The ghost story 1840 –1920

A cultural history

Andrew W. M. Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719087868
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The ghost story 1840-1920: A cultural history examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts' it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral. This book is the first full-length study of the British ghost story in over 30 years and it will be of interest to academics, graduate students and advanced undergraduates working on the Gothic, literary studies, historical studies, critical theory and cultural studies.

1
Seeing the spectre: an economic theory of the ghost story

This chapter attempts a theorisation of the ghost story which outlines its associations with economics in the nineteenth century. Marx, political economists, and journalists writing on economic issues all worked to make visible the seemingly ineffable and the ghost story participated in a field of spectrality which was informed by these factors. The very different theories of political economy articulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s and William Jevons in the 1870s elaborate a theory of desire which historically underpins Freud’s account of pleasure and pain in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The model of the subject developed in these contexts is Gothic to the degree that it is shaped by a theory of the emotions that has its roots in an explanation, and attempted monitoring, of the relationship between pleasure and pain. The literary Gothic and these ostensibly objectively analytical contexts are bridged by images of spectrality generated within theories of economics and political economy, images that are reworked both within Freud’s model of the subject and the ghost story.

In order to illustrate how the ghost story is linked to these matters it is first important to account for how a Gothic language was recycled in economic contexts. However, before exploring that specific link it is useful to delineate some of the more materialist critical approaches to the Gothic as they help situate the form within the wider areas of history and theories of class.

David Punter has noted that the Gothic developed against the background of the emergence of a laissez-faire economy in the eighteenth century.¹ Consequently the Gothic questions not just the Enlightenment rationality that supported the coming into being of the middle classes, but the very class contexts in which knowledge was produced. For Punter, this becomes transposed into the Gothic as a fascination with seemingly dead, antique, worlds in which social order appears in implied feudal hierarchies. According to Punter, the key question is ‘whether it is an accident that an age marked by the breakdown of accepted class structure, and also by increasing consciousness of this phenomenon, should produce a literature which harks back obsessively to a time of rigid social hierarchisation’ (p. 196). The past is alluring but unattainable and this suggests a degree of alienation from the processes of the new laissez-faire economy because ‘the laws of economic activity and even personal success and failure were utterly mysterious to most of the population’ (p. 194). These new ‘laws of economic activity’ were articulated in a particular strand of Enlightenment thinking: theories of political economy.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1768) was the first text to synthesise an earlier tradition of political and philosophical writings in order to develop (rather than simply explore) the new rules for economic behaviour. Smith’s Enlightenment vision of political economy was subsequently given a powerful expression in David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Whilst such texts might appear to have only an oblique relationship to the Gothic they nevertheless inform a particular model of the Gothic imagination which appears in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell, and more subtly, Henry James.

Punter identifies ambivalence as central to Gothic representations of class, desire, and history and it is also key to understanding the relationship between theories of money and the Gothic. The danger is that one could be crudely reductive in asserting a quasi-Marxist context into which a diverse range of Gothic narratives could be subsumed. Indeed, the assertion of the importance of an economic context requires a careful reading of that context. Theories of political economy and how they become Gothicised can be illuminated by Marx’s analysis of commodity production. However this is not to develop a strictly Marxist reading because although such ideas enable the possibility of a materialist account of the Gothic, Marx’s critique of industrial capitalism also uses a Gothic language of monstrosity and deformation in self-conscious ways.

Gothic Marx

Marx develops his theory of ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’ in Capital (1867), where he argues that an object, in the example of a table, contains the labour (life) which produced it. The question is one of visibility, an issue that is central to notions of spectrality:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties […]. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.²

Objects become alive with ‘grotesque ideas’ because within them exist traces of the exploited labour that produced them. For Marx seeing is important because how one sees the object requires us to radically view it as the culmination of subjective endeavour. Commodities therefore contain within them the possibility of overcoming the system which produced them.

The animation of the inanimate draws Marx to a Gothic idiom as the most suitable vehicle for expressing his critique of theories of political economy because for Marx, it is not just capitalism which creates certain ways of mis-seeing, it is also the theories of political economy upon which such mis-seeing rests. His exploration of the ‘rationality’ of the system of production depends upon exposure of the irrationality which is inherent to the system, so that instead of the pristine commodity we see the ‘grotesque ideas’ which lurk within it.

