by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)
The ghost may act as a symbol of the lost past, but it manifests itself in modern conditions. Newfangled electric lights do not dispel its presence; it haunts railways, modern flats, houses withdrawn from bustling streets. Within the city, the ghost is that which cannot be absorbed rationally, which cannot be taken by the blasé. Confronted with unavoidable presence (or its trace), the self is shocked into feeling, and out of logical thought.
Parallel to the haunting of the historical past is the idea that the ghost reveals adult life as suddenly being in correspondence with childhood fears. The theme is strong in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1890), where the company of male colleagues staves off a horrifying return to infantile dread in sleep. As the Irish writer Frank O’Connor (1903–1966) put it, talking more generally of Kipling’s work, but clearly evoking this particular tale: ‘If one were left alone, nightmare succeeded.’10 This was a further way in which ghostly horrors might seem atavistic. Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘Nightmare-Touch’ (1900) draws together the dread felt by primitive man and the night-fears of children. The dream itself, the night-terror, might similarly encroach, as in childhood, on the real world. M. R. James’s ‘ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” ’ (1904) informs us that for the storyteller the haunting here was brought to mind by a childhood memory; the narrator’s ‘Experto crede’ (see p. 270) intimates a personal involvement in the tale.
There are purely literary forms of the ghost story’s characteristic intrusions, in which the genre elements themselves might seem to be interventions. The reader may also become aware of the incursion of extraneous texts in the form of quotation and allusion. The key example of this would be that moment in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’ (1869) where Dr Hesselius pauses to read passage after passage from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, on the correspondence between the spiritual and material world, and for a moment one work haunts another.
Politically speaking, as has been often observed, the ghost story mirrors the imperial expansionism of the period and hence denotes the intrusion of the disturbingly ‘foreign’ into the comfortably domestic, hinting, as elsewhere, at their tacit interconnection. In the work of Kipling, and others, the colonized world was in any case imagined as the site for mystic horrors. For example, India could seem an uncanny place, replete with hidden secrets, dark beliefs and murky possibilities. The plot of W. W. Jacobs’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ turns on the arrival in Britain of an imperial property, one linked to fakirs and The Arabian Nights; the heroes’ family name of ‘White’ is perhaps a significant choice in this connection. Even in Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ there are such arrivistes: the gloom of ‘ombres chinoises’ (see p. 304) falls upon the domestic world.
Finally, the ghost raids our privacy. The haunting is a foray into the domestic realm. The very coldness of the ghost signals this; it enters like air from outside, and occupies that place in the house where the warmth of home falters. Ghosts are the intrusion – the link – between the private and the public. Their haunting demonstrates that this secure place is not sealed off, but lies open to others, to previous inhabitants, to strangers. In this sense, the ghost is a figure equivocally connected or contrasted with the domestic servant, also a sharer of the home who may or may not be counted as a part of the family. Certainly ghost stories frequently show an interest in such borderline figures, as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterward’, or the dependable or unreliable servants in tales by Robert Hichens, Edward Bulwer Lytton and Margaret Oliphant.
Most often, therefore, the intruded-on space is a house. There are of course many outdoors ghost stories – Algernon Blackwood specialized in them. Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’ occupies a transitional place, the haunted site being a now disused boundary between inside and outside. The haunted house nevertheless stands at the centre of the genre. There may be psychological reasons for this: after all, the house is a convenient symbol for the human mind, spatially imagined.
