Contemporary Women's Ghost Stories

PALGRAVE GOTHIC
Contemporary
Women’s
Ghost Stories
Luke Roberts
Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns
Gina Wisker
Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
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Gina Wisker
Contemporary
Women’s Ghost
Stories
Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns
Gina Wisker
University of Bath
Bath, UK
ISSN 2634-6214 ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic)

Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-3-030-89053-7 ISBN 978-3-030-89054-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4
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Acknowledgements
I have always loved ghost stories for their Gothic spookiness and their
social justice and psychological comments on our lives and times, the ways
in which they reveal both dangerous underpinning lies, and possibilities
for positive change. This book has haunted and accompanied me through
job changes, life changes and lockdowns, and perpetually reminded me it
needed to be finished, when I had sufficiently sorted out my understand-
ing of the issues the ghost stories provoked. Some of it has leaked out in
talks and papers, at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the
Arts, the International Gothic Association (IGA) conference, the
University of Southern Queensland, the University of the Free State, and
in my Gothic teaching.
Thank yous go to Michelle Bernard, Liam Wisker and Alison Curry
for sourcing reading and mostly for expertly sorting out my messy text;
to Emma Bell, who continued to support my Brighton Gothic work, and
to the students at Brighton and, latterly, the Open University, who have
engaged with it and contributed ideas. Thanks to the Sunday IGA online
discussion group, Facebook Gothic friends; to Paulina Palmer for insights
into all things women’s Gothic and our Gothic conversations; and to
Emma Liggins and her women’s ghost story expertise in her careful
reading and commenting on three chapters which nudged me back into
action. Thank you to Clive Bloom, Lina Aboujieb, Emily Wood and
Poppy Hull for expert publishing support and believing I would finally
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
finish the book. My sons, Liam and Kitt, have been supportive through-
out; they will help celebrate the book and I know they hope the book
mountains might now move elsewhere. Finally, thanks and cuddles to
Roxy for her faithful support starting the process with me for over a year
and to Calypso for the following three years—insisting on walks and
games to help finish it.
Praise for Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories
“In this compelling exploration of the gendered resonances of ghosts, revenants

and superstitions for the contemporary woman writer, Gina Wisker asks us to look
again at the dark secrets which leak out of haunted spaces. Revelatory in the con-
nections it makes between female-authored Gothic narratives and forgotten
crimes, violence, injustices and oppression, it advances arguments about the ghost
story’s inventiveness by critiquing the terrifying silences of history and the trauma
of place.”
—Dr Emma Liggins, Reader in English Literature, Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK
“Gina Wisker has brilliantly shone a spotlight on ghosts. She has provided an
excellent historiography of the ghostly critical landscape and invaluable analyses of
contemporary novels in a chorus of spectral voices channelled by women writers.
No self-respecting ghostbuster should be without a copy. 20th and 21st century
ghosts from Britain, America, Singapore and Malaysia crowd its pages. You will be
haunted by this book for a long time to come.”
—Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Professor of English Literature,
University of the West of England, UK
“Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns com-

bines a truly impressive geographical and sociocultural reach with depth of analysis
and detailed close reading. Accessibly and engagingly written, this book constructs
a compelling argument that connects the oppression of women, in a variety of
cultures and milieu, with the depiction and social function of ghosts. Though
focused on narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Gina Wisker situ-
ates that focus within a highly authoritative broader historical context, endowing
the ghost story almost with testimonial insights into the plight of women
everywhere.”
—Lucie Armitt, Professor of Contemporary English
Literature, University of Lincoln, UK
“Moving eruditely and ghost-like across narratives from such diverse locales as the
Caribbean and Ireland, Southeast Asia and Australia, Contemporary Women’s
Ghost Stories reads the post-Jamesian internalized world of the 20th- and 21st-
century ghost story as a woman writer’s vehicle of choice, through which to articu-
late personal and cultural trauma and expose histories of oppression, repression,
and exclusion. In what Gina Wisker cogently argues is a fundamentally female
form, women – figuratively spectral and possessing a silenced, spectral history –
resurrect the often vengeful and monitory disembodied to question, in powerful
and provocative ways, what it is to be embodied and human. A compelling must-
read hauntology for all lovers of ghost stories, layperson and scholar alike.”
—Carol Margaret Davison, Professor in Women’s and Gender
Studies, University of Windsor, Canada
Contents
1 Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s Ghost Stories 1

Undead: Critical Background 10
Ghosts at the Turn of the Century and Women’s Modernist
Writing 21
Structure 25
Conclusion 30
References 31
Part I Haunted Texts, Haunted Houses, Haunted Lives 37
2 Haunted Romance and Haunted Houses: Rebecca (du

Maurier, 1938), The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson,
1959) 39
Rebecca 40
The Haunted House, the Haunting Mother: Shirley Jackson, The
Haunting of Hill House 52
The Haunting of Hill House 56
References 69
3 Revengeful Ghosts: The Woman in Black (Hill, 1983),

Beloved (Morrison, 1987) 73
The Woman in Black (1983) 76
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) 86
References 96
ix
x Contents
Part II Possession 99
4 True Love as Possession: Ashputtle (Carter, 1987), Lady

Oracle (Atwood, 1976), The Greatcoat (Dunmore, 2012),
The Glass Bottle Trick (Hopkinson, 2000)101
‘Ashputtle’, Angela Carter (1987) 104
Lady Oracle (1976), Margaret Atwood 107
The Greatcoat, Helen Dunmore (2012) 112
Duppies and ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, Nalo Hopkinson (2000) 121
Conclusion 123
References 123
5 The Spectral Voice: In the Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990),

Affinity (Waters, 1999), Beyond Black (Mantel, 2005)125
Popular Ghosts and Real Ghost Hunting 128
Spiritualism 130
Spirit Contact 133
In the Red Kitchen (1990), Michèle Roberts 136
Beyond Black (2005), Hilary Mantel 141
Affinity (1999), Sarah Waters 146
References 153
6 Domestic Hauntings: The Little Stranger (Waters, 2009),

Birdcage Walk (Dunmore, 2017), The Stopped Heart
(Myerson, 2016)157
Haunted Houses and Change 157
The Little Stranger (2009): Sarah Waters 161
Silenced Women: Oppressive, Domestic Spaces, Murders Birdcage
Walk (Helen Dunmore, 2017) 168
Julie Myerson’s The Stopped Heart (2016) 174
References 181
Contents xi
Part III Traumas of Place: Postcolonial Hauntings 183
7 Postcolonial Hauntings and Urban Gothic in Singapore

and Malaysia: The Serpent’s Tooth (Lim, 1982), The
Bondmaid (Lim, 1992), Haunting (Lim, 1981), The Black
Isle (Tan, 2012), Ponti (Teo, 2018), House of Aunts (Cho,
2014), The Crocodile Fury (Yahp, 1992)185
Artifice, Bondmaids and Family Ghosts—Catherine Lim 191
The Bondmaid (1997) 193
The Serpent’s Tooth (1982) 197
Domestic Ghosts: Shirley Lim, ‘Haunting’ (1981) 198
Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle (2012) 201
Singapore: Cities, Space, Place and Ghosts 207
Pontianaks at Home, Ponti (Sharlene Teo, 2018), ‘The House of
Aunts’ (Spirits Abroad, 2014), Zen Cho 209
Conclusion 214
References 214
8 Traumas of Place, Travel, Hauntology: Novel without a

Name (Duong, 1995), Daughters of the House (Roberts,
1992), The Winter Ghosts (Mosse, 2010)217
Trauma: A Particular Form of Haunting 217
Duong Thu Huong: Novel Without a Name (1995) 225
Kate Mosse: The Winter Ghosts (2010) 227
Michèle Roberts: Daughters of the House (1992) 231
Conclusion 238
References 239
9 Visits and Visitations: A Visit (Jackson, 1950), Ghost

Summer (Due, 2015), Her Fearful Symmetry
(Niffenegger, 2009), Hotel World (Smith, 2001)241
‘A Visit, or The Lovely House’, Shirley Jackson (1950) 242
Hotel World, Ali Smith (2001) 245
Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger (2009) 248
Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching (2009) 250
xii Contents
Past Guilt and Ghostly Returns—Tananarive Due, Ghost

Summer (2015) 251
Conclusion 257
References 257
10 Conclusion: Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths,

Pressing Issues: Ghost Wall (Moss, 2018)259
Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths: Ghost Wall (Sarah Moss,
2018) 263
Moving Forward by Learning from the Haunted Past 268
References 269
Index271
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s

Ghost Stories
There is nothing cosy about ghost stories. There is nothing frivolous,

nothing funny, about the ghosts they bring (back) to life, and their con-
stant haunting presence, their insistence that we live daily and must deal
with trauma, that we cannot forget, and must actively engage with the
sources as well as the recurrent traces of that trauma. While vampires were
the Gothic figures which spoke to our concerns in the late twentieth cen-
tury, the plague-ridden, apocalyptic, threatened days of the twenty-first
century can best be tackled, expressed, through ghost stories, a constant
presence reminding us we must deal head-on with violence, sickness and
evil, even when we might hope it had been overcome, forgotten and bur-
ied. As Catherine Belsey reminds us (2021), ghost stories and our rela-
tionship to them are products of time, culture and place, so they change
accordingly, as do their functions ‘ghosts don’t stay put. Seen by glimpses,
they come and go unpredictably. And so, it seems, do their stories’ (p. 1).
She is assured of their fictional as well as their contextual nature ‘ghosts
exist in their stories’ (p. 3), whether we believe in them or not. The ways
we construct and share them relate very much to the differing ways in
which people over time see what is real, believe in the afterlife and in
reward and punishment. Contemporary ghost stories, particularly those
by women, are socially and culturally engaged with the problems, lies and
silences of history and the present. They expose the links between the
political and the personal, global genocides and local domestic tyrannies,
and do so through the ghostly body, the embodiment and presence of
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_1
2 G. WISKER
unceasing reminders of the violations, the violence, both in the distant

past, and today. Like unquiet spirits which cannot be silenced and must be
heard, women’s ghost stories speak the unspeakable and reveal the contra-
dictions and oppressions at the heart of seemingly smooth social, cultural,
political, domestic and personal performances. Women, like ghosts, have
historically lurked in the background, trapped in grand and humble
houses, disenfranchised legally and politically, and incarcerated in domes-
tic spaces and in domestic roles by norms of family, heredity and inheri-
tance. They have been seen and have seen themselves as property to be
owned, manipulated, curtailed, destroyed, and de-storied. They have
been, and in many contemporary societies still are, voiceless, penniless,
without rights, unable to own even their own bodies, defined by (cared
for, if you believe in paternalism, controlled and curtailed by if you expose
patriarchy) their fathers, brothers, husbands and, then, their sons. There is
much to be eternally troubled about here, much to point the spectral fin-
ger at, much to speak out about and many wrongs to right. Ghost stories
are a familiar and recurring example of the Gothic, and like the Gothic
more generally, they defamiliarise the ostensibly everyday to upset and cast
new light on whatever has been repressed, ignored, marginalised, misrep-
resented and silenced, upsetting and emptying out the social, cultural,
personal complacencies. Ghost stories open up the cracks and through
these cracks and fissures leak, then storm out, contradictions and sup-
pressed evils, the hidden histories of gendered and racial injustice.
Configured as white-sheeted and revengeful figures, or as projections of
troubled minds, our ghosts tell us much about ourselves, some of which
we would perhaps rather not look straight at and deal with. Women’s
ghost stories are unstoppable reminders, a franchised, legitimated voice to
expose wrongs, particularly those which are fundamentally gendered and
grow from inequalities of power.
Women have told and/or written ghost stories forever and everywhere
as creators of Gothic vision and versions of the darker and more complex
sides of life, although often their gender and identity are unspoken. Ghost
stories, like the Gothic of which they are a form, are creations of horror.
In Supernatural Horror in Literature (1928), H.P. Lovecraft speaks of
tales told by our ancestors, round the fire, in the dark, trying to imagine
the unimaginable, and, by doing so, by storying and embodying this,
keeping myriad terrors at bay. Some of such tales would have been of
monsters, some others of those less tangible, less definable and so more
terrifying boundary breakers, ghosts. Some would surely have been told
1 INTRODUCTION: LIFTING THE VEIL ON WOMEN’S GHOST STORIES 3
by women, since we also know that the Gothic tales of the brothers Grimm
and of Perrault were largely collected from oral tales constructed and
spread by women. Sometimes it is difficult to name what you sense, feel,
even directly experience and, just like struggling after shape and words, so
there has been a struggle to name the ghost story, to recognise its spectral
presence and its conjuring up or recording of spectral presences. Ghost
stories also hover round those edges of mainstream publishing, making
subtle or central appearances in works from Hamlet (Shakespeare, 1603)
to ‘A Christmas Carol’ (Dickens, 1843), and from The Lifted Veil (Eliot,
1859) to To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927). Women have always produced
ghost stories, although not every writer, reader or critic has either recog-
nised them as such, or approved their critical reception as such. In my own
experience in the early 1990s, offering a paper on Woolf as author of ghost
stories (‘A Haunted House’, 1944; To the Lighthouse, 1927; Mrs Dalloway,
1925) was acceptable, but offering a piece for publication following that
presentation met with a formal riposte which went something like this ‘we
do not see her work in this way’. Some readings are out of favour when
others have become not only prevalent but legitimated in an exclusive
fashion. Woolf was not Gothic and neither was Katherine Mansfield, it
seems. At least they could not be recognised and read as such by some in
the 1980s and 1990s. Setting confused pique aside, it is interesting to
note that some rather exclusive critical orthodoxies about the Gothic and
ghost stories have changed since then. The literary Gothic is respected as
more than entertainment; importantly, it offers a historically and imagina-
tively engaged perspective on and articulation of broadly cultural and per-
sonal, widespread and local, temporally limited and timeless concerns of
what it means and feels to be alive, which given our focus here on ghosts,
has a certain delightful irony.
This history of contemporary critical appreciation of women’s ghost
stories as socially engaged examples of the literary Gothic probably begins
in the 1970s when Julia Briggs’ Night Visitors (1977) re-awoke slumber-
ing critical interest just as feminist criticism and re-recognition of the pow-
erful voice of popular cultural literature and the Gothic was also awakening.
Briggs’ work lays down many of the critical perspectives we build on in
this book. Necessarily, her examples are mainly of the earlier part of the
twentieth century and before. From Briggs’ work, and Gilbert and Gubar’s
Gothic revisioning through their re-readings of nineteenth-century wom-
en’s writing in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and on into the 1980s
and 1990s, feminist critics began to relate women and ghosts, see
4 G. WISKER
women’s ghost stories as ways of re-empowering women’s voices, vision

and storying. Broadly concerned with the revaluation of women’s writing,
some critics emphasise women’s ghost stories as a perfectly suited vehicle
for exposing their often-silenced and occluded positions as writers and the
hidden issues of which women write. Conventions and taboos alike are
broken in this creative and critical writing. Sara Maitland (1991) notes
that ghost stories cross formal and technical boundaries, interweaving the
real with the fantastic to give the latter credibility: ‘In order for the ghost
story to work, the realist elements of it have to be firmly fixed’, mixing ‘the
language of social realism and the language of the subterranean, the not-
explained’ (1991, p. xi). In so doing, ghost stories ‘play with the patterns
of our own ambivalence’ (Maitland, 1991, p. xv). They disturb, and their
Gothic disturbance can shake up thought and behaviour, leading to alter-
native ways of imagining and being. Ghosts in literature and film are fig-
ures of the fantastic. The role of fantasy, the Gothic, horror, and ghosts as
figures of these genres is to disturb the dangerous comfort we place in the
solidities of objects, beliefs and behaviours which we invest in, live in and
amongst, and to destabilise the constraints of the singular, release and
enact the plural, the diverse, alternative realities, varied ways of seeing,
believing and behaving. The destabilisation and destruction are the dark
side, the revelation and opportunities of alternatives the light side. Unease
and disease can in much Gothic remain as threats, be only destructive;
however, they can also lead to new insights and ways of being. Highlighting
the need for and effects of the fantastic, Rosemary Jackson argues that it:
… exists alongside the ‘real’, on either side of the dominant cultural axis, as
a muted presence, a silenced imaginary other. Structurally and semantically,
the fantastic aims at dissolution of an order experienced as oppressive and
insufficient. Its paraxial placing, eroding and scrutinizing the ‘real’ consti-
tutes, in Hélène Cixous’s phrase ‘A subtle invitation to transgression’.
(Jackson, 1986, p. 180)
Ghosts are also intentionally disturbing, forcing a rescrutiny of history, as

Jeffrey Weinstock notes:
The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its
haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks
another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the
authorized version of events. (Weinstock, 2004, p. 5)
Historically, ghost stories by women were often published in popular out-

lets and it is only since the 1980s and ’90s that collections began to make
the range of work more visible. The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories
(1988, 1998) was accompanied by The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The
Twentieth Century (two volumes, 1987 and 1991), all edited by Richard
Dalby, and focusing on ghost stories by women. These, among other
texts, enabled access to a rich, mainly UK and US-based literary history,
bringing into view the ‘lost and misty’ line of writing of which Sarah
Maitland speaks:
Women come to the ghostly task of writing ghost stories as ghosts (even, for
much of literary culture, as dangerous spectres). Our tradition is a tradition
in the shadows; our past is lost and misty; our identity as writers and as
objects of men’s writing, is both owned and denied. (Maitland, 1991, p. xiii)
A burgeoning of published ghost stories by women in the nineteenth cen-

tury and early twentieth century has been seen as the fictional accompani-
ment of spiritualism, and an antidote to or alternative emanation of the
growing fascination with early technologies. There is now, in 2021, much
critical work focusing on the flourishing women’s ghost story of the late
nineteenth century, while the traditional phase in the period during and
just after the First World War is only recently being given the recognition
it is due. Two forthcoming issues of Women’s Writing will engage with
some of these works from international as well as UK origins (eds. Zoe
Brennan, Emma Liggins, Gina Wisker, 2021, 2022), but other recent
books have also focused on this critical creative gap. Melissa Edmundson’s
work on Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire
(2018) notes that the golden age, which supposedly ended with the out-
break of the First World War, should be extended to the period of the
1920s and 30s while Victoria Margree’s British Women’s Short Supernatural
Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness (2019) provides a welcome bor-
der crossing between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questioning
the idea of a ‘rupture’ (p. 2) in that period: ‘the very notion of the “golden
age” of the ghost story, for example, typically describes it as coming to an
end just after the war’ (Margree, 2019, p. 2). Margree’s work here, like
Edmundson’s and the many collections of women’s ghost stories which
have appeared over the last twenty or so years, evidence a continued, sus-
tained interest in the undying past, the revisited histories of individuals
and ways of life, which cannot be so easily forgotten and moved on from.
6 G. WISKER
Edith Wharton, Alice Perrin, Edith Nesbit, May Sinclair, Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant are all widely known
as writers of ghost stories. These works expose women’s fears that often
derive from everyday life, and from various broken promises concerning
love, security and safety. Jenny Uglow emphasises the direct exposure of
and attack on gendered inequalities found in women’s ghost stories, so:
Again and again, with almost shocking repetitiveness, the stories attack the
symbolic and actual domination of the father, the husband, the lover, the
doctor, the cruel emperor—the men of power. At times there is no escaping
the role of victim, but at others the tables are turned. (Uglow, 1998, p. xii)
And:
Female fear clustering around vulnerability and marginality, sex and child-
birth, love and jealousy, intensifies the loneliness which marks all ghost sto-
ries, whether by men or women. (Uglow, 1998, p. xiii)
Women’s ghost stories do not only deal with vulnerability and revenge,
they also reveal desire:
A different energy which burns in women’s ghost stories is that of female

desire and its more ‘feminine’ but equally consuming counterpart: the hun-
ger for love. Its desperate force is often perceived as a threat by men and
feared by women themselves, but its strength can be conveyed by the light-
est touch. (Uglow, 1998, p. xiii)
The ‘hunger for love’ drives some women in ghost stories to dangerous,
deadly liaisons, while others find it, and once it is rewarded, the safe bodily
emotional space, the comfortable mix of romantic and domestic relation-
ship, is as insubstantial as a seemingly solidly built house. Some critical
work on women’s ghost stories, such as by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik
in Women and the Gothic (2016), and by Margree and Edmundson, among
others, including Rebecca Munford (2016) and Tatiana Kontou (2009),
is augmented by work on themes with which the stories deal. Emma
Liggins’ The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender Space and
Modernity 1850–1945 (2020) spans time in which such works have been
widely recognised, and where and when they have been less recognised,
drawing on the periods of the two world wars, when trauma, the stimulus
for and content of many ghost story texts, offered rich opportunities to
stare one’s own ghost in the face, while also, in this critical work, recognis-
ing that the domestic space becomes a haunted one, of the past, of deaths
and losses, as well as one of incarceration in domestic roles faced by spin-
sters, mothers and wives. This latter is a theme taken up by Sarah Waters
in both The Paying Guests (2014) and The Little Stranger (2009), contem-
porary novels (one haunted by loss, the other with a ghost resisting
change) set respectively (and retrospectively) post the First and Second
World Wars, i.e. in the period dealt with by Emma Liggins, and are of a
piece with a concern with domestic spaces and the haunted house, as is, of
course, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which, in
Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories, is, I argue, one of the markers of
change of focus for issues dealt with in women’s ghost stories. Minna
Vuohelainen notes the growing attention being paid to the spatial in
Gothic narratives: ‘Critical attention to gothic speciality is only slowly
gathering pace’ (Vuohelainen, 2015, p. 16) and Liggins’ work examines
‘the spatiality of women, of the ways in which they inhabit and navigate
space in the gothic mode’, which, she argues, ‘opens up new understand-
ings of gender and modernity’ (Liggins, 2020, p. 3). Liggins is interested
in spatial encounters in different places where elements of the house and
home speak to class, status, freedoms and constraints, as well as various
hidden secrets of families, not least economic and romantic. Contemporary
Women’s Ghost Stories is also interested in haunted houses and locations,
and begins by looking back to Daphne du Maurier’s ghostless ghost story,
Rebecca, in 1938, so there is some overlap with the historical moment of
Liggins’ work, and many of the issues and the appreciation of the psycho-
logical, physical, historical resonances of the spatial on women’s lives offer
forms of continuity throughout the period and locations considered here.
We also explore how ghost stories vehicle a response to historical moments
and deeply damaging traumatic events, including wars, transatlantic slav-
ery and its legacies, genocide and epidemics, as well as ongoing circum-
stances of isolation, and of marginalising and silencing women. We think
about the spatial hauntings of cities and of rural and war-torn landscapes.
This book focuses on women’s ghost stories, novels and short stories,
from just before the second half of the twentieth century and through the
twenty-first century, beginning roughly, a little early, with Daphne du
Maurier’s haunting, ghostless Rebecca (1938), followed by the equally
influential Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Both
novels undermine the solid fabric of great houses as they equally under-
mine the fabrications of romance, and the reward of ‘happily ever after’
8 G. WISKER
promises of financial, domestic and emotional security. We look at ghost

stories by women recognised as women’s Gothic, dealing with issues and
concerns familiar to women’s lives and recognised by feminist critics and
others as offering a women-oriented, women-originated perspective. Work
from writers as diversely situated as Ireland, Australia, Southeast Asia, the
Caribbean, Canada are seen as postcolonial women’s Gothic, while African
American women’s writing also runs throughout the work. We cannot
attempt a global coverage here so in-depth cultural histories which pro-
duce such globally located stories, and the stories themselves, particularly
those from written and oral sources which are other than Anglophone, are
largely beyond the scope of this book. Critical work on women’s ghost
stories in Anglophone literature is largely concerned with stories by UK
and US women, although ghost stories appear to be a global phenome-
non, expressions of both widespread, locally specific and personal traumas
and concerns. Melissa Edmundson’s (2018) writing on imperial and colo-
nial turn-of-the-century ghost stories takes readers to India, Egypt and
Southeast Asia, dealing with the terrors of physical danger from tigers,
snakes, unknown illnesses, while showing both local people and the colo-
nial or imperial sojourners as equally likely to be haunted, possessed, or to
haunt. Ghost stories by such as US authors Toni Morrison and Tananarive
Due, Sandi Tan and Catherine Lim from Singapore act as vehicles for
exposure of trauma. They offer the beginnings of ways of working with
the trauma arising from genocide, enslavement and the undermining of
indigenous and local people and their worldviews, as well as personal expe-
riences of violence, incarceration, silencing, dehumanising and sex-
ual abuse.
A global focus does not negate any argument about the effects of local
events, local traumas and the personal, but it does also recognise the global
reach of some traumas, specifically that of transatlantic slavery, of the holo-
caust, and the Second World War. There will be women’s ghost stories
about the coronavirus, the plague pandemic, but the unimaginable, the
devastating and the unutterably damaging take some time to settle, per-
haps, before we fictionalise them, before their ghosts lurk on in our imagi-
nations and are partially exorcised through writing about them. Currently
(2021) this is possibly too raw to exorcise (Wisker, Palgrave blog,
Sept. 2020).
There will be many more stories to be shared, as yet unearthed or
untranslated, voices to be heard and hidden wrongs to be revealed. We are
just scratching the surface.
This, Chap. 1, does several things. It considers critical reception of the

ghost story, often (elsewhere of course) dealt with as lightweight, as any-
thing supernatural might be, and particularly women’s ghost stories, his-
torically sometimes considered a sillier version of sensation fiction. As
influential writers such as Andrew Smith (2010) and Jeffrey Weinstock
(2004) have argued, it is important to reinstate the value of the ghost
story, a branch of the Gothic, as a way of bringing into the light cultural,
political, social, historical, personal and psychological confusions, repres-
sions and terrible wrongs in order to radically readjust understanding and
behaviour. For something apparently so flimsy and merely entertaining as
a story with ghosts in it, it is interesting to re-engage those critics who
have worked with the cultural and psychological importance of ghosts and
the ghost story, including Derrida, Freud, Marx, Kristeva and Cixous.
This is not a book claiming to be mainly focused on deploying the com-
plex politicised terms of hauntology or spectrality; rather, its focus is more
social, cultural and gendered, considering ghosts as figures exposing
wrongs, reminding of lies, losses and debts, only lightly buried dark histo-
ries of repression, silence, marginalising, destruction. Engaging with the
broader field of the spectral and spectralities, Frederic Jameson comments
(1999) on the use of spectrality in Derrida’s work Spectres of Marx (1993):
‘spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist’ (p. 39).
Ghosts and spectres play particular roles regarding language and values,
which are essentially contested, unfixed. Blanco and Peeran suggest: ‘For
Derrida the ghost, even when turned into a conceptual metaphor, remains
a figure of unruliness pointing to the tangibly ambiguous’ (p. 9), ‘the
ghost also questions the formation of knowledge itself’ (2013, p. 9). So
‘Derrida then, far from being a ghostbuster like Freud, Adorno, and
Abraham and Torok, uses the figure of the ghost to pursue (without ever
fully apprehending) that which haunts like a ghost and, by way of this
haunting, demands justice, or at least response’ (p. 9). Contestation,
ambiguity and questioning underlie the social, cultural and personal roles
the ghost plays in fiction. Augmenting the politicising and gendering of
readings of the ghost story enabled by these heavyweight thinkers and by
feminist critics already mentioned, other contemporary international criti-
cal voices are brought into the dialogue to revalue and fully appreciate the
insights, re-readings and new understandings offered by contemporary
women’s ghost stories. Some critical engagement with Jeffrey Weinstock,
Diana Wallace, Andrew Smith, Melissa Edmundson Makala, David Punter,
10 G. WISKER
Simon Hay, Clive Bloom, Emma Liggins, and others briefly situates wom-
en’s ghost stories historically, culturally, contextually and formally.
In focusing on women’s ghost stories and on haunting it is also impor-
tant to consider the wider understanding and revelations of hauntology
(Shaw, 2018), in which past writings, revelations and creative responses to
events and relationships of power, personal and political, are echoed in,
replayed through, haunt the texts themselves. While appreciating these
textual returns, these hauntings, I am not making the case, for example,
for all neo-Victorian fictions to be ghost stories, although some are that as
well as being revisitings and rewritings of familiar texts offering new per-
spectives on their concerns. I also use hauntology as the imprinting of past
events on places. Influential earlier stories are mentioned setting up
themes, concerns and ways of dealing with these concerns using women’s
ghost story strategies; however, I wanted to focus on the period immedi-
ately preceding and mostly after the Second World War. Fictions of
romance, domesticity and security prevailed; however, physical and eco-
nomic conditions changed for women, as did the ghost stories which
undercut complacencies, exposed constraining lies and revealed ostensibly
safe places, relationships and behaviours to be constructions fraught with
danger. The book engages with theoretical perspectives, trends and high-
lights in critical appreciation of women’s ghost stories to offer ways of
reading the selected contemporary work considered here. Much women’s
Gothic, including ghost stories, concentrates on the domestic, haunted
lives and families, the incarceration and silencing of the ostensibly safe and
caring home. This is a location, focus and microcosm for greater social ills,
and contemporary women’s ghost stories often link the local with the
global, with racism, sexism, Otherising, genocide, cultural politics, pan-
demics and war. The grand defining traumas and the insidious acts of bul-
lying and spite replay through the bodies and minds of the women in this
ever-growing richness of tales in which ghosts, the ghostly, the spectral
and haunting play a part both as near-tangible figures, and representa-
tions, emanations of the hidden, and unspeakable.
Undead: Critical Background

Intriguingly, some great literary critical masters claimed the ghost story
was outdated, as did Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel,
1960), just after Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House
(1959), arguably a novel which is itself, like all good ghosts, lurking,
ever-present, restless in its desire to reappear (in tales, films, the popular
imagination and a TV series) when least expected, and most needed. In
2018, commenting on the ubiquitous nature of the ghost story in con-
temporary American fiction, Parul Seghal reminds readers of Fielder’s
inappropriate interment in 1960:
‘An obsolescent subgenre,’ he declared, with conspicuous relish; a ‘naïve’

little form, as outmoded as its cheap effects, the table-tapping and flickering
candlelight. Ghost stories belong to—brace yourself for maximum Fiedlerian
venom—‘middlebrow craftsmen,’ who will peddle them to a rapidly dwin-
dling audience and into an extinction that can’t come soon enough.
(Seghal, 2018)
Dodging away from the presence, visibility and even tangibility of the
spectral in literature, Buse and Stott, in Ghosts: Deconstruction,
Psychoanalysis, History (1999), construct complex theoretical positions
using the ghost and ghostly, haunting and hauntology as modes of speak-
ing about problems of late capitalism. They begin by dismissing the genre:
‘to be interested in ghosts these days is decidedly anachronistic’ (p. 1),
displaced by aliens at the time of writing, but predicting, ‘Chances are,
ghosts will make another comeback’. Ghosts are concerned with time and
with timely returns, so this can be seen as a prediction of how their previ-
ous presences in literature as modes of representing lingering or recurrent
concerns will be revived. For critics following that revival it is difficult to
avoid the range of more complex theorising. Roger Luckhurst’s discussion
of psychoanalysis (Luckhurst, 1999) and Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928)
mention Derrida’s use of haunting, from Fors (1977) to The Spectres of
Marx (1993), where Fors concerns ‘the heterotopic crypt which lodges
inside the ego and comes up to haunt’, and in Spectres of Marx it is clear
not that you haunt but that you are haunted, or, rather, subjected to
haunting. Derrida’s comment on ghosts sets up a relationship between
memory, phantoms, traces and hauntings:
[g]hosts always pass quickly, with the infinite speed of a furtive apparition,
in an instant without duration, presence without present of a present, which,
coming back, only haunts (1993, p. 8)
12 G. WISKER
Next he notes:
The ghost, le re-venant, the survivor, appears only by the means of figure or
fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it merely semblance. And
this ‘synthesis of the phantom’ enables us to recognise in the figure of the
phantom the working of… the transcendental imagination… whose tempo-
ralizing schemes… are indeed ‘fantastic’, are in Kant’s phrase, those of an art
hidden in the depths of the should… the art of memory and… the memory
of art. (Derrida, 1993, p. 64)
Derrida marks the figurative rather than the (solidly) present nature of the
ghost, arguing for its role. Ghost stories are political and engaged, they
articulate the unsayable hidden secrets and darknesses of social and cul-
tural moments as well as of individual experiences and perspectives to be
projected and enacted, perhaps exorcised.
Avery Gordon reminds us that ‘To write stories concerning exclusions
and invisibilities… is to write ghost stories’ (1997, p. 17). Ghosts have a
duty to reveal what lies beneath the everyday, revisit what hidden histories
have been neatly hidden. Not all critics concerned with ghost stories single
out the experiences, perspectives and representations of women, however,
and even fewer find parallels and differences in different cultural contexts
‘at home and abroad’. We look here to women’s Gothic criticism, postco-
lonial criticism regarding Otherising, colonial and imperial histories, cul-
tural difference and connections as well as critical work on horror and
specifically on ghost stories to situate the concerns of this book. Intersecting
with myth, fairy and folk tale, women’s ghost stories are also a branch of
horror. Lisa Tuttle’s introduction to her collection of women’s horror,
Skin of the Soul (1990), emphasises how different seemingly safe spaces are
for men, for whom they are no more than that, places, and for women, for
whom they can be entrapping (buildings, apartments, castles, the domes-
tic house) or dangerous spaces where they are viewed as prey. Contemporary
Women’s Ghost Stories specifically focuses on writing by women partly
because of an interest in ways ghosts haunt and express the hidden histo-
ries of places, domestic houses, apartments, and remind of the dangers of
ostensibly safe spaces, crossing fields, woods, roads and parks. I am also
interested in how ghost stories by women can speak from silenced subor-
dination, for those who are marginalised and unseen, enabling those con-
structed as ‘other’ to the (male, white, able-bodied, middle-class, Western)
mainstream to assert their perspectives, and histories.
Critics and historians dealing with ghost stories might bypass women’s
writing. Simon Hay’s A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (2011)
stretches back historically, considering Dickens and others and in his

review, Paul Cowdell (2012) suggests there is more an ‘argument for his-
toricity in reading the modern ghost story’, quoting one of his own inter-
view respondents who characterised the ghost as ‘Something which should
be confined to the past but which invades the present’. Hay considers the
ghost story reflects a troubled relationship with the past, the single trauma
of history is, ‘the traumatic transition… from feudalism to capitalism lived
out over and over again’ (Hay, p. 2), which also includes the violent impo-
sition of empire. There is little on women writers, with one mention of
Virginia Woolf, and an absence of work on Susan Hill, the great reviver of
ghost stories (The Woman in Black, 1983). Where it deals with the colo-
nial or postcolonial it confines itself to male writers, including Kipling,
Dickens, le Fanu, and does not fully ground twentieth-century ghost lit-
erature in works by women—Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, E. Nesbit—nor in
colonial work by Alice Perrin, etc. Cowdell reminds us an often-forgotten
woman author of ghost stories, Catherine Crowe (1790–1872) (The Night
Side of Nature, Or Ghosts and Ghost Seers, 1848), relating her work to the
legend-influenced ghost stories mentioned in some of the cases ‘collected
by the Society for Psychical Research’. Crowe goes beyond an exploration
of links between cases and stories and is increasingly recognised as highly
influential in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century
and latterly, with Ruth Heholt’s recent Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre,
and Radical Politics (2021) as political and prescient.
Jeffrey Weinstock’s Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American
Women (2008) explores ‘supernatural fiction’ written by American women
between 1850 and 1930, revealing this (critically) neglected body of writ-
ing to be an important transatlantic parallel to the British female Gothic
tradition. His examination of ghost stories also questions current periodi-
sations and generic categories of American literature, revealing crossings
into sentimental, Gothic, romantic and realist work. Weinstock comments
that gender inflects women’s ghost stories: ‘Women writers’ ghosts are
rarely horrific or sinister, and women writers are more likely to treat the
natural and supernatural world as part of a continuum’, more often serv-
ing as ‘an expression of the fear of the known rather than the unknown’
(2008, p. 41), thus providing a link between the real lives lived and the
ghostly reminders. Weinstock has written extensively about ghost stories
and particularly those by women, and while I don’t really agree that their
ghosts are neither horrific nor sinister, we concur on the case he makes for
the continuum between the natural and the supernatural, and the links
14 G. WISKER
between the ghostly and real lives, which I argue is particularly the focus
in African American women’s ghost stories (Chap. 9).
Female and feminist Gothic criticism helps situate many of the issues we
deal with here, such as domestic spaces, disenfranchisement and absence.
Diana Wallace’s Female Gothic Histories: History, Gender and the Gothic
(2013) traces the development of women’s Gothic historical fiction from
Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) in the late eighteenth century, through the
work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria
Holt, to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century,
and takes an approach which emphasises the centrality of historical fiction
to the evolution of the Gothic. Its main focus is not on the ghost story as
such but rather on women’s historical novels, and women’s Gothic writ-
ing. This forms part of the range of critical works on which this book calls,
particularly in dealing with ghost stories lying behind the contemporary
tales with which we are concerned. Some other concerns are with interna-
tional and postcolonial ghosts, where the histories of imperial and colonial
rule and subjects reappear as figures of revenge, disease, ghostly reminders
of the invasions and disempowerments, the silencings that accompanied
such rule, with particular focus on the double position of the woman as
subaltern and how women began to speak out against that position using
the incessant and terrible reminders of ghosts.
As I noted earlier (Wisker, 2016), ‘The figure of the ghost puts spectral
flesh on those hidden, repressed stories, versions, perspectives, lives, invit-
ing us to look again and understand differently. This is not always a friendly
invitation, and although revenants are frequently familiar figures, their
familiarity can be misleading, their anger at previous silencing and margin-
alising is as likely to return through the settling of old scores, or specific
revenge, as it is in re-writing misleading or silenced narratives’ (p. 207).
Contemporary women’s ghost stories are often set in domestic locations,
and open up the doors hiding oppressive behaviours, hypocrisies about
cosy families and consistent bloodlines, loving and cherishing. Uncanny
returns shake the fabric of the home, beliefs and behaviours. Seghal recog-
nises the return of the repressed ghost story as a popular common con-
temporary conduit for whatever literature wishes to engage with and
present: ‘Literature—the top-shelf, award-winning stuff—is positively
ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haunts and wraiths of
every stripe and disposition’ (2018). Ghosts, then, are the vehicle of
choice to deal with everyday and grand, life-threatening or serious consid-
erations. While this is, on the one hand, serendipitous (vampires have also
been used metaphorically as vehicles for most cultural and everyday com-
ments) (Wisker, 2016) it is also significant. The ghost’s role is different
from, more political (and widespread) than that of the life-draining,
boundary-breaking vampire. Its established form and role are internation-
ally widespread, and historical, embodying liminality of every kind, most
particularly the space between the living and the dead, causing serious
questioning about the reason for life and our ways of living it, what is real,
what imagined, the effects of the ghost on the present, and the security of
our versions of the everyday, as real, tangible and solid. The nature of
ghosts is based on a middle space between substance and insubstantiality,
today and yesterday and their interrelation, on our control or otherwise,
of experience and surroundings, and on what can be said to be solid, verifi-
able, influential, from the bodily, to the assuredness of heredity and conti-
nuity (or their opposites). So, the ghost might be the figure of choice for
investigations of everything from romance and domestic and family safety
to teen murder in a housing estate (The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold, 2002),
child abduction in a village (The Stopped Heart, Julie Myerson, 2016) and
recurring vicious figures with endless grief and an undying need for retri-
bution (The Woman in Black, Susan Hill, 1983). In contemporary wom-
en’s ghost stories, ghosts curse society and individuals for everything from
personal damage, to endemic gendered wrongs, to town planning and the
building of metros through Chinese burial grounds (The Black Isle, Sandi
Tan, 2012). But they are not superficial, cosmetic, temporary figures.
They, the ghosts, reminding, cursing, seeking revenge for personal or
grand-scale hidden evils, insisting on righting wrongs, are themselves
examples, evidence of, fundamental ways in which we invest in cultural,
social and personal values, and in what is solid, real and of value, and what
might not be. They characterise our uncertainties. Ghost stories, by ren-
dering ghosts tangible and felt on the page, bring our dark secrets and
insecurities into view, enact them, cause fundamental questioning about
the condition of being human (or animal), what has been or is being lost,
and what is stable, what merely constructed as stable (and can also be
destroyed, or exposed as oppressive). They emphasise the strangely waver-
ing space between the world of the imaginary and of the tangible, reveal-
ing each to be equally real (or unreal).
Ghosts are needed in a world which invests in highly developed tech-
nology to solve its problems, to enable quality of life and balance, while
paradoxically at every turn politically and in humanitarian and natural
terms the same world, of the Anthropocene, is clearly determined to
16 G. WISKER
destroy life. When those in power fail to see they create and live amongst
worlds built on dark fantasies teetering blindly on the edge of global war-
fare and extinction, creeping neoliberalism, a festering divisiveness of peo-
ple and place, and an investment in paper money or bitcoin, the commercial,
the commodity, rather than the energies of embracing of difference, cele-
bration and support of life, it is only logical that the ever-ironic and cultur-
ally incisive Gothic is mobilised to lay bare the contradictions and expose
the flaws, fissures and yawning deadly cracks which could so easily drag us,
bombast and blindness and all, straight to hell.
Ghosts are also a contrary imaginative force against this dangerous
hubris. They remind us of our flawed pasts and our precarious futures.
This power and control of the rational, of technology, could be seen to
reduce ghosts by explaining, constructing and managing the everyday,
solving a range of problems, but, and probably luckily, they also produce
them. Ghost stories are alive and well in a technological age, as Clive
Bloom notes in ‘Angels in the Architecture: The Economy of the
Supernatural’ (1999):
Despite the importance of science and technology in the western world and
advances of rational thought across the last two hundred years, a general
belief in the paranormal is both widespread and deeply felt. (p. 226)
He sees not the return of the supernatural but rather ‘the narrative of a
progressive and inclusive modernity in which supernaturalism is an inte-
gral art—both marginal and essential’ (p. 226). We might think this is a
technological orientation of the North and West, producing ghosts, but
these stories of unsettled relationships between the fast-moving, commod-
ity- and technology-oriented worlds of late capitalism are equally present
in the East. In the contemporary world of Catherine Lim, for example, in
that global crossroads, Singapore, the high-tech, everyday world exists
alongside the everyday ghosts of the family and the local and regional
environs. This parallel ghostly world has comments to make on the accel-
erated everyday. With the ghostly returns of family, of the silenced and
hidden bondmaids, scorned lovers, beyond-their-due-date housekeepers,
those whose lives are marginalised in the race to construct more high rise
malls, faster motorways, there is much opportunity to halt consumers,
commuters and late capitalists in their tracks with the ghostly. This is also
the role of dead, scorned lovers; abused, powerless women; and those hid-
den from polite society. Some others of this ghostly group are revengeful
figures, such as the familiar Southeast Asian, malicious, ghostly woman

with her long black hair, Sadako, ghost of the ancient and the technologi-
cal age who seeps out of the TV screen to engulf everyday lives in
Ring (1998).
Our ghosts are all around us in everything we think, do, see and inter-
pret. While traditionally they warned of terrible doings, and a major
response was to lay or repress them, contemporary responses are more
likely to be to greet them, invite them to speak, attempt to learn from
them about the origins of our daily lives, fears and hopes, and particularly
our present and absent influences, and then perhaps to use them to predict
the future, to warn us of what could happen if… In this, contemporary
fictional ghosts resemble Dickens’ three ghosts in A Christmas Carol
(1843). The first, the ghost of Christmas past, opens up a history of self-
ishness and neglect of others, a bad past which will affect Scrooge’s wealthy
but empty present. This ghost points to past ills whose punishments are
being meted out on Scrooge, who seems unused to facing his historical
meanness and unpleasant acts. Ghosts remind, signal revenge for past
wrongs. The ghost of Christmas present opens up visual access to the
places and people around Scrooge and indicates options for him to mend
his ways, learn from his ghosts, his guilty past and mean-minded present,
serving as a warning which indicates possibilities for positive resolutions;
while the ghost of Christmas yet to come reveals what a terrible, empty,
negated future awaits him if he does not change, mend his ways, care
about others. The tale is set in nineteenth-century London, its streets
haunted by historical poverty and strife, theft, and the everyday presence
of death from disease, violent crime and hunger. Dickens emphasises these
traces elsewhere in Bleak House (1853), with its impenetrable insidious
fog, and Oliver Twist (1837), with crumbling buildings and waterways,
foul low life and poverty-stricken back alleys. In a haunted city, the ghosts
of A Christmas Carol demand that Scrooge learns from what they show
him, from their cautionary tales based in his own behaviour. They are
reminders, clarifiers, warnings.
These are roles for ghosts in the work of contemporary women writers
who focus on haunting and ghosting of places, events and people. Such
ghosts are there to remind and clarify, not to be ignored and walled up
again, shut down, banished, and they warn about both the present and the
potentially empty future. Although there are kindly, gentle, whimsical
ghosts in fiction, ghost stories are more often a subset of Gothic horror
stories, and have similar designs upon readers. Such designs are not merely
18 G. WISKER
to scare, terrify but rather are socially engaged, alerting us both to the
repercussions arising from past wrongs and the potential deadly damage
which could result in the future from current behaviours. The narrative
trajectories and the characteristics of horror have been adopted by con-
temporary writers as ways of response both to the more serious and com-
pelling issues (climate change, racism, violent death, war, identity) and to
the more everyday (shopping in malls, ill-thought-through consumption).
Everything, every event or potential event, can be seen and expressed
through the lenses offered by horror, seen at this point as a genre rather
than affect/effect (see John Clute’s arguments that no other genre has
been defined with affects: 2006, 2014, pp. 269–343). In Horror Fiction
(2005) I argued, ‘Horror is both an everyday occurrence, terrorism, the
cannibal next door, torture, and a way of dramatizing our hidden fear and
desires through fantasy that takes the everyday that few steps further’
(Wisker, 2005, p. 1). While Botting takes horror into the limits of reason
and emphasises its essential human quality, ‘Horror constitutes the limit of
reason, sense, consciousness and speech, the very emotion on which the
human reaches its limit. Horror is thus ambivalently human’ (Botting,
1995, p. 131). Sarah Dillon also argues about the widespread option of
horror to express our world, lives and stories, suggesting we will see ‘a
literary mainstream incorporation of the story moves of the horror genre
akin to the literary mainstream incorporation of the story moves of science
fiction witnessed in the late twentieth century’ (2018, p. 5). Writers are
turning to horror—just as Veronica Hollinger argued they were doing to
science fiction back in 2002—‘as a narrative discourse through which to
map the metamorphoses of present reality’ (Hollinger, 2002). Dillon’s
piece concerns the Anthropocene, that period in which we live now, when
humankind will soon have destroyed so much of the world that it will
become unlivable, a scientifically based argument which underpins much
of the end of the world dystopian fiction such as The Road (McCarthy,
2006). She says ‘the Anthropocene threatens to render the planet unfit for
human habitation. Without an immediate and concerted move towards
active planetary stewardship’ (2018, p. 9), commenting on Steffen et al.’s
statement that ‘the Anthropocene threatens to become for humanity a
one-way trip to an uncertain future in a new, but very different, state of
the Earth System’ (Steffen et al., 2011, p. 757). Eugene Thacker takes this
a little further into the realm of horror when commenting on the end of
philosophy.
The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters,

emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched sea-
scapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our
daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend
the world in which we live and of which we are a part. (2011, p. 1)
Like other socially and culturally focused horror figures (vampires and
zombies, for example) our ghosts in contemporary women’s fiction no
longer just remind us of the walled-up but leaky past; they warn us of the
deadly results of and repercussions from our currently wayward ways.
Aiming to focus on the end of the world horror underpinning the
Anthropocene, Donna Haraway builds on Lovecraft’s creation of Chtulhu
to create the idea of the Chthulucene. As Dillon notes, Haraway retains
the horror by referring to Lovecraft, but her focus on cyborgism and
hybridity leads forward to a sense of species and multispecies stories and
futures. Haraway argues, ‘both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene
lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and
self-fulfilling predictions’ (2016, p. 51). The Chthulucene displaces the
human and replaces the horror of the Anthropocene with ‘ongoing mul-
tispecies stories and practices of becoming within times that remain at
stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky
has not fallen—yet’ (2016, p. 56). Haraway’s Chthulucene and ghost sto-
ries of the Anthropocene (see Chap. 10) remind us of what is precious,
vulnerable, threatened and can also act as an alert to change human behav-
iour before it is too late.
With such a scientifically based sense of an impending ending, it is not
surprising that of the horror figures who enable writers and readers to
express various feelings of dismay, desire, loss and confusion, the ghost,
and the horror condition of ghosting and haunting, are best suited to
dealing with this troubling moment transiting perhaps into nothingness,
an end. The ghost allows us to constantly look back and see traces of the
past, people, movements, place, in the present. This both initiates a sense
of mourning and loss, of what is no longer present, who is no longer pres-
ent, including the historical, often romanticised situations and places of
the past, and the people within them, a response suited to dystopian end
of the world narratives. Ghosts in this argument trigger a romanticising of
loss, of the past, building on their role in the Romantic period as popular
figures with which to express emotions of loss and the destruction of past
idylls as well as of past threats (Cusack & Murnane, 2012).
20 G. WISKER
My own location in the UK and personal history of being brought up

‘overseas’ followed by as much working in other cultures and countries as
possible, informs much of my concern about discovering, rescrutinising,
owning then facing a whole range of historical and cultural ghosts. Some
of this is theorised in both gendered and cultural terms by engaging with
the work of Julia Kristeva (1982), whose description of abjection, the con-
struction of the Other (from ourselves), closely resembles the points of
tension between familiar constructions and presentations of the ghost,
between the ostensibly real, almost tangible other, and the fantasy, tempo-
rary and seductive, limited in its appearances. The ghost is both product
of and dweller in the liminal space between life and death, dark and light,
being and non-being, meaning and lack of meaning. ‘We may call it a
border… On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that,
if (we) acknowledge it, annihilates (*us)’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2). In 2020,
as the statues of figures of Britain’s imperial, colonial and slave trading past
were removed in the UK, those of colonial rule in South Africa, and of
slavery in the US, we were reminded of the ways in which grand buildings
and cities are haunted by the dark past of falsely legitimised acts of violence
based on such Otherising. Constructions of difference, Otherising and
brutal silencing are exposed in many colonial, postcolonial and African
American fictions which use the figures of ghosts to expose dehumanising
beliefs and behaviours. In Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century
Britain (2013), Melissa Edmundson Makala offers an earlier historical
counterpart to some of the work in Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories,
and in her book on British colonial women ghost writers, Women’s Colonial
Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (2018), she shows the super-
natural particularly engaged with women’s perspectives and lives, explores
female Gothic and ghostings, the paranormal. Women’s writing from the
UK, Africa, Asia and Australia offers new insights into female Gothic in
women’s writing of the period. Some elements of this provide a compan-
ion piece to my own interests here. She deals with the haunted house—
colonial bungalows, and terrors of the foreign Other, the unknown. My
focus on contemporary writing from postcolonial and African American
origins is on ways in which, by reimagining histories, contemporary
women writers, including Toni Morrison, Tananarive Due, Sandi Tan,
Catherine Lim, Alexis Wright and Nalo Hopkinson, undercut and expose
as partial, flawed, the versions of selective safety offered by colonial and
imperial narratives, bringing the traumatic past back to life, to be storied,
faced and dealt with, though never forgotten and erased.
Ghosts at the Turn of the Century and Women’s

Modernist Writing
David Punter, in The Literature of Terror (1996), re-read the Gothic with
new eyes claiming the traditions of the Gothic for respectable serious,
social, cultural and political ends and simultaneously reclaiming the rich-
ness of horror. This work, alongside that of Andrew Smith and Diana
Wallace in Gothic Modernisms (2001), is also vital for making a connection
between the Gothic tradition and modernism, simultaneously making an
incontrovertible case for the serious social and psychological roles played
by the Gothic and by horror, of which the ghost is the longest-lasting wit-
ness and vehicle. Building on their work, several other critics have also
taken the Gothic and horror into modernism, and extended these links
which, for ghost stories, highlight a shift in the kind and role of the ghost
story by women in early twentieth-century writing. It is broadly recog-
nised that the moment of change in versions of the uncanny comes with
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), which both May Sinclair and
Virginia Woolf reviewed. Sinclair claimed it is ‘the most perfect and the
most convincing ghost story I have ever read’ (1923, p. 114), and in
1921 in her review ‘Henry James’ Ghost Stories’, Virginia Woolf differen-
tiated James’ psychologically based ghosts from the ancient ghost stories
of angry returned revengers: ‘James’ ghosts or apparitions have nothing in
common with the violent old ghosts—the blood stained sea captains, their
white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They
have their origins within us. They are present whenever the significant
overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears
ringed by the strange’ (1921, p. 324). Julian Wolfreys notes how Virginia
Woolf identifies this momentous shift in the use of ghosts, their purpose
and engagement with us in early twentieth-century texts, when he com-
ments on Henry James’s ghosts, registering ‘the epochal shift from the
Gothic to the psychoanalytic’ (Wolfreys, 2010, p. 5). Wolfreys identifies
her marking of the ‘tacit, and almost imperceptible admission of the
uncanny, Woolf’s reading of James has the effect of dating—if such a thing
is possible—the interiorisation or incorporation of the ghostly and spec-
tral’ (2010, p. 5). Using Nicholas Ryles’ definitions of uncanny, he argues
that Woolf is crossing the boundary between ‘narratives about the ghostly’,
and, on the other, manifestations of ‘ghostly narrative’ (2010, p. 5). In his
work Liminality (1988), Richard Dilworth Rust identifies James as setting
up two kinds of reading in this story, which probably explains the duplicity
22 G. WISKER
we have in discussing it. One is the psychological, and the other the
ghostly, so the governess’s psychological disturbance causes her to pro-
duce the whole Peter Quint experience and put the children at risk, or
there is perhaps an evil ghost and she tries to rescue them from him/it.
Claire Drewery calls this the ‘blurring of the distinction between the
ghosts as an apparition and as symptomatic of a protagonist’s neuroses’
(2011, p. 68), and when there are two readings we have further terror. We
are actually as readers in a discomfiting, liminal position because we don’t
know how to read the story, a kind of double uncanny (my idea) of distur-
bance of our traditional readings of the uncanny. Drewery sees Sinclair
and Woolf’s work as transition narratives: ‘a complex narrative of transi-
tion,… insufficiently explained by the categories of “ghost story” or “hor-
ror fiction”’ (2011, p. 68).
In her chapter ‘The Modernist Uncanny Tradition: Mysticism,
Metaphysics and the Psychological’ in Modernist Short Fiction by Women:
The Liminal (2011), Claire Drewery considers influences on short stories
by Woolf and May Sinclair, arguing that ‘oblique, ambiguous and typically
experiential’, these two writers’ ‘fragmented impressionistic ghost stories
drawing heavily on the Gothic literary tradition in order to explore and
interrogate the liminal space between what is seen and what is unseen;
what is palpable and what is intangible’ (p. 6). She links with T. S. Eliot’s
statement in his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which
recognises the traces of influences and echoes of previous great writers in
the work of poets and artists, in fact, that form of ghosting and haunting
of texts by those of previous days, ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his
complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appre-
ciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’ (2011, p. 15). What
Drewery sees as being made new is the interrelatedness of contemporary
modernist work with predecessors, dead poets and artists, which ‘although
drawn from the Gothic tradition, also interrogates the complex interrela-
tionships between psychological and mystical themes’. She recognises the
importance of the ghost story as lying directly on that cusp of change from
a belief and investment in the occult to an interest in the psychological, so
the ghost moves from being a physical emanation to perhaps something in
the mind, although how this affects what it is used to represent, remind,
point out, expose, if it is being perceived, written and told as a conduit for
representation and for a message, a comment, is not so sure, so ‘a discern-
ible shift between the traditional and the experimental uncanny tale
occurred when the Victorian fascination with the occult gave way in the
early twentieth century to an interest in the newly developing science of

psychoanalysis: a palpable influence on the work of both Sinclair and
Woolf’ (2011, p. 676).
Many of the concerns about silenced, marginalised, walled-up women,
the oppressiveness and deceptive security of the domestic context, mar-
riage, the home, and about relationships, demon lovers, returned wives,
are central to the late Victorian and early modernist ghost stories. Some of
these are standalone short stories, some parts in novels, so, for example,
with Woolf, there is ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V.’ (1906), with a
woman so unnoticed she is a ghost of herself, and her death only empha-
sises her nothingness in terms of relationships and status, or a lasting love
in ‘A Haunted house’, or as centrepieces in novels concerned with large-
scale events such as the devastation of the war on families. In To the
Lighthouse (1927), the ghost of Mrs Ramsay hovers in the minds and the
home, and surrounds the family’s holiday island retreat, post war.
War, trauma, personal, family and cultural crises continue to be core
experiences leading to expression through the figure of the ghost, and
through the haunting of lives, families and places both domestic and more
public, as sites for murder, war and genocide.
Ghosts in contemporary women’s fictions might well accost someone
like an old headless sea captain, a traditional ghostly figure. They could do
so in the figure of a brutalised bondmaid, or a radical freedom fighting
bandit but many contemporary ghosts are less semi-solidly present, prefer-
ring to affect the minds, dreams, repressed histories, guilt, personal trau-
mas and terrors of individuals, families, communities and whole nations,
the latter with transatlantic slavery, the Holocaust, the invasion of
Singapore, or the Vietnam War.
Ghosts are not just night visitors; as Julia Briggs’ work reminds us, they
are actually embedded in the fabric of wealth and security all around us in
the UK, in the grand wealthy buildings of the North, Liverpool and Hull,
and of the South, Bristol and London Docks, where some transportation
of slavery actually took place, and where the poisoned fruits of its success
came back in the form of wealth to fuel the Industrial Revolution and
build grand buildings. The ghosts of slavery are not merely in the upstairs
attics in Kentucky, they are in the beautiful, old buildings on the water-
front of the River Thames in London, and they are in Port Royale in
Jamaica, where families were split up and sent to plantations. And they are
in the castles of Ghana, where the doors to the sea offered no way back.
Elsewhere buildings speak of wars and human trafficking. The ghosts of
24 G. WISKER
the Opium Trade and two world wars are, for example, embodied in the
lovely old colonial buildings of Singapore.
In contemporary women’s ghost stories, women often face violent
threats and sometimes helpfully haunting presences. They are mediums
acting as conduits for voices from the past, they channel the voices of
those silenced by history, which marginalised and walled them up. As
ghosts themselves, they return from once-subordinated positions, walking
back into homes which have tried to bury them, with the trauma they
represent, to remind of and seek revenge for, compensation for, dealing
with that trauma. They are also figures who represent the energies of hid-
den desire, of alternative power and being, also suppressed in women’s
lives and histories. Simone de Beauvoir defines these unruly spirits as cre-
atively transgressive:
And in truth, cellars and attics no longer entered, of no use, become full of
unseemly mystery; phantoms will likely haunt them; abandoned by people,
houses become the abode of spirits, unless feminine virginity has been dedi-
cated to a god one easily believes that it implies some kind of marriage with
the demon. (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 144)
Some of the discussions in this book draw on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx

(1993), in which he emphasises that hidden, silenced labour is embodied
in the produced object—and much hidden, silenced labour is women’s.
Andrew Smith’s political and economic reading of context, of reasons for
and arguments vehicled by ghosts in the period 1840–1920 in his The
Ghost Story 1840–1920 (2010), takes a particular gendered perspective in
its dealing with women, and this book focuses on similar political and
economic issues taken into the later twentieth and twenty-first century.
We are concerned with women’s ghost stories historically (in the
Introduction and in reference to works focused on) and now; women’s
ghost stories as a form; and the stories’ treatment and expression of
domestic incarcerations, histories of repression, of exclusion from inheri-
tance and seclusion if they don’t fit in, histories of suicide, murders and
revenge. We consider women as spectres, with a silenced spectral history,
and ways in which women’s ghost stories engage with history, context,
theory and background, offering social, cultural and political readings,
dealing with the paranormal, gender-silencing and marginalisation, the
body, voice and the home.
Our ghosts are creatures of the abject, the Other, and are constructed
from the need to present something as whole, flawless, unquestioned, vali-
dated, but they arise from consecrated ground, from our minds and
homes, the houses we live in, the faces of our family members, the very
everyday fabric of our lives. For those silenced, absented, denied, written
out, and for those who need to know—ghosts are essential and inevitable
as vehicles for such understanding, such questioning of the complacent,
smoothed-over wholeness of identity, inheritance, heredity, land owner-
ship and wholesomeness.
Ghosts lurk, or return, slyly, or with a violent eruption to remind us of
the ways in which history has denied other lives and voices, other rights—
unmarried women, indigenous people, slaves, the poor, the annoyingly
other—old, different, their lives and histories uncomfortable to a consis-
tent national, personal or family version of what is and should be. Agents
of the Gothic disturbance of complacency, the ghosts force us to remem-
ber long-hidden secrets—the dead and unburied, whether literally or
unburied in our imagination and deep memories, surfacing in dreams,
terrors, emanations, invasions, anything that disturbs the smooth narra-
tives of consistency and complicity.
Structure
Chapter 1 introduces the theories, themes and issues as they appear
throughout the book. It considers creative and critical work which estab-
lishes the variety, intentions and characteristics of women’s ghost stories as
they have developed in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Following
this, the book has three parts.
Part I focuses on the four key texts in my take on contemporary wom-
en’s ghost stories, crucial novels that changed women’s ghost stories and
have had a significant effect on later twentieth- and twenty-first-century
women’s ghost stories, each socially, culturally engaged, focusing on the
silenced histories of women’s lives, and the constraining lies which haunt
women: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Shirley Jackson’s The
Haunting of Hill House (1959), Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983)
and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Chapter 2 looks at Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) and Shirley
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), each novel with protago-
nists haunted by culturally constructed notions, dreams of romance, in
grand Gothic houses, the unstable fabric of which reflects the instability of
26 G. WISKER
self and of such insubstantial dreams. Chapter 3 looks at Susan Hill’s The
Woman in Black (1983) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), each novel
reflecting the brutal abjection of and widespread culturally produced dam-
age done to those denigrated as ‘others’, here women, their bodies, their
own and others’ vulnerable children, each indicting deadly unequal societ-
ies and expressing a potential threatening legacy.
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) evacuates the lie of romance, love
solving all, marriage as rescue, safety, security, eternity, and wrapped in a
comfortable, financially stable home offering inheritance, wealth, glam-
our, adoration and something glitzy. The grand home’s romance and
security, with the ideal husband, are both the promise and the death of
that promise in much traditional nineteenth century men’s and women’s
Gothic, with Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) at the heart of this emptying out of
an investment and a dream. Romance and the reward of financial security
and continuity are troubled but maintained in Brontë’s novel, questioned
and destroyed in Rebecca. This novel of partying and place, set in the last
days of a blind era of indulgence between the wars, reads as an uneasy,
haunted romance. It reinforces before it destroys utterly the investment in
a grand country mansion with servants, safety, love, a cocoon of wealthy
security, gentility, and adoration. Though the ghost is laid and the lies with
it, the haunting continues in the imaginations of the readers.
In The Haunting of Hill House (1959), The Woman in Black (1983)
and Beloved (1987), houses grand or everyday are unsafe places. In The
Haunting of Hill House (1959), escaping the sideline role as spinster aunt,
Eleanor answers an advert for a few days away, in a controlled experiment,
it seems, held by a reputable Doctor Montague in a grand mansion on the
edge of the motorway in the US countryside. Like an Agatha Christie
murder mystery, there is a weekend party collection of guests, each escap-
ing their own lies and demons, expecting both the grand glory of a rich
house and the glamour of a weekend away with strangers. For Eleanor, the
excitement could potentially help take her away from her constrained and
damaged version of self, but ultimately it all closes her in on herself,
reminding her of the haunting lies she has ingested (that journeys end in
love), and turning the glitzy Hollywood invention of American grand
houses of wealth, mystery and romance into one of denial, lies, incarcera-
tion, tortuous, enclosed, labyrinthine but shuttered corridors and rooms.
Her room is the darkness of the self and the soul, and she escapes up, up
and out. The house will not let her go once it has her. The haunting is
something she brings with her, guilt about momentarily not responding to
her dependent mother, and of a previous death in the house, another

hopeful young woman, perhaps. Everything is constructed and transient,
on the edge. The house is shuttered, threatened, confusing in layout and
event, misleading, and ultimately it returns the terrors, insecurities and
false investments to her. She is its next victim, a victim of a tawdry version
of a glitzy dream. Eleanor, trying to leave and driving into a tree, fails to
escape the house, false social promises and her own demons.
In Chap. 3 Susan Hill does not even let the ghostly woman in black
into the house. In The Woman in Black (1983), Jennet Humfrye is forced
to hover outside, shut out of the security of the grand house and finally,
through the death of her illegitimate son Nathaniel, her own reason to
live. Socially condemned, she has made the mistake of flouting the rules of
heredity, inheritance, sanity, family, love and marriage, which underpin
Victorian and the twentieth-century western world, so she was cast out.
Her role, after her son’s tragic death, is nothing but revenge. This novel is
overtly and broadly social, linking the death of the country house tradition
with the brutal dehumanising displacement of young women who had
children out of marriage. Her revengeful response is to damn and destroy
the village children. This is a recognisable ghost, spectral, dressed in black,
haunting graveyards, wreaking revenge on families. But she is also an
overt, socially critical figure taking revenge on an unfair social system.
There are many more abused and damaged women, haunting and haunted
mothers in women’s ghost stories globally, for example in the work of
Singapore writers Catherine Lim and Sandi Tan (Chap. 7), and the
Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (Chap. 10).
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the fourth foundational novel in my
overall argument, is an even more sweepingly powerful ghost story. It
plays out on both tightly local, domestic and broad levels, a cultural of all
complicit in the enslavement and dehumanisation of others, locally and
across oceans and continents. A little dead baby girl ghost returning as a
full-grown woman, learning to speak for the first time, shatters the
restrained, disturbed silence about an infanticide produced by genocide—
a baby murdered by her own mother to save her from slavery. The house
is haunted, and Morrison points out that so are all other houses, families,
individuals, communities, because of the trauma of the genocide of slav-
ery. Beloved (1987) is individual and cultural, and an international haunt-
ing embodied in a small family and in women’s bodies which speak of the
everyday, lived horrors of slavery.
28 G. WISKER
Each ghost in these pivotal texts highlights the roles society places on
women who internalise and try to live up to certain versions of themselves
in the everyday and cultural imagination—living with loving husbands, as
loving mothers with perfect children, inhabiting a (grand) house offering
security, stability, continuity, comfort, play and enjoyment without drudg-
ery. The ghosts and ghostly presences in contemporary women’s writing
undermine such cultural constructions, constraints and lies.
Ghost stories, then, are not just entertaining tales for dark nights
around the fire; they expose the false promises and the violence people do
to each other, the traumatic results in individuals, cultures, across genera-
tions. These four novels and all the texts considered in Contemporary
Women’s Ghost Stories focus on ways in which ghost stories expose, reveal,
articulate individual, psychological and cultural damage done to women,
because of their bodies, vulnerability and disempowerment socially, legally
and culturally, and in so doing use haunting and the figures of ghosts to
move beyond the women themselves, the locus of the suffering. The sto-
ries burst out of silence, with ghostly force, to expose and indict broader
society, locally, nationally and globally.
Part II considers popular concerns which recur and morph in contem-
porary women’s ghost stories. Chapter 4 ‘True Love as Possession:
Ashputtle (Carter, 1987), Lady Oracle (Atwood, 1976), The Greatcoat
(Dunmore, 2012), The Glass Bottle Trick (Hopkinson, 2000)’ looks at
possession, at Cinderella and Bluebeard influences, considering Angela
Carter’s ‘Ashputtle’ (1995), Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976),
Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat (2012) and Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The
Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000). Chapter 5 focuses on séances and spiritualism
in the contemporary period with Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen
(1990), Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005) and Sarah Waters’ Affinity
(1999). Chapter 6 returns to the haunted house and domestic hauntings,
abuse and murder related to a particular time and place, considering Sarah
Waters, The Little Stranger (2009), Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk
(2017) and Julie Myerson’s The Stopped Heart (2016).
Part III takes up the issues of trauma underlying many ghost stories and
considers how they grow from and express different histories, cultures and
contexts. In a Southeast Asian setting in Singapore, Chapter 7 considers
the ghosts of war, of the Japanese invasion, everyday Chinese household
ghosts and creeping capitalism in Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle (2012). It
exposes the abuse of women, as does Catherine Lim’s work in The
Bondmaid (1997) and Little Ironies (1976). In several Southeast Asian
tales, the revengeful vampire ghost, the pontianak, reminds us both of
Latin American La Llorona and the woman in black. Chapter 8 continues

a concern with trauma, revealing the damage of war in the Vietnamese
War, with Duong’s Novel without a Name (1995), and in France after two
world wars and historical genocide first Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts
(2010), then Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1992). Chapter 9
reminds that places and families can tether the living and the dead to
unfinished business, damaged histories, inherited loss. It concentrates on
the insecurities, the liminality of transient spaces, visits, visitations and the
trap of unresolved tragedies and deaths linked to these places which engulf
the inhabitants and the newcomers. The chapter begins with Shirley
Jackson’s ‘A Visit’ (1950), where a wealthy family encircled by their house
and lands and by their past trigger off and replay fatal loss through inviting
in new young women. In Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry
(2009), another family lie, and inheritance invites then entraps young
women in a ghostly power game. Both Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001)
and Daisy Johnson’s broadcast The Hotel (2021) show the danger, liminal-
ity and false comforts of these transient temporary homes where the
undead and their confused and confusing stories trap the living who might
try to understand the circumstances of their deaths, the reasons for their
hauntings. Finally, Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2015) returns chil-
dren and families on summer holidays to the location of ghosts of slavery.
The final chapter, Chapter 10 Conclusion. Breaking boundaries, leak-
ing truths, pressing issues-the Anthropocene, moving forward,
Afrofuturism, focuses on both loss and recovery, moving on. Novels and
stories briefly mentioned look at the relationship between mankind and
nature in the Anthropocene, trauma, genocide, ghosts and women victim
survivors. The central text, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018), is set in
Northumberland, on Hadrian’s Wall, where the physical wall and the wall
of time separate but align the historical abuse of a sacrificed bog woman,
and domestic abuse meted out to the twenty-first-century girl and her
mother. It begins to consider the ghosting of place and body in the
Anthropocene, the destructive period dominated by the worst damage of
humankind which would make ghosts of everyone and every living thing,
as do the briefly introduced novels and stories which follow. Aboriginal
Australian Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) focuses in the future on
an abused Aboriginal girl, people using power to invest in a reinterpreta-
tion of a damaged haunted past and a more positive future. This latter,
indigenous treatment of the ghosts of the Anthropocene aligns with
Afrofuturism in the work of Nalo Hopkinson, in The New Moon’s Arms
30 G. WISKER
(2007), using haunting and ghosts to begin to offer alternative rewriting

of the traumatic genocidal past of transatlantic slavey and magical power-
ful alternatives to toxic threats to the future.
Conclusion
Women’s ghost stories are alternative histories, setting biased stories
straight, shouting from the silence and shadows. Both Naomi Mitchison
and Walter Benjamin remind us that history as passed on is that of the
conqueror: ‘the conquered is always forgotten’ (Mitchison, 1930); ‘all
rulers are heirs of those who conquered before them… There is no docu-
ment of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barba-
rism’ (Benjamin, 1973, p. 258). Family histories, those legitimated, partial
histories of the establishment, warming stories of homes and nations are
all so whole and wholesome because of their partiality, silences, absences,
their cover-ups. Women’s ghost stories peel away the deadly cladding or
torn wallpaper revealing abjection, dismissal to silence and the liminal
spaces of traumatic, oppressive histories and stories. They are walled up in
our homes, our ghosts, and walled up in our minds and the minds of the
unscrupulous in power and their legitimated histories. The existence of
ghosts, in stories, blurs boundaries between life and death, newly articu-
lated and heard, they blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, imagi-
nation and solid reality, the safe and familiar and the unsafe and unfamiliar.
So, like the essence of the energies of the Gothic, ghosts are there to dis-
turb complacencies and ruffle the smoothness of our accredited histories,
stories and beliefs. They are about our relationships with the past—with
trauma and with our selves now, and with our futures.
As figures of Gothic horror and of the everyday fantastic, ghosts are
uncanny; they undermine complacencies and certainties, and do so for a
wide range of reasons, some of which are linked to the psychological,
some to identity, history, space, place, power and economics. In these
respects, an engagement with ghosts and particularly with women’s writ-
ing about ghosts and spirits, the spectral, haunting, is an opportunity for
a culturally and gender-inflected exploration of the ways in which our
ghosts, arising from their unquiet graves, can engage us actively and ener-
getically with righting a range of historical and crucially immediate, politi-
cal, cultural and personal wrongs. They are revengers, they warn, and like
all good Gothic creatures, they call to action. In considering ghost stories
by contemporary women we move beyond fireside shockers into facing
stark truths about our relationship to each other, to the often-damaging

narratives which control our minds and those of others, local, national,
international, and to the planet in an age of the Anthropocene, when we
seem determined to destroy it. As with much overtly feminist work, this
book engages with and invigorates the essential relationships between the
personal and the political. Our ghosts tell us much about ourselves, our
age, and they warn us—warnings ignored at our peril.
Contemporary women’s ghost stories look back, reveal domestic and
more broadly cultural, psychological and physical lies and traps, settle old
scores, disabuse destructive fantasies, work with trauma for individual,
family and cultural histories by bringing them into the open, giving them
shape. With this acknowledgement, articulation and shape, ghost stories
can also then begin to help us look forward.
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Filmography
Ring. (1998). dir. Hideo Takata.
PART I
Haunted Texts, Haunted Houses,

