his mother, and Joseph and Peggy never married—in contrast to Peggy and Joseph’s greedy, uncaring families. The suggestion is that these three outcasts will have in heaven the family they never had on earth. The story ends with the narrator leaving Peggy and Caty together ‘‘seeking consolation in the shadow of that Rock to which, some time or other, if we will not voluntarily go, we are driven for consolation’’ (226), and the story concludes with the narrator’s benediction, ‘‘Blessed are they by whom that time is not put off ’’ (226). This comment returns the reader to the very start of the story, which begins with the narrator discoursing on the necessity of enjoying the moment. She explains that ‘‘the habit of sacrificing daily the pleasant things in our reach, or of pushing them from us into the dark, in the hope that some future daybreak will shine upon them, is a great and fatal mistake’’ (221). This is because such moments never return—at least, not in the same form. In order to avoid misinterpretation, the narrator qualifies her assertion: ‘‘I do not mean to commend greediness,’’ she writes, ‘‘but a sensible and wise appropriation of the good gifts of God is, I believe, acceptable to him; for has he not made them and given them for our use?’’ (221). The story of Peggy and Frederick is then proffered in order to illustrate the dangers of the ‘‘procrastination of enjoyment’’ (221). On the face of it, this introduction is wholly incongruent with the story that follows. ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ does not seem to illustrate a carpe 5 For more on American female regionalist or ‘‘local colorist’’ critique of urban industrialism, see Donovan (8–9).

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diem approach to living. Indeed, the lesson seems to be the exact opposite—that heaven will reward those who suffer on earth. One way of interpreting the narrator’s apparently anomalous admonishment to enjoy the present, however, is to read the story as asserting a different definition of enjoyment—one that emphasizes connection with others and spiritual awakening rather than consumption of material goods and private sensual pleasures. This seems to be the message of the conclusion, which blesses those who, together, seek God, the ‘‘Rock,’’ sooner rather than later. Enjoyment at the start is thereby linked to religious consolation in the conclusion through an emphasis on the present. This present, peaceful time of spiritual fulfillment is contrasted throughout the story with the frantic time of material consumption and industrial expansion—symbolized by a young lower-class child being run down in the street by a speeding carriage owned by a member of the upper class. In place of the individualistic pursuit of wealth, Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ employs the supernatural in the service of privileging the sympathetic establishment of personal ties between people without regard to race or class. The story thereby critiques the urban industrialism that was rapidly changing the face of antebellum America.

Rural Versus Urban: Mary Noailles Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock’’ Like Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree (who published much of her work under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock) was a prolific and widely read author during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During her lifetime and into the first half of the twentieth century, her literary output, which consisted of eighteen novels and more than fifty short stories, was compared favorably with Bret Harte for her ability to develop distinctive regional details and with Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable for her depictions of dialect (Gehrman 321).6 More than half of Murfree’s works focus on the people and topography of the Tennessee mountains and, according to Gehrman, ‘‘The most prominent theme running through all of [her] fiction is an unwavering belief in a common humanity transcending economic and social class’’ (320). Gehrman adds that ‘‘rough and unlettered, her mountain characters usually possess a level of dignity and pride based on self-sufficiency unmatched by their sophisticated urban counterparts’’ (320). 6

Eppard notes that Murfree published twenty-five books in her lifetime (41).

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Murfree’s tendency toward social satire in which she deflates the pretensions of genteel society is evident in her 1884 supernaturally infused tale ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ which was included in her first work— also generally considered to have been her best—In the Tennessee Mountains.7 ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock’’ is the story of two refugees from urban society, John Cleaver and Fred Trelawney, who have migrated to a rural East Tennessee area because they cannot find jobs in the cities of their births. John Cleaver is a Parisian-trained physician born to a family of high social standing and he is resentful of the ‘‘failure’’ of his life and of his new social situation (184). Fred Trelawney is a young lawyer who had ‘‘confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer’’ (185). Unlike Cleaver, who bitterly resents his situation and holds himself above his rural Tennessee neighbors, Trelawney not only seems resigned to his existence among the unpolished residents of the poor agrarian community, but to embrace it. This tension between the two over their disparate assessments of the indigenous culture erupts when Cleaver discovers Trelawney’s intention to marry a local girl, Selina Teake. Previous to this revelation, Cleaver had been bothered by Trelawney’s adoption of local mannerisms. The narration observes that ‘‘[Cleaver] thought Trelawney was already degenerating in this disheveled life,—mentally, in manner, even in speech’’ (189); when he discovers that his friend plans to marry into the local community and remain there permanently, Cleaver feels it imperative on him to help his friend avoid this ‘‘almost grotesque catastrophe’’ (200). Cleaver’s attempts to dissuade his friend from this marriage morph interestingly into a debate on the In the Tennessee Mountains was widely reviewed and praised at the time of its publication in 1884 and was both a critical and popular success (Eppard 43). Godey’s Lady’s Book, for example, salutes Murfree as an accomplished ‘‘character artist’’ and compliments the book for its originality and richness of humor (‘‘Our Book Table’’); the Literary World: A Monthly Review of Current Literature refers to Murfree (writing as Craddock) as a ‘‘keen observer and virile writer’’ and praises her stories for their ‘‘remarkable power and attractiveness’’ (Rev. of In the Tennessee Mountains); Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science hails Murfree as a ‘‘true artist’’ (‘‘Recent Fiction’’ 630); and Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, although referring to her stories as ‘‘overrated’’ (which perhaps emphasizes how prominent Murfree was during the time), concludes that ‘‘there is both strength and beauty in the stories’’ (Rev. of In the Tennessee Mountains 109). Early-twentieth-century criticism was much harsher toward Murfree. Most notable perhaps is Fred Lewis Pattee, who criticizes Murfree in both his A History of American Literature since 1870 (1915) and The Development of the American Short Story (1923). In the latter work, Pattee characterizes her style as artificial and her material as thin (271–75). See Eppard for an overview of Murfree criticism to 1983. 7

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relative merits of urbane and rustic women. Trelawney defends his intention to marry Selina in a lengthy diatribe against society women. He begins by deriding the education they receive: ‘‘Education,’’ he said abruptly, ‘‘what does education accomplish for women in our station of life? They learn to write a fashionable hand that nobody can decipher. They take a limited course of reading and remember nothing. Their study of foreign languages goes so far sometimes as to enable them to interject commonplace French phrases into their daily conversations, and render their prattle an affront to good taste as well an insult to understanding. They have converted the piano into an instrument of torture throughout the length and breadth of the land. Sometimes they are learned; then they are given over to ‘making an impression,’ and are prone to discuss, with a fatal tendency to misapply terms, what they call ‘philosophy.’ ’’ (199)

Trelawney then continues this fierce critique by observing that the social ambitions of upper-class urban women, their ‘‘flirtations and husband-hunting’’ (199), fail to foster delicacy and refinement. Instead of these society women, Trelawney expresses his preference for Selina Teake, ‘‘the only sincere woman I ever saw’’ (199). Cleaver is stunned by this unexpectedly vigorous defense and is forced to admit that Selina is attractive and that if she were Trelawney’s social equal, he would have no cause to object to the union. To this Trelawney responds that social standing is an accident of birth and that what a man falls in love with is someone’s character, not her social rank. In addressing Cleaver’s concern about Selina’s ignorance, however, Trelawney again revisits his curiously dismissive position as regards the education and intellectual potential of women: ‘‘Great God! does a man fall in love with a society girl for the sake of what she calls her ‘education’? Whatever attracts him, it is not that. They are all ignorant; this girl’s ignorance is only relative’’ (201). This debate concludes with Cleaver’s mean-spirited remark that he hopes ‘‘something—anything’’ may put a stop to what is in his opinion a disastrous romance (202). Early on in ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ the lines are drawn, as they are in Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ between urban and rural, rich and poor. Cleaver here acts like Joseph’s father in Cary’s story by attempting to forbid an undesirable match. Trelawney overcomes these objections but curiously does so at the expense of women in general. He does not dispute Cleaver’s assertion that Selina is ignorant; rather, he disparages the education of society women as not only cursory and insincere but also

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harmful to feminine delicacy. Beyond this, he straightforwardly states that men in actuality do not want educated wives; his comments can be construed as suggesting that women lack the capacity for real education in the first place. What is particularly interesting about Trelawney’s dismissive comments about women’s education is that they come from the character who most obviously reflects the opinion, expressed throughout not only the story, but throughout much of Murfree’s work in general, that rural inhabitants ‘‘possess a level of dignity and pride . . . unmatched by their sophisticated urban counterparts’’ (Gehrman 320). Although Trelawney’s views on women are just as stereotyped and limited as Cleaver’s jaded and scornful perspective toward the rural population in general, Trelawney’s opinions seemingly are supported by Murfree’s narrative voice whereas Cleaver’s views are shown to be close-minded and inauthentic. Having established the dichotomous viewpoints of the text—Cleaver’s snobbishness and Trelawney’s disdain precisely for snobbishness and ornament—Murfree sets the stage for an ironic double twist: Cleaver discovers that Selina has fallen in love with him and ultimately it is her ghost that facilitates his removal from the community and restores his class status. As physician to the rural community, Cleaver is summoned to the Teake house to attend to Selina and discovers that she has been sick for some time and is now dying from diphtheria. He also discovers as he tends to her that she loves him. Curiously, Cleaver is extremely touched by the knowledge of Selina’s unrequited love for him. There are even suggestions in the story that Cleaver himself possesses a repressed attraction to the girl, which would render his dismissive attitude toward her and Trelawney’s potential alliance with her particularly hypocritical. In any case, his contemplation of Selina’s secret affection for him, perhaps accentuated by his own repressed and conflicted longings for her, leads him to suspect that his nerves are disordered and culminates in a vision that may or may not be supernatural. Driving home in his carriage late at night after attending to a patient, he seems to see Selina leaning against a cemetery fence post. She enters his carriage and, as they hurtle together through the wintry woods, he sees her face ‘‘drawn in lines of pallid light and eloquent with some untranslated emotion of mingled wonderment and pleasure and pain’’ (209). They speed through the night until, at some point, Cleaver realizes that she is gone from his side. Unaware of having checked the pace of his carriage and arrived back at his home, he only becomes alert again after he has ‘‘burst into the warm home atmosphere, a ghastly horror in his face and his frantic fright

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upon his lips’’ (209). Immediately after recounting his tale to Trelawney, he discounts it and insists that it must have been a hallucination. What is most significant about Cleaver’s ghostly encounter is the use to which he puts it. From it, he develops a treatise on ‘‘the Derangement of the Nervous Functions,’’ from which a section on hallucinations meets with ‘‘high praise in high quarters’’ and makes his fortune. The general acclaim that greets this work facilitates Cleaver’s return to high society and secures him a medical practice passed along from a notable physician who has esteemed Cleaver’s work greatly and has decided to retire. That the basis for this treatise is his own experience is something that Cleaver hides from the public: ‘‘No one knew, no one ever knew, [the work’s] romantic inspiration. No one ever knew the strange source when he had this keen insight; how his imperious will had held his shaken, distraught nerves for the calm scrutiny of science; how his senses had played him false, and that stronger, subtler critical entity, his intellect, had marked the antics of its double self and noted them down’’ (211). Whether Cleaver actually rides with Selina’s ghost is left an open question within the text; his response to the experience, however, is unambiguously mercenary. He co-opts and converts her affection for him (and possibly his own denied affection for her) and his vision of her—whether supernatural or merely recollected—into financial and cultural capital. In so doing, he mirrors the exploitation of the lower classes by the upper classes in America’s rapidly developing late-nineteenth-century industrial society and, simultaneously, foregrounds the false pretenses of scientific objectivity. Furthermore, in order to transform his personal experience into scientific treatise, he is forced to assume an almost schizophrenic perspective on himself, in which he analyzes the ‘‘antics of his double self.’’ Such self-division, coupled with the insincere presentation of his own experience disguised as that of another, contrasts markedly with the sincerity, simplicity, and presumed psychic unity of Selina and the country folk she represents. Cleaver’s fortune comes at the cost of being dishonest to himself and others and exploiting the memory of a country girl who loved him. Cleaver’s experience in East Tennessee—and particularly the revelation that he had been loved without his knowledge—does alter his perspective, however, on the urban high society he has rejoined. He finds his world ‘‘flattened, narrowed, dulled strangely’’ and discovers that ‘‘people were sordid, petty, and coarse-minded; and society—his little clique that he called society—possessed a painfully predominating element of snobs’’ (211). Despite himself, Cleaver has been affected by his experiences in Tennessee, and his sudden wealth and success lead not to happiness but to bitterness. What he misses is the simplicity and sincerity of ‘‘his friend

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Trelawney and the independent, money-scorning aristocrats of the mountains’’ (212). The story concludes with a melancholy Cleaver, through a form of misty ‘‘second sight,’’ contemplating his distant friend Trelawney’s deceived yet calmly resigned existence: ‘‘And the daybreak finds . . . his heart turning wistfully to that true and loyal friend, with his faithful, unrequited love still lingering about the grave of the girl who died with her love unrequited’’ (214). As in Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock’’ introduces conventions of the supernatural to critique industrial society’s mercenary ethic of capital accumulation and exploitation. John Cleaver not only turns his back on his friend, Trelawney, and the residents of East Tennessee, but also employs the unrequited affection of Selina and his own possible encounter with her ghost to make his fortune. In order to do so, however, he is forced to disguise the origins of his neurological hypotheses. And, beyond this, his experiences with Trelawney and the Tennessee community have broadened his perspective on the world and rendered him unable to reassume comfortably his former position within genteel society. Trelawney is left in the most inauthentic position possible: aware of the superficiality of the culture he inhabits and his own culpability in the exploitation of others, he still cannot surrender these ties and assume the authentic, generous existence of someone like Trelawney. The return of the dead in Murfree’s story, whether real or hallucinated, shreds the ideological veil of false consciousness for Cleaver and forces him to confront his own implication in maintaining structures of inequality.

Gold, Women, and Other Objects: Mary Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’’ From the slums of New York in Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ and the East Tennessee mountains in Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ we continue our push westward with Mary Austin’s ghostly tale of California miners, ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ included in her 1909 collection of sketches and stories entitled Lost Borders. In a career that spanned four decades, Austin published 34 books and over 250 shorter pieces (Reuben Ellis 2). In the 1980s, Austin was rediscovered by feminists and ecocritics who saw her as ahead of her times in her championing of women’s rights and environmental consciousness (Cheney 84). To a large extent, her work focuses on the inhabitants and landscape of the desert southwest.

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‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’’ is one of two supernatural stories included in Lost Borders, a collection of sketches and stories that Jaycox has described as ‘‘folk-legendary biographies of natives and borderers (settlers) in the mountains and deserts of California’’ (8).8 Set among the ‘‘spined and warted humanity of the camps’’ of rough California prospectors (223), it tells the story of the enmity between two men, identified only as Mac and Creelman, and of supernatural revenge from beyond the grave.9 The origin of the mutual distrust is presumed by the men of the camp to have been a dispute about a mine. The incident that flamed this distrust into outright hatred concerned control of an Indian woman’s sexuality. The narrator, recounting the story as told by a man referred to only as ‘‘the PocketHunter,’’ reports, ‘‘She was Mac’s woman; though, except by being his, he was not thought to set particular store by her. He used to leave her in his cabin while he was off in the Hills for three weeks’ pasear’’ (223). Just what the incident with this woman consisted of is never revealed by the story. Instead, the reader is informed that ‘‘the tacit admission of an Indian woman as no fit subject for white men to fight over forbade [Mac’s] being put to the ordinary provocation on account of her’’ (223). The initial premise of the story neatly intertwines economics and gender. The camps of which the story speaks are populated by male prospectors, all seeking to get rich by discovering gold—unlike in Cary’s and Murfree’s fictions, there is no romanticized natural nobility to any of these characters. The origin of the distrust between Mac and Creelman in a dispute over a mine finds its basis in greed, while the brief discussion of Mac’s Indian woman concisely foregrounds misogynistic practices that treat women as possessions—as a form of wealth like gold—and racist practices that rank the value of persons and what they have to say based on ethnicity. The Indian woman, who remains nameless, is presented as ‘‘Mac’s woman’’—as his possession. His lack of appreciation or affection for her is established by the comments that ‘‘he was not thought to set particular store by her’’ and that The other supernatural tale—which in fact presents itself as more straightforwardly supernatural—is ‘‘The Readjustment.’’ In this tale, a widower named Sim Jeffries discovers that his recently deceased wife, Emma, has returned and is haunting their home. In Lundie’s summation of the story, ‘‘A dissatisfied wife returns to haunt her husband, seeking a deeper meaning to the emotionally stunted life they led together’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 5). Emma must readjust to her new situation by realizing that her husband was incapable of giving any more emotional support than he did during their life together. 9 Quotations from ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’’ refer to the version of the story included in Marjorie Pryse’s Stories from the Country of Lost Borders. 8

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he leaves her confined to his cabin for weeks at a time. The generally racist attitude of all the men of the camps is displayed by the statement that an Indian woman is ‘‘no fit subject for white men to fight over.’’ Fit subject or not, Mac, the reader learns, has on several occasions threatened to kill Creelman and, after learning that Creelman has in some way violated his property by making advances toward ‘‘his’’ woman, becomes fixated on harming him. Mac, we learn, is a virtual nonentity, defined only by greed and thwarted ambition. He is described as follows: ‘‘Hair, beard, and skin of him burned to one sandy sallowness, the eyelashes of no color, the voice of no timbre, more or less stiffened at the joints by the poison of leaded ores, his very name shorn of its distinguishing syllable’’ (224). Mac’s pursuit of wealth in the desert has drained him of vitality and distinguishing features. He is also a sickly man with a game leg who, when overcome with rage, ‘‘gushes’’ blood from his mouth and nose (224)—an important feature for the later events of the story. With this background concerning Mac’s ailments and the animosity between Mac and Creelman, the story switches to that of two other prospectors, the team of Shorty Wells and Long Tom Bassit. Following a rapid descent from a high altitude mountain pass to a low valley, Bassit, we are told, was afflicted with heart trouble and died in the night. Seeking assistance in dealing with the corpse, Wells left the camp and returned with the Pocket-Hunter. What they discovered in place of the corpse of Long Tom Bassit, however, was the body of ‘‘a smallish man of no particular color or complexion, with that slight distortion of the joints common in a country of leaded ores’’ (228). Furthermore, this corpse was marked by blood that had ‘‘gushed freely from the nose and mouth’’ (228). The reader quickly recognizes that this corpse was that of a man Shorty Wells had never met— Mac. Tom’s corpse was nowhere to be found. The mystery deepened as Shorty and the Pocket-Hunter discovered tracks in the sand moving away from Shorty and Tom’s camp—Tom-sized tracks but evidencing an uncharacteristic limp. The tracks led through the desert to Creelman’s cabin—a place of which neither Shorty nor Tom was aware. Inside the cabin, Shorty and the Pocket-Hunter discovered Tom and the dead Creelman. The narrator reports, ‘‘It was Tom, though over his face as it leered up at them was spread a strange new expressiveness, such a superficial and furtive change as frivolous passers-by will add sometimes to the face of a poster with pencil touches . . . plain enough to have shocked them back, even as against the witness of clothes and hair and features, from the instant’s recognition, to produce in them an amazement, momentary, yet

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long enough for the dying man to take note of them unfriendily’’ (231). The body of Tom let loose a stream of curses concerning the deceased Creelman and, when Shorty begged Tom to deny having committed the murder, the figure of Tom failed to recognize Shorty. ‘‘Aw, who the hell are you?’’ the body of Tom sputtered at Shorty as it slumped to the floor and died, leaving Shorty to ‘‘cry quietly as he watched the dead man’s features settle and stiffen to the likeness of his friend’’ (232). Although the supernatural in this story is never confirmed, everything in the story points to a situation in which Mac’s spirit somehow animates Long Tom Bassit’s body and uses it to complete his revenge on Creelman from beyond the grave. This in fact is the vision that the Pocket-Hunter had as he surveyed Tom’s tracks in the sand with their telltale limp: ‘‘He saw on the instant Mac inching out from Tres Pin˜os on his unmatched legs, his hate riding far before him, blown forward by some devil’s blast, tugging at him like a kite at its ballast, lifting him past incredible stretches of hot sand and cutting stone, until it dropped him [at Creelman’s cabin]’’ (231). What the Pocket-Hunter envisioned is a body animated by hatred so intense that it somehow persists beyond death. What the story thereby foregrounds and critiques is an economic system that structures relationships between individuals on the basis of competition for wealth and possession of women. Mac’s greed and his wounded pride at having ‘‘his’’ woman (a woman about whom he otherwise cares very little) in some way insulted or violated by Creelman precipitates a passion so intense that it manifests itself in gushing blood and murder. What we thus see in ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story’’ is that Austin makes use of Gothic conventions to illustrate the violence attendant on greed in a capitalist system that pits men against one another in the contest to acquire wealth and to control women. More explicitly violent than either ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ or ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ Austin’s naturalistic tale paints capitalism itself as a sort of supernatural force that structures human responses and precipitates aggression and hostility as men struggle to accumulate financial and cultural capital.

‘‘Just Business’’: Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Afterward’’ Although there are a variety of other stories one could discuss in this context of supernatural stories written by American women that critique the money ethic of the expanding late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrial capitalist system, I would like to close this chapter by focusing on another supernatural tale that, like Austin’s ‘‘Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ is (at

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least obliquely) about a mine and contests for control of capital—Edith Wharton’s ghost story ‘‘Afterward,’’ first published in Century Magazine in January 1910. This tale, in which the protagonist and her husband have accumulated enough capital to shift the scene from the American West to the English countryside, not only uses Gothic conventions to call attention to and protest unsavory business practices but, much more explicitly than Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ also links unrestrained capitalist expansion and exploitation to the social and economic disempowerment of women.10 As such, ‘‘Afterward’’ brings together much of the preceding discussion in its demonstration of the ways that capitalism not only fosters violence that produces unhappy ghosts, but also participates in the silencing of women who themselves are rendered metaphorical ghosts by virtue of not being fully autonomous agents. ‘‘Afterward’’ tells the story of a married couple, Edward and Mary Boyne, ‘‘two romantic Americans’’ (58), who purchase Lyng, a Tudor estate in Dorsetshire, England, because of its remoteness and rustic charm.11 As the result of a sudden windfall from a mine, the couple is able to leave behind the ‘‘soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town’’ and retire to the English countryside so that Mary may devote herself to painting and gardening and Ned may produce his ‘‘long-planned book on the ‘Economic Basis of Culture’ ’’ (60). As a ‘‘romantic’’ couple, Ned and Mary are desirous that the country home they are to inhabit should come with a ghost and express some disappointment that the legend concerning the house is that it is indeed haunted, but that the ghost is never recognized as a ghost until long after the encounter. Later in the text, Ned disappears and it subsequently becomes clear that he was involved in some dubious business dealings in relation to the mine the nature of which Mary was kept—or kept herself—in ignorance about. It also becomes clear to Mary that a gentleman she directed to her husband just prior to his disappearance was in fact the ghost of a suicide named Elwell—an individual Ned had maneuvered out of a share of the lucrative mine. 10 Other stories that could be introduced in this context include Freeman’s ‘‘The Shadows on the Wall’’ (1903), Gertrude Atherton’s ‘‘The Dead and the Countess’’ (1905), Mary Bradley’s ‘‘Maxwell’s Ghost,’’ pts. 1 and 2 (1884), Rose Terry Cooke’s ‘‘Three Ghosts’’ (1871), Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘‘The Mad Lady’’ (1916), and Wharton’s ‘‘The Triumph of the Night’’ (1914). 11 Page numbers here refer to the version of ‘‘Afterward’’ included in The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.

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As the pieces fall into place at the end of the story and Mary realizes her complicity in her husband’s disappearance, it becomes evident that Mary’s repressed knowledge of her husband’s unscrupulous dealings, as well as her unacknowledged feelings of animosity toward him, have facilitated his apparent demise. The reader learns that Mary has assiduously avoided learning anything about her husband’s business practices. After a mysterious (and outdated) newspaper clipping arrives in the mail for Mary detailing a suit brought against her husband by Elwell, Wharton writes of Mary, ‘‘Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on [Ned]’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. . . . Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built’’ (70). Even more interestingly, following Mary’s reading of the clipping, she jumps to her feet and calls to her husband for an explanation. Wharton writes, ‘‘[Ned] had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk’’ (68). This scene introduces dual tensions into the narrative—the reader observes both that Mary has avoided any knowledge of her husband’s business practices and that husband and wife bear a submerged animosity toward one another. These tensions are rapidly glossed over, however, as Mary allows herself to be soothed by her husband’s reassurances that all is well. Jenni Dyman observes in her study of Wharton’s supernatural fiction, Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, that, ‘‘In keeping with the social code and her husband’s desires, Mary Boyne has developed habits of submissiveness, repression, and absence of direct communication. . . . Mary’s need for preservation of the status quo is so strong that she conveniently ignores or forgets any information that might alter her life’’ (42). Nowhere is Mary’s ability to forget more clear than in her encounter with the ghost of Elwell. On the day of Ned’s disappearance, Mary is tending to her garden when she is approached by a stranger who asks after her husband. She directs him to the house’s library, returns to her duties, and promptly forgets the encounter entirely. It is only on subsequent interrogation of the household staff following her husband’s disappearance that she recalls this individual, but nothing more concerning him can be determined. Mary senses that there is a secret surrounding her husband’s disappearance but personifies the

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house as the keeper of repressed knowledge: ‘‘The house knew; the library in which she spent her long lonely evenings knew. . . . The books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come’’ (85). Mary is wrong on both counts—the revelation does in fact come, but it is not revealed by the house or its library. Rather, it arrives with her late husband’s American solicitor, Parvis, who calls on Mary in the library to discuss compensation for Elwell’s family. What Mary learns in the course of the conversation with Parvis, as horror sweeps over her in ‘‘great deafening waves’’ (87), is that her husband had cheated Elwell and that the man had subsequently committed suicide. Further, Parvis shows her a newspaper clipping sympathetic to Elwell, which includes his picture, and Mary recognizes Elwell as the stranger in the garden whom she directed to her husband. Finally, Mary learns that Elwell’s arrival for her husband took place the day after his physical death in America. As Mary puts all the pieces together, it is at this point that she recalls the ghost of Lyng is only recognizable as a ghost long after the encounter and understands that she had just such an encounter with a ghost but failed to recognize it at the time. As Dyman appreciates, in ‘‘Afterward,’’ Wharton draws on familiar Gothic motifs but departs from the supernatural tradition by crafting a ghost that changes in relation to the inhabitants of the house (Dyman 41), a manor whose name, Lyng, is suggestive of lying. And as Dyman also observes, several critics have read the story as one focusing on marital estrangement (41). Janet Ruth Heller, for example, writes that ‘‘Afterward’’ is a ‘‘psychological study about the emotional alienation of a husband and his wife’’ as a result of ‘‘Ned’s dishonesty and Mary’s escapism’’ (18). Less convincingly, Richard A. Kaye has proposed that Ned’s disappearance suggests his repressed homosexuality. I agree with Dyman that although the ‘‘overt text’’ of Wharton’s narrative focuses on the ‘‘controlled release of information about Ned Boyne’s villainy and Robert Elway’s [sic] ghostly revenge or return’’ (42), the central focus of the tale is on Mary, who has been culturally conditioned not to delve too deeply into her husband’s business dealings or indeed her own feelings about her marriage. While it is her husband who disappears, it is Mary who is haunted and who in fact directs the ghost to her husband. The ghost’s appearance to her in the garden can be read as the symptomatic return of the repressed—of her refused recognition of both her knowledge

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of her husband’s unscrupulous dealings and her suppressed animosity toward him. Wharton’s ‘‘Afterward’’ thus carefully critiques the mercenary nature of capitalist expansion and exploitation. In this story of a man intending to write a treatise on the ‘‘Economic Basis of Culture,’’ Ned’s own cutthroat business maneuvers literally come back to haunt him, and, unlike Cleaver in Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock’’ whose own treatise exploits his haunting experiences of America’s underclass to make his fortune, Ned’s financial windfall serves as his undoing. As in Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ a dispute about a mine leads to violence and revenge from beyond the grave. In Wharton’s tale, however, the revenge accomplished is presented as supernatural punishment for unethical business dealings. Beyond simply criticizing the ethical void at the center of capitalist business transactions, ‘‘Afterward’’ also calls into question gender expectations which assume that either women have little capacity for comprehending business dealings and therefore should have no interest in them or that genteel women need to be protected from the unsavoriness of business. Mary Boyne is portrayed as a woman who has been content to benefit from her husband’s less-than-scrupulous business dealings without ever asking where in fact the money comes from. By conforming to gender expectations which dictate that she should have no interest in her husband’s economic transactions, she, too, is complicit in the ruining and suicide of Elwell.

 The stories addressed in this chapter represent a subset of the American Female Gothic that deploys familiar conventions of the supernatural in order to critique not just the disempowered status of women in American culture, but also the expanding capitalist system—and in some cases to show the direct correlation between the two. Cary and Murfree both depict the increasingly entrenched class stratification in American society and the ways in which the lower class is exploited by the upper class. In both Cary and Murfree the legacy of Sentimentalism is felt in the valorization of the ‘‘noble rustic’’ and the celebration of country values that oppose the urban emphasis on wealth. Each story also offers a countervailing Realist tendency, however, in which the economic disenfranchisement of the poor is shown to be the cause of preventable social ills. Cary takes the reader into the New York slums and depicts scenes of poverty and degradation that wouldn’t be out of place in the naturalist writings of Stephen Crane toward the end of the century, while Murfree with an ethnographer’s eye points out the lack of education and medical ailments to which her good country folk are prone. The

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ghost of Joseph in Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ holds out the hope that heaven is organized according to an alternative economic model that doesn’t segregate rich and poor or allow for the exploitation of the latter by the former. In ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ Dr. Cleaver exploits the country folk among whom he lived, as well as his own uncanny experience, to cement his place in high society, but only at the cost of his psychological well-being. He achieves the status he so desires, but his eyes are opened to the insincerity and selfishness of those around him. The ghost of Selina Teake awakens in him an awareness of capitalist false consciousness and of his own implication in systemic inequities. Austin and Wharton build on these observations about the schism between rich and poor and the exploitation of the working class by the rich to demonstrate the ways in which the pursuit of material wealth fosters mercenary individualism that is always on the edge of erupting—and occasionally crosses over—into open violence. In Austin’s ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ women and gold are both objects men covet and control, and this possessiveness turns to rage so powerful that it transcends death. Wharton’s ‘‘Afterward’’ is perhaps most damning of all as Ned Boyne’s treatise, ‘‘The Economic Basis of Culture,’’ is shown to be itself a type of ghost story. Ned has made his fortune through mercenary tactics that have harmed those he beat to the punch, and what Wharton stages is a sort of capitalist revenge tragedy in which the duped Other returns from beyond the grave to repay Ned in kind. Intimately connected to this ghostly revenge tale, however, is Mary’s own uncanny realization of how little she has wanted to know about the material basis of her and her husband’s financial success and indeed her complicity in Elwell’s spectral revenge. Mary, by virtue of not taking an active interest in her husband’s affairs but enjoying their financial status, is implicated in the Elwell tragedy. At the same time, however, like Elwell, she has been duped by her husband, who has carefully kept his questionable financial dealings a secret from her. The ghosts in all these stories are situated within social contexts that foreground the disparity between rich and poor that structures the American dream of achieving financial independence, and the space they haunt is precisely that of the ethical void at the heart of American capitalism. Mary, however, becomes in the end an especially suggestive figure for the situations of many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American female authors—directing ghosts to readers in their libraries to keep from becoming ghosts themselves.

4.

