Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

By Melissa Edmundson Makala

Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain examines the Female Gothic genre and how it expanded to include not only gender concerns but also social critiques of repressed sexuality, economics and imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780708326978

Melissa Edmundson Makala

Dr Melissa Edmundson Makala teaches in the division of arts and letters at the University of South Carolina.

Book preview

WOMEN’S GHOST LITERATURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.

Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

© Melissa Edmundson Makala, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN      978-0-7083-2564-3

e-ISBN   978-0-7083-2697-8

The right of Melissa Edmundson Makala to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff

Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

For my parents, Rudy and Karen

C

ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Female Revenants and the Beginnings of Women’s Ghost Literature

2 Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities

3 ‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital

4 Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

A

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the staffs of the following institutions for their assistance with this project: the Rare Books, Manuscripts and India Office Records sections of the British Library, the Department of Special Collections at Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. I would also like to thank the British Library, Edinburgh University Library and Pennsylvania State University Library for permitting quotations from letters in their collections. An abridged version of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘The Uncomfortable Houses of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant’ in Gothic Studies 12/1 (May 2010), and part of Chapter 4 was published in an earlier version as ‘Bithia Mary Croker and the Ghosts of India’ in The CEA Critic 72/2 (Winter 2010). Thanks to the editors of these journals for granting me permission to reproduce this material.

I would like to express my gratitude to Paula R. Feldman, who read several early versions of this book, and who was always available to lend advice or talk through certain ideas. Her pioneering work in reclaiming forgotten British women writers has greatly influenced my own research and continues to inspire me. This book would not have been possible without the early support of Andrew Smith, who offered invaluable comments and suggestions during the manuscript stages. It was a rewarding experience to work with such a gracious scholar in the field of Gothic studies. My sincere thanks go as well to the reviewer for the University of Wales Press, whose careful readings and insightful suggestions made this a better book. Sarah Lewis likewise has my gratitude for her early interest in the project, her patience, and her overall guidance of this volume from the initial evaluation process to final publication.

My appreciation is also due to the women writers discussed in this book, whose work has provided me with years of reading fascinating poems and stories, along with discovering their equally captivating lives through biographies, letters and memoirs. If ghosts do exist, I hope these women are smiling approvingly as I write.

I would especially like to thank the family and friends who encouraged me throughout my years of research and writing. This book could not have been completed without the love and support of my parents and grandparents, who fostered my interest in literature and history from an early age. Growing up in a house full of books, ideas and conversation most certainly led me to pursue a life of research and writing. I would also like to express my appreciation to my grandmother, Dixie, who earned her college degree during the 1930s and became a much-loved elementary school teacher. She taught me the importance of an education and never let me forget how proud she was of me for continuing on to graduate school. She didn’t live to see this book completed, but her memory was with me every step of the way. I would especially like to thank Jeff, who read and commented on several early drafts and assisted in my endless quest for obscure sources. He has offered advice and support throughout the creation of this book and has otherwise patiently lived with my interest in ghosts and the Gothic over the years. Final thanks go to Dalton and Murray for always being there.

‘At my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes

Of burning cressets …

… I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’

– Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I,

as quoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’