A range of commentators have explored Marx’s use of a Gothic argot. Terry Eagleton, for example, notes that in Marx:

Capital is a phantasmal body, a monstrous Doppelgänger which stalks abroad while its master sleeps, mechanically consuming the pleasures he austerely forgoes. The more the capitalist forswears his self-delight, devoting his labours instead to the fashioning of his zombie-like alter ego, the more second-hand fulfilments he is able to reap. Both capitalist and capital are images of the living dead, the one inanimate yet anaesthetised, the other inanimate yet active.³

For Punter and Fred Botting, such ideas are manifested in the Gothic through a class-bound ambivalence about the past. A feudal past might represent seemingly secure hierarchies, but the Gothic fascination with demonised or otherwise maligned aristocrats suggests that the past is also a source of considerable horror. Botting notes that this process is closely associated with locating the middle classes within history, so that, ‘The anxieties about the past and its forms of power are projected on to malevolent and villainous aristocrats in order to consolidate the ascendancy of middle-class values’.⁴

In Marx, fantastical or ‘grotesque’ ideas are part of his analysis of models of economics. However, he is also, in less ambivalent terms, critiquing this ‘ascendancy of middle-class values’, at least as they appear in theories of economics. This is another way of saying that Marx focuses directly on the perceived sources of economic and social power, whereas the Gothic more typically addresses the effects of such power as it is manifested in images of the family and versions of individualism. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Marx is merely using a Gothic idiom in order to demonise capitalism, rather he suggests that capitalism is a source of the demonic because it is inherently irrational. The Gothic fascination with malign aristocrats is in reality a version of this as it involves the projection of present-day anxieties on to constructions of the past. This explains why it also becomes necessary to enact a demonisation of that past because, as Punter notes: ‘It could […] be said that the middle “class” is largely an illusion, a frozen moment in which are collected together people and families on the way up and on the way down. And aspiration and fall are the abstract topics of Gothic fiction’ (p. 201).

It might be tempting to claim that the Gothic is in reality little more than a byproduct of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century middle-class anxieties. However, the Gothic is so much more than this and to reduce the Gothic to a solely class-bound analysis is to ignore the aesthetic, national, and geopolitical context in which it emerged. Nevertheless such ideas help us to critically read specific issues about power which are relevant to a discussion of ghosts and money.

Marx’s use of the Gothic has received some attention by scholars working on the Gothic, most notably Chris Baldick, whose In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing (1987) includes a ground-breaking chapter on ‘Karl Marx’s Vampires and Grave-diggers’.⁵ Baldick addresses the issue of spectrality in Marx’s writings and its suggested continuing presence within a threatened bourgeois imagination. Baldick notes that Marx’s beginning of The Communist Manifesto, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe …’ (p. 121), implies that communism has become a kind of ‘bogy’ to the supposedly rationally minded bourgeoisie. Baldick notes, ‘Yet what such a figment is doing in the most rational, enlightened, and calculating culture known to history, and why the bourgeoisie having swept away all superstitions, should still be “haunted” by it ought to be a puzzle’ (p. 121). He also observes:

Throughout Marx’s writings […] some of the most gruesomely archaic echoes of fairy-tale, legend, myth, and folklore crop up in the wholly unexpected environment of the modern factory system, stock exchange, and parliamentary chamber: ghosts, vampires, ghouls, werewolves, alchemists, and reanimated corpses continue to haunt the bourgeois world, for all its sober and sceptical virtues. (p. 121)

Baldick therefore acknowledges that Marx’s critique of capitalism evidences a Gothic challenge to Enlightenment notions of certainty, at least as they are manifested in systems of production and theories of economics. The wider concern is that the inherently Gothic quality of such a process of production recrudesces in the imagination. The subject under capitalism becomes turned into alienated, disembodied labour, in which objects are granted a life that resurrects the transformed subjectivity of the labourer. People become things and things become people because ‘There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx, Capital, p. 436). The system thus perpetuates itself through a new mode of subjectivity that renders the subject inhuman. Considered in these terms the Gothic imagination enables us to see the system, the spectral presence of labour, in a new way. However, horror, as an appalled insight into the system, can seemingly only take place when the subject steps outside of ideology.

Baldick’s account of Marx is an invaluable starting point for a wider examination of how issues relating to seeing and spectrality came to bear on the ghost story. It is also important to acknowledge that this view of Marx as a latent Gothic writer has become increasingly influential in criticism on the Gothic.