Haunted Lives
CHAPTER 2
Haunted Romance and Haunted Houses:

Rebecca (du Maurier, 1938), The Haunting
of Hill House (Jackson, 1959)
The rise of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary wom-

en’s ghost story begins, in this study, with Daphne du Maurier’s ghostless,
haunted and haunting anti-romantic novel, Rebecca (1938) and Shirley
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Both novels undercut the
romantic dreams of their protagonists, respectively the unnamed second
Mrs de Winter, and Eleanor Vance. Each woman starts out relatively pen-
niless, the to-be-second wife acting as companion to a selfish, rich, intoler-
ably bossy social climbing employer in otherwise romantic south of France,
before being whisked of her feet into a grand mansion and the unfillable
shoes of her predecessor, Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter, who appears to
have been the embodiment of glamour, intelligence and wifely power.
Jackson would have seen the film of Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first import of
British horror into Hollywood, and her protagonist is similarly a relatively
penniless young woman, also approaching a grand house with excitement
and only a few misgivings, bringing with her own ghosts, but driven by
the romantic belief that ‘journeys end with lovers meeting’ (Jackson,
p. 305). Both The Haunting of Hill House and Rebecca lack visible palpa-
ble ghosts (although Eleanor feels there is one and something, some pres-
ence rattles door handles), while both are haunted by past presences,
events, deaths. These are threateningly hinted at in The Haunting of Hill
House by local townsfolk and the housekeepers (who refuse to spend the
night there) while the figure of the dead Rebecca herself is worshipped,

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_2
40 G. WISKER
fantasised about and kept alive by being constantly referred to by the

housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Heterosexual romantic love is also disturbed:
in Rebecca by Mrs Danvers’ sensual response to the preserved glamorous
garments and the lingering sexual excitement of her dead employer, and
in Jackson’s novel by Eleanor’s attraction to the exciting Bohemian Theo,
another houseguest with whom she exchanges clothes, and about whom
she fantasises. The hopeful young women, and the grand houses, are each
haunted by outdated fantasies that romantic love solves everything; solid
grand family houses are safe and suggest continuity, and you can take
exciting journeys into fabulous futures rewarded eternally by love, wealth,
security. Each exposes and undercuts the romantic and socially constrain-
ing narratives entrapping women who are influenced by the dreams,
expectations, demands and fears which drive these narratives. Each also
evacuates fantasies of safety, continuity and belonging perpetuated in
common belief, fiction and film.
Rebecca
Rebecca is not the popular romantic fiction it was initially seen to be, but
rather the death of romantic fiction. Its Cinderella promises and Hollywood
dream romance lie exposed as both dangerous, more of a Bluebeard threat
of courtship and dismemberment than a happy-ever-after idyll. Perhaps
worse, this romantic future is also exposed as dully mundane, a life (or
death)-long sentence of lies, deceit, cover-ups and silence. In Daphne du
Maurier’s work, women investing in such romances are culturally haunted
by the promise they offer: of eternal undying love, economic stability, and
the domestic bliss of husband and children. The haunting and the under-
mining are also exposed in Rebecca’s nineteenth-century predecessors,
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847a), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë,
1847b), both also mistaken as romantic fictions, and the darker The
Woman in White (Collins, 1859). A fine example of hauntology (Shaw,
2018), in which later writings echo and remind of earlier work and the
values informing that work, Rebecca is haunted by these earlier novels of
romance, passion, false dreams, imprisonment, madness and problematic
rewards.
The novel starts not with the meeting of new lovers, and follows not
with their marriage and any domestic joy, but with a nightmarish return to
the refusal of all of these clichés, embodied in the overgrown monstrous
rhododendrons along the untended, wild, Manderley drive up to the
2 HAUNTED ROMANCE AND HAUNTED HOUSES: REBECCA… 41
ruined mansion. This is itself a moment fitting a revenant, a ghost return-

ing compulsively to an emptied-out building or space replete with unfin-
ished stories, hidden violence and oppression. If this were ‘sleeping beauty’
a prince would untangle the thorns and brambles, the decayed mansion or
castle would spring to life as his kiss awoke the deeply slumbering heroine.
However, this is a fairy-tale romance in reverse, and the ghost of fairy tale
in the Gothic, nightmarish description presages the narrative of a haunted
past of misleading dreams and dark secrets, the stuff of ghost stories.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... The drive was a ribbon
now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and choked with
grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impedi-
ment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws… Ivy held
prior place in this lost garden, the long strands crept across the lawns, and
soon would encroach upon the house itself. (Rebecca, pp. 5–6)
The opening dreamlike sequence is a Gothic nightmare return up a mon-

strously overgrown driveway, to a burned-out house which keeps its own
secrets. Such a return is repeated in the return of the family to the version
of their own home and its traumatic memories in the TV series of The
Haunting of Hill House (2018). Fire also wreaks terrible damage to the
US house in that series, with romance, family harmony and success mea-
sured by gracious historical roots and grand homes. All such personal and
national fictions are undermined in Rebecca, as they are in fictions and
films it has influenced, which it haunts.
While there is no actual ghost in the novel, for the nameless, second
wife, the first wife, Rebecca, sophisticated and outgoing, now dead, is a
constant haunting presence, reminding her of her own shortcomings. As
Rebecca Munford notes (2016), in this novel, as in Shirley Jackson’s The
Haunting of Hill House and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), ‘ghostly rep-
resentations and narrative effects make present experiences of social invis-
ibility and historical dispossession, as well as anxieties about the “visibility”
of new models of “femininity” emerging in the twentieth century’
(Munford, 2016, p. 121). Munford’s arguments about spectral femininity
consider, I suggest, the ‘ghostly yet corporeal [trace]’ (Munford, 2016,
p. 209) of the first Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, whose presence is constantly
reminded in her absence, since the second wife is trying to live among and
use the objects which remind others of her predecessor. Though she never
knew Rebecca, these objects bring her, the first wife, to mind as an almost
42 G. WISKER
embodied presence, more lively than the young second wife can be herself
in any of the rooms and grand spaces of Manderley, all of which are still
filled by Rebecca, as she still fills the memories of everyone visiting or liv-
ing in the house. This second wife is alive, yet somehow less lively than
Rebecca. Like a spectral presence, she finds herself disempowered in a
place already full. Munford notes:
The narrator’s experience of Rebecca’s ghostly presence is heightened by

the supernatural vocabulary of ‘possession’ that marks her narration. Her
spectralized language makes present the absent other woman as a chilling
corporeal effect when she ‘unconsciously’ shivers ‘as though someone had
opened the door… and let a draught into the room’ (du Maurier, 2003,
p. 87). (Munford, p. 122)
Rebecca’s handwriting comes to life, her writing desk contains her devel-
oped and undeveloped thoughts and some hidden messages. She might be
a figure only embodied in her clothes, her writing, the memories of her
decisiveness over daily matters but she has more presence than the second
wife who therefore is herself emptied out, a spectral figure in the house she
is meant to try and inhabit. She cannot fit the house, she cannot fit the
version of the previous wife which she has partly developed herself and
partly imagined from Mrs Danvers’ underlining of her own lack of pres-
ence. Later, she cannot fill Rebecca’s dresses or her space and when she
tries to do so, wearing Lady Caroline de Winter’s dress at the ball, the
effect is disastrous.
Writing of the novels of the 1790s, Claudia L. Johnson notes: every
household conceals the dead body of its mistress (Johnson, 1995). Max is
a Bluebeard figure, rich, dashing, if often dour, his inherited wealth
embodied in his grand house, to which he gives the young wife the keys.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, we are told, but it seems that he must
also have a wife to control within his castle, and so often in Gothic tales,
one or more dead ones who refused such control, haunt the castle, or the
domestic home, contributing to the contradictions these constructions
represent. In Rebecca, this unquiet presence is the first wife. In Nalo
Hopkinson’s Jamaican-Canadian tale ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000; dis-
cussed later in this book) it is several duppy wives trapped in bottles in a
tree, their bodies semi-preserved by the air conditioning in the back room.
In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009), it is no wife but a dead baby
girl, or female spirit of the house perhaps, stalling any movement into a
future for the women of the house. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987),
movement forward, coming to terms with the horrors the ghost repre-
sents, is physically embodied in the returned full-grown baby ghost who
refuses such movement forward, such a future until some reparation has
been achieved. Most of these haunting, angry, hurt female spirits have
been sold a lie about the safety of romance, family, home (however grand),
and the secular, cherished worth of women and girls. As these cherished,
sacrificed women and girls aggressively remind of the lies they were led in
by, and of their victimhood, tricked, sacrificed, unprotected, dead, so too
the places they haunt and the values these represent are contested and
undermined by the wealth and power represented by castles and grand
mansions, by small-scale family homes, and the dark local, social, cultural,
national secrets these hide. Domestic ghosts and hauntings represent more
than the undermining of romantic and family fictions, fictions of love,
stability and home. They are microcosms of the cultural haunting of trau-
matic events both relatively sharp and devastating such as war, and
ingrained, beneath the skin, such as sexism and racism, each variety caus-
ing long-term damage. In The Little Stranger, the damage wrought by the
war is locally presented in the battle-scarred body of Roderick, the heir to
the family mansion Hundreds Hall, but the long-term legacy of damage
brought by imperialism, the cause of war, and embedded social and eco-
nomic hierarchies in the class system cast the house in a kind of rotting
aspic, ruled by an angry vengeful ghost which cannot let anyone change,
develop, escape this past. In Beloved, the wronged, returned full-grown
baby ghost is the cultural and domestic haunting of the sustained evils of
racism and its emanation in the US in slavery.
Rebecca was written in the build-up to the Second World War. The
partying and economic stability were as much an illusion as the romantic
fiction whirling Max and the second wife off into marriage and the grand
mansion, Manderley. As I have argued elsewhere (Wisker, 2003), its
haunting goes beyond the lies of romance, as well as the false promises of
romantic fictions, it is also a cultural unease, foreshadowing the death of
an outdated way of life. The opening presents a ghastly nightmarish drive,
and a fire-damaged, overgrown ruin which is far from the historical gran-
deur of Manderley, British history, inheritance, and ‘happy ever after’. It
also replays a moment of restlessness and ennui at the end of romance and
illusion:
44 G. WISKER
How different that little restaurant where we are today to the vast dining
room, ornate and ostentatious, the Hotel Cote D’Azur at Monte Carlo.
(Rebecca, p. 14)
Rebecca is haunted by both popular romantic fictions and pre-feminist

Gothic romances critical of the fantasy those fictions peddle. The bored
couple sound betrayed, their lives at the start of the novel are dull, insipid,
they are transients in a faded budget hotel, merely recalling memories of
some long-lost heyday. Revenants, returned memories, returned bodies,
are meant to teach us something, that is why they return, to reveal and to
enable new visions and behaviours, but like their historical moment, ignor-
ing the build-up to another war, Max de Winter and his second wife are
stuck, having learnt nothing from their experiences.
This is no romance novel; rather, it is a novel haunted by the decay,
deflation, deceit of the promises of romance novels. A romance structured
in reverse, the happy couple we hear of at the start of the novel are home-
less, living in a series of shabby chic hotels, aimless, emptied-out, held
together by the dark secrets they keep. Rebecca is disturbing, it under-
mines and queries more than romantic fiction, indeed, all novels in which
at the core there is some solid investment in family, home, marriage. As
Clery notes of historical romance, which Rebecca undermines: ‘Romance
fiction revolves around this double standard, alternately condoning and
deprecating, pointing on the one hand to the [marital] throne on which
the heroine will be installed at the end of her trials, and on the other to the
grave where one false step might, however undeservedly, lead her’ (Clery,
1992). The revelation of the body of Rebecca herself reinforces this point
while upsetting the conventional trajectory of a romance tale, since her
lingering presence, as the murdered, wayward and energetic first wife, also
undermines the ontological security of the nameless second wife.
It is a novel haunted by all those romance novels which precede it and
it haunts all which follow it, it is a novel haunted by a romance of place, a
kind of ideal of a comfortable upper-class Western Northern world,
England in this instance, and in the haunting Gothic house with grand old
mansions of the US, places which, in Get Out (2017), are so removed they
might be from acceptance, integration and equality that they can kidnap
Chris, a young African American man, one of many, through a romantic
deception, managed by the woman who pretends to be his girlfriend, and
then effectively auction him off to his next owner. These grand old houses
are celebrated in poetry (Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’, 1616), for their
reflection of culture and values, most of which was built on imperialism.

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) undermines
the sense of solid heritage and wealth, the house. Later, in Sarah Waters’
The Little Stranger, such a grand house is also seen in the full onslaught of
decay, as are the values which it represents. Opening with Empire Day,
death, decay, war and the expenses and haunted scratching on the walls,
slammed doors and deaths, show the family are locked in the haunted
mansion, which prevents them from moving on, even as Eleanor Vance is
also locked in the haunted house on the hill in Jackson’s novel, bringing
with her the unresolved issues she has about her care for her mother, and,
most particularly, her emptied-out role as a woman of value in a society
which only seems to value women when they are married to a man and
take his name and enter the grounds of his castle or apartment. Rebecca
makes explicit from the outset the trajectory of undermining romance,
domestic houses and grand mansions, wealth, empire and solidity of all the
worldviews and values these suggest.
The second Mrs De Winter, walking into the romantic dream of a
grand old English country house, expects romance, comfort, a place, a
future, instead she wanders or hovers about without a purpose like the
country house itself, now purposeless, at the moment of the build-up to
the Second World War, contradictory, hiding secrets. Such secrets are per-
haps of the kind of colonial wealth which fed into Austen’s Mansfield Park
(1816), or Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The grand old houses of the English, which
were imitated and recreated with other wealth across other parts of the
colonised globe, and carry the secrets of their oppressive pasts. They are
essentially as gothic as the castles of the first era of the Gothic, Otranto,
Udolpho, but displaced in the English countryside and its colonial off-
spring, and they ache with the loss of grandeur, power, oppression and
hierarchy, a hierarchy in which women, first the rich wayward energetic
wife, and then not even her, just the nameless replacement, are always in
second place. Rebecca is a novel which undercuts romance and does so
with the haunting of the second wife by the first; it also undercuts British
power, land, ownership, and the often-dubious sources of this complacent
comfort of imperialism, colonialism, and their oppressive behaviours
across the world. One of its inheritors, The Little Stranger, locks the
women up fatally in the angry resistant house. The Haunting of Hill House,
another of its ghostly inheritors, prevents Eleanor Vance from leaving the
haunted house whose haunting she brings with her as her own sense of
inadequacy, misfitting and guilt.
46 G. WISKER
Indicting that fabricated historical substance, wealth and safety repre-

sented in fictional mansions, castles and family homes, Judy Simons
reminds us of Rebecca’s origins in Jane Eyre:
the grand country house of which he is the master and which appears ini-
tially to be the epitome of establishment power, becomes instead a symbol
of degeneracy which must be destroyed by fire before any semblance of
harmony can be restored. (1995, p. 88)
Rebecca is a doubly haunting novel. It enacts the damaging effects of dom-

inant cultural pressures on women to seek love and marriage, to conform,
to live happily ever after without questioning or upsetting expected condi-
tions and behaviours, and in this mission it also establishes a new trend in
twentieth-century and contemporary women’s literature to remind,
replay, perceive from newly oriented perspectives the living legacy of
women’s Gothic fictions. After reading Gilbert and Gubar’s The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979), it was impossible not to see that founda-
tional work of the Brontës: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847a),
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847b), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(Anne Brontë, 1848), and of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s
Secret (1862), and the sensation novel, as rebellious spirited pieces open-
ing up and exposing the repressive narratives which silenced and con-
strained women, removed their rights to money, ownership, their own
children, and often their own versions of bodily safety and of sanity. It is
not surprising that from such silencing and repression the rebellious spirit
clamoured and clambered out in the shape of mad women in attics, women
seeking independent means, whether by fair or foul means (in Jane Eyre
inheritance, in Lady Audley’s Secret poison). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
(1892) hallucinations, emanations of misunderstanding and constraint
written out and through the wallpaper of an imprisoning nursery room, in
which a woman suffering from post-natal depression is treated as danger-
ously mad, with first her body turned against her and then her mind. The
questioning of notions of power, and the rights of women’s bodies in
space, place and identity, run throughout the great Gothic novels. Seeing
them as offering this contested narrative totally reoriented much of our
critical view on representations and narratives of the past, and on the
model which enabled that dual reading—the conventional, somewhat
unresolved in conventional terms and troubled, and the radical, under-
mining, questioning, the Gothic—in the hands of women writers.
Ghost stories in the late twentieth century variously pick up from the
revelations of the Gothic novels of earlier periods. They are haunted by
these revelations, which permanently undercut, undermine, write over
and circumvent the staid, conformist narrative covering women’s expected
dreams of hopes for and embodied achievement in romance, home, family.
The rebellious spirits of these earlier works speak out through Rebecca, a
novel of transition.
This Bluebeard tale is both ostensibly romantic, and has murderous
secrets. The second Mrs De Winter, nameless, lacking in inheritance and
much income, trapped in lower middle-class spinsterhood, meets and is
whisked off her feet by Max de Winter, in the South of France. He is holi-
daying, she is acting as a companion to an ageing, selfish, ostentatious and
often grumpy rich woman, Mrs van Hopper. In the narrative trajectory of
a whirlwind romance, no one really needs to know anything about the
dashing male lead who takes her out for drives in his car and, like a char-
acter in a Hollywood movie of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, wins her heart
and takes her away with him to be his lovely wife in the grand mansion.
Max De Winter’s name is gallant, and also medieval, Norman/French,
suggesting a turreted Gothic mansion, but were she, and we, able to read
the other narrative trajectories, the cruelty of medieval times, and the
Bluebeard story, suggesting potential for power and violence, the sense of
insecurity might undermine all this whirlwind fantasy romance. Max:
belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled

streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and wor-
sted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange medi-
eval way... Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in
black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our
new world from a long-distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at
night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways
and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier
blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy. (Rebecca, p. 18)
Max is remarkably calm most of the time, the servants a little edgy, and
Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper who manages everything, utterly resentful
of the new little upstart, who is neither as beautiful nor as daring and dash-
ing, nor as capable of running a household as Rebecca, the first Mrs de
Winter. Rebecca has her own name, the second Mrs de Winter has none,
and she is stunned by the bureau and its locked drawer, and confusion of
48 G. WISKER
expected plans, orders, structure and management, since she has no expe-
rience in organising anything but her own ordinary day and that of Mrs
van Hopper, when her companion. Left to play in the house, she’s like the
hapless wife in the Bluebeard tales, who explores the grand house and
accidentally unlocks the door to which she has been forbidden but to
which she has been given the bloodied key to tempt her from obedience
and silence. The second wife tries to investigate the ways in which Rebecca
lived, and what she did. This takes her to the grounds and the little cottage
down by the beach where she meets a retainer, clearly confused and dev-
astated by the loss of the dashing and beautiful Rebecca. The second wife
is always treading in Rebecca’s footsteps, unaware that this is dangerous
ground. As with another Bluebeard tale, Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass
Bottle Trick’ (2000) (Chap. 4), investigation is dangerous, and any
attempts to win her husband round by trying to be the glamorous woman
in whose shadow she feels she dwells is very dangerous indeed. In a stan-
dard Bluebeard tale, the next wife of a powerful, wealthy, serial womaniser
and killer is forbidden entry into the hidden room of knowledge and
agency, while being deliberately offered that key. Any enterprising young
wife, bored in a large house, would investigate. There are usually no
ghosts, but there are mutilated dead bodies, evidence of the kind of pun-
ishment which patriarchal tyranny masquerading as gallantry and romance
can wield in the context of economic imbalance (the women are always
poor) and female investment in tired romantic plots in which they are
whisked off their feet, adored forever and able to enjoy wealth in the house
of gallant powerful men. This is the tale of patriarchy masquerading as
paternalism (permanent love and care) and the romantic hero role. For
Nalo Hopkinson’s Beatrice, the dead wives are duppies, ghostly figures
semi-kept alive in glass bottles, as was in line with Caribbean folklore. For
the second wife in Rebecca, the murdered body of the first surfaces in a
terrible storm during a terrible, grand party in which she has inadvertently
usurped Rebecca’s role (beautiful wife in a grand house) by wearing an
exact copy of clothes Rebecca once also wore to a party, the historical dress
of Lady Caroline de Winter, whose portrait hangs over the stairs. She is
desperately trying to both fit in to the family and to please, but her
attempts have the opposite effect. She looks like a re-embodied Rebecca,
a ghost made flesh, a reminder of the woman whose spirit dominates the
house, and actually to Max like a walking reincarnation of his ghostly,
murdered wife. He responds with anger born of terror at being found out.
The second Mrs de Winter is trapped in a narrative of romantic happy-

ever-after in a house with grand Gothic aspirations: turrets; staircases;
shuttered-off wings; outhouses hiding secrets; windows to the sea which
are in someone else’s, not her own room; and hidden notes and traces of
the secretive and powerful entitled ways of the women of the past, the past
owner, Rebecca. The second wife lives in her shadow, not even deserving
her own name, utterly erased, unable to fill the shoes, seats, personality,
and eventually punished when she tries to fill the party dress worn by the
dominant, energetic, wayward Rebecca. She is a walled-in second wife
silenced in her attempts at romance, semi-domestic (she has servants,
domestic bliss), tormented in her own mind and in the ghosted spaces of
the grand house Manderley. But the rebellious, spirited Rebecca who did
what she wanted to and strode out and away from these embedded con-
straints. Rebecca’s wayward will, her deviant behaviours, her wandering
and love affairs, refusals and rejections of conformity, breaking out of the
nineteenth-century Gothic novels by women, appears as the haunting of
this text, and the figure of Rebecca herself, which maddens the controlling
Max, who embodies those wayward energies. It’s a novel which is haunted
by Rebecca the woman and Rebecca the representative of women’s Gothic
novels of rejection and contestation, responses to the hothouse confor-
mity of women’s cultural, domestic and intellectual lives. Rebecca has also
been recognised as an expression of Du Maurier’s own sexuality, which
could be understood today as bisexual, since she maintained a long het-
erosexual marriage while also both characterising herself often as a ‘boy in
a box’ and expressing feelings of love towards other women, notably Ellen
Doubleday, the wife of her publisher, as Margaret Forster (1993) details.
In Rebecca, it is Mrs Danvers who enacts both undying devotion and les-
bian love towards her dead mistress, in doing so scorning, rejecting and
undermining the second wife as if a spurned love object. As Olivia Laing
notes, ‘In the novel’s most sexual scene, “Danny” forces the narrator to
put her hand in Rebecca’s slipper and fondle her nightdress, while she
murmurs an incantation to Rebecca’s hair, her underwear, how her clothes
were torn from her body when she drowned. No wonder Mrs Danvers’
was the face that launched a thousand drag acts. She was embodying clos-
eted lesbian realness even before Judith Anderson catapulted her into the
high camp stratosphere in the Hitchcock film’ (Laing, 2018).
One form of later twentieth-century- and twenty-first-century wom-
en’s ghost story writing for the Northern hemisphere is that expressing
the haunting of the rebellious, contesting novels of the past—they echo
50 G. WISKER
and remind the reader. The issues of silencing, second-class citizenship

shutting women down, constraining financially and intellectually, are ever-
present. They haunt the texts, through reminders of the oppressions and
the deceits in the form of protagonists, places, space, ideas and events. As
the grand party in honour of the couple approaches, Manderley is fabulous:
As we crossed the great hall on the way to our rooms, I realised for the first
time how the house lent itself to the occasion, and how beautiful the rooms
were looking. Even the drawing room, formal and cold to my consideration
when we were alone, was a blaze of colour now, flowers in every corner, red
roses in silver bowls on the white cloth of the supper table, the long win-
dows open to the terrace, where, as soon as it was dusk, the fairy lights
would shine. (Rebecca, p. 219)
The second wife longs to be adored and lovely, as Rebecca must have
been, and also wants to be noticed, at her own party. Mrs Danvers cer-
tainly knew what she was doing in colluding in the making of a lovely
costume based on the portrait of Caroline de Winter. Ironically unaware
of the history of such a costume, ghosted in the place in which she dresses,
the self she sees in the mirror, the young second wife feels she is literally
turning into Rebecca as she prepares to make her entrance: ‘if she sat there
I should see her reflection in the glass and she would see me too, standing
like this by the door’ (p. 221). Manderley, prepared for its grand party
with the orchestra, sumptuous food, and large numbers of guests, is itself
rather collusive in its celebration: ‘It was as if the house remembered other
days long ago, when the hall was a banqueting hall indeed, with weapons
and tapestry’ (p. 219). As she descends the stairs in her lovely costume,
her false curls, her hat in hand, she hopes to make an entrance, awaiting
‘clapping and laughter’ (p. 222). What she does not know is that Rebecca
wore the same outfit to her very last ball. Max, horrified and caught off-
guard, causes a scene—‘“What the hell do you think you are doing?”. His
eyes blazed in anger, his face was ashen white’ (p. 223). He sees the ghost
of Rebecca innocently repeated in the body and dress of the woman whose
timidity he felt would never cause any stir, or upset his own version of life
at Manderley. The fireworks explode, the storm rages, the boat cracks
open and releases its secret, rejecting the corpse of the first wife.
By the time the dead body of Rebecca herself washes up, the danger she
represented to wedded obedience and coupledom was already palpable in
the visits of her lover; as the second wife appears at the top of the stairs on
the night of the grand ball she sees Rebecca reincarnated. The fireworks
blow the quiet sky and elegant pretence of the evening wide open in a
massive disturbance, a celebration turned dark revelation. The weather
becomes as enraged as Max, storming, rising tides, wind, rain—and the
drowned, murdered body returns from the sunken boat, on the edge
where the land met the sea, and the illicit affairs and freedoms were pun-
ished by Rebecca’s rightful owner, her husband. This wonderfully cathar-
tic Gothic moment gives power to the ghost of Rebecca in the dress choice
of the second wife, a blowing open of the tensions of the house and the
relationships past and present, and a revelation of murder of the wayward
spirit. It is a moment reminiscent of the house in Jane Eyre burning as
Bertha, furious that there will be a new wife, sets fire to Jane’s wedding
dress in Rochester’s house, inherited and funded by the wealth of colonial
oppression and the madness of those who benefited from it locally, come
home to invade and destroy the peace of those who benefited from it in its
imperial home, the shires of Britain, Rochester.
The second Mrs de Winter wandering nervously in the Gothic mansion
and the romantic dream is always only a shadow trying to find out the
nature of the role she is meant to step into, what to do with the planner,
the writing of letters. She is dominated by the hidden secrets and the
never-erased haunting presence of Rebecca herself, who she feels Max
idolises, as Mrs Danvers certainly does. Trying to follow a romantic fiction
and a domestic script, he misreads everything, she is trapped in a marriage,
in a house and in an outdated romantic fiction, her everyday is one of try-
ing and failing and misunderstanding how to pretend to be a version of
someone who she has herself constructed from her own imagination, the
ideal Rebecca, who was actually wayward and ultimately a victim of their
shared husband, Max a murderer who punished Rebecca’s independence
and wayward female energies.
The moment of explosion and the returned dead body is also an indica-
tor of the vulnerability and transience of the partying and place, historical
wealth and culpable political ignorance of the bright young things of the
inter-war years (Wisker, 2003). It is pre-haunted by the war to come, and
the explosion of the fabric of class which that war brought. The de Winters
remind of those trapped, contemporary couples on an endless world tour
in an apartment-sized cruise ship, or in a series of temporary mediocre
homes in the middle of nowhere. The collusion in hiding the murder and
the loss of the romantic dream and the house undermine any sense of
happy-ever-after togetherness. Gothic romantic fictions of the past haunt
52 G. WISKER
them and reveal both the artifice of those fictions and the inadequacies of
their lives. [on] this indifferent island... our little hotel is dull, and the food
indifferent (p. 9). Caught in the mundane, rootless in a hothouse medioc-
rity they both maintain the secret of the death of Rebecca, haunted by but
learning nothing from the past.
The Haunted House, the Haunting Mother: Shirley

Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The haunted house is our unacknowledged past, the seemingly safe and
nurturing domestic and personal space transformed into something
threatening and unsettling. The haunted house is the history you are
trying to escape from, whether you do so as an individual, a culture or a
community. The haunted house is the history; it is the place of history
that has been unacknowledged, betrayed, neatly tidied away into a locked
cupboard, a basement or a box in an attic. While in local culture, haunted
houses are spooky places you are warned not to visit; they are a metaphor
for the ways in which what should be familiar, safe, comfortable and
predictable is actually threatening and dangerous because of socially
reinforced deceits, and repressed hidden histories. Some of those histo-
ries are culturally inflected and located, such as the haunting of every
attic in America by the ghosts of dead slaves, representing the haunting
of widespread racism and its violent enactments on the bodies and minds
of all involved, as we see in Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison’s novel of a
haunted house, the haunted family and a haunted culture. The haunted
house is also a reminder of the instabilities of those psychological and
physical structures we construct to make ourselves feel safe, to keep our-
selves from the cold outside, the cries of wolves, the dangers of a barely
held back wild. First- and second-wave feminists have fundamentally
questioned the nurturance and safety afforded by cultural myths of the
house and home, beyond that of keeping out bad weather. In consider-
ing the role of the haunted house we look to the historically, socially
documented real, to myth, and to the Gothic imagination, we look to
history, culture, psychology, health and to the contrasting experiences of
men and women.
Julian Wolfreys convincingly locks the notion of haunting in with that
of the domestic, safe space because of this fundamental linkage between
bodily safety, cultural myth about domesticity and the home, and the
homes as house as head as self. ‘Haunting,’ writes Wolfreys, ‘is nothing
other than the destabilisation of the domestic scene, as that place where
we apparently confirm our identity, our sense of being, where we feel most
at home with ourselves’ (Wolfreys, 2002, p. 5). It seems, however, to be a
stable, safe place, and much of this is due to the maintenance of a set of
myths, beliefs, around roles based on a thoroughly unequal gendered
worldview and set of practices. Emma Liggins’ The Haunted House in
Women’s Ghost Stories 1850–1895 (2020) situates her rich critical explora-
tion and discussion to cross the later nineteenth century into the early
twentieth-century haunted house ghost story by women, recovering
Gothic ghost stories by women in the period of modernism, as well as the
familiar period predating modernism. In so doing she establishes both
continuities and rifts, related to historical moments, and also highlights
ways in which the gendered conceptualisation of the house and home
were changing, producing new forms of spectrality, new hauntings, new
ghosts. She emphasises both the gendered nature of haunted spaces and
how different periods can produce different forms of response to changes
in economic conditions. This enables a refocusing onto, in this case, the
changing kinds of houses being built, different conceptualisations of the
house and home affected by the rise of the middle classes without servants
(or maybe a daily or weekly help), and changes in gendered roles affected
by the pre-war period, the condition of war and its aftermath.
In this chapter we consider the haunted house as a gendered site in
which ghostly presences embody and remind of the continued and chang-
ing demands on women, and the social, cultural, material and psychologi-
cal pressures of these changing demands, which bring with them their own
guilt, repressed memories, traumas and terror, sometimes leading to exis-
tential terror and breakdown, and sometimes to death. In considering
women’s haunted house ghost stories in this chapter we focus on the US
and specifically the work of Shirley Jackson, while in the next chapter Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) continues this interest, and the haunted house
recurs throughout the book in different times and cultural contexts
because of the force of the relationship between women and that particu-
larly defining gendered space, the house and home. There is also a deliber-
ate interweaving of the psychological, the mythical and the historical,
concrete, cultural and the gendered in haunted house stories. Where there
54 G. WISKER
are continuities or changes in established narrative expression of ghost

stories to deal with the changes in demands and expectations, with trau-
mas and terrors we also look at these.
The haunted house is our past, a theoretically safe space, and also a
metaphor for the individual mind. It is the head, the conscience, the imag-
ination, the nightmare fears of dissolution and the erasing of body and
mind, invasion. For women, the haunted house is particularly resonant
because of valorisation of the wife at its centre, bringing and maintaining
order as nurturing mother figure in the family domestic space, which the
house, the home, the hearth, the loving family represent. There are
enough examples in fairy stories and myths to warn us of these warm gen-
eralisations: babes in the wood, with its child abandonment and the terri-
fying house of sweets and the old witch who will put you in the oven,
certainly not a nurturing mother figure. Historically, fictional Gothic
houses, big and small, are not safe places for anybody, but particularly not
for women. Houses are haunted by the women walled up within them,
who are physically and psychologically silenced and sidelined, so they rep-
resent that dangerous complacency about domestic security, psychological
whole, a myth, a construct, which in the Gothic usually suggests there’s
something dark, hidden and unacknowledged. So it is with Shirley
Jackson’s houses, town apartments and country mansions. For the women
who live in them, who escaped to them, who spend some time sojourning
within them, none of these are safe spaces because they are outward rep-
resentations of the instability, the fears within. And while they represent
the instability of the individual woman caught in the social expectations of
her time, caught in the psychological toils of expectations that she should
be nurturing, motherly, domestic, a loving wife, waiting, tending, serving,
it is hardly surprising that most of Shirley Jackson’s women suffer a kind
of existential crisis about their relationships to the shared world, and the
contradictory expectations of them as women in houses, in roles, in soci-
ety. Several short stories show a dissociation from what could be thought
to be shared reality. One woman in a rented flat in New York (‘The Pillar
of Salt’, 1948a) goes out while her husband is at work and completely
forgets where the apartment is. Everything is unfamiliar; this is not a
home. The flat is haunted by the expectations of her, of the roles that she
will play as a wife, to stay put. She feels unreal within the apartment and
more unreal outside it. The inability to find her way back, to label, to see
how she fits within these spaces, these places, shows a basic existential
crisis on her part, where taken-for-granted behaviours and places are so
suddenly alien that she can no longer recognise them, or find her way back
to what has, in this instance, become a temporary home.
The houses and flats are haunted by gendered expectations, ones which
have been resoundingly questioned during first wave feminism, particu-
larly by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892),
who survived her own post-natal depressions and disempowerment to
theorise the relationship of home to gender, the economic, psychological
and health damage produced by this theoretically nurturing safe space. As
she noted: ‘A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband’
(1910). Despite this far-sightedness, the social expectations, personality
formation and limitations, the mixture of infantilisation (if there are ser-
vants to do the work and the wife is a pretty ornament), domestic toil and
exhaustion (for households beyond the super-rich), incarceration and lack
of contact with the broad spectrum of other meaningful work and other
people, the maintenance of the constraining myth of the home particularly
affects women (see Gavron, The Captive Wife, 1966). The wives and visit-
ing women in Shirley Jackson’s short stories and novels are insecure about
their identity, their position. They’re always playing parts and they are
frequently preyed on. They are insubstantial, spectral figures trapped in
cultural myths of women’s domestic roles, and equally trapped by and
defined by the often only temporary homes, the houses and flats they
uneasily inhabit.
Daphne du Maurier also often portrays insecure women, confused
about their relationship to a reality which others seem to take for granted,
sometimes seem to haunt. Jackson, like du Maurier, Virginia Woolf and
Katherine Mansfield before her, shows how the stability of the fabric of
society, of the everyday house and home, undermine individuals’ hold on
fundamental physical constructions, the house, the bricks and water,
wood, the gables of grand houses, gothic castles and New York apart-
ments. These external constructs, which seem solid and represent com-
munity, national as well as individual wholeness and solidity, are actually
insubstantial, transient, sometimes treacherous and deceitful. The house
or apartment, the home, represents incarceration of the female subject in
this constructed dream, which can become a nightmare, and the tenuous
hold that the individual mind has on a form of shared reality, that relation-
ship between labelling, ontological security, identity, homelessness. The
insubstantiality and threat felt by Jackson’s women indicate how very frag-
ile is the hold on a shared reality and an individual sense of wholeness. The
house of the self is haunted by both that sense of being constrained and
56 G. WISKER
also being out of oneself, in a construction, alien. A house might represent

wholeness of self and family but the haunted house, initially seeming invit-
ing and safe, is always a defamiliarised space. The role of the Gothic is to
question this safe construction, and the role of haunting is to remind not
just of hidden historical secrets but of that very dubious investment in
solidity and wholeness of spaces and places, of belonging of the self in
places and among others, and of self itself.
The Haunting of Hill House

Hill house, not saying, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness
within… silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, or
whatever walked there, walked alone. (2015, p. 243)
Shirley Jackson’s (1916–1965) 1959 The Haunting of Hill House is one of

the four pivotal women’s ghost stories considered here that revive the
characteristics of the genre and develop specific, women-centred issues
which bring into the foreground fundamental constraints and problems in
women’s lives. Where Rebecca (Du Maurier, 1938) haunts the present
with the glamour of romance narratives of the past, and undercuts them,
leaving an overgrown, shabby, burnt-out ruin of a house, the end of the
pre-Second World War partying excess, Shirley Jackson’s Gothic mansion
is totally out of kilter with self, built at all the wrong, slightly off angles, as
befits a house known for its paranormal activities. The weekending group
called to spend time there because of their various sensitivities to the para-
normal, to test them out, are themselves tested. It seems like a cocktail
party weekender with friends and family, something from an Agatha
Christie novel in which, of course, relationships will also soon become off-
balance, deadly. That escapist idyll implodes, and the house turns on the
temporary occupants as they turn inwards on themselves—insecure, neu-
rotic, their lives built on lies, as is true of Eleanor Vance, the protagonist
and the house’s new victim. The house might well be haunted and others
have died there. It is also haunted in terms of its out-of-date representa-
tion, over-faded grandeur, hemming people in, locking them into its com-
plex internal, circular, disjointed constructions. But Eleanor brings her
own hauntings with her, cultural hauntings of what she could have been
according to romance and norms for women, which still drive her, feeding
a lingering desire. Culturally, as a spinster sister and carer for her elderly
mother, she is a ghostly figure on the sidelines, without the energy or
opportunities of those who came before her, including the erstwhile coun-
try witch, Lolly Willowes (Townsend Warner, 1926). The historical posi-
tioning of women authors and their intellectual, politicised feisty characters
during first-wave feminism produced the suffragette movement and the
work of Virginia Woolf and other early feminist critics of economic, cul-
tural and psychological undermining of women. Some of this underpins
Eleanor’s decision to escape babysitting and inhabiting an upstairs room
like the poor relation she was. She also carries with her own nagging
hauntings of guilt. Rebecca Munford (2016) locates the problem histori-
cally and culturally when she sees the novel as belonging to a Gothic tradi-
tion of women psychically or/and psychologically unable to have a life
beyond their homes, as DeLamotte (1990, p. 10) puts it, they are: ‘women
who just can’t seem to get out of the house’. Munford sees The Haunting
of Hill House in terms illuminated by Betty Friedan’s second-wave feminist
text, The Feminine Mystique (1963), itself a turning point in our under-
standing of the thoroughgoing, eternally expressed physical, economic
and internally absorbed, dominating psychological, cultural oppression of
women. Friedan speaks of the feminine mystique as a dominant culturally
inflected creation, a kind of living myth which ‘has succeeded in burying
millions of American women alive’ (Friedan 1963, p. 293). This margin-
alisation and domination operates through the idealisation of forms of
femininity and domestic roles as both aspiration, and then embodiment of
a fully achieved romantic and domestic life for women, one which sup-
plants any intellectual, political, contestatory and articulate roles for
women in American history. For individual women, the dangers of being
taken over by culturally constructed, ghostly versions of themselves,
become their life in the claustrophobic house. Munford suggests that ‘By
calling attention to the indeterminate animism of the housewife, Friedan
gives expression to a model of spectral femininity that is profoundly affili-
ated to the nanny space of the home’ (p. 125). We know nothing of the
woman who died there previously, but in The Haunting of Hill House we
can see Eleanor descend from a disoriented hopefulness into a fatal mad-
ness as she, the house and the country are all haunted.
Jackson captures the idylls, the neuroses and the very real constraints
and vacuums at the centre of women’s lives in her figure of Eleanor. While
Daphne du Maurier was quite early in undermining the pre-war,
Hollywood-style partying and historically repetitively fictionalised narra-
tives of romance and marriage, Jackson undermines the post-war sense of
the harmonious nuclear family, and the nurturing of the home by the
58 G. WISKER
woman, the woman by the home. Jackson’s short stories are replete with
married women whose essential estrangement from their ostensibly com-
fortable married partnerships and homely worlds, with status, offers no
ontological security and no confirmation of self-worth. Her unmarried
women are destabilised; they find it difficult to identify a role in life; they
stay with friends, are on the edge of shattering, and alternate between a
semi-hysterical celebration of belonging and some kind of existential ter-
ror at the vacuum in their being. Eleanor Vance projects this desire to
belong and, in the tales she tells the other house guests, constructs a role
at the centre of a home.
According to Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson (2016), Stanley
Edgar Hyman, her husband, wrote the information which fed into that
selected for the back cover of her first novel The Road Through the Wall
(1948b), and the Lit Hub version of this records it as: ‘She is an authority
on witchcraft and magic, has a remarkable private library of works in
English on the subject, and is perhaps the only contemporary writer who
is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and
fortune-telling with a Tarot deck... She is passionately addicted to cats,
and at the moment has six, all coal black... She reads prodigiously, almost
entirely fiction, and has just about exhausted the English novel’ (Temple,
2018). Only the comments on witchcraft and the tarot got onto the back
flap of her book.
Jackson is also said by Hyman not to like ‘the sort of neurotic modern
fiction she herself writes, the Joyce and Kafka schools’ (Temple, 2018).
Her characters tend to be disoriented, experiencing the world as unusual,
threatening, different, and this offers a sense of a kind of parallel world
into which they slip, holding the shared everyday world at bay, undermin-
ing the everyday securities of the taken for granted. Sometimes this causes
a kind of panic, disruption at the disorder and ungraspable nature of the
shared real; sometimes it suggests a kind of haunted parallel existence,
where elements of, projections from the tentatively, existentially secure self
appear as unstable events, threats to the received versions of now-haunted
alternatives. In her short stories and The Haunting of Hill House in par-
ticular, Jackson’s women seek a place which affords an identity and a sense
of self-worth for them as women, which is always rewarded by distance
and entrapment, possibly death. These women are the alternatives to and
necessary parallels of Jackson’s others, with their constant sense of the
defamiliarisation of the everyday, the instability of houses, streets, doors,
homes, families, partners, roles. The women return to houses they no
longer recognise, do not recognise partners they meet from trains, feel
utterly disorientated when they leave the flat or house to go shopping.
Their hold on reality and stability is terribly tenuous, they are like Woolf’s
Miss V, disoriented, ghostly presences in themselves, deeply insecure in
their roles and constantly unsure of familiar places, norms of how to act,
expected behaviour and their own self-presence. They are shadow selves,
their roles in life constantly questionable, their reality insecure.
Before Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and other
novels of breakdown and breakthrough, Shirley Jackson’s work focused
on alienation from behaviours expected from women. Her disoriented,
often comfortably off American wives or singles suffer in their discomfort
with emptied-out roles, led to incarceration in their homes, alone, or
imprisoned with dependents. They are assumed comfortable, in safe set-
tings, but they are alienated in these defamiliarised homes and surround-
ings. They break down, but rarely break through to another version of
self. Her women are haunted by their own socially and personally limited
worlds. Eleanor projects the ghosts, conjures them from the house, or is
victim to them because she is receptive. The ghost story formulae empha-
sises conditions of women’s lives, particularly Eleanor’s life, her refrain
‘journeys end in lovers meeting’ is just a fantasy: the only lover she meets
is her own death.
According to her biographer Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson’s life was
ostensibly a standard 1950s wife’s life in middle- to upper-class America of
the time. Jackson came from wealthy parents; her family moved to San
Francisco when she was a child and then to New York when she was a teen.
This uprooting and her unusual appearance (large features, red unruly
hair—somewhat to the dismay of her sophisticated socialite mother) made
her feel different wherever she lived. In her first university she did not
complete her studies, but re-entered university in Syracuse, becoming the
editor of the campus horror magazine. Here she met the critic Stanley
Hyman. They lived first in Greenwich Village and then settled in North
Bennington, Vermont, where she had four children, entertained other
great writers, including Dylan Thomas, and worked by writing from
home. But hers was also an early pre-second-wave, post-first-wave feminist
experience, since the expected dependent and housebound captive wife
life was the source of both her stasis, comfort and ostensible normality but
also, in her fiction, the claustrophobia and defamiliarisation, the break-
downs which lie at the core of the women’s lives in her short stories, and
the two most famous, well-known novels, The Haunting of Hill House
60 G. WISKER
(1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). The titles of both
of these emphasise the centrality of the home, of varied domestic situa-
tions, but also isolation, large rambling houses, the castle and Hill House.
Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife (1966) and Virginia Woolf’s expres-
sion of the dissociation from the everyday, the hyperreality of its oppres-
sive, demanding nature splice together in Jackson’s work. She suffered
from being seen as a wife rather than as a famous author whose own
achievement easily matched her academic husband’s in his own writing
field. Entering hospital for the birth of her third child and giving her occu-
pation as ‘writer’, the woman said, ‘I’ll just put down housewife’. Talented
and successful, she was nevertheless always seen as dependent on husband
and family. Perhaps because of the isolated nature of the artist and writer’s
life, as well as the conformist moment pre-second-wave feminism, her
everyday social isolation led to forms of ontological insecurity played out
in her protagonists who are notable for finding the parameters of place and
social and personal expectations too limited, too other-directed and yet
also hollowed out, emptied at the core, vague. Measurements of time,
space and expectations become alienating constructions, at one moment
terrifyingly pressing, another irrelevant and immeasurable. This leads to an
existential crisis, reminding of Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse,
and Sartre’s Nausea (1938), questioning barriers, boundaries, naming,
rules, everyday modes of being. The domestic home, built for couples and
families, offers a pretence of normality. But for Jackson, the family home,
the apartment and the grand house each produce a state of defamiliarisa-
tion which fuels the writing and questioning of the position of her women
characters and their sense of being, their insubstantiality and role ambigu-
ity in the midst of others’ expectations and constructed norms. Charlotte
Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847a), and Sylvia Townsend Warner in Lolly Willowes
or the Loving Huntsman (1926), also question the solidity of fixed spaces
and behaviours, names, things, roles. Sylvia Plath, a contemporary, and
Anne Sexton, fellow Americans, destabilise norms of gender, domesticity,
identity. For Plath and Sexton, the dangerous disorientation and question-
ing fed into suicide. A little later, such inventive destabilisation appears in
The Summer Before the Dark (Lessing, 1973), and parts of The Golden
Notebook (Lessing, 1962). Andrew Smith defines the novel as female
Gothic (2009, pp. 152–165), although I would go one step further and
see it as feminist Gothic; it is edgy, critical, sometimes dangerously on the
brink of breakdown, imaginative, creative.
The Haunting of Hill House is a significant moment in the development

of the contemporary ghost story. Ostensibly this is a haunted house tale
and here, as in an Agatha Christie novel, particular chosen sensitives,
receptive to hauntings and spectral presences, are invited to stay in an
ostensibly haunted old house up a rough back road, off a side road of a
freeway, out of a village, where no one in their right mind would live, visit
or move to. The circumstances are filled with opportunity in Eleanor’s
mind, and with nothingness or threat in the mind of the reader. Haunted
events often happen in out-of-the-way houses or hotels—The Grudge
(2004) on the outskirts of Tokyo, The Overlook Hotel (The Shining,
1977) in a remote area of the US, but the haunted mansion house in
Jackson’s novel is mainly haunted by the disturbance its guests bring with
them, ghostly embodiments, sounds, presences indicating their tenuously
maintained personal narratives and performances, their constrained exis-
tences, lost dreams, foiled hopes. Eleanor longs for escape and some form
of life, having spent her youth looking after her aged, infirm mother, while
her sister, married with a child, treats her as a second-rate person with no
income and without any point to her existence now the dependency has
gone, a spinster with no friends and no activity. She is not a domestic fig-
ure of the type Hannah Gavron writes of in The Captive Wife, or even the
wife figure in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; instead she’s sidelined,
marginalised in society because she is a spinster carer. Like a hopeful holi-
daymaker, Eleanor responds to Dr Montague’s ad to stay in a grand house
for an experimental weekend with strangers and drives out of the city to
find both the house and a new future. She is recklessly giddy with the hope
of a kind of Hollywood adventure, in which love would figure, and as the
protagonist of her own fairy tale, she would be fascinating and active. She
takes with her, however, her own haunted self. Eleanor Vance in The
Haunting of Hill House has a semi-hysterical fantasy. The invitation to
come to the house is couched for her in magic images of fairy princes,
bubbling brooks. She exaggerates everything, romanticises and fantasises
it, including the excessive friendliness of the people in the place where she
stops for a snack.
There is more than one moment when the novel reminds us of Rebecca,
and the burnt-out Manderley’s overgrown monstrous rhododendrons
along the darkened drive are recalled when, conjuring a story about poi-
sonous oleanders and a mix of horror and fairy-tale potential, Eleanor
imagines ‘once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, when I find
myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken, I will go into a
62 G. WISKER
sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses’. She will find a
magical route: ‘one path—jewelled, perhaps come up with rubies and
emeralds—and it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under his
spell’(p. 255). She imagines the queen who is missing her princess daugh-
ter, herself, and that when she arrives there will be a great feast because the
enchantment is ended and the palace is itself again. ‘And we shall live hap-
pily ever after’ (p. 255). This is a fairy tale, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Cinderella’
all rolled into one translated into a Hollywood romance in a timeless land
filled with enchantments. These are swiftly made and swiftly broken. On
arrival, she has forgotten why she was there in the first place: ‘why am I
here? She thought helplessly and at once; Why am I here? The gate was tall
and ominous and heavy’ (p. 260). The house turns in its description into
something vile, a reminder of the House of Usher (Poe, 1839). ‘No
human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which
suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposi-
tion, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned
Hill House into a place of despair, both frightening because the face of
Hill house seemed awake, with a watchfulness from a blank from the blank
windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice’ (p. 265).
Her romanticised fantasies colour her view and remove any sense of
caution, but the contradiction between her excessive hope and the event,
an out-of-the-way road trip, the sly, bad tempered, offhand people she
meets as she gets closer to the house, followed by the surly caretaker who
tries to refuse to let her in the locked gate of Hill House all act as warning
signs for the reader, if they are ignored by Eleanor, thus setting her up as
potential victim. Eleanor brings her own ghosts, a haunting guilt of ignor-
ing her mother’s last calls and if ‘HELP ELEANOR COME HOME’
(p. 345) is written on Hill House’s walls, it is not welcoming her into the
fantasy of a new life with a substitute and ideal family, rather both turning
her away back to an empty house, and indicating she brings with her the
vacuum of her life and her haunting guilt.
The house is difficult to fix spatially; it seems like a person, with a heart.
There are isolated rooms and ominously a space at the end of the house
from which a previous inhabitant plunged to their death. We bring with us
our own ghosts and layer them on to a place, which reflects them back,
embodies their control. As everyone in this house party has such a ghost,
the place is confused with distress and warning, and its shape and events,
difficult to pin on the usual parameters of place, space and time, are under-
mined. She feels even that she is escaping when at the very end, in the car
half-stolen from her sister with whom she shares it, is driven straight into
a tree. She felt she might not get out. Nothing attacks Eleanor but herself.
This is the end of the idyllic tale and the coming home of guilt and empti-
ness. We make our ghosts, they haunt us, we produce them, they are
imprinted on places because of us, and some places bring this out with
fatal consequences.
When Stephen King wrote of the influence of The Haunting of Hill
House he cited it as an inspiration for both Salem’s Lot (1975) and The
Shining (1977), and both of these construct horrors of place. So the
Overlook Hotel is imbued with the deaths that took place previously, and
it can take over a damaged mind and cause the novelist figure Jack Torrance
to turn on and attempt to murder his own family, re-enacting previous
horrors, which themselves are reflected and seen by his own son in the
haunted Overlook Hotel. Horror inhabits a cursed or haunted place. In
the chapter ‘Horror Fiction’, King writes of Hill House as a ‘living organ-
ism’. The other terror in The Shining is the insecurity of families, and Hill
House also upsets any invested security in nurturing. In ‘Walking Alone
Together: Family Monsters in The Haunting of Hill House’ (2014) Richard
Pascal argues that Jackson’s novel ‘conjured up post war America’s dis-
turbing anxieties about the modern family with wit, acuteness, and a
healthy modicum of dread’. The domestic work which is visible is that of
Mrs Dudley the housekeeper, who operates like a Stepford wife without
the glamour, mechanistically setting out and clearing food, and keeping
everything in its place, while the artificial family constructed in the house
turns on itself. Eleanor, no longer with a role, has no rights or dignity in
her own family. Later, in Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1992)
(Chap. 8), another cross-cultural family also reveals hidden secrets, where
their dignity conflates with the revelation of wartime deception and
betrayals.
Jackson’s novel appeared in the middle of the Cold War, a time of great
insecurity, where it was difficult to determine politically who one’s ene-
mies were, spy dramas proliferated, and films such as Quatermass and the
Pit (1967) characterised the threat from outside as a threat from another
world invading our own. Nothing felt safe or familiar. The shape of the
house built by High Crain is off-kilter, with no real centre, so it is difficult
to find where you are, which room leads to which other room, and wan-
dering lost within it is a decidedly disorientating and uncanny experience.
Dr Montague’s rather eccentric intention to bring several sensitive strang-
ers together for an experiment in the house to call up the spirits which
64 G. WISKER
inhabit it is somewhat contradicted by his projection of control and good

sense, and also contradicted by his assertions about the purely fictive and /
or benign, nature of ghost stories since they first started: ‘No physical
danger exists. No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt
anyone physically’ (p. 340). He is a man of science and projects certainty,
but he has organised this experiment and ignores how the house destabi-
lises and confuses everyone differently. All Theodora’s clothes seem ruined
and she has to leave her own room and use Eleanor’s clothes. The moments
of bangs and rattles on shut doors upset and disorientate Eleanor in par-
ticular, and everyone else, including the male guests, patrolling the corri-
dors to catch anyone or anything that is wayward and dangerous.
Montague declares himself to be scientific and rational but his statement
about the supernatural and superstition is contradictory and strange: ‘The
menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are
weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armour of superstition
and have no substitute defence’ (p. 340). And when the domineering wife
arrives with her gun-bearing, over-jolly male follower and her planchette
to call up the spirits, it is possible to see his bravado as a reaction against
her dominant views. He offers no protection against the terrors of pound-
ings, doors blowing open, and the foolishness of telling to vulnerable
younger women the tale of the young woman who threw herself off the
ramparts, having climbed up the damaged steps to the turret. Hyman,
Jackson’s husband, said the novel was a parable for the Cold War. John Le
Carré and others focused on fallibility, secrecy, lack of trust, constraining
narratives of insecurity in the face of duplicitous colleagues, deceptive,
aggressive behaviours. The world of international spies is shrunk in Hill
House to the personal, the local, a weekend gathering of susceptible, dam-
aged people who do not really have their own homes to go to (though
Luke will inherit the house), and who are utterly destabilised in that con-
text. Eleanor, who only has a cot in her sister’s apartment, and a disrupted
part share in a car, has to entirely fabricate even a meagre tale to fit in, and
she always wants to fit in. The Haunting of Hill House inherits much from
Henry James’ game-changing ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), in
which the delicate Miss Jessel and her young charges suffer from manipu-
lative ghosts or psychological disturbance. The Haunting of Hill House
mixes modes: this is a Gothic haunted house with hands rattling door-
knobs at night, although later Eleanor mimics (and possibly was) the
ghost. Families, homes, financial security, the safety net of the past, are
disturbed, undermined, and threatened. With its unexplained dark history,
local warning, it’s malign, threateningly warped and alive, it turns on peo-
ple, opening their minds to sensed, visualised palpable threat, triggering
off psychological disturbances. Eleanor has internalised romantic fantasies
of finding love, finding herself and a reason for living and she has focused
all of this on the four days in the house, like a hopeful over-imaginative
holiday maker sold on the lies of brochures, like a Hollywood filmgoer,
excited by making everything into a romantic melodrama with a
happy ending.
Unlike many ghost stories set in haunted houses, Eleanor seems to be
called by, spoken to by the house, so she comments, ‘It knows my name,
doesn’t it? It knows my name’. And when someone scrawls on the walls
first in chalk then later similarly in blood, ‘HELP ELEANOR COME
HOME’, it talks directly to her and seems to know how guilty she feels
about leaving her mother that last time, and falling asleep. It is a kind of
ur tale for the horrors of the haunted house. The Haunting of Hill House
undermines securities of identity, place, historical record. In this as in
many haunted house films, such as The Amityville Horror (1979),
Poltergeist (1982), families are dysfunctional, boundaries and relationships
volatile, life is lived in a liminal space between the flawed real and first the
imagined idyll then the horror, which is family, are quite dysfunctional in
that all the caring was left to her, and she has no legitimate role or place
when her mother dies. But this is the lot of many single women, so a
destabilising of the myth of the family is unsurprising, and making this
discomfort part of the novel and the house’s core upsets broader social
myths and visions, while causing us to see the flaw in social constrictions
and fantasies.
As they settle in at night, something bangs on the door; Eleanor runs
to it and it stops. Theodora and Ella move in together for protection,
Eleanor wearing Theodora’s clothes. Approaching the women Luke says
to Theodora ‘why, you look as though you’d seen a ghost’ (p 335). The
men heard no noises. At night, sharing a bed with Theodora for safety,
Eleanor hears a gurgling laugh, a mad sound, believes it’s a child crying:
‘“go away… don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me. Please let me go home”
and then the little sad crying again’ (p. 357). This leads her to wonder
what hand she was holding in the dark. Her dreams coming into her half-
awakeness she displaces the past with the present nightmares, with current
confusion, a ghostly child, ghostly hands and ghostly knocking completely
real for her.
66 G. WISKER
This is one form of disturbance, pointing to the inner disturbance of

each of those staying at Hill House. Another is a sexual disturbance, not
just the mild heterosexual flirting and speculation, but also the lesbian
undertones. The latent lesbian attraction between bohemian Theo, who
pauses before she denies she is married and shares her apartment with a
‘friend’, and Eleanor/Nell emerges in their increasing closeness, exchange
of clothes and managed stories. At one point, Eleanor throws herself
across the bed like a teenage girl staying over in a friend’s room and fanta-
sises a relationship with Theo that continues beyond this weekend. Black-
clad Theo is depicted as a lesbian character in each version of the film. As
Sara Century notes, the films draw this out: ‘her importance to queer
horror fans is impossible to overstate. In every appearance, Theo has been
either openly or strongly implied to be queer, even in her first appearances
in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. To put it mildly, positive portrayals of a
black-clad bohemian lesbian were not exactly frequent for the time.’ So
‘In her many forms, The Haunting of Hill House’s Theo is valuable to
queer audiences specifically because she has never been turned into a
morality tale or a tragedy.’ The house brings out latent desires, indicates
the possibility of fantasy becoming real, and it is not merely heterosexual
romantic lovers which it signals, then refuses.
As her time sours in the house and Mrs Montague’s planchette will not
conjure up ghostly writing, everything is at odds. Eleanor, like Mrs
Montague, feels she is being mocked. Considering Eleanor’s role and
increasing disorientation, Roberta Rubenstein (1996) examines relation-
ships between women’s roles and tropes in Gothic novels and mentions
Claire Kahane’s work (1985), noting the house acts as a maternal antago-
nist to Eleanor. The outbreaks of assaults and dislocation of space in the
house threaten Eleanor’s mind and Michael T. Wilson (2015) examines
‘the book’s depiction of the relationship between madness and absolute
reality’ (p. 116).
Eleanor brings the seeds of her breakdown and delusion with her, only
feeling real because she is a dependent and a carer; she has no status and
no social worth and little sense of solid existence. She is also a product of
her time. Edemarium sees:
the crux and power of the novel—the ways in which judgments and expecta-
tions dictate and trap and make the vulnerable the outer and inner lives of
women. Eleanor’s existence so far has been ‘built up devotedly around [the]
small guilts and small reproaches, [the] constant weariness, and unending
despair’. (Edemarium, 2018)
By destabilising her the house drains her, and into that vacuum come pro-
jections of presences, rattling openings, cold air, and finally the internalised
insistence of her own death. Critics are divided about Eleanor’s final rela-
tionship with Hill House and her fantasies. For Brittany Roberts, the end-
ing is satisfying as ‘Far from participating in the dissolution of Eleanor’s
selfhood’ (2017, p. 70), Eleanor and the house become one achieving ‘the
romance of isolation that she fantasises about… Eleanor provides a genu-
ine love and appreciation for Hill House and the seclusion, isolation, and
silence it promises’ (p. 70) while Laura Miller, who equates Eleanor’s ‘lov-
ers’ meeting’ refrain with a return to the womb, sees her as at home in
death ‘[i]f it is Eleanor who now walks in Hill House, then she has arrived
at something not too far from her dream of living in the little cottage
behind the barricade of poisonous oleander. She walks alone… the fate
that she most feared and most desired’ (2006, p. xxii).
As a location the house is liminal, boundaryless. Jackson enacts the
potential freedom for a bounded domestic woman with no home to care
for anymore, and moves ghost stories out of the rut of merely replaying
revengeful revenants. A stuck woman, no one’s appendage, without
power, identity, position or substance, Eleanor seeks those for herself in
this fantasy weekend journey away. She has been a carer, however, as was
Jackson for her large family, and as are many unmarried women for their
elderly parents. In such contexts, a woman is a haunted presence, insub-
stantial yet leant on at the centre of a full household, her position and her
immediate past removed when those for whom she cares leave or die. For
every one of those present, the house is constraining, walled, labyrinthine,
yet filled with potential, with what they bring. Jackson turns this situation
into an enclosing, deadly space. She fills the house with oppression, cryst-
allised, unrealised potential and for Eleanor the memories and constraints
which she brings with her. While leaving the grounds of the house, Eleanor
drives her car straight into a tree and dies. This is individual as a story and
timeless as an exteriorised experience, projected from within, dramatized,
enacted in the final moment of Eleanor’s potential and misread freedom,
her death, driven flat against a tree, trying perhaps to get out of the place
but stuck in it, with it, as in her own limited life in this false potential escape.
She leaves chanting that they are sending her out of the house but ‘I
won’t go,’ and ‘Hill house belongs to me’ (p. 417). Confused, Eleanor
68 G. WISKER
feels in control of her fate once she presses the accelerator, imagining she’s
achieving something previously planned: ‘I’m really doing it, she thought,
turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of
the driveway, I’m really doing it, I’m doing this all by myself now, at last;
This is me, I am really really doing it by myself.’ In the unending, crashing
second before the car runs into the tree she thought clearly, ‘Why am I
doing this? Why am I doing this? Why didn’t they stop me?’ (p. 417).
Eleanor, finally believing herself in control, expects others to care, just as
she crashes.
The Haunting of Hill House was a quietly influential novel which has
most recently returned to a wider readership and audience in 2018 in rela-
tion to the TV adaptation, and probably because of the contemporary
fascination with ghost stories as ways of focusing on and telling tales about
psychological disturbances, physical unease, the instability of the ostensi-
ble stable lifestyles, locations, values, and belief systems, and continued
women’s interest in exploring the house, home and roles of women as
causes of and reasons for limitations on women’s lives. Stephen King’s
work on writing influences and process, Danse Macabre (1980), included
an extensive review of the book. There have been several adaptations for
the stage and screen, including Robert Wise’s film The Haunting (1963),
and the more bohemian 1999 film with Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-
Jones. There has also been a recent play adapted by Scottish playwright
Anthony Neilson (2015), and the TV series The Haunting of Hill House
(2018), which is less faithful to the novel, but which, by mixing up names,
and developing a large unhappy family, emphasises the incarcerating con-
straints not just of the house itself but of ostensibly secure nuclear families,
since this one self-destructs several times over the years. The Haunting of
Hill House also influenced a spate of haunted place films where the ghosts
of the hidden, suppressed and silenced past, of social justice, obliteration
of the less powerful, Native American Indians, women locked up as mad,
slaves, return to invade the lives of the new inhabitants. Poltergeist (1982),
The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Evil Dead (1981) are among the
successful films of this post-Cold War era.
At the core of women’s ghost stories lies romantic fantasy about love,
family, domestic bliss, identity enabled through relation to others. These
are also the source of disorientation, dissolution, disillusionment, and dis-
appearance since that which only exists as dependent might fade into thin
air, be unseen in places, emptied from memory. In the period of revised
romance Hollywood glamour, the build up to the Second World War and
its aftermath, women writers of ghost stories tackled the captive house-
wife, the invisible woman, the false trails of romantic and domestic fantasy
and saw women as haunted in everyday roles, as themselves, ghosts, dis-
embodied in spaces in which they did not belong, and simultaneously, as
writers, busy turning this into the stuff of horror, revealing the dark core
of emptiness, critiquing social cultural psychological constructs of and
constraints on women. Both the second Mrs de Winter and Eleanor Vance
are in a way ghosts in the grand houses, Manderley, Hill House, neither of
which offer anything homely and reassuring but instead denial or a death
embrace.
Relegated to the space of emptiness, women characters encounter,
project and become ghosts—while the fictions, highlighting this, expose
and critique this culpable insubstantiality, the heart of many women’s
ghost stories.
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Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Journal of Popular Culture,
4(1), 114–123.
Wisker, G. (2003). Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shaking
the Foundations of the Romance of Privilege, Partying and Place. Journal of
Gender Studies, 12(2), 83–97.
Wolfreys, J. (2002). Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and
Literature. Palgrave Macmillan.
Woolf, V. ([1906] 1985). The Mysterious Case of Miss V. In The Complete Shorter
Fiction of Virginia Woolf. : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press.
Filmography
Amityville Horror, The. (1979). dir. Stuart Rosenberg.
Evil Dead, The. (1981). dir. Sam Raimi.
Get Out. (2017). dir. Jordan Peele.
Grudge, The. (2004). dir. Takashi Shimizu.
Haunting, The. (1963). dir. Robert Wise. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros Studios,
2003, DVD.
Haunting, The. (1999). dir. Jan de Bont.
Poltergeist. (1982). dir. Tobe Hooper.
Quatermass and the Pit. (1967). dir. Roy Ward Baker.
Shining, The. (2008). dir. Stanley Kubrick.
72 G. WISKER
Theatre
Haunting of Hill House, The. (2015). Anthony Neilson.
TV
Haunting of Hill House, The. (2018). Netflix.
Salem’s Lot. (1979). CBS.
CHAPTER 3
Revengeful Ghosts: The Woman in Black