Introduction

Prior to the nineteenth century, there were a small number of ghost stories and poems written by women, but these works had limited printings and today are exceedingly rare. Sarah Malthus’s pamphlet, King William’s Ghost (1704) and Elizabeth Boyd’s ballad ‘Altamira’s Ghost; Or Justice Triumphant’ (1744), which tells of a barony dispute between an uncle and his nephew, are two examples of works by women who used their writings as a means of social and political commentary. However, during the nineteenth century, ghost literature became increasingly popular among women writers. It was published in collections of supernatural tales and was regularly seen in magazines throughout the century, including special Christmas issues. These stories and poems also were frequently published in keepsakes, under such titles as ‘The Regretted Ghost’ (1826) by Mrs Hofland and ‘A Ghost Story’ (1846) by the Countess of Blessington. In their Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert state that ‘the reasons why women took to the ghost story so successfully is one of the great unasked critical questions’.¹ Their answer to this question is the one usually given by critics: women writers needed to make a living and tended toward the ever-popular and reliable ghost story to make money. This reason is no doubt true for many women writers of the century, ranging from writers of chapbook ballads in the early 1800s to authors of penny-dreadfuls and ‘shilling shockers’ later in the century. But for many women who included supernatural plotlines in their writing, this argument does not present the entire rationale behind the phenomenon. These authors understood that any writing by a woman which sought to critique gender inequality or their country’s involvement in questionable socio-political or imperial practices would be automatically subjected to greater scrutiny by reviewers, as well as the general reading public. Regarding the publication of her Gothic ballad collection, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), Anne Bannerman admitted to her publisher, Thomas Hood, that she was ‘well aware that from their peculiarity of subject, it was not to be expected they could please generally’.² Other authors, such as Ellen Wood and Bithia Mary Croker, who had already achieved financial success as writers of popular romance novels, later ventured into the realm of the ghost story without being assured of a financial profit. At the turn of the century, Olive Schreiner used the supernatural in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonland (1897) to critique the controversial policies of Cecil Rhodes. The title page to the first edition of the work, showing hanged native Africans, was subsequently banned in later London editions. Schreiner’s choice of subject almost assuredly had more to do with raising British awareness of the problems in South Africa after the notoriously badly handled Jameson raid on the Transvaal Republic in 1895–6 than with making money by serving the public taste with run-of-the-mill romance or sensation novels.

Throughout the nineteenth century, women emphasized the importance of the supernatural and repeatedly discussed an artistic and intellectual appreciation for the possibilities of the genre that goes beyond a mere obsession with financial profit. In her essay, ‘On Ghosts’, published in the London Magazine of March 1824, Mary Shelley described the appeal of supernatural stories for both readers and writers. She saw the modern world as too regimented and organized, and in the face of the modern, the world was losing its unknown quantities and mysteries. In the absence of these things, Shelley asks, ‘What have we left to dream about?’³ She also connects this loss of superstition to a loss of fear and imagination, which are natural parts of human nature. For her, the unknown holds an important place in the everyday world because it reminds us of the limits of earthly knowledge:

There is something beyond us of which we are ignorant. The sun drawing up the vaporous air makes a void, and the wind rushes in to fill it, – thus beyond our soul’s ken there is an empty space; and our hopes and fears, in gentle gales or terrific whirlwinds, occupy the vacuum; and if it does no more, it bestows on the feeling heart a belief that influences do exist to watch and guard us, though they be impalpable to the coarser faculties.⁴

The ability to imagine is vital to both the author of the ghost story and the reader of the story; each person must give way to the unknown, the ‘empty space’ as Shelley calls it, to experience the full impact of a supernatural tale.

Nearly seventy years later, Vernon Lee, in the Preface to her short story collection, Hauntings (1890), would write about the continuing importance of mystery and the abstract in telling good ghost stories:

the supernatural, in order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity, must necessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in mystery. Indeed, ’tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior’s breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the flickering shadows.⁵

For Lee, truly scary tales have their beginnings in the creative mind, which also creates the lingering sense of fear and disorientation that comes from such a tale. Rumours of dead relatives returning to visit family members or local village corpses rising from their graves, told as factual occurrences, are to her, ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’.⁶ The ‘real’ terror exists in products of one’s imagination:

They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.⁷

While Lee insisted on the internal workings and irrationalities of the human mind as the genesis for true terror, other authors, such as Catherine Crowe, who published her own collection, Ghosts and Family Legends: A Volume for Christmas (1858) and contributed to the increased public taste for ghost stories with her widely read prose work, The Night Side of Nature (1848), believed that the ‘authentic’ ghost story occurred outside the human mind, was often provable, and could be ‘learned’. One of the most famous Victorian ‘ghost hunters’, Crowe sought to bring the public closer to an understanding of the unknown, describing in the Preface to The Night Side of Nature ‘these vague and misty perceptions, and the similar obscure and uncertain glimpses we get of that veiled department of nature, of which, while comprising, as it does, the solution of questions concerning us more nearly than any other, we are yet in a state of entire and wilful ignorance’.⁸ The Night Side of Nature is organized by chapters discussing such varied things as ‘Allegorical Dreams’, ‘Doppelgangers’, ‘Troubled Spirits’, and ‘Haunted Houses’, and throughout the book, Crowe attempts to establish a ‘scholarly’ exploration of these as-yet-unexplained phenomena. Crowe’s work was so successful that it even led fellow ghost connoisseur Charles Dickens to accuse her of stealing some of his own stories. After being, in turn, accused by Elizabeth Gaskell of claiming one of her stories as his own idea, ‘To be Read at Dusk’, published in Heath’s Keepsake for Christmas 1851, Dickens responded:

Crows have plucked at the fleeces of other Ghosts of mine before now – but I have borne it meekly. Ghost-stories, illustrating particular states of mind and processes of the imagination, are common-property, I always think – except in the manner of relating them, and O who can rob some people of that!⁹

The cultural significance of Crowe’s work and her influence on the ghost tradition is attested to in Anstey Guthrie’s essay, ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’, which appeared in the January 1884 issue of Longman’s Magazine. In the essay, Guthrie applauds Crowe’s effort on behalf of authentic ghosts, calling her collection an ‘excellent work’, which is ‘positively swarming with spectres; spectres to suit all tastes; spectres ugly and comely, opaque and transparent, full dress and undress, plain and coloured, and all on such impeachable testimony that unbelief is rendered impossible’.¹⁰

The interest in spirit phenomena among women writers continued at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond. In an 1895 letter to William Morris Colles, Flora Annie Steel described the main plot of her most famous novel, On the Face of the Waters (1897), which remains one of the most effective nineteenth-century critiques of the 1857 Indian Uprising: ‘Its central idea is that the Mutiny was, what the natives call it a breath, a moving on the face of the water of a spirit evoking order from disorder, light from darkness.’¹¹ The wife of an Indian Civil Service officer, Steel spent several years in the Punjab observing Indian natives and working to promote the education of Indian women. She recognized that the spiritual or ghostly (i.e. unseen) causes which stirred the revolt were directly connected to the ‘disorder’ that ensued because of the British imperial presence in the region.

In a larger context, British women writers and their stories of the supernatural can also be seen as ‘a moving on the face of the water’. Their writings stirred British social consciousness by exposing the social tensions and inequalities that existed for those who were on the margins of society (namely women, the poorer working classes and minorities). Recognizing that direct political or social critique would potentially alienate their reading audiences, these authors sought more subversive means to discuss current issues. Like the ghosts and spirits which haunt their pages, women writers of ghost stories ‘troubled’ the present by raising awareness of unsafe domestic spaces, gender relations, economic conditions and the consequences of imperialism.

This social use of the supernatural has been discussed by theorists as a way of understanding how the political functions in literature and history. In The Fantastic (1973), Tzvetan Todorov regards supernatural writing as a way of bringing about change:

The supernatural appears in the series of episodes which describe the transition from one state [to] the other. Indeed, what could better disturb the stable situation of the beginning, which the efforts of all the participants tend to consolidate, if not precisely an event external not only to the situation but to the world itself?¹²

Todorov believes that the supernatural is the literary motif that best brings about change in narratives. In this context, the supernatural serves ‘to afford a modification of the preceding situation, and to break the established equilibrium (or disequilibrium)’.¹³ This breaking of established order lends itself well to social critique. As Todorov says, ‘We see, finally, how the social and the literary functions coincide: in both cases, we are concerned with a transgression of the law. Whether it is in social life or in narrative, the intervention of the supernatural element always constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules, and in doing so finds its justification’.¹⁴

Likewise, in Specters of Marx (1994) Jacques Derrida describes the political implications of ghosts in the collective memory, and his theories help to shed light on women authors’ use of the supernatural as a means both to forward and to complicate identity. According to Derrida, ghosts are forces that should not be forgotten, as they go beyond history and haunt all subsequent generations. He states that ‘this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’.¹⁵ Punning on the words ‘ontology’ and ‘haunting’, Derrida uses the word ‘hauntology’ as a way of describing this return: ‘After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.’ This idea of repetition is key to understanding the force of meaning inherent in the ghost. For him, it is ‘a question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.’ (p. 11). The unsettling nature of the ghost not only complicates the present, but also exists beyond a specific moment, representing the past and influencing the future. Derrida describes this impact as a disruption to temporal normality:

What exactly is the difference from one century to the next? Is it the difference between a past world – for which the specter represented a coming threat – and a present world, today, where the specter would represent a threat that some would like to believe is past and whose return it would be necessary again, once again in the future, to conjure away? … Why in both cases is the specter felt to be a threat? What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a present-future, between a ‘real time’ and a deferred time’? … If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents. (p. 39)

He ties this ‘coming back’ to a political consciousness that must be recognized and dealt with, as living beings must reconcile themselves to their (ever-present) past:

an obligation of justice … this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them. (p. xx)

It is precisely this political undertone which the ghost carries that makes Derrida’s theories so pertinent to the study of what I term the ‘social supernatural’. From the dual meaning of the term ‘haunting’ itself [the French term ‘hantise’ can also mean ‘an obsession, a constant fear, a fixed idea, or a nagging memory’] the implications behind the word stress the unwanted return of memory, as well as a social consciousness.¹⁶

While Derrida’s notions of spectrality must inform any discussion of socio-political memory, his theories are by no means the only way to ‘read’ meaning in literary spectres. In his introduction to The Ghost Story, 1840–1920 (2010), Andrew Smith states that different ways of ‘reading ghosts’ are important in ‘decoding the central political visions of the period’.¹⁷ In addition to Todorov and Derrida’s theories of the spectral, more recent studies by Julian Wolfreys in Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002) and Christine Berthin in Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (2010) have reaffirmed the Gothic’s connection to psychoanalytic theory and the deeper cultural anxieties that fictional spectres symbolize. Likewise, the importance of feminist theory in bringing to light the gender concerns that are inherent in women’s writing has been well established. Yet, as important as these theoretical frameworks are to understanding the meaning behind ghosts, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that literary ghosts are also direct products of their time, and as such, have a vast amount to tell us about the many significant cultural shifts that occurred in the nineteenth century. As Margaret Anne Doody claims in her study of female dreams and the Gothic novel,

history is a chronicle of pain and sorrow. Institutions, power, political activities are the nightmarish cruel realities from which no one can escape. All the characters are trapped in their own historical situation; what we have here may not be exactly the history of the textbooks, but we are presented with an historical situation. The past affects the present.¹⁸

She goes on to say that within the Gothic genre, women writers could make private suffering public: ‘It is in the Gothic novel that women writers could first accuse the real world of falsehood and deep disorder. Or perhaps, they rather asked whether masculine control is not just another delusion in the nightmare of absurd historical reality in which we are all involved. The visions of horror are not private – they have become public’.¹⁹ Likewise, Andrew Smith observes that ‘the ghost retains its status as a vehicle through which a superior, because critical, insight into the past and the present can be established’ (p. 187). In particular, women authors of the nineteenth century recognized the social and political power behind the genre of the ghost story and used it to shed light on cultural problems and inequalities. Their supernatural writings frequently transgress the cultural boundaries of their day, just as the spectral forces in their writings transgress the boundary between life and afterlife.

The difficulty in identifying and uncovering forgotten supernatural texts by women authors is compounded by the lingering difficulties faced by critics in discussing the genre of supernatural fiction itself. In her essay on women’s ghost stories as Female Gothic, Diana Wallace mentions that one of the reasons that there has been so little criticism on the ghost story is because of debates over genre and how exactly the ghost story fits into the larger Gothic tradition. She advocates ‘detaching’ the idea of Gothic from ‘the Gothic novel’, which she rightly claims would then allow the ‘Gothic’ as a whole to become ‘flexible enough to encompass the ghost story’.²⁰ Wallace states, ‘The lack of critical attention to women’s ghost stories is also to do with a wider neglect of the short story, within which the ghost story (associated with anthologies or magazines and other ephemeral types of publication) has been doubly marginalised’ (p. 57). In order to rectify this ‘lack of