Familial Ghosts: Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Either explicitly or implicitly, ghost stories are always about violence. The ghost is the uncanny afterimage of sorrow, pain, and tragedy. If there is a ghost, someone has died or something has gone out of the world, and if the ghost walks, something has been left undone, a crime needs to be redressed, or a story needs to be told. In the hands of American Female Gothicists, the ghost is put to work to tell these unhappy tales—and while the stories occasionally have happy endings, they are seldom untinctured by sorrow. The stories addressed so far in this study have dealt with murder, confinement, abuse, and control, and, as such, they highlight the ways in which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women made use of Gothic conventions to express a variety of anxieties related to the place of and roles for women in American culture. In particular, I have argued that ghost stories were used as a double-voiced medium to communicate discontentment with the specific forms of violence to which women were subject, as well as with the broader development and expansion of American capitalist society. This chapter will address a different set of female anxieties—one that has less to do with outright violence and more to do with cultural expectations and social demands. The dominant issues in ghost stories by Victorian and Edwardian women do not concern women being murdered or physically abused by men but rather marriage and motherhood. In stories focused on these themes, the tensions between the idealized expectations surrounding feminine roles and the far less fulfilling realities of marital life for many women are brought to the fore. Ghost stories that address marriage, according to Catherine Lundie, deal with infidelity, psychological and sexual abuse, arranged marriages, and the incompatibility of partners (‘‘One Need Not’’ 246). Such stories also frequently engage with the anxieties of a young woman marrying a widower—a not-uncommon situation in the nineteenth century—and attempting to fill the shoes of a previous wife. Ghost stories about motherhood address not only the ponderous imperative for women 105

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in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to be mothers, but also the sacrifices motherhood demands. Behind the veil of the supernatural tale, women within a culture that enshrined maternity as a woman’s highest calling could express fears and horrors related to childbirth and motherhood. In this chapter, I survey a variety of ghostly American tales by Victorian and Edwardian women that attend to the subjects of marriage and motherhood and that reflect differing opinions on the subjects. In some cases, the stories celebrate nineteenth-century expectations concerning women’s roles even as they depict the discrepancies between idealized expectations and lived realities. In other cases, the stories are directly critical of the circumscribed roles permitted for women and the subordination of female autonomy attendant on being defined as caregivers. I start with a trio of stories that share the conceit of being narrated by deceased wives reflecting on their marriages. In both Louise Stockton’s ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ (1877) and Olivia Howard Dunbar’s ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ (1908), dead wives look on as their living husbands begin new relationships with other women and thereby undermine not only romantic ideals of undying love but Spiritualist expectations of the heavenly reunion of loved ones. In Edith Wharton’s ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ (1893), the deceased wife opts for eternity with a husband she does not truly love out of a sense of obligation. Following attention to these three stories, I focus on a series of stories that all highlight the immense pressures on women to bear and protect children. In Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Children’’ (1913), a woman conjures up the children she never had. In Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ (1898) and Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass’’ (1911), deceased first wives return from the dead to protect their children from negligent or callous second wives, and in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ (1902), the ghost of an abandoned child makes imperious demands on a living woman. Taken together, these stories demonstrate yet another way in which American women put Gothic conventions to use in order to express anxieties about the circumscribed roles for women in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century American society.

The Spectral Afterlife of Marriage: Stockton, Dunbar, and Wharton In the nineteenth century, marriage was simply a fact of life for the vast majority of women. Nine of ten women married according to Kelley (34), and while attitudes toward the necessity of marriage loosened somewhat toward the end of the century—in part due to expanding opportunities for

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women to earn livelihoods outside the home—the expectation that women would marry remained firmly entrenched well into the twentieth century (and some would maintain still exists strongly today). The development in the nineteenth century of what Barbara Welter has famously dubbed the ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood,’’ which characterized women as being defined by the four primary virtues of piety, purity, subservience, and domesticity, was celebrated both in nineteenth-century sentimental literature and in the vast body of women’s magazines, gift books, novels, poems, and sermons that ‘‘glorified the American woman as purer than man, more given to sacrifice and service to others, and untainted by the competitive struggle for wealth and power’’ (Mintz and Kellogg 55). This definition of femininity resulted in the increasing consignment of women to the domestic circle in which they were responsible for fostering a virtuous home environment and inculcating appropriate moral values in children. Degler adds that in addition to these responsibilities, there was the onerous and unending task of meeting the physical needs of husband, children, and oneself (52). Recent academic research has contested the idea of a rigid ‘‘separation of spheres’’ between men and women in nineteenth-century America and has sought to nuance this discussion by introducing other variables such as race, class, religion, sexual preference, and occupation into the mix. The social climate, however, remained one that not only assumed marriage to be the inevitable destiny for women in general and necessary for their personal fulfillment, but also emphasized the moral imperative for women to marry in order to reform wayward men and produce and raise virtuous citizens to renew and expand the developing American republic.1 Given such expectations, it is not surprising that many women who recognized that actual experiences of marriage differed from the idealized representations of domestic harmony portrayed in magazines, gift annuals, novels, religious pamphlets, and advice manuals of the time found it difficult or dangerous to critique directly attitudes toward matrimony and expectations surrounding women’s roles. While some women, like the infamous Sarah Payton Willis (Fanny Fern), did tackle such explosive topics head-on, many others, as Lundie notes, explored the subversive potential of the supernatural tale to express concerns about marriage (‘‘One Need Not’’ 245). Lundie contends concerning such stories that ‘‘at their least dramatic, they reveal women’s disillusionment and disappointment with the marital relationship. At their most 1 On the contestation of the ‘‘separate spheres’’ proposition, see the special edition of American Literature edited by Cathy N. Davidson from 1998 dedicated to the topic, especially Davidson’s introduction, ‘‘Preface: No More Separate Spheres!’’

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dramatic, the tales’ heroines accept death as a welcome alternative to continuing in a loveless marriage’’ (246). One of the most fascinating tales from the latter part of the nineteenth century that engages with the disappointments of marriage is a story from a woman named Louise Stockton entitled ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ which appeared in the Galaxy in 1877.2 The story presents the first-person narration of a ‘‘spirit’’ who offers to a young woman counsel derived from the spirit’s own life experience, and the subject of her discourse is the folly of staking one’s eternal bliss on the constancy of men. The spirit begins her story by explaining that she and her husband, Philip, were not just lovers, but also ‘‘comrades’’ (528). During their life together, she was satisfied and never doubted the depth of his affection. Indeed, their bond was so passionate that during the last days of her terminal illness they prayed together that they would not be separated even in death: ‘‘Together . . . we besought Heaven to give me no other happiness than that I had known in life, but to let me linger near my home, and be with my husband until he died’’ (529). Their prayer was granted, but the narrator’s transformation following death prohibited her husband from recognizing her presence.3 Despite this, she remained confident that sooner or later Philip would become cognizant of her hovering spirit. She recalls thinking, ‘‘It was impossible . . . for him to dwell in such an atmosphere of love and always be unconscious of it. Why, we thought only of each other, we longed only for each other, and so he must at last come to know how near I was, and then, I thought with joy, waiting would lose its pain!’’ (529). What she instead observes, however, is Philip’s eventual attraction to Esther, the daughter of one of the narrator’s previous friends. Unlike the conventional nineteenth-century plotline built around the ‘‘bifurcated’’ (Lundie, ‘‘One Need Not’’ 265) image of demonic and divine women, in which a good, ‘‘pure’’ woman battles with an evil seductress, 2 Stockton published occasionally during the 1870s and 1880s in the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, and the Galaxy, and it is likely that she was the younger sister of more famous nineteenth-century author Frank Richard Stockton, whose ‘‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’’ caused a minor sensation in 1882. 3 This conceit of the inability of the living to perceive the lingering spirit of the dead is also present in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’s 1873 tale ‘‘Since I Died,’’ which was published in Scribner’s four years prior to Stockton’s story. The twist of Ward’s tale, which I will take up in Chapter 5, is that both lovers are female. While there is no way of ascertaining for certain whether Stockton or Dunbar (who also makes use of the same conceit) were aware of Ward’s story, given Ward’s prominence in the 1870s, it would not be unlikely.

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Esther is not a temptress who belittles Philip’s memory of his first wife or attempts to sway his affections.4 Rather, the narrator recalls her as pretty, rich, good, and loving (529), and as speaking of her together with Philip ‘‘lovingly and gently’’ (530). Having witnessed her husband’s grief over her death without being able to comfort him, the narrator recalls that she now was condemned to observe his growing love for and courtship of another woman. And just as she cannot find fault with Esther, similarly she cannot condemn her husband. She observes, ‘‘He thought of me tenderly. I was a part of a past too dear to be forgotten; but I did not belong to the present. He had lived without me, and I was no longer necessary to him, but this younger love was very near and real to him’’ (531). Despite this acknowledgement of the persistence of her husband’s tender feelings toward her and her awareness that he cannot perceive her, the narrator still feels bitter over her husband’s failure to remain true to her memory. She notes, ‘‘If he had died, I would have been faithful’’ (531), and claims that she ‘‘cannot pretend to understand a man’s love, nor to tell you how faithfulness to an old affection, and desire for a one that is new, can dwell in the same heart’’ (531). What rankles her most, however, is that he has forgotten their pact, their joint plea to heaven to allow them not to be parted even in death, while she has been forced to comply with her part of the bargain: ‘‘But he was not bound to me only for life—for my life. Our love reached out toward the other world and swore eternal fidelity, and I—I have not been freed from him’’ (532). The ramifications of Philip’s alienation of affection are made clear toward the end of the story: there will be no joyous reunion of the narrator and Philip in heaven upon his death. ‘‘The sting, the bitterness of my bereavement is in my knowledge that we are parted for ever [sic]. If Philip had not grown so far away from me in the years in which he has not known me, I As Lundie notes, nineteenth-century literature and art is filled with portrayals of the ‘‘two-sided nature of woman’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 265) in which women are either saints or whores. As regards Gothic literature by American women, Lundie references Mary Heaton Vorse’s ‘‘The Second Wife’’ (1912). One could also point to, among others, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘‘The Amber Gods’’ (1860) and ‘‘Her Story’’ (1872), Louisa May Alcott’s ‘‘Behind a Mask: Or, a Woman’s Power’’ (1866), and Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ (1931). On the ‘‘bifurcated’’ image of women in nineteenth-century literature and art, see also Nina Auerbach, Bram Dijkstra, and Joy S. Kasson. The inability of men and women to communicate with one another is the theme of Mary Austin’s ‘‘The Readjustment’’ (1909). Bad marriages are also at the heart of Olivia Howard Dunbar’s ‘‘The Long Chamber’’ (1914), Clarice Irene Clingham’s ‘‘The Seaweed Room’’ (1896), and Ellen Glasgow’s ‘‘The Shadowy Third’’ (1923). 4

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could expect some happy reunion with him; but this man will need me no more in Heaven than he now does upon earth. . . . But this I know: in the future the soul of this man will lay no claim to mine’’ (533). What adds to the narrator’s bitterness is that her child, Nellie, also has a new mother and will not remember her first mother. Not only is she no longer a wife, but she has been deprived by Philip’s inconstancy of her status as mother as well. The story concludes with the narrator’s admonishment to her auditor not to trust in men for her eternal bliss: ‘‘I warn you child, that your love to Heaven cannot be too strong; your love for man too true; but while you give to man the sweetness and comfort of your life, you must look to Heaven alone for faithfulness’’ (533). After providing this moral, the spirit departs, leaving the girl alone on the sand, looking out at the ocean. Stockton’s ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ is both a cogent critique of idealized marital expectations and, more broadly, of nineteenth-century Spiritualist beliefs. In terms of conceptions of matrimony, it paradoxically uses the conventions of fantasy to call into question overly romanticized ideals and to provide a more realistic assessment. While the narrator is bitter about the course of events, she is careful to point out that neither Philip nor Esther are truly at fault for their relationship. Rather, where the narrator and Philip erred was in pledging eternal faithfulness. Had they not sworn eternal fidelity, the narrative suggests, the narrator would not have been forced to hover invisibly and impotently around Philip. It is true that the narrator generalizes about men based on Philip’s failure to abide by their pact; she claims that if the roles had been reversed, she would have remained true to his memory and cautions her auditor to look to heaven alone, not to men, for faithfulness (533). The true thrust of the story, however, is not so much that men are inherently flawed and unfaithful as that women need to be able to depend on themselves, even within marriage (also a lesson learned, one might note here, by Mary Boyne in Wharton’s ‘‘Afterward,’’ discussed in the previous chapter). One must not surrender one’s self or soul, even to one’s husband. The narrator, the story suggests, brought about her own predicament by rejecting her own spiritual development and instead making her husband her heaven. Presumably, she will not be able to enter paradise until her husband dies and her bond with him is dissolved, and she hopes that then there will be some recompense for her suffering, that ‘‘in some way the lost love of my husband, the misled affection of my child, will be made up to me’’ (533). Beyond this critique of romanticized marital ideals, ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ also offers a decidedly non-saccharine reconceptualization of Spiritualist ideas

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prevalent in the 1860s and 1870s. Spiritualism, as commentators including Ann Braude, Bret Carroll, and R. Laurence Moore have detailed, was an optimistic philosophy that offered consolation to the bereaved by affirming the continued existence of the departed and their abilities to interact with the living. An important component of Spiritualism’s attraction was its emphasis on the future reunion of the living with the dead in heaven—an understandable desire, especially given the carnage of the American Civil War. Stockton’s ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ published in 1877 during a peak of Spiritualist interest, takes the air, so to speak, out of the rosy picture of ‘‘spiritual progression’’ offered by novelists and Spiritualist commentators such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward.5 The story in fact raises an extremely vexing question: with whom does one spend eternity in heaven if he or she remarries following divorce of the death of a spouse? Beyond this, however, what the story foregrounds is that the living change and that the heavenly reunions celebrated by Spiritualists may be complicated by the inevitable fact of human development. Stockton’s story not only cleverly calls attention to the ways in which idealized treatments of marriage differ from ‘‘real-world’’ experiences, but also suggests that religious ideologies predicated on heavenly reunions of spouses and offspring need to take into consideration the facts of human growth and change. Spiritualism, from this perspective, comes across as overly naı¨ve and out of touch with the realities of human existence. A less radical treatment of the theme of male inconstancy and the dilemma posed in the afterlife by remarriage is presented in Olivia Howard Ward’s novel, The Gates Ajar (1868), promises ‘‘a heaven full of friends and loved ones and cozy homes surrounded by gardens’’ (Kucich 72). The book was phenomenally popular and sold over two hundred thousand copies by the end of the nineteenth century (72). The Gates Ajar was followed by Beyond the Gates (1885) and The Gates Between (1887), each of which offers a detailed vision of heaven in which the afterlife resembles a utopian version of American life. Ward’s 1885 book Songs of the Silent World contained reassuring poems purportedly composed by dead people for their living and grieving relatives. The doctrine of progression asserted that individual souls continue to develop after death and advance through a series increasingly perfect spheres, ‘‘each one suited to promote the spiritual development for the attainment of the next sphere of heaven’’ (Braude 40). Ghost stories by American women often focus on the reunion of loved ones following death. Such stories include Alice Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ (1855), Hildegaard Hawthorne’s ‘‘There Shall Be No Misunderstanding’’ (1901), Inez Haynes Irwin’s ‘‘The Sixth Canvasser’’ (1916), Katherine Keife’s ‘‘On the Copley Road’’ (1912), Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘‘The Foreigner’’ (1900), Fanny van der Grift Stevenson’s ‘‘Anne’’ (1899), and Katrina Trask’s ‘‘Beyond’’ (1895). 5

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Dunbar’s ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ (1908). Dunbar, who was a journalist for the New York World and active member of the women’s suffrage movement, published prolifically in the leading turn-of-the-century magazines and her body of work includes a number of supernaturally themed stories that address women’s concerns. ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ appeared in Harper’s and, like Stockton’s ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ is narrated postmortem by a woman who watches her husband begin a romance with another woman. In this case, the ‘‘other woman’’ is the narrator’s sister. Unlike in Stockton’s tale, however, this story concludes with the narrator’s gradual acceptance of the fact that death severs the marital bond and that she must not stand in the way of her former husband and sister’s earthly happiness. At the start of the ‘‘The Shell of Sense,’’ the narrator, Frances, is overwhelmed by jealousy. It was only following her death that the affections her former husband, Allan, and her sister, Theresa, bear for one another became visible to her. She explains that she returned in the first place for Allan simply to remain close to him. Her desire was to watch him secretly, merely to linger by his side (53). What she discovered, however, was her sister increasingly occupying her place, sitting at her desk, waiting for Allan, and that her sister has depths of tenderness that she never recognized or appreciated. Beyond this, however, what she discovered while enduring in the scene of her former life was that her husband did not reciprocate her adoration. Unlike in ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ both Allan and Theresa in ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ can perceive Frances’s disapproving presence, which elicits from Allan the confession of a confused sense of guilt. Allan, the narrator recalls, asked of Theresa whether she believed Frances to have been content during her life. Theresa replied that both she and Frances believed him to have adored her. The reader learns, however, that this was not true. Allan did not reciprocate her adoration, although he carefully disguised this fact to avoid hurting her. Beyond this realization of the alienation of her husband’s affection, what Frances also realizes is that, as with her sister’s depths of feeling, she has misjudged her husband’s capacity for love. Hovering unseen, Frances discovers in her husband’s love for Theresa a depth of feeling that far exceeds that which he possessed for her. As in ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ the dead first wife here feels stunned and betrayed by the course of events she observes. Presumably anticipating that her husband romantically would subject himself to a form of endless mourning in which he melancholically endures a life bereft of his beloved until they are reunited in heaven, she instead discovers that she never really knew the person closest to her and that her marriage was not the idealized union

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she perceived it to be. Despite the fact that her husband honored his vows and was attentive and faithful, Frances describes her bitterness, anger, and jealousy and her resolution to prevent Allan’s union with Theresa. ‘‘ ‘Earthbound’ my jealousy relentlessly kept me,’’ Frances explains, as she details how she manipulated the couple, manifesting herself in ‘‘a touch or a breath, a wish or a whisper,’’ leading Allan to ‘‘come to believe that he had done evil in silently loving Theresa all these years’’ (56). Unlike in ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ however, Frances has a change of heart. As Theresa, honoring the sense of disapproval she intuits from Frances, prepared to leave Allan forever, Theresa’s sympathy and pity for Frances initiated Frances’s transformation. Theresa’s altruistic act of respect and kindness toward the dead moved Frances to reconsider her vengeful program. Frances explains, ‘‘And as I remembered [Theresa’s] extraordinary speech, and saw the agony in her face, and the greater agony in Allan’s, there came the great irreparable cleavage between mortality and me. In a swift, merciful flame the last of my moral emotions—gross and tenacious they must have been—was consumed. My cold grasp of Allan loosened and a new unearthly love of him bloomed in my heart’’ (60). In order to prevent their separation, Frances explains that she visited each of them in the night and blessed their union. This act of love and renunciation on Frances’s part liberated her from the mortal plane. The story concludes with her sense of fulfillment: ‘‘I am freed. There will be no further semblance of me in my old home, no sound of my voice, no dimmest echo of my earthly self. They have no further need of me, the two that I have brought together. Theirs is the fullest joy that the dwellers in the shell of sense can know. Mine is the transcendent joy of the unseen spaces’’ (61). ‘‘The Shell of Sense,’’ like ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ makes use of the Gothic convention of postmortem narration in order to call into question idealized expectations concerning marriage. In each case, the dead wife’s expectation of a joyous heavenly reunion is undermined by the living man’s subsequent remarriage. From one perspective, ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ is even more caustic in its critique of marriage than ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ because what is revealed is that the husband, Allan, never reciprocated his wife’s adoration and instead silently coveted his wife’s sister. Frances is revealed to have been deceived throughout the entirety of her marriage. Despite this underlying critique of social expectations governing marriage, however, the story ultimately retreats from a strident affirmation of women’s rights by highlighting the selflessness of women as the key to marital bliss. Interestingly, while Allan’s generosity in scrupulously preventing his wife from realizing that he

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did not reciprocate her adoration is viewed negatively within the story as a form of dissimulation that misleads her, Theresa’s selfless act of renouncing Allan for the sake of Frances’s contentment in the afterlife is the catalyst for Frances’s change of heart and, in turn, stimulates Frances’s own selfless act of renunciation. Theresa can only have Allan because she was prepared to give him up for Frances, and Frances will only give up Allan because Theresa was ready to do the same. Both women, in the end, realize that their happiness is attendant on the happiness of others. That both women ultimately find fulfillment by virtue of their willingness to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure the happiness of others reconfirms stereotypes associated with the Cult of True Womanhood, even as the story subtly critiques idealized representations of marriage.6 Although Dunbar’s story undermines its feminist critique of idealized expectations concerning marriage by reconfirming stereotyped conceptions of female selflessness, this idea of renunciation as the key to happiness for women is the primary target of critique in Wharton’s ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ (1893). This story begins with a woman on her deathbed. As death approaches, she draws solace from the fact that ‘‘she should never again hear the creaking of her husband’s boots—those horrible boots—and that no one would come to bother her about the next day’s dinner . . . or the butcher’s books . . .’’ (232).7 As the life leaves her, her husband paces the room, walking ‘‘vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking boots’’ (233). When consciousness returns to the woman, she stands on the edge of paradise, confronted by the Spirit of Life. In response to her involuntary exclamation that ‘‘perhaps now [she] shall really know what it is to live’’ (233), the Spirit draws out from her a lack of fulfillment concerning her mortal existence. Particularly unsatisfying to her was her marriage, which she describes as a ‘‘very incomplete affair’’ (234). In an interesting inversion of Dunbar’s ‘‘The Shell of Sense’’ the protagonist of ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ reports that she was fond of her husband but that they were not soulmates. A number of excellent late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ghost stories by American women address the insecurities of second wives who feel themselves to be haunted by their husband’s first wife. Such stories include Ellen Glasgow’s ‘‘The Past’’ (1923), Anna Holland’s ‘‘Haunted, or the Third Wife’’ (1860), Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘The Ice Storm’’ (1918), Edith Wharton’s ‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ (1931), and Mrs. Wilson Woodrow’s ‘‘Secret Chambers’’ (1909). Ellen Glasgow’s ‘‘Dare’s Gift’’ (1923) is an interesting innovation on this theme, as is Lurana W. Sheldon’s ‘‘A Premonition’’ (1896). 7 Page numbers refer to the reprinting of the story in Bendixen’s Haunted Women. 6

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Making use of an architectural metaphor to develop this idea, she describes a woman’s nature as ‘‘a great house full of many rooms’’ and comments that her husband not only never penetrated to her ‘‘innermost room’’ where ‘‘the soul sits alone and waits for the footstep that never comes’’ (234), but he never even recognized that wonders lay within his reach. She explains to the Spirit, ‘‘I felt like crying out to him: ‘Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?’ ’’ (235). In place of shared moments of the fullness of life, the woman tells the Spirit of Life that she experienced only a sense of frustration and missed opportunities with her husband: ‘‘His boots creaked, and he always slammed the door when he went out, and he never read anything but railway novels and the sporting advertisements in the papers—and—and, in short, we never understood each other in the least’’ (235). She recalls in particular a rapturous experience she had within a church in Florence that she could not share with her husband because his main concern was with the possibility of missing dinner. Following this list of grievances against her husband, the Spirit of Life reveals to the woman what the ‘‘dead Vashti’’ in Stockton’s story hopes for: heaven provides compensation for those unfulfilled on earth. Because fulfillment with another escaped her in life, she will be united with her soulmate in heaven. The gentleman in question steps forward and it is immediately evident that he and the woman share the same appreciation of everything, from art and literature to landscapes. Indeed, as they discuss different subjects, they finish each other’s sentences and answer each other’s questions before they are even fully articulated. Yet when her soulmate suggests that they transition into ‘‘that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river’’ (239), the woman hesitates. The tantalizing possibility of a shared home in paradise for all eternity with her soulmate crumbles in the face of what she appreciates to be an inescapable obligation. Although the figure before her is the partner that she has sought, she cannot disassociate the idea of home from slamming doors and creaking boots (239). She begins to doubt herself and questions her soulmate as to whether there is anyone on earth whom he remembers. His response is telling: ‘‘Not since I have seen you’’ (240) and, to prevent the possibility of the reader’s missing this subtle jab at masculine fidelity, the omniscient narration adds, ‘‘For, being a man, he had indeed forgotten’’ (240). The narrator cannot so easily forget her husband, however, and her sense of uneasiness is accentuated by

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learning that because her husband believed that he had found his soulmate on earth in his wife, there will be no true soulmate awaiting him when he arrives in heaven: ‘‘Your husband imagined that he had found his soul’s mate on earth in you; and for such delusions eternity itself contains no cure’’ (241). The protagonist concludes that she cannot abandon her husband, even for the prospect of an eternity of bliss with her soulmate. She attempts to articulate her reasoning to the Spirit of Life, claiming that even though she does not love her husband, ‘‘I shouldn’t feel at home with him’’ (241). She continues, It is all very well for a week or two—but for eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don’t suppose it will ache here; and he was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only he never could remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of stamps and visiting cards. He would never remember to have his umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he bought it. Why, he wouldn’t even know what novels to read. I always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a forgery and a successful detective. (242)

This remarkable speech in which the narrator attempts to justify her decision—both to the Spirit of Life and to herself—to turn her back on eternal bliss in order to attend to the needs of a man she admits she does not love emphasizes the wife as caregiver. She feels herself obligated to assist her husband with the minor tasks she considers him incompetent to effect on his own. When the Spirit of Life cautions her that she is choosing for all eternity, she responds, ‘‘Choosing . . . Do you still keep up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that you knew better than that. How can I help myself ? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else—never, never’’ (242). The story ends with, ‘‘And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of his boots’’ (243). ‘‘The Fullness of Life’’ offers an ironic inversion of both ‘‘A Dead Vashti’’ and ‘‘The Shell of Sense.’’ In Wharton’s account of a dead wife reflecting on her marriage, it is the wife who is given the opportunity to experience the romantic fulfillment she perceived to be missing from her marriage and it is the husband who was deceived by his wife’s outward attentiveness into

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believing she reciprocated his devotion. Unlike the men in Stockton and Dunbar’s stories, however, the wife in Wharton’s story does not choose personal happiness over obligation to the memory—and future reunion—with her spouse. Rather, she rejects her soulmate so as not to disappoint her husband’s expectations. In Lundie’s estimation, the wife in Wharton’s tale sticks with her husband because she is unable to go against social expectations. She becomes first metaphorically and then literally ‘‘an ‘angel’ for her husband’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 247). What is essential to recognize about ‘‘The Fullness of Life,’’ as Lundie points out, is that the wife is fully aware of the sacrifice she is making—and yet she feels that she has no choice but to attend to her husband’s needs. Thus, although the situation in Wharton’s story is the reverse of that in Stockton and Dunbar in that it is the wife faced with the prospect of romantic fulfillment and the consequent abandonment of a spouse in heaven, the outcome is the same: the wife chooses fidelity over fulfillment. And in the narrative’s brief aside in which the wife’s remembrance of her husband is contrasted with her soulmate’s forgetfulness of his time on earth, a caustic commentary about gender roles in American culture emerges: women are expected to sacrifice their personal fulfillment for the sake of the happiness of others, while men are free to pursue personal satisfaction even when it may affect negatively those around them.

A Mother’s Work Is Never Done: Ghosts and Children in Bacon, Peattie, Pangborn, and Freeman Nowhere is the expectation that women should not only sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of others but in fact derive personal fulfillment from caregiving more evident than in ghost stories by American women that focus on maternity and the raising of children. As Ann Douglas notes, American culture in the nineteenth century ‘‘seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother’s Day’’ (Feminization 5). Motherhood was enshrined as a woman’s most sacred calling, and the cult of motherhood, which Douglas comments was ‘‘nearly as sacred in mid-nineteenth-century America as the belief in some version of democracy’’ (87), characterized women as naturally pure and religious and emphasized their roles as nurturers who inculcated virtue in their children. As Lundie observes, in such a social climate obsessed with motherhood as a woman’s highest calling, mainstream fiction seldom dared to question this assumption or to express frustration with or

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exhaustion over the demands of maternity.8 Lundie in fact finds something sinister in this subordination of women’s concerns in nineteenth-century literature: ‘‘Where is the discussion of a mother’s inevitable confrontation with pain, disease, and death in the fiction of the day?’’ she asks. ‘‘Where is there a mention of the sheer exhaustion of mothering a child? What about the endless self-sacrifices, the lifelong commitment, the feelings of entrapment?’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 257). And she concludes that ‘‘these unspoken but very real aspects of motherhood are glossed over in nineteenth-century fiction, sentimentalized to the point of innocuousness and used as further evidence of woman’s innate fitness to be a mother. Society (then as now) expected women to be fulfilled through motherhood, and any woman who questioned the ‘sacred duty,’ even in fictional format, would have been vilified’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 256–57). The conventions of supernatural fiction opened a window of opportunity for social critique of cultural expectations concerning motherhood. According to Barbara Patrick, ghost stories concerning children and motherhood generally celebrate the female maternal role through stories that emphasize the bond between mother and child that transcends death, the demands of motherhood, and the fortitude and resilience of the women who bear those burdens (‘‘Invisible’’ 119). In the process of affirming nineteenth-century ideals concerning motherhood, the stories also foreground the tendency to overlook or take for granted the work that mothers perform: ‘‘Collectively, these writers address motherhood not as a biological and social inevitability but as a commitment requiring tough choices, a steadfast will, patience, passion, and daring’’ (Patrick 120). Motherhood is represented not as anatomical destiny, but as the ‘‘studied practice of attentive love, recognition of Otherness, and true compassion’’ (122). More darkly, Lundie asserts that supernatural tales by American women focusing on motherhood paint a picture of an unseverable mother-child bond that ‘‘exerts a stranglehold from beyond the grave’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 257). The conflation of femininity with motherhood and the cultural imperative for women to bear children are the focus of critique in Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Children,’’ first published in her collection of stories, Baym also observes that nineteenth-century authors seldom had the courage to suggest that raising children might be burdensome (6). Zephine Humphrey presents a very interesting treatment of this theme in her ‘‘The Lady of the Garden.’’ A mother following her death lovingly lingers in her garden, only to have her children, much to her distress, cut her precious flowers to place on her grave! 8

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The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon (1913).9 Told from the perspective of a retired housemaid named Sarah Umbleby, the story concerns her mistress, the suggestively named widow Mrs. Childress, and the ways in which, together, Sarah and Mrs. Childress dream into being the children Mrs. Childress (Child-less) never had. Sarah, a middle-aged married woman now with two children of her own, begins her story by recounting that with the arrival of a new housemaid to the Childress household—one indignant over the belief that she has been mislead into thinking that there were no children to attend to when in fact it appears that there are two—Sarah was forced to recapitulate the strange tale of the household. Sarah recalls that she began her story to Margaret, the new housemaid, by recollecting her own arrival at the Childerstone estate as a chambermaid five years earlier. At the time of her arrival, her mistress was a young widow in deep mourning and in failing health. In addition, an elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Shipman, was also failing rapidly and Sarah was put into the position of having to attend to her. Although Sarah did not in fact see her mistress for a full week after her initial arrival, through conversations with the dying Mrs. Shipman she was led to believe that there were two children in the household, a little boy and a younger sister, who Sarah first believed had gone to stay with relatives and then concluded had died. Because there was concern within the household that Mrs. Childress’s grief would lead to actual physical debilitation, Sarah—believing that Mrs. Childress was mourning the loss of her children as well as her husband—counseled her to pretend that the children remained with her: ‘‘You should control yourself and be cheerful and act as if they were here—as if it had pleased God to let you have them and not Himself!’’ (80). Thus began the charade in which the two women—and increasingly the rest of the household—pretended that two imaginary children, Master Robertson and Mistress Winifred, inhabited the house. Although Mrs. Childress rallied as a result of this game, members of the staff had misgivings about participating in what they perceived to be a delusion, and finally Mr. Hodges, the butler, questioned Sarah as to whether the idea of the game was hers. It was in the course of this conversation that 9 Bacon, according to Lundie in the headnote to ‘‘The Children’’ in her Restless Spirits collection, published voluminously throughout the first half of the twentieth century—her output includes thirty-six volumes of poetry and short stories. A graduate of Smith College in 1898, she was prominent in the Girl Scouts Movement. Stories of the supernatural form an important part of her oeuvre, especially in The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon and an earlier volume of short stories entitled Whom the Gods Destroyed (1902).