(Hill, 1983), Beloved (Morrison, 1987)
In their dealings with violent loss of a child, the resultant personal devasta-
tion and ghostly returns, The Woman in Black (1983) and Beloved (1987)
lay open the destruction and trauma of gendered and racial oppression at
the core of which is the vulnerable body of a woman, outcast or beaten,
and of her child, victim of destructive propriety for one and of the horrors
of slavery for the other. If the Gothic traditionally often focuses on (threats
to) heredity, inheritance, continuities of lineage, these two novels deal
with such fears and also lay bare the sexism, racism and entitled privilege
at the core of such a protected existence. The woman in black, Jennet
Humfrye, is a revengeful ghostly mother always in tattered black full
mourning dress who with her (illegitimate) child is both a culprit and vic-
tim of the gender-related strictures of the law. In Beloved, escaped slave
mother Sethe and her child are victims of the monstrous structures of
slavery which makes them objects. Here the returned baby ghost, now a
full-grown woman, victim of infanticide provoked by her mother’s desper-
ate desire to protect her child against slavery, returns to stay forever with
her mother and sister, ostensibly to reunite the family but actually to dis-
rupt their tenuous stability. There can only be a very temporary pretence
at peace while dehumanisation and trauma, in the forms here of sexism
and racism, are the norm. Both these mothers are social outcasts. One
hovers outside; the other lives within a haunted house. Each indicts not
merely local versions of otherising, but also global forms of abjection

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74 G. WISKER
based on sexism and racism, where the body of a woman, and that of her
child, can be readily abused and sacrificed for prudery, prosperity, or profit.
Much work on Gothic writing by women and most work on women’s
ghost stories focuses on that of the late eighteenth to early twentieth cen-
turies. The two novels considered here are set in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury in the US (Beloved) and in the early twentieth century (The Woman in
Black, although it feels more like the time of Dickens) in the UK, but both
are contemporary women’s ghost stores, setting straight some of the his-
tories of oppression of women, taking strong stands against sexism
and racism.
Julia Briggs’ (2012) feminist exploration of women’s ghost stories,
recuperated and emphasised their importance for reading the hidden lives
of women in periods when they had no property, little education, and
were expected to be silent. Ghosts lure readers into a space of tension
‘between certainty and doubt, between the familiar and the feared,
between rational occurrence and the inexplicable’ (Briggs, 2012). Ghosts
do not merely deal with the local. Their revelations and restitution go
beyond the personal, which is often only a proxy for more widespread
social blight on women’s hidden lives. In his Scare Tactics, Supernatural
Fiction by American Women (2008), Jeffrey Weinstock fills a gap in our
knowledge and received critical views concerning Victorian women writ-
ers of Gothic and, in particular, of ghost stories, introducing arguments
about the radical intent and achievement of often unheard-of or ignored
women writers of the supernatural, focusing on work produced by
American women writers between the end of the civil war and c.1930.
While Ellen Moers largely characterised female Gothic as Gothic written
by women (1976, p. 138), Weinstock instead cites Margaret Anne Doody’s
1977 work Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction
and the Development of the Gothic Novel, where she sees British women’s
Gothic as ‘the novel of feminist radical protest’ (1977, p. 562). Building
on this deliberately radical edge, Weinstock revalues much women’s
Gothic writing, focusing on American work, and, while recognising that
although some ostensibly radical protest work then recapitulates and
everyone lives married, happily ever after, much does not, much instead
challenges oppressive gendered norms, positions and behaviours. Some
begins to deal with both sexism and racism.
I have always relished ghost stories, the form of the speculative and the
supernatural, and I appreciate, as other critics do, that women’s writing of
the supernatural, of ghost stories can offer a radical critique of patriarchal
3 REVENGEFUL GHOSTS: THE WOMAN IN BLACK (HILL, 1983)… 75
constructions which affect people’s everyday lives physically and psycho-

logically. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) was a personal turning point in
appreciating the serious radical critical intent and effect of which ghost
stories can be capable. Morrison took the unspeakable horror of slavery,
the incredible, terrible narratives and turned this history into something
no less shocking but which, rather than left to fester, inchoate and angry,
instead is powerfully seized, articulated, lasting and can be shared,
passed on.
Talking of slavery engages facts and the critical vehicle of the ghost on
the deepest level. This cannot be said to be merely entertaining, a critique
historically levelled at women’s ghost stories, particularly in the nineteenth
century where they overlapped with sensation fiction. Expressing the
unspeakable horror of years of slavery, the curse of slavery at the personal,
emotional, physical, psychological level through a family narrative and
through the body of a young woman, the returned grown-up baby ghost,
the subject of infanticide, is a terrifying but understandable response to
the worst horror of slavery itself. Unseen and unheard initially, then a
damaging, poltergeist nuisance, Beloved is a very sad and angry ghost. She
is a constant reminder of how easy it is for the beliefs informing horrific
practices to also lie dormant and reappear, as Beloved herself lies dormant,
until her mother seems to suffer slightly less and then the re-embodied
Beloved reappears and enters the everyday. Bringing back a baby ghost as
now a full-grown woman makes the personal horror central without
diminishing the cultural horror. Her return is not merely calling for repa-
ration; emotionally painful, Beloved as a figure reminds of how widespread
and internationally located is genocide followed by trauma, how it is taken
into houses, bodies and minds, can hardly be spoken of, recognised but
not forgotten. Far from trivialising this horror, the use of the returned
baby ghost and her effect on bodies and minds brings the issues vibrantly
back to life, to be lived and worked through and with.
The Woman in Black (1983) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) are
the main focus here, each novel reflecting the brutal abjection of and
widespread culturally produced damage done to those denigrated as ‘oth-
ers’, women, one an ‘unmarried mother’, the other an enslaved woman
who managed to escape to freedom. The dehumanising damage is done to
both their bodies and minds, and to their own and others’ vulnerable chil-
dren, each instance indicting deadly, unequal societies and expressing a
destructive, threatening legacy. Susan Hill’s novel grows from the tradi-
tion of nineteenth-century British ghost stories told round the fire, on
76 G. WISKER
dark winter nights, their truths testified to by reputable people, vehicles

for personal, local and cultural warnings, such as Dickens’s ‘A Christmas
Carol’ (1843), M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
(1898) (much of the title of one of the chapters in Hill’s novel). Toni
Morrison’s novel has its roots in US southern Gothic, Flannery O’
Connor, Tennessee Williams (on whom Morrison did her master’s work)
the brutal normalities of plantation slavery. Each places the trauma of the
death of a child central in the community who suffer, try to keep their
distance from the horrors being played out, but in which they are caught
up. Each has liminal spaces of swamps, or deadly mudflats, each a house,
grand or small, rocked by the cries and sad or angry actions of a dead
child, haunted by the presence of a ghost and by the terrible sense of loss
ultimately left at the door of brutal, inhumane societies. In Britain, this is
enacted through the cruel rejection and casting out of unmarried mothers;
in the US through the utter inhumanity of slavery (in which, of course,
Britain is centrally implicated). Each novel focuses on a small place, a small
family unit, but the causes of the evils that led to the hauntings are wide-
spread. In other cultures unmarried mothers are not only cast out; many
are the subject of ‘honour killings’. The brutalities of slavery focused on
here are of the longest, most dreadful expression of slavery, the transatlan-
tic slave trade, while, shamefully, slavery remains global.
The Woman in Black (1983)

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) is a significant moment in the
later twentieth-century revival of women’s ghost stories in which the ghost
of the shunned, fallen, maddened woman, herself a victim of social and
moral hypocrisy, enacts her revenge in a series of uncanny returns, causing
the deaths of children. Jennet Humfrye, who loses her son first to bigotry,
which labels her a fallen woman, then to drowning, returns from a dam-
aged past to limit the future. Hill’s revival of the British ghost story in The
Woman in Black engages readers with the power of Gothic horror to reveal
horrible secrets of the past and their deadly legacy in the present, putting
spectral flesh on hidden, repressed stories, versions, perspectives, lives, and
inviting readers to look again at social mores, and understand differently.
The woman in black herself, marginalised, maddened, ghost Jennet
Humfrye, wreaks fatal revenge on local children for the loss of her illegiti-
mate child Nathaniel, adopted by her wealthy sister Mrs Drablow, drowned
in an accident crossing the marshy spit to her remote mansion.
Arthur Kipps, solicitor, is sent to sort out the papers of a deceased,

widowed client, Mrs Drablow who lived in some isolation, in Eel Marsh
House, right out on a spit of land, cut off daily by the rising tides. Like
Stoker’s Jonathan Harker in Dracula (1897), Kipps is orderly and depend-
able, not someone to imagine ghosts or vampires, rather someone repre-
senting the structures, organising and labelling of legal and social processes.
Solicitors know about land rights, wills, and how to make some kind of
final, formal, storied sense of events in order to settle any claims, clarify,
define and shut down any excess definitions and demands. Ghosts, how-
ever, are a reminder that this is only ever partial and probably futile. The
excess of versions and claims on the truth seeps out from the nicely
bounded finality of settling the demands of a will, selling a house and
moving on. Ghosts are there to remind that what is defined then denied as
waste and excess as other and abject because it does not fit, has a place in
history as well as the imagination. The Woman in Black replaces into family
history the wronged woman, the outcast family member, with her child
born out of wedlock, bringing the shadowy secret side of a rigidly consti-
tuted and heavily maintained respectability into the light, questioning
such easy divisions between legitimate and illegitimate, approved and not
approved histories, through the figure of the ghost. The ghost, a liminal
being, caught between its condition of being dead and its manifestation of
acting in the lived world questions the boundary between the living and
the dead as it does other boundaries, around legitimacy, respectability,
what is acceptable and what objected. It is interesting that this novel slides
into view as feminism is at its height, and is beginning to identify intersec-
tionality, the very different experiences of lesbian and heterosexual women,
of Black and Asian women and of white western middle-class women, at
least in UK society. Problematising class, and gender, if not race or sexual-
ity, this novel is partly a throwback to the nineteenth-century ghost story
of wronged women, and partly a testament to the new sensitivities of the
twentieth century where homes of unmarried mothers in Ireland were
investigated, their graveyards filled with lost babies, lost children and
sometimes their mothers (2017). (Under Margaret Thatcher, children of
some working-class mothers in the Republic of Ireland were also removed
from ‘unfit’ i.e. homes in poverty.) These are twentieth-century examples,
those abusive inequalities of earlier times are hidden in plain view as
women with children and no husband had no rights, identities, no exis-
tence. There are few ghostly laments of this terrible situation, but The
Woman in Black is one. It is also a reminder of the dangers of bureaucracy,
78 G. WISKER
which seeks to define and label everything. Both Jonathan Harker (who
Kipps resembles) found bringing order to Dracula’s property purchase
invasion had negative side effects for him and Kipps becomes victim to
Jennet Humfrye’s revenge. Vampire and ghost stories are reminders of
disruption, injustices. While the figure of the vampire problematises the
wholeness of body and property ownership, this particular ghost under-
mines everything; bringing devastating destructive loss, debts to be paid,
revenge.
The Woman in Black is an audacious, game-changing women’s ghost
story for the twentieth century. It echoes and revives the traditional char-
acteristics, bypassing the psychological doubting of Henry James’ The
Turn of the Screw (1898), using all the paraphernalia of the ghost story
which insists on its veracity, and on everyone’s vulnerability. It capitalises
on and plays out the ghost’s embodiment of irreversible anger, the endless
revengeful spite of the wronged and silenced, written out in some forgot-
ten history, walled up in castles and memory, but endlessly returning to
wreak a revenge which knows no bounds. It evokes M.R. James with the
really desolate East of England settings, and Susan Hill’s chapter entitled
‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’, in The Woman in Black, directly references
M.R. James’s short story ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to You, My Lad’
(1904). Hill took a trip to Suffolk, to the Fens and their edges in the early
1970s, and although set further north, up in Lincolnshire, also in the
Fens, Eel Marsh House, its liminal place on the end of a spit twice daily
submerged under the sea, and its surroundings, were inspired by this visit.
In an interview in The Guardian (2012), she talks of visiting the nearby
marshes where ‘it was quiet except for the slight moan of the wind and
reed beds that make a dry rattling sound. And when dusk came there was
always a slightly odd light.’ The silent, ever-changing treacherous marsh in
The Woman in Black destabilises all who cross it, cutting off the house,
isolating Kipps, drowning Nathaniel Drablow, the woman’s young son
(and his nanny) when the pony slipped on the muddy surface and the trap
crashed, into the water. Shifting, misty, it has an eerie atmosphere and a
dark history of loss. In the pub and village, however, Kipps feels like a
ghostly outsider: ‘I felt like a spectre’ (p. 46) dressed in black. Eel Marsh
House is ‘gaunt, empty’ (p. 46), the weather is unpredictable, the house
seems haunted, with spectral sounds and Kipps when staying there is lent
Spider (another Gothic reference), the little dog, not just to keep him
company but probably to pick up on haunting presences and impending
danger. There are other traditional Gothic motifs which haunt the story,
including an abandoned graveyard, where the woman in black herself,

Jennet Humfrye, is seen by Arthur Kipps, who first encountered her at
Mrs Drablow’s funeral, standing at the back of the church and again, out-
side the wall of the graveyard during burial (although no one else saw her).
He senses she has evil intent but he is a logical man, come to sort out the
papers of a dead client, and he has no idea what this sense of lingering
dread about the woman and the place might mean. Jennet Humfrye is in
many ways quite a transitional ghost, malevolent, appearing in different
places at significant moments, dedicated to harming those remotely related
to the harm done to her, and anyone else who comes into her presence.
Although Kipps is initially fascinated by the ‘silence and the mysterious,
shimmering beauty’ of the marshes, drawn in by the house’s isolation, he
becomes ‘conscious of the cold and the extreme bleakness and eeriness of
the spot’. And then the island and the house start to affect him with their
overwhelming loneliness, isolation, claustrophobia and a growing sense of
being trapped and vulnerable. The novel also references Dickens with
insidious London and East of England fog in Bleak House (1853), its role
representing the life-numbing, destroying complexities and torpor of the
system of law and inheritance and its embeddedness in English historical
control on human rights, on women as a form of property and on their
children as inherited objects, maintaining the solid lines of blood and heri-
tage. These are not mere echoes in The Woman in Black they are at its
core. The novel revives the settings and scenarios of traditional ghost sto-
ries in a terrifying and chilling way not just because of the location, accou-
trements, atmospheres and events of a ghost story, but also because it
fundamentally indicts an evil, rotten, social system. This system is one of
privilege, rights and legitimacies. Women had few or no legal rights in the
nineteenth century in which the tale is set, and unmarried mothers were
considered social and moral outsiders, utterly sinful, thus bringing in not
just the everyday foggy, intricately knotted legal system but the more
embedded knotted sanctified religious version of this construction. The
unmarked graves of unmarried mothers and their children treated as waste,
circuit the socially respectable graveyards of (at least) England and Ireland,
on the outskirts of cities and towns, or buried in the countryside. With The
Woman in Black, Hill revives the settings, atmospheres and the terrible
revengeful repetitions of the traditional ghost story where wrongs, once
brought to light can never be righted. She particularly indicts the ponder-
ous historical deadening tangles of social laws and religious imperatives
which cast women as less than second-class citizens, their bodies a source
80 G. WISKER
of embarrassment, betrayal, evil, excess, and the status of the ‘fallen

woman’ outside the law, inheriting rights, bloodlines and the sanctity of
marriage as particularly abject. The revenge of Jennet Humfrye is not ran-
dom; it is all encompassing. Anyone who is comfortably fixed in this sys-
tem which abjects and rejects women as other and steals their children
from them, removing even their minimal rights, anyone complacently liv-
ing their lives with their wives/husbands and their children, supported by
the economic, social and imperial system which so constructs outsiders, is
a fair object for that revenge. The novel then uses the ghostly figure and
story of Jennet Humfrye and her dead lost child Nathaniel to expose the
social and moral, religious, legal and political strictures surrounding
women, and the insidious and cruel effects on the lives of so many women
and their children.
The Woman in Black revived the traditional ghost story, with Gothic
locations, graves, isolated communities and more isolated great houses,
hidden terrible secrets, and ghosts who have a deadly intent on revenge.
The revenge of the woman in black is both particular—probably aimed at
her sister and anyone related to the death of her child Nathaniel, but it is
also much more widespread and wide ranging, as it focuses revenge on the
mores and behaviour of society which abjects women and disempowers,
isolates, destroys and disinherits them. The echo of Wilkie Collins’ The
Woman in White (1859) suggests it is an indictment (as is Wilkie Collins’
novel) of the psychological, social, legal and physical violence done to
women to remove what little power and property rights they had in order
to steal from them, undermine, and permanently remove them. In Collins’
novel, the strong sister Marian acts as a sleuth, discovers the wrongs, per-
sistently fights for her sister against the power of evil men and the injus-
tices of the legal system. Women could easily be deemed mad and have all
their rights removed, and the nineteenth-century literature about hysteria
as a woman’s illness, and in which even in the more radical texts mad
women are incarcerated in attics to remove them from any social space for
recognition of difference (see Moers, 1976; Showalter, 1977; Gilbert &
Gubar, 1979), is revealed by the work of feminist critics. This novel is also
haunted by Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847), and Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon,
1862), and The Yellow Wallpaper (Perkins Gilman, 1892), in which post-
natal depression is defined and treated as a form of madness and the wife
is incarcerated in the upstairs nursery, kept confined by the patriarchal
forces of power—husbands, doctors—until having stripped the yellow
wallpaper off because of the creeping woman behind it, she commits
suicide. Representations of women as mad, are based in social, moral,

legal, political and psychological oppression, and a deep-seated fear of
women’s sexual energies and any kind of power.
The woman in black channels all of these. She is a victim turned
revenger of her time. Jennet Humfrye is an outcast because she had illicit
sexual relationships out of wedlock, and became pregnant. She might well
also have always had psychological problems, we are not told, but the
alienation, rejection and abjection she experiences when her child is taken
from her and brought up by her wealthy childless sister, and she has no
place or rights to see him—clearly destabilise her. Her revenge is
unbounded in the novel and it is understood as an extreme reaction to
intolerable social circumstances. She is not just a love-revenge figure, as
some women ghosts are; she is an indictment of and a curse on social
hypocrisy and marginalisation of women, their abjection, the denial of
their rights over their own bodies and children, their right to live. As she
is a ghost, she has already paid the ultimate price—loss of her child and her
child’s loss of his life, which leads to her own suicide. Now she comes back
as a terrifying, overwhelming, unstoppable social karma on anyone’s lives
should they be conventionally married, with children. Her curse is on the
complacent normalcy of others. It is bigger than her, this curse, but it
manifests itself through her appearances as a traditional-looking ghost
wreaking direct deadly results on families and children in particular. The
social wrongs are not mere statistics, they reach deeply into the sufferings
and losses of individuals, just like in Bleak House, Jo the crossing sweeper,
lowest of the low, product of a sick society translates his own sickness
(smallpox) up the hierarchy which oppresses working-class and classless
boys like him—and infects both Lady Dedlock, and Esther. The partly
guilty and the innocent alike suffer. There are many resonances in Dickens’
work on social injustice and cruelties, including the setting in the East of
England, but the references to the law, injustice, inheritance, fog and con-
tagion remind readers of Bleak House in particular. The other resonance is
with Dickens’ Gothic Great Expectations (1860), which also concerns the
damaging haunting of the past, and in which Miss Havisham’s house life
is secluded, beleaguered by relatives who would like her dead so they can
inherit. Her home resembles that of Mrs Drablow, with its paralysing past
darkness, and cobwebs. The sins of the fathers enacted in the young; the
woman in black is a wronged individual but her curse indicts a society.
In traditional ghost story form Arthur Kipps and his new family settle
down at Christmas to share spooky ghost stories. While he does not want
82 G. WISKER
to share his tale, that he is the originator of the tale lends the familiar cred-
ibility to what he does share. It happened to him, it must be true. While
Stoker’s (Dracula, 1897) Jonathan Harker is an estate agent, Hill’s Arthur
Kipps is a young solicitor, and his role in visiting the remote village of
Crythin Gifford is to sort out the will and papers of the reclusive, heirless
Mrs Drablow. First, he has to attend her funeral, then chooses to visit her
house to work on the papers. Rather like Harker’s journeying, Kipps has
to take a train further into the wet flatness of Lincolnshire until he reaches
first the remote village and then latterly, after the funeral and burial, travel-
ling by pony and trap, the even more remote house, Mrs Drablow’s home.
Eel Marsh House, is in a liminal space, not really land, not really sea, but
isolated across a spit covered at high tide by the sea and subject to heavy
confusing fogs. The Woman in Black has all the familiar ghost story set-
tings, strategies and events, including spectral visits, inexplicable night
sounds, ostensibly empty rooms echoing with the past and an overwhelm-
ing, invasive atmosphere of dread.
Kipps first sights the woman in black when she joins the congregation
at Mrs Drablow’s funeral, coming close to him in his pew. But when he
asks who she was, no one else has seen her. Turning at the end of the
funeral he glimpses her ‘dressed in deepest black in the style of full mourn-
ing that had rather gone out of fashion’ (p. 48), ‘she was suffering from
some dreadful wasting disease, for not only was she extremely pale, even
more than a contrast with the blackness of her garments could account for,
but the skin and, it seemed, only the thinnest layer of flesh was tautly
stretched and strained across her bones, so that it gleamed with a curious,
blue-white sheen’, incurable ‘ravages of the flesh’ (p. 49) ‘pale and gaunt
with disease’ (p. 49). Out by another headstone, though, there is a linger-
ing ‘glimpse of a not inconsiderable former beauty’ (p. 50) but she seems
like a victim of smallpox. Jerome the lawyer is frozen with horror when
Kipps asks who she is. He hasn’t seen her this time, but knows that when
she appears children start to die. Jerome leaves Kipps in the care of Mr
Keckwick, who is the ‘go-between to that place’ (p. 53), transporting any
visitors across the spit to the grand emptied out Eel Marsh House. He
reminds one of Charon the ferryman ferrying the dead to hell, crossing
another liminal space. The house’s isolation is spatially represented by the
narrow spit, the landline which links and divides the house, its wealth, and
once the child Nathaniel, Jennet Humfrye ’s child, from the village. It also
divides life and death, as it is the location of Nathaniel’s death. On Kipps’
first visit to Eel Marsh House, isolated across the misty marshes, he hears
the terrifying ghostly pony and trap which historically lost its footing in
the mist as it was engulfed by the sea, and toppled into the water, drown-
ing the child, young Nathaniel Drablow, and his nurse Rose Judd in the
mud and the rising tide. Kipps hears a pony and trap crashing, a terrified
child crying, sounds of drowning, then silence.
Baffled, I stood and waited, straining to listen through the mist. What I
heard next chilled and horrified me, even though I could neither understand
nor account for it. The noise of the pony trap grew fainter and then stopped
abruptly and away on the marsh was a curious draining, sucking, churning
sound, which went on, together with the shrill neighing and whinnying of a
horse in panic, and then I heard another cry, a shout, a terrified sobbing—it
was hard to decipher—but with horror I realised that it came from a child,
a young child. I stood absolutely helpless in the mist that clouded me and
everything from my sight. (p. 74)
Nathaniel’s mother, Jennet Humfrye, helplessly watched and heard the

whole terrible event, going mad as a result. When Kipps visits, he experi-
ences the repetition common to ghost stories, a compulsive rerunning of
the worst events in an attempt to lay them, settle them, to do something.
The boy, his mother and the nurse are condemned beyond death to repeat
the fatal accident over and over again, driving Jennet to haunt the grave-
yard, church, marsh, and the village. Her son’s terrified, ghostly, crying
presence remains on the spit, and, at night, is heard in the nursery at Eel
House. When Kipps decides to stay on the island in the house to immerse
himself in the papers, he is given as company the dog Spider, whose pres-
ence and sensitivity to abnormal sounds and sights could be protective;
however at a crucial moment Spider runs off back home through the
growing mist.
Jennet Humfrye is a recognisable revengeful ghost seen as having ‘a
desperate, yearning malevolence… with eyes sunken but unnaturally
bright’ (p. 65). Kipps is permanently altered by and unable to fully com-
prehend the ghostly occurrences in the church, churchyard, on the spit
and in the house, ‘they had been, in some sense I did not understand,
unreal, ghostly, things that were dead’ (p. 82). Mrs Drablow must have
got used to the accompaniment of ghosts; however, the sound of a rock-
ing chair behind a locked door is eerie when alone in a dark house. Kipps
hears ‘something bumping gently on the floor, in a rhythmic sort of way,
a familiar sort of sound and yet one I still could not exactly place, a sound
84 G. WISKER
that seemed to belong to my past… old, half forgotten memories and

associations deep within me, a sound that, in any other place, would not
have made me afraid but would, I thought have been curiously comfort-
ing, friendly’ (p. 109). The rocking in the shut nursery (a familiar ghostly
signature) terrifies both Kipps and Spider, who whines when he enters the
room ‘the very heart of the haunting’ (p. 138). The nursery is in ‘a state
of disarray as might have been caused by a gang of robbers, bent on mad,
senseless destruction. The toys are smashed ‘as by a hammer blow and the
rocking chair had been pushed into the centre, to preside… like a great
brooding bird, over the wreck’ (p. 138), but the room was bolted and the
rocking chair now seems to resemble a gaunt woman in black who has
clearly wrecked the nursery. These are ghostly entrances occurrences and
damages.
Jennet Humfrye’s terrible loss and terrible rage haunt the village and
decimate the lives of its children. She loses everything, goes mad and dies,
but returns as a ghost, haunting the village, the house, the spit and the
graveyard, her presence in liminal spaces emphasizing her own liminal sta-
tus in life, as an unmarried daughter, condemned and silenced socially,
refused any rights over her own child, and only able to watch him from
afar then watch him die. There is a gap between social acceptability and
her marginal status, life and death. Her marginalisation is a product of a
bigoted age which banished, silenced and incarcerated unmarried mothers
(Wilhelms, 2012). Jennet’s fate, that of her son and subsequently that of
the village children are an indictment against the hypocrisy of the age.
The novel has had a powerful hold on readers and audiences.
Adaptations, including the first film (1989), the play from 1987
(Mallatratt), the 2012 film (dir. James Watkins) and a sequel The Woman
in Black: Angel of Death (2014), emphasises its relevant and haunting
presence. It received pleasant enough reviews but its hold on readers and
audiences did not set in until a few years after its publication. When
released in the United States in 1986, a review of The Woman in Black
called it ‘memorable, one of the strongest stories of supernatural horror…
in many years’, warned readers about the story’s slow start and the narra-
tor’s ‘confusing’ circumstances (Bleiler, 1986). Since 1983, The Woman in
Black has sold more than half a million copies and a 2012 review in the
Belfast Telegraph refers to The Woman in Black as Hill’s ‘masterpiece’ and
promises ‘it will scare the bejasus out of you’. The novel has been adapted
into a successful stage play and two films. The commercial success of the
2012 film adaptation led to a sequel The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
(2014) and then a novelisation of the screenplay written by Martyn Waites

in 2013. Susan Hill suggested the sequel’s central plot but then removed
herself from the project.
Some critics situate the novel within the canon of traditional stories,
thus Andrew Green in ‘The Subversion of Expectation in The Woman in
Black’ (2004) explores Hill’s engagement with Victorian ghost stories,
used to ‘both meet and to subvert the expectation of the reader’. Hill’s
links with older texts are investigated by Alan Jones in his article ‘Who is
haunted by what in The Woman in Black?’ (2003) which argues that the
novel could be read in reverse, not as a ghost story but as a tale Kipps
constructs to confess his own ‘painful loss and buried guilt’. Jennet’s
revenge for the death of her son is taken out on those whose normal family
structures condemned her to the margins. Silenced and marginalised in
life, she is a deadly centre to the village whose children she visits and
whose deaths she causes as a part of her revenge. Mullan notes that ‘The
ghost in The Woman in Black is in fact given a kind of voice’ (2012), which
begins when Kipps finds Jennet’s letters begging to see her son. Finally
Kipps, too, is caught up in the woman in black’s revenge not just because
he has been dealing directly with Mrs Drablow’s papers and uncovering
histories through letters and financial transactions, but because her revenge
is on the everyday, complacent conformity of families, rather than directed
at her sister or specific other. Society has wronged her and she lost her own
because of social marginalisation and condemnation. The job is tidied up
and closed. Kipps returns home, marries, has a child. The woman in black,
however, does not need a direct connection of sin with those who she
attacks. Social and cultural revenge is less personal, repercussions of dam-
age are more widespread than small local debts. Eventually Kipps and his
family are also caught up in the woman in black’s malevolent revenge
cycle. When Kipps’ wife Stella and his one-year-old son Joseph have a day
out, they go for a spin in a pony trap, significant because of the pony trap
in which young Nathaniel Drablow’s death took place. He notices, too
late, that the woman in black with her wasted face, stands at the side,
observing silently, intently, malevolently: ‘For a second, I simply stared in
incredulity and astonishment, then in cold fear. I was paralysed’ (p. 158).
She steps straight out in front of the pony and trap in which his wife and
child are riding. Like the crash killing Nathaniel and his nursemaid, both
passengers die violently: ‘I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she
had had her revenge’ (p. 160).
86 G. WISKER
The Woman in Black successfully revives ghost story traditions with its
liminal setting, gaunt spectral visitor, and personal damage. It is also a
powerful indictment of a sick society and, just as with damage done to
nature, the retribution for social evils extends way beyond the immedi-
ately guilty.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)

This section was begun in August 2017, and the Charlottesville rally/riot
was a brutal, astonishing reminder of the seething, barely repressed poten-
tial for the eruption of alt-right fascist racial hatred into violence on
twenty-first-century streets. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter move-
ment, there have been widespread protests against institutional and every-
day racism in the US, and also the UK and removal of statues erected to
celebrate historical figures of local and national stature who were actually
connected to the slave trade. That is not a ghost story; it’s the news. But
this news reminds of the angry silences of towns, streets and homes, which
when they erupt into such violent hatred testify to the damage of
entrenched racism. Gothic writers have a role to play, their social justice
focus refuses to let the horrors of the past remain buried and the evils
assumed be safely interred with the dead left silent. Ghosts do not just
remind us of hidden histories; they are an everyday warning of the poten-
tial for recurrent horrors if their stories are unheard, obliterated, and the
lessons not clarified, opened out, highlighted, shared, learned from. The
power of narrative is not of propaganda and conflict but of the ways in
which the imagination connects historical fact with values; motives, can
shape the wrongs and begin to enable imagining of ways forward beyond
incessant seething of guilt, hate, reprisals, and continued oppression.
The silenced voices and traumatic histories of marginalised peoples
haunt and speak through the lives of those who follow them. These are
local, national and international ghosts, the uneasy, unsettled ones who
remind that the domination and success of some is more often at the
expense of those who have been considered Other, at best forced labour
sources, at worst dispensable, waste by-products of that success. This
chapter is concerned with the haunting, the insistent refusals of historical
silencing and erasure. It concentrates on how ghost stories enable the
recovery of hidden pasts of trauma, both personal, national and interna-
tional, and here with a particular focus on African American work on the
trauma of slavery and its legacy. When Toni Morrison decided to begin to
tackle a response to, and engagement with, the horrors of slavery, the
supernatural, a ghost story, was perhaps a risky choice since it could be
seen as mere entertainment, or just a supernatural scare.
In Scare Tactics (2008), Jeffrey Weinstock talks about gendered roles,
and the balance of power in relationships, but notes that radical question-
ing goes much further in some women’s Gothic writing, where the figures
of ghosts vehicle an attack on culturally embedded, legislated inequalities
and abuse. Weinstock focuses on one main story concerned with racism,
Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘The Unburied’ (1913). Here, the employer,
Dr Stanchon’s terror and disgust break out in response both to the sexual
self-confidence of a young African American servant, Mynie, and her
mother, Althea’s trance-like state. He hears incantations, they are calling
up the dead, and the atmosphere changes in the house (challenging his
sense of normal, his power). Stanchon defines his horror at their actions as
‘the undertow of things’ (p. 314), which remind him, he says, of ‘a wind
out of the jungle’ (p. 310) but which is in fact also linked to his troubled
dismay at women’s power to read and write (that of the parson’s wife)
(Weinstock, pp. 187–189). As, aghast, Stanchon declares his views,
Daskam Bacon’s ironic, critical tone reveals them as problematically con-
ventional, sexist and racist.
The horrors of the past prey on the present, but some of the work by
Morrison and in ch. 9 Tananarive Due, goes beyond terrifying revelations
to a form of recovery. This involves living in, with and beyond the horror,
and it also involves a psychoanalytic turn, recognising that the construc-
tion of the Other springs from the self. The notion of abjection is useful in
considering how colonial and African American people have been consid-
ered as ‘Other’. Stuart Hall comments in the postcolonial context that the
‘Other’ is ‘constructed as the absolute opposite, the negation of every-
thing the West stood for’ (Hall, 1992, p. 314). While linking Otherising
with foreignness and abjection, from a feminist psychoanalytical approach,
Julia Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror (1982) and Strangers to Ourselves
(1988), makes a connection between the ‘difference’ established when a
powerful white male perspective dominates, arguing that ethnicity and
gender are the focus of such Otherising. Kristeva builds on Lacan’s engage-
ments with Freud, in which it can be seen that the Other (traditionally the
mother and, by connection, women) is considered as abject, then rejected,
abjected with disgust. Kristeva points out that this abject turn constructs
the Other as a projection from the self. If women and those (because of
African or Asian or semitic or… origin) of ethnicities other than the
88 G. WISKER
dominant European originated white are considered as Other, a projec-

tion based on the basic need to recognise the separate self during the
childhood years, then it should be logical and straightforward (and also
absolute necessary) to unpick this construction, expose and move beyond
it. As African American, lesbian feminist critic Audre Lorde, noted:
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason
for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction. (Lorde,
1984, p. 100)
With the help of critics and writers such as Toni Morrison, Tananarive
Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delaney, warped theorising underpinning
the dehumanising and erasure of others is revealed. Through this, hidden
secrets, histories, vile thoughts and truly evil behaviours are exposed. Toni
Morrison uses both historical detail and the supernatural in her revelation
and critique, as I have argued earlier (2005, 2021), since in much writing,
including African American women’s writing, the supernatural, and
Gothic horror in this instance in the figure of the ghost, can embody and
articulate both the historical and the ongoing damage of genocide based
on, grown from abjection and desire to destroy anyone who is, for what-
ever arguments, constructed and then rejected as Other.
Beings from Gothic horror, vampires, zombies, ghosts embody and so
disturb the complacent everyday and force recognition of the evil people
produce and invest in, challenging the ongoing practices of such human
evil. Slavery and the dehumanisation of constructed ‘Others’ is a core evil
and a target for such imaginative critique. Beloved engages with the
hauntology of place—a community, a house, individual and representative,
and does so through using the once discredited form of the supernatural,
which derives from community folk tale, superstition, a ghost story ‘dis-
credited and unaccounted for’ (Morrison, 1987) like the experiences and
lives of which it speaks, finding ways of articulating the painful, often-silent
presence of the lived history of slavery and the damage it does to individu-
als and communities. With this novel Morrison seeks ways of dealing with
the lived imaginary (Castoriadis, 1975), the ever-present history of slavery
in the lives of African Americans, coming to terms with this pervasive rev-
enant which will not lie down, but must be lived with. She speaks of:
the tone in which I could blend acceptance of the supernatural and a pro-
found rootedness in the real time, at the same time with neither taking
precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in

which Black people looked at the world, we are a very practical people, very
down to earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also
accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is
another way of knowing things. But to blend these two works together at
the same time was enhancing not limiting. And some of those things were
‘discredited’ only because Black people were ‘discredited’, therefore what
they knew was ‘discredited’. And also because the press upward towards
social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge
as possible. That kind of knowledge has a very strong place in my world.
(Morrison, 1985)
Just a year later, Gloria Naylor also wrote of dealings with the supernatural
in African American homes in Mama Day (1988) and latterly Tananarive
Due, among others, has also worked with vampires and ghosts to engage
with troubling beliefs underlying racism, casting mortals as the Other in
her vampire trilogy, and enabling the recovery of Scott Joplin’s music by
ghostly channelling through a young African American pianist (Chap. 9).
Bodily destruction, and an undermining of the stabilities on which we
depend, such as identity, personal safety and a home in which we can be
nurtured and nurture others, are in many ways familiar in much horror.
But there is in African American horror such as Beloved something deeper
and more terrifying, which makes the reader uneasy about personal safety,
familiar neighbours, family and friends. African American horror is based
historically and psychologically in the utter dehumanisation and erasure of
all that everyone and anyone holds dear, enacted initially through slavery,
and through the racism and Otherising that both fuelled and followed it.
Speaking of the endemic haunting of American homes and communities,
Toni Morrison lays out a widespread community of suffering:
Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year

alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men
whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by
the crew; property taken, necks broken. (Beloved, p. 180)
African American Gothic horror such as Morrison’s Beloved and Due’s

Ghost Summer helps to re-write and re-balance history. These texts expose
a festering, rotting wound at the heart of not just America but wherever
genocidal histories erase and bury the despicable, dehumanising
Otherising. It reveals occluded histories of debasement; eradication of the
90 G. WISKER
kindness, safety and security on which we depend in our lives; and denial
of human rights and of the right to life. In Beloved, in the story of an indi-
vidual escape and the return of a revenant seeking recognition and justice,
Toni Morrison reminds us of the everyday lived history of the violence of
slavery. In her ‘American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and
Ethnographers Author(s)’, Kathleen Brogan makes connections across
several African American works from the 1980s, identifying them as a
form of cultural haunting, elevating the figure of the single white-sheeted
figure randomly haunting a ruin or reminding an individual of their
wrongs, to a figure or figures embodying the losses, grief, and terrible hid-
den histories of slavery. In this she focuses on the painful erased past of a
continent, whose legacies are beyond.
Brogan links together several texts published around the same time by
men as well as women, though we are concentrating on the women writers
here. August Wilson’s drama The Piano Lesson was staged in 1987 the
same year as Toni Morrison’s Beloved appeared, a game-changer both for
cultural haunting of the traumas of slavery and its legacy, and embodi-
ments of the supernatural, opening the door for the ghost into the house,
home, minds of all present, immediate and undeniable because in the
body of the lost dead baby ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which dared to make
a ghost a central, fully bodied character’ (Brogan, 1995, p. 149). Brogan
situates Morrison’s novel among others also engaged with other haunt-
ings of family and home, reminders of the violence and disenfranchise-
ment of the past for African Americans. In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for
the Widow (1983), ‘the emotional development of the protagonist is pro-
pelled by a series of encounters with family ghosts’ (149) and in Gloria
Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) ‘the spectral appearance of an enslaved African
ancestor begins the process of unravelling the title character’s family curse’
(p. 149). These women writers are revisiting Gothic tropes and locations
and insisting on their cultural historical physical psychical meaning. The
grief and demand for attention of the lone traditional Gothic ghost in a
haunted mansion or castle enters the ordinary home and speaks through
the local and domestic, for the historical pain grief and loss of the many,
beyond the individual, There are haunted houses, family secrets and
‘endangered inheritances, imprisonment and escape, the encounter with
the unspeakable’ (p. 149), differently focused not just in the personal
encounter with the taboo but also ‘powerful dramas of the individual
psyche, yet these dramas are woven inextricably into the recuperation of a
people’s history’ (p. 150). Brogan also makes a case for the ancestral
African histories lying behind these texts inheriting elements of ancestor

workshop into New world religious beliefs and the inherited re-imagined
tales of the transatlantic slave crossings, especially in Beloved. This latter
‘race memory’ would certainly begin to situate the memories of the
Middle Passage which Sethe could not have experienced herself, and
which Beloved also seems to channel, walking newly alive out of the water
of the swamp.
Talking of the role of storytelling, of Gothic horror, of ghost stories,
Abraham and Torok note: ‘What haunts us are not the dead but the gaps
left within us by the secrets of others’ (Abraham and Torok, 1994, p. 171).
Stories are passed on by storytellers, from the relics of the past, haunting
spaces, places and bodies, and read through the eyes of the living. In
Beloved, Grandma, Baby Suggs the healer, remarks, ‘Not a house in the
country but is packed to its rafters with some dead negro’s grief’ (Beloved,
p. 5). As Anya Heise-von de Lippe notes (2021) Morrison uses ‘spectral
invasions to draw attention to the brittleness of cultural constructions of
reality and normality based in the abjection of a suppressed spectral Other’
(p. 36) and focuses on how Morrison has a particular way of attaching the
traumatic to the spatial, here Sethe’s haunted house, but also the many
houses with their many attics which are haunted by the ghosts of slavery
itself. For Anya, Morrison has traumatic events ‘cling to a specific location,
creating a form of culturally—specific, localised haunting’ (p. 37).
‘124 was spiteful, full of baby’s venom’ (p. 1). Beloved begins with a
confusing, strong, shocking statement, bringing together the domestic,
the house with its number on a newly numbered, named street, and the
turbulence within the fabric of the house and the lives of those trying to
get on with living within it. The venom of babies is almost an oxymoron,
since in popular thought they are vulnerable, incapable as yet of mean and
evil deeds, but demon children run through the films of the 1980s, with
The Omen (1976) standing out. Morrison draws from popular culture,
disrupting the norms of the family home and women’s protective, nurtur-
ing response to innocent, vulnerable babies. This baby is charged, fuelled
by anger and revenge, and it enacts this in poltergeist disturbances in the
house. The house, home, children and the bodies of women are central to
Beloved, in which Sethe is haunted by a half-understood memory of her
mother (her defiance and death), and her powerful, inchoate, inherited
memory of the middle passage of the Transatlantic slave trade. Trauma is
passed from generation to generation. Not only does Sethe inherit it, but
trauma is also re-enacted in the brutality she experiences herself. Just as
92 G. WISKER
the body of Sethe’s mother, raped by the crew transporting her from
Africa, broken, used, is cast away on a heap when she speaks out, so Sethe
is raped, defiled and beaten by the boys of Sweet Home, taught she is
property, an animal ripe for violence, an object. Sethe’s back evidences
abusive beating, but it is also a tree of life pattern and she survives, bearing
the visible signs of the violations of slavery, the mental, psychological signs
turned inwards, to emerge later when her personal and the family’s trauma
arises from the swamp of memory and death and enters the new house,
just becoming a home, in the form of Beloved.
The traumatic history, the haunting past, is borne both on the body of
Sethe and through the body of Beloved, the fully grown woman who,
entering her mother’s house, must learn to speak and interact with the
living, and live among them. The terrible past will not lie down; it sets up
home in the house. And like other ghosts who reappear in Gothic corri-
dors and haunt the castles and old houses of their living days, it is here
embodied in the living selves, as this loved and longed-for succubus starts
to drain Sethe of her self-esteem, strength, and physical health. Beloved is
like so many other returned, dead, lost, loved ones, welcomed in, with
confusion, since she died as an infant. Those haunted accept the unlikely
in their need for returns, as is the case in both Stephen King’s Pet Sematary
(1983), where loved animals return, but cause damage, and in the earlier,
‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (Jacobs, 1902), where a bereaved family call up their
son, dead in a factory accident, but use the final wish granted through the
monkey’s paw to keep him out, beyond the door, aware somehow of his
altered state and the threat he poses. But motherly Sethe receives with love
her longed-for and lost child, and her mixture of love and fear indicates
that mixed reaction to the mourned, lamented, guilty past, her raw reac-
tion to the horror of the slavecatchers, the infanticide, and, deeper than
that, the dehumanised, monstrous reality of slavery which traumatises the
country and its buildings and bodies.
Beloved is based on the true story of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner
(Sethe), who in 1854 committed infanticide in her attempt to prevent the
recapture of her children into slavery, a fate worse than death. Sethe’s
haunted family lives in the liminal space of an initially unnamed, unnum-
bered road in Cincinnati, the first state in the Free North, to which escaped
slaves secretly travelled via the underground railroad, led by Harriet
Tubman. It is a novel with at least five time layers. The first, Sethe’s moth-
er’s transportation and death, has a middle passage memory, followed by
Sethe’s life in Sweet Home, the plantation, which is initially moderately
paternalistic under Mr Gardner, then on his death, brutal under

Schoolteacher. The small community of uncastrated male slaves and the
little family Sethe and Halle are putting together, are emptied out leaving
each man burned, hung, lost, escaped, and Sethe beaten, her milk stolen,
treated as less than the lowest, most abused animal, a property, her human
and animal characteristics listed side by side in a sale format by Schoolteacher
to his boys, to pass on to them misinformation, through warped educa-
tion. Following her escape with her children, Sethe’s short period of joyful
freedom in Cincinnati, in Baby Suggs’, her mother-in-law’s house, ends in
tragedy when she kills her baby in the moment of desperation on the
arrival of Schoolteacher and the slavecatchers, attempting to recapture
the family.
The novel opens on the fourth period, in which the dead baby acts as a
disruptive poltergeist. The poltergeist baby ghost hides food and breaks
crockery, shakes and disturbs everything, unaffected by all attempts to
ward off or lay its ghostly presence, as handprints in food or on mirrors,
eventually both removing the small family from the community and send-
ing the boys, Harold and Buglar, off wandering to escape its attacks. These
are the traumatic histories haunting the house, haunting Sethe, and which
become embodied in the return of the revengeful, full-grown, baby ghost.
When Paul D, another survivor from the ironically named plantation,
Sweet Home, treks back into Sethe’s life and enters the house, the ghost
revolts pitching the place about ‘“God damnit! Shut up!” Paul D was
shouting, falling, reaching for anchor. “Leave the place alone! Get the hell
out! A table rushed towards him and he grabbed its leg. The quaking
slowed to an occasional lurch’ (p. 18). As the living people ‘breathed to
the same beat, like one tired person. Another breathing was just as tired’
(p. 19) Paul tackles the presence with matched violence, mentions God
and Hell, and calms it all down, for now. Leaving Denver miserable as she
has lost ‘the only other company she had.’ (p. 19)
As Sethe starts a new relationship with Paul D, the period of the body
of the novel is in the traumatic nineteenth-century present, i.e., here and
now. The angry, displaced baby revives and surfaces from a swamp, return-
ing as a fully grown woman learning to be socially acceptable, learning
relationship politics. ‘A fully dressed woman walked out of the water’
(p. 50); ‘She had new skin, lineless and smooth’ (p. 50); she looks a little
drunk with a smile on her face. This is more than a partygoer or a survivor,
she is a revenant with tasks to do. One is positive, to help Sethe unravel her
past, storytelling while she folds the sheets. The other is gradually revealed
94 G. WISKER
as less so, like the angry house and furniture, Beloved’s intent is to ensure
memory, pain and loss are a constant, eating up Sethe. ‘Beloved could not
take her eyes off Sethe… Sethe was tasted, licked, eaten by Beloved’s eyes.
Like a familiar, she hovered’ (p. 57).
Morrison emphasises the invasiveness, the ever-present, overwhelming,
haunting drain of the silenced, hidden and abusive past. Beloved also
returns to remind her mother, the community, of the degradation and
inhumanity of slavery’s repercussions in ordinary lives. The little family are
imprisoned in their house. But this is not a story of total paralysis. Sethe
loves her bemusingly returned daughter, and Beloved, succubus, clings to
and drains her, eating her up with love and guilt, and disrupting the family
with dependency and sexually predatory behaviour. She brings out every-
one’s weaknesses. Beloved represents a destructive, self-devouring,
embodied past, not merely haunting the present, but preventing its move-
ment forward, its health, and any form of agency for everybody involved.
In the microcosm of this small family is embodied the problem of trau-
matic haunting, internalised histories, lived out through the bodies, places
and spaces of the contemporary, who are like vessels carrying the poisoned
energies of the past. They have to somehow recuperate.
Ghosts will not lie still. They need to be acknowledged and incorpo-
rated into a story that moves forward, as does this one. When the seem-
ingly pregnant Beloved stands on the doorstep, her emaciated, drained
mother Sethe by her, the community of women who initially ostracised
them return to help make the family and the community whole, and their
sounds banish Beloved. In so doing they together banish the negative
energies of a self-devouring guilt and trauma. The effects of the damaging
past can be acknowledged, but it is also possible to acknowledge life and
move on, never forgetting but nonetheless not being permanently, repeat-
edly destroyed by its negative energies. Both the body of the mother and
the house are invaded in this woman’s ghost story, which domesticates
and internalises the national and international horror and shame of slavery,
through the individual domestic family and body. In Beloved, Sethe both
recognises her own trials and responses, and shows how difficult it is to
live on with the traumatic history haunting you, how it gnaws at your
insides with confusion and sometimes with guilt.
In Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘The Unburied’ (1913), the sexism and
racism of Dr Stanchon are critiqued through making the reader hear his
views, see his perspective, and find it blinkered and ridiculous. The women
servants in his house are steeped in Southern knowledge of the everyday
supernatural and their dealing with the ghostly exposes his blinkered bad
behaviour. 1913 is early for such an insightful anti-racist ghost story.
Morrison in many ways builds on the tactic of placing the reader inside the
mind of someone so steeped in their bigotry that their worldview is
revealed in its toxic illogic, when she places us straight into the mind of
Schoolteacher and the slavecatcher come to wrench Sethe and her family
into re-enslavement, speaking only of them as owned objects, worthless
if dead.
Ghosts are essential when seeking to expose widespread and local,
undead evil and the pain and destruction it leads to of which the ghost is
the embodiment, an articulate reminder.
Both The Woman in Black and Beloved can be read with Kristeva’s and
Lorde’s arguments in mind. The ghost story is a vital channel for critique
of gendered and racial oppressions, Otherising, grown from ingrained
socially and culturally constructed terror and disgust at difference and at
those who exist, and behave outside the artificially constructed boundaries
which protect the prioritised, predominantly white, male, wealthy, the
owners of those historical grand houses and relatively unchallenged niche
views of what and who is of value, what and who is waste, abject, Other.
In this exclusive economy, just like ghosts, anyone considered an outsider
can be treated as without human rights, their perspectives unvalued, sto-
ries unheard, their bodies shut up and shut out, worthless. With The
Woman in Black this plays out as casting out the unmarried mother, the
economically vulnerable, who then becomes a woman psychologically
damaged by terrible grief, hovering on the outside of lives, houses and
graveyards until, stepping straight into the lives of not just the direct per-
petrators of crimes against them but both individuals and wider society,
wherever she can reach, she causes damage. Hers is a social retribution
which damns social, cultural legalised rejection, and abjection. It is like a
famine, a plague, it sweeps through everyone she targets not just those to
blame because society is to blame. In Beloved, the evils of slavery and rac-
ism are global as well as local, and in an extraordinary fashion grief, anger
and loss dominate. The dehumanisation of slavery invades homes and
blights lives and Beloved emerges to challenge her mother, the new nuclear
family, a microcosm and, by extension, the community. Her return and
entrance single out this individual house as a locus of the churning grief
and damage done, a hot spot of the sort sensitives can detect in locations
of trauma, and while the trauma is played out in the ongoing new encoun-
ters of Beloved and her family, as a microcosm this involves the whole of
96 G. WISKER
the community, the US, and, by extension, all who were implicated in
slavery and who held and acted on beliefs leading to both its normalisa-
tion, and its profitability. These hauntings are emanations and products of
psychological and cultural fallout from gendered and economic inequali-
ties and violations. But just as ghosts will not lie still, so by forcing recog-
nition and demanding reparation, they can be agents of recuperation.
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Filmography
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DVD & Blu-ray.
The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death. (2014). Directed by Tom Harper. Los
Angeles: 20th Century Fox.
PART II
Possession
CHAPTER 4
True Love as Possession: Ashputtle (Carter,

1987), Lady Oracle (Atwood, 1976), The
Greatcoat (Dunmore, 2012), The Glass Bottle
Trick (Hopkinson, 2000)
Possession lies at the heart of the ghost’s role in an economy of romance

and domesticity which values, seduces, deludes, constrains, and sometimes
destroys women. Women become possessed by compelling but ultimately
destructive narratives which in the end leave them as only possessions, or
utterly dispossessed victims. Women are haunted by, written through by
their predecessors and by the controlling narratives of romance, true love,
performance, beauty, maternity, domesticity. In the texts considered here,
versions of these narratives are perpetuated by friends and family mem-
bers, such as great aunts who ghost-write through their female relatives,
mothers, some of whom are themselves ghosts, and by popular media,
romance novels, by film. These collude with and perpetuate oppressive
ideals, roles, body and life shapes for women. Body dysmorphia, mental
health issues and often economic or racialised Othering lurk behind and
operate throughout these tales, expressed in disgust at difference, which is
enacted and embodied in destructive constructions of ugliness, weight,
deformity, racialised and economic difference, and forms of madness.
Ironically, while on the one hand myths and stories abound, haunt and
take over the imagination, driving choice and action, the disembodied
ghost itself, mother or lover, might take possession of the woman’s mind
and decision-making processes and sometimes her body, driving a repeated

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_4
102 G. WISKER
return, a re-enactment of relationships based on illusion, delusion and

destructive power.
Many contemporary women’s ghost stories expose these controlling
myths of romance which offer eternal love, protection, and instead lead to
constraint, exclusion, incarceration, silence. They replay and rewrite the
romances which haunt and direct the ways in which women see them-
selves, write about and imagine their futures. In tackling the dangerous
fantasies of romantic love as escape and romance, and domestic bliss as
reward for ideal beauty and conformity, contemporary women’s ghost sto-
ries expose both their corollary, the underpinning danger of any form of
difference or resistance, and their real results, a deadly controlling trap.
We start here with the two controlling fairy tales which dominate wom-
en’s imaginations, the narratives by which they might perceive and attempt
to structure their lives. ‘Cinderella’ (Perrault, 1697a; Grimm, 1812a) is
the first half of what seems to me to be much the same tale, of which the
darker version, the next step or the flip side, is the story of ‘Bluebeard’
(Perrault, 1697b; Grimm, 1812b). Cinderella goes to the ball and after
help from a fairy godmother, some luck and her tiny feet, she wins the
handsome prince. This story suggests that although her loveliness and
worth might be initially hidden from sight, every girl can be rescued from
economic insecurity with the aid of a fairy godmother, and be rightfully
installed into the arms and the castle of a Prince Charming, to live ‘happily
ever after’. ‘Bluebeard’ is the second half, the flip side of the story, and
initially invests in the same opening, the same financially secure promise.
As it develops, however, the girl’s small inquisitive rebellions and asser-
tions of individuality through disobedience (taking a look in the forbidden
chamber, using the forbidden key to open the lock to the bloody chamber
where dead previous wives are stored) lead to punishment and death, or to
rescue by other strong men. The two tales are themselves the ghost moth-
ers of narratives of romance, domestic security and its underpinning dan-
gers. They haunt, underpin and problematise embedded narratives, the
origins of which are confused, since so many versions exist. Angela Carter
exposes the ways in which such narratives, like ghost mothers, become
dominating, having designs on us. Michelle Ryan-Sauteur, commenting
on the focus on the two mothers in the tale, says of ‘Ashputtle’, that while
there is ‘a preoccupation with anonymity in relation to the fairy-tale tradi-
tion’ (2011, p. 33), Carter weaves together ‘the genealogy of the
Cinderella tale with questions of motherhood and generating allegory
about culture and authorship’ (2011, p. 33). Carter and Hopkinson
4 TRUE LOVE AS POSSESSION: ASHPUTTLE (CARTER, 1987), LADY… 103
expose and ironise the social, cultural impetus of the tales. While Beatrice’s
mother is a little sceptical about wealthy, staid (serial killer) Samuel in
Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000), the motherly hope that her
wilful daughter might settle down comfortably drives her support.
Mothers, sold on the Cinderella version, push the narrative of economic
escape through beauty, conformity and obedience, sometimes from
the grave.
In Angela Carter’s ‘Ashputtle’ (1987), the economic success and
romance narrative possesses everyone, living and dead. ‘Ashputtle’ is the
Cinderella story told in three different forms, each informed by this triple
notion of possession. Woman is an object to be window-dressed for pur-
chase and owned. A haunting romance narrative dominates and drives the
actions, and there is a ghost. In each version, the strong ghost mother
looks out for her vulnerable daughter from the grave, fiercely ensuring she
gets the opportunities to be discovered and rescued into marriage by the
prince. The second wife, whose less than beautiful daughters also need
marrying off, has no idea she is in competition with a ghost for this prize.
Most critics praise the fierce ghost mother’s dedication to her daughter
and her future (Ryan-Sauteur, 2011); however, as the three stories grow
darker, we find the ghost mother can be read as utterly colluding with the
oppressive economic and social values and the belief that the only way
forward for a woman is through investment in a romantic myth. Both
mothers are out to push their daughters into this, the stepmother even
mutilating their feet to do so. Fathers and princes meanwhile are useless
cyphers, blind to the cruelty. Ashputtle’s ghost mother might help rescue
her daughter from ignominy and the ashes, but she can offer no critique
of the society which perpetuates and peddles the cruelties, inequalities and
fantasies.
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) also brings the ghost mother in
to remind of the ways women ‘should’ behave, ‘should’ look, emphasising
women’s behaviour as controlled performance, and undermining the
romance fiction writer protagonist, Joan Foster’s, sense of corporeality—
her body, weight, and identity. A Gothic romantic fiction writer, Joan lives
her own life like a botched romantic fiction, and at one point masterminds
a performance of drowning in Lake Ontario, which allows her to shed her
former self and construct a new identity, in another country (Italy). Joan
is a Canadian Rapunzel, a favourite tale of romance as escape, often
replayed (and undermined) by Atwood. She feels herself limited, as if
trapped in a high tower awaiting a lover to release her. Lady Oracle is
104 G. WISKER
dominated by a ghost of conformity and constraint which Joan must face

and shake off to really establish a version of herself with which she is
comfortable.
Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat (2012) places the ghost lover centre
stage, possessive, compelling and ultimately entrapping and deadly. She
takes the moment after the Second World War with women’s return to the
domestic sphere and focuses on a trapped, bored housewife, Isabel, who is
open to receive the haunting of a returned dead airman, once lover of her
landlady, for whom she is an unwitting surrogate. This is a tale of a demon
lover couched in romantic terms, with time skips and tragedies, where
Isabel is finally caught in the terrible recurring return of his plane, a
bomber which crashed in the war, trying to protect her own child, who is
also that of the demon ghost lover, the airman, Alec.
Marriage, body issues and social conformity are a concern in Nalo
Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000), which merges the interna-
tional romantic entrapment tale of Bluebeard with Caribbean duppies,
and a critique of internalised racial self-denigration. Wealthy, conventional
Samuel murders a series of wives as each becomes pregnant, because he
cannot stand the thought of his own black children. The ghostly former
wives are released by Beatrice, the victim next in line for punishment by
murder because of her inquisitiveness, and her potential for pregnancy.
The female ghosts revive and together aim to attack this contemporary
Bluebeard, although their sisterhood with the new wife is unlikely.
Romantic narrative drives both the established novels and the cultural
myths which haunt and control the lives of the women in ‘Ashputtle’,
Lady Oracle, ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ and The Greatcoat. In each, the
women must deal with the controlling, conforming ghosts of their moth-
ers, of former wives, or a lover (initially someone else’s), attempting to
shake off oppressive, repetitive ghostly returns, of being a possession and
of being possessed, driven, even destroyed by the dangerous deceit of
these culturally embedded, romantic narrative straitjackets which haunt
their every move, and of the ghosts who enforce and perpetuate them.
‘Ashputtle’, Angela Carter (1987)

There can be no other story for a poor woman, it seems, than to find a
husband. Thus, the Cinderella tale of coming from nothing to win a prince
is a transformational tale, offering a fantasy of love and economic security.
In Carter’s hands, however, it’s actually a more overly calculated affair.
Carter’s posthumously published story, ‘Ashputtle or The Mother’s

