Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture

By Robin Roberts

The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizard have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows--the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts.

Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles.

Roberts's analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496815576

Robin Roberts

Robin Roberts is professor emeritus of English and gender studies at the University of Arkansas. She is author of several books on gender and popular culture, including Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture, Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons, and Ladies First: Women in Music Videos and coauthor (with Leslie A. Wade and Frank de Caro) of Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

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INTRODUCTION

The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, wizards, and other fantastical creatures have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. The Untold Story brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. The female spirit is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. As Andi Zeisler notes, The female ghost is an enduringly fascinating figure, and her presence in both history and pop culture holds a wealth of perception and stereotype in its clammy hands … [F]emale ghosts have what seems like a particular power to haunt our pop-culture memories (2).

While the phantoms discussed in this book differ from each other in the particular settings in which they disrupt patriarchal narratives, they share a similar function of exposure and cultural critique. Privileged with insights due to their shadowy, ambiguous position between life and death, female ghosts provide warnings not just to the other living characters in their narratives, but also to their readers and viewers. For every wraith, the difficulty of deciding how and where to speak and be heard is paramount. Sometimes literally voiceless, the female ghost reflects a struggle for women to be narrators and authors of their own lives (and deaths). Even the ghosts who serve as guides to heritage sites tell the stories of others, with their own narratives unknown or subordinate to a public, male-dominated history. As Kathleen Brogan explains, as an absence made present, the ghost can give expression to the ways in which women are rendered invisible in the public sphere (25).

To correct this absence, this book presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female spirit changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. (The vampire and the werewolf, for example, have transmuted from terrifying monsters into more sympathetic, even heroic and romantic, characters.) Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit). Terrifying and vengeful female spirits in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle). In the twenty-first century, this figure expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human, UK and US).

While no other book focuses exclusively on the female ghost, critics have analyzed wraiths in many ways; these books provide helpful insights into the history and use of the supernatural. In Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, Jeffrey Weinstock makes a compelling case for looking at the use of ghosts by female authors from 1820 through 1920. Identifying a literary tradition of male and female ghosts, Weinstock argues that it is important to understand why American women writers made use of supernatural fiction and why this use has been ignored by literary critics. His book explores the ways that supernatural conventions [function] as a form of cultural critique in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2). The themes he analyzes in this tradition, from the control and abuse of women to same-sex desire, provide a new way of looking at American writing. He states that the use of the supernatural by women authors declines after 1930 (194).

While it may be true that literary production of ghosts declined, these figures appear regularly first in film and then in television in the twenty and twenty-first centuries. Ghosts rank sixth in an analysis of horror movie monsters from 1931 through 1984, leading Tom Ruffles in Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife to conclude, [I]t is surprising that they [ghosts] have not been subject to intense scrutiny as a whole, unlike, say, vampire and zombie films (3). Pointing to the flexibility of the ghost, Ruffles explains its appeal: [W]hile the post-Stoker vampire is usually aristocratic, and the zombie has a working-class ambience, the ghost achieves a kind of universality (2). Yet this universality does not escape the influence of gender. The preponderance of female ghosts, benign or sinister, is in contrast to slasher films where females are menaced by a male with seemingly supernatural powers, Ruffles explains (96). Ruffles’s observations point to the locus of the female phantom as empowering.

Criticism that includes discussions of ghosts takes a variety of approaches and focuses, from nineteenth-century literature to folklore. A number of excellent studies have focused on supernatural beings in particular periods with a precise emphasis, such as Katherine A. Fowkes’s Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films; Tom Ruffles’s Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife; and Kathleen Brogan’s Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. The interest in the figure of the ghost is attested to by recent books such as The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities, edited by Lee Kroger and Melanie Anderson; Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Melissa Makala; Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature, by Brian Norman; Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from the Silent Era to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder; and Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Film, edited by Kate Griffiths and David Evans. Folklore ghosts are the focus of Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeanne Banks Thomas’s Haunting Experiences: Gender and Ghosts, and there are a number of excellent articles that deal with literary ghosts, such as those included in the ground-breaking Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, a collections of essays edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Many other ghost traditions have also received attention, such as the yurei in Japanese horror comic books (Dollase). However, no other analysis has examined the female ghost as depicted in English-language texts over a range of popular culture platforms over such a wide swath of time. Looking at the female ghost, as opposed to the female author, for example, reveals the ways that the character’s traits direct readers and viewers to the representation of the feminine.