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Sarah was undeceived concerning the existence of the children. She recalls Hodges’s assertion, ‘‘I know as well as you do that she couldn’t lose what she never had!’’ (83), as well as his clarification that the figures in the photographs she had believed to have been Mrs. Childress’s children were really her husband as a child and his sister who had died as an infant. Despite this realization, Sarah decided to continue with the fantasy. Sarah’s story then takes an eerie turn as she recalls that odd things started to happen around the estate that seemed to suggest the actual presence of children. She remembers hearing children playing quietly behind her when her eyes were closed, observing swings in motion on windless days, and finding the table set for tea in the morning; she states, ‘‘I’ve lain in my bed, just off the two cribs, and held my breath at what I felt and heard’’ (85); and she claims that both she and her mistress heard a rocking horse in motion above their heads as they sat sewing. The evidence she observed became increasingly hard to ignore or explain away. Sarah states, ‘‘I saw with my own eyes a little crumpled bunch of daisies—all nipped off short, such as children pick, and crushed and wilted in their hot little hands,’’ placed on the grave of Mrs. Childress’s husband (87), and she recalls that a particular hat made by Mrs. Childress for Miss Winifred would often go missing from her closet. She remembers hearing sounds on the piano in the drawing room and notes that children’s books would disappear from bookshelves, only to be discovered in front of the fire (87). The strange happenings at Childerstone culminated, Sarah explains, three years after the arrival of the new housemaid, Margaret, when a family with two children moved into the neighborhood. Reciprocating a social call from Mrs. Childress, two young girls and a lady arrived at the estate in order to visit with Mrs. Childress and Miss Winifred (Master Robertson was considered too old to take an interest in these children). Sarah recalls taking the children to the garden and, aware of the difficult situation, intending to head them off before their return to quiet them. When the visiting children returned, however, they evidenced no distress and indeed reported coveting the little girl’s hat (89). The conclusion that these children actually saw Miss Winifred caused Sarah to faint and the shock of this revelation ended Mrs. Childress’s life. Following the description of this dramatic event, Sarah rapidly concludes her story by detailing Hodges’s proposal to her, the remembrance by Mrs. Childress of both of them in her will, and their two children named after the imaginary children at Childerstone. In many respects, it must be acknowledged that ‘‘The Children’’ is more about the narrator, Sarah, than about Mrs. Childress or even the ghostly

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children. It is told from her perspective and details not just her reactions to the events described, but also her participation in them. It should also be pointed out that there are questions about Sarah’s reliability. The reader learns that she is quite willing to tell a lie if it comforts a person in distress and that she disguised the fact that she herself had been previously married (although she does claim in her initial interview with Mrs. Childress to have had two children who died [80]) and went by ‘‘Miss’’ because ‘‘it’s much easier to get a place so’’ (81). Beyond this, the reader also receives little solid evidence that anyone besides Sarah ever perceives the ghostly children. Concerning the sounds of the children in their cribs, she claims of Mrs. Childress, ‘‘She knew it, too. But never heard so much as I’’ (85), and later she notes that she was always alone when she would hear the piano played. Even her account of the concluding drama in which the visiting children led her and Mrs. Childress to believe that they saw the imaginary daughter only focuses on Miss Winifred’s hat; the girls in Sarah’s summation of the event never actually admit to seeing a little girl. It therefore is conceivable that Sarah either was deluded or the perpetrator of a hoax. The ‘‘reality’’ of the children in Bacon’s story, however, ultimately matters less than the intense desire of Mrs. Childress to have them. From this perspective, what undergirds the entire story is the cultural imperative for women to have children. The true tragedy for Mrs. Childress in ‘‘The Children’’ is not the death of her husband, but the concomitant loss of the possibility for offspring. She grieves more for the children she presumably will never have than for her dead husband. That Mrs. Childress cannot feel complete as a woman in late-nineteenth-century American culture without being a mother becomes clear through Sarah’s reflections on Mrs. Childress’s interactions with the other lady who has moved into the neighborhood. Sarah reports that she never knew exactly what transpired during Mrs. Childress’s visit with this other woman, but that ‘‘she came back with a bright red circle in each cheek and her head very high, and spent all the evening in the nursery’’ (87). Presumably confronted with the stark reality of the other woman’s children, Mrs. Childress was forced to console herself with her fantasy. Beyond highlighting the conflation of femininity with maternity in nineteenth-century America, Bacon’s ‘‘The Children’’ also foregrounds the complicity of women in this essentializing of gender identity. Mrs. Childress’s interactions with other women either assist her in constructing a fantasy in which she is a mother, tacitly confirming her belief that a woman needs children to be complete, or cause her to feel inadequate and defensive

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over her lack of children. In the end, the children Mrs. Childress has dreamed into being cause her demise—the impossible realization of her most fervent desire literally breaks her heart. Sarah recalls, ‘‘Then the colour went out of her like when you blow out a candle, and she put her hand to her heart. ‘Oh, oh, what pain!’ she said very quickly’’ (89). The children Mrs. Childress never had cause her to die of a broken heart.10 The conflation of femininity with maternity is also at the heart of both Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ (1898) and Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass’’ (1911). In each of these two stories, deceased mothers return from the dead to protect their children from neglect and abuse. As in ‘‘The Children,’’ maternity in each of these stories is celebrated and motherhood is confirmed to be a woman’s highest and most natural calling. Lurking beneath the surface of each story, however, is the chilling proposition that the mother-child bond ‘‘binds on into eternity’’ (Lundie, ‘‘One Need Not’’ 260) and entails the mother’s self-sacrifice and complete subordination of personal needs.11 Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ included, along with ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ in her collection of uncanny fiction The Shape of Fear and Other Ghostly Tales (1898), is a deceptively simple tale in which an aged storyteller, Urda Bjarnason, regales her listeners with the fairy-tale–esque story of a ghostly mother who returns from the grave to protect her two children from a cruel stepmother. Through the juxtaposition of the framing narrative, in which Urda is introduced along with her thoughts about American culture, and the subsequent story that she tells of supernatural intervention, the story both confirms the centrality of maternity in the lives of women and calls attention to the ways in which the maternal role subsumes female identity. Peattie’s story is set within a late nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century American community of Icelandic immigrants in which the wisdom of elders is respected. Adopting a style 10 Bacon’s ‘‘The Children’’ is not the only ghost story that makes use of the conceit of imaginary children given life to make up for a felt deficiency. In Hildegaard Hawthorne’s ‘‘Unawares’’ (1908), an elderly couple is visited by the grandchild they never had, and in Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Cara’’ (1914), two children are joined by a ghostly playmate that may be their imaginative invention. 11 Within the body of supernatural fiction produced by American women prior to 1930, the theme of the ghostly mother who returns to protect a living child is one of the most prominent. In addition to the works to be discussed below, one could also examine Katherine Holland Brown’s ‘‘Hunger’’ (1907), Genevieve Clark’s ‘‘A Message from Beyond’’ (1898), Cornelia A. P. Comer’s ‘‘The Little Gray Ghost’’ (1912), and Ellen Glasgow’s ‘‘Whispering Leaves’’ (1923).

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clearly derived from the tradition of New England women’s regionalism and heavily suggestive of Native American folktales, Peattie begins by establishing the aged Urda’s credentials as a storyteller: ‘‘When Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to listen, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people’’ (145). Foregrounding concerns over cultural continuity in the face of rapid turn-of-the-century change and modernization, the omniscient narration continues, ‘‘[Urda] is especially prized by [the Icelandic men] here in this new country where the Icelandmen are settled—this America, so new in letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books’’ (145). Urda’s concerns, however, are somewhat different from those attributed to the men. Rather than thoughtless speech and vapid literature, what she observes disapprovingly is the changing relations of women to their families in her contemporary American culture: ‘‘[Urda] notes with suspicion the actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store, instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in the fire faster than it can be turned from the churn’’ (146). Urda is dismayed by a lack of both care and thrift on the part of the young women in relation to their families in her immigrant community. Having detailed both the esteem for Urda’s storytelling abilities within her Icelandic community and her attentiveness to changing social expectations for women, the frame narrative then establishes her abilities as seer and medium. In Urda’s presence, ‘‘Those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone’’ (148). In addition to this, Urda ‘‘tells true things’’ (148). She is able accurately to describe events that take place in distant places and can forecast the arrival of visitors in some detail. When asked by a young wife why the spirit world only becomes visible to her in Urda’s presence, Urda replies, ‘‘Having eyes ye will not see!’’ (148). This framing narrative concisely performs several functions: it establishes Urda as a figure of importance within the Icelandic community and highlights her storytelling abilities, suggesting that her stories play important roles in the perpetuation of cultural identity, as well as in the communication of knowledge—Urda, in the estimation of the Icelandic men, ‘‘has more learning than can be got even from the great schools of Reykjavik’’ (145). Beyond this, the framing narrative highlights issues of gender and

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family, as well as the characteristic imbrication of the natural and supernatural worlds within supernatural literature by American women. Urda’s concerns are with the changing roles of women in American culture, and part of the failure of the younger generation is its inability to perceive its surroundings—the spirit world. This inability to perceive ghosts and spirits seems to be directly connected by Urda to a similar inability to perceive the value of labor on behalf of one’s family; women who buy cloth instead of spinning it and purchase butter rather than churning it distance themselves not just from tradition, but from an intuitive connection with the land, their families, and the world around them, which includes the spirit world. Having established these themes, the narration then focuses on Urda’s storytelling. The story she tells in ‘‘language so simple that even great scholars could find no simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand’’ (150–51) is, it is not surprising to note, one that is concerned with women, children, thrift, weaving, and the spirit world. This emphasis on the simplicity of her language suggests something both timeless and universally applicable in the story to be told. Her story concerns two children, Jon and Loa, who lived with their father on the Island of Fire. The family, Urda explains, was happy until the mother unexpectedly passed away. This was the children’s initiation into sorrow, and their woes were only aggravated by the appearance of a wicked stepmother who gave them little to eat and forced them to work like adults. What afflicted the children most, however, was the cold they were forced to endure. The stepmother was penurious and refused to buy the children clothing despite the fact that the clothing which their mother had made for them was ‘‘so worn that the warp stood apart from the woof, and there were holes at the elbows and little warmth to be found in them anywhere’’ (153). In addition, because the children were still growing, the quilts on their beds had become too short for them ‘‘so that at night either their purple feet or their thin shoulders were uncovered, and they wept for the cold’’ (153). The children’s reproach of their stepmother that their true mother would have woven them new garments, Urda explains, was met by the woman with a disdainful laugh and the caustic response, ‘‘Your mother is where she will weave no cloth!’’ (154). Of course, the logic of this tale insists that the mother will appear to weave cloth for her children, and this is precisely what happens. Urda details that the stepmother awoke in the middle of night for reasons she could not determine and espied a woman weaving, without loom or shuttle. Urda’s narration describes this ghostly weaving as both beautiful and natural:

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‘‘Stooping and bending, rising and swaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in a midwinter sky, she wove cloth’’ (155). The pure, gossamer materials produced by this spectral weaver were marvelous to behold: ‘‘The warp was blue and mystical to see; the woof was white, and shone with its whiteness, so that of all the webs the stepmother had ever seen, she had seen none like to this’’ (155). The comparison with the northern lights here and the purity of the fabric weaved suggests that this ghostly appearance is not a violation of nature, but somehow an accentuation of it—the mother is a force of nature who weaves what may be considered the ‘‘fabric of motherhood.’’ Interestingly, the stepmother in Urda’s story is wrapped by the ghost of the dead mother in the product of her weaving, which the stepmother— who lacks maternal feelings altogether—experienced as abhorrent: ‘‘The wraith of the dead mother moved toward [the stepmother]—round and about her body was wound the shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her flesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned’’ (156). Following this faint, Urda continues, the stepmother awoke in the morning still encircled by the ‘‘hateful, beautiful web’’ that filled her with fear and loathing (156) and, seeming to comprehend what she had been enjoined to do by the dead mother, set about making the magical cloth into clothes for the children, only to observe it fade into nothingness before her eyes—lacking maternal feelings, the stepmother cannot fashion clothing from the dead mother’s magical cloth. That evening, Urda recounts, the experience of the ghostly weaver repeated itself, and when morning came, the stepmother produced money for the husband to purchase cloth from town (158). He returned with fine cloth and blankets and ‘‘after that the children slept warm and were at peace’’ (158). The stepmother, in contrast, was cowed ‘‘for she feared to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see the mother’s wraith’’ (158). The stepmother here becomes one of the mothers considered negligent by Urda in the frame narrative, who buys cloth for her family rather than weaves it. This, however, is considered by the tale as substantially better than nothing. The story told by Urda emphasizes the mother-child bond as one so strong that not even death can sever it. In contrast, the bond between the father and his children seems to be wholly nonexistent. Indeed, the father in Urda’s tale is a virtual nonentity; he plays no role in the story, except at the end when he purchases cloth and blankets—at his wife’s request and

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with money that she allots to him! The story thereby affirms cultural expectations that women are responsible for bearing and raising children and that this obligation supersedes everything else—even death. Tellingly, the only difference between the words ‘‘mother’s wraith,’’ with which the story ends, and ‘‘mother’s wrath,’’ which is what the stepmother truly fears, is the ‘‘I’’ of ‘‘wraith,’’ suggestive of the fact that the mother’s identity—her ‘‘I’’—is inherently ghostly; defined by her relation to her children, she has no self apart from them and her maternal role not only dominates her life, but governs her afterlife as well. Taken together, the frame and inset stories of Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ ostensibly celebrate the traditional role of mother. ‘‘Mother Urda,’’ as the story calls her (148), first negatively critiques what she perceives to be the shallow values of contemporary women and then tells a story in which a particularly callous and shallow woman is taught a lesson by the ghost of a woman who represents appropriate maternal values: the woman in life wove clothes for her children and in death returns to protect them. Linking the two parts of the story together is the idea that the contemporary women who ‘‘having eyes will not see’’ the spirit world may find themselves face to face with an indignant wraith from the past if they do not honor the traditions of their culture and attend to their families. (It is important that one of the things that the stepmother in Urda’s story refuses to do at the end is to interrupt the children as they tell the Icelandic sagas their mother had taught to them [158].) Lurking beneath this celebration of traditional values and conventional gender expectations, however, is also the limiting conflation of womanhood and motherhood. As Lundie observes of ghost stories featuring the uncanny return of dead mothers in general, ‘‘In the kitchen, in the bedroom, even in the grave, women cannot escape from the responsibilities of motherhood’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 260). There is no rest for the dead mother in Peattie’s tale: even in death, she must return to weave for her children. The necessity for women to look after and provide for their children even in death is also the explicit theme of Georgia Wood Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass’’ (1911). As Jessica Amanda Salmonson details in the preface to her edited collection of Georgia Wood Pangborn’s uncanny fiction, Pangborn—who Salmonson proposes may well have been the best supernaturalist of the first two decades of the twentieth century (xiv), and whom Lundie describes as among the most accomplished writers of the supernatural genre of her day (Restless 91)—centered much of her fiction on women’s concerns. Her supernatural tales are populated with ghostly children, abusive

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men, and female suicides and often focus on female insanity and the medicalization of women. One recurring theme in her uncanny fiction is that of the mother who returns from beyond the grave to protect her surviving child. In ‘‘The Rescue’’ (1912) and ‘‘The Substitute’’ (1914), as well as the story I will discuss below, ‘‘Broken Glass’’ (1911), the mother-child bond transcends death and the mother cannot rest easily until the well-being of her child is assured. While such stories, in Lundie’s estimation, fulfill ‘‘the most saccharine requirements of domestic fiction,’’ they are, she continues, ‘‘undercut by the purgatory endured by a spirit tied to that mother-child bond’’ (260). Thus, even as maternity is celebrated, the monstrous demands it makes on women are simultaneously highlighted. At the start of ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ two ‘‘New Women,’’ Mrs. Waring and another woman who remains unnamed, discuss the new opportunities available for women and the resulting class-based distinctions in women’s roles. Both women are cultured and artistically accomplished—each can read in three languages and ‘‘write magazine verse’’ (92)—and each employs lower-class help to look after her children.12 It is almost as though Mrs. Waring has been listening to Urda Bjarnason’s story in Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ when she questions her friend, ‘‘What is the matter with us women . . . that we can’t take care of our own children and run our own houses, to say nothing of spinning and weaving as our grandmothers did?’’ (91). This reference to female forebears leads Mrs. Waring to contemplate the prevalence of child mortality during the previous century and how horrified she would be to lose a child: ‘‘My grandmother was a Western pioneer and brought up six without help, and—buried three. Think of it! To lose a child. . . . How can a woman live after that?’’ (91). This train of thought prompts the two women to consider that there are now two different types of women: cultured women such as themselves who are ‘‘wrecks after spending an afternoon trying to keep a creeping baby from choking and bumbling and burning and taking cold’’ (92), and ‘‘solid and quiet and stupid’’ (92) types like Delia, the servant of Mrs. Waring’s friend, or Aileen, Mrs. Waring’s servant. The two women conclude that ‘‘Delias’’ are best when children are young and women like themselves are preferable once the children are somewhat older: ‘‘Delias are best when they’re little,’’ asserts Mrs. Waring’s friend. ‘‘We enter later on. We couldn’t nurse our babies. All that part of us was metamorphosed into brain—thanks to a mistaken education. Very well; we must nourish them with our brains’’ (93). 12

Page numbers for ‘‘Broken Glass’’ refer to Lundie’s Restless Spirits.

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Another difference that the two women claim exists between the ‘‘Delia’’ types and themselves is an awareness on the latter’s part of the value of their children. Mrs. Waring’s friend, who, it turns out, is a retired concert pianist, relates that ‘‘my babies came to me after I was thirty, and I know their value, as your Delia type or your grandmother type doesn’t for all her motherliness. When women are mothers in the early twenties they don’t know. They can’t’’ (92). With this in mind, Mrs. Waring concludes that she must let her servant, Aileen, go, primarily because of an incident in which she discovered Aileen seemingly lost in a dream while Mrs. Waring’s child, Martha, played amid the titular broken glass. With this, Mrs. Waring bids farewell to her friend and begins her solitary journey home across the moors. She does not get far, however, before she is suddenly joined in her movement by the appearance—seemingly out of nowhere—of a cloaked figure that Mrs. Waring associates with her washerwoman, Mrs. Magillicuddy. This woman begins to discuss Aileen with her, expressing herself in a lower-class Irish dialect that contrasts markedly with Mrs. Waring’s own proper English. The woman, after asserting that there are more dangerous things in the world than broken glass, describes the background of Mrs. Waring’s servant, Aileen, who was reared in a cloistered environment by nuns. Aileen’s position with Mrs. Waring, the woman reveals, is her first one and she is unused to rough treatment afforded to servants by members of the upper class. In fact, Aileen’s negligence related to Martha was related to Mrs. Waring’s chastisement of Aileen for mixing together different-sized rolled-up balls of stockings. ‘‘Can ye not guess,’’ exclaims the woman, ‘‘that the eyes of her were blind with tears for a harsh word ye had given her about mixin’ up the big baby’s stockings with the little ones?’’ She continues, ‘‘Do ye mind that each of your children has two dozen little rolled up balls of stockings to be looked after and that they are very near of a size—very near?’’ (96). Then, contrasting Mrs. Waring and her children’s life of luxury with Aileen’s poverty and ill-treatment, the woman adds, ‘‘My Aileen—she never had but two pairs at a time and she washes out the wan pair at night so she can change to the other. And do ye mind that hers are thin cotton—twelve cints the pair they are—and her feet are cold to break yer heart as she sits in the cold wind watchin’ your little girl at play, so warm in her English woolen stockings and leggins’’ (96). As in Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ lack of warmth, both figuratively and literally, is here associated with the neglect shown to a motherless child. Not only is Aileen inadequately clothed, but the woman reveals that Aileen’s room in Mrs. Waring’s house lacks heat: ‘‘Do ye know that the fine

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gilt radiator in [Aileen’s room] is never warm and that she has but one thin blanket and a comforter so ragged your dog would scorn it?’’ (96). Mrs. Waring’s lack of consideration for her servant finally is embodied in her concern that if a slight cough Aileen has should be consumption, then she should be segregated from the children. Beyond even this callous disregard for the well-being of Aileen on the part of Mrs. Waring, the woman next reveals that Aileen is in fact in even greater jeopardy because of the licentious predations of one of Mrs. Waring’s other servants. When Mrs. Waring protests that this is impossible, the woman rebukes her, asking rhetorically, ‘‘What do ye care what goes on among the help so long as your house is clean and quiet?’’ (97). Mrs. Waring is shown here to be almost willfully ignorant of what goes on among her servants. She is implicated by the woman not only in psychological and physical abuse of Aileen, but of fostering conditions in which Aileen’s chastity—and thus potentially even the limited security of her position in Mrs. Waring’s household—is in jeopardy. At this point, Mrs. Waring, disconcerted both by the woman’s direct tone and her intimate knowledge of the goings-on of her household, concludes that this is not the washerwoman, Mrs. Magillicuddy, as she had first assumed. Attempting to peer beneath the woman’s shawl, she catches a glimpse of a face she perceives to be ‘‘lined and worn, singularly noble’’ (97). ‘‘Who are you?’’ asks Mrs. Waring, who is again rebuked, ‘‘ ‘Do you ask me that?’ said the Voice. . . . ‘Do ye ask me that, mother that loves her children? What would ye do, then, if ye were dead, and your children’s tears fell upon ye in purgatory? What would ye do if the feet of yer own colleen were standing among broken glass that is broken glass indeed?’ ’’ (97). Following this, as Mrs. Waring again articulates her question concerning the woman’s identity, she finds herself alone on the moors. Arriving at her home, Mrs. Waring proceeds immediately to Aileen’s room where she discovers the girl shivering and recalls remorsefully that her daughter Martha had previously cried because Aileen’s hands were cold when she dressed her. The story ends with Mrs. Waring crying out, ‘‘Oh, you poor little thing— Come down, child, where it is warm!’’ (98). In ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ as in ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ a mother returns from the grave to rescue a child from neglect and potential danger and, in ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ the mother is explicit: she cannot rest easily while her child is abused and in danger. As in Peattie’s story, Pangborn’s also offers a commentary on the changing roles for women in American culture. The two women at the start, Mrs. Waring and her friend, despite their various

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accomplishments, still claim that maternity is their highest calling. Mrs. Waring’s friend—who references her ‘‘misguided education’’—even speaks dismissively of her own career as an accomplished pianist: her music, she claims, ‘‘served to express the despair of a barren woman—that was all’’ (92). There is a certain disingenuous quality to their discourse at the start, however, that is revealed in their disdain for the ‘‘Delia type.’’ Their languorous celebration of the fortitude of their grandmothers rings hollow as a conventional nostalgic lament for simpler times, and nowhere is their hypocrisy more evident than in the disconnection between Mrs. Waring’s high estimation of the importance of motherhood and her own neglect not only of Aileen but of her own daughter. As Mrs. Waring tramps home, she initially considers that being a mother makes one a coward, because when one has a child waiting at home, ‘‘a mother must not let the least shadow of danger come hear her’’ (94). Mrs. Waring, however, does not seem to be directly involved with child rearing—she leaves it to servants to dress and tend to her children, presumably reserving her attentions for when the children are older. The true mother in the story, the one who truly acts on the assertion that ‘‘a mother must not let the least shadow of danger come near’’ one’s child, is the dead mother—a ‘‘Delia type’’—who returns from the grave to defend her daughter and prompts Mrs. Waring to an act of tenderness. When asked who she is, the dead mother—rather than answering with a name—asserts her identity as mother and transforms into ‘‘the Voice.’’ She is ‘‘the mother of Aileen,’’ but, as ‘‘the Voice,’’ she is also the internalized expectations of American culture—Mrs. Waring’s conscience—that accuse her of neglecting her proper role as caregiver. In neglecting Aileen and not participating in the rearing of her own child, she has failed to fulfill her highest maternal function and therefore is rebuked by the indignant spirits of cultural assumptions. In the end, she redeems herself by showing the warmth and compassion expected of a woman. (It is worth noting that Mr. Waring is absent from this tale entirely.) It is important to note that despite the hunger, deprivation, and cold that, in Lundie’s estimation of tales such as these, convey an ‘‘overall impression of painfulness’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 260), neither Peattie’s nor Pangborn’s story presents an explicit critique of expectations governing motherhood in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; indeed, in both stories, the dead mother’s return is presented as the most natural thing in the world and as the mark of true virtue—Peattie’s story compares the mother’s appearance to the northern lights and Pangborn describes the mother’s face as

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‘‘noble.’’ Undergirding stories such as these that essentialize women as mothers and celebrate the maternal role as a woman’s highest natural calling are the darker implications that, as expressed in Bacon’s ‘‘The Children,’’ a woman without children isn’t really a woman, and that a woman, once a mother, must sacrifice everything—even her eternal peace—for her children. While it may be coincidence that neither ghostly mother in Peattie’s and Pangborn’s stories has a name, it clearly exemplifies the ways in which the identities of these women are reduced solely to their maternal functions—if these women ever did anything other than weave cloth for their children and protect them from harm, the reader is none the wiser. Thus, even as they celebrate maternity, such stories simultaneously foreground the entrenched cultural conventions that transform biology into necessity.13 At the end of Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass’’ the chastened Mrs. Waring finally performs her maternal function as caregiver by extending both literal and figurative warmth to the neglected servant girl, Aileen, who, at that point, figuratively becomes Mrs. Waring’s child. This expectation that women will be maternal, as well as the demands that children make on mothers, are at the center of the final story that I will address in this chapter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ (1902). Freeman’s tale is emblematic of a whole class of ghost stories by American women in which, rather than a ghostly mother returning to protect a living child, a child returns from the dead in order to find a woman to mother it. Such tales invariably foreground both the innocence of children and the ‘‘natural’’ maternal instincts of women.14 Although they clearly reinforce the association between womanhood and motherhood, perhaps even more clearly than stories about the return of ghostly mothers, however, tales featuring ghostly children illustrate the intense demands children make on mothers. Freeman’s story begins with two elderly women, Mrs. John Emerson and Mrs. Rhoda Meserve, discussing the fact that a prominent home in their 13 In both Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead’’ and Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ bad mothers are reformed into good mothers through supernatural intervention. On occasion, American female authors penned ghost stories illustrating the penance bad mothers would be forced to perform after death. Such stories include Cornelia A. P. Comer’s ‘‘The Little Gray Ghost’’ (1912), M. E. M. Davis’s ‘‘At La Glorieuse’’ (1898), and Ada Peck’s ‘‘Duncan’s Ghost Story’’ (1890). 14 Among this class of ghost story, one could also number Katherine Bates’s ‘‘Whither Thou Goest’’ (1896), Freeman’s ‘‘The Wind in the Rosebush’’ (1902), Hildegarde Hawthorne’s ‘‘Perdita’’ (1907), Pangborn’s ‘‘The Fourth Watch’’ (1905) and perhaps ‘‘Cara’’ (1914), and Peattie’s ‘‘Their Dear Little Ghost’’ (1898).

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neighborhood rumored to be haunted is to be let after a prolonged vacancy.15 The occupancy of this storied home prompts a discussion between the two women of the reality of supernatural events and leads Mrs. Meserve to reveal her own experience with a ghost many years earlier, one that she has never gotten over. Mrs. Meserve’s story takes her back to when she was a young woman, just engaged to teach school in East Wilmington. Arriving in the town, she found space to board with two widows, Mrs. Amelia Dennison and her sister, Mrs. Abby Bird. Neither woman had ever had children, although Mrs. Bird is described as especially maternal: ‘‘She was a real motherly sort of woman; she always seemed to be the happiest when she was doing something to make other folks happy and comfortable’’ (191).16 Mrs. Meserve had only been with the women for a few weeks when the apparition first made its appearance. Having left her coat in the foyer on a cold September evening against the advice of Mrs. Bird, she was interrupted from her comfortable meditation before the fire by a knock on her bedroom door, which elicited from her a vague feeling of fright. Opening the door revealed her coat in the arms of a tiny, pitiable figure. Mrs. Meserve recalls, ‘‘I saw my coat first. The thing that held it was so small that I couldn’t see much of anything else. Then I saw a little white face with eyes so scared and wishful that they seemed as if they might eat a hole in anybody’s heart’’ (192). She continues, ‘‘It was a dreadful little face, with something about it which made it different from any other face on earth, but it was so pitiful that somehow it did away a good deal with the dreadfulness. And there were two little hands spotted purpose with the cold, holding up my winter coat’’ (192). The child, Mrs. Meserve states, would only repeat, ‘‘I can’t find my mother’’ (192). As in both Peattie’s and Pangborn’s ghostly stories, the child in Freeman’s story is also associated with cold and deprivation. Upon opening her door, Mrs. Meserve first experienced a cold draught of air and a smell ‘‘like a cellar that had been shut up for years’’ (192). And she remembers, confronting the tiny figure, ‘‘All the time I could smell the cold and I saw that it was about the child; that cold was clinging to her as if she had come out of some deadly 15 It is unclear why Mrs. Emerson is identified by her husband’s first name and Mrs. Meserve is identified by her own first name. This may suggest that Mrs. Meserve has managed to preserve more of her own identity following marriage than Mrs. Emerson. The irony here is that Mrs. Meserve’s suggestive surname (Me-Serve) is appropriated from her husband. 16 Page numbers for ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ refer to Bendixen’s Haunted Women collection.

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cold place’’ (192–93). Retrieving her coat, she found it icy cold, and, scrutinizing the child more closely, she observed, ‘‘She was dressed in one little white garment made very simply. It was a nightgown, only very long, quite covering her feet, and I could see dimly through it her little thin body mottled purple with cold’’ (193). After repeatedly stating that ‘‘I can’t find my mother,’’ the child, Mrs. Meserve explains, went away, not like a child, but ‘‘like one of those little filmy white butterflies, that don’t seem like real ones they are so light, and move as if they had no weight’’ (193). Mrs. Meserve’s panic summoned Mrs. Bird and Mrs. Dennison, who detailed their own experiences with the apparition, which they had hoped wouldn’t disturb Mrs. Meserve, as well as the tragic history of the house. According to the two women, the house had previously been owned by the Bisbees, a father and mother with one daughter. Mr. Bisbees was often away and Mrs. Bisbees was a ‘‘wicked woman’’ (199) who failed to take much interest in her child and, as in Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ forced it to perform labor inappropriate for a girl of just over five years old. There were also suspicions that Mrs. Bisbees had taken up with a married man, although no one could be sure of this. Following the disappearance of this married man with a stolen sum of money, neighbors began to notice that Mrs. Bisbees and her daughter were missing as well, but they also remembered that she had mentioned the prospect of taking the child to visit family in Boston. No investigation was launched until one of the neighbors recalled hearing a child crying three nights in a row a week after Mrs. Bisbees had last been seen. Entering the house at last, neighbors discovered the daughter dead in a back bedroom on the second floor, ‘‘starved to death, and frozen, though they weren’t sure she had frozen to death, for she was in bed with clothes enough to keep her pretty warm when she was alive. But she had been there a week, and she was nothing but skin and bone’’ (201). This tragic tale culminated in the murder of the wife by the husband once he discovered what she had done. Although the little ghost was disconcerting to them all, Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Meserve recalls, was the one most often visited and most powerfully affected by the tiny apparition. Mrs. Meserve recollects Mrs. Bird saying, ‘‘ ‘It seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can’t get that awful little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed her and stop her looking for her mother,’’ and remembers that ‘‘she cried when she said it’’ (203). In retrospect, this statement becomes prophecy. One morning, Mrs. Meserve came down to breakfast to find Mrs. Bird missing—not feeling well, according to Mrs. Dennison. As the two sat down to breakfast, they noticed

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shadows flicker across the wall and, as the two women gazed out the window, they viewed Mrs. Bird walking hand in hand with the child who ‘‘nestl[ed] close to her as if she had found her own mother’’ (204). Mrs. Dennison intuited from this that her sister was dead and indeed the two women found her ‘‘dead in her bed, and smiling as if she was dreaming, and one arm and hand was stretched out as if something had hold of it; and it couldn’t be straightened even at the last’’ (204). The story concludes with Mrs. Meserve reporting that the ghostly child was never seen again after she was seen walking with Mrs. Bird. According to Alfred Bendixen, the story ‘‘focuses on the devastating result of the deprivation of maternal love’’ and offers a ‘‘powerful indictment of parents who deny emotional and psychological nourishment to their children’’ (‘‘Afterword’’ 249). One could, however, be more specific here; as in Peattie’s and Pangborn’s stories, it is the woman who is shown to be deficient as a result of her failure to be sufficiently maternal. Mr. Bisbees in ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ is depicted as a good provider, as doting on his wife and child, and as ‘‘a real nice man’’ (200). The villagers never criticize his absence from the home and his failure to participate in rearing his child. Instead, it is his wife who is held accountable for abuse of the child. According to Bendixen, however, ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ is ‘‘not an unqualified plea for mother love’’ (249). Rather, ‘‘It will be noted that the child demands a human sacrifice: a living woman must become a ghost. Thus in this tale we find strong sympathy for the deprived child combined with the suggestion that motherhood may require self-sacrifice to the point of sacrifice of self ’’ (249). This anxiety, according to Bendixen, is a recurring theme in uncanny fiction by American women: ‘‘Underlying much of the supernatural fiction written by American women is the fear that the traditional roles imposed upon women often turn them into ghost-like creatures, not fully alive, not fully human’’ (249–50). Lundie adds that ‘‘the fact that the appearance of the dead child is received not so much with terror or surprise as with a sense of the inevitable, is chilling in itself ’’ (‘‘One Need Not’’ 259). As in the stories by Bacon, Peattie, and Pangborn, Freeman’s ‘‘The Lost Ghost’’ celebrates maternity as a woman’s natural calling, even as it disturbingly underlines the sacrifices that motherhood demands. At the start of Freeman’s story, the husband and father moving into the previously haunted house jokes that he’d rather see a ghost than be a ghost. The situation is exactly the opposite for Mrs. Bird, however, a motherless woman, who laments that she would rather die than to have to witness the distress of the

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ghostly child—and die she does, happily, but also suggesting, as Bendixen notes, that ‘‘the woman who sacrifices herself to the role of mother may become a ghost’’ (Haunted Women 6). Together with ghost stories by American women that focus on marriage, ghost stories about motherhood, such as Bacon’s ‘‘The Children,’’ Peattie’s ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ and Freeman’s ‘‘The Little Lost Ghost,’’ reveal the ways in which women used conventions of the Gothic to engage with social institutions and to question entrenched cultural attitudes and expectations regarding gender roles. As Barbara Patrick notes, these ghost stories therefore are not escapes from reality, but rather investigations of the ‘‘reality beneath the surface of custom, class, and gender roles’’ (‘‘Invisible’’ vii) that celebrate the courage, compassion, and fidelity of women even as they highlight the daunting expectations placed on women and the sacrifices of self that marriage and motherhood demand. Taken together, the ghostly tales of Stockton, Dunbar, Wharton, Bacon, Peattie, Pangborn, and Freeman demonstrate how supernatural fiction became a powerful means for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women to ‘‘move into otherwise forbidden regions’’ (Bendixen, Haunted Women 2) and to address such ‘‘unladylike’’ topics as bad marriages, the cultural injunction to have children, and the demands of maternity. What these stories make clear is that the demands of marriage and motherhood had the potential to ‘‘ghost’’ women with personal desires apart from caring for spouses and children.

