A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 90
material life ” (41). Much as in Irving ’ s “ The Tale of the German Student, ” ontological
uncertainty – the question, what world is this, and are there others? – is at the heart
of Poe ’ s supernaturally themed stories, among them “ Ligeia, ” “ Morella, ” “ Metzenger-
stein, ” “ A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, ” “ The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, ”
“ The Man of the Crowd, ” and “ The Fall of the House of Usher. ” We will deal briefl y
with “ Ligeia ” here – arguably the closest Poe comes to an actual ghost story.
In “ Ligeia, ” the narrator ’ s beautiful, accomplished, and mysterious bride, Ligeia,
sickens and dies, but not before cryptically communicating her belief that strength
of will can overcome death. The melancholic narrator remarries and his second wife,
Rowena, similarly falls ill. Attending to her, the narrator, who admits to having taken
opium, senses a presence in the room with him and Rowena, and sees – or thinks he
sees – strange drops of a ruby - colored liquid fall into Rowena ’ s cup of wine. There-
after, she fails and dies – only seemingly to revive. This happens multiple times until
Rowena arises and approaches him and the narrator discovers she apparently has grown
taller, her hair has turned from fair to black, and Ligeia ’ s eyes are staring back at him.
For Ringe, there is “ little doubt that we are intended to take literally the revivifi ca-
tion of Rowena ’ s corpse by the soul of Ligeia ” (135). While I ’ m a bit more circumspect
than Ringe – the narrator ’ s melancholic and drug - addled state seem to license doubt
– I do think “ Ligeia, ” like “ The Tale of the German Student, ” can be interpreted as
either foregrounding the irrational components of human psychology and thereby
critiquing our abilities to assess perceptual data objectively or as demonstrating the
insuffi ciency of science and logic to account for the strangeness of the universe – or
both. Either the narrator is hallucinating due to grief, madness, and drugs or “ Ligeia ”
returns fi rst as a ghost and then in the form of the possessed Rowena. In either case,
Age of Enlightenment presumptions about rationality and logic are undermined.
In contrast to Poe, the ghosts in the short fi ction of Nathaniel Hawthorne do not
so much challenge conventional epistemological frameworks as represent either the
world of the imagination or the grip of the past upon the present. Famously in the
“ Custom - House ” introduction to The Scarlet Letter , Hawthorne discusses the condi-
tions under which the imaginative faculties of the Romance writer are best stimulated
– moonlight transforms the familiar into a “ neutral territory, somewhere between the
real world and fairy - land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet ” (1372) and
it is here that ghosts enter as the author ’ s creative juices get fl owing.
In much of Hawthorne ’ s fi ction, however, ghosts, rather than representing the
liberation of the mind, stand for the skeletal reach of the past intruding into the
The Ghost Story
415
present, sometimes for good, mostly for evil. Both these poles are represented by two
inclusions in Hawthorne ’ s Twice - Told Tales : “ The Gray Champion ” and “ The White
Old Maid. ” In “ The Gray Champion, ” an old man perceived by many to be a ghost
emerges to challenge the tyrannical Sir Edmund Andros and possesses what seems to
be prophetic knowledge of the abdication from the throne of King James I. Described
as “ the type of new England ’ s hereditary spirit, ” he is the embodiment of liberty
incarnate who materializes to challenge domestic tyranny “ whenever the descendants
of the Puritans … show the spirit of their sires ” (8).
In the vast majority of Hawthorne ’ s work, the supernatural is presented hesitantly,
as one possibility among several. In the most famous example, Young Goodman
Brown in the story of the same name may have a rendezvous with the devil or he may
simply have dreamed the whole occurrence. Similarly, in “ Old Esther Dudley ” , Esther
– a living symbol of the past – is rumored to be able to call up images and fi gures of
days gone by in the blurred mirror of the Province House, but this rumor is never
substantiated. In “ Graves and Goblins ” (a magazine sketch generally attributed to
Hawthorne), however, Hawthorne offers a straightforwardly supernatural tale that
combines the themes of the ghosts as fi gurations of creative spirit and ghosts as rep-
resentations of the persistence of the past. Narrated from beyond the grave, the story
begins by asserting that all authors are haunted:
Sprites, that were poets once, and are now all poetry, hover round the dreaming bard, and
become his inspiration; buried statesmen lend their wisdom, gathered on earth and mel-
lowed in the grave, to the historian; and when the preacher rises nearest to the level of
his mighty subject, it is because the prophets of old days have communed with him. Who
has not been conscious of mysteries within his mind, mysteries of truth and reality, which
will not wear the chains of language? Mortal, then the dead were with you! (para. 1)
After this introduction, the ghostly narrator discusses the unhappy ghosts that inhabit
his graveyard, chained to events in their pasts, and his own fascination with the ghost
of a pure young maiden who spends only a short time on earth before ascending to
heaven.