The Untold Story focuses on the depiction of adult female spirits, who differ significantly from the ghosts who appear in young adult literature. There are certain similarities in terms of setting—water imagery and rebirth appear in many young adult ghost novels and in the texts discussed here. However, the female ghosts I discuss are more radical and more overt in their resistance to patriarchy than the ghosts June Pulliam discussed (some of whom are male). As Pulliam explains, the ghost enables the haunted girl to nurture her strengths in stealth (19–20). As the chapters in the Untold Story reveal, adult female phantoms are disruptive, sometimes to the point of physical violence. In many cases, the female ghost’s activity is compelled by her exclusion from history and memory.

In her influential work, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination Avery F. Gordon makes the case for considering the ghostly as a representation of living people whom sociology and history have forgotten and the experiences that have been left out of history. In making her argument, Gordon draws on two novels that feature wraiths, showing the centrality of fiction to the discussion of the ghost. The female ghost as a character directs us to social critique, but she also draws attention to the development of the feminine self.

The female ghosts discussed in Subversive Spirits constitute a tradition, consistently and insistently exposing the ways that the feminine is silenced and constrained. At the same time, they offer alternatives to oppression, providing both positive and negative role models for readers and viewers. The female ghost’s insistence on being heard balances with the violence to which she often must resort. Yet in the final texts considered, Being Human (UK and US television shows), a twenty-first-century maternal vision offers an antidote to rage and violence. Even more striking is the vision in Being Human of the female ghost as savior of the world.

The female ghosts examined in Subversive Spirits come from very different time periods, but they share certain features. First, the female spirit becomes engaged in a struggle for control of the narrative, often the narrative of her own life. Texts that focus on female ghosts, then, are about authorship: whose version of reality is told and whose perspective is explained and validated. In a number of instances, the contested narrative is that of history; in others, the texts provide a sympathetic backstory for what would otherwise seem inexplicably horrible acts, including infanticide. Whatever the frame, the female wraith creates an alternative narrative, even if she has to wrest authorship from a male figure. Second, class, race, and ethnicity play important roles in the stories of these spirits. Female ghosts react against the biases used to oppress them while they were alive, and their supernatural powers allow them to overcome the obstacles that blocked them. They do not divest themselves of their gender and ethnic identities but use these aspects of their cultural identities to empower themselves after death. That women’s success requires supernatural powers shows how oppressed real women are in the living world. These female ghosts share the unfinished business of addressing and often correcting social injustices created by prejudice and discrimination.

Throughout the narratives discussed here, feminine concerns and metaphors for the feminine, especially that of motherhood, appear repeatedly in various forms. With the exception of the comedic characters discussed in the first chapter, female ghosts embody the maternal. First, the spirit engages in a struggle with patriarchal society for control of children. In this conflict we see a struggle over values identified as feminine and masculine. Although her maternal quest occurs after her own death, the female ghost models the struggles of living women for control and autonomy as mothers. Finally, the female wraith reverses the presentation of the maternal as a force to be excluded from society.

As she writes her own life, the female ghost creates a sort of reverse kunstlerroman, in that after death she grows and develops her authorial skills. Because the female ghost changes emotionally over the course of most texts, I employ Mary Belenky’s insights on female psychological development from Women’s Ways of Knowing. To understand the broad cultural implications of the female ghost, I evoke French feminist theorists Hélène Cixous’s and Julia Kristeva’s ideas about the feminine. Each approach helps make sense of the journey of the individual spirit, and together these three perspectives help us understand the ways that the figure operates over time.

Because female ghost stories customarily depict gender struggles that reveal aspects of psychological identity, American psychological and French psychoanalytic feminist theories situate this figure’s relevance for real life. The emergence of supernatural fiction, Weinstock points out, occurs in conjunction with and gives expression to modern conceptions of human psychology (8). Subversive Spirits builds on Weinstock’s work by expanding the genres and time periods covered and focusing exclusively on the female spirit. As the ghost moves through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, feminist psychology and psychoanalytically based philosophy help us understand how the figure changes.