5.

Ghosts of Desire: Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull

As I note briefly in the last chapter, recent studies of nineteenth-century American culture have begun to call into question the accepted wisdom of ‘‘separate spheres’’ for men and women. This is not to say that cultural expectations for men and women didn’t differ, but rather that they didn’t function in some monolithic way uninflected by other factors such as race, class, geographical region, religion, and occupation. Furthermore, as Amy Kaplan has noted, the boundaries between the ‘‘spheres’’ need to be considered as permeable, ‘‘demonstrating that the private feminized space of the home both infused and bolstered the male arena of the market, and that the sentimental values attached to maternal influence were used to sanction women’s entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them’’ (581). The existence of the ghost stories included in this study in fact testifies to the permeability of the boundaries circumscribing male and female spheres of activity and influence because the women who wrote them—in large measure ‘‘literary domestics,’’ to use Mary Kelley’s phrase—operated in a sort of cultural middle-ground by writing professionally. One main reason that women began to move into publishing in the nineteenth century is because, although women were barred from many professions, conventional understandings of authorship did not prohibit a ‘‘lady’’ from writing. Sarah Robbins notes that writing for magazines and newspapers was a way that middle-class women could make money without surrendering their gentility, ‘‘since composing a ‘charming’ piece with an ‘acceptable’ topic would not violate expectations for female social action’’ (54). Coultrap-McQuin adds that the ideal of the leisured writer was compatible with social expectations for middle-class white women (13) and that it was important that writing could be done in the home, where women could still be attentive to their families and not put their ‘‘virtue’’ 136

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at risk (24).1 Thus, as Baym notes, women could publish for ‘‘power and pleasure’’ at a time when most other professional career options were unavailable to them (xi). While Kelley has argued convincingly that many female authors, particularly during the antebellum period, experienced varying degrees of cognitive dissonance over moving into the traditionally male-dominated domain of authorship, nonetheless it is clear that authorship could provide a variety of benefits for the talented female writer. In addition to calling into question the rigidity of the boundary between the spheres of male and female activity, the ghost stories addressed here also make clear the ways in which other identity categories complicate the separate spheres paradigm. The role that class plays in structuring expectations and possibilities for women is an important component of a number of the stories discussed in previous chapters, especially Hoyt’s ‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques,’’ Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ and Murfree’s ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ and geography itself becomes a sort of antagonist limiting the possibilities for the young farm wife in Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not.’’ Race enters the picture explicitly in Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost through the idea of ‘‘gypsy blood,’’ and Cary’s ‘‘Ghost Story Number III’’ connects race with religion when a black washerwoman and a bereaved white vegetable-stall saleswoman kneel together in prayer. Beyond this, race implicitly underlies all the stories addressed in this study—that the female protagonists are white is simply a given in Bacon’s ‘‘The Children,’’ Pangborn’s ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ or Wharton’s ghostly fiction in general due to their upper-class status. The point here is that the experience of a sexed being in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, as it is today, was influenced by a variety of other factors, and the literature of the time period reflects both overarching ideologies of gender that affected all women as well as the more specific experiences of individuals combining different categories of identity. One particular component of personal identity mentioned in passing by Cathy N. Davidson in her preface to the special ‘‘No More Separate Spheres!’’ edition of American Literature that nuances the separate spheres thesis is that of sexual preference. And while this may come as a surprise to 1 Kelley echoes this point and adds that not only could women write from the privacy of their homes, but they could also publish anonymously (125). Facilitating anonymous or pseudonymous publication was the demise of the patronage system in the eighteenth century (Poovey 36).

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some, there are a handful of ghost stories by American women from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that can be read as contesting the restrictions of what Adrienne Rich has called ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ and as encoding with various degrees of explicitness same-sex desire. These stories, by introducing what I will call below a ‘‘queer textual impulse,’’ arguably work a bit differently from the stories discussed so far. Up to this point, this study has mainly emphasized the ways in which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women made use of the supernatural tale as a flexible tool to express a range of anxieties related both to the domestic realm of the home, marriage, and children, and to the business world of developing American capitalism. Such stories, precisely through their expression of anxiety, posit an implicit concomitant desire for a cultural reconfiguration protecting women from violence, allowing them greater autonomy of expression and action, and recognizing and esteeming their contributions and achievements, as well as for a more just and egalitarian culture in general. In supernatural fiction encoding same-sex desire, however, rather than the reader having to extrapolate a particular wish or desire based on the negative representation of the status quo, the expression of desire itself is more direct. In ghost stories by Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull, what gets ‘‘ghosted’’—what tries to present itself but can only achieve a sort of halflife existence—is a configuration of erotic longing that transgresses cultural expectations. In these stories, the ‘‘love that dare not speak its name’’ can only be represented by being, as Terry Castle explains, ‘‘derealized.’’

Apparitional Lesbians Terry Castle begins her essay ‘‘The Apparitional Lesbian’’ (included in her volume of the same name) by asserting that when one tries to write the history of lesbianism, one confronts from the very beginning ‘‘something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or ‘whiting out’ of possibility’’ (28). Her essay goes on from there to consider what she calls the ‘‘phantasmagorical association between ghosts and lesbians’’ (60) from two perspectives: the patriarchal perspective in which lesbianism is a threat that must be ‘‘derealized’’ through a process of spectralization, and the counterhegemonic perspective in which, paradoxically, spectralization facilitates an uncanny form of re-embodiment. According to Castle, in the hands of lesbian authors, the metaphor of the ghost allows for what she terms ‘‘recognition through negation’’ (60). The ghost story becomes a privileged

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rhetorical mode for representing and even embracing that which otherwise could not be recognized or acknowledged. The first part of Castle’s essay is devoted to detailing what she hesitantly titles the ‘‘great tradition’’ of anti-lesbian writing in which women who desire women repeatedly find themselves derealized or ‘‘vaporized’’ by metaphorics of spectrality (45). According to Castle, Diderot, Gautier, James, and others have attempted to defuse the threat to patriarchal culture posed by lesbianism by associating it with the apparitional (62). Most important is ‘‘the way the apparitional figure seemed to obliterate, through a single vaporizing gesture, the disturbing carnality of lesbian love. It made such love—literally—a phantasm: an ineffable anticoupling between ‘women’ who weren’t there’’ (62–63). What Castle proposes in the second half of her essay—and which will undergird this chapter—is that this strategy of ghosting, when co-opted by lesbian writers, is turned on its head. ‘‘The very trope that evaporates,’’ writes Castle, ‘‘can also solidify’’ (47). For the lesbian writer, the spectral metaphor may function as a form of ‘‘rhapsodical embodiment’’ (46) and as a ‘‘new and passionate beckoning’’ (47). The thesis of this chapter is that it is precisely this form of ‘‘passionate beckoning’’ that is at work in the homoerotic supernatural fiction of American authors Cooke, Brown, Ward, and Hull. Each author makes use of the spectral metaphor to encode with varying degrees of explicitness same-sex desire.

Queer Textual Impulses Before attending to my selected texts, I must address two potential objections, the first sociological, the second biographical. The first objection, noted by Ralph J. Poole in his essay on spectrality in Poe, Ward, and Cooke, is that it may be anachronistic and potentially misleading to apply twenty-first-century understandings of lesbianism to nineteenth-century society and literary texts (240). Poole shares this concern with scholars who take as their starting point French philosopher Michel Foucault’s contention in his Introduction to the History of Sexuality that, in the West, homosexuality as a category of identity is a function of naming; according to this viewpoint, prior to the invention of the homosexual as a category of identity, sexual acts were considered as acts rather than expressions of a particular identity. As Martha Vicinus summarizes in Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928, scholars have disagreed about what constitutes lesbian sexuality in general, as well as its ‘‘chronology, terminology, and categories’’ (xx). The question organizing much of the debate is to what extent

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can one discuss lesbianism prior to the establishment of ‘‘the lesbian’’ as a social category of identity.2 In considering this question, however, it is important to point out that scholars do not deny that some women possessed erotic longings and carnal desires for other women prior to the start of the twentieth century, when sexologists established the lesbian as a social identity defined by a specific sexual orientation. Rather, the debate concerns the ways in which such erotic longings and sexual practices were viewed both by society in general and the actors themselves. The situation is rendered even more complex by recognition of the fact that nineteenth-century expectations governing female interactions and behavior differed from those that exist today—as Lillian Faderman remarks, ‘‘What the nineteenth century saw as normal, [the twentieth century] saw as perverse’’ (174). In important studies, both Faderman and historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have scrutinized what Faderman calls ‘‘romantic friendships’’ between women characterized by ‘‘closeness, freedom of emotional expression, and uninhibited physical contact’’ (Smith-Rosenberg 74). In nineteenth-century America, such romantic friendships were very common and often had a physical component to them that was not perceived as signaling sexual desire. Girls often slept in the same bed, kissed, and hugged each other. Faderman proposes that because of a general cultural naivete´ about even the possibility of lesbianism throughout the nineteenth century, women were allowed certain freedoms of expression and physical contact that would become increasingly restricted in the twentieth century as doctors and scientists studied, classified, named, and pathologized various forms of erotic longing and sexual behavior. Vicinus argues for a more nuanced discussion of the development of attitudes toward intimate friendships between women, noting that during the second half of the eighteenth century, intimate female friendships were divided into two types: ‘‘sensual romantic friendship’’ and ‘‘sexual Sapphism’’ (xvii). The former was characterized by an idealized, spiritualized bond between women; the latter signaled carnal intimacy and was associated with social respectability (xvii). Vicinus’s study is notable because it acknowledges many varieties of erotic love between women from the late-eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, ‘‘from the openly sexual, to the delicately sensual, to the disembodied ideal’’ (xx). She contends that even though women prior to the 2 As Vicinus and Roden separately summarize, scholars have attempted to engage with this question by changing the terms of the debate. For example, medievalist Judith M. Bennet suggests the term ‘‘lesbian-like’’ (Vicinus xxi; Roden 6); Americanist Leila Rupp prefers the phrase ‘‘same-sex sexuality’’ (Vicinus xxi).

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twentieth century did not use the word ‘‘lesbian,’’ women did experience various forms of same-sex desire and self-consciously worked to comprehend these feelings. Some women, she continues, acted on their counterhegemonic desires, while others controlled or repressed them. And, of particular importance to this chapter, which scrutinizes embedded or veiled same-sex desire in Gothic fiction by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women, Vicinus notes that because there could be dangerous consequences attendant on women admitting physical desire for other women, women frequently encoded same-sex desire, often through the use of metaphor and allusion (xix). Therefore, while I acknowledge the objection that it may be anachronistic to apply current understandings of lesbianism to pre-twentieth-century authors and literary texts, this clearly does not mean that same-sex erotic desire in fictional texts by women prior to the twentieth century does not exist or cannot be identified and scrutinized in light of attitudes toward gender and sexuality pervasive in their broader historical context. Indeed, given that pre-twentieth-century understandings of lesbianism appear to have been less rigid and defined than current conceptions, perhaps one may consider expressions of same-sex desire in Gothic fiction of the period as precisely one means utilized by women in the pre-sexologist era to attempt to negotiate, understand, and express confusing or counter-hegemonic feelings and longings. This supposition leads to the second potential objection, which is biographical in nature. Of the authors to be addressed in this chapter, only Hull identified herself as a ‘‘lesbian.’’ While it is true that Alice Brown was a New England spinster who was extremely close to her female friend Louise Guiney and with whom she, at least in Salmonson’s assessment, led a ‘‘Boston marriage’’ (headnote to Brown’s ‘‘There and Here’’ [136]); that Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward both had troubled marriages that were initiated after the age of forty-four for reasons that included financial support (Cooke) and failing health (Ward); and that all four women, to varying degrees, cast a critical eye toward the experience of women in marriage and in American culture more generally, no real ‘‘evidence’’ exists to characterize Cooke, Ward, and Brown as ‘‘lesbians.’’ In response to this second objection, however, it is not my intention here to try to establish or characterize the sexual inclinations of any of the authors under discussion—for one thing, as discussed above, it is a hazardous endeavor to attempt retroactively to apply contemporary understandings of lesbianism to pre-twentieth-century texts; for another, it is risky at best to

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attempt to psychoanalyze an author based on her fictional productions, and I certainly would not presume to generalize about an author based on an analysis of a single text. Rather, what I am interested in here is what I will refer to below as a ‘‘queer textual impulse.’’ In each story, the explicit or implicit representation of same-sex desire—what one, borrowing from Castle, may refer to as apparitional lesbianism—interrupts the apparent seamlessness of the heterosexual norm, rendering the story ‘‘queer’’ in Eve Sedgwick’s sense of revealing the ‘‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent element of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’’ (Sedgwick 9). Each story’s ‘‘passionate beckoning’’ summons the specter of alternate sexual possibilities through an anti-hegemonic gesture of refusal. And in each case same-sex desire is turned into a Gothic tale—a story of ghosted desire and of erotic longing that can only find expression through rendering it impossible by ‘‘derealizing’’ one of the participants. Taken together, these stories suggest yet another way that female authors writing in the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-centuries used the ‘‘bitextual’’ (Showalter, Literature xvi) framework of the Gothic to express counter-normative desires.

Visited by Desire: Rose Terry Cooke’s ‘‘My Visitation’’ I begin here with Rose Terry Cooke, who was one of the most popular and respected American authors of the nineteenth century. Cooke, who wrote hundreds of poems and over one hundred short stories, as well as novels, religious tracts, essays, and children’s stories, was published in the most prestigious periodicals of the second half of the nineteenth century, including the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Putnam’s Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, and Galaxy. Gail C. Keating observes that Cooke, whose first short story was published in Putnam’s in 1855 and who had gained such a substantial reputation by 1857 that she was invited to contribute the lead story for the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly, was among the first American writers to create literature out of purely local material, and today she is hailed as a pioneering New England regionalist who was especially innovative in her use of dialect (69).3 Fitz comments that, by her death in 1892, Cooke’s reputation as a writer seemed secure. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward included Cooke in her 1884 anthology, Our Famous 3

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Cooke’s writings, however, lost much of their popularity and remained largely out of print following her death in 1892 until their relatively recent rediscovery by feminist scholars.4 Judith Fetterley’s inclusion of Cooke in her 1985 reader of literature by American women, Provisions, and Elizabeth Ammons’s 1986 collection of Cooke’s short fiction, ‘‘How Celia Changed Her Mind’’ and Selected Stories, have done much to prompt reconsideration of Cooke’s work. Both Fetterley and Ammons emphasize the element of social critique in Cooke’s writing with an emphasis on Cooke’s attention to the psychological consequences of marriage for women and the ways in which patriarchal culture constrains the lives of women. According to Ammons, Cooke was a careful observer of the ways in which men abuse their wives and daughters (xxiv) and also the ways in which women participate in their own oppression (Scribbling Women xxvi).5 Cooke’s early story ‘‘My Visitation’’ was first published in Harper’s in July 1858 but, interestingly, was not reprinted by her in any of her four collections of short writings.6 Considered in light of Cooke’s general body of fiction with its emphasis on realism, the story’s use of Gothic conventions, signaled right from the start by the story’s title, seems anomalous— Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of the Times, and William Dean Howells ‘‘almost consistently praised and upheld Cooke’s writings’’ (Fitz, Introduction, paragraph 8). For additional background information on and analysis of Cooke’s writing, see Ammons’s introduction to Cooke’s collected short fiction, Downey, Fetterley’s Provisions, Kleitz, Toth, and Cheryl Walker. 4 For overviews of Cooke studies, see Fitz and Keating. 5 Both Evelyn Newlyn and Cheryl Walker also emphasize Cooke’s social consciousness and feminist tendencies. Newlyn characterizes Cooke’s realistic tales of New England life as about ‘‘women who lead miserably unhappy lives, women who are emotionally and physically crippled by husbands who are at best thoughtlessly cruel, and at worst, brutally and intentionally cruel’’ (49). Cheryl Walker asserts that ‘‘Cooke portrays New England culture as particularly devastating for women in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Women’s lives are barren, filled with endless work, and wives are subject to the whims of their husbands’’ (146). More recently, Fitz has argued that Cooke’s work has been read too selectively, with an overemphasis on Cooke’s more subversive short fiction by critics anxious to incorporate her into the tradition of protest literature by women. Fitz notes that acknowledgement of Cooke’s opposition to the women’s rights movement and to women’s suffrage problematizes any attempt to view her as unabashedly feminist; she proposes instead that Cooke must be read as characteristic of nineteenth-century women unsettled by and ambivalent toward rapidly shifting ideological views. 6 Page numbers provided for quotations from ‘‘My Visitation’’ will refer to the version of the text reprinted in Ammons.

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which perhaps explains Cooke’s dismissal of the story. Also anomalous, however, is the story’s explicit representation of same-sex desire.7 The story is the first-person account of a woman’s passionate love for another woman, her rejection by that woman, the narrator’s illness, and the haunting to which she is subject. The tale begins by immediately intertwining passion and illness in such a way that the reader is put on guard from the start and given cause to question the reliability of the narrator throughout. The narrator commences her account with the following admission: If this story is incoherent—arranged rather for the writer’s thought than for the reader’s eye—it is because the brain which dictated it reeled with the sharp assaults of memory, that living anguish that abides while earth passes away into silence; and because the hand that wrote it trembled with electric thrills from a past that can not die, forever fresh in the soul it tested and tortured—powerful after the flight of years as in its first agony, to fill the dim eye with tears, and throb the languid pulses with fresh fever and passion. (14)

The sensual, impassioned language here of throbs and electric thrills foregrounds the theme of haunting even before the introduction of the actual ghost—the narrator’s potential incoherency is the result of the overwhelming presentness of a thrilling past ‘‘that can not die.’’ Memory unsettles time as past passion is reignited. Following this admission, the narrator pleads with the reader to accept her account ‘‘as it stands’’ and not to ask ‘‘from a cry of mortal pain the liquid cadence and accurate noting of an operatic bravura’’ (14). The first two paragraphs of the story signal its emphasis on the subjective emotional life of the narrator. The narrator’s acknowledgment of her impassioned state during its composition and her caution to the reader not to look for accurate renderings of external reality do call into question her ability ‘‘objectively’’ to perceive reality; these factors, however, simultaneously establish confidence that the account will be true to her subjective experience. That she makes no claim for the objective truth value of her account can be interpreted as a cagey stratagem designed to disarm skeptical readers 7 ‘‘My Visitation’’ was included in the 1994 anthology edited by Susan Koppelman entitled Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women, in which Koppelman suggests that Cooke did not choose to reprint the story due to its representation of same-sex desire. Fitz, however, takes issue with this idea and asserts instead that her failure to reprint the story ‘‘reflects her move away from the gothic genre . . . not any controversy or concern about portraying love between women’’ (6–7n1).

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from the start. The reader is subsequently free to interpret the fantastic events that follow as either factual accountings or the product of fevered imaginings. After poetically introducing the haunting nature of memory, the narrator begins her tale proper by recalling the first time ‘‘It’’ came. It was a cold, sunny autumn day and she had been ill and ‘‘unable to rise’’ (14). To pass the time, she was deep into reading Charlotte Bronte¨’s Shirley, which ‘‘excited’’ and ‘‘affected’’ her (15). She comments that ‘‘it is always to me like a brief and voluntary brain-fever to read that book’’ (15); she then compares this experience of reading Shirley, which treats ‘‘the political turmoil caused by shifting relations between workers and owners in rural England’’ (Ammons, How Celia 261n2), to her experiences of reading Jane Eyre—‘‘insanity for a time’’ (15)—and Villette—‘‘like the scarlet fever; it possesses, it chokes, flushes, racks you; it leaves you weak and in vague pain, apprehensive of some bad result’’ (15). The narrator’s reflections on her reading experiences here are significant for two reasons: first, like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, it suggests both her impressionable nature and the ways in which her reading has fostered potentially inaccurate appraisals and expectations concerning reality. Readers familiar with the common nineteenth-century concern that consumption of imaginative literature could unsettle one’s rational faculties thus are provided with further cause to doubt the objective reality of the narrator’s account. Second, the language the narrator uses to describe her response to her reading echoes the impassioned language of the opening of the story. The brain fever that Shirley inspires resonates with the ‘‘fresh fever and passion’’ her memories stimulate. That Villette ‘‘possesses,’’ ‘‘chokes,’’ and ‘‘racks you’’ reminds one of the narrator’s previous characterization of the ‘‘sharp assaults of memory’’ that cause the brain to reel, and the ‘‘vague pain’’ that the text elicits reflects the ‘‘cry of mortal pain’’ that constitutes the narrator’s account. The ‘‘insanity for a time’’ that Jane Eyre provokes sounds remarkably similar to the narrator’s incoherency, her inability to narrate smoothly as a result of overwhelming emotion. This connection between the way in which the narrator responds to her reading and the way in which she characterizes her experience of being haunted cannot help but to suggest that the two are connected. It may be that her stimulating reading stirred her imagination to such an extent that the line between reality and fantasy blurred and that our narrator recast herself as a heroine in a Gothic novel. The narrator’s morbid turn of mind and

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the influence of her reading is readily apparent in her recollection of the cold, sunny autumn day on which her haunting began. She explains, There is something peculiar in a silent day of autumn; melancholy pierces its fine sting through the rays of sunshine; sadness cries in the cricket’s monotonous voice; separation and death symbolize in the slow leaves that quit the bough reluctantly, and lie down in the dust to be over-trodden—to rot. I can endure any silence better than this hush of decay; it fills me with preternatural horror; it is as if a tomb opened and breathed out its dank, morbid breath across the murmur of life, to paralyze and chill. (14–15)

The passage, with its overwrought despondency and emphasis on death and decay, is rife with all the hallmarks of the Gothic and foreshadows the ‘‘preternatural horror’’ the narrator is about to experience. And, sure enough, as the narrator momentarily lays aside her reading to get up and fetch her medication, she becomes aware of an invisible presence significantly on her bed. She writes, ‘‘I remembered that it had seemed to me something was on the bed when I moved . . . I looked, there was nothing there; but I was not alone in the room—there was something else I could not see. I did not hear, but I knew it’’ (15). The narrator’s response to ‘‘It’’ is terror. Following this account of the haunting’s first appearance that begins the story, the narrator shifts her focus and provides information about her own background that she feels will be necessary to understand her tale. The reader is informed that she was orphaned at age fifteen after the death of both her parents within a year of one another and she went to live in the household of an uncle by marriage named Mr. Van Alstyne. Unlike most uncles in Gothic narratives, Mr. Van Alstyne, the reader is told, was generous, kind, and gentle. Despite this comforting environment, the narrator remained melancholic—she explains that she grieved ‘‘long and deeply’’ over the death of her parents and particularly lamented the loss of her mother: ‘‘I had no mother. What that brief sentence expresses many will feel; many, more blessed, can not imagine. It is to all meaning enough to define my longing for what I had not, my solitude in all that I had, my eager effort to escape from both longing and solitude’’ (16). This then was the narrator’s mindset, one defined by loneliness and unfulfilled desire, at the moment that Eleanor Wyse, a distant relation of Mr. Van Alstyne one year younger than the narrator, joined the Van Alstyne household. The narrator’s response to Eleanor is carefully detailed by the text: she fell ‘‘passionately in love’’ with her (16). The narrator wishes the reader to understand that she quite consciously selected the term ‘‘love’’: ‘‘I

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speak advisedly in the use of that term; no other phrase expresses the blind, irrational, all-enduring devotion I gave to her; no less vivid word belongs to that madness’’ (16). The narrator describes herself as having been ‘‘captivated’’ by Eleanor’s beauty (16) and writes that she ‘‘looked up to Eleanor with respect as well as fervor’’ (17). She longed ‘‘to be clay as long as [Eleanor] was queen and deity’’ (17). Eleanor, the narrator recalls, stayed in the Van Alstyne household for three years, during which time the narrator remained blinded by her adoration. Subsequently, Eleanor removed to the home of her father who had relocated to Bangor, Maine, not too far distant from the Van Alstyne residence. When the narrator was twenty-one and Eleanor twenty, they were paid a visit by a nephew of Mr. Van Alstyne, Herman Van Alstyne, whom they had both known in his boyhood. The narrator explains that she enjoyed his company, but her affection went no further than cordial regard: ‘‘I saw him much, and liked him. Love did not look at us. I was absorbed in Eleanor; so was he’’ (18). We learn that Eleanor, however, spurned Herman’s attentions. The narrator recalls, ‘‘I think [Eleanor] respected him, but her manner was careless and cold, even neglectful. Herman perceived her repulsion’’ (18–19). After a three-month stay in the company of the narrator and Eleanor, Herman, a minister, relocated to a Western parish. The narrator’s account then skips ahead three years and she reports that she went to a seaside resort to convalesce from a progressive illness resulting from an ill-fated romantic engagement. She explains that being ‘‘a young girl, totally inexperienced, I had loved a man and been taught by himself to despise him—a tragedy both trite and sharp; one that is daily reacted, noted, and forgotten by observers, to find a cold record in marble or the catalogues of insane asylums’’ (19). In a gesture characteristic of Cooke’s more feminist short fiction, the narrator here links her own disappointment to that of women in general; her experience of coming to despise the man in her life is not presented as extraordinary or even unusual, but commonplace for women who, once married, are powerless to improve their situations— some go mad, others are driven to untimely graves. What the narrator also reveals here, however, is that the relationship was doomed from the start because her affections lay elsewhere. She writes, ‘‘I loved Eleanor too well. I had always loved her more than that man; and when the episode was over, I discovered in myself that I never could have loved any man as I did her, and I went out into the world in this conviction, finding that life had not lost all its charms—that so long as she lived for me

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I should neither die nor craze’’ (19). In this instance, it is difficult to determine if the narrator’s fiance´ was truly as horrid as she describes him to have been, or if her negative appraisal of him stemmed from the fact that he, quite simply, was not Eleanor, was not the true object of her heart’s affection. Although perhaps saved from an unhappy fate by the breaking of her engagement, the narrator’s health was undermined by the ‘‘shock and excitement of the affair,’’ and she reports that she sought refuge at a seaside resort. Despite the soothing solitude of her retreat and the general sublimity of the setting, she however could not escape ‘‘constant yearnings’’ for Eleanor and recalls that ‘‘wanting her, even this scenery lost a charm. . . . It must be a very pure love of nature that can exist alone, and without flaw, in the absence of association’’ (20). At this point in the story, Herman Van Alstyne reenters her tale. He joined her in her seaside reverie and, toward the end of a summer spent together, surprised the narrator with a marriage proposal, which she refused. The narrator explains, ‘‘I could not, in justice to him or to myself, be less than utterly candid. I told him how much I liked him; how grieved I was that I could have mistaken his feeling for me so entirely; and then I said what I then believed—that I could not marry him—for I had but the lesser part of a heart to give any man. I loved a woman too well to love or to marry’’ (22). The narrator concludes, ‘‘The one present and all-absorbing passion of my soul was Eleanor; beside her, no rival could enter. I shuddered at the possibility of loving a man so utterly, and then placing myself at his mercy for life. . . . I told him plainly that I could not love another as I did her’’ (23). Herman’s response to this was simply, ‘‘I can wait.’’ Even bearing in mind nineteenth-century understandings of same-sex desire, it is difficult not to regard these professions of love on the narrator’s part for Eleanor as lesbian-like in orientation. The narrator is explicit: she loves a woman too well to consider marrying any man. Eleanor is the ‘‘allabsorbing passion of [her] soul.’’ It is true that this expression of queer desire is pathologized—Eleanor conveniently fills the gap of the narrator’s absent mother, and, as previously noted, the narrator’s erratic emotional state and consumption of Gothic novels calls into question her ability to discriminate between ‘‘reality’’ and fantasy. The expression of queer desire here, however, is readily apparent and, significantly, is not outwardly condemned by either characters in the text or the author’s tone. Following the narrator’s dismissal of Herman and her return to Bangor, her account is interrupted by an omission to which she draws attention. She

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explains, ‘‘And here I must leave a blank. The forgiveness which stirs me to this record refuses to define for alien eyes what that trouble was. All that I can say to justify so extreme and piteous a result which followed is, that Eleanor Wyse had utterly, cruelly, and deliberately deceived me; and when it was no longer possible to do so, had been obliged by circumstances to show me what she had done’’ (23–24). Precisely what Eleanor has done goes unstated by the text. What the text intimates, however, is that the narrator’s sense of betrayal stems from Eleanor’s having become engaged. The ramifications of Eleanor’s ‘‘deception’’ for the narrator, she explains, were dramatic: ‘‘The world cracked and reeled under me; I returned from a brief stupor into one bitter, blind tempest of contempt’’ (24). Her faith in goodness and Providence was shaken. She details that ‘‘I was morally destroyed; I made a shipwreck of myself and my life; my whole soul was a salt raging wave, tideless and foaming, without rest, without intent, without faith or hope in God—for he who loses faith in man loses faith in man’s Maker—and this had Eleanor Wyse done for me’’ (24). The narrator became ill as a result: ‘‘Slow, persistent fever gnawed me; my nights were without sleep or rest; my days lagged and delirious . . . I tottered on the very tempting brink of death, without awe or regret; I made no effort to live, or any to die, except to pray that I might—the only prayer that ever crossed my seared lips’’ (25). She reports that she was sent from home again to recuperate (it is unclear if she was sent to another spa or seaside resort or if, in fact, she was sent to a sanitarium), and during this time Eleanor Wyse became Eleanor Mason and moved first to Illinois and then farther west. It was when the narrator returned to the Van Alstyne home two years after having ‘‘lost’’ Eleanor that the haunting began. Having provided this detailed background about her passionate regard for Eleanor Wyse and subsequent feeling of having been betrayed by her, the narrator then returns to her beginning point, her first experience of being haunted by the unseen but oppressive presence felt initially on her bed. Uncertain of her perceptions as a result of a long illness, the narrator escaped her terror by consuming a medication with soporific effects and falling asleep. She awoke with a continued sense of something beside her in the bed, however, and she seemed to perceive ‘‘wave after wave of cries from half-free souls; sobbing with dull pain, and moans of deprecating anguish; a cry that neither heaven nor earth answered, but which crept—a live desolation—into the ear attent, and the brain morbidly excited’’ (26). That the felt presence should here multiply into waves of cries from many ‘‘halffree souls’’ is especially provocative—it suggests that what is haunting the

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narrator is a singular representation of a more general condition. The apparition that visits her, it is suggested, is only one of many such anguished souls trapped in limbo. Following this first unearthly intrusion, each time the presence appeared, the narrator presents herself as having understood more about it and herself having become more courageous as a result. Following its first two appearances, when it next appeared beside her in bed and alerted her to its presence with a sigh, she initially regarded it as ‘‘unseen, unheard, but felt in the secretest recesses of life and consciousness; a spirit, whereat my marrow curdled, my heart was constricted’’ (27). Despite her terror, she describes that she also sensed ‘‘that something yearning, restless, pained, and sad regarded me’’ (27), and she began to pity it until ‘‘something rustled like a light touch the cover of [her] bed’’ (27) and her courage failed her. As the visitations continued, the presence became increasingly perceptible. The narrator explains, ‘‘At first I felt only a sense of alien life in a room otherwise solitary; then a breath of air, air from some other sphere than this, penetrative, dark, chilling; then a sound, not of a voice, or pulse, but of motion in some inanimate thing, the motion of contact; then came a touch, the gentlest, faintest approach of lips or fingers, I knew not which, to my brow; and last, a growing, gathering, flickering into sight’’ (27). The presence gradually took on form for the narrator, developing from an impression of ‘‘quivering air’’ into a shadow, then a mist, then an ‘‘expression’’: ‘‘Believe it who can, an expression, earnest, melancholy, beseeching; a look that pierced me, that pleaded with my soul’s depth, that entreated shelter, succor, consolation, which even in my terror I longed to give’’ (27). Intriguingly, during the period that the visitation slowly takes shape, the narrator reports that Herman Van Alstyne reentered her life and won her heart by restoring her faith in God: ‘‘[H]e taught me as a father teaches his little child a newer trust in the Father of us all. I returned to those divine consolations that he laid before me with a pierced and penitent heart’’ (28). Her body was healed by renewed faith and the knowledge of Herman’s love for her. On the day that the narrator promised to become Herman’s wife, however, she returned home from a walk with him to discover news that Eleanor had died two months before and that ‘‘her latest breath had gasped out a cry’’ for the narrator (29). The swift conclusion to the story confirms what the reader has anticipated based on the background provided by the narrator and the news of Eleanor’s death: the ‘‘It’’ appearing beside and on the narrator’s bed was the ghost of Eleanor. The narrator describes her last encounter with the spirit as