Ghost: Three Versions of One Story’ (1987), depicts a war of two moth-
ers, one a second wife, one a ghost first wife, each trying to get their
daughters married off to the Prince. Each will stop at nothing. While the
ghost mother in ‘Ashputtle’ is variously represented as fiercely defending
her daughter and caring for her, this is accompanied by a hardnosed invest-
ment in marriage as the only way forward for a girl left in the ashes follow-
ing her mother’s early death and her father’s rapid re-marriage and casual
neglect. Carter points out the father is terribly irresponsible and we too
wonder why he can’t see that his daughter is eating leftovers, sitting in the
ashes and being bullied by the new wife and daughters. Or perhaps he can.
But his irresponsible blindness says much about romantic love and mar-
riage in itself. The stepmother is fully determined to reject Ashputtle,
ignore her, leave her without rights or hope. Although they have different
daughters in mind, both mothers invest in the romantic, economic stabil-
ity narrative, the ghost mother vying with the living mother to seek the
same result; marriage to the Prince, happily ever after. This is a tale in three
versions: ‘The Mutilated Girls’ is ‘a drama between two female families in
opposition to one another because of their rivalry over men (husband,
father, husband son)’. The men seem no more than passive victims of their
fancy, yet their significance is absolute because it is ‘“a rich man”, “a King’s
son”’, an economic bargain. All three girls are animated solely by the wills
of their mothers. Even if Ashputtle’s mother dies at the beginning of the
story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position more authori-
tative, controlling. On her death bed the mother assures her daughter that
‘“I shall always look after you and always be with you”’ (p. 391) and she
is, of course. The stepmother sleeps in the bed. The controlling ghost
mother reappears as a turtledove, and Cinders, Ashputtle, realises that
even though her mother is dead, now that she has reappeared ‘hencefor-
ward she must do her mother’s bidding’ (p. 393). With the ghost mother
in control, rather alarmingly, the coach to take Ashputtle to the ball devel-
ops from a coffin, significantly representing a commitment to a constrained
new life. So Ashputtle dances at the bride-selection fair, is seen by the
Prince and loses her dainty shoe. Nothing is pleasant about this economic-
driven marriage plotting. As the search is on to find the owner, each
mother is determined her daughter will fit that lost shoe, and win the
Prince’s hand. The stepmother is so determined to marry her daughters
off that she mutilates them, cutting off the big toe of one of them, the heel
of another to cram into the little slipper. When the Prince sees the mess of
106 G. WISKER
blood, and the deformity caused by the mother, he rejects both sisters,
thus leaving Ashputtle with the prize. She wins but her foot is also so small
that it’s deformed, and against her wishes, with some disgust, she has to
collude and commit the abject act of forcing it into the squelchy, bloodied
slipper in order to win the Prince:
so now Ashputtle must put her foot into the hideous receptacle, this open
wound, still slick and warm as it is, for nothing in any of the many texts of
this tale suggests the Prince washed the shoe out between the fittings. It was
an ordeal in itself to put a naked foot into the bloody shoe, but her mother,
the turtledove, urged her to do so in a soft, cooing croon that could not
be denied.
If she does not plunge without revulsion into this open wound she won’t
be fit to marry. (p. 394)
She is ‘Almost an amputee already’ (p. 394) and both the bloody wound
and the act reminds of sexual violation at the core of Carter’s own
Bluebeard tale, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979). This is not a caring
mother—this is a collusive mother, forcing her daughter to do something
utterly abject and disgusting in order to fit in with the marriage plan, her
future as a possession.
In ‘The Burned Child’, another of the three versions, the mother’s
ghost constantly urges the girl to ‘Drink milk, grow fat’ (p. 395). She’s
fattening her up, like a sacrificial animal, and in order to maintain power
callously sacrifices other animals by possessing them bodily. She enters a
cow, a cat and a bird, all of whom suffer in their support of this fattening
up, dressing up, dolling up of Ashputtle for the marriage. And when the
man takes the girl away, gives her a house and money, the ghost mother
can rest, her job done: ‘“Now I can go to sleep” …“Now everything is
alright”’ (p. 396). But of course it isn’t, because she has sacrificed crea-
tures en route to sacrificing her own daughter.
In this economy of possession and sacrifice, the third story, ‘Travelling
Ghosts’, starts with violence, the stepmother burning the orphaned
Ashputtle’s face with a red-hot poker. The girl cries on her mother’s grave
and her mother returns at night, gives her a blood red dress, takes the
worms from her own eye sockets and turns them into jewels:
They went together to the grave, ‘Step into my coffin.’ ‘No,’ said the girl.
She shuddered. ‘I stepped into my mother’s coffin when I was your age.’
The girl stepped into the coffin although she thought it would be the death
of her. It turned into a coach and horses. The horses stamped, eager to be
gone. ‘Go and seek your fortune, darling’. (p. 396)
The mother marries her off so she can survive in an economy with no
value, rights or future for pretty, impoverished girls, except violation and
possession.
These three versions of Cinderella have the ghost mother from the
grave ensuring the daughter marries richness but loses her freedom, fits
into a bloody shoe, into a coffin, into a role. Ashputtle, first possessed by
her mother, herself possessed, driven by this economic narrative masquer-
ading as one of romance, is assumed to live happily ever after as a posses-
sion of the Prince.
Lady Oracle (1976), Margaret Atwood

Perhaps all writers are haunted by their predecessors, whose traces and
influences offer images and modes of expression to react against, accept,
reject or modify. Perhaps all women are haunted by their mothers and
grandmothers, by aunts and great aunts and by previous generations of
women, from the compliant to the articulate and critical. By extension,
every woman is haunted by her mother if she knew her, alive or dead, pres-
ent or absent, but there as a commentator, touchstone, guide, critic, a
producer of sorts, with an eye on what the younger woman should and
could become—maybe more, or less, than a ghost at heart. In Margaret
Atwood’s Lady Oracle, the protagonist, writer Joan Foster, first introduces
herself as a failed ghost, since she has tried to escape her reputation as an
author, and her marriage, by changing her identity and faking her own
drowning in Lake Ontario. Artists and writers are haunted by those who
came before them and whose work has influenced them, and Lady Oracle,
by focusing on Joan, engages with the fictionalising processes of the artist
as writer. Judith McCombs describes Joan as a composite of Atwood’s
previous artist characters: ‘for this artist, this lady oracle, born one Joan
Delacourt, is everything mystic, Gothic, divided, multiple, Canadian,
female, victim, visual, satiric, visionary—everything to exceptional excess’
(McCombs, 1988, p. 76). A romantic fantasist drawn to the reward first
of rescue from her own independent self, and then into dependent mar-
riage, Joan is a ‘creative Trickster ducking in and out of Canadian and
female victimhoods’ (McCombs, 1988, p. 69), and the novel is haunted
108 G. WISKER
by Atwood’s earlier Surfacing (1972a) and Survival (1972b), foreground-

ing issues of gender and sexuality, woman and artist as mystic or ‘sell-out
and manipulator’ (McCombs, p. 68). Atwood replays and critiques the
Gothic romance in her own and Joan’s novels, using Gothic feminist strat-
egies to explore, expose and debunk the hold that cultural norms have on
women’s constructions and representations of self. Brooks Bouson focuses
on feminist aspects of Lady Oracle, comprising a ‘critique of the romance
plot’ (1993, p. 63) with a ‘potentially damaging effect on women’ (p. 85),
through comedy and dialogic narrative:
one of the primary tasks in Lady Oracle is to construct a feminist reading

position by exposing and resisting the romantic ideology that attempts to fix
women in a rigid, culturally established order and literary structure. (Brooks
Bouson, 1993, pp. 63–64)
Joan has imaginary or real relationships. She meets ‘the Daffodil man’ in
a cinema lobby. He offered flowers, then exposed himself, but his poten-
tial as partner haunts her imagination. Next is a writer and Polish count,
then Arthur and ‘the Royal Porcupine’ Chuck, an installation artist. For
each, she transforms herself to be the woman they seek, then gradually and
secretly asserts herself against them, as no possession, rather a writer and
an independent woman, reacting against versions of women inherited
from Gothic romances, the movies, and popular culture. The text is
haunted by Gothic romance, exposing its dangerous artifice and con-
straints. Joan both channels her aunt through her poetry and is literally
haunted by her mother, a very controlling figure, who appears to her at
significant moments, silently berating her from beyond the grave for being
a disappointment, unsuccessful, the wrong shape, somewhat ridiculous
(Davidson, A.E & Davidson, C.N., 1978; Fee, M., 1993). Like many
women, Joan was bullied in her childhood and adolescence by a mother
who wanted her to look and behave differently, be a more conventional
shape and figure, be at least a little glamorous. As a child, she watched her
mother put on her make-up, turning herself into something she felt was
social and desirable while Joan, a plump child was made to feel inadequate
and ridiculous, forced to perform, peaking when dancing as a large clumsy
mothball. Partly, her mother constructs this role for her and humiliates her
with it—as society forces women to perform, and maintain their appear-
ance. This oppression haunts her sense of self-worth, which explains the
mother’s ghostly reappearance when Joan changes her life. Such oppres-
sion is hard to escape.
Joan is visited by the ghost of her mother prior to being informed of
her death and sees her stabbed. At this point the ghostly is endured, both
frightening and everyday—she sees her mother in her living room:
she was standing very upright on the clay-coloured rug, dressed in her navy-
blue suit with the white collar… Through her back I could see the dilapi-
dated sofa; it looked as though the stuffing was coming out of her. (p. 33)
This is both comic and terrifying. Her mother is in her everyday clothes,
and a domestic setting, but bizarrely displaced, and aligned with the dete-
riorating sofa. Joan is unsure what to do with this ghostly presence and
later when seeing her mother with her face pressed against the window,
cannot engage because of the solidity of the glass between them, but her
mother’s hold on her is still very strong: ‘I loved her but the glass was
between us, I would have to go through it, I longed to console her.
Together we would go down the road into the darkness, would do what
she wanted’ (p. 33).
Atwood sees Joan’s romantic hopes as a Rapunzel obsession, rewriting
the Grimm fairy tale exposing how women internalise versions of their
gendered appearance and performance. But for Joan this oppression, this
enforced performativity, is directly linked to pain, artifice and a threat of
death. During a next major dance, her cut and bleeding feet recall ‘The
Red Shoes’ (Andersen, 1845) and Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red
Barn (Rosmer, 1936):
Shit. I’d danced right through the broken glass, in my bare feet too. Some
butterfly. I limped into the main room, trailing bloody footprints and look-
ing for a towel. I washed my feet in the bathtub; the soles looked as if they’d
been minced. The real red shoes, the feet punished for dancing. You could
dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to
dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced they’d cut
your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance. Finally you overcame your
fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too,
because you wanted to dance. (LO, p. 368)
In another moment she imagines herself as a wife in a Bluebeard tale, in

which she would not survive:
110 G. WISKER
In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbid-
den door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one
who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of water-
tight lies. (LO, p. 170)
Atwood’s women, like Carter’s and Hopkinson’s, know their folk and
fairytales and (eventually) deliberately face down the painful contradic-
tions of collusion with patriarchally informed stories about romantic love
and domestic bliss. Ghost mothers, however, seem to be blind to the
problems, determined to marry off their girls whatever the physical and
emotional cost. They possess their daughters, and support their becoming
possessions of ‘suitable’ husbands.
Margaret Atwood has several significant ghost figures, their use linked
to the Canadian context which Devendra Varma relates as isolation, cold,
the pioneering spirit Varma suggests the supernatural, haunting in
Canadian women’s writing might ‘emanate from the darkness and cold’,
and that ‘Canadian literature, therefore, is kindred to the spirit of magic
and the supernatural, a fertile ground for the exploration of the unknown
and beyond’ (Varma, 1986, p. 31). Judith McCombs notes: ‘Canadian
literature shows women as icy, stony Rapunzels who are their own tower’
(McCombs, 1988, p. 28) and Shuli Barzilai (2000) expands on Atwood’s
consistent use of the Rapunzel tale as a way of expressing how women
constrain themselves in their own towers and the knots of their own long
hair when internalising traditionally passive, romantic versions of women’s
roles. Molly Hite sees powerful, spiritual, supernatural elements in
Atwood’s work (Hite, 1992), where her use of the supernatural reverses
its operation in traditional Gothic novels, because ghostly events in Lady
Oracle have mundane explanations.
Spiritualist Leda Sprott told Joan she was a receiver—after which she
seemed to receive the Lady Oracle tale from her mother’s three-sided mir-
ror. Haunted by her ghostly mother, by the writing and expectations of
others, she channels the words of the dead through her spiritualist-
influenced work, which McCombs calls ‘a high-brow upside-down spirit-
dictated mythic Gothic McKuen-Gibran book of prose poetry’, concerning
‘a Jungian Shalott-Lady Goddess and her mysterious threatening lover’
(McCombs, 1988, p. 7). This relates to her romances of women entrapped
in Shalott-Rapunzel tales, waiting to be rescued by the right man.
Although Joan gains fame through her spiritualist-informed poetry which
questions the sources of great writing in everyday reality, she argues
spiritualism and the afterlife must be flawed as everyone is so keen to con-

tact the living.
Joan’s greatest guise, though, is as a writer, with the creative spinning
of alternatives in spontaneous, automatic poetry and her historic, Gothic
costume romance, bodice rippers set in grand homes, with lawns and
hedged labyrinthine gardens, familiar from Pride and Prejudice (1813),
Northanger Abbey (1817) and Jane Eyre (1847a), each of which end with
happy marriages. Her life is ghosted by her novels, and they by the moth-
ers of the Gothic novel, as women readers and writers might be (see
Gilbert & Gubar, 1979), each exposing social expectation on young
women, expressed in Gothic romances. Haunted by her mistakes, Joan
attempts to change her life, but always centres this round new relation-
ships: ‘I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me, it waited for
sleep, then cornered me’ (p. 216).
For someone so humiliated into conformity as Joan, it is not surprising
that she adopted other guises, changing her name to that of her poetry-
writing aunt (Louisa Delacourt), faking her own drowning in Lake
Ontario, going into hiding in Terremoto, Italy, with dyed hair. Her much
over-reported ‘death’ by drowning is a performance, and escaping to Italy
she brings her history with her clothing, in the cellar, realising whatever
her past selves were, they won’t lie down. ‘Below me, in the foundations
of the house, I could hear the clothes I’d buried there growing themselves
a body’ (p. 321). Her life is a series of attempts at romance with, then
escape from performative lovers and husbands. This entrapment in a his-
torically constraining narrative is a product of internalisation of various
visions of women’s roles and versions of self, peddled by society, families
and fictions, both the Rapunzel obsession and a variant, Tennyson’s ‘Lady
of Shallot’ (1842). Atwood exposes those self-fashioned chains which
restrain development beyond romantic, then domestic roles, ultimately
constraining life stories. However, mixing the fantastic, realistic, horror
and comedy engages social criticism while offering alternative modes of
behaving and being (Weese, 2008). Joan Foster, among other Atwood
women characters, exemplifies the difficulties of first working within these
constraining narratives, then imagining and behaving beyond them, break-
ing away from the ghosts of a culturally constrained past, and of forms of
woman presented in myth, fairy tale, folktale, family history and fiction,
moving also beyond the ghosts of one’s many mothers.
112 G. WISKER
The Greatcoat, Helen Dunmore (2012)

Ghosts remind us of the haunting of places (Debord, 1955). They are a
form of conscience and of memory laced into the surroundings, the ruins
and the new builds, which reflect back at us the need to remember and
recognise, compensate and make reparations for terrible past events and
secrets. The grand buildings of England’s industrial North, the plantation
homes of the Southern states of America, Jamaican Great houses and the
Savannah in Trinidad, once a sugar plantation, where the Oval is situated,
each holds embedded secret histories of brutality, suffering, forced labour,
slavery, theft and death. Inequalities and injustices are called out by our
contemporary ghosts, who will not let us complacently rest and admire
towering buildings and wealthy, successful streets. Helen Dunmore’s his-
torical ghosts tell of moments of change imprinted on those who died
during those moments or who, equally restless, survived them. Their
descendants come to realise the legacies they live amongst, silver services
and family jewels perhaps but something darker, recurring traces of suffer-
ing and injustice.
A popular influential fictional theme is of energetic or lost ghostly lov-
ers returning to rerun relationships or, if wronged, murdered, walled or
locked up, to wreak revenge on unfaithful partners, and unrelated others
who happen to wander into their sphere of spirit influence, seeking
romance and security. These ghosts emphasise and embody loss and deceit
in the lies and controlling behaviours of bad relationships, and underpin-
ning grand, cultural narratives.
Writing of the haunting reminders and replays of historical fictions,
Sarah Moss (2012) places Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat in good com-
pany: ‘There is a sense in which all period or historical fiction is telling
ghost stories, populating the reader’s present with voices from beyond the
grave, calling up characters into a time that isn’t theirs.’ But she sees little
threat in the charming revenant at its core. In The Greatcoat the recurrent
traumatic memories of war, which devastates lives, scarring homes, land-
scapes, bodies and futures, return in the figure of Alec, handsome RAF
officer and pilot deliberately called up by the loneliness of the Yorkshire
landlady, once his lover, through the material object of his greatcoat, lent
to the lodger, Isabel, to keep out the cold at night. Isabel, newly married
and isolated in a village house where she has no occupation and no friends,
is vulnerable, an inadvertent channel for his return. In Helen Dunmore’s
The Greatcoat, Isabel is an example of a post-war woman suddenly returned
to a limited domestic role, her plans of teaching scotched by her doctor

husband Philip, based on his pride that he can maintain his wife, and not
have her wandering about working for others, as if in some form of ser-
vice. So Isabel is condemned to the post-war pointlessness of being a
housewife when she had previously felt some sense of identity in her work
outside the home. Unfortunately for a non-Northern wife in a Yorkshire
village, this would be immensely isolating, and disorientating. Isabel meets
only close-knit female hierarchies, coldness and distance in village shops
whose social rules are unknown to her. This village is one of several in flat-
ter Eastern Britain (Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire,
Yorkshire), which once hosted busy wartime airfields, and in which the
lives and homes, the geographies of the area, are haunted by the excite-
ment, aggression and the now dead but still disruptive energy of the war.
Here, local people get on with their lives in the days of rationing; as with
all wars, however, even where the land has escaped invasion, everywhere
there are traces of ravaged lives and lost hopes. The losses and unspent,
unsettled energies of the war are drawn together, embodied in the hand-
some invasive revenant Alec, and the bustling reanimated ghostly RAF
camp and airfield from which he rides back to his historical lover, on his
wartime motorbike, called up by the greatcoat. The lack at the heart of
Isabel’s life is a yawning space into which such a wandering ghost, a demon
lover, can enter.
Domesticity and romance are the twin inescapable, entrapping narra-
tives for women post-war with the return to the home. In The Captive
Wife (1966), Hannah Gavron reveals the domestic incarceration of women
in marriage and the house of love and domestic bliss. Following the femi-
nist adage, ‘you start out sinking into his arms and end up with your arms
in his sink’, Gavron and other second-wave feminists exposed both roman-
tic love and domesticity as narratives and locations of imprisonment for
women, particularly in the UK and US post-Second World War, when
women were returned to the home to enable surviving troops to re-enter
the job market. Advertisements of the period show women no longer
needed for war work, re-domesticated, celebrating household appliances
(fridges, washing machines), with men doing the paid jobs so the norms
of gendered roles and relationships are reinforced. Domestic appliances
offered freedom from some of the most tiring chores and the constant
attention demanded by a house, like a greedy lover. Middle-class women,
in particular, were sucked into the notion that they could be women of
leisure, while their (somewhat compulsory) husbands earned. Such social
114 G. WISKER
practices were underpinned by the notion of the family wage, by inequali-

ties in pay between the genders (equal pay apparently arrived in the 1970s).
Isabel is bored with domestic bliss and entering the village shops she’s an
outsider without any understanding of local norms, behaviours, values.
She might be in another country. The headscarved matriarchs of the vil-
lage ensure she’s at the back of the queue and gets the worst meat, with
that divisive xenophobia of small villages and isolated towns, explicit here
at the end of rationing.
In The Greatcoat, the disruption of the Second World War is embedded
in the house in which the landlady’s relentless pacing overhead serves to
call back Alec, the dead airman, a ghost from the Second World War. The
local airbase sent Lancaster bombers to Germany, retaliating for the bomb-
ing of London and the Home Counties. The seemingly permanent, inten-
tionally temporary airfield remains, weeds growing through concrete
cracks. Dunmore grew up aware of such British and American bases in
Suffolk and Norfolk, and here turns to the East Riding, to an airfield and
small town, telling a tale which would have been erased from anything but
gossip, and which is terrifyingly linked to the area. The imprint of the
wreckage of lives and the liminal spaces in which people lived, died and
conducted alternative relationships and identities is that of wartime but
Isabel, too, is in a kind of liminal space, uprooted, bored, incarcerated, a
captive wife, her days, her imagination and ultimately also her body, open
to alternative possibilities.
Isabel’s life shrinks to the rented flat with the landlady pacing up and
down above, as if waiting for something impatiently. Her husband has a
social role, she doesn’t; she is absolutely an open door, an open space wait-
ing for something to happen. What Isabel and the reader do not know is
that the landlady is both a war widow and a woman who lost her lover in
the war; both men and her child killed in the one incident. Alec’s Lancaster
bomber, returning from a bombing raid (probably its last mission for a
while), flew lower and lower, falling, until it crashed into the farmhouse,
where the landlady’s husband and child awaited her return. She, mean-
while, was awaiting her lover’s return to the village. On Isabel’s arrival, the
landlady gave her an airman’s greatcoat to cover the freezing bed, thus
passing on to her an object which is possessed, a special link with the
ghostly Alec, who she hoped to lure back into her life. Isabel is a wide
open space, a bored housewife with no direction, trapped in her gender
and the rules and stories of the age.
Alone one night she hears tapping on the window in the sitting room.
It is not a tree, it is an airman, in the dark, who clearly knows her, though
he’s a stranger, yet somehow familiar and safe to her. On his second tap at
the window, she lets him in. Ghosts also have to be invited over the thresh-
old in this novel, and although Alec the airman is clearly in a liminal
space—hovering just above the ground outside the window, he is also in a
liminal space hovering between death and re-life as a ghost, called up and
back from the dreadful final nights of his flying career by the landlady’s
pacing, by the greatcoat, and by the vacancy at the core of Isabel’s life.
She could still hear the tapping sound that had woken her. It must be her
dream still turning, like a record after the needle had been lifted off. Tap,
tap, tap. Soft, insistent, determined. It was a real sound. It was coming from
the living room. It sounded like someone tapping on glass… on a window…
Isabel snatched the greatcoat and pulled it around her. Thank heavens he
was back. She’d make some tea and he’d tell her about his case and every-
thing would be fine. She ran over the cold lino, into the living room and
across to the window, without switching on the light. She drew back the
curtain. (2012, pp. 55–56)
Isabel believes it is Philip, returning, but the greatcoat she covers herself
with overcomes her, substituting her natural caution with the lure of
familiarity, transferring her into a liminal space/time which Alec can enter.
A strange man outside the window is certainly a defamiliarising moment,
unexpected, and could be terrifying, but Isabel, without explaining this to
herself, comforts herself with something else safe and familiar—rank. He
is identified as an officer and so probably honourable. The bizarre is turned
into reassuring, everyday reality underpinned by recognised values. The
ghostly visitation of a dead airman is normalised for both Isabel and
the reader.
There was a man outside the window, she saw the pallor of his face first, as
it seemed to bob against the glass, too high up to belong to a man who had
his feet on the ground. The street lamp hit him from the side, throwing the
sharp shadow of his cap over his face. He was too close, inside the railings
that separated the house from the pavement. Of course, the level of the
ground there was higher than the level of the floor inside. That was why he
seemed to float in midair. An RAF greatcoat, exactly like the one on her bed:
she couldn’t mistake it. An officer. There, he was an everyday figure, safe as
houses, but her heart clenched in fear. It was the look on his face: recognition,
116 G. WISKER
a familiarity so deep he didn’t have to say a word. But she had never seen
him before in her life.
He gave her the thumbs up as if to say, ‘Good show. I wasn’t sure if you’d
heard me tapping.’ (2012, p. 56)
Alec’s first arrival is recognised but rejected by Isabel. Dunmore shows us

in Isabel’s response how we treat the uncanny and reorient it into a famil-
iar logical pattern of the everyday, as we also reorient, retell, refocus the
horrors of the past and its troublesome entry into the present by turning
it into stories, making it familiar, safe. Places and presences both call up
that pattern of behaviour and show the bizarre gap between what is being
described and experienced. On a third visit, she lets him in. A dead airman
is coming in through the door—crossing a span of time—acting familiar
when he is a stranger. Our often-unseeing eyes and minds focused on
refusal and ignorance of the horrors of the past are forced by the presence
of ghosts to engage with the ever-presentness of that past in the everyday.
He clearly knows her, and skips easily into the chat of an ongoing relation-
ship, but so does she, bewitched perhaps, possessed, open to suggestion.
The moment is out of time but boundaried by two times, the fatal night
of Alec’s death and this night of his return, one of many.
Alec’s call to Issy, Isabel, the 1950s housewife, could be to Lizzie, the
landlady. At one point we are alerted to the slippage when she realises
Alec, unlike her husband Philip, calls her ‘darling’, but when he does use
her name is it Lizzie, the landlady, who called him up and back, not Isabel,
the young woman substituting for the lover of years ago? The role of lover
is not her own as yet, but it soon will be. Just before she sees Alec the
second time, Isabel, looking up at her bedroom ceiling, sees through time
and space and dreams the Lancaster bombers flying overhead, coming
back from a raid. This is a slippage into the wartime period; the trauma of
the region. The ghostly plane with its ghost pilot is close and real:
Isabel dreamed of the Lancasters. They came over so low and heavy that it
seemed they must lose their grip on the air and plunge down, loaded with
bombs, onto the sleeping village. She lay tense, willing them higher. The
roof above her was transparent and she stared straight up at the belly of the
aircraft that was passing over, and then she could see through metal, too,
and there were the men, the pilot like a coal heaver at the controls, the flight
engineer alongside him helping to push the throttles forward to get the
laden beast into the night sky. Through the thunder of engines she heard
him knocking. This time she knew at once who it was. (p. 73)
The narrative takes these two into a fatal trajectory. The gap of time opens,
the landlady’s pacing and the loan of the wartime greatcoat calls upon the
young airman on the exact liminal moment between the penultimate and
the ultimate flying mission. He is forced to replay the deadly mission, and
when Isabel’s life is entwined with his in the strange zone between two
times, she is also forced to relive the moments. The whole area recovering
from war carries the gossip, the imprinted memories and the loss. Isabel’s
life, opened to Alec’s, then bears them onwards—in the shape of their child.
In the lives of those who survive there is always the trace of those who
died, those were erased. Dunmore emphasises this with the immediate
post-war sense of stasis, recovery, and lingering haunting presences. In
one bizarre moment of confrontation, Alec and Isabel are in the hall and
the landlady comes out onto the landing. In contrast to young, attractive
Isabel, her face reveals her age, waiting out her days in decay, loss and
stasis, waiting for the moment when she could reunite with Alec. Here she
realises, however, that she is not the young woman he returns to see. Her
life has been wasted, one of continued guilt at the death and loss of hus-
band and baby.
These gaps, leaps and connections and our human ways of invoking
realistic, explicable details in a satisfactory, satisfying narrative are demon-
strated by Isabel’s responses to Alec. She wants to be bewitched, pos-
sessed. The language familiarises, draws the reader in, but points to the
jolting gap between what is really happening, not a love story instead a
spirit entering a space, linking the past and present in the bodies of two
people and the place they inhabit, and what we try and normalise and
rationalise. It enacts what the Gothic does so well: the realistic historical
detail with the supernatural.
Alec and Isabel ride off into the countryside on the back of his motor-
bike. The realist reader wonders what would happen if someone saw them
in either her time zone or his. The Gothic reader enjoys the parallel times
and worlds which unite these events, the ways in which in one time zone
Alec worried that he will never be able to sneak her into the camp past the
guards, yet Isabel sees decaying weeds, rust, doors off their hinges, evi-
dence of destruction, remnants of the furious activity of the airfield in
wartime, all gone, blowing and crying in the wind. The two visions,
decayed and broken, lively and flourishing, merge together, the ghostly
with the real, making this a moment of lived psychogeography, the past
playing through place into the present. Later, crossing the liminal spaces
118 G. WISKER
between them, the threshold into his context, Isabel sees both bustling
airfield and decay.
He was right; there wouldn’t be time. She saw him raise his right hand,
greeting someone she couldn’t see. The broken fence stretched out ahead of
them. At the entrance to the airfield, the guardhouse guarded nothing. She
could see everything that was invisible to him, although it was a quarter of
a mile distant: blackened weeds, split concrete, gaps where the wind
blew… (p. 126)
There is a mix of present and past, decay and vitality. Parallel time is
ever-pressing.
The floor here was also rotten, and the old carpet that had once covered it
had sunk into the pulp of the wood, so that it seemed to be woven into it.
The carpet had been red. It was dry enough inside, and smelled of earth.
There’d be spiders and beetles, but there was no reason for rats to settle
here. ‘Here we are,’ said Alec. She saw that he was smiling… Suddenly,
naked fear seemed to possess him. Isabel backed towards the door, but he
put out his hand and held her. ‘Don’t go,’ he murmured rapidly, ‘Don’t go,
Issy. It’s quite safe. I’ve got plenty of time.’ ‘But what’s the matter?’ ‘I
couldn’t see the mattress. I thought someone must have moved it.’ She
knew at once that he had seen what she saw: the carpet rotted into the rot-
ting wood, rust and decay. (p. 129)
The description shifts in and out of time zones—the ghostly lover sud-
denly seeing the contemporary decay; the mortal woman seeing nothing
else but understanding he sees a mattress, a solid door, a busy airfield. He
calls her by the landlady’s name, and eventually he uses the greatcoat as a
mattress. The figures, living and dead, of the past, ghost the present, the
liminal space bringing time zones and states of existence together because
of their love and urgency, an urgency due to Alec’s innate knowledge that
his time is limited, however he may deny it.
On this visit they also see, significantly, a crew trying to fix the problem
with the Lancaster, which was hampering Alec, and which, historically, in
the time-shifted period, so soon, just after Isabel’s time-travelling visit,
ultimately prevented him from landing safely as it sped past the runway
and plunged into the farmhouse containing the landlady’s husband and
son, while she was waiting for Alec in town.
Alec rarely seems ghostly, he’s joshing, good-looking, insistent, solid.

The novel is compelling and the new/old love affair between Isabel and
Alec sensual, romantic and idyllic, fulfilling the promise of romances in
fiction and imagination. There are moments out of time spent passionately
in each other’s company, sometimes lovers, in the bedroom, sometimes
out on Alec’s motorbike in the countryside, but Isabel resembles a
bewitched wanderer in a fairy tale as they ride through the countryside.
The people they see are either from her own time or his—and no one sees
them pass. They slip in and out of the two parallel periods which have
been opened up to offer a gateway in for the ghost into the emptiness of
Isabel’s life, and the space he left behind in the house when he died.
This, like so many ghost stories, is a tale of trauma. Wartime history
lingers on in the lives of those in the village, as it does in any space and
lives intruded on and invaded by the horrors of war (Chap. 8). Freud
emphasises the difficulty of making sense of trauma, of rationalising what
has happened to place it and so move on, however futile: ‘As we know, the
interdependence of the complicated problems of the mind force us to
break off every enquiry’ (Freud, 1918). This happens before the story can
be shaped into ‘the outcome of some other enquiry and come to its assis-
tance’ (Freud, 1918). Traumatic histories circle round and repeat; there is
little way out of them. Deborah Madsen, building on Freud and the work
of Dominick LaCapra (1994) and writing in the main about the Holocaust
as source of trauma narratives, warns of the potential that such narratives
might become scripted, normalised so that:
A historical juxtaposition of the autobiographical with the fictional leads to

‘normalising’ of traumatic experience i.e. the scripting of trauma and its
assimilation to cultural narratives of normality. (Madsen, 2011, p. 6)
In The Greatcoat, absences and loss come together in the alignment of

Alec, Isabel, the landlady’s history, and the new and old family, but there
is no movement forward for those who are living. Alec is a ghost of a long-
lost, illicit love affair which has not died in the life of the permanently
possessed landlady, and is revived in that of Isabel. He is also the ghost of
the wartime activity, energy, defiance, danger, and the ghost of the war
which hangs over the lives and the locations which it touched—some now
overgrown and known only through sepia photographs, some vivid and
permanent livid scars in the places bombed. For the people whose lives
were immediately affected, such as the landlady, into the next generation,
120 G. WISKER
the ghost of the recent past insistently demands entry and recognition, but
it also shows that to be so fixated and overwhelmed, so committed to the
romantic narrative which leads to entrapment and to the story of lost hope
and lost times of that period, is overwhelmingly inescapable, a fatal trap.
The ghost of the war and of the lover Alec drain the present. Isabel’s
child is not only Philip’s but Alec’s. The blond baby on the greatcoat like
a rug in the garden senses this after the ghost of Alec reappears, visible
through the child’s features. This generation is trapped by the ghost of the
past, the wartime scars in locations and lives. Isabel has also been entrapped
by that version of romantic love, as an obsession which dominates and
possesses her life, and the novel ends with her perpetually hearing the stall-
ing Lancaster heading towards her country home, hoping only to rescue
her family before it crashes. Alec is both a demon lover and reminder of
the scars of war. Letting him in was clearly a mistake, but trying to be rid
of him through throwing away the greatcoat, traces of the war and the
romance, is impossible. Both return insistently like bad memories and
traumas which cannot be shaken off. Like an unstoppable, recurrent
nightmare and the endless replay of traumatic memories blighting the lives
in the present, Isabel will always be awaiting the crash and always trying to
rescue her child from it. The awful moment recurs, slipping time and space:
Freezing air washed over Isabel. Before her eyes the clear summer moon-
light thickened into fog. It was winter now, and the early hours of morning,
Two o’clock, three o’clock perhaps. They had been all the way to the big
city and now they were limping home. That sound must mean that the Lanc
had engine damage. The noise swelled towards Isabel, rasping the sky, mak-
ing the ground tremble. The Lanc was behind her descending towards the
airfield, coming in to land on the runway where the flare path was lit and the
chance light waiting. But he could not get her down. Get down, you bitch,
he said as the Lanc fought him and the runway slid past… (pp. 237–238)
Isabel relives the moment of the crash and the death in the farmhouse, and
then slips tainted, back into her own present.
The grey farmhouse with the green back door exploded as the Lanc came
down. A long time later Isabel opened her eyes. The baby’s shawl had
slipped down over her arm, but it didn’t matter… The air was still, but
down on the grass the greatcoat’s heavy cloth rippled, as if a night wind
were walking under it. (p. 239)
There are many dominant narratives controlling lives here, as well as

those of loss and repeated return, the trajectory of post-traumatic stress
disorder in the land and its inhabitants. Isabel is stuck in a clash between
the two available narratives for women: domesticity and romance, each
equally deadly.
Duppies and ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, Nalo

Hopkinson (2000)
In The Greatcoat, Isabel is possessed by her demon lover, through his coat,
while in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ we return to the flip
side of the Cinderella story where tiny deformed feet are thrust into
bloody shoes to repeat the act of violation and a life trap, masquerading as
romance and domestic bliss. Here solid respectable Samuel, haunted by
his own internalised racism, is a demon lover who both woos his wives and
dismembers them.
The Bluebeard tale haunts several of Angela Carter’s short stories and
novels, including ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), in which the warrior
mother, having initially colluded in the economic escape such a marriage
seemed to promise, races to the rescue of her fully sexually aware, endan-
gered daughter. The girl survives and marries a blind piano tuner, who has
also helped in her rescue. The ghosts are those of the previous versions of
the tale which infuse our reading and refocus on the gendered inequalities
of women’s economic and social positions and their bodily safety, which
the Bluebeard tale highlights, alongside its cautionary message not to
believe that romantic love, wealth and lots of gifts means self-fulfilment
and ‘happy ever after’.
Previous (dead, ghostly) wives and lovers can serve as inadvertent warn-
ings against serial philanderers and murderers. The lure of a promise of
love and security underpinning the courtship of the many Bluebeards in
international fiction testifies to the shortcomings of cultural narratives of
romance and domestic safety, and the comfortable contexts offered by
wealthier men in societies where men earn more than women, are more
likely to have a job to support wives and children, and women not only
follow their hearts but their need for sustenance and the comfort and
paternalistic protection offered in marriage.
In Trinidadian/Jamaican/Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in
the Ring (1998), gang leader, Rudy, keeps his ghost wife as a duppy in a
122 G. WISKER
jar, not just to restrain any form of vengeance but to enslave her further
than he did in life, calling her out of the bottle to commit acts of violence,
vengeful on his behalf. Rudy keeps his abusive and dangerous power
beyond the grave (hers), and the lingering traces of such domestic brutal-
ity and gang violence are embodied in the form of the entrapped duppy.
Hopkinson replaces Bluebeard’s dead wives with duppies a form of ghost
originating first in West Africa then crossing the sea to the Caribbean and,
as Maisha Wester notes (2019, p. 293), re-enacting the transatlantic slav-
ery crossing, so reminding of ancestral-based violence and enslavement.
Kept between living and dead for three days to force them into this angry
spirit form, their position as ghosts is more liminal than European ghosts,
since they’re both alive and dead and trapped in a container, here the blue
glass bottle ominously hanging in Samuel’s tree, outside the domestic
home. Beatrice, a feisty young woman, is cautioned to give up her way-
ward ways and her gold chain wearing boyfriend to settle down and enter
the domestic security of marriage and a stable home offered by Samuel.
Although Samuel is staid and somewhat dull, Beatrice’s mother (powerful
but no ghost) is in support of the marriage, a financial rescue into some
status and respectability for her free-spirited daughter. The prospect of
having enough money and a secure marriage is a lure for Beatrice, as it is
for the many similarly penniless young women attracted by older wealthy
men of power in Bluebeard scenarios in European and international litera-
ture. As both I and Maisha Wester note in Hopkinson’s hands, as well as a
Caribbean setting this tale has a racial twist signalling ‘the ways in which
black souls are imprisoned by destructive western ideals’ (Wester, 2019,
p. 294) because uptight Samuel has ‘so internalised a negative racialised
self-image that he cannot allow one of his own black babies to enter the
world’ (Wisker, 2016, p. 146). Whenever one of his previous wives became
pregnant, he murdered them, leaving their spirits in transition, controlled,
as duppies hanging in blue glass bottles permanently on the tree outside,
while the bodies remained in air-conditioned stasis in the back bedroom.
Bored Beatrice takes the keys and follows the narrative trajectory of the
Bluebeard tale to open the door to the one forbidden room, but Samuel,
home owner, likes to possess his house and his women and prefers them
between coma and death. Part of his power is to keep his wives in this
liminal stasis. Beatrice enters the freezing room, realises the plot, breaks
the bottles and releases the ghost wives, but she is not so naïve as to expect
their thanks and forgiveness; rather she sees that they might blame her and
wreak revenge on her: ‘The duppy wives held their bellies and glared at
her, anger flaring hot behind their eyes’ (‘The Glass Bottle Trick’,
Skin Folk p. 100). Beatrice might free them from the bottles but in their
liminal duppy/ghost existence, there is no rest.
Conclusion
Possession is at the core of each of these four tales of the dangerous false
promises of romance where ghostly lovers, psychological and physical
trickery, domination and threats to life threaten to turn these young
women into near automata or ghosts themselves should they totally suc-
cumb to the implications of the dominant variants of the narrative trajec-
tories of Cinderella, the ghostly demon lover and Bluebeard.
References
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Filmography
Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn. (1936). dir. Milton Rosmer.
CHAPTER 5
The Spectral Voice: In the Red Kitchen

(Roberts, 1990), Affinity (Waters, 1999),
Beyond Black (Mantel, 2005)
In a traditional-seeming ghost story, with the walking wraith in white, the

icy spaces and the banging door, we willingly suspend our disbelief. While
we are scared and chilled, we don’t believe in the events. The ghost is a
fictional strategy in the lives of fictional characters come to warn them,
explain something they can’t yet know, or to threaten with its power to
bring them over to its side, the side of violent, lingering, eternal undeath.
However, the work of mediums and spiritualists, the practices of séances
and large-scale public performances and actual ghost-hunting TV shows
all invest in our credibility and trust because they claim to bring materiality
into play; the ghostly body appears, the ghostly voice speaks and the con-
tacts are personal.
What are ghostly contacts but reminders, often of one’s own or of
someone else’s pain and loss, stirred up accidentally by a new presence, or
called into view by a medium, a seer, a spiritualist. Engaging with spirit
encounters is something which itself crosses boundaries between the real
and the fictional, since such encounters, like ghosts themselves, hover in
the air, in our homes, in haunted places, and in our minds with various
degrees of substantiality and credibility. They are invested in, personally,
emotionally and often financially. The connection of spirit encounters with
profitability casts almost as much doubt upon their veracity as does their
connection with the unstable states of trauma or grief from which many
seek something solid; proof of continuity, or of closure.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_5
126 G. WISKER
In Spectres of Marx (1993), Derrida relates spectrality, sight, the

uncanny and Marx and his views concerning labour and economics.
Discussing Marx, Derrida identifies as a problem the difficulty of actually
making visible and seeing what is invisible, as Andrew Smith interprets,
this amounts to ‘the labour which has gone into’ (Smith, 2010. p. 17)
something more solid. Mary Poovey’s work on difficulties of actually see-
ing money after paper money replaced gold and bartering (2003), making
it ‘trustworthy’ (p. 3), emphasises the ghostly nature of finance, financial
transactions, and then, by extension, the labour which goes into the activi-
ties and objects which are ultimately the bases of such transactions. Smith
notes ‘the processes of the money market were invisible and money itself
seemed to disappear’ (p. 18). Writers struggled to make money and mon-
etary transactions more visible, both ‘morally and intellectually compre-
hensible’ (Smith, 2010, p. 18), emphasising links between money, the
economy and morality. Women’s labour, often domestic within their own
or others’ homes, or in other service work, is largely invisible. It is with
their work as spirit mediums in particular that the worlds of work, financial
transactions and ghosts come together, bringing visible signs of security
and status, based on transactions of the largely invisible, ineffable, invested
in spirit contacts, trust, and money. These interactions often also brought
gender-based abuse since historically male managers and spirit guides have
chaperoned, guided the interactions between female medium, ghost and
the paying audience, and the bodies of the women are, therefore, con-
duits, financially valuable, and manipulable. That women are the popular
conduits of ghostly encounters, as well as those who seek such confirma-
tion, interestingly links the for-profit ghostly encounter with women’s
gullibility, hysteria and their position as manipulated body and voice, ves-
sel, substantial as in the shared world, and insubstantial, only a medium
through which others engage and speak. The three novels discussed here,
In The Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990) Affinity (Waters, 1999) and Beyond
Black (Mantel, 2005), each deals with these investments and exchanges in
terms of the visible, imagined and invisible, gendered economics, and the
safety and control of women’s bodies.
Calling up ghosts is dangerous, performative, and possible evidence of
instability. As Breuer and Freud commented,
We are reminded. Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. (Breuer and

Freud, 1991, p. 58)
5 THE SPECTRAL VOICE: IN THE RED KITCHEN (ROBERTS, 1990)… 127
Hysteria is a familiar accusation directed at women, emphasising their ten-

uous hold on normality, their vulnerability located in, and emanating
from, their bodily functions. Acknowledging that women speak from
silenced and outsider positions and often through the power of other
women, through writing, for example, Cixous turns the tables linking
spiritual contact as a metaphor for women recovering and revoicing the
women of the past.
she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language.
She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which
knows neither enclosure nor death. (Cixous, 1981, p. 260)
Cixous sees ghosts existing in a position of limbo neither alive nor dead
‘erasing the limit between two states’ uncanny (Cixous, 1973, p. 542),
‘The direct figure of the Uncanny is the Ghost’ (Cixous, p. 543). They
can, as Paulina Palmer argues (2012), be seen as vehicles of the queer
uncanny, their invisibility, liminality between states reminding of ways in
which lesbians in particular, in hiding their sexuality in plain sight, can
resemble ghosts. Terry Castle asks, ‘What better way to exorcise the threat
of female homosexuality than by treating it as ghostly?’ (Castle, 1995,
p. 34) in what Palmer defines as ‘an attempt to dematerialise the lesbian,
exorcising the threat she is regarded as posing’ (Sandal, 2020), while other
theorists use the spectral image to suggest the vulnerability some lesbians
might feel in some social contexts if constructed, treated as or feeling other.
In The Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990) Affinity (Waters, 1999) and
Beyond Black (Mantel, 2005) are variously explicitly engaged with gender
politics as expressions of women’s social and economic positions, identity,
sexuality and their relationships to others living and dead, including both
personal and literary forebears.
This chapter begins briefly with everyday ghosts and ghost hunting,
then moves to recalling the earlier spiritualists, the Victorian domestic and
staged séances and connections with the departed developed in an era of
infant mortality, early deaths and worship of mourning (popularised by
Queen Victoria). The focus is mainly on more contemporary fictional
explorations of ways in which the work of mediums, spiritualists, and con-
nections with the departed expose gullibility, patriarchal and economic
control of women’s bodies, and empowerment through social and socio-
economic power. Contact by ghosts, and spiritual contact, are disturbances
of body and mind and for women the experience of being haunted by the
128 G. WISKER
past, voices and bodies from previous times is also linked to, and diag-
nosed as, hysteria, as if this often very real contact, invasion, expression
through the body of the medium is just a form of women’s destabilisation,
madness, despite widespread fascination with finding, communicating,
understanding the messaging and intent of spirits in the human world.
There is an uneasy connection here between real belief and experience and
that expressed in fiction, where the spirits, spiritualists and mediums are
also present to represent perspective in control over women’s minds and
bodies, incarceration, manipulation, exploitation. This is a psychological,
social and cultural issue.
When we consider ghosts and spectral presences we must also look
closely at the delicate, contested interface between literary, fictionalised
ghosts and those perceived by others during spiritualist encounters includ-
ing séances, not least because of the role of women in such interactions,
such spiritualist encounters in literature, where often the role of the
medium in a séance or a spiritualist encounter is one of the female medi-
um’s power, and most often male control of that power. Historically, many
women were mediums, channelling contacts with the dead, loved and lost.
The end of the nineteenth century saw practices of using mediums and
engaging in séances as normal in the Western world, although open to
abuse where need, gullibility and money are concerned so, in Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Grace recognises the fake spiritualist Jerome
as a former pedlar, which calls the veracity of the interchange into ques-
tion. In the late Victorian era in Britain, a period dominated by worship-
ping death and grief, mediums were a popular route through to
reconnecting with the dead. Everyday spectrality and paranormal activity
are also popular on TV and social media and seeking ghosts whether in
known haunted locations or anywhere else leads to TV shows such as Most
Haunted, and ghost phone apps. My phone has a ghost tracking app and
I am encouraged to believe there is a 409-year-old, vengeful spectre in the
spare room.
Popular Ghosts and Real Ghost Hunting

Ghosts are creations, inhabitants of liminal spaces between life and death,
real and imagined, good and evil, and their presence is uncanny—they
cause us to fundamentally question what is there, present, tangible, real,
to trust our senses, and yet be betrayed by them when the spectral pres-
ence plays on those senses with signs, sounds, smells, freezing
temperatures, the disorder and displacement of familiar objects. When the

ghost enters the real space we try to apply a mix of forensic exploration,
seeing and proving through clues, data, hard facts, tangible objects,
breathing bodies, and at the same time appreciate, trust, rely on the intui-
tive and the selectively heard and seen. The role of ghost sensitives is to
feel, see, prove through their own skills, or through technology, the
entrance to the realm of the uncanny Other, the presence from the world
of the past, imprinted on space, place, bodies, our minds, in the air, a spirit
whose very intangibility offers evidence of its exciting, dangerous
otherness.
The insistence of the solidly factual and real, the verifiable and testifi-
able, is a mainstay of ghost stories as it is of spiritualists, and of ghost hunt-
ing in haunted houses and spaces. The film Ghost Stories (2018) focuses on
a hunter of fake ghost hunters, exposing shams and performers whose
technological tricks include hidden earpieces and friends in the audience.
Three separate ghost stories are explored to be exposed. All three, enacted
on screen, and in the stage version (2010, 2017), are portrayed as real and
terrifying. The veracity of the screen and stage and the testimony of the
ghost hunter prove the facts of the events, however, given the media, it is
of course a performance, as is The Enfield Haunting (2015).
For women, ghost stories offer a nuanced, gendered location, experi-
ence and comment, in enforced cultural contexts, economies of worth and
trade, law and regulations. Women have always been in a parallel world to
that of men, but just as the boundaries between just two genders are tested
and found wanting, and as the bold, brash, heaving maintained divisions
between the genders are questioned and eroded, leading to a range of
potential interactions and identities, so women’s ghost stories can be seen
as pointing the crooked ghostly accusing finger at these constructed limi-
tations and constraints and meanings so that the narratives and worldviews
which limit our lives can be seen as only that, themselves imaginary world
constructions, descriptive fantasies. The new version of gender and other
boundaries, those creatures of such important liminal spaces, ghosts, have
a real duty to enable us to depose contradictions and constraints, and
imagine differently.
In TV shows and films such as The Enfield Haunting (2015) there is a
slippage between the performativity of Most Haunted (2002–) and shows
which do or do not, might or might not, actually trace ghosts, and the
horror film. Technological techniques used alongside intuition and sensi-
tives prove, on a film of course, that there are ghosts. It seems like a
130 G. WISKER
documentary (as the Poltergeist films (1982, 1986) do, with their time-
lapsed camera) but it’s a performance. The TV shows ‘prove’ the existence
of ghosts, but with their technology and their intuitive seers, they also, like
the séances of the nineteenth century, make us doubt what has been con-
structed and presented as proof of the senses, as the other world of time,
space and being leaks into ours and is shown to be real, using the forensic
tactics, techniques and tools—photography, heat sensors, visible traces.
Resolving the mystery brings the ghost and the story into the light, offers
the same excitement of control and resolution as found in a crime story,
yet because they are creatures of the liminal, of the other, and never fully
proved, they also offer excitement of a world beyond the tangible and the
cycle of life and death.
In Popular Ghosts, Blanco and Peeren (2010) comment on the ubiqui-
tousness of ghosts as a marker for ways in which the popular mind con-
structs, sees, represents issues in the early twenty-first century. Magazines
and TV shows emphasise an interesting return to later nineteenth-century
fascination with spirits of the dearly departed and newly dead, and palpa-
ble traces of the proximity of our everyday world to theirs. The Victorian
and Edwardian periods normalised séances and contact with the dead,
seers and mediums, capitalising on the era’s fascination with death and
journeying, and utilised the newly developed technological skills enabled
by photography to do so. We all have unfinished business with dead loved
ones, dead infants and partners, the gimcrack nature of much of the spiri-
tualist shows and interaction, part performance, part trust, part intimacy,
part fraudulent deceit of the vulnerable and rich enough, haunts the more
contemporary fascination of popular TV shows such as Most Haunted, and
the quite recent rise of a variety of films focusing on the return of the
loved, hated and feared, such as Ghost (1990), The Sixth Sense (1999).
There is a crossing over, a splicing between Most Haunted, from tracking
ghosts at night with cameras and the magazines which accompany this.
Spiritualism
Clive Bloom reminds us, in his introduction to Gothic Horror (2007), of
the investment in:
superior invisible forces which can intervene in human affairs either for rea-
sons of their own or because they have been invoked through prayer ritual
or some other form of sorcery. These forces break into the human plain and
the world of the everyday in the form either of the miraculous or of the hor-
rific. (2007, p. 19)
Spiritualism, as it developed in the nineteenth century, offered a direct link

with the dead and assumed a belief and acceptance that both the living and
dead existed simultaneously. Many authors responded to this development
even at the height of their writing realism, so George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted
Veil’ (1859) might be a surprising output from the author of the solidly
based exploration of middle-class middle England, Middlemarch (1871).
In the notion that the dead could be contacted by the living in a period
which also latterly developed the radio and the electric light, there is both
a sense of technology at odds with the world of the supernatural and the
spiritual reproducing some of the same wonders: voices from objects, light
into darkness, probably starting in 1848, when the Fox family of Hydesville
in New York State experienced rappings and tappings related to their
daughters Margaretta, Leah and Kate. A moment of ‘apocalyptic imagina-
tion’ (Bloom, 2007, p. 20), it led to the founding and flourishing of the
spiritualist movement in the US but the sisters later acknowledged they
were frauds (Davenport, 1888; Lehman, 2009). America was wide open,
it seems then to a belief both in the apocalyptic, terrifying, nightmarish
element of contacting the dead and its everyday nature, like a tea-time
gathering in somebody’s darkened living room. Mediums were common
across the US and Britain by the 1850s, and in 1882 Henry Sidgwick and
Frederick Myers and others founded the Society for Psychical Research. At
the same time, Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 founded the first Church of
Christ, Scientist, and, building on the work of the Bank sisters of Lilydale
near Buffalo, there was a summer school in Lilydale, New York State, for
spiritualism. Once theosophy developed ‘spiritism’ later “called spiritual-
ism” and the occult gained a fully comprehensible and internally logical
basis’ (2007, p. 20). Madame Blavatsky, who influenced Yeats, grew to
fame in the mid-1870s, and with Colonel Olcott formed a ‘miracle club’
followed by the Theosophical Society in 1875, inspired by entities from
Egypt and Tibet. Blavatsky wrote two books and established a spiritual
centre in India. The link with Egypt is interesting when we consider
Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen, where one of Florence Milk’s his-
torical spiritual contacts is an Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut, dominated by
her father, who she has to marry (Kontou, 2009a, b). Milk, based on
Florence Cook, was trusted to deliver weeping waifs, children who had
passed over, relatives who needed to be in touch, perhaps with secrets to
132 G. WISKER
tell, living messages. Being a medium was ‘one of the few professions open
to women during the Victorian age, and one which relied heavily on what
were traditionally thought of as ‘feminine’ qualities of passivity, receptive-
ness, lack of “reason”’ (Byatt 2000, p. 104). The mediums and the spiri-
tualists were conduits between the here and now and the afterworld. More
so than the white-sheeted stranger in the gloomy castle corridors, the
ghost of a loved one who has passed on, not dead, gone somewhere else,
is welcomed, called up and recognised. Mediumship and spiritualism are
services—you get what you pay for, and trust in what is presented, reported
through the spiritualist’s voice, dramatised through a spirit body or voice,
or spelt out on the Ouija board. There is a direct tangible and audible link.
The spirit re-enters the world of the living in a variety of acceptable ways,
even if only by messages passed on. With Victorian spiritualism the séances
were in a parlour, intimate among friends and strangers, with the star of
the evening, the medium, often either a young girl or an older woman,
known to have certain gifts rather than skills enabling her to gain com-
munication with those who have passed over—bringing their messages
back, putting them in touch with those suffering loss, who invest imagina-
tively, emotionally and economically in the disturbing/comforting event.
What they have is a confirmation of the parallel existence of worlds and of
the dead with the living. This most tasteful intimate parlour activity of
contacting spirits is also a money-making scheme, and the need to believe
is so great that every test of the veracity of events and the medium’s talents
are made. Roberts’ Flora Milk is locked inside a cupboard. Suppressing
the medium’s physical abilities so that only spirit contacting abilities oper-
ate, offers incontrovertible evidence of no trickery. Like fiction and the
stories people tell themselves, the more the real and trustworthy is proven
and asserted, the more comforting, and the more we question its basis.
Lin Young (2021) notes both the domestic social atmosphere some
mediums established, welcoming spirit guests in as old friends among
friends and paying customers, each treated as equally solid and present. So
Georgiana Houghton, a medium who wrote of her work, characterised
her séances as social evenings (1881, p. 18, 1882, p. 46). Blending an
interest in the scientific (Kontou, 2009), Young argues that Houghton
dissolves division between illusions, the calling up of spirits, and scientific
views of a séance encouraging her readers ‘to question how firm the
boundaries between spiritual, the scientific are to begin with, and to ques-
tion how a scientific understanding of materiality was far from incompat-
ible with a spiritual view of the world’ (Young, unpub. 2021).William
asserts a scientific interest in Flora, common in the late nineteenth century

(Richard Noakes, 2012, p. 28), revealed to be both predatory and
controlling.
The managed event of séances and latterly the music-hall type public
entertainment are showy yet ostensibly trustworthy performances, evi-
dence of widespread investment in belief in the afterlife of loved ones,
reunited through the voice and body of the medium. Visits to fictionalised
conduits of the messages of others, staged mediums in the Midlands
(Mantel, 2005), the late Victorian parlours where Selina Dawes (Waters,
1999) or Flora Milk (Roberts, 1990) contacted lost partners or children
are followed in the fictional texts variously with acknowledgement of
fraud, although the most performative medium Mantel’s Alison makes it
all earthy and credible.
Spirit Contact
The issue of spirit contact is the most borderland of all. Here the world is
one of money, manipulation, patience and, for the women, one of sexual
power and abuse. They use their bodies as channels for others, for pay. It’s
immensely powerful, and everyone who has lost someone wonders what
lies after death and what their loved one would say, think, do next, so they
seek the power of this channel and are willing to invest—with their imagi-
nations and economically.
Passing over as a term suggests an active event of passing and a hereaf-
ter: a place and an interaction, then a calling back for communication,
linked with questions concerning veracity, trust, scheming and nonsense.
The test between fact and fantasy lies between religious confirmation also
(see Weinstock, 2004) and doubt or denial. Mark Morrisson explores the
particular interactions and slippages between the personal, private and the
public, the living and the dead, in the fascination with communications of
mediums at the fin-de-siecle. The public’s interest in periodicals, newspa-
pers and books placed engagement within spiritual practices ‘at a curious
intersection between the private and personal and the flamboyantly public’
(2008, p. 1).
It is with the consideration of spiritualism, séances and performative
ghost hunting that we find the seedy sales techniques of the for-profit
ghost encounters, ghost investigations and explorations, and manipula-
tion of women, again for profit. Most of these women hover between
fakery and an assertion of genuine connection with the afterlife. Most are
134 G. WISKER
manipulated, performing for pay. In the Red Kitchen deals with three
timespans: an Egyptian queen, and a nineteenth-century medium contact-
ing a twentieth-century woman, trapped in her body, finding her way in a
new home, open to connections with other mediums through time and
space. In the neo-Victorian Affinity, Margaret’s traumatic loss of both her
father, and her lover Helen (who marries Margaret’s brother), leaves her
in a vulnerable vacuum with a desperate desire for connection. The osten-
sibly misjudged, spiritually connected, seductive Selina Dawes is herself
both a plausible conduit and a solution for that loss. Serena offers a con-
vincing reengagement with life for Margaret for each of them are in their
own prison cells, she in the women’s prison, Margaret in the prison of
mourning for her dead father, and the vacuum at the heart of her life
through the last loss of her potential lover. Selina offers both the connec-
tion with the dead and a romantic connection. Margaret invests in both,
her investment capitalised upon by the medium who knows what she sells
is some kind of opportunity to bring from the dark and into the light. The
only real medium who both makes a living out of it, but is genuinely
engaged with, invaded with, driven and often annoyed by, heckled by, the
spirits of the dead speaking through her is Alison in Hilary Mantel’s novel,
whose gift is also an investment and very often an overwhelming nuisance
because being real it’s there 24/7 365 days a year: a cacophony of some-
times threatening, more often mundane voices, fighting to be expressed
through her. Like the other mediums, her body and mind are not her
own, the channels for others, for voices, or the invention of voices, and for
monetary gain. For Alison, it means being able to get on and build a
middle-class house, instead of being stuck in an incredibly dangerous envi-
ronment on the edge of a small town, dominated by an army camp, and
attendant furtive, dangerous characters. Mantel brings it very definitely
into the everyday but she also confirms that mediums can speak to the
dead, though the voices they hear are not always the ones they call up and
it’s sometimes not only indistinct but annoying.
Our dealings with ghosts hover between the metaphysical, the psycho-
logical and the need for proof. I think they can be said to resemble the
functions of religions, with a range of firm believers depending on evi-
dence at one end of the continuum, and, at the other end, believers in the
power of the symbols, the metaphorical, the imaginary world alongside
whatever could be said to be solid and real, and responding to this actively
as to the evidential. From the moment of Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the
Screw’ (1898), ghosts became a mode of presenting the psychological as
much as or rather than the semi-solid apparitions, pointing at the need to

redress psychic goings-on in the daylight world. We have also moved on
to recognise their power as creatures of the work done by the Gothic, in
that parallel world of the imaginary as real, as the tactile ghosts are part of
the way we see and understand, identify problems with and construct
solutions to our entire world, physical and psychological, tactile and in the
lived imaginary.
Ghosts reappear in their own bodies, spectral or more solid. Some
inhabit the bodies of others, some spectral encounters involve ectoplasm,
a ghostly substance which was thought to issue from the body of a medium
and produce a ghostly form—making solid the insubstantial. ‘Mr
Elphinstone’s Hands’ (Tuttle, 1990a, b) and ‘Serena Sees’ (Sprinkle,
1990) are two short stories which open up the sense of a spectral body
through séances. Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) also focuses on spiritual-
ism and séances, in Millbank Prison in the 1870s, where a romantic rela-
tionship develops between prison visitor Margaret Prior, pursuing some
‘good work’ with the lady criminals, and the imprisoned spiritualist, Selina
Dawes. Waters’ novel is a mystery, a lesbian love story with a twist, and an
encounter with ‘unseemly’ passions and unruly spirits, where the liminality
of the spiritual interactions parallels the relationship of the two women.
Through the bodies of the women in In the Red Kitchen, Beyond Black
and Affinity there speaks and enacts contact with chatting, often trivial,
social, personally insightful, powerful hordes of individual spirits for liai-
son with the spirit world. In Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, the everyday-
ness of such contact, the solid, annoying, often tedious and mundane
reality of it as well as the showmanship dominate the tale as it does the life
of Alison: solid, everyday medium worried about how to get round the
motorways to gigs in town halls and to manage the rather bawdy spirit
who is her conduit to the other worlds, and therefore her credibility and
ultimately her bread and butter. For Alison, it’s like being stuck on the end
of a phone with crossed wires, or trying to pick out the sound from poor
headphones with a crowd intervening, the eerie noise clamours to such an
extent that important messages just can’t get through. This is true for
Flora, channelling First World War victims, and Alison channelling the
everyday dead. The cacophony is endless and difficult to interpret, insis-
tent and scrambled. The talent of the medium is to get through that to
decipher the messages. The ways these women are presented, there is no
doubt they have genuine spirit voices and connections. The levels of doubt
enter at the performance context and the way it must be staged, either in
136 G. WISKER
a parlour or on an actual stage. It’s so unlikely but desired that it’s hover-
ing in liminality. Ghosts hover in the liminal space of the parlour, their
voices in the spaces between time and elsewhere, the body and voice of the
medium their bridge between life and death. Crossing all of these spaces
and order could be either an exchange of belief and trust, or nonsense, or
something in-between. With Alison it’s often in-between, since she has
both a spirit guide, the clown Morris, and someone planted in the audi-
ence giving tips. There is no simple single answer. In each novel the
woman is seen by others, invested or not, in the fictions (as we are), as if
gifted, or perhaps a fraud. Of course, it all comes to us through the
medium of fiction. The bodies of the women are conduits, their mouths
speaking tubes, and they can be abused, by disabling, and by the economic
transactions, as well as sexually.
In the Red Kitchen (1990), Michèle Roberts

The lives of four women, three of them psychics, interweave through time
and place in Michèle Roberts’ novel set mainly in a run-down North
London house. The red kitchen is both a kitchen, the heart of the house,
and a metaphor for the roiling sexual centre of the self—both physical and
emotional. It is located in the basement beneath most of the interactions
of the twentieth-century Hattie’s version of that house, the centre for
domestic activities, and close to the psychic communications of the late
nineteenth-century house where Flora Milk, the medium, and her sister
Rosina, stay with Minny, who has lost (suffocated, it emerges) her recent
baby, and William. William is a well-connected, highly thought of, influ-
ential researcher of the veracity of the connections with the spirit world
and women’s hysterical behaviours, with a rather dubious, controlling,
predatory sexual life—the Jekyll and Hyde-like behaviours we have come
to know of tight-laced Victorianism. Minny’s own extraordinary, upbeat,
well-toned decorous letters to her Mama hide her own affairs, the baby’s
murder, her suspicions of Flora. This is a period of pretence and artifice
perfect for the investment in relationships with the spirit world, where
performance or genuine spirit interactions are never fully separated, not
least because of the baseline cynicism of the practising scientist proving or
disproving its existence. Flora channels Hat, Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut,
Thutmose II’s sister and wife. Hat’s ancient world is one of incest lauded
as godly sexual interactions. Born of her father Thutmose I and the gods,
she married her half-brother Thutmose II to preserve their line. Writing of
literary ghosts, Luke Thurston argues that much spirit contact avoids writ-
ing, depending mainly on ghostly sounds and sights, producing a ‘dra-
matic cleavage of the topology of signification into incommensurable
fields or perspectives’ (2012, p. 5) so the literary ghosts is ‘an illegible
excess, different from linguistic representation’ (Deer, 2013, p. 348).
However, it is clearly important for Hat. As Sarah Falcus notes, ‘drawing
on psychoanalytic paradigms, Hat’s story links language and the pen to
manhood and authority. She must learn to write in order to be powerful
in ancient Egypt; Language allows her to deny her womanhood and her
mortality, making death and not the mother the place of birth’ (Falcus,
2007, p. 134). For Hat, ‘the tomb is the first book; the House of life: the
body that does not decay because it is written’ (Roberts, p. 24). Eventually,
however, her name is reduced from King Hat down to ‘O’ (p. 146) which
Falcus sees as a ‘failure of this position of male authority, which erases the
feminine in order to speak’ (p. 134). A need to be heard causes her to con-
nect with both nineteenth-century Flora Milk and Hattie in the twentieth.
Layers of time remind of layers of the house. Hat is vicious to the concu-
bines and potential enemies until her own time comes. But she is also a
woman initially awarded the power of a man, then refused that power, her
beard cut off. Entombed, she cannot tell her story and so needs to do so
through Flora Milk, from a deep parallel past speaking to the young
medium and offering real access to women’s historical experiences of dis-
empowerment as a result, in contrast to the rather dubious performativity
of the displays of mediumship with locked boxes and darkened rooms, in
which Flora herself performs. For Hat knows, ‘I am an exile, doomed to
wander in the night, homeless, searching for something I shall never find’
(p. 133). She is silenced and hidden from history because of her gender:
I have been unwritten. Written out. Written off. Therefore I am not even
dead. I never was. I am non-existent. There is no I… I have lost the great
male force that was once in me… I am a spirit condemned to roam forever
through the dark never to find a resting place… I have lost the carved and
painted house that sheltered my remains. (p. 133)
Both the Egyptian moment and the twentieth-century moment seem to

worship death and believe in eternal life simultaneously. They trade and
glorify, demean and invest in sexual manipulation of others, in Hat’s case
as glorious ritual (her father disguised as a god becomes sexually powerful
other in this mask), and in that of Flora, Minny, William and the
138 G. WISKER
twentieth-century characters, as illicit, hidden, manipulative economic

exchange. In the twentieth-century version, the old house is only occu-
pied in the top rooms, which Hattie attempts to paint and tidy to some
extent, even while her own body moves between comfort with the non-
aggressive creative painter/lorry-driving partner, and the loss of a child.
Babies do not last long in any of these spaces and places, and reproductive,
ritualistic, abusive or domestic sex all equally dominate the women’s bod-
ies in In the Red Kitchen. Their sexual, economic worth, and their repro-
ductive potential, accidental or planned, are all in constant turmoil and
activity. This is the red heart of the red kitchen, the dominance over
women through their bodies, and by men as controllers of the economy,
as through their bodies the exchange with the spirit world is called up,
deliberately in Flora’s case, unexpected in Hat’s and Hattie’s. This shows
both the similarities and bonds between women through the ages, and
uses the spirit connections seen, unseen, felt, heard, sensed, as a constant
channel between them all, a red thread.
As a medium, Flora’s role is to validate the continuity of existence of
the spirits in the spirit world and maintain a channel from them to the real
world and back again. The belief in this channel is based on trust and
proofs, which latter are hard-won. Flora is tied up in the cupboard, pho-
tographs and experiments take place but the one early moment when she
was grabbed by a punter and found in her cupboard dishevelled with her
cord untied was almost enough to permanently ruin a reputation based on
trust in the skill of the individual medium, the truthfulness of her record,
trances, reports and, ultimately, the whole edifice of contact with and exis-
tence of another world: the great beyond. It’s a huge investment and a
huge collapse, and the undoing of a single medium might well be enough
to disturb the entire investment. But at the core of this is also trust in a
narrative, and in communication more generally. Most of the novel is
composed in diary entries or letters with Queen Hat, showing her own
talent and communications are undeniable and their communicators mis-
taken or confused; weaving a version to suit time and place. Hat deliber-
ately pretends she doesn’t recognise her own father as he approaches her
in the night in his mask for the ritual rape; Minny describes a perfectly
idyllic life in the house with William and constantly creates innocent
delightful versions for Flora, riddled with class-conscious comments which
undermine her special talent brought into the house, as a kind of insur-
ance policy against her own infanticide. Calling up Minny’s baby Rosalie
initially produces the fake, conventional, loving exchange, before the real,
dead, beyond the grave child’s voice betrays her murderer, Minny.
However, this is difficult to prove:
It is impossible to suspect one so young, innocent and beautiful of deceitful

intent, and I am, I must say, shocked that you have allowed your mind to
entertain such dark thoughts of one who is not only pure as an angel and
incapable of falsehood, but whose conduct has been readily submitted to the
calm and objective scrutiny of William himself. (p. 34)
Minny also renders Flora as innocent when describing her as ‘a schoolgirl’