A psychoanalytical framework is useful for examining ghosts, for their characteristics evoke the idea of the unconscious, but an awareness of feminist psychology is vital for understanding the female ghost. Often unseen and unacknowledged, she, like the unconscious, is frequently denied. The ghost also represents the repressed, that which an individual or society fears. To examine female spirits, we must look at them from a perspective that acknowledges their femininity, such as that of feminist psychology. In an ethnography of more than a hundred and thirty women, psychologists Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule identified a specifically feminine path of development that emphasizes alternatives to traditional masculine views of epistemology. Their book, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, presents a path by which real women came to understand knowledge and authority in a new framework.

The first stage in women’s ways of knowing involves confronting silence and voicelessness, a stage experienced by the female ghost when alive and often continued into her early ghosthood. At some point, however, the female ghost moves along a trajectory of empowerment. In a final stage, she parallels the pattern by acquiring constructed knowledge, the understanding of interconnectedness. After she rejects silence (and removal from the world), she develops subjective knowledge, the understanding that she herself has and can wield authority. After subjective knowledge comes the concept of separate and connected knowledge, where the ghost interacts with and affects living people. The last level of development achieves constructed knowledge and integrative knowledge that enables the female ghost to see globally and beyond her own individual experience. Many female ghosts follow a similar trajectory of development, moving from being silent, and as ghosts, literally invisible, to acquiring and integrating knowledge. This path sometimes occurs for an individual spirit, but it also appears in the development of the figure over time, over various genres. As this text will show, the comedic female ghost uses humor, and the maternal female ghost wields horror, but these figures merge into a ghost who mothers the entire world. One salient feature of female ghosts is their empathic ability, an important quality identified in women’s development in Women’s Ways of Knowing.

Before the female ghost moves to the level of integration and collaboration, however, she can appear monstrous. Female ghosts are customarily presented as terrifying, in part because of their hideous appearance and their use of sound rather than words. Therefore, feminist theory that deals with the fantastic helps explore this dimension of the female wraith. French feminist theory, particularly the work of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, provides a basis for exploring the meaning of female ghosts, particularly as it pertains to language and narrative. Revising Jacques Lacan’s idea of psychoanalytical development, Kristeva and Cixous posit an alternative to a male-dominated, patriarchal symbolic order. For Lacan, language and the development of an individual identity are inherently masculine. To develop into an autonomous being, the male subject has to reject formlessness, fusion, and unbridled emotion and subordinate these aspects to a controlled and controlling language. Lacan’s identification of the mirror phase, during which the infant recognizes itself as a subject, is connected to that infant’s separation and rejection of the mother who has a lack, who is castrated. Lacan’s phallocentric view situates the symbolic order of culture in distinction to a disordered and imaginary nature, which is feminized. Rather than rejecting the feminine alterity, French feminist philosophers embrace and celebrate it, especially in terms of writing. Sharing an interest in revolutionary language, French feminist philosophers characterize a type of language that defies traditional patterns and hierarchies as feminine, stressing that this is a type of expression that may be written by male and female authors.

In The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous reclaims the figure of the Medusa, who kills humans by petrifying them with her gaze. Cixous advocates for women to write their bodies, to see the female body as represented by the Medusa as joyful, laughing, and empowering. To cite just one example (discussed in chapter 3), author Sandra Cisneros reclaims the female folklore ghost, La Llorona. Revising La Llorona from a murderous female who represents death to an empowering figure whose laughter can be heard in a running stream provides one compelling example of how feminist authors can write the female body using a female ghost. The texts in The Untold Story provide examples of writers and characters who follow this paradigm, creating female ghosts who embrace and sometimes celebrate what traditionally has been depicted as the horror of the female body. While the female ghost is representation of a female body rather than a living form, the female ghosts discussed here all retain their female shape; in fact, their bodies, unbound by gravity, time, or space, are more powerful than when they were living.

The most specific aspect of the female body that leads to repression and control is the gory maternal body. Consequently, Subversive Spirits employs Kristeva’s work on this subject to illuminate the female ghost. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, a book that has influenced much feminist criticism of the horror genre, Kristeva explores the depiction of the preverbal feminine as abject (that which is rejected by culture) and terrifying. She identifies the psychoanalytic experience of the abject in the weaning child’s rejection of the maternal body. The identification with and the necessary separation of the infant from the mother’s body lead to both the eroticization and the repulsion of the female body. In this frame, the maternal functions for patriarchy as the archetypal abject because of its uncontainable power over human life. What we designate as ‘feminine’ far from being a primeval essence, will be seen as an ‘other’ without a name, Kristeva explains (58). The dead body also represents a classic version of the abject that must be expelled. Ghosts, who emanate from a dead body, exemplify that which culture and individuals deny and repress. A dead female body is thus doubly abject, and the female ghost who emanates from such a body especially so.