Tricia Lootens has coined the term ‘Commodity Gothicism’ as a label for the new economic processes of the nineteenth century.⁶ Her analysis addresses how the spectrality of labour becomes visible in a range of Victorian texts including Bleak House (1854), Dracula (1897), and selected articles from Punch. She argues that the image of the ghost is frequently used in order to draw attention to the occluded presence of labour within the production of commodities. She also raises questions about the role that consumption plays in this, as it too brings into being objects that are transformed subjectivities and desires, and thus have a key role in conjuring the ghost. It is also important to acknowledge the work of Regenia Gagnier and Gail Turley Houston in this area, although my argument moves beyond Gagnier’s focus on aesthetics and Houston’s close focus on banking systems and forms of accountancy, in order to explore in detail how money and its abstractions shaped certain models of subjectivity.⁷

The Marxist account of spectrality, as developed by both Baldick and Lootens, provides a sophisticated and non-reductive way of reconsidering the Gothic. The role that the imagination plays in perceiving the commodity in Gothic terms suggests the presence of a radical scepticism which transcends both bourgeois formations of subjectivity and Marx’s reading of capitalism. As we shall see in the following chapter, how to generate and account for this way of seeing is a principal theme in Dickens’s ‘A December Vision’ (1850). Making visible what is invisible is an issue shared by the ghost story and Marxist praxis. However, so far our analysis has largely been confined to an exploration of this influence in a particular strand of Gothic criticism (Baldick and, briefly, Lootens) or in scholarship concerning some of the form’s more generalisable socio-economic contexts (Punter and Botting). It is also crucial to see how such ideas can be related to readings of spectrality.

Reading the spectre

The first major contemporary study of the ghost story was Julia Briggs’s The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), in which she explored not just the ghost stories of Dickens, Henry James, M.R. James, Vernon Lee, and Walter de La Mare, but also examined the more subtle ways in which images of ghostliness were exploited by realist writers such as E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence.⁸ Briggs returned to the ghost story in an essay in A Companion to the Gothic (2000), where she noted that the ghost story ‘constitute(s) a special category of the Gothic’, because the supernatural is never explained.⁹ The factual presence of the ghost is a given of the form and it is the notion of the return of the dead which, for Briggs, implies the presence of the Freudian uncanny.

The terms of Freud’s discussion on the uncanny are the homely (heimlich) and unhomely (unheimlich). He claims that the two terms slide into each other in uncanny moments as the home is no longer the place where security can be guaranteed because it is the site where sexual secrets are generated within families. This view informs his reading of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sand Man’ (1816) as a thinly disguised Oedipal drama, a drama that would ‘normally’ be enacted within the family. Therefore what is seemingly strange and distanced (demonically ‘othered’) comes to haunt the subject in the ostensibly private place of the home.

This exposure of family secrets bears a relationship to the issue of seeing which, for Marx, is a precondition for the emergence of scepticism. Within this debate about sight it is relevant that Freud’s analysis of ‘The Sand Man’ focuses on the role of the optician Coppola and the threat of blindness which, for Freud, evidences the presence of a castration anxiety.

Freud recounts how Hoffmann’s tale makes repeated associations between blindness and castration as Nathaniel, the narrator, is placed in a variety of situations where his sight becomes threatened (the lawyer Coppelius, for example, threatens to burn Nathaniel’s eyes with hot coals) or linked to mental disturbance (as when Nathaniel looks through Coppola’s spectacles and sees the dangerous presence of Coppelius). For Freud, the tale can only be understood as a reworking of Oedipal anxieties because otherwise it seems to concern little more than a series of irrational impulses produced by the inexplicably deranged Nathaniel.

Freud reads the tale for its ghostly symbolism by addressing how the persistence of the past is manifested through unresolved Oedipal desires. The tale is not an orthodox ghost story as it possesses a necessary ambivalence (that Nathaniel could be just ‘mad’) which casts doubt on any supernatural presence. However, it also suggests that ghostly aspects of the past should not be read literally because they function as allegories about particular anxieties. The spectral therefore configures a ‘real’ past to the extent that it symbolises the presence of real social and psychological issues. Hoffmann’s tale is not a ghost story as conventionally understood but Freud does associate it with a model of the uncanny which is linked to a notion of the spectral when he claims that ‘Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’.¹⁰ Nathaniel is in thrall to a spectral Oedipal past and so is ghosted by a particular anxiety that is represented in symbolic form.

The relationship between spectrality and forms of seeing is crucial. In Marx, to see the subjectivity contained within the object requires a moment of scepticism. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Seeing the spectre: an economic theory of the ghost story
• 2 Dickens’s spectres: sight, money, and reading the ghost story
• 3 Money and machines: Wilkie Collins’s ghosts
• 4 Love, money, and history: the female ghost story
• 5 Reading ghosts and reading texts: spiritualism
• 6 Haunted houses and history: Henry James’s Anglo-American ghosts
• 7 Colonial ghosts: mimicry, history, and laughter
• 8 M.R. James’s Gothic revival
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index