(p. 22), young, naïve, working class, under her benevolent management.
As Kontou comments (2009), Flora Milk is based on the medium
Florence Cook, through whose mediumship manifested Katie King. Cook
was herself the subject of scientific investigation by William Crookes, a
renowned member of the Royal Society, who published research based on
his ongoing experiments with Florence. These involved, among other
things, taking photographs comparing Katie King, as she manifested, with
Florence herself, Katie being asserted as much taller and larger than
Florence. In the novel, the various management of the truth in letters
from Minny to her mother, and reports of the successes of mediumship
interplay, along with fictional Minny’s portrayal of herself as a devoted
mother, overwhelmed and tired with the lying in for her tenth child. Her
benevolence towards Flora, who they take in under their roof along with
her sister Rosina (for propriety’s sake), is a whitewash of the real events.
Her affair with Andrews, and the losing of the child, accompany William’s
less than purely scientific interest in Flora when he takes her to Calais, sets
her up her in a hotel room, and represents her as both resembling a hys-
teric and of scientific interest. Flora is no innocent victim, but William has
the power. He is simultaneously a grand man of science, benefactor, and
her seducer. His paternalism belies his patriarchal control, and his repre-
sentation of Flora’s mediumship and contact with Hattie are prioritised
over those of Flora. Ultimately, the verification of Flora’s talents and
achievements as reported in William’s writings are seen as potentially just
as fictional as Minny’s letters to her mother.
Donna Cox emphasises the spatial layering of the novel as it enacts vari-
ants of physical and psychical control over these women by dominant
males, whether doctors, kings, fathers or brothers pretending to be gods.
In the North London house, parallel spaces, times and lives are embodied
140 G. WISKER
in the floors of the house itself, resembling a female body, and a Victorian
necropolis:
In the Red Kitchen offers a textual geography of superimposition, the text

becomes itself a moving pastiche, a mosaic of bits-and-pieces in its represen-
tation of a feminine writing body.
… In its enclosure of different narrative bodies, the novel functions like
a Victorian necropolis. It lays out its stories within a space where they are
kept carefully separate but lie so closely to each other that one may enter the
other in a display of dissolution, a patterning of narrative scraps. (Cox,
2000, p. 103)
This is a novel about women’s bodies, the economy in which they are
placed, and the psychic links between women of different times and places,
different ages. The heart of the novel is the focus on Flora Milk and her
psychic career. Questions about the reality of spirit possession and medi-
umship constantly pressure Flora, trapped initially in a cupboard to show
the punters she cannot be the one appearing as their lost loved child/
other relative. She is empowered by her role but also as only a conduit,
speaking for other women, like a servant being called from the kitchen to
the parlour through a Victorian speaking tube.
I am a hollow stick the spirits blow messages down. I’m the speaking tube…
a corridor for others’ voices… I am the cave they enter. I don’t belong to
myself anymore; I don’t know who that is. (p. 92)
Channelling Hat/Hattie is an important part of Flora’s role, and her sud-

den understanding of the experiences of Minny’s child solves another
puzzle: of how a healthy baby died. The ghost baby speaks to her,
revealing all:
a sigh escaped from Minny or myself, I don’t know

Mother me. You mother me.
So cold, the draught at my back. Looking down from billowy air, see the
half-dead medium shudder with cold, hold out her arms rigid and stiff,
moan. She is the point at which opposite charges, opposite impulses, spark
and meet: life explodes into death, heat into cold, past in to future, She jerks
a tree struck by lightning.
Mother. Smother, Mother, you smothered me. Mother, you smothered
me (p. 94)
Flora reveals Minny’s guilt and is slapped.
I am her guilt. She wants to mash me to a pulp and get rid of her guilt that
way. But I’m too strong for her. So is little Rosalie (p. 94)
Minny’s guilt exposed, she must find ways to manage and silence Flora.
Women speak through each other’s bodies. Their oppressed lives, whether
as queen or baby, are not silenced because of the mediums, instead they
use the ghost as a form, through the spirit medium or that medium of
writing, recording, to express the truths of violence perpetrated on wom-
en’s bodies.
This is a piece of fiction but two, at least, of the central three women
characters are documented as existing. The verifying of Flora’s life through
photos discovered in the attic, and her own storytelling testify to the
appearance of a connection with spirits, how they speak through her,
offering a convincing version of her mediumship. Flora might be a manip-
ulative young woman but she’s telling the truth about spirit connections.
Flora’s voice only ceases when latterly she channels traumatic testimonies
of deaths in the trenches during the First World War, mollifying messages
from lost soldiers to their living mothers and fathers. However, cheating
on the spirit world by not passing true messages eventually renders their
senders silent.
Beyond Black (2005), Hilary Mantel

Spirits return and communicate through the bodies of women, conduits
for life, birth, and the voices of the dead but not quite completely gone.
Flora Milk in Victorian times in The Red Kitchen, Alison Hart, turn-of-
the-millennium spiritualist in Middle England, in Beyond Black, and
nineteenth-century Selina Dawes, in Affinity each claim to contact the
dead, experience, see, speak to them on a daily basis and perform that
interaction, for cash, for others. Their own spirit guides are very physically
present. Flora Milk has her own guides and a connection with Hattie,
Egyptian princess from many years ago. Peter Quick informs, misleads
Selina and inveigles his way with her younger women customers, while the
low-life/dead Morris lies across Alison’s doorway, lounges in chairs or
takes himself off to pubs.
A major feature of the spirits called up by Alison in Hilary Mantel’s
Beyond Black is their mundanity. The boring, everyday, ongoing existence
142 G. WISKER
of the dead invades her life on stage when responding to the needs of oth-
ers or just randomly, like an incessant nagging set of voices, sometimes
mentioning the banal and spiteful and sometimes just the banal. What is
truly horrible is the emptied-out places and lives of both the living and
dead, condemned to exist in some form or other on crammed motorways,
in land and cityscapes vacated of meaning. Alison’s job is a regular one,
tough, financially secure as long as she is both able to be contacted by the
mundane dead to advise their relatives they are doing well, and can actu-
ally manage her money.
When not under the patronage of the dubious scientific experimenta-
tion of William and his deceptive wife Minny, Flora in Roberts’ novel has
to appear publicly on stage as a show with all the performativity that
requires. So, also, Alison operates in several modes, the travelling show
with the dressing room and Morris, the bawdy, highly physical spirit
guide/presence, variously spread across doorways or taking himself off to
the pub. She offers messages and insights by phone to regulars, like an
agony aunt, dealing between the spirit world and that of the living, passing
on messages by gossiping while shopping, and travelling on:
the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping
London: the margin’s scrub-grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves
of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four
o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling
on Potters Bar. (p. 1)
Alison’s commuting roads are replete with unwanted hitchhikers, some

brought by Morris to leer, grumble and lounge in the back seat, some
remnants of her girlhood, where everyone had a dangerous dog and most
deals went on in grimy military camp housing kitchens with the back door,
just about keeping out the cold air. This world was very physically threat-
ening and psychologically disturbing for a young girl but Alison escaped
from it through her mediumship.
This is a job that pays the bills but she must manage the randomness
and uncontrollability of messages and the hungry audiences (testified as
genuine, to both audiences and us as readers). Her work is a mixture of
receptiveness, a gift, and people management, an acquired skill. Alison
needs help with sales, marketing and the driving. The job is far from easy:
There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you have to do it any-
way. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces.
Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want them and you
can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they won’t be coerced.
But the public has paid its money and it wants results. (p. 1)
Like the land she drives through and the people whose voices she repre-
sents, Alison is also marginal and conveys a telling image of the uncontrol-
lable marginality of twenty-first-century Britain, its landscapes ghastly and
its people and animals on a precarious emotional and financial edge.
Alison’s everyday, dangerous job is communicating with the dead to try
and assuage the needs of the living. She talks of the ring road around
London as a place of the dead:
A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of

strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and
starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts
and escapees. (p. 1)
The contact with spirits is everyday and yet Alison also plays it as a perfor-
mance using her sidekick Colette to move among the audience and pass
her any information as a fake spirit medium would. Her head is a cacoph-
ony of irritating noises, as random spirits contact her with inane comments
which stress her, making her feel physically sick. This visceral, dull service
is reported on as fact, believed in by the punters yet constantly tested and
undermined.
You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regur-
gitate or else digest all the distress that she’s sucked in from the carpet and
the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other
people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold,
full of their torsions and strains. (p. 29)
Ruth Heholt (2017) notes that Mantel was influenced by her interest in
Ruth Rendell, whose stories she reviewed in 1987. Rendell also empha-
sises the banality, the ‘small, domestic hauntings’ of everyday ghosts in the
domestic sphere. Alison suffering the inanity of the everyday dead natter-
ing, nagging and replying to their trivia notes: ‘[t]he dead are like that;
give them a cliché, and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living,
spoiling their beauty sleep’ (p. 41). Noting the overlapping spiritual and
144 G. WISKER
material worlds, Catherine Spooner suggests, ‘[t]he interpenetration of

the two worlds comes as no surprise; each is as boring as the other. The
spirits themselves are just as banal as their living counterparts’ (Spooner,
2010, pp. 83–4).
One temporarily fixed moment for psychic activity is the death of
Princess Diana, which Alison suddenly foresees in all its issues, from the
failure to wear a seatbelt onwards, unrolling the story like a shock piece of
journalism, advance breaking news. She readies herself for the pause then
real deluge of the event, the overwhelming number of contacts with oth-
ers who seek to hear from or about Diana once she’s passed over. Alison,
putting them in touch with their idol, like a publicity agent would com-
ments ‘There was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloat-
ing. (p. 171). Contact and content are unreliable, and presented here in a
wryly comic voice:
It’s not 14 million to one, like the National Lottery, but you have to take
into account that the dead, like the living, sometimes like to dodge and
weave. (p. 33)
Alison, avoiding the word death, puts people in touch with the dead but,
like a good used car salesman also manages problematic, third rate, accept-
able information, telling them what they want to hear, reserving facts for
Colette and readers.
But she would never speak it. Never. Never utter the word ‘death’, if she
could help it. And even though they needed frightening, she would never,
when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature
of the place beyond black. (pp. 193–194)
Some spirits wanting to come through are ‘lowlives’ from whom you need
protection since:
They don’t become decent people just because they’re dead. People are
right to be afraid of ‘ghosts’. If you get people who are bad in life—I mean,
cruel people, dangerous people—why do you think they’re going to be any
better after they’re dead? (p. 193)
We end up in the next world raw, indignant, baffled or furious, and igno-
rant, all of us: but we get sent on courses. Our spirit moves, given time, to a
higher level, where everything becomes clear. Or so people tell me any-

way. (p. 268)
The mundanity of ‘or so people tell me’ lends veracity to her narrative.
The everyday world of Alison and other mediums involves commuting
between performances in halls, fairs and markets, sometimes people’s
homes, but they are also constantly surrounded by cross-overs from the
spirit world. The banality mixes with that of the everyday dead, but the
threat of the revengeful dead, nasty and annoying when living, is ever-
present. At the novel’s end as Alison is again commuting, she presents a
parallel Gothic world to that of the green fields, planned roads, housing
estates, managed social services. Shifting from making the ghostly banal,
the banal is revealed to be nightmarishly ghostly. She has Gothic advice
about not trying to trap ghosts, lure them in—because of potential
dangers:
You shouldn’t leave bait about for it to attract entities, the slow grub and
creep of legless things, feral crawlers looking for wounds to suck or open
minds to creep inside. You shouldn’t leave traps, for you don’t know what
will spring them: severed legs, unclaimed and nameless feet, ghouls and
spectres looking to stitch themselves together, haunting the roads looking
for a hand, an ear, for severed fingers and dislocated thumbs. (p. 449)
But today we are going to Sevenoaks, by way of junction 5: to see whom

fortune favours today. Will it be the brave, or is it the turn of the
bloody? (p. 449)
It is a comic Gothic novel, blackly humorous, presenting through Alison

both this world and the next without any of the ethereality of magic.
Alison’s larger-than-life earthiness: finding a house on a new estate, not
eating properly, commuting to work, contrasts with the management of
unruly spirits, like feral street wanderers. Her ability in both worlds—
respectable and well-off enough in one, and able to channel messages like
phone calls through from the other, gives her power over an otherwise
vulnerable position.
146 G. WISKER
Affinity (1999), Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters’ work consistently uses twenty-first-century insights and
empathy to reimagine hidden lesbian lives and loves, revealing hidden his-
tories rather as mediums offer ways into the continued existence of and
contact with the silenced dead, sometimes through voices, sometimes
apparitions (Castle, p. 19). Love, deceit and trickery are constantly present
in Affinity and as readers we are also deceived, drawn into the desire of the
protagonist Margaret Pryor for Selina Dawes, the young medium who she
meets when visiting Millbank, the women’s prison. Margaret is almost a
ghost herself, both a spinster and hiding her lesbian desires, on the edges
of social gatherings, socially approved roles and relationships. There is
certainly trickery in this story, in these interactions, but also a lasting sense
of women who have become ghosts in their own bodies, because socially
unseen or outcast. Spinsters, lesbians, criminals incarcerated in a prison or
the prison house of their own secrets and losses, denials and silences, they
are constantly under surveillance and on the verge of being caught out,
exposed. In this context, the compelling medium can operate on the very
edge of belief and scepticism, innocence and guilt in this and other worlds,
with her own versions of events, control of people and spaces beyond the
everyday, like a ghost controlling from beyond the grave.
The novel opens with Selina Dawes, imprisoned because of a bungled
séance in which one young girl was molested and another woman, Mrs.
Brink, her employer, had a heart attack and died. We immediately feel
sympathy for her and as the tale unravels we, like Margaret the recently
bereaved protagonist, believe Selina’s version of events, particularly as
backed up by members of the Spiritualism Association. She is frightened
and alone:
I was never so frightened as I am now. They have left me sitting in the dark,
with only the light from the window to write by. (p. 1)
Margaret is also marginalised and isolated. Coming into a room she

realises:
I have turned, in two years, from a girl into a spinster.

There were many spinsters there today, I think more, certainly, than I
remember. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts;
and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all. (p. 58)
Margaret, recovering from a breakdown, following the death of her father

and the loss of Helen, her now sister-in-law, once lover, becomes a prison
visitor to raise her own and others’ spirits. She enters the ever-spiralling,
totally enclosed, surveilled, incarcerating space of Millbank prison, where
nothing is missed, everything heard and watched: ‘It is as if the prison had
been designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare or a madness’ (p. 8).
Her description peoples the prison not just with the women who can-
not yet be seen, but with the ghosts of others who have perhaps once
walked there, implicating the City, the (oppressively gendered) trading,
banking heart of London, in the invasion and incarceration, movement in
and stasis of the prison.
We of course had turned three angles of the floor and, though the women
were near, we could not see them. I said, ‘They might be ghosts!’—I
remembered how there are said to be legions of Roman soldiers that can be
heard passing, sometimes, through the cellars of the houses of the City. I
think the grounds at Millbank might echo like that, in the centuries when
the prison no longer stands there. (p. 20)
Affinity focuses on a binary divide in a constrained society with its need to

blame and punish, its divisions between rich and poor, good and bad, liv-
ing and dead, male and female. Both young women have had damaging
blows to their self-esteem and freedoms. Margaret has lost both her father
and her lover and has a minimal social existence. Selina Dawes is punished
for a crime committed by someone who avoided blame as their existence
was denied, her spirit guide, Peter Quick, reminder of the evil Peter Quint
in Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). For Selina, the doors
to life and freedom are fixed shut in the dehumanised regimentation of
prison life in Millbank, based on Dickens’ Marshalsea, where Little Dorrit’s
father ekes out his final years (1857). Millbank is also based physically on
the panopticon, a prison designed to keep everyone constantly in full view,
under surveillance, which Foucault (1975) characterised as the outer form
of a surveillant society intent on controlling behaviours, thoughts, feel-
ings, and, in particular, sexuality. Its intent is to police the women inmates’
bodies, preventing criminal and sexual activity, and their minds, constrain-
ing devious or imaginative thoughts and any (deviant) affinity. Both
women write journals which, interspersed, form the novel’s substance.
Selina’s version includes events prior to her unfortunate incident with the
insalubrious spirit guide Peter Quick. Unsurprisingly, while other spirit
148 G. WISKER
mediums verified her account of the attack, she is widely disbelieved and
the prosaic, rational version of her guilt leads to her incarceration. Seeking
information about Selina’s case, Margaret locates supportive spirit medi-
ums at a spiritualist library, and in the pages of the spirit medium newspa-
pers. They too have spirit guides and understand the powers of mediums
are extra rather than abnormal or fake and that the basis of mediumship is
the appearance and entrance of the spirit into the world of those seeking
confirmation of an afterlife, contact and communication with dead loved
ones. The keeper of the artefacts and books in the spiritualist library, a
limited medium himself, convinces Margaret, as a scholar can, that it
is a gift:
‘I catch glimpses, only—“a little flash, a mystic hint” as Mr Tennyson has

it—rather than seeing vistas. I hear notes—a simple tune, if I am fortunate.
Others, Miss Prior, hear symphonies.’ (p. 225)
And of spirits…
‘One cannot but be aware of them, when one has seen them once! And
yet’—he smiled—‘to gaze at them, too, may be frightening.’ … He said I
must imagine that nine-tenths of the people in England had a condition of
the eye, a condition which prevented them from appreciating, say, the colour
red. (p. 225)
Spirit guides like the low-life alcoholic carnival trickster Morris in Beyond
Black, are rather slippery movers between the living and the dead. We
learn less about Peter Quick, but he clearly used his powers and access
from a liminal space to interfere with a young lady visitor, to her horror.
This intrusion emphasises the potential, sexually predatory nature of spiri-
tualist interactions, seen clearly in the control of William over Flora Milk
in The Red Kitchen. Young, poor girls in vulnerable transitional positions,
speaking and spoken through the bodies and words of others, their whole-
ness invaded, their gifts and skills on the borderline of brilliant and sus-
pect, are open to a range of abuse, as commodities and in In the Red
Kitchen, as scientific curiosities.
The prosaic rationality of the legal system has no place for a seeming
crime committed by an irrational liminal spirit. Of course, Selina is impris-
oned. Margaret takes up visiting in the women’s prison, rigid Millbank
with its labyrinthine corridors and endless lock up, shut up, no contact
rules, its consistent surveillance and containment of all that is alive and
female. The women are kept silent in the terrible dark, without stimula-
tion or contact. There are other lesbian relationships in the prison as that
which develops between Margaret and Selina, all refused, unspoken or
condemned and messages are conveyed through tapping (recalling table-
tapping mediums). Even acknowledging this behaviour is dangerous. The
love that dare not speak its name has no place in a prison for women,
where attempted abortion following rape is a crime, and those who steal
to eat or feed their family are condemned to years away from those fami-
lies. Inside, everything that is feminised is taken from them, starting with
their hair and their clothes. Everything individual is refused, and relation-
ships, unspoken, are the top of this list. In establishing their own under-
standing, Margaret and Selina cross other boundaries, between the
allowed, understood and spoken and the refused and unspoken. This
boundary is as tightly maintained as that between life and death; the vital-
ity of each boundary-crossing echoes the other. In this prison, filled with
imprisoned minds and bodies, there is real potential for border crossings
and diversity, and mediumship is a powerful vehicle for young women’s
solidity of identity and relationships. Selina is first seen with a flower,
brought to her she says by the spirit. There is no other explanation for this,
since she has no visitors and nothing is grown in the prison. She is not
lonely, she says. Although she appears alone, her spirit friends visit her.
Margaret becomes a more solid, legal visitor. While finding out more
about her and her supposed crime she learns more about how Selina out-
side and before the prison, was an energetic, creative, powerful and
respected woman.
Like those who attend séances at Mrs. Brink’s, the reader wants Selina
Dawes’ convincing spiritual connections and manifestations, her caring,
managed concern for the need of others, palpable in the air and desperate
in their form, expressed or otherwise—to be real.
Millbank, bastion of repression, is actually portrayed towards the end of
the novel as utterly insecure in its establishment because of flooding. Dead
and mechanised when operational, it is finally more like a shifting beast.
This disturbance of the fixed is aligned with the disturbance of the every-
day of spiritualism and it also undercuts Selina’s tight story of affinity.
Selina sends contact and messages, tokens and kindnesses, through space,
indications of a reciprocated love and proof that dimensions and rules can
be challenged. Both Mrs. Jelf and Margaret invest time, money, emotion
and belief: Mrs. Jelf hoping for more proof of her dead child’s continued
150 G. WISKER
existence; Margaret seeking a link with Selina, but, most importantly, both
relying on Selina to be psychic, and to truly care about them. Selina uses
each to transport proof for the other. Margaret, as the main voice of the
novel, is sympathetic, gullible following her breakdown after the death of
her father and her overdosing of laudanum, drawn in by her need to
believe in Selina’s love and her movement through space and time. The
range of potential and real lesbian relationships exposed in the novel
emphasises how tentative some of the conformity to respectability must
have been, for so many of the women are vulnerable to men’s advances,
their access to economic power and to the oppressive constraints of expec-
tations that they marry, do that duty, have children and spend their lives
cooing over curtains and babies, while their minds and bodies administer
to the needs of pipe-smoking, whiskered fellows, none of whom, except
perhaps Pa and Stephen, seem to have sensitivity or a brain. A policeman
guards Margaret’s house outside since Pa died, echoing a socially surveil-
lant incarceration for women such as her, ageing, dealt with as sick because
they can’t or won’t conform to marriage, living in a social and emotional
straitjacket resembling Millbank’s physical straitjackets. Women are incar-
cerated in the home, prey to the whims of others and the tight constric-
tions of social mores, dress, behaviour, expression of norms and the
confines of a house. Women’s lives are straitened in the prisonhouse of
family and respectability; they are the slaves of their bodies. If middle class,
they are forced to be respectable, obedient, deferential, aware of their
worthlessness in an economy of wifehood and marriage, while working-
class women are additionally both economically and physically vulnerable,
suffering rape, pregnancies and abortions, misled by lies and class and, in
Millbank, finally subject to the whims and demands of the gaoler. The
prison and the house are parallel incarcerations for women. For the les-
bian, they are fraught with punishable offences—and identification as mad
as well as bad.
The novel centres on Margaret’s desire to believe in Selina, her delicacy
and her mediumship. She needs to believe although she does not use
Selina’s skills for contacting her dear father; rather, she is fascinated with
the spirit contact Selina offers and the closeness the two women develop,
forbidden though their affection and communications are in the jail.
Tokens somehow pass into and from Margaret’s room, and she even
acquires Selina’s cut-off hair transported by spirits, or so it seems. Margaret
becomes fascinated, captivated, and her imaginative versions of Selina
resemble the conjuring of a spirit by a medium, Selena gradually coming
into view formed through their conversations and Margaret’s needs until
she seems solid and real:
I look at my own face, that is reflected in my bulging window: it seems

strange to me, I am afraid to gaze too hard at it. But I am afraid, too, to look
beyond it, to the night which presses at it. For the night has Millbank in it,
with its thick, thick shadows; and in one of those shadows Selena is lying—
Selina—she is making me write the name here, she is growing more real,
more solid and quick, with every stroking of the nib across the page—Selina.
In one of those shadows Selina is lying. Her eyes are open, and she is look-
ing at me. (p. 116)
They have an ‘affinity’. As they draw closer, Selina says they can be
together, drawn by a line through the night. Selina’s promise is compel-
ling, backed up by her competence as a medium, assured through
Margaret’s desire to believe because in the end Selina is offering some
form of eternal life through love:
She smiled. Do you think it works like that? It works through—love; and
through wanting. You need only want me, and I will come. (p. 287)
Margaret, as if to embody her loved one in clothing with which they could
each escape, went shopping, something she hated doing, and bought
clothes for them, expecting, once Selina escaped, to run away with her to
Italy. She does not help Selina escape, but she expects the escape, and she
expects Selina to come to her in the night so she leaves the door open.
However, it is Mrs. Jelf who works in the gaol who comes instead, drawn
by her own belief that Selina put her in touch with her lost son, who
died aged 4.
Now I began to shudder. She looked, and tilted her head. ‘No-one knows
as we do, do they, miss’? Each time I saw her, she had some new word from
him. He would come to her at night—he is a great boy now, of almost
eight. (p. 333)
Selina told Mrs. Jelf she also channelled Margaret’s father:
‘She told me that you came to her so often, to get word of him. And after
your visits started, indeed, my boy came through stronger than ever!’ (p. 334)
152 G. WISKER
Mrs. Jelf, fallen in love with Selina through her stories, is equally conned,
believing the link between Selina and Margaret must be maintained as it
channels her own dead son, while the power similarly channels Margaret’s
father back to her. The multiple hoax dissolves, revealing Mrs. Jelf alone
has been the ‘ghostly’ transporter of personal items.
Neither really mentions their desire not merely for the dead to refill
their lives, but rather for Selina herself, who offers everything and just
builds on their needs to get what she wants. It is a deep disappointment
not just about the spirit world, but also the relationship between Margaret
and Selina.
The ending is sad. Throughout, the spirit movements have been
through a servant, Vigers, who also visited Selina, who appeared out of
nowhere and tended to Margaret with care, and who therefore, of course,
had access to the locket and was able to remove the hair. Selina has a triad
working for and with her, and the two finally escape with tickets to Italy
and bought clothing. The other two women are left bereft, fooled, alone,
in the cold light of day, as is the reader.
Sarah Waters takes spirit mediumship as a metaphor for the opening of
perspectives towards and practices of women’s power and creativity, and
lesbian lives, while she also uses the manipulation of this power and its
denial and misinterpretation by some of the very people who might well
benefit from it—the mind-forged manacles, the prison walls and surveil-
lance of a suspicious, insecure society, swift to differentiate, blame
and punish.
All three novels address the question of what it would be like to be a
spirit medium, and in Beyond Black, this is London, the home counties
and the Midlands, the motorway, estates and halls, the everyday town or
theatre version. Nobody manipulates Alison; she is far from the vulnerable
Selina Dawes, herself a sly manipulator, or the equally managed, self-
marketing duplicitous Flora Milk. In all three novels, the relationship with
the spirit world is asserted, and only in Mantel’s novel is the protagonist
quite obviously very much in touch with an everyday, mundane spirit
world. In the Red Kitchen travels through time and space, emphasising
women’s vulnerability and power; Beyond Black is a spiritualist novel for
the feminist, TV-watching twenty-first century; while Affinity offers then
removes the support of affinity which genuine spiritual crossing might
enable, and reminds us that ghosts embody the abject and also,
equally, desire.
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CHAPTER 6
Domestic Hauntings: The Little Stranger

(Waters, 2009), Birdcage Walk (Dunmore,
2017), The Stopped Heart (Myerson, 2016)
In Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories, all houses, contemporary twenti-

eth- or twenty-first-century, or historical, eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century houses and mansions, still standing cottages, rented rooms, flats,
are similarly insecure, leaky, their occupants threatened, vulnerable both
psychologically and physically. The threats are embodied and enacted in
these spaces and places in the minds and bodies of the women occupants,
through sensed, historical haunting presences and ghostly visitants.
Haunted Houses and Change

The house and home, whether a mansion, cottage or small apartment,
though ostensibly a place of domestic comfort and safety can also be a
place of incarceration and oppression. It is, in our lives, a place which
physically embodies the stabilities/instabilities, securities and insecurities
of social and domestic life, of an attempted grasp on history and sense
making, and the seemingly solid, actually delicate securities of relation-
ships and of one’s own identity. A place of safety for women in particular,
the house and home is also often one of the utmost danger because of that
alignment with identity, place, security and safety, physical, economic,
social and psychological. For many, it can also be dangerous because of
woman’s position within the home, should a controlling abusive or mur-
derous man dominate, own or intend to own both the structure of the
house and home, and the mind and body of the woman. The haunted

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_6
158 G. WISKER
houses in the three novels discussed in this chapter embody and enact
those vulnerabilities, those leakages through the physical structures, cel-
lars, attics, staircases, locked rooms, sound and water pipes, and the physi-
cal and psychological dominance asserted by variously controlling men.
Women might well not recognise and admit to this abusive control, is it is
veneered over by romance, seduction, marriage, but there are ghostly
warnings, hints, in the fabric of the building, from historical or family
photographs, from a dead first wife or mother.
Writing of the haunted house in a particular transitional moment ‘on
the cusp between the Victorian and modernist periods’ (Liggins, 2020,
p. 2), Emma Liggins focuses on a feminist history of the ghost story
between the 1850s and the 1940s, noticing that the ghost story ‘trans-
forms domestic space into a place of terror that threatens marital relations
and women’s lives and sanity’ (p. 2). She’s writing of one transitional
moment. In Chap. 2 we looked at Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill
House (1953) set in a moment when women began to seek jobs outside
the home, were still considered major carers, and sometimes were bedaz-
zled by romantic fiction and Hollywood versions of romance, wealth,
grand houses, as earlier, was du Maurier’s unnamed second wife, in
Rebecca (1938).
This chapter focuses on work by three novelists. Sarah Waters is well
known for her Gothic novels in different moments in history (Affinity,
1999, is discussed in ch. 5), most often focusing on reimagining lesbian
lives and secrets; Helen Dunmore also ranges over different historical peri-
ods, haunted places and moments (the handsome airman, Alec in The
Greatcoat, 2012) (ch. 7 is a ghost of war and romance) and Julie Myerson
writes in a Gothic mode of children, including Living with Teenagers
(2008) (an anonymous Guardian column and book) (Gardiner, 2009).
The three novels discussed here, The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters, 2009),
Birdcage Walk (Helen Dunmore, 2017) and The Stopped Heart (Julie
Myerson, 2016), focus on different historical moments, but for each the
house expresses constraining threats on role, identity and safety, danger-
ous concerns of the past, dangerous abusive and controlling intent leaking
into the present and into women’s lives and bodies. The history of past
events, of oppression, invasion, physical and psychological violence emerge
from the physical structure of houses and their grounds, from locked
rooms, cellars, barns, gardens, preventing movement, incarcerating, dom-
inating mentally and physically, as the past leaks into the present often as a
warning, a threat or direct violence.
6 DOMESTIC HAUNTINGS: THE LITTLE STRANGER (WATERS, 2009)… 159
The moment of The Little Stranger is just after the Second World War,
when various social freedoms were opening up for women, as they were
for the working classes, with education, the National Health Service and
women taking paid work outside the home. Hundreds Hall, the decaying
imperially funded mansion, is named for its status, suggesting continuity
and age, but it incarcerates its women, prevents movement onward into
the second part of the twentieth century, and destroys each of them,
except Betty, the young maidservant. Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk
has another imprisoning house, in the eighteenth century, its shape
warped, offering a promise of both romance and domestic stability and of
wealth and status, as such grand houses seem to embody. In these houses,
the wife is at the centre, usually with several servants, and the achievement
of soaring aspirations is figured in the shape of the building itself, in this
case one of those fabulous architectural achievements hanging over the
Bristol Avon Gorge. But among houses which are all for status, the house
in which Lizzie, the architect’s wife, lives is no more than a show home.
This one is out of shape. It was built to embody achievement and wealth,
to claim grandeur but is deceptive, constraining, like the relationship
Lizzie is in as the second wife to the abusive and controlling John Diner
Tredevant, the speculative architect. His speculations collapse as the
French Revolution takes hold across the channel. Julie Myerson’s The
Stopped Heart draws from her own locations in East Anglia (she lived in
Suffolk) and a London home where she felt the presence of previous chil-
dren while bringing up her own. The ostensibly peaceful country home,
to which and her husband move, is haunted by an intrusive insidious ghost
who brought past violence to historical residents and to which is receptive,
vulnerable, given the terrible loss of their own young daughters.
Each of these haunted houses reflects the instability of the periods in
which the stories are set, just after the Second World War (The Little
Stranger), at the moment of a terrible murder of two children in
Cambridgeshire in the late twentieth century (The Stopped Heart), at the
moment of the French Revolution and its economic and political shock
waves across the water, in England (Birdcage Walk). The instability of the
houses, the threats to the lives within them, are echoed in the fabric of
domestic lives by all emanations of particular threatened moments of his-
tory. The houses embody and enact the instability of transitions amid
threats at home and abroad, bringing it all into the house/mansion/rela-
tionship and the family. According to Anthony Vidler, the uncanny in the
haunted house operates as ‘the quintessential bourgeois fear’, the
160 G. WISKER
‘underside of material comfort (1992, pp. 28–29). It also exposes control

of and threat to women’s bodies and minds in a period when a range of
texts, some Gothic, some without ghosts also reveal manipulation and
abuse (The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, 2015; Big Little Lies, Liane
Moriarty, 2014; Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, 2012). Emma Liggins notes ‘the
supernatural seems to be activated by, or take the form of, a visitor, guest
or intruder’ (2020, p. 2). None of these houses in all three novels are actu-
ally homely and each has an intruder, who, like all good catalysts, upsets
pretences, and façades and tests the kind of security that houses represent
in the solid bricks and mortar of domestic safety, identity, continuity. The
stranger in The Little Stranger is perhaps Faraday the doctor, rather than a
baby for which the term ‘a little stranger’ is commonly used, although
resistance to change seems to be violently acted out by a ghostly presence,
perhaps Susan, the young daughter who died. In Julie Myerson’s The
Stopped Heart, the house is haunted by a terrible domestic tragedy. The
stranger in The Stopped Heart is James Dix, an evil redheaded casual
worker who dominates the house, the garden and the bodies of the
women, and leaks into the twentieth century attempting to do the same,
taking many guises. The stranger in Birdcage Walk is Tredevant, with his
architectural lies, his romantic lies and physical and psychological control,
his many creditors, entering lives, constructing façades and slipping off
when the going gets rough.
Social and political upheavals and insecurities are played out in the inse-
cure, entrapping houses, which destabilise the women within them. Each
lives in their own transitional moments, with changing financial and social
contexts affecting everyone including the historical ruling classes. Some
upheavals are on a grand scale, the French Revolution, the Second World
War, some local, murders amongst communities and each upheaval plays
out through the lives of the women, embalmed in the past, trying to break
free into a new way of life. In The Little Stranger, the historical insecurities
arise once the country begins to change politically and social, post-war,
casting the old aristocratic semi-feudal landowning class into marginal
positions. For writers and architectural speculators alike, grand historical
insecurities arise as a revolution begins in Birdcage Walk. The Stopped
Heart is more local, domestic and follows personal tragedy that re-awakens
historical domestic violence and danger, vulnerability, in two parallel fami-
lies separated by time. These transitional liminal moments open up dan-
gers for the women in each of the houses, as events trouble the set patterns
expected in their lives, and as the houses themselves suddenly embody the
leakiness, insecurities, and vulnerability. The fabric of each house embod-

ies insecurities of the time. Each is not to be trusted as a home. The social
fabric is ruptured as the fabric of the houses are skewed, shaken, invaded,
and the women’s lives become insecure in terms of family history, romance,
domesticity, community and personal safety.
The Little Stranger (2009): Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) marks a key moment in the
development and resurgence of the ghost story which is influenced by
many of the previous twentieth- and twenty-first-century works, particu-
larly The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson, 1953), and Rebecca (Du
Maurier, 1938). Just post-war, in the period of huge social changes,
including the development of the welfare state, in Waters’ novel, a ghostly
child of a previous era seems to haunt and beleaguer a no longer wealthy
family, the Ayres, scrawling on walls, attacking guests, seeping noisily
through the servants’ tube and the phone. Its aim seems to be to prevent
change, particularly that of the Ayres’ (reminding of Jane Eyre (Brontë,
1847), and or ‘airs’ or spirits) way of life, long underfunded and that of
the unmarried daughter of the house, Caroline. Faced with the changes in
class, economics and housing following the end of the Second World War,
Caroline works well with the changing fortunes of the estate, taking over
some of the management of the rambling house and lands and helping to
sort out the actualities of land sale to property developers, including the
new build of council houses. She takes much of it in her stride, but some-
how she is unable to thrive, to move into the second half of the twentieth
century, and neither can the great house, Hundreds Hall. The writing is
literally on the wall for the family and the house, which falls daily into an
increasingly decaying state, the wallpaper falling off the damp walls in the
yellow room, both Betty the servant and Roderick the war-damaged heir,
being attacked by angry nameless spirits or perhaps just by the dangers of
a decaying house. Meanwhile, an unlikely fairy story prince, the ex-
grammar school doctor Faraday arrives back into the house he visited as a
child, waking it up as he gradually determines to wake up and take over
both house and so, en route, the woman who will inherit it, Caroline, in a
warped, reversed, romantic tale, in which the woman is less of a prize than
the house. In the end, everyone dies, except Faraday, himself its final
owner, seen as a living haunter of a shuttered-up relic of the past.
162 G. WISKER
Sarah Waters engages with issues of women’s freedoms post-war, in

terms of class, heredity, inheritance, the values and constraints of the age.
She channels these issues through the ghostly actions and location, the
enveloping walls of the house, the ghostly scrawling and poltergeist vio-
lence, the attacks and then deaths of the family members and the eventual
shutting down of any forward movement. So here while poltergeist action
interferes with house, occupants and visitors the past aggressively haunts
the present and prevents women’s change. The Little Stranger is a particu-
larly enthralling and well-crafted woman’s ghost story. It both rewards
and contests our usual expectations and readings of the work of a ghost
story, leaving us with more doubts than certainties about any form of reso-
lution, either to the lives of those sucked in and attacked, or to the verifi-
able presence (in fiction of course) of the ghost itself as an agent of
provocation. It has all the elements and contraptions of a ghost story,
echoes back to The Haunting of Hill House with women’s fantasies about
positive futures, and the constraining luggage of the past and present. It
has many of the specifics of The Woman in Black (Hill, 1983): threats to
family, isolation, social change and paralysis, and further back it recalls The
Woman in White (Collins, 1859) and The Yellow Wallpaper (Perkins
Gilman, 1892), with madness, incarceration and dangerous nurseries (also
in The Woman in Black), and the equally dangerous duplicities as well as
impotence of men in positions of power: doctors, the authorities, solicitors
(Kipps, the solicitor, tells the tale in Hill’s novel). Its moment is the con-
tested period after the Second World War, of ‘neo-Forties Gothic’
(Heilmann, 2009) where the landed gentry could not afford the upkeep
of their ancestral homes, while homes for the poor grew from the mud at
the bottom of their neglected lands. Here physical health could be man-
aged by grammar school-educated doctors, but mental health, always an
embarrassment, was largely ignored, and women, proving their workforce
abilities during the war, were returned to and incarcerated in the home, or
enabled to find paid jobs outside in the newly regenerating industrial con-
texts, factories and shops. Class, historical and geographical location
comes together with gender at this moment of change for some and stag-
nation for others. The ghost is an emanation of the Hall’s resistance to
change, but its mischief also destroys the house and family from within. It
is a ghost of unease and conflicts culturally and socially, with pointed
emphasis on gendered tales and possibilities for change, or lack of such
possibilities.
Hundreds Hall on Empire Day introduces a moment caught in mem-

ory, which haunts the lives of the living in a fond memory of better times.
The novel’s opening recalls the days of long summers and Imperial glory
when servants knew their places and wealthy families could be support-
ively feudal. The elegance and comfort of those days is like a snapshot
before a change in the ether, and in the fortunes of England, its landed
gentry, the house and this family. The opening establishes the interest of
Dr Faraday, the grammar school-educated GP, son of a servant at the hall,
who covets and longs to own it, seeing it as ‘absolute mansion’, in which
his mother was in service—in the kitchen—where Betty is and the ghost
later speaks through the tube ‘in admiring the house, I wanted to possess
a piece of it’ (p. 3).
Hilary Mantel’s review captures it all; the rot, the lurking of old values
and old ways all emanating from and embedded in the fabric of the house
and its grounds. This is part of the country house tradition—Austen’s
Pemberley (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) (Parker, 2013); the values are
embedded in and eroded in the fabric of the house. It is a house haunted
by the grand country homes and mansions of a romanticised England
conjured in poetry and long gone if it ever existed, elsewhere undercut by
work such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989), which empha-
sised the wrongheaded collusion with fascism, attractive to the owner of
another great house, just before the Second World War:
Sarah Waters’ masterly novel is a perverse hymn to decay, to the corrosive

power of class resentment as well as the damage wrought by war. Hundreds
Hall is crawling with blights and moulds, crumbling from subsidence and
water damage. Beetles knock behind panelling. Weeds force themselves
through stone. The window panes are dim and warped; they reflect nothing
truly. Its corridors are dark, light spilling unexpectedly from open doors and
the great dome above. The psyches of the inhabitants are riddled with
ambivalence, holed by self-doubt, worn away by genteel, stifled frustration.
They speak the soothing language of upper-class good manners, but all are
unable to face their damaged selves, or contemplate their capacity for doing
damage in their turn. (Mantel, 2009)
The nature of its haunting is the subject of critical discussion (Braid, 2013)
whether it be Empire, loss in the war, class, an individual baby or a longing
for romanticised unreal perfect past, the good old days. But the haunting
is less nostalgic then increasingly angry, trapping and locking, finishing off
164 G. WISKER
any moves towards change, with death. The family are trapped here, like
the family in the TV version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill
House (2018).
The scribblings on the walls and the cries down the telephone or the
bell to summon the servants, the slamming of doors in the nursery, are in
some respects typical signs of a house ghost and a family ghosted by a past
with a hidden secret. The hidden secret would seem to be both the death
of Susan, the first child of Mrs Ayres and older sister to Caroline and
Roderick, but also perhaps the ghost of the long-gone days of imperial-
based English country house landed gentry and wealth. The dead child
speaks back to her living family and disrupts their attempts to move on
beyond her, but the house itself, replete with imbricated memories of a
past of servants knowing their place, and wallpaper in the yellow room
hanging safe and sound, and each part of the house and its occupants
doing what they should, is actually terminally disturbed by the changes
post-war. The encroachment of public housing on the land purchased by
property developers means they can at least preserve something of their
land. The encroachment physically on the house of the ex-grammar
school, working-class, poor boy, Faraday, who became the local doctor,
represents a more invasive threat because of his seeming plan to both win
Caroline and through her the house, thus maintaining or reviving a his-
torical view of the landed gentry and their great houses, and of the role of
women as both marriage partners, and prizes, a view which informs his
grand fairy story plot with himself at the centre.
There is resistance beyond this sleeping beauty plot with the encroach-
ment of new equalities in the general populace and new ways of life for
women. But resistance is doomed. This haunted house and old ways of life
let none move on. No matter how she steps out and meets the developers,
attempts to meet Faradays advances in awkward unromantic exchanges,
and changes her clothing from outdates cocktail dresses and ballgowns to
wellington boots and jackets for the outside world, Caroline is paralysed
within the house, trapped like Jackson’s Elanor Vance within its boundar-
ies, or a sleeping beauty who will die if she attempts to stay awake and
move on. Caroline is in a liminal space; she does not meet the expectation
of women to don fancy decorative clothes like her mother’s mantilla, worn
at teatime, or attach herself to suitors brough to the only party for that
end, while she is also somehow shunted into the mid-twentieth century.
The haunting of this house does not call them back to redress earlier
wrongs, it calls them to recognise the wrongs of the English gentry more
broadly. The sense of entitlement becomes one of incarceration. Caroline

cannot move beyond the bounds of her great house as she tramps the
byways, picks berries and talks to the property developer about gullies and
houses. She is still utterly stuck and trapped in a version of what it means
to be an early-twentieth-century wealthy woman, out of her depth and her
milieu, which have shrunken and been emptied out around her despite her
attempts to adapt. This is a ghost story of the end of an era that still incar-
cerates the living in the deaths of the past, and prevents anyone moving
on. Perhaps it is a ghost story focused on the metaphorical grip of a long-
gone age rather than one of any particularly spooky presences. However,
spooky violent presences are a repeated part of the action in this locked-
down mansion. Roderick, like Betty, is physically attacked by ‘fates’, or
‘spirits’, flitting round him (p. 145). Readying himself for the disastrous
party he is caught in his room and bombarded with objects. In his dressing
room mirror he sees:
something small and dark dropping down in the room behind him—like a
spider dropping from the ceiling. It was followed almost immediately by the
striking of metal against china: a crash so relatively violent in that still room
that it frightened the life out of him (p. 160).
A ‘smudge’ on the ceiling grows and he is aware ‘that something really

uncanny was at work in the room’ (p, 160). For Faraday, this would be
considered unbalanced imaginings, but for Roderick it is paralyzingly dan-
gerously real and the spirit attacking him is intent on refusing his attempts
to rejoin some form of social interaction.
Dr Faraday’s prosaic limited perspective dominates the tone and narra-
tive inclusion or exclusion of The Little Stranger. Named for a great scien-
tific experimenter, he is a product of the grammar school system, a
working-class boy made good, who became a doctor because of schooling
and his parents’ sacrifices, but while he had developed medical practice
abilities in a class-liberated new age, he failed to develop any sensitivities
for others, and also longed to inherit, take over, the very edifices which
represented a past which oppressed his mother, who was in domestic ser-
vice at Hundreds Hall. Faraday coveted the Hall right from the early days
which open the novel, of an imperialistic celebration ‘Empire Day’, when
the minor aristocracy of Hundreds Hall, Colonel Ayres and his wife Mrs
Ayres, graciously invited the local people to their lawn, rather than their
home, waited on by servants, including his mother. Faraday unconsciously
166 G. WISKER
establishes his claim on the back door of the house when he took a piece
of plaster from the Hall. Though his mother flung it in the fire and was
shocked at his theft, he never lost his interest in the house. The novel
makes it clear that though initially invited through the back door, the ex-
servants’ quarters when attending to Roderick the son, he covets the
whole house and what it represents: decayed grandeur occasionally
papered over with and tacked down with the temporary fixing of the fam-
ily, i.e. Caroline up on a step ladder. Like a fairytale castle, Hundreds Hall
is lit up in his mind, but the night of the party is grotesque, and reveals not
only the cracks in the wallpaper but also the cracks and fissures in the
maintenance of order and sanity in the house. The ghostly spirit of the
house attacks Gillian, a precocious and annoying wealthy child, signifi-
cantly the daughter of a local property developer, Baker Hyde, who has
already improved or damaged a lovely old local house. As she pesters the
calm family dog, Gyp, the spirit acts through the dog and she is bitten in
a way which disfigures her, damaging her future chances of marriage.
Women’s roles and expectations are all attacked at this moment, an exam-
ple of the overall control and damage being done to the women. The son,
Roderick, a victim of the war, is also brutally attacked by the poltergeist.
In one reading we can say he imagines spirits flinging his shaving gear
around the room; in another we can see it is the spirit of the house attack-
ing him as he tries to manage himself, readying to join that chaotic party.
Faraday is a stubborn, self-oriented, prosaic narrator, but readers are
caused to veer towards the supernatural as a direct result of his avoiding
and dismissing it. As Mantel notes:
Every ghost story needs a Dr Faraday, a blunt literalist with a sturdy sense
of self. Such a figure begins as the reader’s surrogate, the voice of scepti-
cism. We’ve been told ghost stories before, and we’re not going to fall for
the author’s wiles and tricks; our narrator is determined, on our behalf, to
avoid melodrama. Then as the story progresses, our representative comes
up with ever more tortured “rational explanations” for bizarre events,
explanations that require us to be more imaginative and gullible than we
would be if we simply accepted the supernatural. “I see what’s in front of
me,” Faraday claims stoutly. For the love of God, the reader cries: wake up
man, look behind you! The author has worked a spell. We now see that our
guide and mentor is dull-witted, complacent, perhaps self-deceiving
(Mantel, 2009)
Faraday’s initial visit to deal with what he defined as the hysterics of the
maid Betty led to his regular re-visiting for treatment of Roderick’s war-
damaged leg with his new electrical methods. Through Faraday’s eyes,
spirits, as well as neuroses and Roderick’s PTSD, or in the case of Mrs
Ayres, mourning, are all versions of figments of the imagination. Everything
can be understood and cured by advanced treatment, although he doesn’t
cure Roderick’s leg, thus undermining such medical, rational views of
events and the world. His desire for the house and a version of historical
property and place leads to a fumbled grotesque courtship of Caroline
conducted in village halls and parked cars. His disgust at her body and
presence is clear in the fumbling and disorder of any of their interactions,
while his confusion over what he does or does not like of her represents in
part the confusion of the age over women’s roles, hovering between lovely
and decorative (both pre-war, and post-war as women returned from
munitions factories and field hospitals to home to enable men to take their
places in the job market) or stoic, efficient and plucky (driving ambu-
lances, nursing, making munitions, as well as getting by with little while
simultaneously running homes under rationing and bombing). Caroline
prepares for the party by tacking up the rotting wallpaper, up a ladder to
do so in an unseemly, manly manner, in Faraday’s view. Her appearance as
a kind of ageing debutante launched into a potential marriage market at
the party is distasteful to him and a remnant of a past age. Faraday realises
at that party that she is not intended for him; rather, she is to be matched
with a wealthy man. There is no romance or sensitivity; the match is only
a shadow of a possibility. Caroline, awkward in fancy clothes, is out of
place in the whole fantasy her mother has created to pair her off. Faraday
prefers her in the useful clothing of the wartime woman rather than the
dated fantasy of the Ayres, though it is an heiress he is courting—an heir-
ess of debts and decay. Ultimately, of course, it is the house he wants to
own, not Caroline; she is just a means to an end, in what I have called a
reversal of the Cinderella (Wisker, 2016) story, seeking not a prince but a
faded non-princess, and the house, rather than the romance. But the
woman is tied to the house, to its faded grandeur reflected in her own and
that of her mother, to its rot and decay and its paralysis amid change.
While Caroline tries to engage with the change, walking among the
developing council houses and seeing how the land is measured off and
people will be housed, her own house, Hundreds Hall, incarcerates her in
her past—slams doors, mumbles threatening things down the cut-off
phone, speaks through long-gone servants’ speaking tubes, shuts her
168 G. WISKER
mother in the nursery and eventually, probably, but we will never know,
throws Caroline to her death over the stair rail and into the stairwell below.
This spirit, denied by Faraday, is an embodiment of a resistance to change,
incarcerating the women of the house and destroying them for even trying
to move on or survive. Or perhaps it is a heavyweight poltergeist, the spirit
of a dead child, a little stranger, Susan, the daughter Mrs Ayres lost to
diphtheria (curable by Faraday and others in the recently established post-
war NHS just a short while later). Meanwhile, the ex-grammar school
doctor Faraday wants to take over the house and so the woman who will
inherit it, Caroline, in a warped, reversed, romantic tale, in which the
woman is less of a prize than the house.
Waters engages with issues of women’s freedoms post-war, in terms of
class, heredity, inheritance, and the values and constraints of the age, and
she channels these issues through the enveloping walls of the house, the
ghostly scrawling and poltergeist actions, the deaths and the shutting
down of forward movement. We wonder whether the ghost is Susan, or
the possessed house, or something else, a force for circular loss and anger,
a conservative force for stagnation which embodies and incarcerates,
paralyses and prevents change, refusing to let trauma heal and new
life begin.
So here mid-century, the past ghosts the present and prevents change,
particularly for women. Everyone dies except Faraday, himself its final
owner, seen as a caretaker, a living haunter of a shuttered-up relic of
the past.
Silenced Women: Oppressive, Domestic Spaces,

Murders Birdcage Walk (Helen Dunmore, 2017)
This is Helen Dunmore’s last novel and the sense of darkness, foreboding,
betrayal, pressure, and tension of dashed hopes is maintained throughout.
There is no literal ghost but there is a constant haunting of the life of one
woman contemporary to the novel, by another, her predecessor, the mur-
dered wife lying in her unnamed, unmarked grave out in the woodland
across the grand Avon Gorge of the Bristol estuary. The whole novel and
the location are also haunted by the otherwise erased presence of a strong
articulate outspoken woman pamphleteer, Lizzie’s mother, Julia Fawkes,
who is married to Augustus, an academic focusing on marginal issues. It is
also haunted by the many silenced women who tried to live lives, ordinary
or politically articulate, silenced by domineering controlling partners, by

political movements, or just by the erasure of time. The grave of this lesser
or unknown female pamphleteer, Julia Fawkes opens Birdcage Walk, and
one reading of the novel can be that the writings for liberty and equality,
such as those produced by Julia, Augustus and their political friends, are
not merely pointless work within airy words, alone nothing substantial,
but also dangerous—because of their connections within liberty and its
connections with the French Revolution. It is 1792, the violence of dis-
ruption of the social order with the murder of the French aristocrats,
including the king and queen and princes, is enacted at a distance, heard,
read out, through Susannah’s letters, or in a newspaper report—and their
own politics as a group in England, is that of words rather than actions.
However, these are disruptive speculative times and this violence at a dis-
tance is reflected in the taut, domineering, patriarchal power of John
Diner Tredevant, the speculator builder. His speculations are no less fanci-
ful (and much more costly) than those who write on politics and who
change minds, or who write poetry as does Will Forrest, also a Romantic
and a radical, part of Lizzie’s mother’s broader group. Diner the specula-
tor believes he is more real, solid, useful, because his work is in stone, but
this work soaring above the Avon Gorge in Bristol is no more in the end
but the breaking wings of the terrace. In Bristol, Birdcage Walk is a cov-
ered walkway in the graveyard of St Andrew’s Church in Clifton, but there
have been historical collapses of lovely eighteenth-century houses where
Diner’s developing terrace stood.
Diner projects and invests in an image of himself as an artisan whose
imagined constructions will rise in the air gracefully, expressing solidity,
beauty, achievement and wealth while everything will fit together in his
own, show house on Birdcage Walk above the Avon Gorge. He is an
example of the need to invest and imagine, but also of the folly of believ-
ing in our own fantasies. The control he exerts over the bricks and the
stone, particularly in the deep cellars, the vaulted rooves, the precision of
each piece fitting together, marble tiles etc., in each house, this grand
sweep is as fanciful as the dreams of liberty for the radical pamphleteers,
yet he would feel he was in touch with reality because he works with his
hands and his stonemasons build solid buildings. He has also built versions
of life for Lizzie and, before her, we find out, for Lucie, and here the con-
trol is the same as over the creditors, the workers and the hard stone:
promises, perseverance, total ownership, drive, dominance, control
and deceit.
170 G. WISKER
The novel opens with a death which has clearly been a murder. A man
returns to bury a dead woman whose body has lain unmoved, in the
woodland. It is like Nick Cave’s murder ballad (1996) ‘Where the Wild
Roses Grow’, based on a nineteenth-century folksong from local history
(‘Down in the Willow Garden’/‘Rose Connelly’). She is finally buried out
in the woodland where no one will find her. The detail and care with
which the murderer places the grass back over her body, the twigs, the
parts of the forest which will hide her body, are the skills of a craftsman
and a manipulator, an owner. We then see Diner. He is the murderer, but
he does not see himself as such, rather as a wronged husband, someone
who has had something he owns stolen from him.
This is a meticulously researched book in which the historical and loca-
tional research does not dominate rather fuels the pervasive sense of lim-
inality, the insubstantiality of seemingly solid buildings, plans, ways of life,
and of writings. Places are real and significant: the graveyard of St Andrew’s
Church is ‘where the fictional Julia lies buried with the inscription “Her
words remain our inheritance.” Only they don’t—and it is this imperma-
nence that is another of Dunmore’s poignant themes’ (Kellaway, 2017).
The darkest parts of the book are Diner’s overwhelming oppression
of his new wife, Lizzie. He wants to protect, control and manipulate her
mind, her body and her possessions, and should she resist, curtail and
conclude each of these. His dominance is the deceptive power of pater-
nalism, presenting everything he does as being in her interest. Unmasked
in due course, it is familiar as patriarchal bullying. As a middle-class
woman and the wife of an ambitious, ostensibly successful builder, she
does not need a job, she can keep servants, she should not do this and
that, he says, and yet his total often quite violent control of her body and
mind is not just for effect and a means to sell the houses. Lizzie, sitting
in elegance in the window, sewing, is not following her choice but
instead a marketing act for him, so that potential buyers will buy a ver-
sion of the only finished house, and a version of life as represented by the
woman of leisure, Lizzie. The house he builds her is a little smaller than
the grand others.
The house is like a birdcage itself, a shrunken version of an incarcerat-
ing enclosing home. Diner told Lizzie that the elegance was in the pro-
portions, as a woman’s beauty lies in her bones and her role is to be part
of the show home. He is annoyed because she fails to praise it enough, or
to notice the silence of her step in his perfect building. It is a prison to
Lizzie, as his body imprisons her, weighing her down, heavily controlling
her in their lovemaking and hurting her, perhaps inadvertently. That very
heavy weight he has, that weight that crushes Lizzie is like a heavy stone,
the stone of his buildings. She has to become deceitful to hide his domi-
nance from herself, and from her mother who would disapprove:
When I was with my mother I could not help seeing Diner through a darker
glass. When I stepped out of our house the world changed a little and I saw
things differently. I allowed myself to think how Mammie would frown in
disapproval if his face hardened with anger against me, or if she saw him
push me away when I offended him. She had never seen such things or
heard of them: I had made sure of that. (p. 94)
His grasp of Lizzie bruises her—but his mind games are worse, wanting
her not to work, not to have her own money, not to visit her mother, not
to rescue and raise the baby, Thomas, her mother produces, before she
dies horribly, wretchedly, from what sounds like puerperal fever. Lizzie’s
care for Thomas is intense and Diner resents him as he resents anything
she does, everything she loves, wherever she goes, watching her like a
hawk. Lizzie only manages to do what she must, visit her mother, taking
Thomas in by deceit. Thomas is cared for by the servant who used to scare
the crows, but there are terrifying moments when Diner takes Thomas,
and we have no idea if he will hurt him, and we know he resents him
because he is not wanted in his house, since he takes Lizzie’s attention.
Lizzie, dominated by a man she initially believes she loves, has to turn her
very life and every word to placate and soothe him, to not annoy him,
more tenuous and terrifying, possible damaging when Thomas is involved,
because his vulnerability increases hers. As they discuss the violence of the
French Revolution, beheadings, and the murder of a girl down town,
Lizzie compares the endgame of such acts to bridges, local places:
Think of it, Diner. To kill another human being is like crossing a river by a
bridge which is then swept away behind you. You can never go back again.
(pp. 109–110)
At one point, uneasy she feels the house is haunted, although his first
wife, Lucie, was never actually there, and she sees a threatening figure
disappear outside. These are embodiments of his violent intent expressed
through the lack of reflection, through the body of the house.
172 G. WISKER
My face made no reflection on the glass. The dark outside, it seemed, was
equal to that within. This house could not be haunted, because no one
before me had sat at this window and looked out, waiting. Lucie had never
lived here. She did not know this window and the glass did not know her
reflection. There was no reason for me to feel uneasy, oppressed, as if I did
not belong here and someone else was taking my place. At that moment, my
eye caught movement outside. There was someone there. I moved very cau-
tiously backwards, so that my face would be hidden. A shape showed in the
faint moonlight. (p. 117)
Diner’s mind games are matched by his physical power and the threat
which this poses. He takes her down into the double cellar and locks the
door. We think he will murder her. Like other abused, dominated women,
she learns to manage her words and movements, tense because he could
not only publicly declare her as mad, he could also kill her. All of this
develops before it is revealed to the reader that Diner’s jealousy, power
and weight killed Lucie, although we have our suspicions. Diner needs to
control everything and everyone with this iron selfishness. His worldview
is such that it can cause gracious buildings of stone to rise from nothing,
from mud and rubble, but it is also jealous, demanding, he must have
complete attention. His presence is a terror to her, but she won’t let it
show. The dominance of this will regarding Lizzie and their lives is
matched by that of his control over the stone and the terrifying dominance
of the violent will of the people in the French Revolution, who murder
thousands.
The French Revolution mounts steadily in the background of the novel like
slow turn of a ratchet. Pressure grows as, in Paris, do the piles of bodies. Six
members of the assembly are beheaded… Diner angered not only by his in
laws’ politics but by the inevitable consequence of the war ahead. No one
will be investing in bourgeois England’s real estate while blood flows across
the channel. (Segal, 2017)
The sites and moments of death haunt and threaten throughout this novel,
and although she is not a visible ghost, the presence of Lucie, who was
French, is always in the background as Lizzie senses something and some-
one, a warning, a parallel. At one moment the past existence of Lucie
comes very close when Lizzie, visiting the same dressmaker, is told of the
mystery of Lucie’s uncollected dress and it is if the one woman is donning
the bodily role, filling the gap left by the previous one. The whole
landscape and the buildings are haunted by speculative lies, evil deeds hid-
den from sight, names and lives erased but lingering. This is a dark
moment, a dark place and a threatened life, particularly for Lizzie with the
proximity of the graveyard where her mother is buried following her ter-
rible death in childbirth, and daily fears of being killed in her own home.
Although this mother does not stand in black by the graveyard as a threat
(as in Hill’s The Woman in Black), her death just after childbirth is a warn-
ing of woman’s bodily vulnerability. In the moment that the French
Revolution rages across the channel, a brutal part of this overwhelmingly
dark control and threat is also the detail of everyday Bristol, a place of
intense cold, meagre food, and lack of healthcare. Life is tenuously held.
The creditors, ever a threatening presence, eventually arrive to try and
smash the house down but the worse violence lives tautly restrained, in
Diner, with his mysterious absences, his demands, his increasing jealousy
of an imagined love affair of Lizzie’s as he was of Lucie, his total bullying
control. Lizzie is like a bird in a birdcage, held behind the bars of the
house. Diner, escaping his creditors forces her to run away when her every
desire is to escape him, and they take a boat and row off into the river in
the Avon Gorge, to meet the sea. First he takes her to Lucie’s grave and
she senses death, possibly her own
Light filters through and flies buzz in her hair. The wood is rank with net-
tles, ivy and clinging vines. It smells of meat that is rotting. (p. 391)
His every sentence is filled with various ways he can murder her, and as he
moors the boat and takes her to Lucie’s grave, we have a flashback to
Lucie, silenced, overpowered, marginalised, managed and misunderstood.
Like Browning’s Duchess in ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842), Lucie’s smiles
were seen as evidence of deceit, although only a nervous manoeuvring
when not really understanding the foreign language (because she was
French). Diner extends his power over Lizzie by forcing her complicity in
their shared knowledge of the murder, yet this is a novel of haunted
moments and contacts and, like Charon ferrying the dead over the river
Styx, Julia, her mother, appears to Lizzie at that very moment in the boat
when she realises she is the next victim. Cleverly escaping him, Lizzie sur-
vives and Diner rows off. The dead haunt in ghostly form in the voids and
spaces in which people are buried or trapped, in the woodland in Diner’s
mind, the warped show house pretending to be a home, the dark cellars.
Women are particularly trapped and vulnerable, and even a pre-feminist
174 G. WISKER
pamphleteer can in those days die in childbirth through lack of healthcare

and have her legacy almost entirely erased, her headstone overgrown.
Birdcage Walk would be Lizzie’s live burial if Diner had his way as, like
a bird in a gilded cage, she would only be allowed to promenade along in
front of the houses, no further. However, ghosted by the parallel life of her
predecessor, advised by the more visible ghostly presence of her dead
mother, Lizzie escapes with the money and a warm coat to bargain with
for her own care and protection.
Julie Myerson’s The Stopped Heart (2016)