Along with Poe, Ambrose Bierce arguably was the foremost nineteenth - century
American author of Gothic tales; unlike Poe, however, Bierce ’ s body of work is full
of clear - cut supernatural stories which Gary Hoppenstand divides into the (occasion-
ally overlapping) categories of Americanized traditional Victorian ghost stories, criti-
cal dialogues about the “ evils of human avarice and the dire supernatural consequences
of greed, ” stories that use the supernatural “ simply as a device to challenge smug
satisfaction with an empirical understanding of reality, ” ironic twist - of - fate stories
that employ satire to “ debunk social institutions or base human iniquities, ” proto –
science fi ction stories built around scientifi c or quasi
-
scientifi c methodology, and
stories of “ family violence ” (226 – 7). For our purposes here, we ’ ll consider two of
Bierce ’ s family violence ghost stories – one fairly straightforward and the other excep-
tionally devious.
416
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
“ The Middle Toe of the Right Foot ” is an uncomplicated but menacing tale of
supernatural revenge. In the story, four men visit the old Manton house for the
ostensible purpose of a duel. The now - abandoned house had been the scene of a
gruesome murder in which Mr. Manton had cut the throats of his wife and children
before disappearing – the reader learns almost as an aside that Mrs. Manton had
been a charming woman, but was missing the middle toe of her right foot. When
the candle lighting the abandoned house is extinguished, three of the men beat a
hasty retreat. The next day, the fourth man – whom the reader discovers to be the
returned Mr. Manton – is found dead at the scene with a look of “ unutte
rable fright ”
on his face. Leading up to him (but not away) are three sets of footprints – two sets
made by small children and the third set made by a woman lacking the middle toe
of her right foot.
Whereas “ The Middle Toe of the Right Foot ” is an effective but predictable tale
of supernatural retribution, “ The Death of Halpin Frayser ” is much more devious –
in large measure due to Bierce ’ s non - linear narrative. At the start of the story, we
are introduced to the titular character who, camping in the hills of Napa Valley,
California, has a nightmare in which he speaks the name “ Catherine Larue ” and then
confronts “ the dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments
of the grave ” (410). The story then fl ashes back to Halpin ’ s youth, in which he and
his mother had an extremely – perhaps perversely – close relationship. The narration
informs us that “ [t]he two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their
manner were not infrequently mistaken for lovers ” (411). Nonetheless, Halpin left
his mother to travel west on business and was conscripted into service on a merchant
vessel which foundered in the South Pacifi c, forcing him to spend six years on an
island before being rescued and returned to San Francisco. Flashing forward, the story
returns to Halpin ’ s dream in which his dead mother, “ a body without a soul, ” attacks
him and Halpin “ dreamed that he was dead ” (412).
In the fi nal section of this convoluted story, the reader is introduced to two bounty
hunters who are hunting a man named Branscom who cut his wife ’ s throat and who
have tracked him to the cemetery in which his wife (who was a widow) is buried.
What they fi nd in the cemetery is Halpin Frayser, choked to death on the grave of a
woman named Catherine Larue (the name Halpin speaks at the start of the story).
Larue, it turns out, is the real name of the murderer they are after and the name of
his wife was Frayser. Halpin thus is found dead on the grave of his mother and the
story ends with a “ low, deliberate, soulless laugh ” that rises out of the fog – one “ so
unhuman, so devilish, that it fi lled those hardy man - hunters with a sense of dread
unspeakable ” (416 – 17). For the reader, privy to the backstory of Halpin ’ s relationship
with his mother and his ominous dream, the unavoidable conclusion is that there has
been a horrible act of supernatural violence. Halpin ’ s mother, the jilted lover, has
returned from beyond the grave to punish the son who left her and whom she believed
to be dead.
While it would be convenient to jump from Bierce ’ s horrifi c tales of domestic
violence and supernatural revenge to the works of American women that also deal
The Ghost Story
417
with similar themes – although often from very different perspectives – there is still
one more American male author of ghost stories who needs to be addressed: Henry
James. Although James is, of course, most famous for his realist works, including The
Portrait of a Lady , Daisy Miller , and The Wings of the Dove , he was also an accomplished
practitioner of the ghostly tale and, in addition to the novella - length The Turn of the
Screw , produced a fi ne body of short supernatural fi ction. In his ghost stories, includ-
ing “ The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, ” “ The Ghostly Rental, ” and most espe-
cially “ The Jolly Corner, ” James focuses his gaze not on malevolent specters, but on
the psychology of his protagonists. In such fi ction “ Gothic elements are used in the
service of realism and psychology to emphasize the impenetrable depths of human
emotion and to highlight the strange and often frightening nature of the human
mind ” ( “ Henry James ” 461).
