The figure at the window

Richard Dalby, editor
THE VIRAGO BOOK OF GHOST STORIES
496pp.Virago. £12.95.
1 84408 159 1

Educated people are not supposed to believe in ghosts. This has done nothing to diminish their popularity, at least in fiction. Richard Dalby has edited two successful anthologies of ghost stories for Virago, drawn from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has now compiled and edited The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, a selection of thirty from his earlier collections, ranging in period from Charlotte Brontë’s exuberant and absurd “Napoleon and the Spectre” (“Mon Dieu!” exclaims the Emperor, “what do I see? Spectre, whence cometh thou?”), written when she was seventeen, to late-twentieth-century tales from Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt and Joan Aiken. This is a publishing venture designed for the Christmas market, in time-honoured fashion. As a literary form, the ghost story has always been seasonal, and generally lucrative. Phantoms thrive in the dark days of late autumn and midwinter, when the blood is soon chilled and mortality is not far from our minds. Victorian publishers, with their sharp eye for a market opportunity, established the practice of commissioning ghostly fiction for the best-selling December numbers of their periodicals. The restless dead have haunted Christmas publication lists ever since.

It is commonly claimed that a tradition of the “classic English ghost story” exists, rooted in those nineteenth-century magazines, revived by the consuming interest in spiritualism generated by the losses of the First World War, and extending into the 1930s. If so, it has largely been established by men – Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, E. F. Benson. M. R. James has been a defining voice. More reflective than most of its practitioners, James would sometimes ponder the proper construction of ghost stories. They ought to rest on “the pretense of truth”. Settings must be mundane, preferably contemporary, or placed in the recent past. Supernatural phenomena emerging from this ordinariness should evoke a “pleasing terror”. James saw no point in kindly spirits. His apparitions are malevolent, and they threaten the living. But he condemned displays of “gratuitous bloodshed or sex”. Nor were disturbing events to be thoroughly explained. Uncertainty is essential to the effect of the story. In practice, no writer sticks to these rules. Even the scrupulous James is inclined to over-explication, and his tales are sometimes brutally violent. Yet the model he describes is recognizable, and it has proved durable.

Because Dalby’s new anthology includes only women writers, and covers a wide chronological span, it highlights the variously distinctive ways in which women have adapted the genre. Gothic legacies dominate early Victorian examples of women’s ghost stories. Lonely castles, gloomy and decaying landscapes, stormy moors and moonlit nights are as prevalent as might have been expected. Stealthy misdeeds fester, to be brought to light by interventions from beyond the grave. So far, so conventional. But an assimilation of different fictional traditions makes these stories more subtle than such mechanical properties might imply. The growth of domestic realism transformed their potential. This was true for men, too. Much of the impact of “A Christmas Carol”, whose appearance marked a seminal moment in the development of the genre, depends on Charles Dickens’s domestication of the eerie. Scrooge is visited by spirits at home, not in some crumbling mansion, and what haunts him is his own life. Women seized the new opportunities suggested by this innovation. Elizabeth Gaskell showed what could be done in “The Old Nurse’s Story”, published in the Christmas issue of Dickens’s Household Words in 1852. Her tale is firmly located within the Gothic tradition, and takes every advantage of its features – there is a depraved nobleman playing a ruined organ (“his hair streaming as in the blast of a furnace”), a spectral child, an abandoned woman driven out into the snow. But these lurid trappings conceal a homelier story, for the old nurse is a comfortable body, and the crime revealed was provoked by nothing more exotic than spiteful family jealousies.

Here Gaskell reveals what she had learned from Dickens, for like the ghosts of “A Christmas Carol”, her spirits are there to teach a moral lesson. The nurse’s resolute loyalty rescues her orphaned charge from the demands of the dead. Wrongdoers, their selfishness exposed, pay for their sins with an eternity of remorse. These ghosts are subject to the government of a Dickensian domesticity. Yet Gaskell’s story denies us the warm homecoming that concludes “A Christmas Carol”, where the lost Tiny Tim is restored to his loving family. She had also learned from the colder landscapes of the Brontës, whose children perpetually haunt and are haunted, standing at windows which open onto another world. “The Old Nurse’s Story” turns on the vision of a lonely child sobbing to be allowed into the house. “I saw a little girl . . . dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors on such a bitter night – crying, and beating against the window-panes, as if she wanted to be let in.” This recalls Emily Brontë’s phantom Cathy, tapping at the distraught Lockwood’s window in Wuthering Heights. The pathos of the child who can never come home is one of the most compelling ways in which ghost stories connect writers and readers with loss. The ghostly Cathy is in part a memory of Emily Brontë’s sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who had died as children. Elizabeth Gaskell’s son did not survive infancy, a sorrow which first prompted her to write fiction. This is not a phenomenon confined to women. Peter Pan has many of the characteristics of a ghost story, possessed by the unappeasable spirit of J. M. Barrie’s brother David, who was killed in an accident at the age of thirteen. Peter finds his mother’s window closed against him, and snatches children to share his sinister afterlife in a repeated act of revenge. In “They”, a tender and potent ghost story, Rudyard Kipling grieves for his lost daughter Josephine. When W. W. Jacobs writes, in “The Monkey’s Paw”, of a bereaved mother willing the return of a dead son, the visitation is seen as an unmitigated horror. Others had more ambivalent feelings on the matter, and women have been particularly likely to present these visitations as both fearful and desirable.