Curiously, such spooky residences also evoke other more social concerns. Very often, temporary residents occupy the haunted house, moving in and moving on, as in Bulwer Lytton’s ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ (1859), while the ghost itself – a more established tenant – stays put. In part, this follows from purely literary concerns: as ghost stories depend on shock, the ghost must be a discovery, just such a surprise as a new tenant might stumble on. However, such tales also fitted changing patterns of property ownership. A shifting population, estranged from lasting connection to place, could thrill themselves with tales where their own evanescence was displayed. It was not merely the increasing urbanization of Britain and America that provided the background for these spectral anxieties. It is notable that the haunted tenant is often someone returning from Britain’s colonies, a person displaced from ‘home’ by the processes of imperial expansion. Such fleeting inhabitants fitted the American situation too, as Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’ (1859) or O. Henry’s ‘The Furnished Room’ (1906) demonstrate. The house in Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ itself has its double, being one of two houses that Spencer Brydon, the tale’s hero, owns in downtown Manhattan: one a long-unvisited family home, filled with memories; the other, a place for rent.
The transient tenant discovers his rooms to be already furnished with a ghost. In such a circumstance, the renter finds himself the trespasser. As casual references in ‘The Open Door’ and ‘Afterward’ clarify, the ghost could also be seen as a charming and even fashionable form of fixture and fitting: nothing else than a ghost is wanted to make a property perfect. This modish response to the supernatural rubs up against the fact that the tenants – particularly Wharton’s (and, in ‘The Canterville Ghost’, Oscar Wilde’s) American leaseholders – are contemporary intrusions into the ‘long, long story’ of a British house’s past. In this way, the ghost tale brings into connection the modern, brief, fragmented forms of the present (exemplified in the short story itself) and lingering, haunted history.
As the nineteenth century progresses, the old Gothic properties, the abbeys, the ruins, the graveyards, the castles, are slowly replaced by modern scenes. Often the haunting takes place in anonymous, shabby, unspectacular neighbourhoods. The old settings represent the abiding: such ruins are places of rest and stasis, symbols of durability too, for all their being wrecked. The modern environment seems essentially temporary. If the haunted do occupy some ancient house, they do so as passing tenants, fixed-term renters. The new haunted houses are provisional, merely passing estates. The building boom of the 1890s flooded the great cities with new – and often empty – houses. In 1917, Dorothy Scarborough noted: ‘But as houses are so much less permanent now than formerly, ghosts would be at a terrible disadvantage if they had to be evicted every time a building was torn down.’11 In these transitory cities the ghosts resided as paradoxical manifestations of solidity.
THE HAUNTED
Who typically were the haunted? Callous lovers, governesses and lost travellers, certainly, but beyond those traditional groups, within the mass of stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two new kinds of victim emerge: the bachelor and the troubled family. Both are seen as abortive examples of domesticity. Into their compromised worlds the ghost comes, an undead symbol of their failures.
In the case of the committed bachelor, the ghost stands for his inability to connect with others. The heroes of tales by Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, Robert Hichens, M. R. James and Oliver Onions all endure a version of this fate. Hichens’s ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea’ (1900) stands as the archetypal account of such hauntings, where the ghost avenges a refusal to love. Such stories re-imagine the ghost as stalker, even as unrequited lover, as in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘The Cold Embrace’ (1860). Some of these bachelor ghost stories were written by men who were most likely themselves hiddenly homosexual. Perhaps in this group of tal
es the fears of men threatened by the social conformity of marriage could find a fitting symbol for their ambivalence.
For the bachelor, the ghost marks an end to privacy. Haunting is an incursion into the private zone, the home that defines itself by the absence of others, by the rejection of unwanted sharers of the space. Yet the haunting too is a private experience, located within the prison-cage of consciousness, where the spirit is only visible, touchable, audible to the haunted one. It is an invasion within the sense of the self. Only the reader shares that experience.
The alternative sets of modern victims are unhappy couples and beleaguered families. These haunted tend to appear in tales authored by women. Examples would include: Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Wind in the Rose-Bush’, Mary Austin’s ‘The Readjustment’ or Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterward’. Here the ghost points to the failure within a relationship. In Wharton’s tale, the wife discovers that in two senses she is domesticated with a horror: both the ghost that is only recognized as such afterwards, and the guilty, greedy husband she does not really know. Like most wives, Wharton tells us, the heroine of this tale never looked into what her husband does for a living. This willed blindness to the public life casts a spectral shadow over the private (rented) home.
