Subversive Spirits

The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture

Robin Roberts

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781496815569
• eBook ISBN: 9781496815576
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizard have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows--the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles.Roberts's analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

The Comedic Female Ghost

Topper and Blithe Spirit

As succeeding chapters will show, the figure of the female ghost can be terrifying and all-powerful. But one significant group is comedic and charming. Drawing on the figure of the New Woman, British and American popular culture promoted a heroine who was wealthy, beautiful, engaging, and reliably troublesome for the men who crossed her path. The resultant mayhem produced comic results for all involved. The most famous version of this female type appeared in so-called “screwball comedies,” films that emphasized the battle of the sexes, with a man and woman resisting, with humorous outcomes, their inevitable romantic relationship. While these female ghosts share some features with the heroines of screwball comedies, the dead female figures are, paradoxically, more powerful and disruptive than living women.

This chapter begins with an analysis of two tremendously popular female ghosts who appear in Thorne Smith’s Topper novels and the films based on his books and Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit and its film adaptation. Despite or perhaps because of their tremendous popularity, there are few critical studies of these works. Dating from 1926 to 1941, these novels, play, and films demonstrate the ways that the figure of the female ghost criticizes contemporaneous gender roles. Their predominant tone is comedic, but, as this chapter will demonstrate, humor is employed to make trenchant social criticism of the ways that living women (and men) are confined by gender roles. Analyzing the feminist implications of the comedic female ghosts reveals humor’s radical potential. Drawing on French feminist theorists Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” and Nancy Walker’s and Regina Barreca’s deft discussions of the uses of humor by women, this chapter reveals the enchanting power of comedy to make serious points about gender. Katherine Fowkes’s work on comedy film also provides a valuable framework through which to consider the comedic female ghost. Analyzing Topper and Blithe Spirit in their various versions shows that the modern tradition of the female ghost began with engaging and charming ghosts. Later female apparitions, as we shall see, are much more terrifying and hostile. Yet despite a dramatic difference in tone, these comedic female ghosts share many features with their more frightening descendants.

Like other female spirits, the humorous female ghost appears across genres in the texts discussed here: in two novels, Topper (1926) and Topper Takes a Trip (1932); three films Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1939), and Topper Returns (1941); a mainstream play Blithe Spirit (1941); and a mainstream film (1945), Blithe Spirit. This female ghost fits the time and context of the period between the two world wars. The early twentieth century saw women getting the vote and entering the professions, while during World War II, gender roles changed due to the need to have women in civilian positions to replace men in the military in both England and the United States. Changes in gender roles provide, as Fowkes explains, the perfect context for ghostly appearances. In her book on the supernatural in comedy films, Fowkes argues that “ghost comedies are emblematic of a cultural confusion with—or an insistence on working through—problems of gender” (12). This chapter first explores the subversive narratives of each group of texts, emphasizing how the various female ghost stories use the figure to create social critique. I conclude by exploring the critical similarities in the ways these female ghosts subvert patriarchal law, institute an alternative feminine justice, re-educate and feminize a human male, and finally provide a model of power and control through female authorship. These features provide a pattern of resistance not only for the characters within the texts but also for later female ghosts.

Because they appear in roughly the same time period, Topper and Blithe Spirit engage similar concerns about gender roles, with the backdrop of women attaining suffrage in both countries, entering professions, and challenging middle-class Victorian ideas about the role of woman as the domestic “angel in the house.” In fact, the female ghosts, despite their supernatural status, are decidedly more devilish and disruptive rather than angelic. The female ghosts in the versions of Topper and Blithe Spirit share many features. (Both texts also spawned 1950s American television adaptations, but since the shows follow the texts closely, this chapter will focus on the source texts and the films.) One defining feature of all of these female ghosts is their ability to wrest narrative control from men.