The necessity of separating from the mother’s body is part of what drives the idea of its horror. Kristeva’s Powers of Horror also examines the phallic mother, a figure unable to use language, only sounds. Focusing on the way that a child is inculcated into the symbolic order of patriarchy, Kristeva notes that the maternal stage is preverbal, during which the mother and child communicate without language. Without drawing on Kristeva directly, Brogan describes this alternative discourse in her discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The experience of this feminine language is ghostly, as Brogan explains: For Paul D, listening to Sethe ‘was like having a child whisper in your ear so close you could feel its lips form the words you couldn’t make out because they were too close’ (78). The intimacy of this close contact describes the experience of the uncanny and the difficulty the female ghost finds in trying to communicate with the living. References to the mother-child relationship recur in the stories of female ghosts, culminating in Being Human’s female ghost serving as mother/savior for the planet. Yet her journey is a torturous and painful one, as Kristeva’s writing about the mother’s position in patriarchy reveals.

As the historical context, female subjectivity, and maternal abject appear in female ghost narratives, certain tropes emerge. Female spirit narratives often include water imagery, present a version of writing the body, enact feminist justice, and depict a successful struggle on the part of the female ghost to be the author of her own story. While the female ghost narratives discussed here differ in terms of particular historical contexts and genres, they share a thematic focus on the maternal body expressed through womb and birth imagery. The female wraith often uses bodies of water, as depicted in The Woman in Black, the La Llorona narratives, The Woman Warrior, and Beloved. Female spirits frequently emerge from water, signifying their rebirth as ghosts. At the same time, the bodies of water represent the female ghost’s maternal focus. Water in the form of mist and fog also accompanies her appearances, stressing her liminal status, her suspension between the world of the living and that of the dead. The use of water as a defining characteristic also evokes the last event before birth, the amniotic sac breaking in the womb. Water imagery presents an alternative to the less fluid and more rigid control of discourse.

At the same time, the female ghost rejects traditional uses of language and writes her body. Kristeva’s description of the transfer of power from the mother to the patriarchy reflects the plots that ensnare many of the characters who become female ghosts: Discourse is being substituted for maternal care, and with it fatherhood belonging more to the realm of the ideal man (45). The female ghost intervenes before fatherhood and discourse can take over. Trapped by discourse (law, custom, language), the living counterpart of the female ghost had been abused and confined. Once ghostly, however, she has the powers of the Othered feminine. Unable to speak or, in some cases, to be heard, female ghosts use their supernaturally empowered bodies and sounds to have an impact on the patriarchal world and male characters who marginalized them when they were alive. The ways that female spirits perform femininity may vary, but at the core these figures resist confinement and celebrate their outsider status. In The Feminist Power of Female Ghosts, Zeisler

Reviews for Subversive Spirits

[pardamustang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Subversive Spirits by Robin Roberts charts a course through modern spheres of entertainment, tracking the elusive figure of the female ghost/spirit in literature, theatre, and film, and what she reflects back to us about the perceived roles of women and the feminine in our culture. This book only looks at US and UK entertainment. The first chapter looks at comedic ghosts. The next two chapters look at terrifying maternal ghosts, each specifically focusing on a geographic region. I particularly enjoyed these two selections. Then a chapter on female spirits and feminist history, followed by one looking at the mediated female ghost in the US and UK, and finally, a chapter on how female ghosts are treated currently via storytelling media. As this book only covers the UK and US, it barely scratches the surface of it's true value and potential. Of course, that would take a massive volume, or more likely several volumes. The role of female spirits in Asian entertainment and those cultural reflections, for example, are quite different! Several suggestions for books looking at female spirits from other cultural contexts are provided in the introduction though. I really enjoyed reading through it, and think it'd make a great addition to media history classes. I once took a class called ‘Frankenstein in Film and Literature.’ You could certainly make a class around female ghosts, or ghosts more generally, in film and lit. ***Many thanks to Netgalley and the University Press of Mississippi for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.