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beginning with her dreaming of Herman, of Eleanor, and, she writes, ‘‘of peace’’ (30). She awoke sensing the presence in the room and details, ‘‘A long, restful, sobbing sigh parted my lips; I perceived It was at hand; fear fled; terror died out; I turned my eyes—oh God! it was Eleanor!’’ (30). On the face of the apparition was ‘‘an expression of intense longing, of wistful prayer, of pleading that would not be denied’’ (30). The narrator extended her arms toward the apparition, which, in turn, ‘‘swayed and bent above [her]: the white lips parted’’ (30), expressing without sound the plea, ‘‘Forgive! Forgive!’’ (31). And forgiveness was granted. The narrator writes that she cried aloud, ‘‘Eleanor! Yes love, darling! yes, forever, as I hope to be forgiven!’’ (31). In response, ‘‘A gleam of rapture and rest relaxed the brow, the sad eyes; love ineffable glowed along each lineament, and transfused to splendor the frigid moulding of snow’’ (31). The narrator closed her eyes and, with a kiss on the eyes, Eleanor was gone. The story concludes with the narrator’s benediction, ‘‘I repeat that forgiveness again. So may Heaven pardon me in the hour of need; so may God look upon me with strong affection in the parting of soul and body, even as I pardon and love thee, Eleanor, with a truth and faith eternal! Thee, forever loved, but, ah! not now forever lost?’’ (31). In the introduction to her collection of Cooke’s short fiction, Elizabeth Ammons describes ‘‘My Visitation’’ as a conventional Gothic tale with a significant twist: ‘‘An avid reader of the Bronte¨s, this woman offers us a love story as Gothic as any the Bronte¨s wrote—a tale of wild, dangerous passion that defies the grave—with the difference here that that passion involved is, explicitly rather than implicitly, the love of a woman for another woman’’ (xxviii). Ammons continues, explaining, ‘‘The issue the narrator struggles with is her disinterest in, her relative lack of attraction to, heterosexuality’’ (xxviii), and adds that what the story charts is the expected movement of the nineteenth-century woman away from romantic friendships with women toward heterosexual union with a man. Ammons emphasizes the social ramifications of this object-choice trajectory: ‘‘the fact that Cooke dramatizes that journey as a horror story,’’ she writes, ‘‘a kind of living nightmare that trips the narrator into madness—reveals both how dangerous the enforced journey into heterosexuality is and, in many cases, how damaging’’ (xxviii). Ammons concludes by asserting that the story effectually undermines Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s contention that romantic friendships between women and heterosexual conjugal unions could coexist. According to Ammons, ‘‘Cooke’s heroine must renounce her feelings for Eleanor; she must come to see her beloved as a monster and her own passionate love for her

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as deranged’’ (xxix). Ultimately, ‘‘Cooke’s horror story records the psychic pain—the descent into madness—that the injunction to love men has caused many women’’ (xxix). Stephanie Fitz interprets the story as communicating a far more conservative message through its ‘‘troubling depiction of a community peopled by weak or malignant female characters and nurturing, supportive and powerful male characters’’ (chapter 1, paragraph 1). According to Fitz, Cooke repeatedly highlights Eleanor’s anti-Christian qualities, which are linked to ‘‘anti-female’’ qualities (chapter 1, paragraph 5). In turn, her ‘‘deviation from her traditional Christian role causes the heroine’s failure to ‘mature’ into heterosexual love’’ (chapter 1, paragraph 9). In contrast to the narrator’s relationships with women, which, according to Fitz, Cooke shows to be ‘‘damaging, absent or impotent,’’ her relationships with men are portrayed as ‘‘beneficial and finally redemptive’’ (chapter 1, paragraph 13). It is Herman who effects the reincorporation of the narrator back into the Christian fold: ‘‘through its depiction of the relationship between Herman and the heroine, ‘My Visitation’ lauds the goodness of traditional Christian gender relations, in which the man, in imitation of Christ, benevolently rules the woman and leads her to greater faith’’ (Fitz, chapter 1, paragraph 1). Both of these readings have their merits. It is certainly true, as Ammons asserts, that Cooke recasts the conventional Gothic into a tale of same-sex desire, and it clearly is the case that, as Fitz observes, traditional Christian gender relations are restored at the end of the tale with the narrator’s marriage to Herman and Eleanor’s exorcism. And yet both of these readings of the text fail to acknowledge the ambivalence or what I will refer to as the queer textual impulse at the heart of the story. Both Ammons and Fitz, in my opinion, are too quick to exorcise the ghost of same-sex desire—the apparitional lesbian—from Cooke’s text. Ammons’s interpretation of the story—as one in which the narrator struggles with her lack of interest in men (xxviii) and ultimately must renounce her feelings for Eleanor and come to see ‘‘her beloved as a monster and her own passionate love for her as deranged’’ (xxix)—seems belied by the fact that the narrator frankly does not appear to struggle with her sexuality and pointedly does not renounce her feelings for Eleanor—their last tender encounter ends with a kiss and the very last line of the story refers to Eleanor as ‘‘forever loved’’ (31). Nor does it seem that the narrator’s madness is related to the ‘‘injunction to love men’’ (xxix). The narrator does not report in her account any pressure exerted on her at all to shift her object choice from woman to man. She has her suitor in Herman but is forthright

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with him about her passion for Eleanor and he offers no further pressure or protestation. Rather, what disorders the narrator’s faculties is Eleanor’s failure to reciprocate her affections. In contrast to Ammons’s position, Ralph J. Poole proposes that ‘‘what is told is not the narrator’s horrific journey into heterosexuality, it is the untold story of Eleanor’s unspeakable betrayal and her unexplained death’’ (254). This is more in keeping with Fitz’s position that what Cooke highlights and condemns is Eleanor’s unfeminine and unChristian qualities (chapter 1, paragraph 5). At the end of the story, according to Fitz, the narrator has replaced her ‘‘corrupted image of love’’ with ‘‘the accepted traditional Christian image of love’’ (chapter 1, paragraph 16). And, beyond this, Eleanor herself is reincorporated (although in decorporealized form) back into the Christian community: While the embodied Eleanor is defiant, proud, and never submissive, the ghostly Eleanor is ultimately humble. She haunts the heroine to beg for forgiveness and craves the heroine’s love. Eleanor, in death, embodies the qualities of the proper woman envisioned by traditional Christianity and sentimental domesticity. Thus, Cooke imagines the reconciliation of the once dominant Eleanor and the submissive heroine that will allow true love between the women. However, for this reconciliation to occur, Eleanor must be stripped of her body and then finally die. Thus, the proper order for Christian society is reached. (Fitz: chapter 1, paragraph 23)

The difficulty with this reading is that it succinctly shuts down the queer possibilities that the entire story has opened up. Fitz never stops to consider precisely for what Eleanor is asking forgiveness. If we assume that Eleanor’s ‘‘betrayal’’ was in loving someone else, then her contrition is for not recognizing, valuing, and perhaps even reciprocating the narrator’s affection. In death, the story suggests, Eleanor discovers that the narrator loved her more truly than anyone else. And in her response to the narrator’s extended arms, her ‘‘beckoning,’’ the kiss with which Eleanor leaves the narrator perhaps can be read as that kiss long deferred, the kiss that cannot be realized or represented between the two living women. The text therefore presents the possibility that it is only in death that Eleanor can free herself from what Ammons refers to as the injunction to love men and acknowledge her reciprocal passion for the narrator. In keeping with Castle’s assertions about ‘‘apparitional lesbianism,’’ one way to read ‘‘My Visitation’’ is that reciprocal same-sex desire can only be represented by ‘‘derealizing’’ it through the decorporealizing of one of the participants. Along these lines, Poole notes the

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indeterminacy of the story’s last line, ‘‘Thee, forever loved, but, ah! not now forever lost?’’ (31). According to Poole, this could reflect the hope that Eleanor’s soul is released from its liminal ghostly state, in which case ‘‘the salvation of Eleanor’s soul would not mean a parting forever and could instead provide the possibility for their reunification after death’’ (253). It could also, according to Poole, ‘‘represent an appeal for Eleanor’s continued presence. . . . The restoration of love between the two women may transcend the gap between life and death’’ (253). This is of course speculation based on the ambiguous conclusion to the story. Whether one reads the conclusion as conservatively reifying the status quo concerning gender relations or leaving open a space for alternative configurations of romantic desire, however, the queer textual impulse of the story is undeniable. Through the narrator’s explicit passion for Eleanor Wyse, the possibility for an alternative same-sex romantic union is introduced, only to be conjured away through Eleanor’s rejection of the narrator and subsequent death. But, in keeping with Castle, one can argue for a sort of recognition through negation here—that precisely through the staging of the ‘‘impossibility’’ of the realization of lesbian desire, the queer textual impulse emerges to unsettle fixed parameters of gender expectations.

Spiritual Marriage: Alice Brown’s ‘‘There and Here’’ What I am calling a queer textual impulse is also at the heart of Alice Brown’s short ghost story ‘‘There and Here.’’ Brown, like the other women authors discussed in this chapter, was a popular and well-regarded author during her lifetime who has fallen into obscurity. She published more than twenty novels, ten volumes of short stories, a volume of travel sketches, three biographical studies, and a number of plays, including one entitled Children of Earth that won a $10,000 prize in 1915 for best new American play. Like Alice Cary, Brown primarily considered herself a poet. In Toth’s estimation, however, it is her short fiction that constitutes her best work, and her New England tales were greatly esteemed at the turn into the twentieth century.8 Brown published, like Cooke, in the most notable literary 8 In her doctoral dissertation on Cooke, Freeman, and Brown, Toth includes the following quotation from a 1910 review of Brown’s collection of tales, Country Neighbors, published in the North American Review: ‘‘We have had three great New England storytellers. Mary Wilkins Freeman has untutored genius, but never acquired craftsmanship; Sarah Orne Jewett had exquisite craftsmanship and lacked the force of genius; Alice Brown has genius and the craftsman’s skill combined’’ (248). Despite the fact that other

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journals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, including the Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Ladies Home Journal, and Lippincott’s. It is also worth noting, given the emphasis within the story I am about to address by Brown on intimate female friendship and the overall focus of this chapter on representations of same-sex desire, that Brown never married and had an extremely close relationship with the poet and author Louise Imogen Guiney, whose biography she wrote and with whom she traveled to England. Although neither the two doctoral dissertations (Toth and Langill) nor the single published critical appraisal of her work and life (Dorothea Walker) addresses the nature of this relationship (indeed, all three carefully skirt the subject), Salmonson, in the headnote to the story in her What Did Miss Darrington See? volume of feminist supernatural fiction, comments that what we today would recognize as lesbian relationships were known during Brown’s life as ‘‘Boston marriages’’ and were not uncommon, that ‘‘There and Here’’ is ‘‘an accurate reflection of Brown’s own heart,’’ and that ‘‘neither she nor Lou Guiney ever married’’ (136). Salmonson’s implications are clear although she leaves it to the reader to put the pieces together. First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in November 1897 and then subsequently included in Brown’s collection of stories High Noon, ‘‘There and Here’’ concerns the relationship of two women, Ruth Hollis and Rosamond Ware, who have been separated for a period of eight years.9 Rosamond, following the deaths of her father, mother, and two brothers in the space of a week, had gone to Italy to be with an older brother and had found it impossible to return to the scene of her grief, the family home in Devonport, New Hampshire. The story opens with an immediate characterization of Ruth’s affection for Rosamond; the third-person omniscient narrator reports, ‘‘Perhaps Ruth Hollis was no more conscious at one time than another of her loneliness and heart-hunger for Rosamond Ware, the friend of her childhood, and her entire life’’ (136). We quickly learn that Ruth is thirty-one and unmarried, and she has spent her entire life in the town of Devonport. She experiences Rosamond’s absence as an omnipresent pain that has ‘‘grown into that emptiness of loss which attends a broken kinship’’ (136). Although Ruth experiences Rosamond’s absence as a sort critics during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth agreed with this estimation of Brown’s skill, critical attention to her work after 1930 is extraordinarily scanty. Beyond Toth’s dissertation, see Langill and Dorothea Walker. 9 Page references for ‘‘There and Here’’ will refer to the reprinting in Salmonson.

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of persistent dull ache, what daily calls to mind and reinforces Rosamond’s non-presence is the empty Ware home, standing as the family had left it, but preyed on by mice, moths, mildew, and the inexorable march of time. Ruth, the reader is told, repeatedly has written to Rosamond, begging her to have the home aired and cleaned, not just for the sake of thrift, ‘‘but because the place was dear to both of them. . . . It was her home too, according to spiritual tenure, and she had a right to speak’’ (136–37). Rosamond’s response, however, has always been, ‘‘Not yet!’’ (137). Following this introduction, the tale proper begins. Ruth’s family, with whom Ruth lives, has all gone to visit with an uncle twenty miles distant for a day or two to celebrate the return of a long-absent son. Ruth, however, for reasons unclear even to herself, had been disinclined to go and instead promised to spend the night and the next day with an aunt living a mile outside of Devonport. Ruth is in the process of closing up the family home for the evening in preparation for visiting with Aunt Barnard when she discerns against the darkening sky a woman quickly approaching her home. She is surprised and overjoyed to discover that it is Rosamond, whom she calls Rose. Ruth wishes to light a lamp better to see Rose in the deepening gloom, but Rose denies this request. ‘‘No, Grandmother Wolf, not to-night,’’ she says. ‘‘You’re going over to the house with me’’ (138), and Rosamond exhorts Ruth to accompany her to her home. Ruth is resistant because she anticipates the distress the dilapidated state of the cold house and the tragic memories associated with it will cause Rosamond and herself, but Rosamond is insistent and the two set off across the snow. As they make their way toward the Ware home, Rosamond’s otherworldliness begins to become apparent to the reader, although not to Ruth. Rose is exuberant and dashes over the crust of the snow without breaking through it while Ruth plods along. Ruth remarks that Rose has ‘‘got a radiance’’ about her and seems to shine (138). At one point, Ruth refers to Rose as a ‘‘fay’’ (138) and inquires if she really is her old friend, to which Rosamond responds, ‘‘Your Rose to keep’’ (138). When Ruth remarks that she is a Rose that seems not to wither, Rose laughs with a ‘‘thrilling undercurrent more significant than mirth’’ (138) and suggests instead that she has been ‘‘transplanted’’ (138). Rose dashes back and forth into the woods, returning to report on scenes of the pair’s childhood adventures. When she claims that the hepaticas are ready to sprout, Ruth protests, ‘‘That’s according to the light of the spirit. Even you can’t see under the snow, Sharp Eyes!’’ (139).

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From the moment that Rosamond refers to Ruth as ‘‘Grandmother Wolf ’’ and the two set off across the snow, it becomes clear that the story has shifted into the fantastic realm of fairy tale. Ruth’s reference to Rosamond as a ‘‘fay,’’ as a fairy or supernatural creature, is truer than she realizes. That Rosamond has a radiance about her, that she can walk across the crust of the snow without breaking through it, and that her vision penetrates the mantle of snow to descry the beauty of a world about to awaken beneath all signal to the reader that indeed she has been ‘‘transplanted,’’ as she puts it, from the material world to the spiritual world. The dream-like nature of Ruth’s experience is only accentuated by the experience of the Ware home. Although the key to the home is kept with another family, Rose is able to gain entrance without difficulty, a feat that prompts Ruth to refer to her friend as a witch (139). Ruth tries to prevent her friend from entering first, explaining to her, ‘‘I can’t bear to have you feel how cold it is, with no one to welcome you’’ (139). The house, however, is not, as expected, cold, dark, and musty. Rather, it is light, clean, and fragrant: ‘‘An airy intangibility of warmth and fragrance poured out upon them like a river delayed and eager. The odors were familiar—a mystic alembic made of the breath of flowers, but so fused that you could never say which was heliotrope and which the spice of pinks. They made up a sweetness bewildering the scene’’ (139–40). Overwhelmed by this sensual bath of stimuli, Ruth cries out to Rose, ‘‘Enchantress! Merlin and Ariel in one!’’ (140). Rosamond leads Ruth into the room, a ‘‘spirit of delicate witchery playing on her face’’ as Ruth is filled with ‘‘rapturous recognition’’ (140). The home has been restored exactly to its previous condition, the past resurrected before her eyes. As the two sit by the fire, Ruth begins to voice a thought only to have it completed by Rosamond. ‘‘Do you remember—’’ begins Ruth (140). And Rosamond immediately chimes in with, ‘‘Yes; that was the last time we were here together. I was telling you, over and over again, that the lonesome house would kill me. I behaved like a child—an ignorant, untrained child’’ (140). Ruth protests this assessment of Rose’s behavior, but Rose remains steadfast in her opinion and explains that she has since grown: ‘‘ ‘I had to grow,’ said Rosamond whimsically. ‘Part of it at a jump!’ ’’ (140). This leads Rose to reflect that she had neglected to inform Ruth about one important matter: her will. Rose explains that two months previous she had prepared her will and named Ruth executor. Her house, she adds significantly, is to be converted into a ‘‘home for tired women . . . for middleaged, tired women: their very own, so that they can come here from the cities and rest’’ (140). Ruth becomes alarmed by this morbid turn of the

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conversation and expresses her anxiety about the subject of Rose’s death. ‘‘I’m not going to die,’’ responds Rose. ‘‘I am safe, contented, happy’’ (141). What follows this topic of conversation is Rose’s unexpected confession that she had been briefly married while living in Italy. This stuns Ruth into silence and the account that Rose supplies of the union is incomplete and confusing. She explains, ‘‘Three years ago I met some one in Italy. He died, and so if I—In any case, I should never have married’’ (141). This initial characterization of the marriage might lead the reader to believe the marriage was unhappy. Rose continues, however, ‘‘You will be glad to know how perfect it was. We understood each other from the first. Whatever it may mean to say, ‘I am yours—you are mine,’ was true for us. It was when that feeling came that I began to understand life a little better. It was my alphabet. I never spoke about it to you because he died so soon after we found each other. And I didn’t take it well. Then, too, I was a child’’ (141). Here, as previously, Rose relates her sense of herself as childish to her grief and despair over the death of a loved one. What she seems to indicate, however, is that the perfect union of her marriage—her sense of shared sympathy and belongingness—helped her to realize the beauty of the world. And this realization leads into Rose’s bedtime story to Ruth. Ruth is reluctant to spend the night in the Ware home both because she anticipates mildewed beds and she retains a certain measure of anxiety related to the two young women staying alone in the house, but Rosamond leads her upstairs and Ruth finds courage in being with Rosamond. They enter the bedroom and, much to Ruth’s surprise, the room is clean, a fire is blazing, and the beds are prepared. The narrative poignantly comments, ‘‘Ruth was never so happy, so well content, she remembered afterwards, as when, with an absorbing delight in physical well-being, and a charming sense of the new and absolutely desirable, she made ready for bed’’ (142). Ruth gets into bed and Rose seats herself in a chair by her bedside, takes Ruth’s hand in her own, and tells her a story—a fairy tale about a child unhappy with being ‘‘Here’’ because he always wants to go ‘‘There.’’ One day, ‘‘a Strong One’’ gathers him up and takes him There, ‘‘a place you couldn’t imagine if I should describe it to you. The best I can do is to say it was all flowers, and living odors, and pine trees, and clear sunlight, and sweet winds’’ (143). The child is made happy by There, but the ‘‘Strong One’’ explains, ‘‘It is always so. They are all happy at once, and they might have been before, if they had had eyes to see that Here is There and There is Here’’ (143). Rosamond stops the story here because Ruth is falling asleep

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and the last thing Ruth remembers is Rosamond bending over her to kiss her on the eyelids but then checking herself (143). The story progresses quickly after this point. Prior to dawn Rose awakens Ruth from the midst of a dream in which ‘‘the one thing . . . that explains everything’’ was about to be revealed; she is rushed out of the house and back to her own. As Ruth enters her home, the door behind her closes, and when she opens it, Rose is gone. Ruth, assuming that Rose is playing a game and anticipating her imminent return, enters her home suffused with a sense of well-being and ‘‘spiritual warmth’’ (145) and falls asleep. She is awoken by the unexpected return of her mother with the news that the reader has likely expected—that Rosamond died the day before. Confused by this report, Ruth revisits with her mother the scene of the previous night’s rendezvous with Rose and finds the house cold, deserted, and thickly covered in dust. Despite all expectations, however, the uninhabited home smells fragrant. Mrs. Hollis observes that ‘‘the house isn’t in the least musty. It’s as sweet as a garden. Sweeter!’’ (147). It is this realization that confirms for Ruth the truth of her experience. The story concludes, ‘‘The odors of the night were all about her, and as she stood there accepting them, great peace and the sense of security fell upon her like a mantle. She began to smile. ‘And they might all be happy,’ she said to herself, ‘if they could only remember that There is just the same as Here!’ ’’ (147). This story has an embedded moral, one clearly signaled by its title. What is detailed by Rose to Ruth is Rose’s growing realization that the world is a marvelous place and that death is not a cessation of consciousness, not something to be feared, but an expansion of perception that ravishes and fills one with wonder. Rose learned her first lesson, about the beauty of the world, from her brief shared union with her husband. She remained ignorant, however, of the true nature of death—in her assessment, she remained childlike—until she grew ‘‘in a jump’’ by being ‘‘transplanted,’’ that is, by dying herself. Rose returns to Ruth to pass along information about her will, but, more important, to share with her what she has learned about death and life, There and Here, and she teaches Rose through a structural repetition of her own brief Italian marriage. As Rose leads Ruth back to their home together, Ruth’s home ‘‘according to spiritual tenure,’’ Rose attempts to make visible for Ruth the marvels of the world: ‘‘See the little twigs pricking through the crust! Hear the tips of the pine trees talking! Oh, what a world! what a world!’’ (138). Rose leads Ruth into a home filled with flowers, warmth,

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and fragrance, and, just as Rose and her husband understood each other from the first, Rose completes Ruth’s thoughts and remarks that her grievous preoccupation with death was misguided. As Salmonson observes, the two even share a bedroom scene, ‘‘albeit a very wholesome if symbolically weighty one’’ (136). And, of course, in the same way that Rose’s marriage to her husband was brief and terminated by the death of her beloved, Ruth discovers the next day that Rose has died as well. Beyond establishing the reciprocal spiritual bond of ‘‘I am yours—you are mine’’ that facilitates recognition of the wonders of the world, Rose tries to teach Ruth the one lesson that escaped the latter during her lifetime: that death is neither something to be feared nor something necessarily to be desired. While death is presented as a wondrous ‘‘transplantation’’ to a realm of ‘‘all flowers, and living odors, and pine trees, and clear sunlight, and sweet winds’’—in short, heaven—once one ceases to fear death and recognizes that these marvels surround one every day, one can make her heaven on earth, if one but has eyes to see that ‘‘Here is There and There is Here.’’ ‘‘There and Here,’’ on a certain level, has much in common with Cooke’s ‘‘My Visitation.’’ In both cases, a passionate bond is formed between two women (although in ‘‘My Visitation,’’ this attachment is onesided until the end); in both cases, the women are separated first by distance and the marriage of one of them, then by death; and, in both cases, the dead woman returns to the living one to acknowledge a spiritual bond and to bring peace to the living. Beyond these shared features, however, what unites the two stories is the gesture of the kiss between the living and the dead, the kiss that, as Castle asserts, cannot be shared between the two living women—that cannot be socially sanctioned or recognized. In ‘‘My Visitation,’’ Eleanor greets the narrator’s willingness to forgive her betrayal with a kiss on the eyes that seals them ‘‘with sacred and unearthly repose’’ (31). Similarly, just as Ruth is nodding off in ‘‘There and Here,’’ she recalls Rose leaning in to kiss her on her eyelids but checking herself. The gesture of the kiss on the eyes, one may suggest, in each case seems connected to a recognition of intimacy—the opening of one’s eyes to love that has always stood before them. In ‘‘My Visitation,’’ it seems to be Eleanor who finally sees the true depth of the narrator’s passion and who asks for forgiveness for betraying this love. In ‘‘There and Here,’’ Rose leans in to kiss Ruth, to open her eyes so to speak, only to stop herself, suggesting that Rose cannot or will not open Rose’s eyes to what she must discover on her own. The extent to which we are entitled to read ‘‘There and Here’’ as reflective of either Alice Brown’s physical or psychological reality is uncertain.

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The sense of passionate longing that suffuses the story, however, becomes most interesting in light of this checked kiss between Rosamond and Ruth and Ruth’s subsequent dream. Ruth is awoken in the midst of a dream in which she is about to learn ‘‘the one thing, you know, that explains everything’’ (143). Near tears, Ruth remarks to Rose, ‘‘I almost had the words, but they won’t stay’’ (144). What Ruth almost has the words for, what she comes tantalizingly close to grasping is, of course, the truth of her situation—that Rose is dead (what perhaps she might have realized explicitly had the kiss on the eyelids been completed). And, beyond this, what is denied to her is precisely the knowledge that is forbidden to the living—what Rose refers to as ‘‘a place you couldn’t imagine if I should describe it to you’’—a real understanding of the nature of death (143). What Ruth also comes tantalizingly close to realizing, however, but which is forbidden to her, is the one thing that ‘‘explains everything,’’ the truth of her desire, what the story tells us in the very first line she is barely conscious of—her ‘‘heart-hunger’’ for Rose. The story strategically interrupts this realization—at the moment that all is about to be revealed, she is awoken from her dream, rushed from the house, and abandoned by Rose. ‘‘There and Here’’ is in fact uncannily similar to Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706), the story that Castle reads as paradigmatic of ‘‘apparitional lesbianism.’’ In Defoe’s story, as glossed by Castle, two estranged female friends, Mrs. Veal and Mrs. Bargrave, reunite unexpectedly and almost kiss. Subsequently, it is revealed that Mrs. Veal had died the day before their reunion. According to Castle, this is an ‘‘archetypally lesbian story’’ because of the kiss that can’t happen because of the apparitional nature of one of the participants. ‘‘Passion is excited, only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized’’ (34); the threat of lesbianism to patriarchal culture is thereby ‘‘derealized’’ by rendering it spectral (62). In ‘‘There and Here,’’ as in ‘‘My Visitation,’’ we can posit a sort of ‘‘recognition through negation’’ (Castle 63) in which, at the same time that Brown sublimates same-sex desire into a sort of spiritual revelation about the nature of the world and of death, she ‘‘conjures’’ from the ‘‘ghostly metaphor’’ a sort of ‘‘multifarious imagery of erotic possibility’’ (Castle 52). Rose gives herself to Ruth, ‘‘your Rose to keep’’ (138), and the sensual imagery of the story—the flowers and warmth, fragrance and comfort of Rose’s house culminating in the bedroom—suggests anti-heteronormative erotic possibilities that the resolution of the story ultimately attempts to conjure away but cannot fully exorcise. Ultimately, both stories are governed by what I am calling here a queer textual impulse, an affective or erotic

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longing that interrupts the apparent seamlessness of heterosexual assumptions. In ‘‘My Visitation,’’ the representation of same-sex desire is explicit and, as I have suggested above, does not seem fully exorcised or contained at the end of the story. Similarly, at the heart of ‘‘There and Here’’ lies a passionate bond and spiritual marriage between two women that transcends death.

If It Were Permitted: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’s ‘‘Since I Died’’ The ‘‘impossibility’’ of representing the lesbian relationship between two living women is also at the heart of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’s 1873 short story ‘‘Since I Died.’’10 Ward is another immensely popular nineteenth-century American author who dropped off the literary map in the twentieth century and has recently received renewed attention as a result of the feminist effort to recover neglected female authors. The author of fiftyseven volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays, Ward was one of the most prolific authors of the nineteenth century, published in the most prestigious literary journals of the postbellum period, and was positively regarded by prominent literary figures including Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Whittier, who favorably compared her collection of short fiction, Sealed Orders, to Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (Kessler 124).11 During her lifetime, Ward was most renowned for her 1868 publication, The Gates Ajar, and its two sequels, Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887), which give detailed representations of heaven communicated by the recently deceased. Ward’s story ‘‘Since I Died’’ presents the ‘‘other side’’ (in several senses) to Cooke’s ‘‘My Visitation’’ and Brown’s ‘‘There and Here.’’ Rather than expressing the longing and desire of the living for the dead, it instead expresses the desire of a dead woman for a living woman. The story is one of passionate beckoning and impotent longing. It begins with the narrator observing the stillness of her beloved, followed by a remarkable series of incomplete conditional phrases that communicate the narrator’s keen scrutiny and intimate knowledge of her beloved, as well as the intense desire of the narrator for the beloved to realize her presence: 10 ‘‘Since I Died’’ was first published in Scribner’s Monthly in February 1873. Page references will refer to its reprinting in Salmonson. 11 Born Mary Gray Phelps, Ward changed her name to her mother’s name some time after her mother’s death. Because her mother was an author as well, this has elicited some confusion among critics. For more information on Ward, refer to CoultrapMcQuin, Elbert, Kelley, and Kessler.

Ghosts of Desire 163 If the shadow of an eyelash stirred upon your cheek; if that gray line about your mouth should snap its tension at this quivering end; if the pallor of your profile warmed a little; if that tiny muscle on your forehead, just at the left eyebrow’s curve, should start and twitch; if you would but grow a trifle restless, sitting there beneath my steady gaze; if you moved a finger of your folded hands; if you should turn and look behind your chair, or lift your face, half lingering and half longing, half loving and half loth, to ponder on the annoyed and thwarted cry which the wind is making, where I stand between it and yourself, against the half-closed window. (230)12

In a gesture reminiscent of that of the narrator in Cooke’s ‘‘My Visitation,’’ the narrator holds out her open arms to the object of her appraisal in what Castle might describe as a gesture of passionate beckoning, and her consideration of possibilities becomes even more sensual: ‘‘If I dared step near, or nearer; if it were permitted that I should cross the current of your living breath; if it were willed that I should feel the leap of human blood within your veins; if I should touch your hands, your check, your lips; if I dropped an arm as lightly as a snowflake round your shoulder—’’ (231). Her hopes are dashed, however, by ‘‘the fear which no heart has fathomed, the fate which no fancy has raced, the riddle which no soul has read,’’ which intervene between her beloved’s ‘‘substance’’ and the narrator’s ‘‘soul’’ (231), and she drops her arms, impotent to attract her lover’s attention and to realize the desired embrace. The narrator is now overcome with emotion; she is filled with longing and frustrated by her inability to make her lover aware of her presence and to convey her intense desire. ‘‘Will she listen?’’ wonders the narrator, ‘‘Will she bend her head? Will her lips part in recognition?’’ (231). Suggesting Brown’s description of Rose’s brief relationship with her husband in ‘‘There and Here,’’ the narrator continues her speculation by wondering, ‘‘Is there an alphabet between us? Or have the winds of night a vocabulary to lift before her holden eyes?’’ (231). Following this poignant scene of frustrated desire, the narrator reflects on her history together with the object of her affection, and of the sequence of events leading up to her own physical dissolution. It seems that the narrator suffered from a terminal disease. She and her beloved sat many times together, holding hands, and talking, through tears, of death (231). The beloved expressed her belief that after death, the narrator’s spirit would depart, 12

Page references for ‘‘Since I Died’’ will refer to the version reprinted in Salmonson.