Examining these comedic female ghosts through the concept of “feminine writing” reveals the significance of the ghosts’ anarchic disruptive behavior. Celebrating the feminine as disruptive and powerful, Hélène Cixous called on women writers to draw on the anarchic feminine. “Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement,” Cixous demands (875). What had been traditionally dismissed as “hysterical” femininity, Cixous reframes as empowering. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining “feminine writing” precisely, Cixous nonetheless evokes a practice that resonates with the figure of the female ghost: feminine writing will be “conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate” (883). Central to Cixous’s vision is the reclamation of female figures who have been defined as monstrous. Cixous praises the figure of the Medusa: “she’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885). The disruption and disorder of the feminine is extensive, according to Cixous. She describes feminine writing as “[j]umbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (887). The philosopher characterizes women’s resistance in words that evoke the literal actions of comedic female ghosts. Cixous describes a primarily analytical, intellectual process, but the female ghost can embody all the actions she describes. The comedic female ghost disrupts conventional plots and challenges heteronormativity by enacting the dis-order that Cixous sees as essential to claiming the feminine.

In Topper and Blithe Spirit, the anarchic impulse of humor is harnessed to great effect: the female ghosts in these texts use physical comedy and the particular powers of ghosts not only to amuse viewers but also to ridicule sexist social conventions. While Topper and Blithe Spirit share some features with screwball comedies, including bizarre situations, slapstick humor, and inversions of the social order, the female ghost texts give their heroines more agency. Screwball heroines appear to create chaos inadvertently, while the female ghosts destabilize the social order deliberately.

Specifically, the comedic female ghost first criticizes and then eventually challenges conventional ideas about marriage. While the comedic female ghost is invariably attractive, the romantic tension between the leads that characterizes screwball comedy is considerably diminished when the female lead is a ghost. Because she is disembodied, the prospect of sexual union disappears, strengthening the ghost’s power and removing the possibility of the “happily ever after” conclusion that diminishes feminine power. The subordinating significance of a marriage would have been particularly true during the time these texts were created, the 1930s and 1940s, when marriage meant women lost their legal autonomy.

The plot of these texts is simple: dying young, a female ghost is called back to the world of the living. Uninvited, she takes command of the text, directing the action and disrupting the life of a male character or characters. However, while in the horror genre, a female ghost is more likely to be malignant and feared, the comedic female ghost operates with benevolent intention to humorous effect. Both types of female ghosts dispense justice, but in the case of the humorous female ghost, the justice is tempered by the comedic frame and the positive result that other characters’ lives are liberated from restrictive gender roles.

The various versions of Topper and Blithe Spirit emphasize role reversals: male characters are subordinated and feminized through the female ghosts’ actions. The gendering of the characters is unambiguous. Despite the absence of the ghost’s physical body, ghost films depict gender in sharp, strong binaries. The feminine defines the supernatural, while masculine qualities define the living. As Fowkes describes it, “The supernatural in ghost and other occult films is almost always associated with feminine emotion, intuition, interiority, and mystery, while the masculine is typically portrayed as ‘normal’: natural, external, visible” (23–24). This gender binary helps explain the appearance and power of female ghosts.

Rather than feeling exploited by the female ghosts, the male character is liberated by the gender-role reversal, either through gaining new knowledge or from the freedom to believe and act in nonmasculine ways. This transformation follows the patterns of “women’s ways of knowing,” as described by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule. First, the character must resist silence and voicelessness, then find authority within herself (or, in this case, himself) and integrate the knowledge of others. In the comedic female ghost stories, the figure develops, but she also educates others. The texts use humor to undercut the constraints of patriarchal society, showing how traditional gender roles limit both male and female characters. Male-dominated institutions—from the law to banking, science and medicine, and compulsory heterosexuality—are shown to be ineffectual before the power of the feminine, as exemplified by the female ghost. By the end of the narratives, the female ghost enacts feminist justice and corrects the wrongs done to the characters. The female ghost takes controlling positions as auteur/director, reverses gender roles, undercuts male-dominated institutions, and enacts feminist justice all in the context of humor. Humor disarms and cajoles at the same time that it makes serious points about gender inequities. While the male authors Smith and Coward could have used male ghosts, their choice of female spirits has a specific, more gender-disruptive, feminist impact.