In her Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (2004),
Myerson researched the stories of those who lived in her nineteenth-
century Victorian terraced house in Clapham, up to her own family’s
arrival in 1988 and discovered another writer who had lived there in 1881,
had children the same ages as her own. She has a fascination with the vul-
nerability of and deaths of children but also the everyday emotional and
physical damage within families and the everydayness of death. A London
house and historical family were one of the origins of this novel, but the
story itself is not one of creative parallels between families over time,
instead it is filled with threat and loss, the haunting of a home where fami-
lies are unsafe.
Threats, hints, death and violence lurk in shadows just around the cor-
ner in old photographs, at the bottom of the long garden, in the apple
barn, in Myerson’s The Stopped Heart. Parallel periods of the nineteenth
century and contemporary times leak between each other, enabled by the
sensitives who pick up future or past parallels and travesties, threats and
catastrophes. This novel is a domestic drama of seduction and violence,
family tragedy, gullibility, complicity. Two families haunt each other, their
traumatic losses opening a kind of gateway between them. Lottie the child
(six years old in the nineteenth-century moment) foresees horrible people,
events and deaths, while Mary Coles in the present feels the presence of
the previous family and the sinister deadly stranger, James Dix, who
destroyed the historical family. There is a haunting of the contemporary
present into the past as the flickering presence of Mary Coles, the protago-
nist in the contemporary moment, is perceived by both Eliza and Lottie
her little sister. Lottie comments in an everyday fashion about seeing this
future inhabitant and Eliza wants to call her short-lived kitten ‘Merricoles’,
resembling Miracles/after the ‘pretty lady with black hair and a very sad
face’, Mary Coles. Katharine Weber comments that Mary’s ‘profound

unhappiness has made time sufficiently porous to create a ghostly pres-
ence’ (2016). Lottie sees forward in time as well as past and talks of a
woman in breeches crying because of a man ‘who took her little girls away
and did-this!-to them’ (p. 58) she frightens her sister and mother, and
explains no further but she has seen the murder of Mary’s daughters, far
in the future.
Mary meanwhile conjures up these children playing round her house in
the neighbourhood, discovering from an old photograph owned by Eddie
and Deborah, new local friends, that the family lived just around the cor-
ner (actually where Mary’s house and garden are), and just around the
corner but ever-present hauntingly in both time spaces is James Dix, a
sinister, ginger-haired insinuating seducer and serial killer.
Dix appears in the little family on the night of a violent storm. A felled
tree knocks him to the ground just outside their door and oblivious to any
bad omens they take him in, care for him, feed him, set him to work. He
can insinuate himself anywhere so he is soon essential in the farm work,
but the hints and half-spoken comments by the children suggest he is
over-friendly not just with the girls, some little more than babies, but also
the boys, and latterly, it is clear, the mother. His own stories of a past of
previously unsuccessful relationships with women only hint at the bad
endings, so that any reader/listener including Eliza, the 14-year-old pro-
tagonist in the early section, misses details of his part in the problematic
relationships, ‘gone bad’ most of which doubtless ended in murder. This
is a violent end he metes out to Phoebe Harkniss, a freckled local girl he
seduces, and prior to that to the dog who annoys him, whose bones he
breaks, whose body he discards, and about whom he lies. James is a sinis-
ter character, familiar in the stories of women from refuges, abused women
who are psychologically entrapped by men. Dix uses psychological, then
physical pressure, imposing upon them and asserting that his love for them
is killing him. He is controlling, portraying himself as a victim, and intent
on seducing naïve young women by telling them they are beautiful; then,
once he has seduced them, all they experience is his controlling side,
undermining, demeaning and continuing to control them. A demon lover,
a charmer with no scruples, predatory, terrifying, fatal, Dix makes the
mother pregnant, abuses the children and seduces Eliza. ‘I’ll come and get
you when I’m ready’ he says (p. 151) ‘He had the knack of always making
you feel that you were the one whose mind had come undine’ (p. 161).
His shadow lurks in the corner of the photo in Mary Coles’ new home,
176 G. WISKER
and in the grass at the bottom of the garden with the swinging gate.
Watching a butterfly in a weird moment of stasis, Mary sees the family.
And then she looks up. A sudden crowd of small children right there on the
old fallen tree. Legs swinging, faces shadowy and smudged, big and small
children, the smallest just a baby, odd, dull clothes, messy hair, pigtails and
boots, all of them squeezed up together in a row, one of them she is certain,
smoking a cigarette—
It’s not possible. Feeling herself settle and still.
She looks again.
And the air thickens and warps and changes shape around her, birds and
insects silenced as time passes. (p. 177)
The cigarette smoking signals Dix’s influence over the girls; they are lured
by his sexualisation of them, casting them as adults in order to seduce
them, as he also seduces their mother. There are in the end two of Dix’s
own babies born in this house. Into this time warp and shift, appears
Eddie, decisively linking his interruption with that of Dix on the little fam-
ily Mary has seen. Warnings move between times, the past ghosting the
future the future the past but this family cannot escape while in the end
Mary does.
But this is more than a haunting of a terrible family tragedy in the past.
Dix’s presence in the contemporary period links him with the devastating
loss of Mary Coles’ two little girls, murdered and found in a ditch. Mary’s
daughters were stolen outside a swimming pool while she went to fetch
the car. Their theft, and loss resembles that of a real historical moment,
close to the fictional location of Mary’s new rural home where in the vil-
lage of Soham, Cambridgeshire in 2002, two little girls were the murder
victims of Ian Huntley, a school caretaker (Huntley’s school teaching
assistant lover, Maxine Carr ,was an accomplice, lying to give him an alibi).
Mary and Graham cannot speak about the loss of their daughters for 100
pages, so we don’t know who was lost nor how. There is a haunting ter-
rible weight of the gap at the heart of their lives; however, they try to
survive and to rebuild something somewhere else. They do not want oth-
ers knowing their story but social media makes this more difficult to man-
age (neighbours Deborah and Eddie have googled them when they come
to supper). The gap of the children hangs over this new house. Mary and
Graham variously cope or collapse, their lives hollowed out by this loss,
and the girls are excised from their acknowledged daily lives. Their deaths
haunt them continually, however, sometimes with an overwhelmingly

sweet memory of the bodies of babies new from the bath, the girls warm
in bed with her, the cries of laughing children, the weight of a child on the
shoulder, and sometimes, increasingly as the book goes on, with odd snip-
pets about the loss, and the worst scenario, the discovery of their bodies
only partially revealed, as so destroyed and mutilated.
The two parallel tales of murderous strangers come closer in the parallel
times in this space of house, garden apple press, the scene of several of the
historical deaths. As in the nineteenth century Miss Narket tells the family
of the murders of three young girls, Mary remembers the police discovery
and removal of her own daughters, whose names, Ella and Flo, begin to
be used again.
When their girls were at last allowed to leave the ditch where they had lain
for so long, their bodies were put into bags and driven to the hospital in a
private ambulance. Mary and Graham were asked if they wanted to be there
while this happened and they thought about it and said they didn’t. But
then in the morning they changed their minds. (p. 265)
The returning memories of time after their deaths contrast with domes-
tic memories of the children, warm from the bath, crawling into her bed
and then suddenly of their ghosts.
She went back into the room, blank and silent, her eyes still barely open,
ready to put herself back into the dark safety of the bed, there they both
were dash she cried out. She saw them for a good few seconds. Both of them
standing there in their unzipped fleeces, warm and present and rosy and
certain. And she thinks they were smiling, that they seemed quite happy
(though later, when she tried to think about it, tried desperately to conjure
their faces, she could no longer be so sure). What she did know was that
despite them being right there in the room, they were also somehow beyond,
apart, out of her reach. She could not have gone to them, could not have
gone any closer, could not have touched them. And before she could do
anything—before she could even call out for Graham—they were gone. And
the cold dread began to take root inside her. (pp. 386–387)
They are ghosts. Their solidity leaks into dissolving; a string presence of
life, they are untouchable, and then gone. As the past forms in Mary’s
memory, so the present of Dix in the long grass round the corner gets
closer, and nineteenth-century teenage Eliza gets further on into her
178 G. WISKER
addiction to Dix’s sexual ownership of her body, and her surprised plea-
sure at sex. Inevitably, the story he always tells of everything turning sour
comes closer to being a reality for her family. Dix never blames himself; it
is always the woman’s fault, and a historically recognisable catalytic char-
acter (like Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy, 1874), he can
always move on to another easily seduced, gullible woman, and then kill
her. He is the stuff of murder ballads: Maria in the red barn (see the film,
Maria Marten, or the Mystery of the Red Barn (2003), based on the real
Red Barn Murder in 1827), and a demon lover, a presence haunting in
medieval myth, faerie lore and local lore. Dix is somewhat reincarnated in
a less destructive, but similarly charmingly oppressive manner in Eddie,
who takes to ringing Mary up at odd times, appears at the door, gives her
flowers, takes her to lunch, locating her in a kind of covert relationship so
that she has to hide some of what happens, even though she had no inten-
tion of a relationship. Charm, oppressive presence, and sob stories, control
women it seems. The lurking men in this novel are psychologically, emo-
tionally and physically destructive, at once the romantic seducer, listener,
and the deceiver or worse the brutal murderer, in a continuum with the
murders of Mary and Graham’s little girls and the murders of the family
who used to live in Mary and Graham’s new home.
As ghostly, feminist Gothic, The Stopped Heart emphasises gender-
power relations, the domestic spaces of women haunted by male invaders,
the window-pane-tapping, gate-opening, doorstep-crossing presence of
these intrusive, destructive, seductive, lying men, and their haunting hor-
rors. Both girl and woman are prescient: nineteenth-century Lottie sees it
coming, as she can imagine forward, as also could Mary as a child, and
perhaps the glimpses and echoes of Lottie warn Mary. Dix causes the
deaths of many of the nineteenth-century family, but twentieth-century
Mary Coles survives, keeps his haunting evil at bay, despite her grief and
vulnerability.
Many late twentieth-century- and twenty-first-century women’s ghost
stories whether in short story or novel form use the structure of the home,
the house and all the safety and position this structure pretends to afford
until the solidity of the buildings which are meant to succour, support,
nurture the domestic environment prove unsafe physically or, more often,
psychologically, and destabilise the invested myths of safety and continuity.
Some of these unhomely places are located in transitional historical
moments, some leak the histories of erased, unspoken moments of
destruction and oppression into the present. Some tales explore the rela-
tionships of power in the past that have influence on, stories to tell to the
present so in The Stopped Heart the house carries many secrets of invasion,
dangerous seduction, dominance, psychological and physical oppression.
Historically, this leads to abuse and death, and the apple press, in the shed
at the bottom of the garden, is where the bodies are stowed. But Dix, this
horrible figure from the past, not only invades the contemporary house on
the corner on the edge of the photographic images but also appears as a
threatening figure, warning of the dangerous darkness of investing in
securities based on domestic and wider community, neighbourly norms. It
is an African saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but there is no
such wider sense of duty of care in the unnamed area (probably part of
London) in which Mary Coles lived and her little girls died. Leaving your
children for a moment on the steps of the swimming pool while eager to
pick the car up so you can take them home, she feels safe, but no one sees
or stops a stranger abducting them. Eddie, the seemingly friendly neigh-
bour who is intent at seduction and transgression, parallels the dangerous
untrustworthiness of the invasive redheaded visitor Dix, who totally
destroys the historic nineteenth-century family and as an evil spirit of
place, uses vulnerability to attempt a new invasion in the contempo-
rary period
The ghosting is not just the evil of the past or its secrets; it is a haunting
of mind, body and the place and space. It catches everyone in a continu-
ous cyclical web of parallel haunting presence, of repetition of the unavoid-
able horror lurking round the corner of the domestic everyday, and of
attempts at recovery and continuity. The threats outside and inside the
house are historic. This man wants to get in again. The doors, the imagi-
nation in Mary’s domestic space, are only occasionally open enough for
her to feel threatened but this time though the fabric of family is severely
threatened, it is not destroyed and the doors and bodies are finally shut to
him. For Mary, there is eventually some resolution, reflected in her lan-
guage, because she can re-imagine her daughters from a happy moment by
the sea, and just follow them:
she will keep on following them over that stretch of bright, early morning
sand, the two people she loves most in this world, small dots of darkness
getting smaller and smaller and further and further away…
180 G. WISKER
It is:
the simplest thing in the world, just to walk, just to keep on going, to follow
them forever, her girls, her daughters, her eyes on them both, keeping them
safe as they raced together over this wide, exhilarating earth. (p. 402)
Each of these three novels take place in haunted houses, but the fabric of
these houses also represents the safety of the woman’s body, her mental
state and as the abusive controlling men in each novel enter the houses
and start to play out their plans of ownership of the buildings, so they try
to control the women. In The Little Stranger, Faraday insinuates his way
back into Hundreds Hall, and frequently disapproves of but seeks the
woman who will inherit the mansion, Caroline. The second wife, Lizzie
in Birdcage Walk, is trapped like a bird in the soaring out-of-kilter osten-
tatious building, with her murderous husband, and Mary Coles, in The
Stopped Heart, is beginning to face her traumatic loss but therefore is
most vulnerable to home, body and mind invasion from the historical
murderous presence of James Dix. These are not safe houses, and their
haunting is informed by gendered oppression, underscored by social and
economic norms. But in two of the novels the haunting also alerts the
women to danger. The bodies and minds of the women are inextricably
interlocked with the houses in which they live. Faraday is the most
respectable and least violent of these men, but the hold of the house and
its resistance to change colludes with him and Caroline and Mrs Ayres
perish. Faced with violent controlling men owning or invading their
homes, both Mary Coles and Lizzie can escape and reject those men.
They can move beyond the threats of the houses in which they live and
are at least temporarily trapped. In Waters’ novel, no one faces up to loss.
The house is newly haunted by the live social upstart Faraday, still in some
form of thrall to the past. In Dunmore’s novel, Lizzie feels the haunting
parallel of Lucie, buried out in the woodland, experiences the direct
ghostly warning of her mother and learns to face up to her mother’s loss.
In Myerson’s novel, Mary escapes, warned by sensing the terrible fates of
the children she partially hears and sees around her, rejecting the insidi-
ous creep of the invasive ghostly Dix. She also faces the loss of her mur-
dered daughters, learning to move beyond silent pain, keeping their
memories vibrant and alive with her.
References
Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice. T. Egerton.
Braid, B. (2013). What Haunts Hundreds Hall? Transgression in Sarah Waters’
“The Little Stranger”. In J. Fabiszak, E. Urbaniak-Rybicka, & B. Wolski (Eds.),
Crossroads in Literature and Culture (pp. 135–145). Springer Verlag.
Brontë, C. (1847). Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder and Co..
Browning, R. (1842). My Last Duchess. Dramatic Lyrics, London.
Collins, W. ([1859] 1996). The Woman in White. Oxford University Press.
Dunmore, H. (2017). Birdcage Walk. Penguin Random House.
Flynn, G. (2012). Gone Girl. Crown Publishing Group.
Gardiner, B. (2009, March 10). Living with the Myersons. Guardian.
Hardy, T. (1874). Far from the Madding Crowd. Smith, Elder and Co..
Hawkins, P. (2015). The Girl on the Train. Doubleday.
Heilmann, A. (2009, March). Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel:
Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and Its Intertexts. Contemporary
Women’s Writing, 6(1), 38–55.
Ishiguro, K. (1989). Remains of the Day. Faber and Faber.
Jackson, S. (1953). The Haunting of Hill House. Viking.
Kellaway, K. (2017). Birdcage Walk Review: Domestic Terror in Georgian Bristol.
The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/19/
birdcage-walk-review-helen-dunmore-georgian-bristol
Mantel, H. (2009, May 23). ‘Haunted by Shame’, Review of The Little Stranger.
The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/23/little-
stranger-sarah-waters
Moriarty, L. (2014). Big Little Lies. Penguin.
Myerson, J. (2004). Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House.
Harper Perennial.
Myerson, L. (2008). Living with Teenagers: A Hell of a Bumpy Ride.
Headline Review.
Myerson, J. (2016). The Stopped Heart. Jonathan Cape.
Parker, E. (2013). The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters’ The Little
Stranger’. In K. Mitchell (Ed.), Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
(pp. 99–113). Bloomsbury.
Perkins, C. G. ([1892] 1981). The Yellow Wallpaper. Virago.
Segal, F. (2017, March 17). Birdcage Walk: Desolation Row. Financial Times.
https://www.ft.com/content/8b8d1da6-04b3-11e7-aa5b-6bb07f5c8e12
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Vidler, A. (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely.

MIT Press.
Waters, S. (2006). The Night Watch. Virago Press.
Waters, S. (2014). The Paying Guests. Virago.
Weber, K. (2016, April 15). The Stopped Heart by Julie Myerson. https://www.
nytimes.com/2016/04/17/books/review/the-s topped-h eart-b y-j ulie-
myerson.html
Wisker, G. (2016). The Feminist Gothic in The Little Stranger: Troubling
Narratives of Continuity and Change. In A. Waters & C. O’Callaghan (Eds.),
Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms. Palgrave Macmillan.
Filmography
Maria Marten, or the Mystery of the Red Barn. (2003). dir. M. Elvey, Motograph
Film Company.
Music
‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, Murder Ballads. (1996). Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds, Mute Records.
‘Down in the Willow Garden’/‘Rose Connelly’, 19th century, see: https://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Wild_Roses_Grow
TV
Haunting of Hill House, The. (2018), Netflix.
PART III
Traumas of Place: Postcolonial

Hauntings
CHAPTER 7
Postcolonial Hauntings and Urban Gothic

in Singapore and Malaysia: The Serpent’s
Tooth (Lim, 1982), The Bondmaid (Lim,
1992), Haunting (Lim, 1981), The Black Isle
(Tan, 2012), Ponti (Teo, 2018), House
of Aunts (Cho, 2014), The Crocodile Fury
(Yahp, 1992)
Ghosts are not always everyday and benign. Postcolonial ghosts have
much to take revenge about, wherever they dwell, since thefts of land
rights, identities, values and life are interwoven losses for them. Those
murdered in invasion, battle, imperial domination and genocide also haunt
the places where they had everything stolen from them, including their
lives. Men and women both sense and are threatened by these sometimes
highly dangerous and revengeful revenants while in war, in seemingly safe
spaces and in the rich houses in which they are employed, women, abused
as bondmaids and servants, are often victims of violence and so become
the ones to haunt homes belonging to the perpetrators of that violence
against them. Some, particularly Pontianaks, thrive for eternity on per-
petual life in death and an endless appetite for widely spread revenge.
Pontianaks are variously women who are the victims of abuse, rape, mur-
der and of death in childbirth (possibly as the result of such violence or
tragedy). They turn into revengeful spirits, ghostly, vampiric, angry with

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_7
186 G. WISKER
long, pointed fingernails, seeking victims to mutilate and devour. For

those of Chinese and Southeast Asian origins, these varied ghosts are part
of everyday reality, some familiar and friendly, many warning, threatening.
They inhabit roadsides, lakes, canals and graveyards, some returning day
and night or, as the original and rightful owners of usurped homes, inhab-
iting plantations and the interstices of Southeast Asian cities, apartment
blocks, malls, public buildings, metro stations, and houses. They demand
attention and are ignored at one’s peril.
As Grandmother warns:
Let sleeping ghosts lie. Never dismiss ghosts as figments of the imagina-
tion or shades left from nightmares. Ghosts are as real as you or me, and as
susceptible to insult. (Yahp, 1992, p. 313)
David Punter (2000) comments on ways in which postcolonial Gothic

exposes how imperial and colonial texts characterised and erased colonised
foreign subjects as objects, the Other. Women, indigenous people and
foreigners are each constructed as Other, abject, victims or monsters. In
this context:
… as the great globalising project of modernity, which has its own control-
ling relationship to the postcolonial, rolls on, one of its more curious cur-
rent effects is that, perhaps against expectations we live increasingly in a
world of ghosts, spirits, phantoms. (Punter, 2000, p. 61)
Punter also indicates the constant presence, the reminders, the ghosting
and haunting of those silenced Others (often women). I argue that their
voices become the channels for contemporary postcolonial women writers
of the Gothic to reimagine and rewrite. From a position of ostensible
double disempowerment and silencing, women writers of postcolonial
ghost stories also have the privileged position of insiders—alive to (some
of) those histories which must be given recognition and respect and to the
constant presence of their owners, ghosts in everyday lived experience,
demanding to be heard. Revenants, by reminding us of these hidden
crimes, enable us to re write, re-envision and move on. As Abraham and
Torok put it:
7 POSTCOLONIAL HAUNTINGS AND URBAN GOTHIC IN SINGAPORE… 187
the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or

collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of
some part of a love object’s life, the phantom is therefore also a metapsycho-
logical fact: what haunts us are not the dead but the gaps left within us by
the secrets of others…. those we are concerned with are the dead who were
shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to their
grave. (Abraham & Torok, 1994, p. 171)
The tales and figures of ghosts and Pontianaks enable women writers of
postcolonial Gothic to expose the contradictions of contemporary and
historical life for women in particular. Ghosts represent the haunting
return of the past and its inconsistencies, hidden horror and silences, and
the leaking of truths about dark deeds from the ostensibly pristine new
builds of motorways, high rises, metros. Their insistence that they be seen
and heard, and listened to, make them perfect vehicles for gendered cri-
tique of the contemporary fast-growing cities of Southeast Asia, particu-
larly Singapore, with its geographical position in the confluence of East
and West. Versions of Singaporean history are selected and represented,
curated for the visitor in the growing number of museums and now artistic
contemporary displays, friezes. There is also the remaking of old furniture,
of shop fronts and go-downs, the rediscovery of old faded photographs
turned into postcards, Singapore revised and revered, sharing its past or a
version of it. But like so many cities, much is erased, re-written, re-
represented, and among that the abused and silenced lives of the women,
Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Ghosts reappear to intrude violently, or silently
comment. They are on every street corner and room corner, domesti-
cated, embedded in the fabric of the shifting, changing streets and build-
ings, and warning from the beds, walls, attics and cellars. Shrines at the
roadside and bulldozed cemeteries indicate that the versions of lives and
stories, of those in power and more particularly of the poor women, will
be heard through their intrusion into the lives and stories of the living.
Ghosts voice and vehicle discontent with imbalances in gender relation-
ships, unbalanced imperial and now new post imperial mercantile power
relations of contemporary Southeast Asia, and in particular, of Singapore.
Culturally diverse, historically vital and significant, Singapore, a rich,
constantly changing small tropical island enacts and shares a lived experi-
ence of defamiliarisation. A city state, placed precisely on the equator,
Singapore exists and morphs in the liminal space that suggests crossings of
zones of time and weather, trade and nationalities, cultures and their
188 G. WISKER
histories, plainly acknowledged, marketised and also darkly secret. It pro-

duces a rich variant of tropical urban Gothic (Joaquin, 1972; Edwards &
Guardini Vasconcelos, 2016) and the accompanying ghosts, which are
variously hidden within, beneath and behind Singapore’s fast-moving
prosperous cityscape. This mixture of versions of Singapore is a hymn to
consumerism and rapid technological change, simultaneously nurturing a
parallel world of the supernatural. It can be understood and appreciated
when considering Singapore’s liminal and influential location, and its
investment in both the world of consumer capital and trade, and the reten-
tion and nurturing of the folklore of, and everyday belief in, ghosts from
its Chinese, Malay and Tamil Indian heritage, as evidenced in the wide
range of Singapore ghost stories published (Lee, 1989–2020; Yeo, 2004)
and also shared by everyone in everyday discussion. Some foundational,
widespread stories morph with time and place. Others are specific responses
to devastating events, such as the Japanese invasion of the Second World
War, or to historical or ongoing culturally inflected practices, such as
neglect of the elderly poor, abuse of servants, particularly bondmaids in
wealthy houses, and controls over women’s bodies and reproduction. As
de Certeau notes concerning haunted places and cities in particular,
‘[t]here is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden
there in silence’ (1988, p. 108). Working with early Freudian psychoanaly-
sis and Walter Benjamin’s critical theory, Steve Pile, in Real Cities:
Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (2005), character-
ises the Gothic significance of ‘dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts for the
emotional work of city life. Dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts are sig-
nificant in other ways too. They reveal aspects of the lived experiences of
cities, of urban social process, and also of the spatial and temporal consti-
tution of city life’ (p. 3). Singapore, along with New York and London, is
one of his chosen cities. He says, ‘I have sought to open up a field of analy-
sis that is capable of taking seriously the imaginative, fantastic, emotional,
the phantasmagoric aspects of city life’ (p. 3), and in his walks in London
uses both the work of Simmel and Ian Sinclair’s psychogeography of
the city.
In his introduction to his work on urban Gothic, Steve Pile character-
ises the manicured, constantly revitalising, soaring testimony to capitalism
that is urban Singapore, with its suppressed, wilder natural side and its
ghostly histories and hauntings as indicative of the hauntings of modernity:
Singapore’s modernity and its urbanism is ghostly, haunted, just as it is mag-

ical and vampiric, Singapore is not alone in this—such experiences with
ghosts expose the ghostly figures that parade through the phantasmagoria of
modern city life, the hauntedness of modernity itself. (Pile, 2005, p. 135)
Pile’s interest in haunted cities, particularly Singapore, is shared by several

women writers, notably Catherine Lim, Sandi Tan, Sharlene Teoh and Liz
Williams. They find stories and locations in the glitzy cityscape of
Singapore, its histories of imperial and colonial intrusion and rule, inva-
sion, import and export, smuggling, drugs, vice and violence, and the
continuities of family life. This is all fertile ground for ghost stories, which
can formulate, channel and help manage the change, pain and loss.
Katarzyna Ancuta talks of animism in Asian cultures and the continua-
tion of ghosts in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where Chinese
Confucian culture in which ‘the living are obligated to care for their ances-
tors’ (2020, p. 176) is predominant and there is no suppression of super-
naturalism from the Chinese communist party (Ancuta, 2020, p. 175).
Ghosts are an everyday part of life and it is as if, as Avery Gordon notes,
the ghost ‘is a social figure and investigating it can lead to that dense site
where history and subjectivity make social life’ (2008, p. 8). As ghosts are
social, it is unsurprising that they are part of families, their homes and
everyday life.
In women’s Southeast Asian, Malaysian and Singapore ghost stories
explored here there are several young women who refuse to be merely
silenced, and marginalised mortals who live alongside and channel ghosts,
or to be defined in purely negative terms if they are themselves ghosts, or
spirits. Instead, like Southeast Asian (Malaysian/Australian) postcolonial
Gothic writer Beth Yahp, they (authors and protagonists) point out that
ghosts are both wise and dangerous. Ghosts and ghost seers reveal secrets,
seek revenge for inequalities, silencing, brutality and theft, and also accom-
pany the everyday activities of ordinary people. These are tales filled not
just with the revengeful ghosts of mistreated young women, some are
Pontianaks, vampiric ghosts with claw-like, pointed nails seeking retribu-
tion for their death in pregnancy, but also with insightful grandmothers
and aunties, and resourceful young women, such as one, herself a
Pontianak, in Zen Cho’s ‘The House of Aunts’ (2014). In Beth Yahp’s
The Crocodile Fury (1992), Grandma, once a bondmaid in the house of
the wealthy landowner, is renowned and sought after for her effective
190 G. WISKER
engagements with ghosts. Only very strong women can begin to work
with them, as they are deceptive and a bit of a nightmare.
Grandmother says: People who strike bargains with ghosts or demons some-
times lose out in the end. People who give their promises recklessly have
been known to regret it. Ghosts know things that people don’t. The favour
a ghost grants always has strings attached and often turns out to be a night-
mare benefit for the one favoured. Never think you can outsmart or outbar-
gain a ghost, unless you happen to be a powerful wisewoman, well-versed in
the arts of magic. Unless your hair is firm at the roots and your eyesight as
sharp as a piercing. Sometimes even powerful wisewomen get caught out.
(Yahp, 1992, p. 313)
This is a postcolonial Gothic novel in which the ghosts of historical radical

forces, deemed bandits, led by Mat Saleh, rebelling against the colonial
imposition of the wealthy man on the hill, return for revenge to the
wealthy man’s house, now overgrown (Wisker, 2016). His historical lover,
stolen from the sea, haunts the body of the Grandmother’s granddaugh-
ter, a young girl who also acts as a conduit for the fury of the natural and
bandit worlds, displaced by the wealthy man, and whose story forms much
of the novel. The sins of the past are punished and the land reclaimed.
These are ghosts of an oppressive imperial history that silenced and
restricted local people, and particularly women, now re-energised for posi-
tive change in the young.
Not all ghosts are vengeful. In Southeast Asian and Chinese lore, in
Singapore and Malaysia, everyday ghosts accompany everyday life as a
fond reminder of lost loved ones, a memory of anyone who died and
moved into the afterlife. They are part of everyday conversation and a way
of understanding actions. Nurul Huda Binte Abdul Rashid’s master’s
research (2009) involved interviewing ‘taxi drivers to the old folks often
found sitting at the void decks’ (p. 8), 80 people in all, six in depth, about
their stories based on beliefs in and sightings of ghosts. Respondents with
a ‘third eye’ saw ghosts everywhere who had something important to tell
them, in bookshops, hawker stalls, homes, but worried that Rashid would
be followed by the ghosts she had brought into solidity just by talking and
writing about them, she says:
Growing up, we were told never to utter the full name of the Pontianak or
toyol for it might beckon a visit later that night, tapping at the window with
her long fingernails, or playing with our toys. If we wanted to speak about
them, we would have to refer to her as Cik Pon and it as ‘T’, abbreviations
that disguise and elude our calling of them. Some of my older informants
warned me about my choice of a topic. ‘Why do you choose such a topic?
Not scared later see ghost?’ (p. 54)
A toyol is a greenish, unformed baby ghost; Cik means Aunt. Rashid sug-
gests the very collecting and writing of the stories could bring ghosts
into being.
Ghosts are everywhere and everyday parts of families, insisting on
attention, reminding of the follies and power struggles of the past. Many
such struggles and silences concern women, sold as bondmaids, subject to
rape and violence at the hands of their owners, kept as concubines, owning
no property themselves, sidelined when old, maintained as wives as if con-
sumer items to signal wealth, or killed at birth, worthless because female.
Ghosts are on every street corner, in every high rise building and in every
home, in the beds, the fabrics, the buildings and the minds of those they
have moved on from, who are reminded of their guilt, of the carefully
selected version of history which ignores the violence done to these ghosts.
They are a signal of the erasure yet everyday honouring of what made the
families and the grand monopolies, the monarchies of Singapore.
Women writers of postcolonial Gothic ghost stories recover hidden his-
tories and enable a re-embracing of the past, as well as of the value of the
self in the present. Much of what they expose is historical, silenced cruelty,
ostracism, racism, sexism, disenfranchisement and genocide, but they also
emphasise how the afterlife accompanies everyone’s seemingly ordinary
daily life, and how everyday ghosts continue to exist side-by-side with the
living. Revengeful ghosts can invade the homes, minds and bodies of their
tormentors or their descendants, howling through the silence and ripping
apart all complacent securities.
Artifice, Bondmaids and Family Ghosts—

Catherine Lim
Catherine Lim, English teacher, outspoken journalist, disinters the hor-
rors of aspiring middle-class and wealthy homes in a materialistic Singapore.
Lim tells of everyday family ghosts comfortably in their place in Singapore
homes and lives, but she also revitalises ghosts and the parallel world of the
afterlife to expose historical and ongoing inequalities and, in particular,
devotion to ostentatious success and the brutal treatment of women. Her
192 G. WISKER
collections Little Ironies of Singapore (1976), Or Else, the Lightning God

and Other Stories (1980) and They Do Return … But Gently Lead Them
Back (1983a), and the novella The Serpent’s Tooth (1982), expose con-
spicuous consumption, materialistic consumerism, the intense pressure for
success in education, finance, property and ‘good’ marriages, and the folly
of ignoring the presence and rights of the dead and buried/undead and
unburied ghosts. In ‘The Anniversary’ (1983b), a devoted lover waits for
the return of a dead fiancée on her death anniversary; in ‘The Exhumation’
(1983c), the constant development of this small island state involves the
exhumation of graves, during which a dead grandmother returns. In Little
Ironies of Singapore (1976), there are two tales of over-pressurised teenag-
ers taking their own lives if shamed with, or likely to be shamed with, poor
school grades, while in another tale, ‘Lee Geok Chan’, the spirit life tri-
umphs when a girl student who dies before her Cambridge Syndicate
English examinations still manages to write her answers.
Part of the family, some ghosts continue to age beyond death and
expect the attention of their relatives. In ‘The Child’ (1999), when a baby
girl dies, the mother continues to care for her as part of the family, and, as
she grows up, even arranges a marriage to someone else’s dead son. She
speaks to her daughter daily at the temple:
For years, Ah Cheng Soh had been going to the Hai Thong Temple to speak
to her dead daughter Ah Lian, through one of the temple mediums. Ah Lian
had died in infancy, during the Japanese Occupation, when desperate moth-
ers, too poor to buy milk for their babies, fed them sugar water. (p. 118)
One day, as if chatting in the sitting room, Ah Lian reminds her mother of
her continuing duty:
‘My Mother, find me a husband.’

So the cause of the poor girl’s distress, which she had been so reluctant
to reveal, was loneliness. Alone in the vast drear world of the dead, the girl
yearned for a male companion. (p. 120)
The marriage between the ghosts is arranged and all is settled. But Lim
extends the tale. One morning a child appears on the doorstep:
Ah Cheng Soh froze in the shock of a sudden realisation: it was exactly nine
months after the marriage of her daughter. She stared at the tiny infant in her
arms: This was her grand-daughter. A ghost child, but her grand-child nev-
ertheless. (p. 122)
Responsibilities do not die. Bringing the child up is actually lucrative for

the grandmother, since she knows all sorts of secrets and lottery numbers.
While the notion of a ghost grandchild is unusual, the marriage tale is
more widespread. Now a series on Netflix, Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost
Bride (2013), set in 1890s Malaya, presents the opportunity of marriage
to a ghost, the son of the wealthy Lims, as a way out of her father’s, her
family’s, poverty for Li Lan, who is only 17 and more interested in a
romantic liaison with a living person: ‘One evening, my father asked me
whether I would like to become a ghost bride…’ (p. 3). What follows
involves contrasts between the overwhelming busy day life of the large
rich Lim family, meetings with her future husband in a dark otherworld,
losing her own body. Like embodying or enacting a conceit, extending the
expectations and experiences of the material and materialistic world into
the ghost world emphasises the liminality between the two, their contrasts
and overlaps.
It is in Catherine Lim’s The Bondmaid (1997) and The Serpent’s Tooth
(1982) that the everyday haunting and palpable histories of crimes com-
mitted on young women, in rich houses, emerges as a theme.
The Bondmaid (1997)

Despite the shopping malls and glamour of expensive restaurants in post-
colonial Singapore, superstition is everyday, and The Bondmaid opens with
the appearance of a female ghost, one of the many ghosts of Singapore, an
island city state layered with histories and ghosts at every corner and cross-
roads. Houses and villages, many built over with grand new complexes,
malls and motorways, maintain ghosts of an ordinary or a violent past.
Some are there to tell of the folly of erasing the older, better ways, of
grasping at richness, and of the brutality meted out to women. Lim’s vic-
tims and ghosts are usually women, the most abused, considered worth-
less. Their ghosts carry a triple burden reminding of sexual abuse, the
undervaluing of the life of the poor, and the violence of erasure of estab-
lished ways of life, expressed in galloping consumer capitalism and
new build.
The Bondmaid (1997) is a story of a haunting of contemporary life by
historical losses of love and values. Cemeteries are notable features in the
194 G. WISKER
small island, treated here as in Tan’s novel, as housing dead who behave
like the living, with relationships and rights. Early on:
A cemetery outside the village. The rooster broke up trysting ghost lovers
and sent them back weeping into their tombs; it disrupted séances at graves
and left transactions uncompleted, for the vaporous forms of the dead,
pushing their way up through the hollows of the bamboo stakes driven deep
into their graves by the hopeful living, had to stop halfway and go down
again. (p. 12)
These commonplace ghosts and local places are intruded on by a terrifying

figure, who resembles Sadako, the revengeful long-haired ghost in white
who crawls out of the TV in Koji Suzuki‘s Ring novel series (1991–2013)
and the film franchise (1995–2019). Perhaps a victim of accidental death,
probably a Pontianak, she is vengeful, following abuse, rape, murder, most
likely at the hands of a Japanese soldier. Her place is subsequently marked
with placatory offerings:
The night soil man saw a female ghost. Up long before anyone in the village,
with his large collecting buckets strung at each end of the long pole across
his shoulder, he froze as the shape loomed before him. He saw a woman in
a long white dress, swaying in front of him, an immense curtain of hair
pulled over her face, which she slowly parted with both hands as she came
close to peer into his face. He shouted, ran and fell, dropping his buckets,
which splashed over a wide area of ground so that for days the village reeked
of the evidence of the ghostly encounter. Some said she was a young woman
who had been raped and killed by Japanese soldiers during the Occupation,
some said that she was the crazy woman who had killed her child, then run
screaming under a full moon to jump into a well. A little jar of joss-sticks and
a plate of oranges and flowers later appeared on the spot where the night soil
man had seen her. (p. 12)
This is reported as if only a slightly out-of-the-ordinary occurrence. This

ghost might be memorialised and appeased with offerings, but she is also
revengeful.
The Bondmaid (1997) reveals dominance of spiritual figures of ghosts
and goddesses controlling the lives of rich and poor, the overwhelming
oppression of class hierarchy and its translation into the brutal, entitled
abuse of poor young women. Lim’s novels and short stories reveal a
Singapore history where much has, like the spread of the motorways and
the soaring of skyscrapers, been layered over and hidden. The ghost of the
bondmaid, Han, also lingers in the area. Han is one of many girls born to
a poor village woman who promptly rejects her worthless girl children.
Sold into household slavery by her hungry overcrowded family, Han suf-
fers constant daily abuse from the men of the rich family, who treat her as
they do other bondmaids, as there for their service and their pleasure. But
Han is a very focused young woman and becomes childhood friends with,
then engages in an affair with, Wu, the young master of the house. Their
love is, of course, denied. Her life is harsh, and when she dies, he devotes
the rest of his to mourning her, trapped in a decaying house, the last of its
kind left in a particular part of this small, rapidly developing, changing,
capitalist island, where motorways intersect across areas once inhabited by
Singaporean Chinese or Malay families in grand old colonial houses.
Haunted by her and by mistakes, he finds the power to reject the eco-
nomically based hierarchical values of his family and the rapidly changing
culture, refusing offers of large amounts of money to move. Now an old
man, Wu holds a permanent sad vigil over a depleted shrine to a goddess
said once to be powerful and where Han’s ghost might exist.
The grand house from which Wu came and into which Han was sold
perpetrated class separatism leading to a range of deaths, among those, an
adolescent girl, several bondmaids and Han, whom he loved, but was for-
bidden even to play with, let alone marry. In the House of Wu, old patri-
archs and perverse uncles use up the bondmaids, casting them off while in
their teens. Han’s childhood friendship with Wu leads her to receiving
both more chastisements and some favours, but they are forbidden to be
together, and Wu marries a wife chosen by the two rich families. When
Han gives birth to a boy, Wu’s son, he is switched for a worthless girl, so
that Wu’s wife can claim a boy child, but Han refuses to accept or feed this
substituted child, who is rescued from her.
Han’s story reveals sexual abuse, hierarchical oppression and power, the
hold of opium on poor and rich, and the worthlessness of the lives of the
poor, particularly women and girls. Abuse is established and normalised.
Chu, a long-dead bondmaid, was brought to the house at 15 to ‘service
the Old One’, also called the ‘Rampant One’ (p. 17), who had already
brutalised and killed her sister. She was brought in to replace her sister—
her beloved sister never spoken about but enshrined in memory forever in
a faded photograph in her drawer. The sister had also been brought in at
15. Discarded at 20, she went home to die, her young body riddled with
196 G. WISKER
disease. ‘“He kept healthy, but he destroyed the bodies of young girls,”
wept Chu’ (p. 179).
Both Chu and Choyin, Han’s predecessors, hang themselves to escape
the constant abuse. Han sees them, of course, and comments on their lack
of slippers, their twitching feet. Caught in the house by the long-dead
Chu, the two have an ostensibly prosaic conversation:
Chu bore down angrily upon her.

‘Why did you give Spitface my money?’ she demanded.
‘But you gave it to me. I thought I could do as I liked with it,’ said Han.
She wanted to add, ‘But you’re dead. You hanged yourself, remember? How
can you be talking to me like this?’ She checked the impoliteness, both of
the question and of the remark that almost escaped her lips, that it was very
strange and improper of Chu to be wandering around with no slippers or
sandals and her blouse opened, exposing both breasts. (p. 253)
Han, polite, quizzical, is also aware of impropriety. Chu is inappropriately

dressed. It seems impolite, perhaps, to remind this girl, who hanged her-
self in the house after so much endless abuse, that she is indeed dead, and
money would not do her much good anyway.
The story ends tragically with Han’s death, and Wu left behind by his
remaining wealthy family, who believe themselves cursed by a moody god-
dess. He mourns Han for the remainder of his life, tends the goddess’s
shrine, and refuses money to build a petrochemical complex on his piece
of land. His scruples die with him and ultimately his hut is replaced by a
motorway—the Kio San Thong Road.
Catherine Lim’s The Bondmaid (1997) brings together the whole range
of issues of women, ghosts, power, violence, legacy and the everyday con-
versation with ghosts, part of the domestic, urban, personal and political
existence in everyone’s lives. So widespread is the dehumanising servitude,
sexual exploitation and death for bondmaids that Lim furnishes this and
other rich houses with the bemused, angry, everyday ghosts of those
young girls, indicting a society where women were worthless and women
of lower classes considered less than human. Lim’s several tales of bond-
maids emphasise the casual exploitation and devaluing of women’s lives in
a sophisticated, increasingly wealthy country, Singapore, where the history
of imperialism and trade led to a crossroads of cultures, the dark sides of
each hidden behind the façades of grand buildings. The crossroads is also
that of Chinese culture in several forms, and of varieties of other Asian and
western cultures.
The Serpent’s Tooth (1982)

The house of Wu is a harsh house, but that in The Serpent’s Tooth (1982)
is much harsher. Gender and economics combine in this household, where
the lives of poor working women are considered worthless. Young servant
girls and bondmaids are abused, and new-born girl babies, considered
valueless, have their faces turned into the ash to die.
‘My elder sister,’ said the mournful Ah Kheem Chae… was murdered just a
few minutes after she was born. A baby girl, they said. That’s no good.
There was the tray of ash in readiness on the table, in case it was a girl; the
baby girl, naked and squalling, was lifted, taken to the tray and her face
turned into the ash. A short struggle, and it was over. They wrapped her in
rags and buried her, not in secrecy of night, but unashamedly, in the open-
ness of daylight. Another girl, said the neighbours sympathetically, for they
too had smothered, or seen smothered, baby girls in their time. (Lim,
1982, p. 106)
There are two dominant forces in this house; one is Angela, the material-
istic perfumed wife, and the other the ghost of the now-dead lecherous
Grand-Uncle. His spirit still haunts the house through the solid body of
the bed on which he used to abuse and rape young girls, and where, in one
instance at least, at the age of 75, he murdered a 14-year-old. However,
Angela mistakenly considers the bed as an antique, gets it restored and
then is vividly haunted by the morphing image of Grand-Uncle, all the
men in the family (including her husband Boon), and the dead girls. The
bondmaid ghost returns to haunt them all, and the house resonates with
hidden evils of rape and slavery.
Grand-Uncle was meticulous about his health. He had his three wives brew
cleansing herbs for him to ingest or soak in, and one night, in bed, he took
a fourteen-year-old virgin by force and she died of the pain and shock. They
removed her bleeding body and buried her quietly, but her ghost returned
to haunt Grand-Uncle repeatedly. He became impotent, then mad, then
one night, hacked the bed to pieces. (Lim, 1982, pp. 105–6)
198 G. WISKER
Angela treats both bed and the dead girl as if antiques:
… She became excited, she wished there were a picture of the fourteen-year-
old bondmaid to match with the girl in her imagination, but of course,
bondmaids had no photographs. (Lim, 1982, pp. 105–6)
There are many layers and sides to this materialistic, fast-growing society,
including the hidden secret of the death houses, temporary asylum, where
the old and poor are turned out to die. Despite their wealth, Angela’s fam-
ily is very troubled, and cannot care for or acknowledge those who are
neither beautiful nor successful, including the aged grandmother; the
now-aged and useless housekeeper, the ‘idiot’; and Michael, the son with
a disability. Pandemonium in the house of death is covered over as Angela
rescues the ‘idiot’, and son Michael, back into the white Mercedes (and
costly treatment), ignoring the signs and revelations of the breakdown of
the family and its values.
Angela managed to grab Michael crying all the time, ‘Oh my darling, my
darling, Mummy was so worried for you,’ as she scrambled down the hateful
steps in this hateful house of decay and death, to the light outside where the
white Mercedes gleamed in the bright afternoon sun, waiting. (Lim, 1982,
pp. 167–8)
It seems that nothing has changed. The memories and decay are still evi-
dent, ghosting, behind the glittering materialistic lifestyles; however, as in
much postcolonial Gothic, events have unearthed the unforgettable,
revealing the many hidden histories of theft, rape, abuse and silencing.
Domestic Ghosts: Shirley Lim, ‘Haunting’ (1981)

Catherine Lim’s domestic ghosts are abused bondmaids seeking revenge
or some form of reparation, but in Shirley Lim’s ‘Haunting’ the house
itself starts to envelop and take over the new bride, schoolteacher Jenny,
sucking her into the ongoing, dominant real and everyday ghostly domes-
tic role. Discussing Shirley Lim’s work ‘Haunting’ (1981), Andrew Hock-
Soon Ng argues that the tale is:
rehearsing certain patriarchal assumptions about the family and femininity,

‘haunting’ seems to reinforce them, be a demonstration of women’s collu-
sion with them… it is not clear if the story, in the view of the male Gothic
plot, is implying women’s acceptance of the fate, or if it is a real Gothic story
that reveals the terrible interpellative power of patriarchy in entrapping
women without their being aware. (Ng, 2006, p. 77)
Hock-Soon Ng sees this as a domestic Gothic tale reworked in an Asian

context, making comparisons with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous
domestic, post-natal, Gothic horror ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1872), also
about domestic oppression and a form of madness. While I agree with the
similarities, in this domestic ghost story, ‘Haunting’ (Lim, 1981), Jenny
survives and is drawn irrevocably into the domestic trap, part of the house
of ghost-like women.
A young Cantonese-speaking schoolteacher, Jenny, moves with hus-
band Jon-Ann to the old Malay family home presided over by his mother
and the servant Toh Peh with whom she is unable to communicate since
both are Nyonya, and speak ‘bizarre’ Malay. As anthropologist Joo Ee
Khoo (1996) notes, Nyonya are women of Peranakan origin, Chinese
women from Malacca who settled into and adopted Malay community
identities but with Confucian codes and lifestyles. A ‘highly domesticated
creature’ (Khoo, 1996, p. 122) confined to the home, a Nonya manages
the domestic space of the house and is meant to be a mother, bearing a
male child in order to become the matriarch of the husband’s household.
Dislocated from her home town of Selangor, Jenny settles into a slow
stasis in the surrounds of the old house and, sleeping in the afternoon, she
realises that the house is actually calling her, opening the traditional place
for her in a domestic role, in contradiction to her new woman’s role as a
schoolteacher:
she had raised the whispers. They were saying ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’. It was the
house giving voice to a welcome for her, despite the mother’s remoteness,
Toh Peh’s coldness. Like a child with a mind of its own, it was calling, if the
house was haunting her, Jenny thought, it was only a playful and tender tug
for her attention. (Lim, ‘Haunting’, 1981, p. 140)
The house is both ghostly and domestic, kindly, like a friendly but
demanding child.
Jenny finds she is shrinking, losing weight, almost ghostlike, ‘slender,
then thin, then skinny, till now there was a skeletal quality to her frame
almost as if the flesh on her body were becoming translucent and letting
200 G. WISKER
in light’ (p. 130), but she is pleased with this and feels in control. It’s a
break from the commuting, constant cooking and keeping house to move
to this new home without a job as yet, with servants do everything for her.
Watching little crabs scuttling near the water of the straits, however, gives
her an unsettled feeling. She does not fit in. Only Jenny hears the haunting
whispering in this old family house, eating alone the traditional food the
other women cooked, which she doesn’t like, and responding to ‘an audi-
ble whisper which flew in from somewhere’. Her mind feels a void, her
body helpless, she is ‘gathering the eddies and ghosts of sounds’ (p. 139)
from the house. Jenny confides to her friend Su Weng that she thinks the
house is haunted, hearing sounds in the afternoon ‘from deep inside’ it.
Among the heavy old furniture and traces of the past there is a space which
‘harbours echoes and puddles of darkness in its niches’ (p. 136). Everything
is meticulously cleaned but the historical traces of family, grandeur, sweep-
ing staircases, rattan furniture and flowered china surround her. Su Weng,
however, experiences nothing paranormal or supernatural. Her only con-
cern is that the house ‘doesn’t belong to this century’ (p. 136).
Read as female Gothic, the comfort of the home and the silence of the
husband in this story can be seen as collusive in the entrapment of the
woman, Jenny. Andrew Hock Soon Ng references Kate Ferguson Ellis’s
exposé of the ‘prelapsarian purity’ (1989, p. xi) of the home and concen-
trates on familial bonds and a focus on violence that is frequently directed
against women (1989, p. 3). For Hock Soon Ng and others, the female
Gothic exposes the ‘insidiousness of domestic ideology and the victimiza-
tion of women’ (Ng, 2008, p. 82) and as Tania Modelski (1984) noted, in
Gothic novels, the woman often suspects her lover or husband of trying to
drive her insane or to murder her, or both. Men look supportive but have
designs on their wives’ security and safety and Jenny’s husband says and
does little—he has brought her into their family home, which drains and
takes her over. Her escape from his control is to have a child and become
absorbed into the household; however, this also means she becomes part
of the house, the traditions, in a conventional domestic and mother-
ing role.
When Jenny discovers she is pregnant, the old woman, friend and
housekeeper dies. Traditionally, her role as new mother will replace the old
generation and ways. The spirits of the place whisper to her and the house
can no longer resist and shrink her. The pregnancy forces her into collu-
sion and, haunted by the house, Jenny slips into a traditional role, which
feels problematic to a modern feminist reader, someone like Jenny herself
at the start of the tale Hock Soon Ng notes: ‘the female subject’s unheim-
lich encounter is the result of her initial resistance to comply with the
domestic ideology of the Chinese patriarchal household. The house gently
coerces her into submission, with insinuations of potential power and sta-
tus; she is won over in the end but the narrative’s ambiguous treatment of
the mother-in-law suggests unstated victimization that awaits the protago-
nist’ (2008, p. 86).
Lim’s work gets inside the embrace of house, tradition and continuity
of a limiting, but respected familiar lifestyle for women. The tale’s neat
conventional ending of motherhood is also entrapment, takeover by the
house and domesticity of Jenny’s disempowerment and it leaves a sense of
unease..
Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle (2012)

The traumas of dislocation and war are concerns for Michèle Roberts,
Kate Mosse, and Vietnamese novelist T.H. Duong (see Chap. 8) expressed
through sad, angry ghosts and violent returns, and they are a major focus
in Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle (2012). Singapore’s development of soaring
buildings and rich lifestyles is one based on cultural and gendered differ-
ence, since the hierarchies of gender and race layer the growth and visibil-
ity of Chinese over Malay and Tamil, while rich Chinese Singapore homes
are laboured in by Filipino or Indian women. Everywhere there is engage-
ment with the West, whether enriching, erased or violent. This is particu-
larly noticeable in the duplicitous experience of culture clash with the
invasion of the Second World War, the focus of The Black Isle (2012) by
Sandi Tan, a Singapore-based Chinese writer.
Traumas of displacement, and of the disruption of war, underlie haunt-
ings in Singapore-based fictions. Andrew Ng Hock Soon’s introduction to
the aesthetics of the Gothic in postcolonial Asian and Asian American lit-
erature, argues for a revaluing and elucidation of themes often neglected
in scholarship (see Chap. 3 for Toni Morrison who has a similar argument
concerning African American writing and beliefs). He uses Adorno’s the-
ory of ugliness and considers neglected themes of loss and transgression,
including:
aspects of trauma, the unconscious, repression, schizophrenia, violence and

even the supernatural which is deeply inherent in the cultures of Asian peo-
ples…, such ‘unspeakable’ issues are often marginalised or muted. My view
202 G. WISKER
is that Gothic aesthetics can open up new critical insights into these writings,
and therefore serve as an important corrective and alternative to the
postcolonial-materialistic reading. (Introduction, 2008, p. 11)
The supernatural and hauntings bring the vividness of hidden violence and
violation into the light whereas curated informative realistic histories
might merely neaten, catalogue them, and in sanitising avoiding terrible
truths and so, ironically, maintain the pain.
Sandi Tan’ s novel begins in Shanghai, where a family is splitting,
unknown to the twins Li, a boy, and Ling, a girl, who are taken by their
father to another life in Malaya (as it was) and then Singapore. Both chil-
dren are equally at home in the world of ghosts or spirits, and the daylight
world of ordinary people.
Ling develops the skill to see ghosts; this makes her initially vulnerable
but then powerful in troubled times. They live in Malaya, just before the
Japanese invasion of Singapore, ostensibly taking care of a plantation
owned by a lazy white man, who visits just once and eats everything up.
Theirs is always a precarious existence, not least because of the fickleness
of the father, so the siblings do all the work. But the Malay plantation is a
dangerous, untamed place, less for its proximity to the jungle than for the
spirits close by. It is said there is a mound in which dwell the spirits of
women murdered before or in childbirth, and to whom the local people
pay a nervous homage. But there is much worse to emerge from this local
myth. Ling, hiding in a cave, comes close to a Pontianak, a young woman
shamed and murdered, or who chose suicide, because pregnant. Pontianaks
take revenge by ripping open other women and tearing out their babies,
but if there are no such women present they will rip out anyone else’s
insides and devour them. The strange woman who enters the house of the
twins and their father when the obnoxious, domineering white man is
staying there, is a Pontianak. He clearly feels this would be a sexual liaison,
relishing his power and wealth, but instead his entrails are removed and he
dies horribly. Revengeful ghosts stalk the area; everyone knows that. This
is vengeance against men, colonial intruders on, usurpers of the land, and
since the Pontianak is an angry ghost, on the living more generally.
The family moves partly in response to the environment but Ling
thrives in Singapore, where they settle, and rises to fortune because of her
natural ability to see ghosts. Here, ghosts are in everyone’s home, on
every corner, reminding of the multitudes who have died over the centu-
ries. Some are just resident and others have crimes to redress and revenge
to take. Singapore is a historical hub for trade, part of the spice route and
the silk route and positioned, as are many British colonial treasures, at the
bottom of a large land mass, in the straits, where ships ply their trade and
money is made quickly. This makes it powerful, exciting, multicultural,
and rife with often-hidden competitions for wealth and political power.
International wranglings over political power also make it vulnerable. Tan
is quite sceptical of what it represents, and upsets its pretensions, exposing
its flaws and the ways in which superpowers have historically used Singapore
and its valuable position to fight their battles, noting, ‘It was the shiny
opal in the Empire’s Far Eastern Crown’ (p. 61). (Opals are lovely but
historically bearers of bad luck.) Its imperial, colonial position is fixed,
essential and very clearly defined: ‘Yet the Black Isle’s place was as solid as
Gibraltar, the British East India Company had owned and operated the
Island since the early 1800s, running it as a city-state, much like Florence
or Venice at their peak, albeit with Anglo-Saxon stoicism rather than with
Latin bravura’ (p. 61). However, its status is also insecure, precarious and
somewhat fantastic, with a tenuous hold on reality and a vulnerability it
ignores at its peril:
Far from being the centre of things, however, the Island—as it was called by
the locals—sat like a dull guest in the northwestern corner of the Archipelago,
itself an unpromising clutch of crumbs with only the pull of the earth hold-
ing it in place. This arrangement seemed entirely provisional, and you got
the sense from looking at the map that even the Isle might someday wear
thin gravity’s welcome and simply float away. (p. 61)
Here women are victims of imperialism, wealth and male power in the
hands of families, businessmen, politicians and invading forces. Ling, how-
ever, uses her beauty as well as her access to ghosts, surviving and thriving
initially through her relationship with Daniel, the son of a wealthy
Singapore businessman. Her job in Daniel’s home was to accompany his
dying mother, who was concerned about a female ghost who had clearly
stolen her jewellery and whose crime dominates the mother’s thoughts.
Only Ling can validate this tale because she sees ghosts. Ling’s power is
both sexual, since she wins Daniel to be her intended husband, and super-
natural/spiritual, since her communication with ghosts gives her insights
into threats and changes. Her usefulness extends to an allegiance with Issa,
the driver, henchman and seer, trying to support him in talking with the
ghosts who refuse the new metro build development through their burial
204 G. WISKER
ground. Such ghostly encounters are dangerous and Ling realises she must
learn new approaches and subtleties to communicate fully.
But the time of trouble is approaching. All this planning and intended
marriage to Daniel is irrelevant, in the end, since the Japanese invasion is
imminent, though in the paralysis and stasis preceding it no one really
appreciates the extent of the horror it will bring. The moment is heralded
by a violent revelation while Daniel and Ling are on a beach walk near the
family’s second house. They see Mrs. Nakamura, the local fisherman’s
wife, in the many arms of an octopus, entangled, seeming to be raped, but
actually making love with the octopus. The scene re-enacts The Dream of
the Fisherman’s Wife, a Hokusai picture of the Edo period of 1814 based
on an older Japanese myth in which Princess Tamatori, initially a modest
shell diver, entangles with an octopus, rescues a precious stone and marries
Fujiwara no Fuhito of the Fujiwara clan (but then dies of her wounds).
The coupling, an affront to nature, defamiliarises the setting and the
events, spelling future danger and presaging collusion with the Japanese.
Almost immediately the Japanese invasion begins, subtly with seeming
political and economic agreements, then brutally from the skies with air
onslaughts wrecking houses, relationships, livelihoods and lives. The inva-
sion by plane and foot soldiers is terrifying and overwhelming. Ling races
back to the besieged city to find her family trapped and herself surrounded
by those attempting to flee the bombing and strafing. New ghosts are
made before her eyes and whether living or dead, at these moments of
invasion those she speaks to and engages with blend into each other.
Chaos, a time of nightmare, it is the end for those local masters of the
island, who have benefited from capitalist engagement with the advance
forces masquerading as financial partners, and it is a stark moment of emp-
tying out, of defeat for the vacuous British promise of protection and
safety. The imperial caretakers are revealed as selfish, useless, their claims
of paternalism dissolving into their absurd, debauched and pointless party-
ing. They are oblivious to the horrors and to their responsibilities.
Ghosts represent the loss resulting from military engagement, from
invasion, the many dead in war, and here also, the civilians, homes and
families invaded and devastated. The trauma of war is enacted in the con-
stant interaction with these ghosts. In her study contextualizing Singapore
and its ghost stories of the Second World War Japanese occupation, Carole
Faucher (2003) notes a collapse between the past and the present.
According to Rashid, she sees this, ‘as a site for collective memory, even
for the younger generation who did not live through it. It becomes a
medium for public recollection about the stories embedded within sites
where history has been erased or forgotten’ (2009, p. 7). Rashid also cites
Kwon (2008), focusing on the ways such trauma-based ghost stories can
make new connections, here of the war across time and space to aid the
development of ‘an everyday comprehension of the experience’, they are
‘a medium of ghostly embodiment to reflect the varying discourses about
the war’(2009, p. 7). For Kwon, ghost stories are ‘constitutive of the
order of social life’ and recognition becomes ‘instructive to the under-
standing of wider moral and political issues’ (2008, p. 3). As with the
trauma tales of Chap. 8, particularly that of Duong (1995) on the Vietnam
War, brutal losses, widespread erasures expressed in ghost stories can
enable both tellers and listeners make temporal and spatial continuities
and to begin to make sense of memories.
Ling’s ability to see and communicate with ghosts means she sees not
only what is happening now and to whom, who is dying, but also those
harmed previously, historically and she senses what will happen in the
future. The paternalism of British imperialistic rule is exposed as a sham,
perpetuated by drunken fools, and no one is any match against the bomb-
ing raids which rapidly add to the numbers of ghosts. In the middle of
town Ling comes across a small family of sisters who lost their mother
when she went for help. They are all lost. Ghosts are produced in an
instant, transiting between the war torrent and the parallel world of death.
The city is teeming with ghosts, old and new.
Post-war, Ling, her name changed to Cassandra (to reflect her powers
with ghosts and seeing the future), is forced to be the mistress of Taro, the
powerful, brutal Japanese military commander. The family she was becom-
ing part of is silenced, murdered, buried. Ling/Cassandra survives because
she can manipulate others and her own freedom through her sexuality,
metamorphosing into whatever woman is needed by whoever is in power.
When the Japanese fall and Taro dies, she remembers her earlier liaison
with Daniel’s family friend, politician Kenneth Kee, and becomes both his
mistress and a fashionable ghost advice expert. She alone, it seems, can put
people in touch with the urban ghosts, and is sought after because prop-
erty investors in the rapidly growing city need to know about the feng shui
(and the ghostly inhabitants) of potential building locations. By actually
meeting the ghosts face to face rather than merely sensing spiritual effects,
Ling knows if there is a ghost preventing a development, and can reason
with them as much as one can. Years later, Ling is famous as negotiator
between the living and the dead to enable urban development, but such
206 G. WISKER
activities depend the living, who must appreciate the importance of not
annoying ghosts of previous inhabitants when building over their newly
created ruins. In contemporary cities, ghosts are denied continuation of
existence in their old family houses, instead being trapped in vast apart-
ment blocks ironically, as Ancuta notes, ‘simultaneously invisible and iso-
lated ‘(2020, p. 174), perpetuating after death the invisibility and isolation
experienced in life. As cites grow, fall, morph, apartment blocks get in the
way of property developers, and when Kenneth Kee decides to erase a
whole community, Ling cannot get him to see sense. As the apartments
burn, more revengeful ghosts are created. Ghost seeing in a superstitious
culture is a precious talent. In her early encounters, Ling/Cassandra
promised the ghosts buried in the Chinese cemetery on Forbidden Hill
that their resting place would be unharmed by developers. However, this
honest pact between a woman seer and an underground town of ghosts is
no match for Kenneth Kee, who relies on Ling/Cassandra’s knowledge to
build apartment blocks, but has none of her qualms about where they are
and who they displace. His motorways and mass rapid transport system
take precedence, or so he thinks. Ghosts are not transient, rather, like
long-time tenants, they remain, asserting their rights to places and ways of
existence. They also act both singly and en masse. Ling/Cassandra knows
they are hard to deal with. First she sees them and is surrounded:
The glaring figures on the hill had only been a preview. The tunnel widened
into a grotto, and there gathered in the dark, stood my real audience—hun-
dreds of men and women, like some secret society of the dead, reeking of
the upturned grave. The boy guide was among them, standing at the fore,
and I finally caught a glimpse of his face—or whatever was left of it. The
flesh had been eaten away by maggots and in place of his nose was a hollow
oozing slime, he had no eyes.
My knees went soft.
The others were just like him–bony, ravaged, decomposed, what all
human beings look like after their time on earth was done.
‘You promised us this could never happen, you promised us we could
rest…’ (p. 447)
But they leave her alone. Kee, entering their space, dies, his greed and
insincerity out-ranked by the claim to place of the ghosts who live in the
hill, his intended new metro station and line.
The novel opens with Ling about to be interviewed in Japan where she
has moved; at its end we see her fly there from Singapore. Although she is
aware of and can communicate with and influence generations of the dead,
Ling has no further desire for this role. Flying over and beyond the Black
Isle, leaving it behind, she puts it in perspective—seeing the ‘teardrop
island’ as small, assailed on all sides by the larger landmasses of the region—
Malaya, Sumatra, Indonesia.
How small this teardrop island really was, even after its multiple expansions.
To its south lay the broccoli heads of another land, lusher, larger, fed on
darker soil. It seemed to be edging across the strait as I watched, a mother
waiting to reclaim her child. And in the waters to the north and east, yet
other isles, younger, smaller, and manifold, each a wellspring of viral fecun-
dity, all creepers and thorns, ready to infect the Black Isle should its coast
draw any closer. (pp. 455–6)
Singapore: Cities, Space, Place and Ghosts

Singapore is a historical crossroads, its tangible history crisscrossing its
glitzy urban development, where those spaces, places and ways of behav-
ing, modes of living which it wishes to hide, are often glimpsed behind,
round the back, down an alley. Much of the once-richly alive mix of plan-
tation or jungle, traditional houses, kampongs, and large, well-kept cem-
eteries is now urban sprawl, high-rise apartments, massive glass and steel
malls, metro lines, and motorways. Ghosts might sometimes have been
sidelined along with conspicuous superstition but, according to the grow-
ing number of revived legends and local stories, they inhabit all of these
places and spaces.
In their call for papers of a special issue of Societies (Gilloch, 2013) the
editors ask questions fundamental to postcolonial urban Gothic and its
many ghosts, particularly because of the emphasis on whose memories and
perspectives are prioritised in such a multicultural historically layered
place: ‘How is the past etched into the very physical fabric of the modern
cityscape?… Whose past is celebrated, whose memories are preserved? Are
cities always and everywhere haunted by their pasts?’ Their emphasis on
amnesia is important since Gothic writers refuse to allow such blanking
and silence, instead bringing into view the ghosts and haunting presences
imprinted on ostensibly brand new, or constantly renewed, places.
Particular views of the non-linearity of time underlie appreciation of
ghosts and hauntings in cities. Tamara Wagner (2008) characterises
Singapore Gothic as ‘an urban Gothic of the nauseatingly mundane, of
208 G. WISKER
death-in-life literalized in the concealed spaces of anonymous apartment

blocks’ (2008, p. 58). Singapore is our main subject here, but the ghost
cities of China emphasise an emptiness at the heart of an artifice of bustle,
speaking to the hollow core. A special issue of Sustainability has several
essays on Chinese ghost cities, notably Ordos (Yin et al., 2017), a ghost
city created for urban dwelling and work, but which has never really been
inhabited. It is a strange reverse image of the parallel, crowded worlds of
ghosts and people found in the work of Singapore authors Sandi Tan,
Catherine Lim, and Fiona Cheong. Filled with expensive grand buildings,
Ordos expects thousands of users, visitors, inhabitants. The scale of the
buildings reminds us of Sydney, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore,
with their skyscrapers, the shopping arcades teeming with people. Ordos,
by contrast, owes more to Ozymandias (Shelley, 1818), Nevil Shute’s On
the Beach (1957), or Richard Matheson’s emptied, vampire-infected future
world in I Am Legend (1954). What these all have in common is that they
embody a lesson against hubris—‘build and the people will come’. The
apparent greedy dream which led to Ordos, dormitory city to a few, is as
dangerously ambitious as expecting that the grandiosity of the current,
populous, ever-changing cities will remain so, as indeed pandemic photo-
graphs of 2020 have illustrated. Historically, this model has always been a
piece of problematic planning. The urban Gothic without history is
avoided, rejected, shunned, suggesting a thing not yet fully brought into
being, just a shell without life, an uninhabited body, undead because never
alive. Distressed urban Gothic spaces are an embodiment of a vacated set
of human values, inhabited by ghosts.
Blending the supernatural crime novel with Singapore Gothic and
focusing on ghosts and demons, Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen
series (2005–2014) brings dark, hidden places into view and ghosts into
play. This boundary-crossing series follows a detective, Chen, married to a
demon, working in a near-future Singapore Three police department.
Chen deals with the bureaucracies of hell while solving crimes, working
with supernatural, mystical investigations in ‘this great new city of
Singapore Three where the entrances to the Hell are closer and the veils
between them fractured’ (Williams, Prologue, 2006, p. 1) offering a
Gothic perspective emphasising the liminal space between hell and con-
temporary urban Singapore. In many ways, contemporary Singapore
Gothic tales remind of the parallel urban world of China Mieville’s The
City and the City (2009), although in a politically managed Singapore,
they are unlikely to be in wide circulation if overtly left-wing. In Williams’
novels, meat markets run alongside remedy and retail markets, buying,
selling and slaughtering, first in plain view then behind the shacks and
down the back alleys. Her cartography of futuristic Singapore resembles
much of the city through history in the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries, the back alleys and death houses just a few steps down a wrong turn
from the religious temples and the taller, but less brightly coloured tem-
ples to conspicuous consumption, the massive soaring malls.
In work set in Singapore and Malaysia there is a rich interaction and
leakage between differently originated Gothic figures (monsters, vam-
pires, werecreatures… ), so the ghost is ubiquitous, everywhere and occa-
sionally combined with other creatures, as in the case of the ghostly,
vampiric Pontianak. Glennis Byron’s Globalgothic (2013) defines such
blending and interaction, as transnational flows between Western Gothic
figures and themes and those from broader global contexts. Sandi Tan’s
work shows Singapore full of historical ghosts jostling to be noticed and
to have their stories told and their versions of imperialistic, invaded, gen-
dered power relations revealed.
Sharlene Teo’s ghosts also emerge from spaces being turned into apart-
ment blocks for the rich, from godowns, and the beginnings of new metro
stations. Meanwhile, the Southeast Asian Pontianak spreads both through-
out the region, and further, to the US and UK (Zen Cho, ‘The House of
Aunts’, 2011).
Pontianaks at Home, Ponti (Sharlene Teo, 2018),