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which the narrator denied (213). Death, explains the narrator, came not with pain, but with a glorious ravishing of her senses and ecstatic expansion of consciousness: The Gates of Space were lifted up before me; the ever-lasting doors of Matter swung for me upon their rusty hinges, and the King of Glories entered in and out. All the kingdoms of the earth, and the power of them, beckoned to me, across the mist my failing senses made,—ruins and roses, and the brows of Jura and the singing of the Rhine; a shaft of red light on the Sphinx’s smile, and caravans in sandstorms, and an icy wind at sea, and gold adream in mines that no man knew, and mothers sitting at their doors in valleys singing babes to sleep, and women in dank cellars selling souls for bread, and the whir of wheels in giant factories, and a single prayer somewhere in a den of death,—I could not find it, though I searched,—and the smoke of battle, and broken music, and a sense of lilies alone beside a stream at the rising of the sun—and, at last, your face, dear, all alone. (233)

And it is precisely this face of her beloved that captures and captivates the narrator, preventing her from cutting free of mortal bonds. The narrator explains, ‘‘One thing only hung between me and immensity. It was your single, awful, haggard face. I looked into your eyes. Stronger than death, they held and claimed my soul. I feebly raised my hand to find your own. More cruel than the grave, your wild grasp chained me’’ (233). Now, having died, the narrator claims that she has attached herself to the earthly realm to make good on a promise to enlighten the beloved as to death. She exclaims, ‘‘I told you I would come. Did ever promise fail I spoke to you? ‘Come and show me Death,’ you said. I have come to show you Death’’ (232). And, as in Brown’s ‘‘There and Here,’’ death is not something complicated or fearful: ‘‘Now, in truth, it seems a simple matter for me to tell you how it has been with me since your lips last touched me, and your arms held me to the vanishing air. . . . I could show you the fairest sight and sweetest that ever blessed your eyes’’ (232). But the narrator cannot penetrate the barrier that separates her from her beloved, she cannot communicate with her or make her aware of her presence, she cannot speak what the living may not hear. She becomes restless and runs from the room. As she passes through the world without being a part of it, remarking the details of rain and wind and cold without being affected by them, the narrator arrives at a ‘‘solitary place’’ where she reflects without violent emotion on her beloved and ‘‘life and death, and love and agony’’ (234–35). She

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realizes the fact of her death and its agonizing implications for her relationship with her living beloved: Am I blotted from your desolate fixed eyes? Lips that my mortal lips have pressed, can you not quiver when I cry? Soul that my eternal soul has loved, can you stand enveloped in my presence, and not spring like a fountain to me? Would you not know how it has been with me since your perishable eyes beheld my perished face? What my eyes have seen or my ears have heard, or my heart conceived without you? If I have missed or mourned for you? If I have watched or longed for you? Marked your solitary days and sleepless nights, and tearless eyes, and monotonous slow echo of my unanswered name? Would you not know? (235)

What raises in the narrator a ‘‘matchless, solitary fear’’ (235) is the possibility of her beloved’s ignorance of the narrator’s continued presence, for them to be parted while still together. In the face of such an unbearable tragedy, the narrator allows herself to begin to slip away from the mortal realm: ‘‘I am called, and I slip from her. I am beckoned, and I lose her’’ (235). Before the narrator removes entirely to another realm, however, she imparts one last bit of wisdom. The tale concludes, ‘‘Time to tell her one guarded thing! Time to whisper a treasured word! A moment to tell her that Death is dumb, for Life is deaf! A moment to tell her—’’ (235). The ostensible moral of ‘‘Since I Died’’ with which the story ends is that death is only fearful and mysterious because the living refuse to see, hear, and acknowledge what is right before their eyes. (The Dickinson-esque dash at the end of the story almost seems to perform this point, suggesting that there is more that the narrator could tell but that the living reader refuses to appreciate.) This moral seems to echo the conviction expressed in Brown’s ‘‘There and Here’’ that life is marvelous and that we could make our heaven on earth if only we would stop fearing death and start living life fully. Beyond this general moral, however, the story also seems to foreground another form of willful ignorance on the part of the living: that of alternative configurations of erotic longing. Beneath the purpose of making good on a promise to explain death pulses an unapologetic expression of same-sex desire, an explicit queer textual impulse that juxtaposes same-sex desire and death and highlights both as subjects the general public refuses to acknowledge, understand, or appreciate. More clearly perhaps than in either Cooke or Brown, the lesbian relationship in ‘‘Since I Died’’—what Salmonson describes as clearly a ‘‘successful Boston Marriage’’—is ghosted. It can only be

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represented precisely through a process of ‘‘derealization’’ in which one of the partners is disembodied and, therefore, actual physical connection is rendered impossible. ‘‘Since I Died’’ is without a doubt a story of ‘‘passionate beckoning’’ between two women that recognizes through negation alternative sexual configurations that reject what Adrienne Rich famously has referred to as ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality.’’

Fear and Desire: Helen Hull’s ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ The last story I would like to consider in this chapter devoted to expressions of queer desire in uncanny fiction by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women’s fiction is Helen R. Hull’s 1926 short story ‘‘ClayShuttered Doors.’’13 Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hull, whose writing career began in 1914 and spanned fifty years, was an early-twentieth-century American feminist who used fiction to address women’s economic status and gender roles within American culture (Miller 1). Well regarded during most of her years as a publishing writer, Hull published twenty novels, at least sixty-five short stories, and several books about writing; she was also professor of creative writing at Columbia for forty years. Patricia McClelland Miller, in her dissertation on Hull, notes that throughout her career, Hull . . . criticize[d] gender-based prescriptions for behavior. Both her male and female protagonists learn that typically ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ traits and behavior must be tempered. . . . In her fiction she was critical not only of men but also of women—both women who continued to behave in stereotypically ‘‘feminine’’ ways and women who wasted what few new opportunities they had by simply aping masculine behavior. . . . Hull also criticized male institutions, masculine abuse of privilege, and the romanticization of male violence, arguing instead for the transformation of male structures through a strong infusion of positive female values. (18)

Of the authors addressed in this chapter, Hull is also the only woman who clearly identified herself as a lesbian, which reflects the fact that Hull chronologically is the latest of the authors discussed here. According to Salmonson, Hull was advised by her publisher to avoid attracting attention to herself because the fact of her lesbianism might dismay fans of her domestic 13 ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ was first published in Harper’s Magazine in May 1926. Page numbers for quotations will refer to the version reprinted in Salmonson.

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fiction. Despite such concerns, Hull sometimes included lesbian characters in her stories (212). ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ clearly incorporates Hull’s political stances visa`-vis gender roles, but does so rather uncharacteristically in the form of a supernatural tale. Within the story, the narrator, Mary, an unmarried ‘‘New Woman’’ journalist with lesbian overtones, recounts the bizarre and tragic story of her friend Thalia Corson. Thalia is presented to the reader as an elegant and sensitive woman married to an arrogant and insensitive cad named Winchester. The contrast between Thalia and Winchester is made explicit in the following passage of Mary’s narration: There are, I have decided, two ways with love. You can hold one love, knowing that, if it is a living thing, it must develop and change. That takes maturity, and care, and a consciousness of the other person. That was Thalia’s way. Or you enjoy the beginning of love and, once you’re past that, you have to hunt for a new love, because the excitement seems to be gone. Men like Winchester, who use all their brains for their jobs, never grow up; they go on thinking that the preliminary stir and snap of love is love itself. Cut flowers, that was Winchester’s idea, while to Thalia love was a tree. (253–54)

The action of the story is set into motion by a car accident on the Brooklyn Bridge. Winchester, who, against his wife’s wishes, has been drinking, weaves out of his lane, resulting in a crash that appears to claim his wife’s life. After a doctor has pronounced Thalia dead, the distraught Winchester holds his wife’s limp body and pleads with her to wake up. Mary recalls, ‘‘Then I heard Thalia’s voice, blurred and queer, ‘You called me, Win?’ and Winchester’s sudden, triumphant laugh’’ (257). What gradually becomes apparent to Mary—and to the reader—is that Thalia in fact does die as a result of the crash, but somehow, in her words, ‘‘get[s] back in’’ (258) in response to her husband’s call. Thalia’s mature love, her tree-like tenacity, is presented as powerful enough to defy even death. The narrative makes clear, however, that Thalia has mistaken the nature of her husband’s distressed call for one of love, when it was really one of selfishness, and the realization of this mistake makes the unnatural act of keeping spirit and body yoked together after death almost unendurable for her. Thalia’s character changes upon realizing her mistake; she becomes rude and bitter. She neglects her children and then sends them off to boarding school. She gives away her favorite little dog (which has become terrified of her). And she caustically remarks to Mary concerning her role at

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dinners for her husband’s business associates, ‘‘We entertain the lords at dinner, and in some mysterious way that smooths the merging. It makes a wife almost necessary’’ (264). When Mary tries to comfort Thalia and affirms her love for her, Mary responds, ‘‘Love? That’s a strange word. . . . One thing I will tell you. . . . Love has no power. It never shouts out across a great space. Only fear and self-desire are strong’’ (265). At the end of the story, aware of the nature of her husband’s selfishness, disregard for her well-being, and marital indiscretions, Thalia gathers her strength for one more important business dinner party and, once the deal is sealed, becomes faint and retreats to her room. Mary notes that Winchester is angry rather than concerned over his wife’s erratic behavior (267), and the doctor who originally pronounced Thalia dead on the Brooklyn Bridge explains to the agitated Winchester, ‘‘She died—months ago. There on the bridge. But you called to her, and she thought you wanted—her’’ (268). Winchester views the now-inanimate corpse of his wife and flees the room. What he sees remains unrevealed to the reader, but, given that Thalia is ‘‘buried with the coffin lid fast closed under the flowers’’ (268), one can conjecture a sort of Poe-esque rapid decomposition of the body following the departure of Thalia’s animating spirit. Rather than a ghost returning from the grave to gesture toward a submerged or alternate history, Hull deploys the supernatural to provide an alternate reading of the narrative’s present. Thalia’s actual death on the Brooklyn Bridge merely literalizes the figurative death she has been living all along as the wife of man who considers her primarily as a tool to facilitate business dealings. In this ‘‘indictment of the nuclear family’’ (Lundie, ‘‘One Need Not’’ 252), the ghostly, undead women function as an allegory for the placelessness of independent women within restrictive patriarchal systems. The supernatural here is used as a metaphor to make a political point about the confinement of women and the violence (figurative and literal) to which they are subject in a culture that disempowers women and polices their sexuality. ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ thereby utilizes and manipulates Gothic conventions to express critical commentary on the roles of women within late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture. The story, however, can also be read as a love story—one that contrasts Mary’s tender, sympathetic regard for Thalia against Winchester’s selfish exploitation of her, and which thereby privileges same-sex desire through its harsh critique of middle-class heterosexual marriage. Recalling the narrator’s detailed observation of her beloved in Ward’s ‘‘Since I Died,’’ Mary begins her account of Thalia by observing, ‘‘For months I have tried not to

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think about Thalia Corson. Anything may invoke her, with her langorous fragility, thin wrists and throat, her elusive face with its long eyelids. I can’t quite remember her mouth. When I try to visualize her sharply I get soft pale hair, the lovely curve from her temple to chin, and eyes blue and intense’’ (252). Mary and Thalia, the reader learns, had been longtime friends, but friends who pursued different courses in life. While Mary went to college, Thalia married Winchester—a man Mary finds distasteful. Particularly objectionable to Mary are his persistent sexual advances toward her: ‘‘There had always been an undertone of sex in his attitude toward me, but I had thought ‘that’s just his male conceit’ ’’ (253). Mary remembers a summer she spent with Thalia and Winchester on Cape Cod, during which Winchester continually made sexual advances on her, even with his wife in the next room. The kisses he forced on her ‘‘were the insulting kind of kisses that aren’t at all personal, and I could have ended them fast enough if there hadn’t been the complication of Thalia and my love for her’’ (253). Mary realizes that if she angers Winchester, he will forbid Thalia to see her. It is following this account of Winchester’s insulting advances and Mary’s love for Thalia that Mary contrasts Thalia’s organic, tree-like love with Winchester’s quest for stimulation and lack of sympathy (253–54). Following this summer on the Cape, Mary notes that she did not see Thalia and Winchester for almost ten years, during which she had pursued her journalism career abroad in France and China. The marked contrasts between Mary and Thalia establish them as foils: on the one hand, Mary is an unmarried, self-sufficient, worldly career woman who can tell stories of villages in France and temples in China and whose journalistic anthropological eye allows her to assess American social customs and practices without undue bias. For example, she notes of American weddings that ‘‘I think a low-caste Chinese wedding is saner and more interesting than a modern American affair’’ (260). Of course, her criticism here of American weddings extends to her unblinkingly critical representation of gender inequities within marriage. Thalia, on the other hand, although apparently the product of the same social class and background as Mary, opted for a more conventional path. Rather than attending college or pursuing a career of her own, she married Winchester Corson, a young man on the rise with no interest in traveling; had two children; and hosted teas and dinners at her Long Island estate. While Mary is presented as an active, independent woman who makes her own decisions and who has built a life for herself, Thalia is presented as a woman who increasingly is aware and resentful of her subservient position within her marriage and her dependence on her husband.

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The queer textual impulse in the story emerges through the realization that Mary would make a better partner for Thalia than does Winchester. After establishing not only Mary’s attraction to and love for Thalia but also her sincere appreciation of Thalia’s positive qualities and her regard for her health and well-being, the narrative persistently contrasts this faithful, sincere affection with Winchester’s arrogant egocentrism and marital infidelities. Mary’s ability to discriminate between true and false love suggests that she, too, possesses the capacity for mature, respectful love. Noting gossip concerning Winchester’s affair with a ‘‘gaudy lady,’’ Mary remarks, ‘‘Thalia was too fine; [Winchester] couldn’t grow up to her. . . . She must, years ago, with her sensitiveness, have discovered that Winchester was stationary as far as love went and, being stationary himself, was inclined to move the object toward which he directed his passion’’ (261). Mary, in contrast, is mobile, both literally—she has traveled around the world—and metaphorically in terms of her love. Rather than attempting to move Thalia through force, Mary expresses her passion through tender regard, sympathy, and care. Finally, what I am calling the queer textual impulse in ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ is actualized, as in Wynne’s ‘‘The Little Room’’ and Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ by the insistent repetition of the actual word ‘‘queer’’ itself within the text. As Thalia is summoned back from the dead by Winchester, her voice emerges ‘‘blurred and queer’’ (257). An elderly cousin of Mary’s who also knows Thalia describes her as changed and ‘‘well—queer’’ (259). Mary is afflicted with a ‘‘queer dread’’ concerning Thalia and, just like Ruth in Brown’s ‘‘There and Here,’’ feels herself to be on the verge of a momentous realization: ‘‘I felt that just over the edge of my squirming thoughts there lay clear and whole the meaning of it, but I couldn’t reach past thought’’ (265). Winchester remarks that if news of his accident and Thalia’s injury had been reported in the newspapers, his business would have been ‘‘queered’’ (265). Even Nug, Thalia’s terrier and previously inseparable companion, is reported to have a ‘‘queer notion’’ about Thalia following his refusal to stay in her company (266). As in Wynne and Peattie, the use of the term ‘‘queer’’ in these instances is as an adjective describing something odd or strange. In light of the explicit political agenda of the story, however, as well as its veiled homoerotic subtext, perhaps one can detect a ‘‘queer’’ premonitory echo of the term’s contemporary theoretical signification in which it foregrounds the social construction of gender codes. Ultimately, ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors’’ is a ‘‘queer’’ text—both in the sense of a strange and uncanny account of living

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death and in the sense of a story that calls into question the ‘‘heterosexual imperative’’ and suggests that passionate same-sex relationships may be equally, if not more, fulfilling for women than conventional marriage.

 In keeping with Castle’s meditations on ‘‘apparitional lesbianism,’’ this chapter has emphasized the ways in which supernatural fiction provided nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women with one means to critique the heterosexual norm and to convey same-sex desire in a muted form. In each of the four stories under discussion here, same-sex desire is ‘‘recognized through negation’’; that is, the derealization or ghosting of the lesbian relationship has the paradoxical effect of foregrounding its potentiality, its uncanny potency. As I stressed at the start, the point of this chapter has not been to establish or define the sexual preference of the stories’ authors—not only is sexuality too fluid and amorphous a thing for that, but the retroactive application of current understandings of sexual object choice is problematic at best and drawing conclusions about authors based on their fictional productions is an especially hazardous endeavor. Rather, the emphasis here has been on isolating what I have referred to as a queer textual impulse in each text, an alternative configuration of desire and passionate longing that interrupts the seamlessness of heterosexual representation and expectations and participates in the more general subversive use of Gothic conventions by American women. The ‘‘queer desire’’ in each text—desire that I have addressed using Castle’s model of apparitional lesbianism—is in each case an unruly desire that upsets patriarchal expectations and implies, to borrow from Castle, a revised social order, ‘‘one characterized—at the very least—by a profound indifference to masculine charisma’’ (62). More radically, the texts suggest a subversive refusal of cultural demands and intimate that alternative configurations of desire may be as satisfying to women—if not more so—than expectations of heterosexual union. As such, these tales participate in the ongoing process of revising and enhancing the ‘‘separate spheres’’ paradigm of nineteenth-century gender relations by inflecting the man/woman binary through a variety of other prisms of identity formation.

6.

Ghostly Returns: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Daskam Bacon

In attending to these ghost stories by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women, we are eavesdropping on a conversation of sorts—an exchange among women in dialogue with the larger tradition of American and British supernaturalism more generally. As I have periodically pointed out, these were women who knew each other’s writing and in some instances corresponded with or knew each other personally. Both Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, for example, wrote appreciatively of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work and she reciprocated their praise. Both likely knew her Sir Rohan’s Ghost and her short supernatural fiction. Ward sought advice on writing from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who shared her interest in Spiritualism (Coultrap-McQuin 174), and Mary Austin also cited Stowe as an influence (Pryse xv). Spofford was one of the few women invited in July 1859 to a dinner given by the Atlantic for Stowe (Fetterley, Provisions 262). Elia Wilkinson Peattie was a member of the Little Room social club, the Chicago social organization named after Madeline Yale Wynne’s supernatural story of the same name, and undoubtedly knew Wynne’s fiction. Alice Brown was a member—and served for a time as president—of the Boston Authors’ Club and included among her friends and correspondents Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields (as well as William Dean Howells who, as editor of the Atlantic from 1871 to 1881 and in a variety of other capacities, knew personally and was directly or indirectly involved in publishing many of the women mentioned in this study) (Toth, ‘‘More Than Local Color’’ 265). Brown, Edith Wharton, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—along with Howells and Henry James—all participated during 1907–8 on the collaborative novel The Whole Family. In a few instances, relationships between these women were more competitive and combative than supportive—Gertrude Atherton’s dislike of Edith Wharton is a case in point. Given this web of connections among women authors writing from the 1850s to the 1920s, however, it is one of the premises of this study that the recurrence of particular feminist themes within their work is not simply 172

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coincidental. Rather, it reflects the development of a discrete body of literature—the American Female Gothic—by a talented pool of women authors who participated together in using supernatural fiction as a strategic means to articulate anxieties related to the positions, roles, and expectations for women in American culture. The women discussed in this study were educated and literate women who knew the work of their contemporaries, as well as their literary forebears, and made use of a shared repertoire of literary conventions. These women, however, were not just writing for each other; by virtue of rescripting the Gothic to express their own anxieties and desires, they also participated in a conversation of sorts with the masculine tradition of the supernatural tale, and negotiated with cultural expectations concerning the place of women in American culture and the relation of women to writing and professional authorship. I dealt with this idea briefly in Chapter 2 through my juxtaposition of Peattie’s ‘‘The House That Was Not’’ with Herman Melville’s ‘‘The Piazza.’’ Melville’s story, I argued there, in keeping with G. R. Thompson’s contention that tales by nineteenth-century American men make use of supernatural themes to foreground the ‘‘apparitional nature of all existence’’ (‘‘Apparition’’ 92), depicts the failure of an inadequate reality to live up to fantasy as the inevitable condition of mankind. Peattie’s story, published thirty-nine years later, I then proposed can be read as a rewriting of Melville’s tale, in which, rather than foregrounding epistemological uncertainty and the inability of human beings to penetrate beyond interpretation to some bedrock of truth, what is emphasized is the particular disempowerment of women within patriarchal culture. Extending on this initial juxtaposition of texts by male and female authors, in this final chapter I examine the ways in which American women turned the Gothic genre back on itself and used conventions of the supernatural implicitly—and in some cases explicitly—to engage with and in some instances to rewrite the male Gothic tradition in order to highlight its inadequacy for representing female anxieties, including anxieties over authorship. My privileged texts for this analysis will be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ (1891), Gertrude Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ (1905), and Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied’’ (1913). Gilman and Atherton, I will assert, appropriate and then recast elements of the American Romanticist tradition in a different light—in Gilman’s case, rewriting The Scarlet Letter with a decidedly more ominous outcome; and in Atherton’s case, placing Henry James at the center of a Portrait of a Lady–

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esque tale in which the villain (a combination of James himself with his fictional heavy Gilbert Osmond) doesn’t succeed in seducing the innocent. Bacon’s provocative story will be examined not as a specific rewriting of a particular author or tale but rather as a meditation on the power of writing itself both to communicate ideas and emotions and as a powerful tool to instill or awaken passion in the reader. Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied’’ is an especially appropriate story with which to conclude this study because it is a Gothic tale about writing that foregrounds both the possibilities that authorship offered to women to ‘‘materialize’’ themselves and the threat that such writings presented to those who would prefer that women remain subordinate and ghostly. Bacon’s tale shows how literature can implant subversive thoughts in readers; in fact, the suddenly sexual women in ‘‘The Unburied’’ scare the wits out of the disconcerted male narrator! Bacon’s story ultimately is about the power of literature itself to provoke action and change.

From White to Re(a)d: Gilman’s Rewriting of Hawthorne David Hartwell’s claim in The Dark Descent that ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper’’ is Gilman’s only horror tale (460) is clearly belied by ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ which was published one year prior to ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper’’ in New England Magazine.1 Gary Scharnhorst’s somewhat hyperbolic description characterizes the tale as ‘‘a terrifying diptych about an unwed mother, tormented by Puritan patriarchy, whose spirit haunts a decaying mansion’’ (166). In the first part of this story, the reader is introduced to an unnamed woman in late-eighteenth-century New England who has recently arrived from England with her parents and who has given birth to an illegitimate child. At the start of the story, this young woman is being chastised by her mother for ‘‘meddling’’ with the latter’s newly planted vine, a gift to her from her husband during the passage from Old World to New (123).2 In order to obscure the blot on the Dwining family name brought about by the birth of this illegitimate child, the abusive father has arranged for the daughter to marry her cousin, ‘‘a coarse fellow’’ whom she ‘‘ever shunned’’ (125), and for the family to return to England where ‘‘none knoweth [their] According to Knight, Gilman wrote several early stories in addition to ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper’’ and ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ that make use of Gothic conventions. Among these she includes ‘‘The Rocking-Chair’’ (1893) and ‘‘The Unwatched Door’’ (1894), the latter of which Knight observes is written in imitation of Poe’s style (Study 18). 2 Page numbers refer to Lundie’s collection, Restless Spirits. 1

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stain’’ (124). The illegitimate child will be left behind as a mysterious orphan for the town to rear. The father in this section is presented as dictatorial and unyielding. He enters onto the scene while the daughter (who is not described except for the detail of a small carnelian cross hanging from her neck) is petitioning the mother for her child and he silences her with a ‘‘hand upon her mouth’’ (124). He banishes her to her chamber and threatens to have her bound if she reappears again that evening. He then expresses to his wife that he would have preferred to have seen her drowned during the crossing than for her to have brought such shame on the family and, in response to his wife’s concern that the daughter dislikes her cousin, adamantly maintains that ‘‘she weddeth him ere we sail to-morrow, or she stayeth ever in that chamber’’ (125). The action in the story then jumps ahead over one hundred years. A young newlywed couple of means, George and Jenny, stumble across the uninhabited but furnished house in which the drama of the illegitimate child played out and Jenny is charmed by it. They arrange to rent it for the summer and (as with the protagonist of Gilman’s ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’), Jenny expresses her hope that the house is haunted. Jenny and George swiftly are joined by two other generic young couples, Kate and Jack and Susy and Jim, who explore ‘‘the house from top to bottom, from the great room in the garret, with nothing in it but a rickety cradle, to the well in the cellar without a curb and with a rusty chain going down to unknown blankness below’’ (125–26). While the grounds of the mansion have devolved into a ‘‘gloomy wilderness of tangled shade’’ due to lack of care (126), what strikes the couples most about the exterior of the house is a magnificent wisteria vine that has covered the entire front of the house (which is apparently the same vine the young woman was ‘‘meddling’’ with at the start of the story). Jenny, who is ‘‘convinced there is a story, if we could only find it,’’ sees in the wisteria ‘‘trunk’’ ‘‘a writhing body— clinging—beseeching’’ (126). It turns out that the house is indeed haunted. As the couples compare notes over breakfast, a story emerges in parts: Jenny initially awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of an old chain rattling and creaking over the stones of the well in the cellar. Jack awakened separately to see a female ghost with a bundle in her arms and a little red cross around her neck apparently taking things from drawers of a bureau in his room (128). George subsequently went down to the cellar to investigate the sounds heard by Jenny and describes seeing ‘‘a woman, hunched up under a shawl! She had

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hold of the chain, and my candle shone on her hands—white, thin hands,—on a little red cross that hung from her neck’’ (129). The couples immediately adjourn to the well in the basement and, having raised the old bucket, discover the well-preserved corpse of an infant. At almost this same moment, workmen repairing the old front porch discover amid the ‘‘strangling grasp of the roots of the great wisteria . . . the bones of a woman, from whose neck still hung a tiny scarlet cross on a thin chain of gold’’ (130). Noting the unanswered questions raised by the story, which include who fathered the child, who killed the child, and how the daughter actually died, Scharnhorst describes the story as an open-ended riddle and as ‘‘an ambiguous, half-told tale disrupted by silences and ellipses’’ (170). The story, he concludes, ‘‘resolves no mysteries of historical causation, repairs no rifts in the mosaic of the past’’ (171). While history is not repaired in ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ the emergence of the ghost in this story does precipitate the recovery of a (literally) submerged history—one that bears witness to one woman’s desperation and the violence of patriarchy. The ghost in the story, as the interruption of the present by the past, is by definition out of place. She is a violation of the linearity of time and history. What the story reveals, however, is that the young woman, while alive, also didn’t know her place—that is, she violated the expectations placed on her by her father and her culture more generally and thus forfeited her place within the rigid patriarchal structure. The haunting she performs thereby figures an entire history of ghosted women—women given the dubious choice of a symbolic death in the grasp of the strangling roots of patriarchy, or the symbolic (and possibly literal) death attendant on transgression of cultural mandates. Her story is one, as Scharnhorst observes, of ‘‘sexual oppression’’ (167), a legacy of violence that undergirds the present relations between the male and female characters in the story. According to Gloria A. Biamonte, what Gilman’s story vividly depicts is ‘‘the destructiveness of male control in defining women’s lives—a destructiveness that . . . perverts the realm of motherhood into one of sin, into a tale of death and oppression rather than one of life and growth’’ (37). In its use of supernatural themes to critique the oppression of women under patriarchal rule (Knight, Study 20), Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’—perhaps even more so than ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper’’—is in fact a paradigmatic example of the American Female Gothic tradition and has clear connections with many of the tales discussed in this study. The story

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plainly shows the ways in which American women appropriated conventions of the Gothic in order to express specifically female anxieties and concerns. Beyond this, however, ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ can be appreciated as a rewriting of the masculine literary tradition and, in particular, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). In ‘‘Such a Hopeless Task Before Her,’’ Denise Knight observes both that Gilman appreciated Hawthorne as a ‘‘ ‘great and deep’ writer whose work was ‘honored as one of the distinctive glories of American literature’ ’’ (250), and that Gilman criticized the narrow depictions of female characters in the masculine literary tradition that are defined only in relation to male characters. According to Knight, Gilman attempted to redress these deficiencies by producing a literature of her own that broke from the masculine tradition and moved women center stage (251). As regards Hawthorne’s writing, Knight contends that Gilman made ready use of many of his most prominent themes, including sin, morality, guilt, redemption, and obsession; she revised the conflicts, characters, and resolutions, however, ‘‘to argue more explicitly her central thesis: that a reformed society—one that promotes the peaceful, progressive, ethical, and democratic improvement of the human race—is not only desirable but also within reach’’ (252). Knight continues, ‘‘Whereas Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne could only look forward vaguely, to ‘some brighter period, when . . . a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness,’ Gilman’s characters are able to effect a ‘new truth’ and to enact a positive change’’ (252). Although Knight primarily focuses in her article on Gilman’s short stories ‘‘Clifford’s Tower’’ (1894) and ‘‘Old Water’’ (1911), Gilman’s urge to reshape classic American literature is also arguably reflected in ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ the first half of which rewrites The Scarlet Letter from a more realistic perspective. Like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, the unnamed young woman in the first half of the story is a Puritan e´migre´ from England who has given birth to an illegitimate child and is subject to the stern Puritan policing of female sexuality. In place of the red letter ‘‘A,’’ she wears a carnelian cross—a red semiprecious stone—that Scharnhorst appreciates as ‘‘the noose or halter of orthodoxy’’ (169). Like Hester, the Puritan patriarchy—here embodied in her literal father—confines her and intends to deprive her of her child and, like Hester, she pleads not to be separated from her baby (124). In yet another parallel with The Scarlet Letter, the plan devised by the girl’s father, similar to that of Hawthorne’s Hester, is to return

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to England to escape the shame brought on the family through the birth of the illegitimate child.3 There are no kindly magistrates in Gilman’s story inclined toward mercy, however, and no eloquent Reverend Dimmesdale to plead on her behalf. The young woman is not allowed to defend herself and her reputation is not rehabilitated at the end. Rather, she is physically abused by her father, silenced, and imprisoned. She is, in Knight’s estimation, ‘‘an archetypal death-in-life character’’ (21). Deprived of name, voice, and freedom of action, the pale young woman apparently enacts the same fate for her child that her father wished had happened to her: drowning.4 Whether she then killed herself or was killed by her father is left in question, but both options are equally abhorrent. Knight writes that ‘‘the sacrifice of the innocent, and her own subsequent death, constitute a morbid repudiation of her father’s declaration that his daughter ‘hath small choice’ but to leave the baby and marry her cousin’’ (21). Her limited measure of empowerment, however, is manifest only in the possibility of her child’s and her own destruction. In the second half of the story, like Hawthorne in the ‘‘Custom House’’ introduction, haunted by his Puritan forebears and discovering in the trash of the attic the material sources for his story, Gilman presents what may be considered the uncanny afterlife of Puritan patriarchy—the ways in which her turn-of-the-century American culture remained haunted by the specters of gender oppression and the circumscribed autonomy for women. While the women in the second half clearly enjoy freedoms denied to the young woman in the first half, the ghost in the house and the monstrous wisteria vine that holds the body of the young woman in its ‘‘strangling grasp’’ reveal both the legacy of oppression these woman have inherited and the extent to which patriarchal culture draws sustenance from and grows out of—both literally and figuratively—the bodies of women. While the contrast between the autonomy allotted to women in the second half of the story with the victimization of the woman in the first half is encouraging and does suggest that gender expectations have changed for the better, the sobering revelation of the bodies of the baby and the mother concludes the tale on a poignant note, clearly illustrating that this distressing history of violence against women in patriarchal culture cannot and should not be forgotten. In 3 Scharnhorst speculates that among the possibilities the story presents, one is that the child might be the product of incest (171). 4 Knight observes that the family’s surname, Dwining, is derived from the Middle English word dwinen, a term signifying to languish, pine away, wither, or fade (21).

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the end, Jenny is right: there is a story to be discovered—or rather dredged and dug up—one about the historical effacement of women’s voices and their systematic disempowerment at the hands of men. Whether this will become the fate of any of the women in the story once they become mothers is left to speculation. ‘‘The Giant Wisteria’’ thus can be numbered among Gilman’s stories that depict ‘‘the plight of women trapped in the private, powerless domestic sphere’’ (Golden 135). At the same time, it is also a powerful indictment of a literary history and heritage that marginalized women and defined them narrowly in terms of prescribed roles for them and their relationships to men. Through what can be read as a reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Gilman emphasizes the reality of Puritan control over women’s sexuality and the subsuming of their identities by their roles of first daughters and then wives. Gilman’s Hester figure does not survive at the end of the story and her child does not prosper. Rather, both child and mother die and the mother is seemingly condemned to replay the infanticide again and again—at least until her tragic story is unearthed. Gilman thus paradoxically uses the devices of fantasy to critique Hawthorne’s Romanticism and to present a more realistic portrayal of the fate in store for a young Puritan woman who mothered an illegitimate child.

Portrait of an Author: Gertrude Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ In Gertrude Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ (1905), as in Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ Atherton uses conventions of the Gothic to take a swipe at the male-dominated American literary tradition and explicitly at both Henry James and Hawthorne. Perhaps the best known of Atherton’s supernatural tales, ‘‘The Bell in the Fog,’’ according to Jack G. Voller, is a ‘‘touchstone work in the supernaturalist tradition’’ that reflects both increasing prominence of Freudian understandings of the mind and the women’s suffrage movement.5 For Voller, the work ‘‘incisively comments on the limitations of male emotional capacity and understanding, on a masculinized Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton was a feminist and social activist born in California. Her sixty books and numerous articles frequently feature strong heroines who pursue independent lives. She is best known for a series of historical novels and short stories set in California, including The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902); a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton entitled The Conqueror (1902); and a sensational, semiautobiographical novel entitled Black Oxen (1923), about a middle-aged woman who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. She also produced a number of Gothic tales, primarily in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories (1905) and The Fog Horn (1934). 5

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cultural tradition, on patriarchy and its limiting constructions of gender, male possession, [and] issues of class and gender’’ (‘‘Discussion’’). For Alfred Bendixen, the work, which is clearly modeled after the writing style of Henry James and features a central character combining James himself with his villain Gilbert Osmond from Portrait of a Lady (1881), constitutes one of the most important feminist critiques in all of American literature (Haunted Women 205). ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ is a complex homage to James that both pays tribute to him (the book in which the story is included, The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, is dedicated ‘‘To the Master, Henry James’’) even as it critiques his values and aesthetic principles. At the center of the story is ‘‘the great author’’ (205) Ralph Orth, an American expatriate who is the toast of European intellectual circles. The narration tells the reader that ‘‘his subtleties might not always be understood—indeed, as a rule, they were not—but the musical mystery of his language and the penetrating charm of his lofty and cultivated mind induced raptures in the initiated, forever denied to those who failed to appreciate him’’ (206).6 Although the characters in his work ‘‘were so remote and exclusive as barely to escape being mere mentalities,’’ Orth ‘‘[was] content to have it so. His creations might find and leave him cold, but he had known his highest satisfaction in chiseling the statuettes, extracting subtle and elevating harmonies, while combining words as no man of his tongue combined them before’’ (211). Orth, as the description above suggests, is an aesthete who prefers to contemplate ideals rather than to engage in the messiness of human interaction and intimacy. An inheritance from a wealthy great-aunt allows him to realize one of his longstanding dreams: the possession of an ‘‘ancestral hall’’ in England in which he can contemplate ‘‘the aristocratic aloofness of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced, generations and generations of the dead’’ (205). Such a property, the narration informs the reader, is something that Orth finds far more alluring than any woman. Orth’s emotional stuntedness is brilliantly symbolized by the name of the estate he purchases, Chillingsworth, at which he is content to spend weeks alone. Beyond connoting coldness, readers of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter will recognize the name of Orth’s estate as an allusion to the villain Roger Chillingworth, the wounded husband in Hawthorne’s novel who persecutes the Reverend Dimmesdale. This allusion to Hawthorne, combined with an 6

Page numbers refer to Bendixen’s Haunted Women.