Writing in 1919, a historical moment when many of his readers and patients were eager to find ways of understanding more deeply the persistence of the dead, Freud proposed that a sense of the uncanny does not arise from our fear of alien entities. It is generated by an association with what has been long known. The homely is secure, hidden from the public gaze. But when its inward rituals of the imagination can no longer be concealed or controlled, it becomes its unhomely opposite – unheimlich, a condition that engages with our anxieties at the deepest level. The familiar dead refuse to leave what was once their home, performing instead what Freud described as our own “compulsion to repeat”, a need which directs the unconscious mind. An interest in some of the ways in which we obsessively and sometimes ruinously haunt ourselves runs through this anthology. Edith Wharton’s ruthless story “The Eyes”, which recalls both The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Henry James’s magisterial “The Turn of the Screw”, is an exercise in this mode of psychological self-annihilation. Other stories consider extinction as a perversely liberating opportunity. Once they have escaped their earthly oppressors, betrayed or neglected women are no longer confined by the laws of custom or logic, and their hunger for justice can finally be satisfied. Accounts are settled with enjoyable thoroughness. A. L. Barker’s neatly constructed “A Dream of Fair Women” is a story of this kind, while Richmal Crompton gives us a memorable example in “Rosalind”, with a heroine recognizably akin to one of the winsome girls who flutter through her stories about William Brown. It is disquieting, but undeniably bracing, to find that Crompton’s reassuring fiction can cast a shadow. Such discoveries count among the oblique pleasures of the genre.

Within the compulsion to revisit and repeat, the distinction between what lives and what does not collapses. A number of the stories in Dalby’s anthology figure innocuous domestic objects that have absorbed the baleful energies of the dead. Two of the strongest – “The Violet Car” by Edith Nesbit and “Who’s Been Sitting in My Car?” by Antonia Fraser – feature vehicles still invisibly driven (far from considerately) by their deceased owners. Kitchens are by no means safe. A bizarre and unsettling story by Margery Lawrence, “The Haunted Saucepan” (“as I listened, the noise of the bubbling shaped itself into a devilish little song, almost as if the thing were singing to itself, secretly and abominably”), might make you glance doubtfully into your own cupboards. Stories of houses that hum with the energy of human malice give scope for larger atmospheric effects. Ella D’Arcy’s vivid “La Villa Lucienne” and “The Haunting of Shawley Rectory” by Ruth Rendell both exploit this established tradition.These are stories that feed on an uneasy feeling that a repressed desire for violence, self-gratification and revenge could readily infect inanimate matter. It is easy to suspect that the things we have made are patiently waiting to turn on us, given half a chance.

This wintry tone is not wholly characteristic of The Virago Book of Ghost Stories. Freud’s penetrating analysis of the uncanny and M. R. James’s matter-of-fact description of what makes a ghost story work leave out something that pervades many of the stories here – an overwhelming sense of compassion for the dead, and for those they have left behind. Gaskell’s orphan is not vulnerable to the appeal of the icy child-ghost out of fear, but because she pities her, and is desperate to bring consolation to “my little girl”. “The Open Door” by Margaret Oliphant, perhaps the richest tale in this collection, rests on a comparable impulse. This is another story with an exiled child at its heart, begging to be allowed into his mother’s house: “Oh Mother, let me in! oh, Mother, Mother, let me in! oh, let me in!”. A listening boy, wild with pity at what he hears, falls sick, and can only be healed by the courage of his initially sceptical father. Oliphant had lost children of her own, and a sense of need articulated within literary convention gives this story its lasting resonance.

Twentieth-century values change our expectations of the strategies a ghost story might legitimately employ, but the most telling of the more recent stories here continue to mix fear with pity. The foundation of these emotions shifts with time. Elizabeth Gaskell and most of her contemporaries wrote out of a solid religious faith, of a kind that could place the claims of the dead within a larger framework of spiritual conviction. Once that belief begins to evaporate, the denial of the finality of death represented by ghosts becomes more valuable, and more fragile. The nature of the apprehension they evoke begins to slip, for it is no longer the damage they might do that troubles us, but the gathering conviction that they can do no harm at all. Phantoms fade, dwindling into comedy, simple-minded benevolence, or whimsy. In “Redundant”, Dorothy K. Haynes’s ineffectual and entirely unfrightening spectre loses his posthumous role: “Slowly, he felt himself seep and settle into his grave like water into a sponge”. When these modern ghosts retain their power, it is often because they can no longer be perceived. Joan Aiken’s “The Traitor” mourns the timidity that separates a woman who is longing to see the ghosts of her own past from her final chance to do so. It is the storyteller’s failure to reach the spirits who peopled her life that we are led to regret. A. S. Byatt discards the Gothic machinery of the supernatural in her brilliantly measured “The July Ghost”, which unfolds in high summer. This too is the story of a dead child. But its intensity does not grow out of a feeling of menace represented by his supernatural presence, nor any anguished demand for reparation that he might choose to make. Calm and smiling, the boy’s image is at its most terrifying when it is absent. It is not the prospect of being haunted that we have come to dread, but the thought that we might be left alone.

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Dinah Birch is Professor of English at Liverpool University. She is the editor of Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, 2000.