As Nancy Walker, Regina Barreca, and other feminist critics have shown, humor can create compelling criticism of restrictive gender roles. Through humor, an audience can be manipulated into laughing at gender stereotypes, as their ridiculous side is revealed. Walker identifies a humorist as someone “at odds with the publicly espoused values of their culture” (9) and explains that the humorist holds “a position of privileged insight” (25). A closeted homosexual, Noel Coward used comedy to expose heteronormativity’s problematic aspects. Thorne Smith, the author whose characters form the basis of three Topper films, similarly employs female ghosts to point to the ridiculous aspects of heterosexuality, especially its confinement of women and men in restrictive roles.

Humor’s subversive elements allow the female ghost to undercut gender norms. Barreca assesses the power of humor as imagining alternatives to social structures: “[W]hen you see humor in a situation, it also implies that you can see how a situation could be altered” (19–20). With her unique perspective of disembodied femininity, the female ghost is particularly well suited to ridicule patriarchal social structure. Freed from conventional womanly behavior because she is dead, the female ghost can use her femininity to control other characters and to challenge the status quo. Because her playful attitude is engaging, she entrances not only reluctant characters inside the films, but also the viewers. That Smith’s successful Topper novels were turned into three films, with the final film featuring a new female ghost character, suggests that something in the character of the female ghost is appealing. While the representation of the feminine as terrifying Abject and Other is stressed in the portrayal of an evil female ghost, the comedic female ghost successfully employs wit, humor, and physical comedy to challenge the dominant heterosexual social order.

The novels Topper and Topper Takes a Trip by Smith and the three popular films based on his characters show the possibilities of the female ghost to resist and expose femininity’s constraints. In Topper, the eponymous hero is a mild-mannered but restless forty-six-year-old banker, dominated by his wife. He purchases the automobile in which Marion and George Kerby, young wild people, had crashed and died. Haunting the car, they soon haunt Cosmo Topper, changing his life forever. Described as “a sophisticated spoof of middle-class morals and manners” by the novel’s contemporary editor (vi), the text creates humor in Topper’s wild antics. The reluctant bon vivant is led to have fun and flaunt convention by the female ghost, Marion. She reappears in the second novel and film, but a new female ghost replaces her in the last film, Topper Returns. In the novels, but even more overtly in the films, the female ghost rebels against a male-dominated world and drags an initially reluctant Topper along with her. By the end of the texts, however, Topper has fully embraced his feminine side.

Noel Coward continues the humorous female ghost’s resistant potential. Indeed, Blithe Spirit has been described as “a cross between Private Lives [Coward 1930] and Topper” (DowdH5). The female ghosts in Coward’s 1941 play Blithe Spirit want revenge, but their creator employs a light touch, using humor and a camp sensibility to display feminine discontent with compulsory heterosexuality. The 1945 film directed by David Lean makes a significant change to the play’s ending: In the play, the male protagonist leaves his two ghostly wives in control of his house and walks out the door. In the film, we see him drive away in his car, which has been sabotaged by his wives. The car careens out of control and Condomine too becomes a spirit. This new ending emphasizes the power and authority of the female ghost. At first Elvira, the male protagonist’s dead wife, appears as a mischievous ghost, but by the play’s end, the second wife, Ruth, also becomes a wraith. Separately and together, the two expose the ridiculous and restrictive nature of conventional gender roles. Sympathetically portrayed, the female characters invite us to laugh with them at their situation.

The female ghosts in Topper and Blithe Spirit use their supernatural powers to destabilize the patriarchal order; the female spirit in these texts becomes an author or an auteur/director. In relationships with male characters whose positions typify male dominance, the female ghosts direct the plot and action. While an emphasis on authorial control appears in the source texts and the film adaptations, it is more pronounced in the latter. In the films, the female ghosts assume the position of film directors, often physically moving the male characters from place to place and telling them how to act, what to say, what to do. In this way, they become authors, not only of their own stories but also of those of the male characters. In the Topper novels and films, the male protagonist seems to be the focus, as his name serves as the title, but all the action is generated by the female spirit.

