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

By Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions.

Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism.

Beyond the simple existence of an unacknowledged tradition of uncanny literature by women, Scare Tactics makes a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism.

Paying attention to these overlooked authors helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823229871

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham, 2021), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

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SCARE TACTICS

SCARE TACTICS

Supernatural Fiction by American Women

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Copyright © 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: The Decline of the American Female Gothic

Works Cited

Index

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).

SCARE TACTICS

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 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.¹My 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 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 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 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 desires operative on both sides of the Atlantic and as participating in a much broader flirtation with the occult. Commentators on both nineteenth-century 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 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 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 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 Ariès’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 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 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 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, Restuccia, Kate Ellis, Tamar Heller, Williams, Hoeveler, and Becker. Writing in 1982, Leeuwen, in asserting that Female Gothic novels of the late-eighteenth 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).²²For 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 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 double-voiced. 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 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

As I observed at the start of this introduction, recognizing the existence of this body of literature raises two questions: why did American women