For bachelors or confused relatives and spouses, being haunted offers a challenge to one’s ability to take in the finer elements of the situation. In the case of Henry James, the haunted one must needs be especially sensitive, an alert and perceptive observer, a ‘poor [pitiable, sensitive] gentleman’, as he puts it.12 The experience of the ghost was to be, after all, a dilemma for consciousness, for our faculty of interpretation.
This view of the ingredients necessary for a good ghost story would not be shared by all the writers in this volume. There is an ‘extrovert’ as well as an ‘introvert’ version of the form. For Edward Bulwer Lytton, for instance, the supernatural story is not about the numinous, it is about a struggle. Such tales present fear through a depiction of the resistance to it. Bulwer Lytton’s hero in ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ takes pistols and knives when he goes to encounter his ghosts. Such virile boldness tends to be a feature of the earlier nineteenth-century tales. By the end of the century, Henry James’s version of the form was triumphant. In the hands of Henry James and his fellow practitioners, the ghost story explored psychological complexity. These interests operated variously, offering diverse routes into the hinterland of consciousness.
For instance, in tales of madness such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’, the ultimate fear is that we are haunting ourselves. As Dorothy Scarborough remarks of ghosts: ‘We’d rather see than be one.’13 Entrapped in a peculiar vision of the world, Mr Jennings cannot flee from the evil familiar that dogs his steps, and that is either an objective spirit or his private hallucination. He is imprisoned with another; but what if that other is himself? That this ghost story, like so many, ends with self-murder should not surprise us. For in suicide the self treats itself as though it were another. Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ presents an analogous doubled self, and if the self here is so split, then by definition it is not single or coherent, and above all not limited to the present body. That of course is the central fear – and consolation – of the ghost story: the idea that we are not limited to the physical. The resistance to the spectral therefore acts as a clinging to earthly life and to the possession of our single body.
The self may also come under threat from the removal of its will. Sleepwalkers, the hypnotized and entranced are all recurrent figures in the period’s literature of terror. This absence of will also appears in some ghosts, when they are automatic figures, locked within recurrent action and appearance. Bulwer Lytton remarks of such ghosts that they give the impression of being ‘soul-less’. (Of course, the most terrifying ghosts are precisely those who do manifest a will, and one attuned to malevolence.) Elsewhere, in this regard, the reflex movements of the ghost are strangely paralleled in the haunted. Frequently in the ghost story the haunted one becomes a mere spectator of events. Such tales present merely a reaction to something seen or heard. But such reaction need not be passive. Much as the ghost story looked to a speculative and astute reader, so the tales themselves posited a rational hero and heroine, alive to the nuance of what they witness. They are busy with the task of understanding.
However, within the ghost story could be found other kinds of observer, whose astuteness was certainly not of a kind to impress Henry James. It is a feature of the genre that beasts should be particularly alive to the presence of a ghost. But why should animals be able to detect ghosts where we cannot? The belief forges a link between the bestial and the spiritual, one that bypasses the human that connects the two. Moreover, this link brings up the definition of the human by being on either side of the necessary limits that allow that definition: we are not animals; nor are we ghosts. In this sense, both animal and ghost (and monster) possess one thing in common: they are generally without language. It is startling how rarely in these stories we encounter a conversable spook. The silent ghost appears to have lost its words in the act of dying.
In Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Moonlit Road’ (1907), the ghost of Julia Hetman apparently talks, but her voice is channelled through the fictional medium Bayrolles. She speaks, but through another; the ghost’s words are sounded in another person’s mouth, possessing but not encompassing another’s voice. If Bayrolles is indeed some kind of pun on the French paroles or ‘words’ (as in the character Parolles in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well), then this may also be taken as Bierce alluding to the fact of speech, and its simultaneous presence within and radical alienation from the speaker (as paroles both loiter about and are not found in Bayrolles). Other stories play similar games. In ‘Green Tea’, we hear of the monkey’s voice, which interrupts Mr Jennings with dreadful blasphemies; yet this is a voice that cannot be quoted; it is in the tale, but never heard, never given the form of words.