‘The House of Aunts’ (Spirits Abroad,
2014), Zen Cho
The furious revengeful wronged mother Jennet Humfrye in Susan Hill’s
The Woman in Black (1983) (Chap. 3) reminds us of La Llorona and the
traditional, angry, restless spectre haunting corridors in Gothic mansions
bringing into focus reasons for such violent, deadly hauntings as a response
not just to individual wrongs and wrongdoers, but to social opprobrium
and rejection of women considered wayward. Jennet Humfrye wreaks her
revenge on whole families, ensuring they too lose their children because
she lost her son, Nathaniel. She is out on a social spit, like the spit between
the village and Mrs. Drablow’s house where Nathaniel drowned. She
appears outside graveyards and, wherever families live or gather together,
wreaking revenge. She is a very English Pontianak, of sorts. In Sandi Tan’s
210 G. WISKER
The Black Isle (2012), the Pontianak is a young woman murdered or dead
in childbirth, resembling victims of honour killing, another way of getting
rid of women raped, abused or wayward, whose pregnancies offend strin-
gent rules and codes of behaviour. Tan’s Pontianak finds her perfect victim
in the greedy, self-indulgent colonial master whose ownership of the plan-
tation drains its wealth, while the indigenous inhabitants are overworked
on sub-standard wages.
Talking of Singapore in his vampire city chapter ‘Singapore, red lips,
and sharp white teeth: sex and death’ (2005, p. 112), Steve Pile considers
urban legends, focusing on Pontianaks, a mix of ghost and vampire while
Pontianak in passing, Christopher Frayling comments that Bram Stoker
noticed the existence of vampires in Malaysia (1991, p. 298). While
‘Victorian men triumphed over the sexual threats of Dracula and Lucy,
Singaporean men, on the other hand, must be very vigilant’ (p. 117).
Across Southeast Asia, women ghosts and Pontianaks frequent grave-
yards, and, in Japanese horror films such as Ring (2000) or The Grudge
(2002), crawl intently out of TV screens, down the stairs, seeking a pos-
sibly quite random revenge. In Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle there are also
Pontianaks. These figures range round Southeast Asia and India and are
also called langsuir, matianak or kuntilanak, shortened to kunti, and in
Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, Churel, or Churayl. They have long black
hair, very pale skin and wear white dresses smeared with blood. A revenge-
ful, pregnant, murdered woman, the Pontianak, uses her long, pointed
fingernails to rip open other pregnant women and devour their insides,
but can stoop to attacking anyone, including men. As Carol Faucher
(2004) shows, stories of Pontianaks are very popular and take a variety of
forms… so in almost every collection of Singapore short stories, a topical
urban legend is that of the lone (seemingly vulnerable, actually predatory)
woman (Anon., 2000a), a version of international folk tales about picking
up (dead) hitchhikers. A man driving home at night sees a lone woman by
the roadside: ‘the woman wore a long red dress and was standing by her-
self’ (Faucher, 2004, p. 30). Always young and beautiful, more seductive
maybe in a long white dress smelling fragrantly of frangipani, these woman
are intoxicating. Men must resist temptation to survive, and avoid picking
them up when they try and hitch lifts. Thinking it dangerous for her to be
on the road alone, he might stop to give her a lift. She is beautiful, with
black hair, white skin and red lips. In one version, suddenly she’ll get out
of the car, angry and throw money at him, which turns into leaves, while
in another, driving, he gets distracted with desire. At the point at which
she reciprocates, putting her hand on his thigh, he thinks she is asleep then
remembers the signs. She is a Pontianak and his time is limited: ‘occasion-
ally the vampire shows her true form: turning into a monstrous old
woman, who threatens to kill the man and drink his blood’ (Pile, 2003,
p. 279). These seductive women always escape to seduce and kill again.
Vampiric Pontianak women don’t just haunt the roadside, however. In
fiction and myth, they are to be found in apartment blocks, hospitals, old
places, including cemeteries, and in car parks. In one story, an Orchard
Road car park attendant sitting innocently in his kiosk is attacked. The
traditional homes where Pontianaks ‘live’ are banana trees but also, as they
adapt to the urban environment, other trees, probably explained as a result
of the root system coming into contact with the (un)dead, especially
where the roots are near cemeteries.
Sandi Tan’s Pontianaks seem to stay in Malaya, and don’t cross the
causeway into Singapore, but set in 2020 Singapore during a remake and
revival of Malay folk horror films, Sharlene Teo’s Ponti (2018) brings the
figure into twentieth-century and contemporary Singapore homes and
high-rise apartments. Ponti revives the figure of the Pontianak set in the
glitzy Singapore that has recently been made famous by the film Crazy
Rich Asians (2018). Both Sharlene Teo and Zheng Cho take the abused
traumatised figure of the Pontianak, forced to become a ghostly vampiric
flesh and blood devouring monster and humanise her, bring her back into
the family.
Sharlene Teo’s Ponti (2018) is set in near-future Singapore, at a moment
when a 1970s film is to be recast and remade. It, like the original film
sequence, combines across folk horror and the rich lifestyle, ostentatious
consumerism reflected in the soaring buildings, the film industries’ repre-
sentation of glamour and wealth, and the dark, hidden secret lies of the
Pontianak’s origins and revengeful intent. It is a tale of several women,
including Amisa, an actress, young in the 1970s and 1980s, mother to
Szu, who is friends with Circe. In Szu’s family, there is Yantzi (not her real
aunt), Leslie her husband (Circe’s brother), various parents and aunts and
missing fathers.
Amisa’s famous, but not very lucrative role is in three horror films based
on the Pontianak, concluding with ‘Ponti 3, curse of the Bomoh’, and,
when, in 2020, the old folk horror tale is rediscovered and remade, Szu
and Circe re-meet. This new glitzy version of Amisa’s original film is a suc-
cess; in the event, however, the remake lacks the power of the original, no
more than a third-rate artificial romance. Like the city, Amisa, or Ponti, is
212 G. WISKER
lovely on the outside but with a dark restrained violence just out of sight.
She is not the only ghostly vampiric woman in Circe’s life. Amisa’s friend,
Yantzi, is probably a medium, and old Mrs. Chang, who might still live in
the same apartment block is a Pontianak. Inviting young Circe over for a
biscuit and Milo after school, when her parents are out, Mrs. Chang
revives her talents, and in a strange moment morphs from old to young,
her 150-year-old goldfish changing with her. Singapore over fifty years is
the backdrop for this tale, which shifts perspective and time frames to layer
in moments of magic and the ghostly, Pontianak revived through memory
and film.
Sharlene Teo and Zen Cho, a Malaysian-born writer living in the UK,
bring the Pontianak into the twenty-first-century urban everyday. She is a
relative, a neighbour, and a foster child/teenager, and she is no longer
always merely furiously revengeful. Zen Cho’s YA short story ‘The House
of Aunts’ (2011) focuses sympathetically on the difficulties faced by this
otherwise normal teenager concerned about her body, her school friends,
identity, boyfriends, as well as her family. This Pontianak at last receives
the sympathy she deserves for her violent death, and with Zen Cho’s work,
she moves beyond revenge to sympathetic friendships. There is a commu-
nity supporting such victims of trauma—the rape, and death in childbirth.
At school, in Lubuk Udang, Ah Lee develops a friendship with the new
boy Ridzual. She does ordinary things such as homework, and at home
her aunties cook for her and look after her, but Ah Lee is actually a
Pontianak, warned against making friends, especially boyfriends. She also
has to go through school several times because, like Edward Cullen, she’s
ageless unlike Edward Cullen, however, she eats human flesh in her lunch-
box and at home. This is tasteless flesh and the domestic context in which
this young Pontianak (who will be forever young) is raised is homely. But
friendship is powerful and so is teenage rebellion; the aunties trying to
manage her life set off to hunt down Ridzual and turn him into dinner,
tricking him, one pretending to be a poor old lady crumpled up in the
bushes, before the others descend on him:
The face the mak cik turned to him was a normal mak cik face. She was a
Chinese lady with fluffy white hair and a mole on her left cheek. She looked
like any other auntie you might see at the pasar basah. Her teeth were per-
fectly ordinary. She was dead… The mak cik held her hands out to Ridzual,
as if she was going to hug him, pet his hair. Her hands were small and deli-
cate. The fingernails were long, curving and yellow—and blunt.
It would take a long time for those fingernails to pierce his belly, for them
to scoop out the intestines. It would hurt.
The others came out of the bushes one by one. They were all little old
ladies–little old Chinese ladies in those Chinese old lady clothes that looked
like pajamas. All with long, blunt fingernails. All dead.
All hungry. (2011, n.p.)
Luckily, Ah Lee flies through the air and seizes her own future by calling
them off. She had tried to warn him of their friendship by saying she was
a vampire and showing her cold skin and lank dark hair, her undead face—
but as a school teenage boy he quibbles with the detail—she does not have
pointed teeth but, like her aunts, she has the long red-pointed fingernails
used to claw out inner organs from stomachs of pregnant, loathed
women, or men:
The aunts knew they had forfeited the moral high ground by trying to eat
her classmate. Ah Lee had listened without saying a word to their uncon-
vinced lectures as they flew home.
At the door, she had turned and said to the aunts:
‘We are not dogs in the forest.’ (2011, n.p.)
It is a YA Gothic romance so these two decide to be more than just friends

and have to share secrets:
They smiled stupidly for a while, shedding radiance on the slide and sand-
box, showering incidental romance on the speed-walking uncle and auntie.
‘Only one thing,’ said Ah Lee.
‘Oh, there’s something else on top of the vampire mak cik and the human
pig stomach soup?’ said Ridzual. ‘What more is there? I have to fight a were-
wolf first before I can date you, is it?’
‘No lah, there’s no such thing as werewolf,’ said Ah Lee. ‘It’s a small
thing only. But– “vampire” is OK. The other word, please don’t use. Is
that OK?’
…
‘Will you tell me how you became a Pontianak?’
Sitting there with him in the park, Ah Lee told him. She had not told
anyone else the story before. He didn’t let go of her hand. (2011, n.p.)
And the story is of being pregnant, dying in childbirth, becoming an

angry Pontianak in the hospital and being taken in and cared for by the
214 G. WISKER
five aunties (one her grandmother, one a great-grandmother). In embrac-

ing and telling her own story, Ah Lee moves beyond the abject definition
of the Pontianak, the ghost vampire woman, and asserts her own identity.
Conclusion
Southeast Asian (and particularly Singaporean) ghosts are both everyday
dwellers in the corner of your house and on the urban corners of great
cities. However, they are also lingering, partially embodied memories and
avid, articulate, direct reminders of the horrors of imperialism, of the colo-
nial past, of wars, invasion, abuse and of the everyday otherising and bru-
tality meted out to women in particular. Trapped in their own homes or
those in which they serve as bondmaids, the women in tales by Sandi Tan,
Catherine Lim, Sharlene Teo and Zhen Cho refuse to remain as victims of
their gendered roles, moving beyond poverty, conformity, confinement,
abjection and abuse. Some commune with the ghosts, tell their tales, and
survive, while others speak out and take revenge beyond the grave. With
this last story by Zhen Cho, the most abused, violent, betrayed, abject
female ghost, the vampiric Pontianak is recuperated and enabled to live
among friends and family without losing either her identity or her personal
power. In Singapore, the busy, crowded, rich, materialistic city is peopled
in each soaring apartment, grand house and street corner hawker stall with
more than contemporary consumers. Present alongside the living are fam-
ily ghosts, the war dead, abused bondmaids, revengeful, betrayed women
who died in childbirth, all reminders of the transience of urban capitalism,
the vacuousness of its values and rewards.
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CHAPTER 8
Traumas of Place, Travel, Hauntology: Novel

without a Name (Duong, 1995), Daughters
of the House (Roberts, 1992), The Winter
Ghosts (Mosse, 2010)
Trauma: A Particular Form of Haunting

Ghosts represent hidden traumatic histories, misinterpreted stories to be
set straight, scores to be settled. Trauma is the source of and impetus
behind many ghost stories and this includes both personal traumas and
those caused by war, genocide, physical and psychological violence, often
with its sources in Otherising, based on sexism, racism, and misuse of
power. The layering of lingering pain is sensed as tangible on both the
bodies and minds of those who directly suffered or, through them, whose
ancestors suffered and it emanates from places, battlefields, killing fields,
grand buildings and domestic homes, locations for traumatic events, unac-
knowledged wrongs, and from personal actions, some shrouded in mys-
tery. Place might hold these traumas tight, hidden, some falsely reported,
represented or mispresented in memorialisation, some seemingly perma-
nently sealed or erased. Several elements of the ghostly are important here,
hauntology of place and things, and ghostly or spectral returns, of reve-
nants. Hauntology deals with ways in which the psychogeography of place
enables the experiences, troubles and traumas of the past to speak through
the landscape, the buildings, the cityscape. Ghostly returns might offer a
salve to heal terrible losses, or they might be more damaging even than
those losses.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_8
218 G. WISKER
This chapter furthers the discussion on trauma from Chaps. 7 and 8,

looking in particular at three novels, the first T.H. Duong’s Novel Without
a Name (1995) set in Vietnam, and the second novel, set in France , each
of which tells of traumas of two world wars and of the Vietnam war
(1955–75) . They each also tell of historical injustices, genocides and hid-
den histories. Kate Mosse’s Gothic The Winter Ghosts (2010), set just after
the First World War (1914–1918), tells the hidden histories of the geno-
cide of the Cathars (Albigensian crusade 1209–1229) and Michèle
Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1992) disinters facts about life and death
in the occupation in the Second World War (1939–1945), traced though
the fabric of a French house and the lives of the women within it: one
attached, like a body part of the house; the other returning to the event to
help complete the fractured, deliberately incomplete picture of events.
The tensions between national ideology, managed public history, lurking
trauma and the depths of individualised suffering are brought into view in
these haunting tales of space, bodies and histories, one novel set in Vietnam
and two set in France.
Both the First and Second World Wars, the death in the trenches, the
fight over small spaces of mud and fields of the first war, the extension into
the Pacific and Far East as well as the invasions of Eastern Europe and the
horrors of the Holocaust, produce loss and mourning, lands scarred and
haunted, returned ghostly soldiers, and damaged families and histories
which need piecing back together somehow. In both Kate Mosse’s and
Michèle Roberts’ novels, war in an invaded France leaves scars and trauma.
Mosse’s tale digs deeper into earlier genocide in a small town and its sur-
roundings while Roberts’ tale brings into the home, the attics and the
cellars the lies, betrayals and brutality of the war at home, in family vil-
lage life.
Trauma is revisited, and secrets and misrepresentations clarified; while
truth is cleansing in many ways, some of the horrors and pains revealed
when facing trauma might make life less rather than more manageable.
Trauma is unfinished business, replete with unquiet, often semi-hidden
memories, unsolved, raw, painful mysteries, some deliberately left mysteri-
ous and partial because so overwhelming; it is unhealed psychological
wounds. Trauma leads to returns, desired or undesired, sometimes there
to reveal the deeper horrors which are repressed in order to just keep
going, keep surviving. Sometimes trauma returns to terrorise and torment
further or to clarify, cleanse (Luckhurst, 2008).
8 TRAUMAS OF PLACE, TRAVEL, HAUNTOLOGY: NOVEL… 219
In ‘Haunted by History: Interpreting Traumatic Memory Through

Ghosts in Film and Literature’, Gina Nordini (2016) considers reactions
from witnesses to a ghost within fiction as: ‘fear, with desire, or… a neu-
tral, non-emotive reaction’ (p. 4), arguing that ghosts force us to ‘acknowl-
edge, revisit, mourn, and commemorate episodes of violence, death, and
injustice’. She discusses Martha and Bruce Lincoln’s (2015) work, looking
at hauntology and the ways in which it helps us to understand official and
local history sites of haunting and collective trauma in Vietnam. They sug-
gest ‘contemporary hauntologists have primarily concerned themselves
with literary representation and figures of the imaginary’ (Lincoln, p. 194).
These fictions or local myths are often based on real people who died and
linger in memory. The Lincolns note two memorials, a government mass
grave (violating local customs on treatment of the dead) and a banyan tree
‘said to contain the souls of those who were tortured and murdered at its
base’ (Lincoln, p. 194), which also attracts traffic fatalities. The Vietnam
example is drawn from forms of cultural history. However, often a trauma
is personal, and while it is only natural to long for the return of a dead
loved one, even these returns, these revenants, though kindly in life, can
carry with them the trauma of their past and their passing. They can cause
disturbance, violence and fear, as emphasised in the French and US ver-
sions of the TV series Les Revenants (2012) (The Returned, 2015) and the
Australian Glitch (2015–2019). Returns are not always calm and comfort-
ing. The experience of death itself has, for the ghostly loved one, caused
damage, and often anger.
An early example of the danger in overcoming trauma of personal loss
though seeking the return of the beloved dead is ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ by
W.W Jacobs (1902), which replays several established motifs, one of which
is that of the travelling visitor bringing what appears to be an offer of
something valuable, which turns out to be cursed. This visitor brings a
shrivelled up monkey’s paw, telling of its promise to fulfil three sets of
wishes for three people. The first man’s third wish was to die, which does
not bode well; however, the second man, their friend and visitor, offers his
wish to the couple. Their son had been mangled in a factory accident; the
monkey’s paw seems to offer a chance to bring him back. In Jacobs’ tale,
the mother and the father obviously want their son back and wish for him
to return. But on the windy night when the door is bashed and hammered
presumably by his returning spirit in bodily form, they realise that wishing
for the return of the dead could have terrible consequences. The thing
which was their son is now his seriously angry ghost, or something worse.
220 G. WISKER
They make their last wish—and all is silence. Parental love called him up,
but the actual returned dead is too terrible to let beyond the outer door;
mangled, but worse still because the hammering suggests rage. This does
not work out well in the 1902 story, and neither does it in Stephen King’s
Pet Sematary (1983), when dead pets are buried beyond the ordinary pet
cemetery in grounds affected by the supernatural; when the family cat
returns from the grave it is a demon. Not all returns salve the trauma. A
loved one in real, daytime life might be less pleasant, recriminating, angry,
if they retain a ghost spirit or more embodied form. Not everyone wants
to face the trauma. In In the Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990), little smoth-
ered Rosalie exposes her murdering mother—Minnie—who constantly
expresses the trauma of deep grief. In fact, however, Rosalie’s recrimina-
tion cannot settle the feigned motherly response of traumatic loss because
Minnie is culpable in that loss. Similarly, Sethe in Beloved (Morrison,
1987), overjoyed at the returned, sacrificed child, an embodied ghost
relearning human speech and behaviour, is exhausted and reminded of her
act of infanticide to prevent her children’s enslavement, a fate which she
considered worse than death. Beloved tricks her mother, drains her ener-
gies and her new hope established in the family unit of Sethe, Paul D. and
Denver, and displaces family members one at a time. She’s not merely
dependent, she’s destructive, an embodiment not just of her own trau-
matic death but that of slavery, which affected the lives of millions and still
remains, a crime against humanity, as a traumatic lived memory.
Places, villages, streets, homes, renegotiate with haunted pasts. In 2020
monuments to slavery were torn down or removed to museums all over the
UK following both the #Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa and
the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in the US. Statues memo-
rialise people, events and values, but the stories behind them might be silent
until brought back to life and re-examined (Stanley, 2020. 1.2, 1.9).
Sometimes, because of their toxic celebration of a guilty violent past, they
are torn down, yet many of these statues have casually stood for years, proud
in grand squares, lurking in parks or, on waterfronts celebrating a version of
history. They memorialise the ‘legitimated’ version of the past and those
who contributed to both financial success, a certain sense of a country’s, or
nation’s identity and seemingly shared values; yet this public front often
hides the silenced, hidden histories of those sacrificed, erased for such a
historical representation, such a constructed partial account. The streets are
filled with ghosts of those who were suppressed or physically erased, and the
grand buildings are haunted by dark pasts and the victims which helped
fund their building and the commemorative statues and their maintenance.
Statues are important, so are grand public buildings, homes, barns, town
halls. Each of these are places of reckoning in the trauma stories in which
ghosts ensure that the full tale is told and the victims remembered.
Uncelebrated, largely unnoticed and not discussed, this is the fate of
those who did not win the battles or make the money and so it is with the
people, the streets and homes in a village once inhabited by the Cathars,
in the Carcassonne region largely destroyed by genocide in Kate Mosse’s
The Winter Ghosts (2010). So it also is with the parallel collusions, deceits
and kindnesses undercut by betrayals, part of everyday life in an occupied
French village in Daughters of the House (Roberts, 1992). The individual
betrayals and murders, the genocides of these different times and places in
France represent the deaths of many others whose histories haunt the
places themselves and are sometimes, when their tales are told, brought
back to some form of life, beginning to be faced, remembered, and memo-
rialised. Ghostly returns of people and objects are often set off by the
arrival, intrusion, and alternate perspectives of a visitor, a long-gone rela-
tive, an outsider and these entrances are catalysts for the unravelling of
established stories, the disinterring of buried secrets and bodies, setting
the stories straight and sometimes settling old scores. New, vulnerable or
sensitive people asking questions causes trauma to re-awake, the haunting
to be revived in the minds of those pretending everything is normal, the
destructive history brought into view and into words, and so sometimes
dealt with, sometimes resolved.
Trauma also plays complex games with time, which becomes Gothic,
disrupted, parallel events appearing at once, past moments erupting into
present. As Cathy Caruth notes considering the notion of trauma’s ‘haunt-
ing power’ of possession, ‘the literal return of the event against the will of
the one it inhabits’ (1995, pp. 4–5) This uninvited return can lead to
major disruption of the everyday, as happens in both Kate Mosse’s The
Winter Ghosts (2010), with the shift of geographies, and of buildings, in
time, and the intrusion from the past into ostensible contemporary festivi-
ties, and in Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1992), with the sud-
den appearance of lost clothing items, particularly a red shoe and with this
the discovery of alternate versions of established histories. Locations where
traumatic incidents have taken place are known to retain a kind of trace in
their geography, in the building in which murders took place, in the land-
scapes where mass battles and genocide wiped out thousands. C.S. Lewis,
in The Screwtape Letters (1942), writes of this, and the theories of
222 G. WISKER
psychogeography report on theorised, enlightened examples (see Chap.

7). Trauma lives on in the minds and in the bodies of those who have
themselves suffered traumatic experiences, but those who went before
them also live on through the bodies of the living, and emerge as memo-
ries which are not directly their own, inherited, like genetic codes, bodily
and behavioural tics and traits. Fiona Murphy (2006) argues that there is
a kind of hierarchy of suffering and authenticity in some trauma narratives
that privileges them and makes the ‘unspeakable speakable’:
How we categorise, define and think about suffering has frequently proven
problematic. How we attempt to make sense of our suffering, our own or
others’, produces an uneasiness and fear, a belief that to indulge in under-
standing will render the unspeakable speakable. Further to this is the fear
that in representing the suffering, some versions of trauma may become
privileged. What is in question today then is the notion of ‘authentic’ ver-
sions of suffering. Can it be said that some versions of suffering are ‘more
authentic’ than others? How does this impact on survivors of trauma? Do
they find themselves divided? Embittered? Re-traumatised? By the very idea
that their suffering may somehow be understood as less real, less meaningful
than someone else’s? (Murphy, 2006)
The hierarchy includes public narrative, historical, personal and practices

of reflection and reporting. There seems to be several kinds of privileged
trauma narrative taken seriously. Some people are told to get on with their
lives, others repress everything or have it repressed for them. This is where
ghost stories come in; they invite the traumatic loss back in through spaces,
bodies and voices, and in doing so privilege the dead. There are also public
narratives which are shared nationally and internationally with commemo-
rations, such as Armistice Day, with mass mourning and the memories of
the lost, as at Hiroshima, where newspaper cuttings remind of the horror
of the bomb and its aftermath. Such public sharing in a sense revives then
placates the ghosts of the traumatic genocidal past, but other ghosts, hid-
den in the margins from the major public memorialisation, might also
want to have their stories told, so they are brought back as part of the
haunting of place, as ghostly figures, the war dead in Novel Without a
Name (Duong, 1995) and Daughters of the House (Roberts, 1992) and in
The Winter Ghosts (Mosse, 2010), as whole villages in a time slip.
Talking of movements between time and treatment of temporality in
East Asian ghost films, Bliss Cua Lim argues that ‘ghost narratives
productively explore the dissonance between modernity’s disenchanted

time and the spectral temporality of haunting in which the presumed
boundaries between past, present, and future are shown to be shockingly
permeable’ (2001, p. 288). In film and text, ghost stories disrupt linear
time and the neat packing away of traumatic histories into a safe space, ‘the
past’. They are particularly vital in dealing with trauma where testimony
can help bring release and order. The story brings back the pain, the
moment, the body or bodies bring the ostensibly solidly real back into
being, to be dealt with, lived on with. With trauma narratives, there is an
oscillation between sudden intrusions of the palpably real, the bodies,
traces, which makes it more raw, so in Beloved the dead baby, Beloved’s,
body reappearing in the form of a grown woman, leads to a desire to both
discover the truth of her death and then to see the footprints back to the
swamp, putting the story, the events, into a safe place, managing the story
in family and community history. Confrontation and enactment are
accompanied by articulation followed by normalising, coping, and there is
a play between these two responses, the raw and the more managed but
not forgotten. Scripting, forming shaping of some sort is necessary, is
important while confining something so raw and repressed to an archive,
a memorial is too dismissive. The ghosts who haunt locations which testify
to traumatic histories around, in and on them all prevent that neat tidy-
ing away.
Building on the work of Dominick LaCapra (1994), Deborah Madsen
engages with the Holocaust as trauma which leads to trauma narratives.
She is concerned that perhaps such stories might become normalised when
scripted, caught, so that:
A historical juxtaposition of the autobiographical with the fictional leads to

‘normalising’ of traumatic experience i.e. the scripting of trauma and its
assimilation to cultural narratives of normality. The untranslatability of
trauma makes survivor discourse especially reliant upon cultural scripting for
the conditions of its own meaning, even when it may resist these cultural
ideologies. (Madsen, 2011, p. 6)
The ‘recovery moment’ noted in American psychology might be likened

to a moment of revelation, I would argue, which could come into view as
a ghostly figure or the emanation of some other history, something hid-
den, alternative, repressed, from common memory, expressed in a location
or an object. Madsen suggests the poetic qualities of a literary text can
224 G. WISKER
recover the trauma of an event, bringing together absence and loss, con-
tributing to identity formation. But the end result in a ghost story might
be a cold realisation that more must be disinterred and made public rather
than calmed down, buried in a changed normal. Some hauntings change
everything we know about a time, place and people, rewriting whole his-
tories. This is the case with both The Winter Ghosts (Mosse, 2010), which
recalls the genocide of the Cathars, and Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the
House (1992), which revives the collusion and the everyday brutality of
the occupation for ordinary French families. It also tells of the dangers
involved in trying to prevent single acts of murder, parts of a larger geno-
cide, since in Michèle Roberts’ story a group of Jews are temporarily hid-
den, then betrayed. All the horrors of the silences and mis-told histories
play themselves out through the fabric of the French house, where two
cousins meet, once as children, then again as adult women, in the second
experience finding out hidden truths, digging up the family and village
ghosts to rewrite history.
While much trauma narrative focuses on the Holocaust and the large-
scale traumas of war, the narratives of marginalised and silenced minori-
ties, the enslaved, those who have lost the battles and the wars, and of
women often deal with individual trauma, and hidden histories of other
earlier women. In Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half Formed Thing
(2013), the trauma stems from her uncle’s abuse, which leads to worth-
lessness and eventual death. Girl’s body and mind bear the brunt of this
traumatic experience and the ghosting, if any, is in her own body. For
women, individual trauma narratives often focus on women’s sexual
trauma, rape, honour killings. Reflecting on her own experiences, Susan
Brison notes how important it is to articulate, make sense, to bear witness
through that sense-making and then, re-enter the community:
Piecing together a shattered self requires a process of remembering and

working through in which speech and affect converge in a trauma narrative.
Saying something about the trauma does nothing to it, the communicative
act of bearing witness to traumatic events not only transforms traumatic
memories into narratives that can then be integrated into the survivor’s
sense of self and view of the world, but it also reintegrates the survivor into
community, re-establishing bonds of trust and faith in others. (Brison, 2003)
Trauma might haunt the conscious and unconscious mind, but it also
remains or resurfaces in the body. It can become embodied, triggered by
travel, visits, objects, encounters leading to a reliving of the traumatic

event and a new understanding, or perhaps reburial. Haunting of locations
and ghosts in fiction dramatize, embody, remind, re-enact trauma and
help manage it so it does not endlessly destructively only eat away at
the living.
Duong Thu Huong: Novel Without a Name (1995)

Little is written of the horrors of the Vietnam War which does not focus
on the American experience, and even less which is from a woman’s point
of view. However, T.H. Duong’s novel (1995) tells of the brutality meted
out to Vietnamese soldiers and to women, some of whom were also fight-
ers in the war, and others forced to serve in other dangerous collusive
roles, many abused sexually. For those visiting Vietnam, the lush landscape
and warm reception from people in small villages hides the traumas expe-
rienced historically, some of which can then be seen in Ho Chi Minh
City’s museums in unforgettable photographs. Duong Thu Huong was
born in Vietnam in 1947 and, at the age of 20, led a Communist Youth
Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. She was one of only
three survivors from a volunteer group of forty. Since the war she has
advocated for civil rights and democratic reform, been expelled from the
Communist party and refused the right to leave the country, where her
novels are banned. She is one of the most popular and controversial writ-
ers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad.
In one terrible moment a Vietnamese ghost, a woman victim, appears
to the protagonist. Some of the genre’s most Gothic elements—flesh,
bones, ghosts and time—combine with local Vietnamese customs of the
dead to form literary and memorial resistances to mythical and ideological
rememberings of the war.
Wars are experienced differently, depending on a range of circumstances
such as economy, culture, and the day-to-day conditions, invasion, cap-
ture, loss, and they are also remembered differently, according often to the
outcome, but also who claims the story. Naomi Mitchison notes, in
‘Vercingetorix and the Others’ (1930), that those who win are heard, oth-
ers silenced absented. W.H. Auden has similar comments (‘History to the
defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon’) (1937).
Although books of the Vietnamese War written in Vietnamese are used
in schools, such as Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1994), little fiction is
widely known. T.H. Duong’s Novel Without a Name (1995) offers a
226 G. WISKER
Gothic view, from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman writer who

fought in the war. Armstrong speaks of anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s
distinction between ‘the idiom of ghost mentioned in American public
media’ (commonly phrased as ‘the ghost/specter of the Vietnam War’)
‘and the widespread public belief in war ghosts in Vietnam’ (2008, p. 14),
whose war dead number approximately fifty times that of the American
forces. Recent critical work has cited the Vietnam War as informing a
‘comeback’ for ‘War Gothic’ in American culture (Monnet & Hantke,
2016, p. xviii); as Kwon argues, however, American and Vietnamese expe-
riences of the Vietnam/American War were very different. While much
American Vietnam War fiction is based on soldiers’ experiences in a
strange, tropical landscape, Vietnamese post-war fiction is grounded in the
suffering of a colonised, occupied and heavily bombed country. Wartime
and post-war experiences, along with Vietnam’s religious, superstitious
and ancestral practices, have led to a literature abounding in horror,
ghosts, and haunted memories at once Gothic and traditionally Southeast
Asian in character (Armstrong, 2019, p. 30).
In the foreword to The Culture of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late
Socialist Vietnam (2001), John Bodnar writes, ‘[w]hen the Vietnamese
government attempted to honor the dead who had fought the Americans,
they cast their commemoration in predictable tropes of patriotism and
heroism. Such images, however, held only a limited value for families
deeply attached to rituals that signified that the dead would be reborn in
another world where they would join a community of ancestors’ (p. 10)
(Armstrong, 2019, p. 31). Forms of recognising the dead are culturally
constructed (Lincoln, M and B, 2015).
Bao’s work is very ghoulish, featuring bloated corpses. Duong’s also
does this, but it focuses on women’s roles, and deaths as well as those of
male soldiers. Many women were employed as infantry or scouts and suf-
fered rape before murder. Duong has a number of particularly gruesome
Gothic scenes in the visions or hallucinations of Quan, her male soldier
protagonist, one of rotting corpses of women alive with maggots and larvae
The soldiers had raped them before killing them. The corpses were bruised
and violet. So this was how graceful, girlish bodies rotted, decomposing into
swollen corpses, puffy as dead toads. Maggots swarmed in their wounds,
their eyes and mouths. Fat white larvae. They crawled over the corpses in
waves, plunging in and out of them in a drunken orgy. (Duong, 1995, p. 3)
There is another of his baby brother, who died in the war, as a skeleton
suckled by his mother.
Armstrong (2019) suggests this is not gratuitously gruesome; rather it
is a Gothicised scene, a changed memory haunted by the horrors of war.
Neither is a seen ghost; they are both imagined Gothicised altered
memories.
Vietnam was subject to invasion, attack, bombing and colonisation at
different times by the French and Americans and Armstrong argues that a
particular form of dealing with a Gothicised time appears in moments of
trauma in Vietnamese work. According to Armstrong, it is important to
understand the different cultural significance of death and writing about
it. For the Vietnamese, there is peaceful death at home, non-peaceful
death in the street, and death on the battleground as in Duong’s novel.
He notes, ‘where Western culture might commonly view these ghosts in
fearful, vengeful revenant terms, the Vietnamese perception of these
ghosts is often of a far more practical and pragmatic nature, as entities with
needs and grievances, or as Heonik Kwon calls them, ‘uprooted, placeless
beings,’ or ‘ontological refugees’ (2008, p. 16) and with two or three mil-
lion Vietnamese dead along with other displaced millions each differently
considered ‘linh hon (lost, wandering souls)’ (Armstrong, 2019, p. 32).
Quan wanders among huge plants in a ‘haunted labyrinth’, hearing the
ghostly sound of a bamboo flute. Eventually, he also comes across the
bones and knapsack of a dead solder who has left a note for his mother.
The flute was real, the ghost played it, seeking return. Quan not only
encounters the skeleton of the lost soldier but is visited by a ‘wraith’ claim-
ing to be an ‘ancestor, from the seventieth generation’. Interestingly, the
public celebratory version of history of grand deeds about historical tri-
umphs over ‘Chinese barbarians’ and the building of ‘triumphal arches’ is
refused by Quan, emphasising ‘the clash between personal narrative and
national ideology and history’ (Armstrong, 2019, p. 39).
Kate Mosse: The Winter Ghosts (2010)

Kate Mosse’s ghost stories are rich and poignant, their locations vitally
important and their revelations of hidden histories, righting of wrongs,
most usually historically therapeutic rather than malign and revengeful.
Still, not everyone can appreciate ghost stories as designed to do more
than scare round the fireplace (if we still have fireplaces), so reviews do not
always appreciate their social message, and in this case one at least calls The
228 G. WISKER
Winter Ghosts (2010) a ‘yarn’: ‘thoughtfully constructed, and contains all

the classic ingredients of a spectral yarn’ (Brown, 2009).
Ghosts demand that history is re-written, re-understood and uncov-
ered, and not every ghostly figure is menacing and deadly. Sussex author
Kate Mosse’s fascination with Carcassonne, its history and locale domi-
nates The Winter Ghosts, as it does other tales where she immortalises
Carcassonne and the experience of the marginalised and persecuted
Cathars (Labyrinth, 2005; Sepulchre, 2008), recuperating a hidden history
of silenced language, a disenfranchised, erased people. In her novel The
Winter Ghosts, she revisits this landscape and develops a story of ghostly
encounters, time shifts, romantic potential and recuperation both for the
protagonist and the community.
Freddie, a returning war veteran, retraces an earlier trip in the moun-
tains of the Languedoc, crashes in the snow, is saved and visits a village
reminiscent of one of Lovecraft’s more dubious settings, where hidden
histories are re-enacted. History haunts the location and there is a watcher
in the landscape, a gap in the hillside, an entry from the past into the pres-
ent, and twin hauntings based on Freddie’s loss of his brother George, the
favoured one of the family, in the Great War, and the historical, brutal
purging of the Cathars in the area. Jane Housham (2010) sees it as a
‘romantic ghost story: its setting in the mountainous region of south-west
France; a vulnerable narrator with a stake in the past; and, key to all,
time-slips’.
Mosse says for her the starting point for the story ‘was really the nature
of grief, and how incredibly hard it was for everybody, but particularly
young men, to be allowed to grieve after the first world war. What would
it be like if you idolised your older brother, and you’d never quite been the
wanted child, but he made it all right—then he was gone?’ (Mosse, in
Housham, 2010)
Space and place are significant in this Gothic ghost story of trauma. The
location in the Pyrenees of Southern France, Languedoc, the Carcassonne
region, ‘a green land soaked red with the blood of the faithful’ (p. 38) is a
haunted space, and the liminal space of place and time into which Freddie
drives and crashes is one he can enter because of his existence in his own
liminal space, in mourning. ‘The watcher in the hills had me in her sights.
She was already there. Waiting for me’ (p. 29). Freddie hears a repeated
whispering: ‘The others have slipped away into darkness’ (p. 40). Freddie
enters the appropriately named Nulle, a village which seems in stasis and
silence, picturesque but gloomy, in which time seems to have stood still
and as it seems is expected of him as a guest, dresses up in antique clothes

for the evening’s event, a moment significant for local people, remember-
ing those who have gone and those still present. His entry into the village
and the evening feast, his presence, causes a rift in time, sending the villag-
ers back, replaying the very evening when they were attacked, prior to
their fatal escape to the mountains, where they were walled up alive.
Freddie’s role in the time-slippage is one of recovery, for the people he
finds himself with, and ultimately for himself. When Freddie feasts with
the local people he notices they sing plainsong, their clothes are remark-
ably ancient, yet still fresh, and the lovely young woman next to him seems
particularly interested in sharing stories. She helps him to talk of George’s
death her wise sadness infusing comments on the impact of loss, the con-
stant overshadowing of life caused by grieving: ‘The dead leave their shad-
ows, an echo of the space with in which they once lived. They haunt us,
never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their
futures but our own’ (p. 113). The tale is also a romance using fairy story
conventions. Fabrissa, whose name signals fabrication, a story, a fantasy
revealing the past, leads Freddie back in time, as the community local
buildings and landscape come to life to tell their tale. She seems to offer a
future, and in some tales such a woman would be a deceptive demon lover,
but instead she singles him out for his sensitivity and honesty and the
openness which pain and loss have given him. What seems a historical
fancy-dress affair of village feasting shifts remarkably in time and action as
the hall is invaded by ancient Catholic soldiers, panic breaks out and there
is violence. The soldiers march those who are left alive off to be walled and
entombed in a mountain cave. Like Freddie, we have no idea how many
visitors might have experienced the sudden time-space shift when feasting
with the villagers in a big, communal, celebratory meal, and how many
times the soldiers of the past have entered the celebrating crowd to drive
them out to their deaths. Fabrissa, a substantial presence among others,
clearly all ghosts from a previous period, realises Freddie’s vulnerable lim-
inal state, his loss of his brother in the war, a major source of trauma, and
engages him with her story and her friendship, the romantic promise—to
reveal the history of that moment and seek his support.
Outside and away from the Ostal is for the two of them a moment out
of time. A beautiful woman, a faery ghost lover, ‘made of air or water,
rather than blood and bone’(p. 131), a guide, she leads him out of the
village but although this is a romantic opportunity and she is beguiling,
she also feels unreal ‘she felt insubstantial in my arms like mist’ (p. 152).
230 G. WISKER
Her selection of Freddie hinges on his sensitivity, his loss, and her recogni-
tion that he can be a conduit for the discovery of her people because he is
solid and alive and this terrible story needs to be heard, the ghosts freed.
Then she tells of the terrible fate of her people, the Cathars of her village
forced out by the French soldiers whose ghosts invaded the evening’s cel-
ebration just moments ago for Freddie and all who were ‘present’. The
soldiers drove the village people out, and when they hid in cave, they
blocked them in to die. Fabrissa says ‘What was a refuge became a tomb.
Every opening was blocked and we could not get out’ (p. 153). Fabrissa
reveals the location of the walled-up, long-dead community, but he loses
her into the early morning light and as he starts to pass out and she to fade
away, she gives him a mission: ‘Find me, Freddie’ (p. 155). Fever follows,
and although he leaves the area to recover, he remains eternally fascinated
with her and intent on finding her, so he returns. Fabrissa engaged his
strength as a contemporary, living catalyst to bring together and into view
the traumatic events of the past, walled up, hidden from memory. She
does so to have the sealed rock opened, the ghosts freed and the memories
settled, and simultaneously move forward from his own state of stasis and
paralysis in mourning his talented dead brother.
Freddie’s return journey takes him to the cave, where he finds evidence
of the lost community. The whispers of the dead call him in and they rec-
ognise each other, the ghosts of the evening in the Ostal, who met a ter-
rible death in the cave hundreds of years earlier. Freddie is first condemned
to watch them die then, ‘Faces loomed in and out of my vision, a terrible
beauty in their eyes, coming closer, then withdrawing’ (p. 213). His sen-
sitivity from his own loss enables him to be a conduit to witness and reveal
he details of theirs: ‘I had been haunted by images of George taken back
into the earth. Now, in this place, I was witnessing skin slipping from
bone, the putrefaction of flesh, the cavalcade of life and death and decay
accelerated’ (p. 213). His living human agency enables him to recruit help
to release the ghosts, then tell their story. Freddie’s actions leads to the
recuperation of a hidden past, of a whole people whose lives had been
silenced and walled up and this release parallels that of his gradual re-
emergence from grief and paralysis post-First World War. As a contempo-
rary women’s Gothic novel, The Winter Ghosts revisits the past with a
feminised eye, since Freddie (like Pat Barker’s characters in the Regeneration
trilogy, 1991–1995) is suffering from the aftermath of war: grief, loss of
his more loved brother, and an undermining sense of values. The Gothic
adds to this historiographical meta-fiction and recuperation, a redrawing
of psychogeographical and other maps, revaluing of values and beliefs,

reclaiming power through storying. This is a Gothic ghostly romance tale
spliced with fantasy, travel, romantic fiction, and a reminder of how the
past haunts, seduces, cannot be ignored and must be passed on, heard.
History is changed because of the ghostly intrusion, rewritten when alter-
native versions of the past re-emerge and are revalued.
Being walled up alive is a familiar medieval Gothic trope and the trau-
matic event behind Kate Mosse’s story is the genocide of the Cathars. The
village to which Freddie drives was once a Cathar village, where the peo-
ple, part of a Gnostic sect, were stamped out by the Roman Catholic
church in the early thirteenth century. The clues to parallel worlds, times
and the deaths of these people appear as slippages, hints, sounds, and
colours, while the names of those who are her influences, Algernon
Blackwood, M.R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu, ghost or leak into the text.
Michèle Roberts: Daughters of the House (1992)

Up from the cellar, down from the attic, in Daughters of the House a single
red shoe testifies to the traumatic experience of the Nazi occupation of
France in the Second World War. The destruction and some of the collu-
sion seeps into the house into the dangers faced by two young girls,
Therese and Leonie. This is a very insightful, focused, women-oriented
feminist tale about trauma, haunting and the need to reveal and deal with
secrets, tales and elements of one’s identity formed by and hidden by his-
tory. Its domestic setting, focus on food preparation and presentation are
metaphors for the preservation, enjoyment and abuse of bodies and how
the routine of everyday busyness, like favoured public versions of events,
covers up histories of illicit sexual activity, lies, betrayal and death.
This is a troubled house, ghosted by the historical presence of the
mother’s/aunt’s illicit relationship and the betrayal of a Jewish family hid-
ing in the attic during the Occupation. Two first cousins, one English, one
French, Therese and Leonie live over one summer in the French house
and come together again over another summer years after the war and the
death of Antoinette. In the story, they sometimes appear interchangeable.
When Leonie as a girl skips in with a newly surfaced red shoe, up from the
rubble of the cellar, Antoinette, at the silent dinner table, blushes and
throws it in the fire, calling it rubbish; yet it has emerged from the wall,
part of the recent past returning while they are all together, arising from
the house and the grounds. While Leonie and Therese both say they saw
232 G. WISKER
a vision in the glade, it is Therese who enters a convent while Leonie mar-
ries Baptiste, the man Therese once spied on dancing with her. The inter-
changeability of the girls, who come together later as women, and of their
mothers/aunts suggests a confusion of detail, truth and fiction which is
the nature of traumatic secrets, especially those of the wartime period, in
this small house among many others, in a small French village. Michèle
Roberts is half-French and the families of the cousins, like her own, cross
the Channel. It is said that Antoinette is Therese’s mother and Leonie’s
aunt; Madeline is Leonie’s mother and Therese’s aunt., After the wartime
events have been rediscovered, and Therese sees a vision of the Virgin,
however, it is Leonie who remains in the house.
There are three time zones in the novel: the war; the girls in the house
with their mothers after the war when the shoe reappears; and the visit
years later of Therese to see Leonie and settle the history they have each
tried to repress. The novel is not filled with actual ghosts, except perhaps
at the very end; rather, it is filled with neatly buried memories and half-
truths, locations and objects which carry a haunted past and which when
resurfacing and coming under scrutiny can be seen differently, as can the
historical stories. Therese’s return begins to unravel the fixed stories,
reviving the memories which haunt the place.
When Therese returns, it is so many years on that it is difficult to
remember or to forget who colluded with the Germans and who resisted,
during the occupation of the homes of their neighbours, families and
friends. The single red shoe that surfaces in the house in which the girls
lived with their aunt/mother over the first, early summer in France, sug-
gests both the unsettled, unrest, of their dead aunt/mother, Antoinette
(whose shoe it is), who is little spoken of, and her hidden, unfinished
sexual energies, which might well have been misdirected during the
Occupation. But the whole house and its domestic history link the day-to-
day experience of the girls and the history of the house and their family.
This is a haunted house novel in which the shape of an ostensibly
intensely domestic house reveals terrible histories of illicit relationships,
abuse, deception, and betrayal; a microcosm of a society damaged by the
war in which, with the occupation of France, bodies, minds and homes
were simultaneously invaded and taken over, and each bear the scars.
Bachelard, building on Jung, sees the attic, near the roof, as a well-
constructed safe space, while the cellar is ‘first and foremost the dark entity
of the house, the one that partakes of dark forces ‘(Bachelard, 1969[1958],
p. 19). However, many Gothic texts tend to see both attic and cellar as
liminal places which hide secrets and ghosts. In Beloved (1987), Toni
Morrison notes that in the Southern states every attic has its ghosts of
slavery. Both attics and cellars are sites of trauma and its returned traces in
Daughters of the House (Roberts, 1992). We focus here on one house in a
village set in three time zones: during the Occupation, which produces a
set of memories which resurface; a few years after when the cousins/sisters
are in the house together, and the time that triggers many flashbacks and
memories, years after the Occupation, when they reunite. The flotsam and
jetsam of memories, hidden histories, appear in suddenly surfacing cloth-
ing from the past, a red shoe belonging to Antoinette, the mother of one
of the girls, symbolising lust, illicit relationships, punishment.
This is a rambling French house, but its cellar and attic remind of tradi-
tional Gothic structures as each hides the silenced histories of past terrors,
guilt and suffering. While there is a highly structured, complex, domesti-
cated semblance of order in the beautiful family heritage plate, the French
meals served with skill at managed times of the day, this cataloguing, man-
aging, ordering and nourishing is an organisational façade. The ghosts of
the past and the guilt of the past have to surface and be reckoned with
once the cousins/sisters unite and their stories are told. While the house is
filled with haunted histories, from its cellar to its attic, the main apparition
historically seen is the Virgin Mary, at the shrine in the woodland near the
cemetery, and this is treated as more of a hoax or an argument for an exor-
cism than a real revelation. Both girls claim to have seen the Virgin Mary,
Therese turning this into something of a self-definition, leading her to
enter a convent.
In this house there was collusion, betrayal and an attempt to protect the
Jews pursued and victimised by the Nazis. Here, cellars hide sexual secrets,
and attics secrets both of the refugees and their betrayal. This house is a
microcosm of the effects of war trauma on the family and the whole com-
munity, and in this it resembles both Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and
Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2015), since each of these also bring
back the repressed histories and the buried ghosts. All is only notionally
calm, family secrets only temporarily hidden, and accepted version of
events are tested when there is physical intrusion of evidence of the past;
the one red shoe.
As in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), this is a
troubled house, its secrets enveloping newcomers, causing distress and
changing their behaviours. It has designs upon those within. In time, the
two girls develop very differently. They might have a vision of the Virgin
234 G. WISKER
in a clearing, but Leonie, initially the more religious of the pair, remains in
the house, hiding her own sexual secret and Therese, who makes a fuss
about the shrine, enters a convent on return to England. They are differ-
ently locked in their traumatised responses, sensing the events leaking
from the past into their lives—the lies, the visions. Ultimately it is impos-
sible to escape from the repressed histories which changed their lives.
The book begins with the reunion of the women and a description of
the house with its lack of fixity, hidden secrets covered with acceptable
histories, a space and place ripe for ghosts: ‘It was a changeable house.
Sometimes it felt safe as a church, and sometimes it shivered then cracked
apart’ (p. 1). Defamiliarised, its windows are eyes, its turrets like ‘pointed
blue hats’. At every point, the house resembles a face and a human body
dressed up, blinded, hiding secrets like a dead woman. But there is no
female apparition; rather the history of the house begins to reveal itself,
and with it the trauma of the war and occupation. Long-dead Antoinette,
her secrets, and the house have become one:
What bounded the house was skin. A wall of gristle a soldier could tear open
with his bare hands. Antoinette laughed. She was buried in the cellar under
a heap of sand. Her mouth was stuffed full of torn-up letters and broken
glass but she was tunnelling her way out like a mole. Her mouth bled from
the corners. She laughed a guttural laugh a Nazi laugh. (p. 1)
Leonie maintains the many secrets and cover-up tales, silent about haunt-
ings of domestic objects and place. The novel’s three time zones oscillate
between the Occupation; when the women were children with Antoinette,
the mother, less than innocent, hiding her past, and the opening moments
of Therese’s return which, like that of a revenant, stir up the past trauma,
re-explaining and settling some of it.
Historically, the rules of this house terrorised Leonie and Therese when
young. Embedded in the behaviours of everyday life, in the shared spaces,
walls, cavities, are secrets of such a monstrous form—rape, brutality,
deception, betrayal, murder—that rules to constrain space, memory and
behaviour were essential. The restlessness of a crawling ghostly Antoinette,
and silence round an attic of betrayed Jewish families, are the stuff of
trauma in a land scarred by fascist violence. With such unimaginable hor-
ror just beneath the surfaces, people must create a cover story to stay alive.
In Northern France, as in other occupied countries, there were many in
the Resistance, many behaving in a humane fashion, others forced or
induced into collusion, and still others happy to join in the killing to
remain safe or to thrive. With such a traumatic history it is difficult to dif-
ferentiate between and understand these very varied responses over time.
There might be new opportunities for revaluation, punishment or forgive-
ness, but to continue in silence shuttered up is damaging. Places and lives
are constantly haunted by what is hidden, unsaid, until it bursts or crawls
its way out and into contemporary lives.
The novel is also constructed as a domestic space, in the Nazi
Occupation, in the time of the girls upbringing and that of their reunion.
Michèle Roberts is known for her writing about cookery, sometimes relat-
ing it to sex and pornography (Food, Sex and God, 1998; Playing Sardines,
2012; New Statesmen, 2003). Chapters are named after French cookery,
or utensils, reminding of the everyday. In the well-managed French house-
hold, time and events are indicated by the objects of domesticity, by the
lovely French plates, everyday routines, the meals. However, behind this
façade of culinary and domestic control and creativity the house is also
actively protecting its past. When Leonie tries to go to forbidden places,
such as the bedroom on the first floor at the back, or the top of the kitchen
stairs, very precise, very domestic, very everyday, terror not only halts her
but what lies up there, behind a door, threatens attack: ‘Behind the terror
was something evil which stank and snarled and wanted to fix her in its
embrace’ (p. 1). Like a ghostly encounter with a wrathful, revengeful,
unstill ghost, the evil is something different from, but connected to,
Antoinette, dead, buried, clutching her red handbag and trying to climb
up and out and to her red petticoats, like a flash of red on the washing line.
Antoinette’s story has to be told, but her collusion is her sexual role, and
her subsequent death is figured in the redness of her handbag. The shoe
which appears from the hidden spaces below is a partner to the white pet-
ticoats she was to hang as a warning, as a call for a truce, as a sign of what
is hidden. The haunting of trauma enters the bodies of the living, ‘the
deadness and the evil and the stink were inside Leonie’ (p. 1).
Women’s sexual vulnerability and collusion lie behind the tale of dead
Antoinette, while deceit and death lie behind that of Henri Taille, whose
grave Therese passes on the bus returning to the house. Taille’s bones are
buried in a tangle with those of the Jews, ‘the shallow pit had opened and
given them up’ (p. 7), but the grave since had been desecrated with swas-
tikas. While ‘The war was a sort of bookmark that divided the page of
history’ (p. 44), racism and anti-Semitism linger on in this desecration and
the racism Therese encounters on the bus. Leonie wanted secrets buried,
236 G. WISKER
shut in the room where she kept bric-a-brac but Therese’s return disinters
them, rewriting fabricated cover-up stories.
The domestic dishes and places of the house are each mentioned daily,
and brought into the spotlight, as gradually the secrets of the experiences
in the war are revealed. Still a topic of conversation for the cooks and
maids, Antoinette’s hidden history is talked over, digested, remoulded and
managed. As if making a meal, Roberts embeds the traumatic history of
scarred and destroyed lives into the fabric of the house and of the everyday
domestic actions within it, its utensils, the cooking and eating, its walls,
attics and cellars—the attic where the Jewish refugees were hidden then
(apparently) betrayed by Henri Taille, and the cellar where Antoinette’s
secrets lie.
So they gossip and make something of the story as they make some-
thing of the food—the haunting tale brought to life and reconfigured:
While their fingers flew in and out of the earthy heap of beans Rose and
Victorine talk, they described village life to each other in intricate detail.
They passed it back and forth. They crawled across their chosen ground like
detectives armed with magnifying glasses. They took any subject and made
it manageable. They sucked it and licked it down to size. They chewed it
until, softened, it yielded, like blubber or leather, to the understanding.
They went over it reportedly until it weakened and gave in and became part
of the tragedy, disaster; they moulded them into small digestible por-
tions. (p. 70)
Food, cooking, culinary arts and eating are domestic metaphors for man-
aging truths. The cooking preparation, the eating resemble the ways in
which even the worst gruesome facts and tales are managed, digested and
sorted away so that Leonie’s desires for a formal meal and her manage-
ment of the cutlery resemble attempts to shut down and organise histo-
ries. Therese is told what cakes are being made. This is how traumatic
histories are managed and made part of the everyday—moulded and
blended in with ordinary routine life so that their edges are not deadly and
sharp and the tales are managed. But for some in the house the haunting
past cannot lie low, and reappears to reveal disasters, tragedies, tell tales.
The priest mocked the girls’ story of seeing the Virgin in the woodland,
her location over a pile of stones, but the mockery hid his own historical
criminal acts of betraying the Jewish families and Henri: ‘The men destroy-
ing the heaps of stones, in the wood, on the orders of the priest, had found
that it covered a shallow grave. Inside was a mess of human skulls and
bines’(p. 116). This town and its environs is filled with ghosts buried in
cellars, in woodland glades, kept secret in people’s minds. When Leonie
asked why women didn’t die in the war, she was shut up by her mother/
aunt, but once Therese returns, the truths will begin to be revealed, ‘she
foretold a groan and a heave of change’ (p. 171). The priests who informed
on Henri and the Jews would need to be outed. Therese’s return has been
like that of a ghost of the past, though she is alive, her role opening old lies
and shut stories. The grave is forced open and reveals its dead, the Jews
and Henri, and with that the whole past comes dribbling out and into
view, onto pages and into records. When Therese wants to know why
there is a remembrance for the war dead still for both wars, and why some
of the men are not in the cemetery, she is told the graves are unknown, the
men were killed by the Germans, and no one knows where in the wood-
land they were buried. This Normandy town has visibly celebrated ceme-
teries, memories, yet hidden tales and bodies are found, ghosting the
outskirts and the kitchens. No amount of retelling the stories into a man-
ageable shape prevents ghostly appearances of objects reminding of the
terrible past. The domestic setting and the women’s lives have been and
continue to be differently recalled and represented in time to be intruded
on, blocked out, covered over, retold, but their tragedies, usually taking
place in the house and home, are still there in the utensils and the kitchen
and cellars, the grounds, and the reshaped fragments of lovely French
serving dishes, of stories. Therese’s return, which starts the novel, also
finishes it, and it signals the uncovering of the past. She is like a revenant
herself walking back into Leonie’s life.
The laying of these ghosts is about to start as the novel ends and Leonie
goes back in time to enter the attic, where the Jewish family and Henri
Taille were. She opens the door and goes in: ‘The voices came from some-
where just ahead of the shadowy bit she could see. She stepped forward,
into the darkness, to find words’ (p. 172). Therese coincides with, sets off,
the return of the undead, the facing of wartime hidden secrets, traumas
and tales, and finding words will, like the building of the structures in the
kitchen, act as management of her own life, and of the history of the vil-
lage, the house, the family.
238 G. WISKER
Conclusion
The three tales explored here each deal with the experiences and haunting
effects of the traumas of war. Duong’s Novel without a Name is itself a
recognised but publically censored testament to the horrors of war, in
Vietnam, as the Gothicising of violent death in war infiltrates, haunts the
land and waterways of Vietnam, revealing dead soldiers sending messages
to their grieving mothers, memories of family dead in the war, and the
horrific haunting visions of invaded and rotted bodies.
Kate Mosse’s novel, set just after the First World War, engages with the
vulnerability of personal trauma, Freddie’s loss of his beloved brother and
his journey to the Carcassonne region to try and regain some sense of bal-
ance, which leads him, disrupted in his own time and space by his loss,
into the haunted revived moment of the genocide of the Cathars. His
story employs romance, a kind of fairy tale, and heroism, which begins to
restore his faith in life, and replace his equilibrium in which mourning has
its own place, as he helps to locate and memorialise the murdered people,
the Cathars.
Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House brings the horrors of France
under Occupation right inside the bodies of the young cousins and the
body of the house, which itself has contained the body of one of their
mothers, whose red shoe surfaces to indicate her collusion, seduction, or
attempt at survival, while the true story of the betrayal of the Jewish family
hidden in the attic is revealed as one of the priest’s cooperation with the
occupying forces. Traumatic histories are written out through the body of
the house and the bodies of the girls. Lies, and silenced, blocked up histo-
ries dominate each tale.
Memorialisation is the way some deal publicly with loss and pain, but,
like personal selective memory, it is sometimes partial, a front to smooth
over violent histories while trauma, with which it is linked, cannot be satis-
fied with outward shows of grief and acknowledgement alone. Dealing
with trauma demands that the dark truths be disinterred and fully recog-
nised along with the lost bodies. The need for honest, full remembrance
runs through all of these stories, engaged with through personal memory,
like revenants and ghosts brought to life in spaces, places and felt through
the bodies of the protagonists. The places and the bodies are equally
haunted, their stories told, re-told and unforgettable.
References
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https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3686
Auden, W. H. (1937). Spain. Faber and Faber.
Bachelard, G. ([1958] 1969). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.
Barker, P. (1991). Regeneration. Viking Press.
Barker, P. (1993). The Eye in the Door. Viking Press.
Barker, P. (1995). The Ghost Road. Viking Press.
Bodnar. (2001). Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed) The Culture of Memory: Remaking the Past
in Late Socialist Vietnam. University of California Press.
Brison, S. J. (2003). Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton
University Press.
Brown, H. (2009, November 17). ‘The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse: review’,
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bookreviews/6588518/The-Winter-Ghosts-by-Kate-Mosse-review.html
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Due, T. (2015). Ghost Summer: Stories. Prime Books.
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N. McPherson, Trans.). Penguin.
Housham, J. (2010, November 13). Review of The Winter Ghosts, by Kate Mosse.
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ghosts-kate-mosse-review
Jackson, S. (1959). The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Books.
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King, S. (1983). Pet Sematary. Doubleday.
Kwon, H. (2008). The Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge University Press).
La Capra, D. (1994). Representing the Holocaust: History Theory Trauma. Cornell
University Press.
Lewis, C. S. (1942). The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles.
Lim, B. C. (2001). Spectral Times: The Ghost Film As Historical Allegory.
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Lincoln, M., & Lincoln, B. (2015). Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife
and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57 (1),
191–220 (Web. 1 March 2016).
Luckhurst. (2008). The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.
Madsen, D. (2011). Teaching trauma: (Neo) slave narratives and cultural
(re)memory. In G. Wisker (Ed.), Teaching African American Women’s Writing.
Palgrave Macmillan.
McBride, E. (2013). A Girl is a Half Formed Thing. Galley Beggar Press.
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Mitchison, N. (1930). Vercingetorix and the Others. In When the Bough Breaks.
Jonathan Cape.
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Routledge.
Mosse, K. (2005). Labyrinth. Orion.
Mosse, K. (2008). Sepulchre. Orion.
Mosse, K. (2010). The Winter Ghosts. Orion.
Murphy, F. (2006). Trauma Trails, Stolen Generations, and The Ethics of an
Authenticity of Suffering, Erasmus Intensive Programme, Vienna, July 22–
August 2, Institut für Kultur und Sozialanthropologie, Hs A.
Ninh, B. (1994). The Sorrow of War. Vintage Classics.
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lications.regis.edu/theses/798
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TV
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CHAPTER 9
Visits and Visitations: A Visit (Jackson,

1950), Ghost Summer (Due, 2015), Her
Fearful Symmetry (Niffenegger, 2009), Hotel
World (Smith, 2001)
Residents in transitional spaces, ghosts are attached to places and for a

reason. Loss, destruction, deceit or simply erasure, burial, and silence are
their lot but they need to be seen and heard because they have social, cul-
tural, historical and personal damage to put right, so they haunt the places
they cannot escape, condemned to bewail or replay events, drawing others
into their perpetual circles.
Ghosts are insiders. They belong to and are locked into the places they
haunt but they are also outsiders existing round the peripheries of others’
lives. Their role is to point to loss, absence, deceit, to hidden pain and to
contradict harmonies of what counts as normality. They expose what is
denied whether that be a history silent about same-sex attraction, poverty,
immigration, or slavery. While haunted houses are the best known, they
are not the only places from which ghosts reappear, demanding justice and
recognition before retribution, revenge or merely the calming silencing of
recognition. The ghost rises from, and hovers in the spaces of the ostensi-
bly safe, neat and conformist locations of homes, grand mansions, towns,
hotels. Its role is to open up and reveal the dark, locked-in or locked-out
histories so that they can be revenged or come to terms with, but never
fully forgotten.
In Shirley Jackson’s ‘A Visit’ (1950), family and visitors alike are locked
in a cycle of repeated hospitality and danger when they enter or re-enter a

Switzerland AG 2022
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242 G. WISKER
lovely grand house and grounds. Margaret, the invited friend brought into
a cyclical haunting, part of the family’s pattern of life. They replicate the
house and its history in a mosaic floor, perpetual weaving of tapestries and
repetition of tragic events.
Graceland, the small town in Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2015),
is a central location charged with the ghosts of slavery, plantation brutality,
local pain and death. The traumatic past of the town leaks out from the
lake, out from the earth, burrowing through lost tunnels and up the mine-
shaft of Free Jim’s mine, taking the form of demonic creatures, bodily
invasion, or re-enacting historical slave escapes played out in ghostly sight
and sound. The geography of a haunted past infuses the lives of those who
live there or who visit family.
Audrey Niffenegger’s family visit in Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)
brings two American sisters into their aunt’s haunted Hampstead home,
their legacy. But the dead resent the bodily solidity of the living and inher-
itances can be all-consuming, like selfish ghosts.
In Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), the promised dream place is not a
country house but a hotel. Hotels market and sell a vision and version of
safety, comfort and quality of life, undercut in Smith’s novel by the focus
on dark, cluttered or cavernously empty spaces behind the façade, and
inclusion of those who are excluded, waste, outsiders. Else (already a
name which suggests unwanted excess), a homeless young woman, who
sits out in the cold; Lisa, the well-turned out desk clerk, who maintains
a show of managed normality, but cuts through this when opening a
hotel room to Else. The haunting vacuum at the heart of the novel is
both the dead protagonist and the shaft of the dumb waiter down which
she fell to her death.
These are places haunted by the intruders and pretenders, where iden-
tity is insubstantial and easily undercut by others, invested in objects which
can be stolen.
‘A Visit, or The Lovely House’, Shirley

Jackson (1950)
Shirley Jackson’s ‘A Visit’ (1950) reminds of the claustrophobic haunting
of The Haunting of Hill House (1959). In this story, after ‘elaborate
arrangements’, Margaret, a young woman, is invited to stay with her friend
Carla for a visit in her beautiful family home. Carla’s home and family are
9 VISITS AND VISITATIONS: A VISIT (JACKSON, 1950), GHOST… 243
perfect, and Margaret is impressed but both the house and the grounds
seem alive in some way, expecting something, and, as it emerges, they are
waiting for a story to replay itself here, a setting for the reliving of histori-
cal moments embedded in the structure and the fabric of the house and
grounds, dormant, haunting, awaiting, awakening.
The house is like a lovely sleeping creature, ‘a complete body’ (p. 627)
with its ‘long boned structure within’ (p. 627), words like steadying, and
restoring, indicating something that remains but could move on, shift.
The stone fawns have warm heads, the tapestries move. All of this is pre-
sented as normal but also defamiliarised, disturbing. The everyday intro-
duction of schoolfriends to stay in the holidays is disturbed by the very
perfection and readiness of the place to welcome Margaret. The house, its
contents, and the practices of the women within it are both normal and
strange. It is a hothouse, dominated by grand domesticity and repetition.
In every room there is needlepoint, and the subject is almost entirely the
house, in different seasons, at different times, mirroring itself, surround-
ing everyone and everything. Mrs Rhodes, the elegant mother, at first
appears quite domestic with this genteel work, but as the amount and
complexity of the needlepoint appears it is a little disturbing, as surely it
would take several centuries to produce?
Everything is historical, alive, both established, traditional, repetitive in
the images, the tapestries and the family’s ceremonious greetings and din-
ners, and yet also constantly insubstantial. Everything and everyone is
‘melting’ (p. 629), ‘not finished’ (p. 629), eternally shifting, the whole an
ideal period piece, waiting, its memory perfect and ready. In one room,
tables nest under others, bowls nest in other carved bowls and the tapes-
tries ‘were of the house reflected in the lake, and the tapestries themselves
were reflected in and out, among the mirrors on the walls with the house
in the tapestries reflected in the lake’ (p. 630). This is but one example of
mirroring and enclosing which frightens Margaret, although she is unsure
why. The house, ever reflected, reproduced, is imprisoning and forced
somehow to repeat itself. This becomes clearer when what is a surely a
regular scenario reopens, the brother Paul and his friend the Captain come
home, and a series of versions of repeated events begins. These include
rowing on the lake, walking in the grounds, picnicking, normal enough,
but not so here, because it is as if the house, the family, the grounds are
permanently alive, caught in a circle of repeated activity, previous events
haunting the present versions. It seems that to repeat, revive themselves
they invited yet another person, Margaret, to this enchanted, ghostly
244 G. WISKER
building and circularity of being. The house locks its family and their visi-
tors into a repetitive cycle, so Margaret, looking on the floor at a mosaic
of a girl who resembles her, sees ‘a curiously made picture of a girl’s face,
staring blankly from the floor, with blue chip eyes and a red chip mouth,
long light braids made of Yellowstone chips going down evenly on either
side of her round cheeks. What it says underneath is “here was Margaret
who died for love”’ (p. 633). The echoing of her name reinforces the cir-
cularity of the revisiting in what must be a series of Margarets to this house
which reflects itself in the water, in the paintings, tapestries and in the
repetitive activities of the celebratory return of the brother. Margaret is a
visitor and this house is haunted by the history of the family and the circu-
lar activities repeating through the years. Its circularity and entrapment
remind of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ condemned to weave, shut in
a tower, offered only a mirrored version of reality and dying as soon as she
breaks the spell which traps her.
There is such a tower in this grand mansion to which Paul says his great
aunt escapes because she cannot endure the tapestry. Her name is also
Margaret and when both Margarets meet the great aunt she says of Paul
‘he should have come and gone sooner, the old lady went on, as though
to herself. Then we’d have it all behind us.’ (p. 641). Margaret has no idea
what the aunt is talking about, but she is referring to the circular visits and
the necessary sacrifice of Margarets over time. The summer idyll begins to
break up when a party in a boat on the lake is threatened by storms and
soon after Paul leaves, prompting Margaret to ask whether (when) there
will be an end to her visit. Carla, hostess, friend, traps Margaret in her
hospitality, saying she will not leave before he comes back. Mrs Rhodes’
embroidery becomes a visual trap, aiming to fix Margaret and Carla on the
lawn near the River. ‘I have only to put the figures into the foreground,
Mrs Rhodes said, hesitating on her way to the drawing room. I shall have
you exactly if you sit on the lawn never ever. We should be models of still-
ness, said Carla, laughing. Margaret, will you come and sit beside me on
the lawn’ (p. 650). And now they will be fixed forever in this haunted
time-warp house of circular actions. The past repeats itself, the protagonist
Margaret is swept up as part of the family celebrations and holidaying, but
the longing to belong in this haunted place fools her into a dangerous
sense of security; she is one of many called in to complete part of the cir-
cular, repetitive story in this entrapped time and place, where the house is
reflected in the lake, the lake circuits the whole space, and ghostly events
repeat themselves.
Hotel World, Ali Smith (2001)

Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) starts with the cry of Sarah, a new
employee, falling down the dumb waiter shaft in the Global Hotel,
plummeting into her new semi-existence as a ghost. Hotels are a home
from home and a managed escape and, like Sarah’s new ghostly state,
they are replete with contradictions, contiguity, parallel worlds, insiders
and outsiders. This hotel, part of a global chain, reminds us of the
home, the world we live in and also the individual person, the Gothic
haunted house which is also the self. Inside its safe structure, with its
ubiquitous background music, maintained atmosphere and promise of
some kind of idyllic, pampered, perfect, paid-for existence, there are
major contrasts. There is a daily maintenance and pretence of safe, clean
glamour and order in this typical hotel inside or just outside of which
four women, each marginal to the grid, maintain a managed version of
self like that of the hotel. In the Global Hotel, the pretence of a safe,
clean order is undermined by the darker underside of lives and hotel
work. Spaces and places might seem safe but it’s possible to climb into
an outdated dumb waiter in the gap behind the wallpapered walls and
fall to your death. Early in the novel, Sarah the ghost, attending her
own wake, speaks to us but first gradually loses words, then taste, smell,
touch, disappearing from the page but, for her sister, remaining a focus
until Clare can first get close to then inside the hotel, and then under-
stand the mystery of her death.
I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust.

Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now
that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent for-
ever, haha, It’s all words with me. Now that I can’t reach out and touch, it’s
all I want, is to. (p. 5)
While her father refuses to sense her and becomes angry by the distur-
bance, her mother is only anguished and sad. Sarah leaves her alone:
I came only twice to the mother. It made her cry, made her miserable, jumpy
and fearful. It was unpleasant. Both times ended in tears and sleepless weeks.
It was kinder not to do it, and so I left her alone. (p. 13)
246 G. WISKER
Clare, however, is constant, leaving Sarah sweets on her grave, which dis-
appear, proving her continued existence. Ali Smith both makes Sarah a
credible ghostly presence, and also traces the differing responses to loss in
family and friends so Sarah remains somehow there, even when she no
longer speaks from the page.
Sarah’s particularly liminal position as a ghost during the period of the
novel is matched by her marginality as a lesbian. Silently attracted to a
girl in a watch mender’s shop, Sarah leaves her watch to be fixed in the
hope they can meet each other when she picks it up, and hovers outside
the shop for a few days, too nervous to re-enter. Her semi-existence is
one matched by the positions of the living characters in the hotel and
undercuts the façade of normality, safety, money and comfortable exis-
tence in this very transitional place for transitory residents. The hotel
presents glamour in its advertising matter, part of which is being written
by Penny, one of the novel’s four other women characters, sitting alone
and bored, cutting between channels and smoking over her room ser-
vice. By her own admission, she makes things up, like a novelist, and
mails her completed page at the end of the novel, preserving a con-
structed ideal while the real hotel goes on behind artifice and order and
where the resentment of those who work there share its darker under-
side. In the restaurant there is no form of power other than spitting in
the food; for the cleaners, similarly, particularly annoying customers
staying there are rewarded by their face flannels being used to clean the
toilets. At the front desk is another of the four women, uniformed Lisa,
whose financial situation is so dire she has her card torn up, and who
continues to present a smiling orderly front but enjoys small wayward
rebellions, such as giving Else, the homeless young woman who sits out-
side waiting for coins, a free night in a hotel room with a lavish breakfast.
Each of the women is marginal, unfixed like a ghostly presence. Lisa does
not have the financial stability which her well-groomed appearance sug-
gests and she’s stuck in a hierarchy where the frontline workers are only
known by the first names on their badges. Her experience of marginality
is less extreme than that of her male colleague, however; traumatised by
having seen Sarah fall to her death down the dumb-waiter shaft, he
spends all his spare time in the backroom with the lost items. In the
novel, all the women are lost items.
Much of the novel focuses not on Sarah the ghost, but on these others
who, like ghosts, are outsiders. Else resembles a ghost herself, as her name,
‘Else’, ‘something else’, suggests. She sits outside the hotel hoping for
some small change, and across the road sits another girl, in her school
uniform, clearly not interested in the money collecting at her feet. This is
Sarah’s sister, Clare, who seeks some sense of the hotel and the truth
behind Sarah’s death. She suffers her grief in remaining in touch with her
dead sister, seeking truths:
I talk to her all the time now we never used to talk at all hardly ever but now
all the time I can’t get my head round it if someone is dead they can be more
alive than they are what they’re actually like alive that is mad that is lobo-
tomic it really is. (p. 210)
At one point Clare joins Penny in trying to pull off the paper to reveal the
cracks beneath. The women are all linked, but they don’t know each other
yet. What is foregrounded, then undermined, is money, language, solidity
of buildings, maintenance of order. Each is revealed as pretence and super-
ficiality, like the role play of the women, like the formalities and awkward-
ness of Sarah’s burial and wake at which she is really seen by her sister
alone. All the women are outsiders, they all fabricate, pretend to be some-
thing, and at least more managed, focused, fitting in, than they each actu-
ally are in the machinery of hotel life, which, like watches, is notionally
functional. Each woman is unfixed, including Sarah the ghost and the girl
in the watch mender’s. Sarah never knows that the affection she feels for
the girl would have been mutual; a lost opportunity for both of them.
Considering this an example of the queer uncanny, Paulina Palmer (2012)
focuses on the relationship which starts and finishes the novel, noting that
Sarah ‘despondently observes she looked straight through me as she
passed me as if I simply wasn’t there. Falling for her had made me invisi-
ble’ (p. 23). Sarah’s invisibility in terms of her lesbian desires anticipates
her invisibility as a ghost, recalling Castle’s discussion of ‘the original
apparitional lesbian’ and her ‘history of derealisation’ (1995, p. 34). As
marginal women, each is variously acting out a role, ill and/or in some
way invisible to others. Penniless Lisa, the hotel clerk, is ill and has a break-
down; Else has a terrible cough, which discourages people from contribut-
ing to her; Clare, Sarah’s sister, is embarrassed by her own grief and the
pretences of the mourners and deliberately puts herself outside their
behaviour, visiting the hotel, wearing the uniform Sarah wore while work-
ing there and so becoming, as Palmer points out, ‘her double’ (2012,
248 G. WISKER
p. 77). Clare’s role is to try not to hide her sister’s death, but to uncover
it by forcing the piece of wood hammered into the wool over the dumb-
waiter’s shaft off the wall and testing the distance of the fall with a watch.
For the girl in the watch shop, the empty shaft ‘appears symbolically to
represent the absence and irrevocable loss that the death of a loved one
creates’ (Palmer, p. 77), although the novel is less about mourning Sarah
than seeing through façades and emphasising women’s precarious exis-
tences, and Palmer recognises the Gothic of the hotel as an example of
Anthony Vidler’s ‘architectural uncanny’ (1999). The story of the fall
down the lift shaft to her death makes Sarah a ghost, but all of the other
women in the novel are performing according to certain social rules,
whether they’re inside or outside the hotel, at odds with the world of
rules, dress codes, relationships. The Global Hotel is both haunted and a
crypt, recalling The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and other Gothic
houses where the ghosts of women hover unsettled, unplaced. A hotel, it
is also global, emphasising the unfixed and unfixable state of the women
both within and without.
Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger (2009)

On the death of their aunt (actually their mother) two sisters move from
the US into an inherited flat in London. They are in transit and transi-
tion, newly rootless and the flat is haunted. This novel focuses on space
and place—Highgate, Hampstead—with its haunted spaces, heath, with
some proximity to Highgate Cemetery, where the vampire Lucy Westenra
was staked by the crew of light in Dracula (Stoker, 1897), led by Van
Helsing, and where the remains of the good, great, wealthy, poetical and
political are interred side by side. The house into which the American
twins move, believing themselves to be inheriting and starting new lives,
overlooks Highgate Cemetery and suggests a haunted London past in
the midst of wealth. If this was a Chinese tale, the ghosts would be seen
nightly in the graveyard, but it is British, and wealth, heredity, inheri-
tance and greed for life dominate what initially just seems a transatlantic
homecoming. Like Hundreds Hall in The Little Stranger (Waters, 2009)
and the incarcerating unmanageable beast of a house in The Paying
Guests (Waters, 2014) or those wracked into rubble by bombs in The
Night Watch (Waters, 2006), this house overlooking the cemetery repre-
sents the passing values of a dying age, refusing to let go, embodied in
the body of the mother, whose duty of care was imposed on her sister
when she initially handed the twins over and left, and who now only
wants them for their bodily youth. Gates in the cemetery, spirits slipping
through the semi-open window, a stuck cat—time, place and bodies are
entrapping but it is worse, as the one twin is released to just hang about
in the house without a corporeal shape.
Her Fearful Symmetry (2009) is a ghost story of swaps and twinning;
contemporary and lively, it draws from hauntology as a ghost story of
literary place, Highgate Cemetery, and as a haunted house/flat novel it
deals with boundaries, enclosed spaces, a mistranslation of different
experiences and romance-fuelled possession. Gothic characteristics, loca-
tions and interactions abound in this novel which initially seems quite
playfully Shakespearean, a ‘Comedy of Errors’ (1623) concerning two
sets of twins.
Power, oppression, silencing and repression are the stuff of horror,
deriving from our essential fears of being forced, denied, controlled and
displaced out of ourselves into constraining roles and constricting places,
which we are unable to resist or refuse. In Her Fearful Symmetry twins
Elspeth and Edie swap roles, Edie taking Elspeth’s twin girls, Julia and
Valentina, to the US to raise them. When Elspeth Noblin dies, leaving her
lover Robert, the PhD student, bereft and lost in a flat overlooking
Highgate Cemetery, the twins inherit and inhabit their aunt’s (actually
their real mother’s) flat. But Elspeth’s ghost dominates the place, even in
the note she leaves the twins complaining about exactly what would be
unbearable to ghosts: ‘I’m trying to protect my own history. A bad thing
about dying is that I’ve started to feel as though I’m being erased. Another
bad thing is that I won’t get to find out what happens next’ (2009,
pp. 46–47). The girls might joke about being lured there, but then one of
the twins sees and feels her presence and they start to take on aspects of
Elspeth’s life, including friendships with her former lover.
Much of the story is told from the perspective of Elspeth (in a third-
person narrative) and her strengthening ability to see herself as she is
forced to ‘feed off the world’ (p. 81) impresses her ghostly presence on
the reader, as it gradually does on Valentina. The ghost Elspeth ends up
placing ghost stories around the house to read about haunting. The tone
is jokey, everyday, but the older generation in the form of Elspeth’s
ghost, invades and takes possession of the younger, living on in Valentina’s
life, displacing her into the non-form of a spirit, trapped, as Elspeth had
been, in the confines of the flat, in eternity and space. Julia lives on in the
flat, playing with a ghostly kitten and eventually feels Valentina’s
250 G. WISKER
presence—as Valentina had previously felt Elspeth’s. There is much

comedic swapping of twins and bodies, partners and security (or lack of
it), and the novel turns into more of a romp as Valentina escapes with
other ghostly lost girls, the little kitten of death under her arm. Elspeth
moves to the country with Robert and has a baby, before eventually he
leaves her. Although amusing, Her Fearful Symmetry acts as a warning
about family ghosts, the houses and the bodies they inhabit and how
they can take over the living.
Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching (2009)

White Is for Witching (2009) concentrates on a family house in the
migrant stopover town of Dover, haunted, as two sisters are, by the
death of their mother during a coup in Haiti, and a soucouyant, part of
their Caribbean past, a figure who emphasises the painful transitional
nature of being a migrant, and further back the uprooting of transatlan-
tic slavery. They return as a depleted family to an inherited family home,
determined to set it up as a financially working boarding house, a settled
space for them, and a transitional one for those who come to stay in this
house in Dover, first stop for many immigrant families and individuals
coming by boat to the UK. While the family has been in the UK a long
time, they are unsettled because of the mother’s death, and a deeper past
of difficulties fitting in locally. One suffers from pica, and eats chalk,
aligning her with the White Cliffs of Dover, also made of chalk and a sign
of ‘home’ for UK returners. It is also white like the white lady, the sou-
couyant. Her difficulties fitting in erupt into teenage eating disorders.
The ghosts of their old Caribbean home remind them they are in transi-
tion, unsettled yet linked.
Ghosts are insiders; they belong to and are locked into those places, but
they are also outsiders haunting the peripheries of others’ lives, like unset-
tled immigrants. Their role is to point to loss, absence, deceit, to hidden
pain and to contradict the ostensibly papered-over cracks and harmonies
of what counts as normality. Whether that be a history which tends not to
talk of slavery, or of homosexuality or of poverty or immigration, the
ghost rises from, comes out from, hovers in the spaces of the ostensibly
safe neat and conformist—homes, town, hotel, grand mansion—but its
role is to open up and reveal the dark locked-in histories so that they can
be avenged, perhaps come to terms with, but never fully forgotten.
Past Guilt and Ghostly Returns—Tananarive Due,

Ghost Summer (2015)
Telling of a woman who murdered her parents and must carry the burden
of that guilt in the form of a ghostly old man in ‘Tan and Dry Bone’, Nalo
Hopkinson (2000) offers a metaphor for carrying the guilt of the past on
one’s shoulders, here in the form of the heavy ghost. As with Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) twenty years earlier, reading Tananarive Due
we become aware that every place, every house has its heavy ghost.
Morrison’s tale, by dramatising the imprinting of this ghostly past, both
loved with anguish, and yet also devouring, emphasises the painful, diffi-
cult necessity of coming to terms with, celebrating and moving on with
the past. In Joplin’s Ghost (2006), Due recovers the unknown/lesser
known music of Scott Joplin and emphasises his legacy in contemporary
music through the body and work of a young musical performer, Phoenix.
In Ghost Summer (Due, 2015), she re-tells and disinters terrible buried
secrets, hidden histories of both escapes and brutal murders, and does so
with the hauntology of place, locating these events and ghostings in a
small Florida town, Gracetown, and in the height of the humid and rest-
less summers when some bodies are in a liminal state, and time and place
slippages embrace and disturb, and seep out into contemporary lives.
Michael J. Sandel emphasises the social justice function of ghost stories
when, in Democracy’s Discontent (1996), he comments on storying our
condition, ‘Political community depends on the narratives by which peo-
ple make sense of their condition, and interpret the common life they
share’ (Sandel, p. 350). Ghost stories, as Gothic horror, disturb compla-
cencies and force the marginalised, hidden and silent to have a voice,
exposing the troubled and erased histories literally built over by the set-
tled, contemporary Gracetown at the heart of Ghost Summer. The hidden,
violent past is engaged, political, driven by social justice, in this remarkable
collection of short stories which revives and reimagines a full range of hor-
ror scenarios and figures. The brutal past of slavery is unquiet in these
tales, largely set in the twenty-first century, with some during slavery
(‘Free Jim’s Mine’). Property development disinters the traces of historical
crimes, and in the ironically named Gracetown, Florida, both lake and
swamp invade and trouble the lives of generations of children and adults.
Tananarive Due constructs a town named after Elvis’s home, Paul Simon’s
song, and the religious ‘Amazing Grace’—Gracetown. A small town not
on the edge but in the middle of a drained swamp, where the boundaries
252 G. WISKER
between land owned now by African Americans is boundaried by that

owned by the descendants of slave owners, the McCormacks. Their name
reminds of the European (Irish/Scottish) origination of these white set-
tlers, who then defined as outsiders the black slaves they forcibly imported
from Africa to do the work which made them rich, and which made the
cities of Britain and Europe rich.
Gracetown is known for its summer ghosts, dismissed by some as super-
stitions, lived through as a mixed richness and terrifying revelation by oth-
ers. There is salvation for some here and for others a continuation of
abuse, often self-perpetuated or carried out on further victims. In Ghost
Summer (2015), historical evils are disinterred along with bodies that
were never laid to rest. Grandmothers are insightful. Morrison’s Baby
Suggs has the traditional insights of African-originated wise grandmoth-
ers, as does Granny in Nalo Hopkinson’s soucouyant tale ‘Greedy Choke
Puppy’ (2001). In Ghost Summer, another Grandma alerts visiting grand-
children to the presence of history in a town built on and unable to hide
the history of slavery, which seeps out in returns and haunting moments,
re-enacting successful or failed escapes. The visiting children unwittingly
take her comments as excitement for summer:
‘I wasn’t gonna say anything to you kids—but there’s bodies buried over on
that land across the street, out beyond Tobacco Road. McCormack’s land.
They found an old burial site, the bones of people who lived ’round here a
hundred years ago. And not a cemetery neither—this has been McCormack
land for generations…’
It was the coolest thing Grandma had ever said. (p. 67)
Tobacco Road recalls slave plantation brutality. The unceremoniously

unshriven bones belong to the unnamed dead and the partially repressed
memories of a poorly buried history. In Due’s collection, Grandmas pass
on the stories, and the children, grandchildren, the pre-teens, even babies,
rediscover then expose the secrets, embody the legacy, sometimes take the
evil within them, to be lived with or to help move the town on into a more
aware future, embracing the other within their midst.
Many of the tales feature children unfamiliar with the history of slavery
in their own backyard or their relatives’ backyards, and so more receptive
to the shock experience of its immediacy in the forms of the summer
ghosts. Children can experience the ghosts until puberty (13/14), after
which only adults with memory of those personal experiences, or those
willing to invest in the immediacy and importance of these experiences in

their own children, can help work with the terrible stories these ghosts
have to reveal to bring them to light and to some form of rest without
silence. In this bordered space with fences separating white plantation
owners and their descendants, and the established or newer homes of
descendants of their slaves, crossroads of time and place allow leakage of
moments in history, buried or drowned, in the swamp, in a hole, in a fire,
in memories. Some try to live without acknowledging the dead, while oth-
ers keep these memories alive and never cease to seek for the truth, to bury
the dead in peace. The town is a crucible for the potent mix of the silenced
in history, and in the contemporary moment. At night and lonely in sum-
mer, the ghosts return to tell the tales through dramatically involving the
living in their relived, repeated lives. The dreadful secrets of violence
accompanying slavery seem buried under old barns and fields, under new
build, or drowned in the lake or the swamp, but they refuse to be at rest.
Constant change to the land and the buildings, and the shifting liminality
of swamp and lake, trouble the summer peace. Further building disen-
tombs the ghosts, and both prepubescent children and certain seers in the
other liminal space of the hot summer are able to perceive the ghosts, call
them up, or be invaded by them. These twenty-first-century sensitives
inadvertently experience time and place shifts which place them at the
heart of a historical tragedy of drowning, chase, interment. For the visiting
children there is a distinct experience and a change. For many, it is an
experience of discovering and encountering ghosts and the lives they had
in a traumatic past.
‘Free Jim’s Mine’ is a tale of shapeshifting in which two historical lovers
running for their lives from the dogs and slavecatchers to escape their suf-
fering as slaves in 1838 end up spending the night in a mine owned by
Free Jim, a relative. There is no human ghostly haunting, rather that of a
swamp creature, possibly the giant frog, Walasi, who has been known to
eat those who he can catch. Jim warns his niece Lottie and her Cherokee
partner William that ‘you’ve got to sell your heart for freedom’ (p. 139)
and warns them ‘you won’t both survive the night’ (p. 140). ‘As a boy,’ he
said quietly, ‘I heard stories about Walasi. A giant frog. My mother told
me, her mother told her, her mother’s mother, through time. To the
beginning’ (p. 140). The damp foul-smelling mine, however, is preferable
to recapture, but they are visited by the age-old, haunting creature:
254 G. WISKER
Ripples fluttered in the lamplight. Then a frothy splashing showered them.

Lottie screamed, but did not close her eyes. She wanted to see the thing. A
silhouette sharpened in the water, like giant fingers stretching or a black
claw. Her hands flew to cover her eyes, but she forced her fingers open to
peek through.
The creature churned the water, tossing its massive body. A shiny bulg-
ing black eye as large as her open palm broke the water’s plane, nestled by
brown-green skin. Lottie screamed.
The creature flipped, its eye gone. (p. 142)
They take their chances, and attack it with a penknife. In the morning, still
alive, they notice that when Jim comes to find them his little finger has
been sliced by just such a knife. Perhaps he sold his soul to get the money
to own a mine, perhaps he is himself a devilish haunting presence because
of his success in what is a world of selective ownership and pain.
As Free Jim reached for her, his two gold rings flared like droplets from the
sun. His pinkie finger, a bloodied crust, was freshly sliced away. (p. 146)
Collusion is at the centre of ‘Summer’, which revolves around the discov-

ery of bodies on McCormack land. Children and young adolescents are
seers and actors in Gracetown, with their liminal position prior to adult-
hood offering both a second sight to perceive ghosts, who must bring the
dead and creatures into their lives, and the protective carapace of charmed
youth. While his parents argue and plan to split up, his middle sister Imani
is at home, and his mother with relatives in Ghana, Davie and his little
sister Neema visit their grandparents for the summer in Graceland. At 12,
this is his final chance to see ghosts because that particular talent disap-
pears at puberty. His sister, however, has never been involved in ghost
hunting before. The ghosts they might see are African American slaves,
historically buried with no ceremony and now disinterred from
McCormack’s land.
Grandpa Walter spoke up, half-limping from the kitchen. His joints hurt
worse at night. ‘If it was Indians, see, there’s special laws about that. It’s a
burial ground so it’s sacred. But not for us. Nothing that’s got to do with us
is sacred.’ (p. 67)
While the search for ghosts seems fun, and Davie is using his ghostbuster
home-made kit for the first time to find them, calibrate their location type
and so on, then film them, the reason they are ghosts and haunting the
house and its surroundings is less amusing. This year he sees his first
ghost(s) and is mesmerised:
For all the summers he had come to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, with
the strange noises in the hall and objects falling down, he had never actually
seen a ghost. He had never seen a human being who had come to visit from
somewhere far away; actual proof that dying wasn’t forever.
That ghost was the most beautiful sight of his life.
When a sight like that crosses your eyes, Davie learned, there is nothing
to do but cry. (p. 75)
But ghosts are rarely just ornamental. The Timmons boys race through
Davie and Neema’s ghost-attuned vision, followed by tracker dogs intent
on bringing them down. The twenty-first century children, both sensi-
tives, are in the midst of a horrific, brutal, historical slave hunt to recapture
escaped long-dead children. Water rises, dogs close in and the trauma and
danger of these two mingles with that of the historical ghostly boys.
But the shrieking was getting louder. Crying children were getting closer,
splashing and stumbling. The three boys.
Davie’s knees stopped working. His legs could barely support him.
‘I’m scared,’ Neema said. She was crying too, joining their chorus.
When Grandpa turned the lights on, all the noises went away. (p. 96)
Davie and Neema uncover the truth of their deaths that, escaping, they all
fell in a gully and died there, unheard, lost, unfound until revived by the
children seeking them, after which they could be finally retrieved and put
to rest. While their secret is revealed and their bodies buried and mourned,
the incident has brought to light the whole horror of slavery, escape, cap-
ture, deaths, cover-ups and, in this case, also accidents and erasure.
This story of the horror of slavery inserts in the living an understanding
of the lives of the past and offers an example of the recuperative power of
African American horror. Davie realises that ‘He would rather remember
the Timmons boys as living, at least. Running. Trying to save each other’
(p. 126).
Due’s Gracetown is a liminal space, ostensibly like any other, with its
ghosts and shapeshifters, its buried, terrible secrets, its swamp and lake
ghosts, and its summertime opening of the gates to another parallel world.
It might seem ordinary but everywhere there are the ghosts of those who
256 G. WISKER
have been abused and silenced, but not quite forgotten. It is a crossroads
of time, lives and spaces, fences and the histories of plantation owners and
their slaves, newbuild and contemporary families, Like Morrison’s homes
in Beloved (1987), alongside, above and below the everyday there are
hauntings of a hidden past which emerge through the sensitivity of mostly
the children, who often act to expose then settle these terrible histories
and hidden lives. Summer in Gracetown is a liminal space, an entrance into
other modes of being, and the layering of time and place with ghosts, hid-
den secrets, repressed histories and the ever-present invasion of the living
by the dead, buried or unburied, all of whom want recognition. The dis-
covery of mass graves in McCormack’s land disturbs periods of erasure
and silence. Ghosts have something to tell people in Gracetown, and the
other selves that emerge as werecreatures, frogs, werewolves, invasive
swamp leeches living in the bodies of suddenly obedient children remind
of the internal rot and dissolution, cancerous potential of collusion and
repression, and, on the other hand, that destructive behaviour is in those
who otherise, not the othered. Brutal erasure of Indigenous and African
American children is now widely known (McGreevy, 2021; Eligon, 2019;
Smithsonianmag, 2021) and Tananarive Due acknowledges such terrible
revelations as part of her own history:
This story and the previous one, ‘Summer’, are a kind of odd prophecy: In
2013, I received a call from the Florida Attorney General’s office informing
me that my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, had an uncle, Robert
Stephens, who was probably among dozens of children buried on the
grounds of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna,
Florida, where boys were tortured and killed for generations. I had never
heard of the Dozier School, buried children, or Robert Stephens, my great-
uncle who died there in 1937, aged fifteen. (p. 127)
African American horror shocks and upsets any sense of settled history, of
shared reality, and exposes the deeply disturbing psychological insecurity
of all that seems safely real. But while much of this is disturbing, it is also
potentially the start of a healthy way forward, and this forward movement
is a characteristic of what Afrofuturism, speculative fiction spliced in with
horror, (Hopkinson & Mehan, 2004; Lavender & Yaszek, 2020), that
rewriting of the past and speculation into a positive future, which charac-
terises much of the ghost work by African American and Caribbean
Canadian women. In Afrofuturism, history is reconceptualised, destroyed
and rewritten from a positive African American perspective. Scenarios are

suggested for positive futures, and here this work intersects with fantasy
and science fiction.
Conclusion
Gothic writers of ghost stories remind us of and confront us with the hid-
den histories of loss which damages families and individuals, and the
hatred, brutality and repression which derives from racism, sexism and all
forms of Othering. They expose contemporary problems born of dark
human drives and behaviours. Some, like Niffenegger, write of dead rela-
tives who refuse to let the new generation live on, instead inhabiting their
bodies. Margaret, in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Visit’, is also locked into an
encircling family history and place, as the family are forced to replay the
romantic fatalities of the past, luring new Margarets into their circle. Visits
to and visitations of haunted towns, flats, mansions, hotels and houses and
the legacies of haunted families predominate in these works, with the tran-
sitional spaces significant in luring people in with a sense of safety, com-
fort, homeliness, holidaying—something delightful and transient which
actually turns to a trap with designs upon them either malevolent, sad or
with a message drawn from a drive for truth and social justice rather than
retribution. For Sarah in Hotel World, the perfect escape offered by grand
hotels is undermined by the ghosts who speak of this and haunt the place.
The southern states of the US are transitional spaces of even more destruc-
tion and danger than haunted flats, hotels, and mansions since they hold
and then leak out the horrors of the history of slavery, in its ghosts, who
live out their hidden and unspoken histories through summer activities for
visitors whose families are resident round the lake, in Gracetown. These
are all tales of restlessness of transition, opening spaces for ghosts to re-
enter, warn, undermine and set some dark histories straight.
References
Castle, T. (1995). The Apparitional Lesbian. Columbia University Press.
Due, T. (2006). Joplin’s Ghost. Washington Square Press.
Due, T. (2015). ‘Free Jim’s Mine’, ‘Summer’. In Ghost Summer: Stories.
Prime Books.
Eligon, J. (2019, April 12). 27 More Graves May Have Been Found at a Notorious
Florida Boys School. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/dozier-
school-boys-graves.htm
258 G. WISKER
Hopkinson, N. (2000). Tan and Dry Bone. In Midnight Robber. Warner.

Hopkinson, N. (2001). Greedy Choke Puppy. In Skin Folk. Aspect.
Hopkinson, N., & Mehan, U. (2004). Introduction. In So Long Been Dreaming:
Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Jackson, S. ([1950] 1968). A Visit. In Come Along with Me. Viking Press.
Lavender, III, I., & Yascek, L. (Eds.). (2020). Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-
First Century. Ohio State UP.
McGreevy, N. (2021). 751 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Former Indigenous
School in Canada.
Niffenegger, A. (2009). Her Fearful Symmetry. Random House.
Oyeyemi, H. (2009). White Is for Witching. Picador.
Palmer, P. (2012). The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic. University
of Wales Press.
Sandel, M. J. (1996). Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public
Philosophy. Harvard University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (1623). The Comedy of Errors.
Smithsonianmag.com. (2021, June 28). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
smart-n ews/751-u nmarked-g raves-d iscovered-n ear-f ormer-i ndigenous-
school-canada-180978064/
Stoker, B. (1897). Dracula. Archibald Constable and Company.
Vidler, A. (1999). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely
(pp. 17–45). MIT Press.
Waters, S. (2006). The Night Watch. Virago Press.
Waters, S. (2014). The Paying Guests. Virago Press.
CHAPTER 10
Conclusion: Breaking Boundaries,

Leaking Truths, Pressing Issues: Ghost Wall
(Moss, 2018)
This chapter does three things. It revisits the arguments of the book and
the roles that ghosts, in stories by women, play in the critique of con-
straints, betrayals of women’s lives, the domestic and romantic lies, cul-
tural oppressions, and also the potential for informed agency. It considers
a recent text, Ghost Wall (2018) by Sarah Moss, which brings these themes
together and briefly mentions women’s Gothic ghost stories related to
pressing issues of the Anthropocene, and climate change. In so doing it
introduces the absent voices of global and indigenous women writers who
use the Gothic and ghosts to rewrite damaged histories, often looking
forward to positive alternatives, and using indigenous storytelling and
Afrofuturism to do so.
Nothing and no one is ever dead and buried, it seems. History is tan-
gible and ever-present, haunting, catching us in a circle of recurring pain
and evil, trauma and loss but also reminding us of what needs to be
avoided, prevented. Kate Belsey asks:
Does it matter whether the dead walk in the world or only in the mind? Yes
and no… If ghosts are deceptions of our own making, it follows that rational
thinking does not define us after all. In death instead, in a space beyond the
reach of reason, we generate visions we cannot explain or control… surely
ghosts have something to tell us about the limits of our understanding—at
least, on condition that they belong to the world of storytelling. (Belsey,
2019, p. 192)

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4_10
260 G. WISKER
Here Belsey deals with changing responses to ghosts by decidedly placing

them in stories. In the Enlightenment, people questioned the existence of
ghosts, relating them to outdated superstition; however, ghosts function,
appear and change in stories as they are repeated and our need to construct
and represent ghosts allows certain kinds of story to be told about the
unknown, the hidden, the abjected. Ghost stories enable the narratives of
others to be spoken and structured (whether the ghosts exist or not).
Ghosts exist in story, and also in our minds and societies as ways of reveal-
ing what has been suppressed. They give voice to the hidden, the dead but
not forgotten. However anachronistic they might seem in the twenty-first
century, these metaphorical spectres ‘register a contemporary uncer-
tainty… Figurative phantoms allow us to think beyond the limited catego-
ries orthodoxy takes for granted because they unsettle conventional ways
of understanding in the world. For better and worse, then, ghosts still
haunt’ (Belsey, 2019, p. 252).
History and the lives of historical women haunt the present because
they must not be ignored, and ghosts or ghostly presences are the embodi-
ment of this reminder. The undead revenants in the stories considered in
Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories remind us of crimes committed
whether historically or psychologically, of individuals and societies razed
and silenced. But the ghosts in women’s ghost stories are far more than
chain-rattling, white-sheeted spectres (although some might also appear
in this identifiable form). They lie dormant in and grow from the condi-
tions in which women live and die, in which they dream, fantasise, and
suffer oppressive waking nightmares. In the stories we have looked at and
many others, all the seemingly safe solidities of women’s lives are proven
ephemeral, constraining fantasies. Domesticity, heredity, romance, the safe
home and hearth are undependable, unstable, entrapping, destructive, the
fabric of a socially constructed dream and houses often outwardly project
the constraints of women’s lives. Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk (2017)
is one such tale of the management, bullying, incarceration, oppression
and probable destruction for Lizzie, wife of builder John Diner Tredevant,
caught in the birdcage of the house teetering into the Bristol gorge, her-
self a marketing object in her own scaled-down house, her thoughts and
movements managed by her husband, who has designs on her life. Her
mother’s ghost warns her and Lizzie is aware of the haunting presence of
the first wife, though there is no actual ghost. This first young victim was
sacrificed to Tredevant’s need to own and control everything, ending her
days on a hillside, buried in woodland. Houses and homes figure large in
10 CONCLUSION: BREAKING BOUNDARIES, LEAKING TRUTHS, PRESSING… 261
women’s ghost stories because of the domestic element of many women’s

lives. The architectural fabric of Tredevant’s houses, and particularly of his
own house, matches that of his ambition, outward ostentation, pretence
and internally a series of underground rooms, a dungeon-like cellar, in
which Lizzie once fears for her life. There are insecure soaring dreams, and
he leaves Bristol in the night, swindling his investors, in debt to everyone,
intent on murdering her as part of this escape.
In such haunting tales as this, previous wives or partners warn, houses
carry the secrets of the past and malevolent insidious villains, family or
otherwise, manifest through time and space, haunting and threatening the
present. Rebecca (1938) has no palpable ghost, but the presence of the
beautiful, wayward first wife, murdered for her free-spirited behaviour,
dominates the grand house, overwhelming the nameless second wife.
Rebecca has an undying energy fuelled by Mrs Danvers, who is enthralled
by her beyond the grave. Rebellious energies burst or leak out from ghosts
sometimes to warn but often to perpetuate or reignite damage. In Shirley
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the actual continued exis-
tence of a ghost itself is also questionable. Eleanor Vance is invited for a
weekend experiment in a house which is haunted, but differently so for all
who spend time there, bringing with her what haunts her, the suppressed
desires of her earlier life as a spinster, carer to her bedridden mother, and
her guilt at refusing the last necessary piece of attention demanded of her
by her mother’s calling and tapping. Haunted by this guilt born of her
own social marginalisation, she becomes the ghostly presence. The ghost
in The Stopped Heart (Myerson, 2016), however, is one embodying insidi-
ous and brutal male violence. A dangerous flame-haired stranger inveigles
his way into women’s lives, historical and contemporary, his violent crimes
overwhelming them and the house. He hovers round the edges of the life
of the new owner, who is grieving, refusing to speak of the loss of her
murdered daughters. He is an evil spirit, attached to the garden and the
house, drawn closer when women are most vulnerable, preying on them.
This is a haunted house, unsafe for women in any time period, with an
ever-present ghost.
In Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the ghost starts as a troubling, sad
haunting, a poltergeist, but then materialises as a returned, full-grown
baby ghost, an embodiment of the repressed haunting memories of the
violence done to body and mind, to humanity itself and to individuals, by
slavery. Morrison’s novel produces a palpably real ghost, aged in line with
the time passed since her untimely death as a baby, a revisiting of the
262 G. WISKER
cultural and personal, historical and current, indelible damage of slavery.

Beloved is a family ghost, a cultural ghost and a ghost of trauma, of geno-
cide. But ghosts do not need to be embodied to dominate the minds and
lives of those they remind of past violence. This is a personal and a large-
scale cultural reminder of the genocide of slavery. Other works also use the
figure of the ghost to indicate the depth and longevity of trauma, the
trauma of the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese in the Second World
War in Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle (2012), the Vietnam War in Duong’s
Novel Without a Name (1995) reminding of the nameless many impris-
oned, blown up, drowned and buried in that war. Ghostings and haunt-
ings in women’s ghost stories are not just personal; they exemplify,
embody, the social, cultural wrongs which women suffer and have suf-
fered. Women are revealed as under threat in ghost stories, from the hid-
den violence of the past, and from their nearest relationships with those
who ostensibly love and legally protect them. Some are also preyed on by
those they protect, so sometimes the ghost child is the malevolent haunt-
ing presence. Domestic cosiness is intruded on by dead wives, dead chil-
dren, abusive relatives and abusive deadly strangers for some women who
have entered romantic marriages but end up in soulless houses containing
the secrets of murdered first wives (‘The Glass Bottle Trick’, Hopkinson,
2000; Birdcage Walk). The conditions of women’s lives as economically
powerless wives, dependent relatives, mothers, sisters, daughters, or
preyed-upon heiresses, leave them in marginal positions, as victims. Some
return as ghosts determined to right the economic, gender-based, ulti-
mately physical and psychologically based wrongs they suffered. In The
Woman in Black (Hill, 1983), an oppressive legal system deprives unmar-
ried mothers of their rights, identities and their access to their children.
Jennet is lucky her son is adopted by her wealthy sister. Until at least the
1950s in the UK and internationally still current, pregnancy out of mar-
riage has been seen as the crime of the ‘promiscuous woman’, refusing the
rule of father and the rule of legal control over who has rights, who inher-
its (though what there is to inherit in most cases is undefined). Women are
ousted, incarcerated as hysterical; babies are smothered at birth and buried
in unmarked graves (Singaporean Catherine Lim’s The Serpent’s Tooth,
1982; The Bondmaid, 1997). These are the real crimes. It is surprising
there aren’t more ghosts of anguished and revengeful mothers deprived of
their children and their rights. Both La Llorona and The Woman in Black
highlight this situation, reminding us that ghost stories, especially now,
are there to bring the hidden past back into view as the duty of the living
to bring justice and release. These women, in particular, enact the revenge
of those marginalised and silenced because of their bodies, their mother-
hood turned against them. While some of Lim’s bondmaid ghosts are sad
reminders of abuse, others linger on, dominating the minds and lives of
those who abuse or failed to protect and love them, and with the Southeast
Asian pontianak in particular, in Shirley Lim, among others, the betrayed,
abused woman or one who died in pregnancy makes a violent revengeful
return. Women mediums are also both the victims of their talents, man-
aged by men in In the Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990), and imprisoned and
socially marginalised in Waters’ Affinity (1999), but they are also powerful
and control their own finances (Alison in Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005)),
making the most of others’ gullibility and their needs to believe that the
dead do return.
The fate of the individual women, walled up in her vulnerable body or
in her oppressive house, might be re-enacted by, reminded by or revenged
by her ghost but ghost stories reveal and remind of both hidden personal
and widespread trauma with slavery, normalise domestic abuse, and geno-
cidal destruction of indigenous people, and of war.
There is and is not a wall between the present and the past, the past,
present and the future, and ghost stories show up its permeability. We
learn by recalling, reliving the past, reconsidering its deadly repetitive
claims upon us, rewriting and newly understanding histories and stories
and their affect upon us, traces within our minds and behaviours. Ghosts
are active, undying reminders offering insights into and re-readings of past
and present damage and, in so doing, can be catalysts for alternative
futures and positive change for individuals, communities and our world.
Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths: Ghost Wall

(Sarah Moss, 2018)
Ghost Wall begins with a terrifying prologue in which a young Iron Age
girl is ritually sacrificed in the midst of her family and neighbours. The past
is forced into the immediate present, and this moment destabilises any
complacent securities we might have about the well-planned academic
jaunt to relive life in the Iron Age, which follows. The novel has all the
attributes, revelations and threatening messages of women’s ghost stories,
but lacks the lies of romantic invitation and promise. Ghost Wall refers to
a location and a boundary breached by the past leaking through to the
264 G. WISKER
present, so that the present is both haunted by and reproduces the past.
The breach is significant for those researching the historical moment of
the bog people, near Hadrian’s Wall in the far North of England. The
discovery of the body of the long-dead young bog woman is a way in, an
opening to the past. Historically, the ‘otherness’ of the bog people was an
excuse for violence, ritualised extermination and control of women, whose
sexuality, bodies and stories are central in this revitalising of history, on
location. The little university-originated troupe and ordinary seeming
family on the re-enactment of Iron Age living erupt into everyday violence
and brutality in the name of superstition, erudition, and of re-enacting the
past. The ghost wall is both Hadrian’s Wall dividing the British from the
advancing Romans up in Northumberland, where the story is set, and the
actual small wall of skulls, some discarded, some of those slaughtered for
food, constructed in the camp. There are two camps of people here. One,
the bus driver Bill, his wife and daughter, the novel’s protagonist Silvie
(named after the ancient Celtic goddess Sulevia) have a long history of
recreating the Stone Age living conditions. The father initially seems one
of those admirable working-class men, self-taught, often Northerners with
a fascination for collection, naming, understanding, who historically were
the rock-solid basis for the Workers’ Educational Association, and fed into
the Victorian skill of detailed classification of species, of ancient artefacts,
of fixing, labelling, killing to identify and collect. They contributed to that
pride in absolute accuracy and detail on which the British Museum and
Natural History Museum have thrived. The other group is Summer School
Archaeology students, who in other circumstances might have been part
of a dig, but here are led by the professor, Jim Slade, to recreate past living
conditions. Their interest is perhaps more academic, although they are
mostly portrayed as throwing themselves with jollity into recreating expe-
riences of eating the food, slaying the rabbits, interested by Silvie’s knowl-
edge of the berries and her survival tactics. Molly, the mother, survives by
secretly shopping at Spar, Silvie by knowing exactly what blueberries, etc.
can be eaten, when and how, exactly when it is dangerous to go into the
sea because of the tides, and what to avoid, or hide or just not mention.
That the contrasting knowledge of the two men, the ostensibly erudite
professor and the self-taught, detail-oriented bus driver, is so firmly estab-
lished, is a sensitive and deliberate move. You cannot blame just the one—
the academic, or the other—bus driver—for the collusion in destruction,
control and near-murder by sacrifice in which they become partners in
crime, equals. These men are different examples of male control in the
name of religion, superstition, knowledge, of secretive and open power.

Silvie, it emerges, will be playing the victim in historical rituals. In their
esoteric plan in the name of authenticity, she is destined to fully re-enact
the terrible sacrificial death of the bog girl, drugged, and made a ritual
sacrifice. Collusive power led by superstition and unquestioned masculine
authority marks Silvie out for an authentic re-enactment of the Iron Age
leaking through into the twenty-first century, which period proves its ways
and people less advanced than they would imagine they are, with their
cars, fancy clothes and universities.
There is only a ghost wall, with skulls, to divide the collusive, supersti-
tious, sexist and racist violence of the past from that of the present. At one
point, Silvie wonders whether the past is ghosting them, marking the pres-
ent, or the other way round, refusing an artificial wall, emphasising paral-
lels, the past ever-present. This undermines the myth of development and
superior understanding which civilisation claims when one power, e.g.
that of the Romans, stamps out what is defined as lesser, historically the
Britons, and when men in the original settlement brutalised and demeaned
‘inferior’ women, correlating race and gender. These constructed hierar-
chies are constantly reinforced by superstition, ritual and disgust at differ-
ence exemplified in Silvie’s father’s definition of women’s inferiority, their
inferior plumbing, bleeding, having breasts, their bodies ridiculous and
shameful when squatting to pee. He punishes his wife secretly and bru-
tally, maiming her body so she is constantly tired and shuffles; he also
undermines her intelligence, confining her to the camp and the cooking.
She is exhausted, putting up with the violence for peace and quiet, self-
preservation, though clearly it’s not preserving her. She avoids conversa-
tions, remains behind when others go out. Her sufferings are not described
but assumed, hinted at by Silvie when she comments that her mother
seems to move more painfully, be more aged than she should. The con-
stantly angry father reserves his true power for his daughter, beating her
back and the backs of her legs mercilessly, and insulting her, demeaning
her in an attempt to control her sexuality. His disgust at women’s bodies
and their sexuality leaks through every dealing with his family and his
comments about women in general. One woman on the dig, however,
Milly, has the power of youth, education and the safety of her outsider
position to talk back to his terrible, ridiculous, dominant power.
As Sarah Crown notes, ‘the theory of iron age sacrificial rituals and the
practice of daily domestic abuse appear, horrifyingly, to be converging’
(2018). The violence of the past wreaked on women, the silencing,
266 G. WISKER
anonymising, lying and sacrifice of the young nameless bog woman, is

paralleled in the daily brutalising and silencing of the contemporary
Northern girl Silvie, stuck in this abusive family, where the disempowered,
entitled anger of her father is taken out on her mother’s body and her
own. Collusion from academics and students means we are in no doubt
that abuse, oppression and sacrifice, are a woman’s lot. It is one of the
roles of ghost stories, of spectral reminders, the haunting of past traumas,
to ensure no one forgets, ignores, refuses to deal with such continued
violence to women’s bodies, minds and their lives. The book moves
towards a terrifying peak in which Silvie is to be ritually sacrificed, as if this
was a natural climax to the historical re-enactments. As with the Iron Age
girl, everyone is collusive; even her mother silent and powerless. The
haunting past seems to be breaking through into the horrors of the
present.
This is a slight book in size alone, with a single driving narrative and a
fine example of the use of the ghost and of haunting in the twenty-first
century. There are no spooks, no ghosts as plot devices, or walk-ons, or
ornamental contemporary nods to a reading public interested in their
presence. Instead, the violence and secrets of the past haunt and are paral-
leled by the present, the evils that (largely) historical men do live on,
through the behaviours of contemporary men, since the cruelty we wit-
ness is all male to female. The tight domestic and cultural collusions over
violence aimed at control, the superstition and ritual which is legitimated
by power, ethnic cleansing, control of women’s bodies and the covering
up interpreted in the name of erudition, knowledge, academic under-
standing, as well as the fiction of advancement in time and of superiority
of forms of living and behaviours are all thrown open. The seeping through
of brutal power from the Iron Age past with its sacrifices of bog people
and young women, into the present, shows that the wall is only a ghost
wall. It ostensibly separates the living from the dead, the past from the
present, but, like the academic writing about and practice of archaeology,
it is a construction made by men and students. The events and behaviours
are still there, not just re-enacted but solidly embedded in beliefs and
behaviours.
Ghost stories prompt rememory, forcing a revisiting of the mispre-
sented past and misunderstood, silenced people and their versions of
events. They fundamentally question all we believe as solid and provable,
and the powers we believe we have to discover and fix damage. But that
fluidity, while unsettling, uses ontological and epistemological insecurity
to offer an entrance into new ways of being and knowing, and to new
forms of personal, historical and social justice. Ghost stories question and
reopen the solid walls of time, place and story we build around ourselves,
dissolve fixities of body, space and received history. They upset the com-
placencies of the everyday by leaking hidden histories and terrible hidden
events through the ostensibly safe walls of stone and brick, and of vali-
dated histories, legitimated, exclusive versions of the past. Nothing is ever
closed down, everything reopened to be reviewed and understood anew
not just for what really happened or for what it meant but also to recon-
nect with contemporary bodies and experiences of the living, and learn
from mistakes, hopefully counteract past evils, avoid repetition.
There are tales to be retold, and boundaries to be questioned and
breached. Walls and homes both firmly keep out invaders, danger, and
offer safety, but they can also be sites for oppression.
Silvie at least escapes from being another social sacrifice to legitimated
superstition, enforced violent ownership and control. In this way, Ghost
Wall (Moss, 2018) is a ghost novel for the late twenty-first century as it
disinters the legacies of the past as a good ghost tale should, showing they
are alive and ever-present in the behaviours of the present, violent, con-
trolling. There is no wall except one we build with our education, com-
partmentalising academic habits. The real violence continues to be
perpetuated—through what people are taught and their collusion with
what to believe and how to behave. These are tales of the domination over
and disempowerment of women, and in the ghost wall, historically of eth-
nic groups, using the artificial legitimacy of paternalism and religion,
superstition, erudition. Historically, not to collude caused even greater
harms to the victims and their relations, friends. This also re-enacts and
explains the wider circle of violence perpetuated on women and on ethni-
cally constructed communities. Ghosting the violence of the past and the
present emphasises that such violence and discrimination might be forgot-
ten or on show as an artefact to emphasise the gulf between the ignorant
horrors of the past and the more enlightened present, but actually the
ghosting motif warns of continued oppression and violence in the parallel
time of the present. Our ghosts are there to warn us, they are undead and
haunting us, because we have not in any way moved on.
268 G. WISKER
Moving Forward by Learning from the Haunted Past

Caught in the toils of the ghost story with designs upon us, we could be
‘gripped indefinitely by an anachronistic event’ (Blanco & Peeren, 2013,
p. 11). Blanco and Peeren (2013) refer here to Martin Jay’s 1998 com-
ment on the ‘uncanny nineties’, when hauntings and trauma narratives
and figures of ghosts crept up into the light as the Gothic figures to define
the concerns of the age. Being gripped, however, is but the start. Some
form of working out, some form of action and enlightened change is called
for by these restless ghosts, this incessant haunting. Fiction of all sorts has
designs upon us, messages to convey through storying and bringing to life
the haunts that surround us and the locations in which we live and move.
Ghost stories embody and articulate past trauma, cultural and individual
oppression, violence; whatever is repressed and silenced. The past speaks
through the fictionalised present and enables us to see the crimes which
funded our buildings, the dehumanisation, oppression and silencing which
confirm our comfortable, complacent cosiness. In Spectralities, consider-
ing the twenty-first century, Blanco and Peeren (2013) talk of an ‘aca-
demic milieu of saturated ghostliness’ (p. 11), referring to critical
fascination with and imaginative acting out of the trauma, the repressed
past through the figures of ghosts in creative works. Ghosts and hauntings
are favoured forms for engaging with the troubled past and infected pres-
ent. As we look back into hidden histories and the violent past, we can see
in the present traces, archaeologies of relationships and behaviours of peo-
ple to each other, animals, the land and sea. The ghost stories of Michelle
Paver set in the Arctic and the Himalayas (2010, 2016), Karen Joy Fowler’s
tale of the zoo of extinct animals brought back through holograph (2000),
and indigenous tales employing ghosts such as Aboriginal Australian Alexis
Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) reveal warnings for contemporary and
future actions, but simultaneously help us imagine forward into alterna-
tives which might yet be filled with new life rather than only the traumas,
lessons half-learned. As we look into a future threatened by the damage of
the Anthropocene, the ghosts of dead or extinct animals, of lost and mar-
ginalised ways of life, haunt our imagined futures. Part of the potential
power of imagining forward into a haunted future of the Anthropocene,
however, resembles the power of Afrofuturism, for example, Caribbean/
Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms (2007), in that
through such fictions we can bring together the haunted past, the present
and impending damage, and use these to project forward into a future
which has learned from the warning message of its ghosts. Ghost stories
related to the lessons learned from the Anthropocene, indigenous Gothic
stories of alternative ecologically sound ways of living, and ghost stories
related to Afrofuturism explicitly offer the opportunity to use the igno-
rance, exclusivity and damage of the past to avoid mistakes in the contem-
porary world and build towards positive imagined futures. In this way,
they might have messages for the present about re-understanding histo-
ries, learning for these damaged histories to build something vital, bal-
anced, positive, sustainable. Lessons learned from such ghost stories are
warnings with creative potential.
References
Belsey, C. (2019). Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History.
Edinburgh University Press.
Blanco, M. d. P., & Peeren, E. (Eds.). (2013). The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and
Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury.
Crown, S. (2018, September 28). Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss Review—Back to the
Iron Age. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/
sep/28/ghost-wall-sarah-moss-review
Dunmore, H. (2017). Birdcage Walk. Hutchinson.
Duong, T. H. ([1993] 1995). Novel Without a Name (H. D. Phan and
N. McPherson, Trans.). Penguin.
Fowler, K. J. (2000). Faded Roses. In E. Datlow (Ed.), Vanishing Acts. Tor Books.
Hopkinson, N. (2000). The Glass Bottle Trick. In Whispers from the Cotton Tree
Hopkinson, N. (2007). The New Moon’s Arms. Grand Central Publishing.
Jay, M. (1998). Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time. University of
Massachusetts Press.
Lim, C. (1982). The Serpent’s Tooth. Times Books International.
Lim, C. (1997). The Bondmaid. Overlook.
Moss, S. (2018). Ghost Wall. Granta.
Myerson, J. (2016). The Stopped Heart. Harper Perennial.
Paver, M. (2010). Dark Matter. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
270 G. WISKER
Paver, M. (2016). Thin Air. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Tan, S. (2012). The Black Isle. Grand Central Publishing.
Wright, A. (2013). The Swan Book. Giramondo Publishing.
Index
A C
Absence, 241, 248, 250 Caribbean, 250
Abuse, 185, 188, 193–198, 214 Carter, Angela, 28, 101–123
African American, 86–90, Cathars, 218, 221, 224, 228, 230,
252, 254–257 231, 238
Anthropocene, 15, 18, 19, 29, 31, Cellar, 218, 231–234, 236, 237
259, 268, 269 Children, 75–77, 79–82, 84, 85, 89,
Archaeology, 266, 268 91–93, 251–256
Ashputtle, 101–123 Chinese, 186–190, 197, 199, 201,
Attic, 218, 231–234, 236–238 206, 208, 212, 213
Atwood, Margaret, 28, 101–123 Cinderella, 102–104, 107,
Avon Gorge, 159, 168, 169, 173 121, 123
City life, 188, 189
Cold War, 63, 64
B Contemporary, 260, 261, 266–269
Beloved, 73–96 Control, 259, 260, 262–267
Belsey, Kate, 259 Cultural, 259, 262, 266, 268
Beyond Black, 125–152
Birdcage Walk, 157–180, 260, 262
The Black Isle, 185–214 D
Body, 42–44, 46, 48–51, 54, 73–75, Daughters of the House, 217–238
78, 79, 81, 90–95 Dawes, Selina, 133–135, 141, 146,
Body dysmorphia, 101 147, 149, 152

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89054-4
272 INDEX
Dead, 127, 128, 130–135, 137, 139, Ghost stories, 129, 158, 161, 162,
141–149, 152 165, 166, 178, 217, 222–224,
Dehumanisation, 73, 88, 89, 95 227, 228, 249, 251, 257, 260,
Domestic, 157–180 262, 263, 266–269
Domesticity, 101, 113, 121 Ghost Summer, 241–257
Due, Tananarive, 241–257 Ghost Wall, 259–269
Du Maurier, Daphne, 7, 14, 25, The Glass Bottle Trick, 101–123
26, 39–69 Gothic, 185–214, 259, 268, 269
Dunmore, Helen, 28, Grammar school, 162, 163, 165
101–123, 157–180 The Greatcoat, 101–123
Duong, T. H., 217–238
Duppies, 104, 121–123
H
Haunted houses, 39–69, 157–161,
E 164, 180
Economy, 101, 106, 107 Haunting, 242, 243, 249, 250,
Enactment, 263 252–256, 259–262, 266–268
The Haunting of Hill House, 39–69,
158, 161, 162, 164, 242, 248
F Hauntology, 9–11, 217–238
Fairytales, 110 Her Fearful Symmetry, 241–257
Family, 40, 41, 43–48, 52, 54, 56–60, Highgate Cemetery, 248, 249
62–65, 67, 68, 158–164, 166, Hill, Susan, 13, 15, 25–27, 75,
174–179, 241–244, 246, 250, 76, 78, 85
256, 257 Historical, 157–160, 162, 164, 167,
Feminism, 77 169, 170, 174, 176–178, 180
First World War, 135, 141 Histories, 1–5, 8, 9, 12–14, 17, 20,
Flora Milk, 132, 133, 136, 137, 23–25, 28–31, 43, 50, 52, 57,
139–141, 148, 152 64, 217–221, 223–225,
French, 218, 219, 221, 224, 227, 227–229, 231–238
230–233, 235, 237 Holocaust, 218, 223, 224
French Revolution, 159, 160, Homosexuality, 250
169, 171–173 Hopkinson, Nalo, 20,
27–29, 101–123
Hotel World, 241–257
G Housewife, 104, 113, 114, 116
Gender, 55, 60, 77, 87 Hundreds Hall, 159, 161, 163,
Genocide, 217, 218, 221, 224, 165–167, 180
231, 238
Ghost hunting, 128–130
Ghosts, 1–31, 125–130, 132–137, I
140, 141, 143–147, Immigration, 241, 250
152, 259–269 In The Red Kitchen, 125–152
INDEX 273
Invasion, 185, 188, 189, 201, 202, Murder, 185, 194, 200
204, 214 Myerson, Julie, 15, 28, 157–180
Invisibility, 41
Iron Age, 263–266
N
New, 187, 193, 198–200, 202–209,
J 211, 212
Jackson, Shirley, 7, 10, 25, 29, New York, 131, 188, 208
39–69, 241–257 Ng, Andrew. Hock Soon, 198–201
Niffenegger, Audrey, 241–257
Nineteenth century, 128, 130, 131,
L 133, 157, 170, 174, 177–179
Lady Oracle, 101–123 Novel without a Name, 217–238
Landed gentry, 162–164
Lim, Catherine, 185–214
Liminality, 15, 29, 127, 135, 136, O
170, 193, 253 Oppressions, 2, 73, 74, 81, 86, 95
Liminal space, 253, 255, 256 Otherising, 73, 87, 89, 95
Literary ghosts, 137
The Little Stranger, 157–180
Living dead, 15, 29, 77, 103, 118, P
122, 127, 131, 133, 142–144, Pontianak, 185, 187, 189, 190, 194,
147, 148, 165, 204, 205, 202, 209–214
256, 266 Possession, 28, 101–123
Loss, 241, 246, 248, 250, 257 Postcolonial, 8, 12–14, 20, 185–214
Post-war, 160–162, 164, 167, 168
Poverty, 241, 250
M Power, 76, 80, 81, 86, 87, 265–268
Magic, 188, 190, 212 Punter, David, 186
Malaysian, 189, 212
Mantel, Hilary, 28, 125–152
Marriage, 40, 43, 44, 46, 49, R
51, 57, 80 Racism, 73, 74, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95,
Modernism, 21 217, 235, 236
‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ 219 Rape, 185, 191, 194, 197, 198, 212
Morrison, Toni, 8, 20, 25–27, Rebecca, 39–69
73–96 Red shoe, 221, 231–233, 238
Moss, Sarah, 259–269 Revenge, 76, 78, 80, 81, 85, 91
Mosse, Kate, 29, 217–238 Roberts, Michele, 28, 29,
Mother, 45, 52–56, 59, 61, 62, 65, 125–152, 217–238
73, 75–77, 79, 83, 84, 87, 91, Romance, 39–69, 101–103, 107, 108,
92, 94, 95, 101–111, 121, 122 110–113, 119–121, 123
274 INDEX
S TV shows, 125, 128–130

Second World War, 68, 159–163 20th century, 157, 159–161, 178
The Serpent’s Tooth, 185–214 21st century, 260, 265–268
Sexism, 73, 74, 94
Sexuality, 49
Silencing, 46, 50 U
Singapore, 8, 16, 23, 24, 27, Urban, 185–214
28, 185–214
Slavery, 73, 75, 76, 86–92, 94–96,
241, 242, 250–253, 255, 257 V
Smith, Ali, 241–257 Vampires, 188, 209–211, 213, 214
Social injustice, 81 Vietnam, 218, 219, 225–227, 238
Social justice, 251, 257 Vietnam war, 218, 225, 226
Soucouyant, 250, 252 Violence, 185, 189, 191, 193, 196,
Southeast Asia, 8 200–202, 212, 261,
Southeast Asian, 186, 189, 190, 262, 264–268
209, 214 A Visit, 241–257
Spirit, 125, 126, 128–130, 132–138,
140–145, 147–150, 152
Spirit world, 135 W
The Stopped Heart, 157–180 War, 217, 218, 222, 224–238
Storytelling, 91, 93 Waters, Sarah, 7, 14, 28, 125–152
Superstition, 260, 264–267 Wife, 39, 41–45, 47–51, 54, 55, 57,
59–61, 63, 64
Winter Ghosts, 217–238
T The Woman in Black, 73
Taille, Henri, 235–237 Women, 126–129, 132–141,
Tan, Sandi, 185–214 146–150, 152, 185–191,
Time, 104, 112, 115–120 193–203, 205, 206, 209–214
Trauma, 1, 6, 8, 10, 13, 23, 24, Women’s bodies, 126, 127, 138,
27–31, 73, 75, 76, 86, 90–92, 140, 141
94, 95, 116, 119, 120, Women’s ghost stories, 162,
217–238, 259, 262, 263, 178, 259–263
266, 268 World War II, 104, 113, 114

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6214 ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022

Cover image © Ezyjoe / Alamy Stock Photo

“In this compelling exploration of the gendered resonances of ghosts, revenants

“Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns com-

1 Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s Ghost Stories 1

Part I Haunted Texts, Haunted Houses, Haunted Lives 37

2 Haunted Romance and Haunted Houses: Rebecca (du

3 Revengeful Ghosts: The Woman in Black (Hill, 1983),

4 True Love as Possession: Ashputtle (Carter, 1987), Lady

5 The Spectral Voice: In the Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990),

6 Domestic Hauntings: The Little Stranger (Waters, 2009),

Part III Traumas of Place: Postcolonial Hauntings 183

7 Postcolonial Hauntings and Urban Gothic in Singapore

8 Traumas of Place, Travel, Hauntology: Novel without a

9 Visits and Visitations: A Visit (Jackson, 1950), Ghost

Past Guilt and Ghostly Returns—Tananarive Due, Ghost

10 Conclusion: Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths,

Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s

There is nothing cosy about ghost stories. There is nothing frivolous,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

unceasing reminders of the violations, the violence, both in the distant

women’s ghost stories as ways of re-empowering women’s voices, vision

Ghosts are also intentionally disturbing, forcing a rescrutiny of history, as

Historically, ghost stories by women were often published in popular out-

A burgeoning of published ghost stories by women in the nineteenth cen-

A different energy which burns in women’s ghost stories is that of female

promises of financial, domestic and emotional security. We look at ghost

This, Chap. 1, does several things. It considers critical reception of the

Undead: Critical Background

‘An obsolescent subgenre,’ he declared, with conspicuous relish; a ‘naïve’

stretches back historically, considering Dickens and others and in his

figures, such as the familiar Southeast Asian, malicious, ghostly woman

The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters,

My own location in the UK and personal history of being brought up

Ghosts at the Turn of the Century and Women’s

early twentieth century to an interest in the newly developing science of

Some of the discussions in this book draw on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx

her dependent mother, and of a previous death in the house, another

Latin American La Llorona and the woman in black. Chapter 8 continues

(2007), using haunting and ghosts to begin to offer alternative rewriting

stark truths about our relationship to each other, to the often-damaging

Myerson, J. (2016). The Stopped Heart. Harper Perennial.

Wolfreys, J. (2010). Ghosts: Of Ourselves or, Drifting with Hardy, Heidegger,

Haunted Texts, Haunted Houses,

Haunted Romance and Haunted Houses:

The rise of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary wom-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 39

fantasised about and kept alive by being constantly referred to by the

ruined mansion. This is itself a moment fitting a revenant, a ghost return-

The opening dreamlike sequence is a Gothic nightmare return up a mon-

The narrator’s experience of Rebecca’s ghostly presence is heightened by

Rebecca is haunted by both popular romantic fictions and pre-feminist

reflection of culture and values, most of which was built on imperialism.

Indicting that fabricated historical substance, wealth and safety repre-

Rebecca is a doubly haunting novel. It enacts the damaging effects of dom-

belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled

The second Mrs de Winter is trapped in a narrative of romantic happy-­

and remind the reader. The issues of silencing, second-class citizenship

The Haunted House, the Haunting Mother: Shirley

are continuities or changes in established narrative expression of ghost

1 Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s Ghost Stories 1

Part I Haunted Texts, Haunted Houses, Haunted Lives 37

2 Haunted Romance and Haunted Houses: Rebecca (du

3 Revengeful Ghosts: The Woman in Black (Hill, 1983),

4 True Love as Possession: Ashputtle (Carter, 1987), Lady

5 The Spectral Voice: In the Red Kitchen (Roberts, 1990),

6 Domestic Hauntings: The Little Stranger (Waters, 2009),

Part III Traumas of Place: Postcolonial Hauntings 183

7 Postcolonial Hauntings and Urban Gothic in Singapore

8 Traumas of Place, Travel, Hauntology: Novel without a

9 Visits and Visitations: A Visit (Jackson, 1950), Ghost

10 Conclusion: Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths,

The second Mrs de Winter is trapped in a narrative of romantic happy-