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unflattering portrait of James that conflates him with his own villain, culminates in a general critique of the male-dominated American literary heritage. As Orth lingers lovingly in his solitude over the rough, ivied walls of his Tudor estate, he increasingly becomes preoccupied with two paintings in the portrait gallery accompanying the house: a little boy in a Robin Hood costume and a fair little girl of not more than six (208). He begins to frequent the gallery obsessively, speculating on the probable fates of the represented children and expressing his preference that ‘‘such perfect beings should die while they are still perfect’’ (209). Admitting the possibility that the artist had ‘‘idealized’’ the little girl, who it turns out is the Lady Blanche Mortlake—that the artist had ‘‘painted his own dream of exquisite childhood’’ rather than an accurate reflection of reality—Orth still cannot get her and the little boy, the Viscount Tancred, out of his mind. Tracking down living relations of the children, he is told that the little boy drowned in a river and the little girl died from an unknown wasting ailment (210). Orth responds to this information with gratification for the fact that the girl had died young, but he grieved for the boy, even as he admits ‘‘a secret thrill of satisfaction that the boy had so soon ceased to belong to any one’’ (210–11). Armed with this knowledge, Orth concludes that the only way to end his obsession with the children is to write them out of his system and the result is his masterpiece. Unlike his other works, in which his characters are abstract and bloodless, his children seem to come to life and Orth becomes their father, so to speak, as he imaginatively reconstructs their histories. ‘‘Oddly enough,’’ the narrative reports, ‘‘the children had no mother, not even the memory of one’’ (212). In the end, the little girl still dies in Orth’s imaginative reconstruction of their lives but he lets the little boy live because ‘‘to kill him off, too, was more than his augmented stock of human nature could endure’’ (212–13). It is following the publication of his book, which is greeted with boisterous acclamation, that the strange occurrences begin to take place. After an absence from Chillingsworth, Orth returns and is walking on the land of an adjoining estate when he encounters a little girl named Blanche Root who is the exact duplicate of Lady Blanche Mortlake, ‘‘his child’’ depicted in the portrait (214). Reproducing the general situation of Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, the little girl is an American ‘‘not of the highest class’’ who, together with her mother, is visiting her father’s relations who are descended from the estate’s tenantry. Orth is dazed by this encounter and feels as if he

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is caught up in one of his own ghost stories.7 Convinced that such extraordinary likenesses do not occur accidentally, Orth reopens his investigation of the children in the portraits and learns that, contrary to what he had been told, the Lady Blanche Mortlake did not die in childhood, but lived to be twenty-four. Furthermore, he discovers that she hated her husband, had no children, and engaged in an adulterous affair with a man named Root, a tenant of the neighboring estate. He learns that it was a minor scandal that ended tragically when the jilted lover, Root, committed suicide. A few months later, Lady Blanche followed suit. Orth cannot shake the impression that the little girl, Blanche, the uncanny doppelganger of the Blanche in his painting, is the reincarnation of Lady Blanche Mortlake: ‘‘He recalled that the sinful dead are doomed, according to [occult] belief, to linger for vast reaches of time in that borderland which is close to earth, eventually sent back to work out their final salvation; that they work it out among the descendents of the people they have wronged; that suicide is held by the devotees of occultism to be a cardinal sin, abhorred and execrated’’ (220). Now obsessed with the little girl in the way that previously he had been obsessed with the paintings of her and her brother, Orth begins increasingly to monopolize her. He buys her expensive presents, plays with her for hours on end, reads to her, and reforms her accent and vocabulary. Venturing with her one day into his portrait hall, Orth is shown by Blanche that the portrait of the little girl hides another portrait of an older Blanche Mortlake. Viewing the previously concealed portrait, he appreciates that ‘‘there was the Lady Blanche Mortlake in the splendor of her young womanhood, beyond a doubt. Gone were all traces of her spiritual childhood, except, perhaps, in the shadows of the mouth; but more than fulfilled were the promises of her mind. Assuredly, the woman had been as brilliant and gifted as she had been restless and passionate. She wore her very pearls with arrogance, her very hands were tense with eager life, her whole being breathed mutiny’’ (223). From this, he concludes that the true tragedy of Blanche Mortlake was the consignment of such a vibrant spirit to a stupid family and more stupid husband, and he expresses to his little Blanche that this will not be her fate: ‘‘You live in a woman’s age. Your opportunities will be infinite. I shall see to it that they are. What you wish to be you shall be. There will be no pent-up energies 7 In addition to The Turn of the Screw, James wrote quite a few excellent supernatural tales. See James’s Stories of the Supernatural. On James’s interest in ghosts and Spiritualism, see Banta.

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here to burst out into disaster for yourself and others. You shall be trained to self-control. . . . Every faculty shall be educated, every school of life you desire knowledge through shall be opened to you. You shall become the finest flower of civilization, a woman who knows how to use her independence’’ (223). Orth resolves, in short, to adopt Blanche. Mrs. Root, however, objects to the plan. Although she appreciates all that Orth can provide for her daughter, she reveals that her sons and daughters back in America worship Blanche and that it is Blanche who keeps them in line. She explains, ‘‘I’ve grown terribly superstitious about [Blanche]. Until she came I used to get frightened, terribly, sometimes, and I believe she came for that’’ (227). Mrs. Root concludes that Blanche is an angel who has come to assist the family, which prompts Orth to speculate (but not voice) that little Blanche is indeed ‘‘Blanche Mortlake working out the last of her salvation’’ (228). Unsuccessful with Mrs. Root, Orth turns his attention to trying to persuade Blanche herself to remain with him. He claims that he is the only person who really needs her and that without her present, he ‘‘shall be the loneliest man on earth!’’ (229). As concerns her brothers and sisters, he opines that ‘‘if they are of the right stuff, the memory of you will be quite as potent for good as your actual presence’’ (229), to which Blanche hauntingly replies, ‘‘Not unless I died’’ (229). Ultimately, Orth is unsuccessful in his campaign to convince the delicate and ailing Blanche to remain with him and the story concludes succinctly: ‘‘He entered the nursery abruptly the next day and found her packing her dolls. When she saw him, she sat down and began to weep hopelessly. He knew then that his fate was sealed. And when, a year later, he received her last little scrawl, he was almost glad that she went when she did’’ (229–30). Although not explicitly a ghost story, Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ is layered throughout with Gothic overtones, including the isolated and solitary Tudor estate, the eerie portraits (including the one with the hidden spring and concealed second painting), histories of adultery and suicide, and the prospect of reincarnation. Interestingly, the story parallels Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Sir Rohan’s Ghost in several key respects: in both stories, an alienated male artist attempts to overcome his sense of being haunted through an incestuous preoccupation with a young girl. In this respect, ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ clearly participates in the tradition of what I have been calling the American Female Gothic. In essence, Orth, who has never taken any interest in women or children before, desires to buy himself a daughter to assuage his own sense of incompleteness—a daughter that he

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will then, like Gilbert Osmond with both Isabel Archer and his daughter Pansy, fashion into his own image of how a contemporary woman should be. In order to fulfill his desire, Orth is willing to disregard both the mother’s wishes and his own superstitious belief that Blanche is the reincarnation of Lady Blanche Mortlake sent to work out her redemption among the descendants of the people she wronged. This complex story, however, becomes even more fascinating when it is read—as it is clearly intended to be—as a critique of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the male-dominated American literary tradition. Orth, the great bachelor author—the story’s Henry James figure—creates idealized representations that lack vitality and eschews human companionship prior to his encounter with young Blanche. Like James’s villain Osmond, he dwells in the rarified air of intellect and prefers ‘‘the ghosts of an ancient line’’ (205) to living, breathing human beings. His financial windfall allows him to purchase a history for himself in the form of a Tudor estate, complete with a portrait hall full of paintings of people with whom he has no blood relation but over which he lingers ‘‘like a bridegroom on a succession of honeymoons’’ (207). Furthermore, he takes liberties with history and gets it wrong. In his narrative appropriation of the lives of Viscount Tancred and Lady Blanche, he alters what he presumes to be the facts and lets Tancred live.8 It is subsequently revealed to him that Lady Blanche did not die in her youth as his narrative depicts. When Orth actually encounters a real little girl, he attempts to repeat the appropriation and revision of history he performed on the figures in the portraits. His intention is to remove Blanche from her family and fashion her into his vision of what a woman should be. In this, he is unsuccessful—Osmond, in this rescripting, does not succeed in seducing Isabel Archer and making her refined and miserable. Although Orth is not a wholly unsympathetic or villainous figure, as a stand-in for Henry James ensconced within his allusive Chillingsworth hall acting like Gilbert Osmond, he is emblematic of an entire literary history that has both marginalized women and constructed them to suit the fancies of the male imagination rather than attempting to represent them as real, active, independent agents. What connects Orth to Hawthorne’s Roger 8 The name Tancred, in this context, accentuates the suggestion of violence against women. In the romantic German epic Gerusalemme Liberata, the hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved, Clorinda, during a duel in which she is disguised as an enemy knight. After her burial, while making his way through a strange magic forest, he slashes a tree with his sword and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned within the tree, cries out that Tancred has wounded her again.

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Chillingworth and James’s Osmond most directly is his selfish disregard for others and an utter lack of sympathy—especially where women are concerned. What ultimately haunts Atherton’s Gothic tale is a literary history in which womanhood has been appropriated, defined, scripted, and deployed by male authors in ways that have constructed and supported unrealistic and disempowering expectations for women in American culture.

Lust Letters and Suddenly Sexual Women: Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied’’ Given the extent to which the literary profession prior to the 1850s in America had been dominated almost entirely by men, one of the obstacles that women writing in the nineteenth and, to a somewhat lesser extent, early-twentieth centuries encountered was simply the fact of their participating in a male-controlled realm.9 This concern is famously characterized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic—primarily in relation to British women (with the notable exception of Dickinson)—as ‘‘anxiety of authorship’’ attendant on being a ‘‘woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are . . . both overtly and covertly patriarchal’’ (45–46). Mary Kelley addresses this anxiety of authorship in her Private Women, Public Stage in relation to American women writers of the nineteenth century whom she terms ‘‘literary domestics,’’ including Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Sara Parton (Fanny Fern). Although these women achieved varying degrees of fame in nineteenth-century American culture, according to Kelley, ‘‘As private women they were uncomfortable in the world beyond the home. At best they felt ambivalent, at worst that they simply did not belong there’’ (29). Professional publication for many women in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth therefore was a practice laden with competing affective responses: on the one hand, it offered the enticing prospects of fame and financial remuneration, as well as a means to articulate one’s opinions and beliefs and to extend one’s sphere of influence beyond the closed confines of the nuclear family and one’s immediate community; on the other hand, for women raised as private, domestic beings conditioned to live as private individuals, professional authorship could engender in women 9 As Coultrap-McQuin details in Doing Literary Business, even as women achieved substantial successes as authors beginning in the 1850s, editorships and the publication business remained male-dominated.

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a ‘‘crisis of identity’’ (Kelley 111) as they felt themselves to be in violation of cultural expectations regarding women’s roles in American culture. Given this cognitive dissonance felt by women moving into the professional sphere in a culture that continued to insist that a woman’s place was in the home, fulfilling her primary duties as wife and mother, it is not surprising to see writing frequently thematized in uncanny fiction by American women as simultaneously a source of anxiety and of potential liberation. I therefore will close out this study of supernatural fiction by American women by attending to a virtually unknown uncanny text that places writing—and its perils and possibilities for women—front and center: Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied’’ (1913). ‘‘The Unburied’’ was included in Bacon’s 1913 collection of uncanny tales, The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon (which also includes ‘‘The Children,’’ discussed in Chapter 4), and focuses on love letters from beyond the grave that turn into ‘‘lust letters.’’ In the story, concealed letters in an old home cause women inhabiting the house to become sexually aggressive, and the combined forces of modern science and ancient religion are called on to shut down this potential threat to patriarchal authority. The radical implication of the story is that all women are potentially subject to sexual desire and that male control of female sexuality, despite constant policing, is always tenuous and incomplete. Beyond this, the story demonstrates the power of writing to awaken suppressed desires. Appropriately enough, ‘‘The Unburied’’ begins in a men’s club with a group, including the famous alienist Dr. Stanchon, discussing the incomprehensibility of women, ‘‘the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beneath the soft curve of the fairest cape’’ (293). This topic leads Dr. Stanchon to recollect an uncanny incident in his own life that had the inscrutability of women at its center—an incident that indeed undermined his understanding of the universe.10 He prefaces his account with the following declaration: ‘‘There comes a time . . . when you first discover what a gnat in a whirlpool you are. I mean that after you’ve done everything, played perfectly fair and followed all the rules, arranged your combinations and observed the reasonable It is worth mentioning here that as Charles Crow has noted in his essay on Wharton’s ‘‘The Eyes,’’ the narrative frame that Bacon employs, in which uncanny tales are told in the entitled atmosphere of a men’s social club, is a variation on a standard opening of the ghost story in the male tradition of American storytelling that goes back to Washington Irving. See Crow’s ‘‘The Girl in the Library.’’ 10

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results for so long that you begin to think you’ve got hold of the System— something happens, and it’s all upset again—flat anarchy’’ (294). To illustrate this point, he recalls that he purchased a home in a Midwestern city—the exact location, he notes, is inconsequential—with the intention of becoming a landlord. He promptly found tenants, a well-to-do jeweler and his family, and then just as promptly lost them after the jeweler’s wife absconded with her husband’s head clerk and all the family’s money (296). Dr. Stanchon’s agent noted to him that just prior to the woman’s running off, she seemed changed to him, ‘‘queer’’ (296). This scenario in which a woman inhabiting the home suddenly becomes sexually voracious then repeats. Following the removal of the jeweler, the house was rented to a parson and his wife. The parson was seldom at home and gossip soon began to develop around the wife. Alerted to this situation by his spouse, Dr. Stanchon consulted with the wife of the parson, who confessed to him that she felt herself not responsible for her actions and that she was putting up a fight that was killing her (299). In response, Dr. Stanchon had her committed to a sanitarium. The next tenant was a ‘‘mental healer’’ named Mrs. Mears—a woman appreciated by Dr. Stanchon as both clever and sensible. She remained for a month before breaking her lease. Dr. Stanchon recollects that she characterized the house as haunted and filthy: ‘‘It’s a crime to rent that house,’’ she stated. ‘‘It’s slimy. It crawls’’ (303). Attempting to elaborate, Mrs. Mears claimed that the house was ‘‘evil’’: ‘‘Evil thought, evil lives . . . you breathe it in . . . it tangles you . . . another night there . . . I should have no more power, absolutely—I could help nobody’’ (303–4). This turn of events led Dr. Stanchon to inhabit the house himself, along with two African American servants, Althea and her daughter, Myrnie. After a week in the home, Myrnie began to shed her subordinate status by speaking to Dr. Stanchon without first being addressed; she was soon discovered flirting with a married man, George, Dr. Stanchon’s accomplished light-skinned African American office assistant. Myrnie was chastised by Dr. Stanchon and he recalls that the look in her eyes reminded him of the similarly ‘‘queer look in the eyes of the parson’s wife’’ (309). Dr. Stanchon explains that at this point he began to appreciate a change in Myrnie, a new self-confidence and lack of inhibition that he, firmly embedded in turn-ofthe-century racist ideologies, associated with the jungle: ‘‘Straight across the commonplace air of my office a wind out of the jungle had blown, a whiff of something old and unmanageable, and beyond rules, or beneath ’em, perhaps; something there wasn’t any prescription for; something not to be

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weighed and measured by any of the new methods, because it antedated method’’ (310).11 It was only when Dr. Stanchon stumbled across Myrnie’s mother, Althea, in the midst of an apparent hypnotic trance that he began to appreciate that something very unusual was going on relating to the house itself. Her rocking and singing elicited the realization from him that ‘‘something was happening there. Something so strong and so actual that it defied all appearances, all ordinary influences that might be supposed to act on the imagination of, say, a sensitive, hysterical, under-occupied woman’’ (312). Thinking back over the history of the house, he noted that he was untouched, as had been the jeweler, the parson, and the man before them. In each case, however, the women in the house had begun to act defiantly and in a sexually provocative manner. Although Althea was suitably chastened by Dr. Stanchon’s disapproval, he reports that her daughter, Myrnie, could not be controlled by him. ‘‘Heavens,’’ Dr. Stanchon recollects, ‘‘the change in that girl’s eyes! It wasn’t that they were bold, it wasn’t that they were beautiful, nor even that they were conscious of it. No, it was more than that—more and worse and deeper and older—Oh, as old as Hell! That look unsettled . . . disorganized . . . how shall I put it? The flimsiness of civilisation, the essential bedrock of animalism—the big, ceaseless undertow of things . . .’’ (314). According to Dr. Stanchon, Myrnie altered before his eyes: ‘‘She bloomed in that infernal house like some tropical bog-flower; she expanded, she shot up’’ (314); under his observation, he ‘‘saw that girl disintegrate, decay, turn fungoid under [his] eyes’’ (315). Ultimately, he recalls shaking her, calling her a ‘‘black slut’’ (316), and expelling her from the house. Thoroughly unsettled by this turn of events, Dr. Stanchon removed himself from the house and consulted with a Catholic priest he refers to as Father Kelly. Together, the two men undertook to explore a home that had 11 As in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature more generally, representations of race in supernatural fiction by women vary from being progressive to lamentably racist. Racism against persons of Asian descent is a prominent component of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Jade Bracelet’’ (1918) and, to a lesser extent, Amy Parish’s ‘‘Ghost of Fan-Tai’’ (1904). Attitudes toward Native Americans are a focal point of Lydia Maria Child’s ‘‘Willie Wharton’’ (1920) and Mary W. Janvrin’s ‘‘The Legend of Starved Rock’’ (1856). A ghostly mammy figure is central to Ellen Glasgow’s ‘‘Whispering Leaves’’ (1923). And, in the extremely interesting ghost story ‘‘Black Is as Black Does’’ (1900) by Angelina Grimke´, the narrator dreams she is in heaven observing the judgments of a lynching victim and his murderer.

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corrupted five ‘‘good, ordinary, honest women’’ (318). Mystically tracing the source of the infection to an upstairs bedroom, Father Kelly underwent a sort of spiritual battle before leading Dr. Stanchon to letters secreted behind a brick in the fireplace. Removing a brick, what they discovered was an iron box containing yellowed letters from a woman named Olive, which Dr. Stanchon appreciated as ‘‘the wickedest letters ever written,’’ adding, ‘‘Even for a woman, they were incredible’’ (324). Dr. Stanchon continues, ‘‘They were not written for me, they offered me nothing, the writer was beyond doubt dead and gone; but for a moment those yellow papers held me, soul and body, in such a grip as I have never known before or since. I can’t tell you . . . I didn’t know such things could be written’’ (325). In an effort to communicate his disgust with the letters, Dr. Stanchon offers the following analogy: ‘‘Did you ever turn over a good old sunny rock, flat, a little mossy, but clean and wholesome? And underneath it crawls—it crawls! Black, slimy slug things . . . the muck of the Pit!’’ (325). After reading the letters himself, Father Kelly consigned them to flames and convinced Dr. Stanchon to deed the house to him, which he did. Father Kelly then used the cleansed house as a parochial school for girls. Dr. Stanchon concludes his tale by reemphasizing that there is more to the world than that which is accessible to scientific rationality. He notes to the men who have been absorbed by his story that ‘‘there’s a Pit below—you have to count on it. Perhaps we’re shovelling [sic] it in, all the time, shovelling it in. . . . And the more you whistle, the better you’ll work, of course. Very well, then, whistle! But don’t mistake—it’s there . . . it’s there’’ (327). Particularly interesting in ‘‘The Unburied’’ is the story’s complicated imbrication of racial and gender politics. Dr. Stanchon is clearly a racist who maintains that African Americans are ‘‘not far from apes’’ (316). When Myrnie, under the influence of the poisonous letters, begins to shed her subordinate status, Dr. Stanchon associates her insubordination with ‘‘a wind out of the jungle’’ and similarly correlates her mother Althea’s ‘‘pagan ritual’’ with ‘‘animalism’’ and savagery. At the same time, he also associates the wild look in Myrnie’s eyes with that in the eyes of the Parson’s wife, figuratively ‘‘blackening’’ the latter. Although Dr. Stanchon explicitly regards persons of African descent as only one step removed from savagery, his account reveals that he fears what one may refer to as the primordial power of female sexuality in general, the ‘‘big, ceaseless undertow of things’’ lurking beneath the ‘‘flimsiness of civilisation.’’ And what is most intriguing about ‘‘The Unburied’’ is that it is precisely writing that leads to ‘‘uncivilized’’ behavior.

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At the heart of ‘‘The Unburied’’ is the ambivalence of the turn-of-thecentury female author. On one level, the story associates writing with desire and clearly portrays the woman writer as a monstrous, sexual being. The woman writer, Olive, expressed her sexual desire in the ‘‘wickedest letters ever written,’’ which shocked and dismayed both Dr. Stanchon and Father Kelly (or so Dr. Stanchon would have us believe!). And the mere presence of her letters within the house infected other women. What characterizes all the women in the story who occupy the house is their defiance of patriarchal expectations. They pointedly refuse to abide by the gender expectations governing female decorum, notably by engaging in sexually provocative behavior, but also, as Dr. Stanchon appreciates, more unsettlingly through a general refusal to be ‘‘manageable’’ (310)—a failure that perplexes and disgusts Dr. Stanchon. On another level, however, what the story demonstrates is the repressive policing of female sexuality and, more generally, the limitations on female autonomy in patriarchal culture. Dr. Stanchon clearly is repulsed by any overt expression of female sexual desire. His initial consultation with the parson’s wife led him to surmise that she was ‘‘simply one of those women who have mistaken their natural vocation’’—presumably prostitution—and then to institutionalize her. His response to Myrnie’s blossoming sexuality resulted in ‘‘the only time [he] was ever brutal to a woman’’ (316) as he shook her and expelled the ‘‘black slut’’ from his household. The expressions of desire in Olive’s letters conjured up images in his mind of ‘‘black slimy slug things.’’ Beyond this overt display of sexuality, however, what Dr. Stanchon, his auditors in the men’s club, and, by extension, men within patriarchal culture more generally, fear is female insubordination—equated by Dr. Stanchon with incivility. The expression of sexual desire by women within the story is represented as symptomatic of a larger refusal to abide by female gender expectations. Dr. Stanchon is most disconcerted by the transformation of ‘‘good, ordinary, honest women’’ into willful beings that disregard both their marital bonds and their subordinate status within American culture. In the end, the patriarchal institutions of science—represented by Dr. Stanchon—and organized religion—represented by Father Kelly— must combine forces in order to delimit the threat of female rebellion and return women to their proper subordinate place. This joint effort is successful, but Dr. Stanchon is left unsettled by the revelation that lurking beneath demure, respectful female exteriors may be unbridled passions and subversive thoughts.

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What finally haunts in ‘‘The Unburied’’ is the power of writing itself and its potential utility for freeing women from oppressive constraints on their sexuality and selfhood. Writing, which is correlated within the story with the expression of desire and erotic longing, is shown not only to be a mechanism for self-expression, but also a device for extending one’s sphere of influence and for influencing others. That this writing has such a pronounced effect on other women and such an unsettling effect on men suggests that it can be an effective tool to subvert oppressive patriarchal demands and expectations. While Dr. Stanchon’s alleged disgust at the thought of female sexual desire and insubordination ostensibly encourages a similarly conservative reaction on the part of the reader, what lurks beneath Dr. Stanchon’s misogyny and racism is an awareness of the threat that women pose to patriarchy should they decide to disregard cultural mandates and act on their own initiative. What the story thus illustrates is the panic that the thought of such a prospect elicits in men and the lengths they will go to ensure their continued dominance over women and, in the case of white men, ethnic minorities.

 Gothic tales in general are always about digging things up—bodies, family secrets, repressed memories—and shining the light of day on them. The three stories addressed in this chapter are exemplary in this respect, in both literal and figurative forms. In Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ the infant’s skeleton that literally resurfaces from the dead water of an old well in the basement and the woman’s skeleton found entwined in the roots of a massive vine offer mute testimony to the crimes that took place within the house and allegorize the varying forms of abuse and oppression to which women and children are subject in patriarchal culture. In Atherton’s strange and haunting ‘‘The Bell in the Fog’’ (which has a belle but not a bell), the hidden story that comes to light concerns the stifling of Lady Mortlake (whose name itself is a suggestive portmanteau word of death and water) and the attempts of the ‘‘great author,’’ Orth, to transplant Blanche Root from her native soil to his garden, where instead of growing wild, he can (with more than a touch of Hawthorne’s Doctor Rappaccini) prune and sculpt her according to his tastes. And in Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied,’’ what are unearthed are hidden letters composed using what Ward might consider a ‘‘different alphabet’’—a woman’s letters considered obscene by male authority figures (a doctor and a priest) due to their explicitly sexual nature and threatening because of the willfulness and sensuality their mere presence in the house provokes from other women.

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But what these stories also dig up and expose to the light are the inadequacies of the masculine literary tradition to represent women’s needs and desires. When the bodies of mother and child are uncovered in Gilman’s ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ what is also revealed is that Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne and Pearl are not living in some European country but rather are buried in shallow graves—and Gilman’s literary autopsy concludes that patriarchy killed them. When, in Atherton’s ‘‘The Bell in the Fog,’’ Orth, ensconced in his Chillingworth estate, decides that he is going to adopt a child that already has a mother and a family so that she can be raised according to his predilections—‘‘written’’ to conform to his beliefs about women—Atherton shows us the predatory nature of a masculine literary tradition that appropriates and scripts femininity to suit masculine conceptions. Blanche Root is simultaneously Isabel Archer, Pansy, and Hawthorne’s Pearl—and that she chooses her mother and her family over being shut up in Chillingsworth with Atherton’s James/Osmond synthesis constitutes a rejection of a literary tradition that has represented women as pawns and playthings for men. And, most damningly, when Olive’s lustful letters are unearthed in Bacon’s ‘‘The Unburied,’’ what also comes to the surface are the facts of female sexuality, the erotics of writing, and the power of literature to instill subversive thoughts. In these stories, what haunts is writing itself—both in the sense of an American literary tradition that had grudgingly made a place for women as authors of ‘‘potboilers’’ but excluded them from consideration as great authors, and in the sense of the uncanny potency that writing presents to influence others, instill new ideas, and provoke responses. As such, these stories are emblematic of the unacknowledged tradition of the American Female Gothic in which American women—to varying extents in concert with one another—appropriated and redeployed conventions of the Male Gothic in order to express female-specific anxieties and to contest various forms of gender oppression. What consideration of these tales makes clear is not only that, contra the prevailing wisdom, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women did write supernatural tales in large numbers, but also that they put the Gothic to work with very specific purposes in mind— among them to foreground violence against women and oppressive gender expectations; exploitation of the working class; alternative configurations of sexual desire; and the gaps, omissions, and stereotypes of the male-dominated literary tradition. This is what I refer to as ‘‘scare tactics’’—using the supernatural for implicit or explicit political purposes—and directed by

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these talented American women, the ghosts that flit in and out of the American Female Gothic effectively materialize the ‘‘terror of the usual,’’ the bone-chilling awareness that what nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women had to fear most was not the irruption of the supernatural, but rather the everyday forms of violence to which women are prone under patriarchy. These haunting tales point to a legacy of violence and it is now time that they too see the light of day.

Coda The Decline of the American Female Gothic

The overriding premise of this study has been that between roughly 1850 and 1930, American women, often in dialogue with one another, produced a coherent body of supernatural fiction that used conventions of the Gothic to express specifically female anxieties and desires. In story after story, authors including Spofford, Stowe, Austin, Gilman, Brown, Bacon, Pangborn, Wharton, Freeman, Glasgow, Hull, and many others put ghosts to work, so to speak, in the service of women, demonstrating that what women feared most was not the unknown but what one may consider as the ‘‘terrors of the usual’’—that is, the roles women were obligated to play and the demands that were made on them. In their supernatural literature, American women foreground the forms of violence to which they were subject in patriarchal culture; chafe against their limited autonomy; articulate their anxieties related to marriage, motherhood, authorship, and the developing American capitalist economy; and express alternative configurations of social and erotic longing. My argument here is that these stories need to be examined together as a body that I am calling the American Female Gothic, a specifically feminist intervention in American literary history. With Barbara Patrick, I assert that our knowledge of not only the American Gothic tradition, but of the American literary heritage more generally, is incomplete if we continue to ignore the contributions of American female Gothicists (‘‘Invisible’’ 8). But what happened to this tradition after 1930? Where did the tradition go? The prevailing critical opinion is that ghost stories in general went into decline in the third decade of the twentieth century and a variety of reasons are adduced to explain the ebb in supernatural output, including women’s rights advances that obviated the need to veil cultural critique, the increasing influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, and a decline in the respectability of the supernatural tale—to which one must also add the changing configuration of the literary marketplace, the economic impact of the American 194

The Decline of the American Female Gothic 195

Great Depression, and a changing world view as a result of increasing technologization of contemporary American culture. Let’s consider these explanations one at a time. As I note in the introduction to this study, the rise of the American Female Gothic was influenced by a variety of cultural factors, including restricted professional opportunities for women, the need for many women to earn an income following the American Civil War, the expansion of the publishing industry and a generally permissive attitude toward women’s participation in it as authors, social taboos against women critiquing patriarchal culture directly, and a climate intensely preoccupied with Spiritualism and other occult phenomena. The first explanation for the waning of the American Female Gothic in the 1930s is that, as Alfred Bendixen details, following World War I, as women made steady strides toward social equality, taboos against speaking directly eased and ‘‘covert investigations of psychosexual themes became less necessary’’ (Haunted Women 8)—ideas once considered radically subversive became more accepted and what once needed to be disguised or muted could be expressed directly. What follows from this is the proposal that women therefore didn’t need to disguise social critique or embed it within a fictional form. Connected to this expansion of expressive opportunity, Kerr, Crowley, and Crow also note that the popularization of psychoanalysis marked a change in the way consciousness was imagined by writers as well as psychologists, ‘‘a change that undermined the philosophical and cultural bases both of a shared sense of reality and of a literature reflecting that reality’’ (Haunted Dusk 8). Kerr, Crowley, and Crow develop this point by way of a quotation from Tzvetan Todorov: ‘‘There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms’’ (qtd. in Haunted Dusk 9, brackets in original). The idea here again is that increasingly over the course of the twentieth century, women could express their anxieties and concerns directly rather than having to rely on more muted expressions. In addition to this easing of taboos against addressing directly both the disenfranchised status of women in American culture and psychosexual themes, one must also note in relation to the proposed waning of the supernatural tale in the 1930s increasing professional opportunities for women in fields other than authorship and teaching, as well as the changing configuration of the literary marketplace. Throughout the nineteenth century, options for women to earn an income were severely limited and many women

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turned to authorship because few other options were available. As Carl Degler details, however, both legal and social restrictions against women working outside the home in a variety of professions eased steadily throughout the end of the nineteenth century, and this expansion of opportunities continued in the twentieth. Therefore, where women once might have turned to the pen to earn a living because few other options presented themselves, they now could seek financial remuneration in other areas. What additionally might have compelled women to do something other than write for a living was the dichotomization of literature during this period into ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘popular’’ and the disparagement of particular genres as lowbrow, including the supernatural tale. Whereas the writing of a ghost story in the nineteenth century could be a respectable enterprise, supernatural tales in the 1930s and 1940s were relegated largely to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (Bendixen, Haunted Women 9)—many of which seldom published works by women. Gwen Neary adds to this that the Great Depression of the 1930s replaced the social progress of the 1920s with the bare necessity of survival and the ‘‘maintenance of the status quo’’ for many women (10). The question of why attitudes changed regarding supernatural tales is an interesting one. Both Donald Ringe and Kerr, Crowly, and Crow suggest that developments in the field of science replaced an openness to the possibility of occult experience in the nineteenth century with a new skepticism in the twentieth. For Ringe, nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization reinforced an American tendency toward rationalism that delimited possibilities for Gothic reverie (177). For Kerr, Crowly, and Crow, advances in the physical sciences that disclosed the existence of a ‘‘suprasensory reality knowable to humans’’ undermined a normative sense of reality that they propose is essential to the composition of an effective ghostly tale: ‘‘In the absence of the normative sense of the ‘real,’ which had always been [the supernatural tale’s] point of departure as well as the object of its questioning, the supernatural could no longer provoke the requisite ‘hesitation’ in the reader’ ’’ (8–9). In their genealogy of the uncanny tale, the supernatural tale evolved in the twentieth century into either Kafkaesque surreal fiction or psychoanalytical case histories (9). Julia Briggs notes in relation to British supernatural fiction that ghost stories beginning in the 1920s seem to demonstrate what she refers to, ironically, as ‘‘inhibitions.’’ She notes that in the wake of both World War I and Freudian psychoanalysis, the ghost stories of this period demonstrate elegance and wit but avoid a serious engagement with the profound subjects of life and death, body and soul, the nature of evil, and the place of mankind in the universe (23).