“
The Jolly Corner
”
is generally recognized by critics as among James
’
s fi nest
supernatural stories and concerns an aesthete and man of leisure named Spencer
Brydon who confronts the ghost of himself
–
the manifestation of an alter ego
refl ecting how Spencer ’ s life could have developed had he made different choices.
Spencer, the product of a wealthy New York City family, has spent the past 33
years in Europe and has only recently returned to the United States to oversee the
conversion of one of his family ’ s properties into fl ats. Although surprised at how
much New York City has changed in his absence, he is even more surprised at how
adept he is at managing the architectural and business details of the construction
and discovers that he has “ for too many years neglected a real gift ” (James 729).
This realization initiates a period of refl ection on Spencer ’ s part, one in which he
obsessively contemplates how his life might have been had he remained in New
York and become a businessman.
As Spencer stalks through the Jolly Corner, his family ’ s now - vacant New York
City mansion, in the dead of night contemplating what might have been, he somehow
conjures into being that part of himself which he has repudiated and transforms from
the hunter to the hunted. His sense of not being alone in the house culminates in a
confrontation with his alter ego, a fi gure like that of Spencer himself, with the excep-
tion of two missing fi ngers, but a fi gure that Spencer fi nds monstrous and horrifying.
The vision of this fi gure is also experienced by his intimate friend and love interest,
Alice Staverton, but she does not share Spencer ’ s aversion, having accepted the ghost
as an alternative materialization of the man she loves.
In “ The Jolly Corner, ” James offers the reader the ghost of a man in search of
himself (721) and a sophisticated rendering of the doppelganger motif common to
Romantic literature in general and artfully deployed in American literature in stories
such as Poe ’ s “ William Wilson. ” In keeping with James ’ s general interest in human
psychology, in “ The Jolly Corner, ” he stages a scene of the self confronting itself – of
the mind turning inward and attempting to penetrate with both curiosity and horror
that which it has rejected on the conscious level. As such, what the story reveals is
something that Irving already knew – that the mind creates ghosts. However, James ’ s
spin on Irving is that ghosts are not the result of misperception or superstition; rather,
418
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
ghosts emerge from within, from the unconscious, and are the inevitable result of the
mind ’ s in certain respects being a stranger to itself. To be haunted, says James, is the
unavoidable corollary of being human.
Ghost Stories by American Women
Contentions like that of Ringe in his American Gothic that the American supernatu-
ral tale ceased to play a role in American literature after Hawthorne and dies 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 fl ourishing of women ’ s
ghost stories in the latter half of the nineteenth and the fi rst two decades of the
twentieth centuries. Between roughly the start of the Ci
vil War and the end of the
1920s, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press
and in books. These include stories by familiar fi gures such as Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Lydia Maria
Child, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Austin, and Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty - fi rst century
readers such as Josephine Dodge 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, nine-
teenth - and twentieth - century supernatural fi ction written in English was predomi-
nantly produced by women and her survey of supernatural fi ction included in North
American Victorian magazines concludes that as much as 70 percent of it was com-
posed by women.
What attention to the body of supernatural fi ction by American women reveals is
what Carpenter and Kolmar refer to as a “ distinctive tradition of ghost story writing ”
(10) organized around recurrent themes foregrounding specifi cally female concerns
and frequently manifesting a feminist consciousness. Participating in and manipulat-
ing the nineteenth century
’
s fascination with the supernatural, American female
authors crafted a coherent body of supernatural literature refl ecting their anxieties and
desires. Thus, supernatural fi ction became a powerful means for nineteenth - and early
twentieth - century women to address such “ unladylike ” topics as bad marriages, the
cultural injunction to have children, and the demands of maternity. In order to
develop these assertions, I will focus on the ghost stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,
Edith Wharton, and Ellen Glasgow.
Although primarily regarded as a New England regionalist and a producer (like
James, Wharton, and Glasgow) of realist fi ction, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman fashioned
an accomplished body of Gothic fi ction, much of which addresses the “ social, personal,
and economic pressures which often silenced or devalued women and their concerns ”
(Voller). While Freeman ’ s “ Old Woman Magoun ” is devastating in its critique of