If the ghost story does concern itself with the question as to what is a human being, it must do so primarily through an assertion that we, uniquely on this planet, are supposed to possess immortal souls. Some have described the monkey in ‘Green Tea’ as a Darwinian emanation, a symbol of our anxiety that no such distinguishing soul exists. It is surprising to discover how many ghost-story writers were Christians: Sheridan Le Fanu, Margaret Oliphant, Arthur Machen, M. R. James and R. H. Benson, to name only the most obvious examples. Yet no simple theological point of view adheres to the genre. The stories can suggest order, but also chaos; they can depict, as in incarnation, the interpenetration of the spiritual and physical worlds, but also a malignant and hostile universe. As many atheists, occultists and agnostics as Christians contributed to the form. However, questions of religious faith cling to such stories as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’ or Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881). Enlightened deists and modern agnostics come in for a tough time in some of the stories in this volume. The religious sceptic, or Sadducee, makes a good victim, since his scepticism rules out the idea that he might be just imagining his persecution. There were other ways to set out the tension between faith and doubt. Bulwer Lytton focuses on the relation between scientific belief and occult phenomena, describing scientific processes of investigation directed towards the metaphysical. As these two discourses grow confused and intertwined, a productive tension arises; we are in a region between two forms of understanding. Here, as in other stories, the conviction persists that science has not covered all the ground; a residue of inexplicability remains.
LAYING THE GHOST
M. R. James declared that the aim of his stories was to make the reader ‘pleasantly uncomfortable’.14 The comfort may come from the fact that the ghost story evades far worse fears: the horrors, the losses, the wars and tortures of the material world. Kipling really did see ‘shadows and things that were not there’, as he puts it in his autobiography, Some
thing of Myself (1936), but these were induced by the childhood breakdown brought on by the abuse visited upon him by his guardians at his foster-home in Southsea.15 His hallucinations were put down as ‘showing off’, and, as a further punishment, he was separated from his sister. Here was a darkness deeper than that of a mere spook. In that sense, the ghost story might be a way of talking about our confrontation with such actual nightmares, a getting around the censor by evoking instead the supplemental fear of other worlds.
Nonetheless in the strongest ghost stories a highly uncomforting sense of life itself as essentially nightmarish is plainly there. It is curious that such darkness should be triggered by such odd elements. The ghost story relies on associations, on a bag of tricks, a strange assembly of tropes, objects and atmospheres, of narrative twists and unaccountable turns. Such things would elicit fear in life, just as they do in fiction. These might include: disembodied sounds, scents without objects, a touch without a person; the muffled, the hidden, the obscure; someone staring at us from a long way off; the emaciated and the small; a mirror in the dark; a cellar chill; a shadow in an upstairs window; children and the accoutrements of childhood – clowns, dolls or puppets; the melancholy of dusk; bat-squeaks and beetles humming; footsteps behind; lonely places – woods or bare platforms; invisibility and darkness; the feeling of being watched; a thing unexpectedly there.
It would be a hard task to account for the reasons why such haunted properties should still terrify us. If listing them makes the ghost story seem a perfunctory or automatic affair, then nothing could be further from the truth. It is the diversity and plenitude of the form that stays with the reader, the fact that it so often and so brilliantly works. The range of great and talented writers attracted to the form is likewise staggering. If the great Gothic sin is curiosity, then that fault remains intimately entangled with the Romantic virtue of wonder. For Henry James, it was the fact that such stories both touched on ‘the blest faculty of wonder’ and also endowed wonder with a motive that formed the chief enticements of such tales. They permitted a perilous foray into enchantment; they were, and remain, the ‘most possible form of fairy tale’.16 They are expressions of pure art, and paths to a pure, if complicated, pleasure.