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Just as the rise of the American Female Gothic was the result of a confluence of cultural forces, its purported decline can also be attributed to a combination of factors having to do with changes in the literary marketplace, social attitudes toward women, and general shifts in American attitudes concerning the supernatural and human psychology. Although supernatural fiction underwent a transformation in the 1930s in which it shifted away from veiled expression of feminist critique, however, assertions concerning its decline or demise have failed to take into consideration the supernatural output in the 1930s through the 1960s of American female authors, including Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Catherine Lucille Moore, Allison V. Harding, Dorothy Quick, Jeanne de Lavigne, and, notably, Shirley Jackson.1 There is still work to be done on the supernatural fiction of American women in the middle decades of the twentieth century; it may turn out not only that there are substantially more supernatural stories by women during the period than has been acknowledged, but also that this body of fiction may have its own set of recurring themes. Such fiction will also need to be addressed in relation to twentieth-century cinema. It may be the case that ghostly women disappear from fiction during the middle decades of the twentieth century only to ‘‘rematerialize’’ in Hollywood motion pictures such as I Married a Witch (1942), The Uninvited (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and many of Val Lewton’s 1940s supernatural thrillers. In addition to acknowledging the contributions to supernatural fiction by American women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and attending to the role of cinema in transforming ideas concerning representations of ghosts, any attention to twentieth-century supernatural fiction by American women will need to pay careful attention to the marked end-of-the-century resurgence of uncanny themes in the works of authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Alison Lurie, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Joanna Russ, and most especially in work by ethnic American women, including Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Christina Garcia, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, and Nora Okja Keller. In her analysis of supernatural themes in the work by contemporary ethnic American women, Kathleen Brogan observes that Erdrich, Morrison, Garcia, and others use ghosts to give expression to the ways in which women and minorities have been silenced, traumatized, and distanced from their traditions. What Brogan’s analysis suggests is that what I 1 One could add to this list British women authors including Cynthia Asquith, Marjorie Bowen, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Elizabeth Howard, and Margery Lawrence.

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have identified as the American Female Gothic did not by any means disappear in the 1930s. Rather, its subversive potential has been reclaimed most especially by contemporary ethnic women who put ghosts to work in latetwentieth- and now twenty-first-century American literature to contest the ways in which minorities are ‘‘ghosted,’’ in much the same way that their Female Gothic forebears did in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to articulate anxieties related to the place of women in general in the United States. What the supernatural output of contemporary ethnic American women attests to is something Victorian and Edwardian women knew well: the usefulness Gothic conventions provide for articulating cultural critique in a nondogmatic—but often extremely visceral—manner. American literature, it turns out, is haunted by its own tradition of the Female Gothic, one that runs from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day. No complete or accurate understanding of the development not just of the American Gothic and women’s fiction but of American literature more generally is possible without taking into consideration the ways in which American women engaged with and have continued to manipulate supernatural themes in order to articulate specifically female concerns. It is only by paying attention to their ghosts that we can begin to acknowledge the impact of American women on the life of the American literary tradition.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 32n10 Alcott, Louisa May, 5, 15, 41n20 Abbot’s Ghost, or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation, The, 5 ‘‘Behind a Mask: Or, a Woman’s Power,’’ 109n4 ‘‘A Whisper in the Dark,’’ 41n20 All the Year Round, 5 American Society for Psychical Research, 6 Ammons, Elizabeth, 83, 142–43n3, 143, 151–52, 153 animals, abuse of, 47, 51–52, 54 apparitional lesbianism, 23, 138–39, 142, 153, 161, 171. See also Castle, Terry; sexual preference Arie`s, Philippe, 9 Asquith, Cynthia, 197n1 Atherton, Gertrude, 15, 23, 24, 100n10, 172, 173, 179–85, 179n5, 191, 192 ‘‘The Bell in the Fog,’’ 173, 179– 85, 191, 192 The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, 23, 179n5, 180 Black Oxen, 179n5 The Conqueror, 179n5 ‘‘The Dead and the Countess,’’ 100n10 The Fog Horn, 179n5 Idle Forties, 179n5 The Splendid, 179n5 Atlantic Monthly, 5, 24, 28, 28n4, 29, 29nn6–7, 30n8, 31, 42, 42n21, 70, 70n14, 108n2, 142, 155, 172

Auerbach, Nina, 109n4 Austen, Jane, 145 Austin, Mary, 15, 22, 24, 83, 84, 96–99, 103, 104, 109n4, 172, 194 Lost Borders, 96–97 ‘‘The Pocket-Hunter’s Story,’’ 22, 83, 84, 96–99, 103, 104 ‘‘The Readjustment,’’ 97n8, 109n4 authorship, anxieties concerning, 23, 136–37, 137n1, 173, 185, 190–91, 194 Bachelard, Gaston, 58–59n3, 59n4 Bacon, Josephine Daskam, 15, 15n25, 22, 23, 41–42n20, 106, 118–22, 119n9, 122n10, 131, 134, 135, 137, 173, 174, 185–93, 194 ‘‘Childen, The,’’ 22, 106, 118–22, 122n10, 131, 134, 135, 137, 186 ‘‘Gospel, The,’’ 41–42n20 Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon, The, 119, 119n9, 186 ‘‘Unburied, The,’’ 23, 173, 174, 185–93 Whom the Gods Destroyed, 119n9 Bailey, Dale, 56, 56n2 Banta, Martha, 182n7 Barnes, Maria, 41n20 Basham, Diana, 10n17 Bates, Katherine, 131n14 Baym, Nina, 3, 3n3, 86, 86n2, 90, 118n8, 137 Beadle’s Monthly, a Magazine of Today, 42n21

219

220 Index Beauvoir, Simone de, 13 Becker, Susanne, 13 Bednarowski, Mary Farrell, 10n17 Bendixen, Alfred, 4, 4n4, 15n25, 18n30, 28n3, 29, 29nn6–7, 30n8, 40, 59, 63, 134, 135, 180, 195 Bennet, Judith M., 140n2 Biamonte, Gloria A., 176 Bible, criticism of, 6 Bierce, Ambrose, 2n2 bigamy, 43, 54 Bleiler, E. F., 4–5, 5n6 Blithe Spirit, 197 Bonner, Robert, 19 Bookman, 70n14 Boston Authors’ Club, 24, 172 Boston marriage, 141, 155, 165. See also sexual preference Bowen, Marjorie, 197n1 Bradley, Mary, 100n10 Braude, Ann, 10nn17–18, 36–37, 36n18, 111 Bremer, Sidney H., 70n14 Briggs, Julia, 2n1, 7, 15n26, 196 Brite, Poppy Z., 197 Brogan, Kathleen, 15n25, 17, 197–98 Bronte¨, Charlotte, 26, 26n1, 36n15, 145, 151 Bronte¨, Emily, 26, 26n1, 151 Brown, Alice, 15, 15n25, 22, 24, 29, 41– 42n20, 138, 139, 141, 154–62, 154n8, 164, 165, 170, 172, 194 Children of Earth, 154 Country Neighbors, 154n8 High Noon, 155 ‘‘There and Here,’’ 22, 41–42n20, 154–62, 164, 165, 170 Brown, Charles Brockden, 2n2 Brown, Katherine Holland, 122n11 Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 41–42n20 Cable, George Washington, 91 capitalism, 7n11, 21–22, 67–69, 69n12, 71, 74, 81, 82–104, 105, 138, 194

Carpenter, Lynette, 4, 8n12, 15n25, 19, 20n33, 28n2 Carroll, Bret E., 6, 111 Cary, Alice, 15, 15n25, 21–22, 41– 42n20, 83, 84–91, 96, 97, 99, 103–4, 137 ‘‘Ghost Story Number I,’’ 41–42n20 ‘‘Ghost Story Number III,’’ 22, 83, 96, 99, 103–4, 111n5, 137 Castells, Manuel, 65 Castle, Terry, 9–10, 9n15, 23, 138–39, 142, 153, 154, 160, 161, 163, 171 Cavaliero, Glen, 8n13 Century Magazine, 70, 100, 108n2 Chandler, Marilyn, 59 Chi, Hsin Ying, 58–59n3 Chicago Tribune, 70 Child, Lydia Maria, 14, 188n11 children, abuse of, 42–45, 54, 176–79, 191. See also motherhood Christie, Agatha, 197n1 cinema, 197 Cisneros, Sandra, 197 Civil War (American), 4, 7–8, 14, 61n5, 83, 89, 111, 195 Clark, Genevieve, 122n11 class, social, 6n8, 21, 42, 69n12, 79, 83, 84–96, 99–104, 137 Clingham, Clarice Irene, 109n4 Comer, Cornelia A. P., 15n25, 122n11, 131n13 compulsory heterosexuality, 61, 71, 138, 166 consolation literature, 20n33 Cooke, Rose Terry, 22, 24, 29, 29n7, 138, 139, 141, 142–43n3, 143nn4–5, 142–54, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 172 ‘‘How Celia Changed Her Mind’’ and Selected Stories, 143 ‘‘My Visitation,’’ 22, 142–54, 144n7, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165 Our Famous Women, 29, 29n7 ‘‘Three Ghosts,’’ 100n10

Index 221 copyright legislation, 5 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 3n3, 136–37, 162n11 Counselman, Mary Elizabeth, 197 Cowie, Alexander, 2n2 Cox, Michael, 5n6 Craddock, Charles Egbert. See Murfree, Mary Noailles Crane, Stephen, 103 Crewe, Jonathan, 57 Crow, Charles L., 2n2, 3, 8n13, 186n10, 195, 196 Crowley, John W., 3, 8n13, 195, 196 Cult of True Womanhood, 56, 76, 107, 114. See also separate spheres, doctrine of Cummins, Maria Susanna, 3, 87 Curtis, Alice Turner, 34n11 Dacre, Charlotte, 30 Dalby, Richard, 15n26 Dalke, Anne, 28n3 Darwinism, 4, 6 Davidson, Cathy N., 2n2, 17n28, 137 Davis, M. E. M., 41n20, 56–57n2 ‘‘At La Glorieuse,’’ 131n13 ‘‘A Room on the Roof,’’ 41n20, 56–57n2 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 56n2, 87 Dawson, Emma Frances, 15, 34n11 Day, William Patrick, 7n11 death, gendering of, 10, 10n18 Defoe, Daniel, 161 Degler, Carl N., 76, 107, 196 DeLamotte, Eugenia, 11–12, 26n1, 56n1, 74 Denison, Mary, 41–42n20, 56–57n2 Dickens, Charles, 4–6, 4n4, 5n6 Dickerson, Vanessa D., 2n1, 7n11, 8n13, 16n27 Dickinson, Emily, 29n7, 165, 185 Diderot, Denis, 139 Dijkstra, Bram, 109n4 Dock, Julie Bates, 18

domestic fiction, 3, 3n3 Donovan, Josephine, 36, 90n5 Doody, Margaret Anne, 11 Dorr, Sarah, 56–57n2 Douglas, Ann, 3n3, 117 Downey, Jean, 142–43n3 Dunbar, Oliva Howard, 15, 22, 56n2, 106, 108n3, 109n4, 111–14, 116–17, 135 ‘‘The Long Chamber,’’ 56n2, 109n4 ‘‘The Shell of Sense,’’ 22, 106, 116–17, 135 Dyman, Jenni, 52, 53, 101, 102 Elbert, Monika M., 162n11 Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 13, 13n21, 26n1, 56n1 Emerson, Edward Waldo, 59n4 Eppard, Philip B., 91n6, 92n7 Erdrich, Louise, 197 Faderman, Lillian, 139 fathers, fear of. See patriarchy Fedorko, Kathy A., 46, 48, 52, 53 Female Gothic, 1, 10–14, 17n29, 21, 24–25, 26n1, 27, 33, 35n13, 41, 41n19, 44, 46, 52, 55, 56, 56n1, 57, 58, 74, 80–81, 82, 83, 103–4, 105, 135, 172, 173, 176–77, 183–84, 192– 93, 194–95, 197, 198 British tradition of, 2, 10–14, 26n1, 30, 52, 55, 172 confronting the maternal, 11, 14 as conservative, 11–12, 12n20 decline of, 194–98 fear of femininity, 11, 14 as radical, 11, 12–14, 13n21, 14n23, 198 feminism, 10, 18, 19, 37, 143n5, 147, 166, 179 connections to Spiritualism, 37 Gothic feminism, 14n23 victim feminism, 14n23

222 Index Fern, Fanny (Sarah Payton Willis), 19, 83, 107, 185 Fetterley, Judith, 23n34, 28nn3–4, 29n6, 84, 85, 142–43n3, 143 Fick, Thomas H., 15n25, 28n3 Fiedler, Leslie, 2n2 Fields, Annie, 24, 172 Fisher, Benjamin F., 5n6 Fitz, Stephanie, 142–43n3, 143nn4–5, 144n7, 152, 153 Foucault, Michel, 139 Frank Leslie’s Popular Magazine, 5 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 15, 24, 26n1, 29–30n7, 56n2, 100n10, 131– 35, 132n15, 154n8, 172, 188n11, 194 ‘‘The Hall Bedroom,’’ 56n2 ‘‘The Jade Bracelet,’’ 188n11 ‘‘The Lost Ghost,’’ 106, 131–35, 132n15 ‘‘The Shadows on the Wall,’’ 56n2, 100n10 ‘‘The Southwest Chamber,’’ 56n2 ‘‘The Vacant Lot,’’ 56n2 ‘‘The Wind in the Rosebush,’’ 131n14 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 8n12, 57, 179. See also psychoanalysis; uncanny, the Fuller, Henry B., 59n4 Galaxy, 108, 108n2, 142 Garcia, Christina, 197 Garland, Hamlin, 59n4, 71, 81 Gaul, Theresa Strouth, 28n3 Gautier, The´ophile, 139 Gehrman, Jennifer A., 91 ghost and justice, 17, 45, 46, 54, 55, 105 as metaphor, 16–17, 16n27, 17, 18, 18n30, 27, 63n7, 100, 138–39 naturalness of, 19–20, 37, 38, 124– 25, 130–31 powers of, 17 as protector, 17, 122–31, 122n11 relation to guilt, 31–35, 32n10

as wish-fulfillment fantasy, 17 See also supernatural fiction ghost stories. See supernatural fiction gift annuals, 62, 107 Gilbert, R. A., 5n6 Gilbert, Sandra M., 12, 56, 58–59n3, 185 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 15, 18, 23, 26n1, 34n11, 57, 166, 173, 174–79, 174n1, 191, 192, 194 ‘‘Clifford’s Tower,’’ 177 ‘‘The Giant Wisteria,’’ 18, 23, 34n11, 173, 174–79, 174n1, 191, 192 ‘‘Old Water,’’ 177 ‘‘The Rocking-Chair,’’ 174n1 ‘‘The Unwatched Door,’’ 174n1 ‘‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’’ 18, 57, 174, 174n1, 175, 176 Glasgow, Ellen, 109n4, 114n6, 194 ‘‘Dare’s Gift,’’ 114n6 ‘‘The Past,’’ 114n6 ‘‘The Shadowy Third,’’ 109n4 ‘‘Whispering Leaves,’’ 122n11, 188n11 Godey’s Lady’s Magazine, 1, 92n7 Gold, Eva, 28n3 Gordon, Avery, 58, 71 Gothic American tradition of, 2–3, 2n2, 14, 14n24, 20 conventions of, 32, 35, 99, 102, 105, 135, 143–44, 146, 151, 168, 171, 183 as male centered, 2, 2n2, 14n24, 30, 56n2, 173, 179, 184–85, 186n10, 192–93 See also Female Gothic; supernatural fiction Great Depression (American), 195, 196 Grimke´, Angelina, 188n11 Griswold, Rufus W., 84 Gubar, Susan, 12, 56, 58–59n3, 185 Guiney, Louise, 141, 155

Index 223 Halbeisen, Elizabeth K., 29n6 Halperin, David, 65n9 Halttunen, Karen, 82 Harding, Allison V., 197 Harper’s Magazine, 5, 59, 70, 112, 142, 143, 155, 166n13 Harris, Joel Chandler, 91 Harris, Susan K., 12 Harte, Bret, 91 Hartwell, David, 174 Hawthorne, Hildegaard, 41–42n20, 111n5, 122n10 ‘‘Legend of Sonora, A,’’ 41–42n20 ‘‘Perdita,’’ 131n14 ‘‘There Shall Be No Misunderstanding,’’ 111n5 ‘‘Unawares,’’ 122n10 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2n2, 4, 56n2, 162, 173, 176–79, 180, 184–85, 191, 192 ‘‘Rappaccini’s Garden,’’ 191 The Scarlet Letter, 173, 176–79, 180, 184–85, 192 Twice-Told Tales, 162 Heller, Janet Ruth, 102 Heller, Tamar, 13, 13n21 Hermann, Claudine, 65 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 28n4, 29, 162 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 13, 14n23 Holland, Anna, 41–42n20, 114n6 home, as prison, 13n21, 14, 21, 46, 51– 55, 56–57, 56n1, 58–59n3, 65n9, 73, 76, 80–81, 138. See also Female Gothic; patriarchy homosexuality. See sexual preference Hooper, Lucy H., 34n11 Howard, Elizabeth, 197n1 Howells, Coral Ann, 12 Howells, William Dean, 24, 142–43n3, 172 Hoyt, Anna, 21, 26, 27, 42–45, 54, 55, 82, 137

‘‘The Ghost of Little Jacques,’’ 21, 26, 27, 42–45, 46, 54, 137 ‘‘Was It Insanity?’’ 42n21 Hull, Helen, 23, 56n2, 138, 139, 141, 166–71, 194 ‘‘Clay-Shuttered Doors,’’ 23, 56n2, 166–71 Hume, Robert D., 7n10 Humphrey, Zephine, 118n8 I Married a Witch, 197 immigration, 6, 6n8 incest, 30, 34–35, 86n2, 178n3 industrialism, 6, 6n8, 7n11, 81, 82–83, 95, 196 Irving, Washington, 2n2, 4, 4n4, 186n10 Irwin, Inez Haynes, 111n5 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 61n5 Jackson, Rosemary, 4n4, 16n27 Jackson, Shirley, 197 James, Henry, 4n4, 7n9, 24, 139, 172, 173–74, 179–81, 184–85, 192 Portrait of a Lady, 173–74, 180, 181, 184–85, 192 Stories of the Supernatural, 182n7 The Turn of the Screw, 182n7 Janvrin, Mary W., 188n11 Jaycox, Faith, 97 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 15, 24, 26n1, 36n14, 111n5, 154n8, 172 Kahane, Claire, 11 Kaplan, Amy, 17n28, 136 Kasson, Joy S., 109n4 Kaye, Richard A., 102 Keating, Gail C., 142, 143n4 Keife, Katherine, 111n5 Keller, Nora Okja, 197 Kelley, Mary, 3n3, 106, 136, 137, 137n1, 162n11, 185 Kerr, Howard, 3, 7n9, 8n13, 36n15, 195, 196 Kessler, Carol Farley, 162n11

224 Index Kilgour, Maggie, 11, 12, 56n1 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 197 Kleitz, Katherine, 142–43n3 Knight, Denise D., 174n1, 176, 178, 178n3 Kolmar, Wendy K., 4n5, 8n12, 15n25, 19, 20n33, 28n2 Koppelman, Susan, 144n7 Kristeva, Julia, 13–14n22 Lacan, Jacques, 68n11 Ladies Home Journal, 155 Ladies’ Repository, 84, 88 Langill, Esther F., 154–55n8 Lavigne, Jeanne de, 197 Lawrence, Margery, 197n1 Ledger, 19 Lee, Sophia, 13, 26n1, 30 Leeuwen, Frederike van, 12, 13 lesbianism. See sexual preference Le´vy, Maurice, 7n10 Lewis, Matthew ‘‘Monk,’’ 30 Lewton, Val, 197 Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, 92n7, 155 Literary World: A Monthly Review of Current Literature, 92n7 Little Room Club, 24, 59, 59n4, 70, 71, 81, 172 Lloyd-Smith, Alan Gardner, 18n30 local color fiction. See regionalism Logan, Lisa, 28n3 Lovecraft, H. P., 2n2, 14n24 Lowell, James Russel, 30n8, 31 Lundie, Catherine A., 5n7, 15n25, 18n30, 28n2, 105, 107–8, 109n4, 117–18, 119n9, 126, 127, 130, 134 Lurie, Alison, 197 marriage, 1, 13, 18, 18n30, 22, 39, 40– 41, 105–17, 135, 138, 143, 143n5, 150, 152, 158, 194 Marshall, Paule, 197 materialism, 7

Maturin, Charles, 30 Maurier, Daphne du, 197n1 Mellor, Anne K., 13 Melville, Herman, 2n2, 77–80, 173 Miller, Patricia McClelland, 166 Modelski, Tania, 12, 13n21 Modernism, 20 Moers, Ellen, 11, 26n1 Moore, Catherine Lucille, 197 Moore, R. Laurence, 6, 10n17, 111 Morrison, Toni, 197 motherhood, 18, 18n30, 22, 76–77, 80, 86, 86n2, 88, 105–6, 110, 117–35, 118n8, 131nn13–14, 138, 174–79, 194 murder, 30, 33, 34, 34n11, 43–45, 54– 55, 176–79, 191 Murfree, Mary Noailles, 22, 83, 84, 91– 96, 91n6, 97, 99, 103–104, 137 In the Tennessee Mountains, 92, 92n7 ‘‘The Romance of Sunrise Rock,’’ 83, 84, 91–96, 99, 103–4, 137 Mussell, Kay, 2n2 Naturalism (literary genre), 20 Naylor, Gloria, 197 Neary, Gwen Margaret, 15n25, 16n27, 17, 19n32, 20, 28n2, 196 Nelson, Geoffrey K., 6 New Englander, 30n8 New England Magazine, 174 Newitz, Annalee, 83 Newlyn, Evelyn, 143n5 New York World, 112 North American Review, 30n8, 31, 154n8 Oates, Joyce Carol, 197 Oedipus (mythology), 13–14n22, 30 Omaha World Herald, 70 Opfermann, Susanne, 28n3 Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, 5, 92n7 Ozick, Cynthia, 197

Index 225 Pangborn, Georgia Wood, 15, 15n25, 22, 34n11, 41–42n20, 106, 114n6, 122, 122n10, 126–31, 131n13, 132, 134, 135, 137, 194 ‘‘Andy Macpherson’s House,’’ 34n11 ‘‘Broken Glass,’’ 22, 106, 122, 126– 31, 131n13, 132, 134, 135, 137 ‘‘Cara,’’ 122n10, 131n14 ‘‘The Fourth Watch,’’ 131n14 ‘‘The Ghost Flower,’’ 34n11 ‘‘The Ice Storm,’’ 114n6 ‘‘The Rescue,’’ 127 ‘‘The Substitute,’’ 41–42n20, 127 Parish, Amy, 188n11 patriarchy, 1, 12–13, 12n20, 13– 14nn21–22, 14, 16–17, 18, 18n30, 19, 21, 26, 27, 34–35, 41, 43, 45, 52– 55, 58, 64, 66, 77, 80–81, 82, 143, 143n5, 176–79, 184–85, 190–93, 194, 195 Patrick, Barbara Constance, 8n12, 15n25, 16n27, 18nn30–31, 19, 28n2, 41, 52, 63, 63n7, 70n14, 118, 135, 194 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 92n7 Peattie, Elia Wilkinson, 21, 22, 24, 56– 57n2, 57–58, 59n4, 69–81, 82, 83, 84, 106, 122–26, 127, 129, 130, 131, 131n13, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 170, 172, 173 ‘‘From the Loom of the Dead,’’ 22, 106, 122–26, 127, 129, 130, 131, 131n13, 132, 133, 134, 135 ‘‘The House That Was Not,’’ 21, 56–57n2, 57, 69–81, 83, 122, 137, 170, 173 The Precipice, A Novel, 70n14 The Shape of Fear and Other Ghostly Tales, 69, 70, 70n14, 122 ‘‘Their Dear Little Ghost,’’ 131n14 Peck, Ada, 131n13 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2n2, 5, 56, 56n2, 84, 139, 174n1

Poole, Ralph J., 139, 153, 154 Porte, Joel, 7n10 Pryse, Marjorie, 23n34 Psyche (mythology), 13–14n22 psychoanalysis, 4, 8–9, 8nn12–13, 9n15, 10, 18n30, 32n10, 179, 194, 195, 196 Putnam’s Magazine, 142 queer theory, 57, 65, 142, 170–71. See also space, queering of Quick, Dorothy, 197 race, 21, 88–91, 89n4, 97–98, 137, 187– 88, 188n11, 189–90 Radcliffe, Ann, 9–10, 12, 13, 13n21, 26, 26n1, 30 Radway, Janice, 11 Raftery, Judith, 70n14 rationalism, 4, 6–7, 196 Realism (literary genre), 20, 29n6, 46, 84, 85, 87, 103 Reeve, Clara, 13, 26n1 regionalism, 20n33, 29–30n7, 36, 89, 90n5, 142 repression. See psychoanalysis Restuccia, Frances L., 13, 13n21 Revolutionary War (American), 6 Reynolds, David S., 3n3 Rice, Anne, 197 Rich, Adrienne, 61, 138, 166 Ringe, Donald A., 2n2, 7n9, 14, 14n24, 196 Robbins, Sarah, 136 Roden, Frederick S., 140n2 Rogers, Laura, 84n1 Romanticism, 4n5, 6, 7n10, 9–10, 13, 14, 20, 28, 29, 29n6, 46, 84, 85, 179, 181 gendering of, 13, 29, 84, 181 Romer, Mrs., 34n11, 56n2 Rupp, Leila, 140n2 Russ, Joanna, 197 Ryan, Alan, 15n25

226 Index Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, 15, 15n25, 126, 141, 155, 160, 165, 166 Scarborough, Dorothy, 2n1, 7n9, 15n25 Scharnhorst, Gary, 174, 176, 177, 178n3 Scribner’s Magazine, 108n3, 142, 155, 162n10 Sedgwick, Catherine, 15n25 sensationalist fiction, 3n3, 29n6, 30 sentimental fiction, 3, 3n3, 20, 35, 87, 103, 107 sentimental power. See Tompkins, Jane separate spheres, doctrine of, 17n28, 76, 107, 107n1, 136, 137, 171 contestation of, 107, 107n1, 136, 137, 171 sexuality, female, 18, 18n30, 40, 186–91, 194 sexual preference, 22–23, 41n19, 137– 71, 140n2, 144n7, 194. See also apparitional lesbianism Shakespeare, William, 4n4, 30 Macbeth, 30 Sheldon, Lurana W., 1, 25, 34n11, 114n6 Shelley, Mary, 26, 26n1 Showalter, Elaine, 8n14, 17n29, 61n5 Smith, Allan Gardner, 46 Smith, Charlotte, 13 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 73, 76, 82, 83, 139, 151 Society for Psychical Research, 6, 7n9 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 5, 185 space, queering of, 21, 41n19, 55, 57– 58, 59–77, 79–81 spinsters, 60–61, 61n5, 64, 67–69, 141 Spiritualism, 6–7, 6n8, 7n9, 9n15, 10, 10n17, 11n19, 36–37, 36–37nn15– 17, 106, 110–11, 111n5, 172, 182n2, 195 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 5, 15, 21, 24, 26, 27–35, 28n2, 29nn6–7, 30n8, 38, 41, 41n20, 54, 55, 82, 84, 137, 172, 183, 194

The Amber Gods and Other Stories, 28, 28n4 ‘‘The Amber Gods,’’ 28n4, 29n7, 31n9, 109n4 ‘‘The Black Bess,’’ 34n11 ‘‘Circumstance,’’ 28n4, 29n7 ‘‘Her Story,’’ 41n20, 109n4 ‘‘In a Cellar,’’ 28n4, 29n7 ‘‘The Mad Lady,’’ 100n10 Sir Rohan’s Ghost, 5, 21, 24, 26, 27– 35, 30n8, 34n12, 37, 38, 41, 45, 46, 54, 137, 172, 183 Stern, Philip Van Doren, 7n10, 9n16 Stevenson, Fanny van der Grift, 111n5 Stockton, Frank Richard, 108n2 Stockton, Louise, 22, 106, 108–11, 108nn2–3, 112, 113, 115, 116–17, 135 ‘‘A Dead Vashti,’’ 22, 106, 108–11, 108n3, 112, 113, 115, 116–17, 135 story papers, 29. See also sensationalist fiction Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 15, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28n4, 35–41, 41nn19–20, 54, 55, 56n2, 82, 89, 172, 185, 194 ‘‘Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House,’’ 21, 35–41, 36n14, 41nn19–20, 45, 46, 54, 56n2 ‘‘The Ghost in the Mill,’’ 36n14 The Mayflower: Or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendents of the Pilgrims, 35 The Minister’s Wooing, 35 Oldtown Folks, 35 Pearl of Orr’s Island, 35, 36, 36n14 Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories, 35, 36, 36n14, 37 ‘‘Student’s Sea Story, A,’’ 36n14 ‘‘Tom Toothacre’s Ghost Story,’’ 36n14 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 35, 89, 90

Index 227 Sullivan, Jack, 2n1 supernatural fiction as Christmas tradition, 4–5, 16 differences between male-authored and female-authored, 19–20, 28, 28n2, 41, 44, 52, 55, 56, 77–80, 173–93 haunted houses, 56–58, 59–77, 80– 81, 100–3 popularity of, 3–10, 4n5, 5nn6–7, 6n8, 7nn9–11, 8nn12–13, 17, 196 relations among authors of, 23–24, 23n34, 172–93 relation to the Gothic, 20 respectability of, 4, 4n4, 194, 196 subversiveness of, 4n4, 198. See also Female Gothic waning of, 23 See also Female Gothic; ghost; gothic Sutherland, Duchess of, 36n15 Tan, Amy, 197 Thompson, G. R., 14, 14n24, 79, 86n2, 173 Todorov, Tzvetan, 195 Tompkins, Jane, 3n3, 20, 86, 89 Torok, Maria, 32n10 Toth, Susan Allen, 142–43n3, 154, 154n8 Trask, Katrina, 111n5 uncanny, the, 57, 58, 79, 80–81 Uninvited, The, 197 urbanization, 7n11, 81, 82, 87–88, 196 utilitarianism, 6 Vicinus, Martha, 139–41, 140n2 Voller, Jack G., 179–80 Vorse, Mary Horton, 15n25, 109n4 Waid, Candace, 52, 53 Walker, Cheryl, 142–43n3, 143n5

Walker, Dorothea, 154–55n8 Walker, Mary, 11n19, 37n17 Wallace, Diana, 18n30 Walpole, Horace, 30 Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 15, 22, 24, 29, 29n7, 37, 108n3, 111, 138, 139, 141, 142–43n3, 162–66, 162n11, 168, 172, 194 Beyond the Gates, 111n5, 162 The Gates Ajar, 111n5, 162 The Gates Between, 111n5, 162 Our Famous Women, 142–43n3 Sealed Orders, 162 ‘‘Since I Died,’’ 22, 108n3, 162–66, 168 Songs of the Silent World, 111n5 Warner, Susan, 3, 87 Weird Tales, 196 Welter, Barbara, 76, 107. See also Cult of True Womanhood Wharton, Edith, 15, 21, 22, 24, 26, 26n1, 27, 45–55, 83, 84, 99–104, 106, 110, 114–17, 114n6, 135, 137, 172, 186n10, 194 ‘‘Afterwards,’’ 22, 83, 84, 99–104, 110 The Age of Innocence, 46 The Custom of the Country, 46 ‘‘The Eyes,’’ 186n10 ‘‘The Fullness of Life,’’ 22, 106, 114–17, 135 The House of Mirth, 46 ‘‘Kerfol,’’ 21, 45–55 ‘‘Pomegranate Seed,’’ 109n4, 114n6 ‘‘Triumph of the Night,’’ 100n10 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 59n4, 84, 162 Williams, Anne, 13, 13–14n22, 26n1 Williams, A. Susan, 15n25 Willis, Sarah Payton. See Fern, Fanny Wilson, Mrs. Woodrow, 56–57n2, 114n6

228 Index Wilson-Jordan, Jacqueline Suzanne, 53 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 46 woman’s fiction. See Baym, Nina World War I, 195, 196 Wynne, Madeline Yale, 15, 21, 24, 57– 58, 59–69, 70, 70n14, 71, 74, 75, 76, 80–81, 82, 84, 170, 172 An Ancestral Invasion and Other Stories, 59n4

‘‘The Little Room,’’ 21, 24, 57, 59–69, 59n4, 69nn12–13, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 80–81, 170 The Little Room and Other Stories, 59 ‘‘The Sequel to the Little Room,’’ 61, 69n13 See also Little Room Club ˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 68n11 Z