The female ghost succeeds in forcing the patriarchal male to subvert the institutions that enshrine him as a figure of power. In the novel Topper, the female ghost, Marion Kerby, gets prim and proper banker Cosmo Topper to break several laws (150). When he tries to subdue her, she tells him, “I’m the master in this house. From now on, I rule.” He concedes, “You are … stop tickling me” (153). The narrator makes Marion’s ghostly power over Topper absolute and emphasizes the gendered aspects of their struggle: “She withdrew from combat and stood looking down on the vanquished male” (153). Of course, her ghostly ability to levitate and disappear means the combat is inevitably unequal, the advantage with the female ghost. Her power is intensified as she isolates her husband, George, from patriarchal society. After George disappears early in the novel (at her instigation), Marion and Topper escape to a bucolic country house by a lake. Having Topper to herself, Marion educates him and makes a new person of him. The first film, also entitled simply Topper, emphasizes the female ghost’s conscious decision to direct Topper’s life. In this film, the still-living Marion saunters into Topper’s private office and asks him, “Why don’t you stop being such a mummy?” Seeing Topper’s potential, she tells her husband, “I feel as if I could pull him apart and put him together again and he’d work much better.” But she must become a ghost before she will have the opportunity and the power to wield her authority. As Fowkes explains, the spirit’s “invisibility” will become a “key to understanding how the fantastic qualities of the ghost elicit a comedic rather than a horrific response” (12–13).

The comedic female ghost exerts her power through writing her body. She cannot be heard by anyone other than Topper, so Marion uses her body to communicate with people. The first film details in several sequences Marion’s pugnacious physicality, as she pummels and moves other characters around, always in a comic frame. As a ghost, she has no compunction about attacking men who criticize or attack her or Topper. For example, in one scene, an elevator operator calls the deceased Marion and George “the crazy Kerbys,” not knowing their ghosts are present and listening. George ignores him and enters their penthouse, but Marion stays behind to unnerve the operator by a stinging and mysterious slap from nowhere. Later, when she and George drag an inebriated Topper from their apartment to the car, a crowd gathers, and a fight breaks out. A temporarily visible Marion leaps into the fray, wielding an umbrella left and right in a crowd of men throwing punches. One of the men describes her to a reporter as “a swell-looking doll but plenty tough.” When they are under surveillance at a resort hotel, she throws mail and paper registrations into the air, knocks over glasses on tables, and pushes people over. Unable to defend themselves, the other characters’ bewilderment and erratic movements provide the film’s slapstick humor. As Fowkes explains, the “invisible manipulation of objects and people causes chaos and confusion” (162).

At the same time, however, the female ghost’s actions embody Cixous’s description of feminine writing as “[j]umbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (887). Symbolizing challenges to the social order through physical actions allows the film’s viewers to visualize the impact of the feminine. The second film is in many ways a reprise of the first, with the ghost Marion leaving Topper with renewed determination not to be trapped by conventional gender roles.

In the third film, Topper Takes a Trip, the physical power of the female ghost expands beyond the United States, to France. The increasing sphere of influence of the female ghost can be seen in the individual spirit’s development. These portraits of individual female power are augmented, as more female ghosts appear in novels and films. In part, the popularity of the character requires the individual female ghost to assume even more authority, to justify another film. Marion reappears because Topper’s wife, Clara, is taking him to divorce court, naming Marion as co-respondent. While the case is thrown out of court because a female ghost isn’t legally actionable, Mrs. Topper travels to Europe to seek a divorce and a new love there. All of the subsequent action is guided by the female spirit. Marion, not Topper, decides that they will follow Clara to France. Marion physically forces Topper out of the divorce courtroom, creating a fast exit that is amusingly preposterous. Even more than in the first film, Topper is pushed hither and yon, in ridiculous positions, as the ghost Marion physically propels him about a dance floor, in a car, on the si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit
• Chapter Two: The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in England: The Woman in Black
• Chapter Three: The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in the Americas: La Llorona
• Chapter Four: The Female Ghost and Feminist History: The Woman Warrior and Beloved
• Chapter Five: The Untold Story: The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace and Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol
• Chapter Six: Being Human: The Female Ghost in Contemporary British and American Television
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index