The trouble with ghost-seeing: Vision, ideology, and genre in the Victorian ghost story

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 70, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 1107-1135

  Smajic, Srdjan ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950102669     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0010     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. See Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917);
2. Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (1952; reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1965);
3. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977);
4. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1978);
5. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longmans, 1980), 314-45.
6. As in Punter's The Literature of Terror, the nineteenth-century ghost story is often considered as only one (and often minor) chapter in the history of Gothic literature. The most notable recent contribution to the scant body of scholarship on specifically Victorian ghost fiction is Vanessa Dickerson's Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1996).
7. Arguing that there is a substantial difference between male-authored and female-authored Victorian ghost stories, Dickerson suggests that women could more readily identify with spectral figures than could men, because "the ghost corresponded . . . to the Victorian woman's visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness, the contradictions and extremes that shaped female culture" (5).
8. Whereas male-authored ghost stories, Dickerson argues, "tend to be more diagnostic, clinical, journalistic, vested in mensuration," for women writers the genre offered "a fitting medium for eruptions of female libidinal energy, of thwarted ambitions, of cramped egos" (7, 8).
9. Briggs, 7. Briggs thus opts for avoiding definitions altogether and broadens the category of ghost story to include narratives dealing with "possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the 'swarths' of living men and the 'ghost-soul' or Doppelgänger" (12). While for Briggs, as for many other critics, the term "ghost story" is interchangeable and synonymous with "supernatural fiction," I will presume that stories dealing specifically with spectral appearances (or so-called visitations) may, at least in nineteenth-century fiction, be considered a distinct literary form, motivated by the need to negotiate a particular set of problems and concerns.
10. For examples of such readings, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981)
11. and Michael Gamer, "Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic," PMLA 114 (1999): 1043-54.
12. For an effective deconstruction of the idea of generic purity, see Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1981), 51-77.
13. For a recent optimistic reappraisal of the role of genre theory in Victorian studies specifically, see Carolyn Williams, "'Genre' and 'Discourse' in Victorian Cultural Studies," Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 517-20.
14. Scarborough, 81.
15. Describing the uncanny as that "something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it," Sigmund Freud offers as the most consummate example of this phenomenon the reanimation of the repressed belief in the existence of ghosts: "Nowadays we no longer believe in [ghosts], we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. " Something may occur at any moment, Freud suggests, that will resurrect the repressed belief and give us reason to say: '"So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!' or, 'So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!' and so on. " "The 'Uncanny,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 22 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 17:245, 247, 248.
16. The indispensabil-ity of the Freudian uncanny to recent scholarship on ghosts and the Gothic is best evidenced by Terry Castle's The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)
17. and Julian Wolfreys's Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002).
18. The case is precisely the opposite with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which has often been read as an overt commentary on late nineteenth-century anxieties about crime, cultural atavism, and degeneration, as well as the dubious ethics of British colonialism. For examples of such readings, see Ernest Fontana, "Lombroso's Criminal Man and Stoker's Dracula," The Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984): 25-27;
19. Daniel Pick, '"Terrors of the Night': Dracula and 'Degeneration' in the Late Nineteenth Century," Critical Quarterly 30 (1988): 71-87;
20. Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45;
21. David Glover, "Bram Stoker and the Crisis of the Liberal Subject," New Literary History 23 (1992): 983-1002;
22. Troy Boone, '"He is English and Therefore Adventurous': Politics, Decadence, and Dracula," Studies in the Novel 25 (1993): 76-91.
23. See Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert's introduction to Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), x.
24. The phrase "ways of seeing" was popularized by John Berger in the small, but remarkably influential, book of the same title: Ways of Seeing (London: BBC, 1972).
25. Berger succinctly expresses what has since been reiterated by historians and cultural critics many times over: "The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe" (8).
26. I will continue to use the term "spectator" rather than "observer" because I wish to underscore the etymological link to "specter. " The connection is reinforced countless times in nineteenth-century studies on ghosts, where the popular phrase "ghost-seeing" always accentuates the mediating role of vision in encounters between the living spectators and the specters of the dead. See Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1996), for a useful distinction between spectacle and surveillance in the nineteenth century.
27. Lalvani rejects Michel Foucault's separation of the two concepts under different regimes of vision, and instead argues that "modernity is the constitution of individuals who are both subject-spectators for the spectacular consumption of images and observed-observers within the regime of surveillance: individuals who engage the abundant field of the visible and are in turn made visible, at each instance producing knowledge and power" (171).
28. One notable exception to this rule is Audrey Jaffe's "Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol," in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995): 327-44.
29. Jaffe describes how A Carol links "visual representation to the production of individual sympathy, and thus, ultimately, to social harmony," and presents "a definition of spectatorship as a means of access to cultural life" (328-29).
30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995);
31. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988): 3-23;
32. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990);
33. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983);
34. Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999).
35. See also Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), for the argument that nineteenth-century realist fiction "equated seeing with knowing and made visual information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal narrative" and, more specifically, the claim that "to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world of objects that either had been or could be photographed" (7).
36. An indispensable work on the subject of anti-ocularcentrism is Jay's Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993).
37. The most important contributions to the development of physiological optics in the nineteenth century came from British and German scientists. David Brewster's and Charles Wheatstone's shorter works on vision have been collected in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (London: Academic Press, 1983).
38. J. W. von Goethe's, Johannes Müller's, and Hermann von Helmholtz's major contributions were, respectively, Theory of Color (1810, translated into English in 1840)
39. Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen (1834-1840)
40. and Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (1855-1866).
41. See Crary for a discussion of how physiological optics gave rise to subjective theories of visual perception in the first half of the nineteenth century.
42. Sir Walter Scott, "Mrs. Ann Radcliffe," in The Lives of the Novelists (1821-1824; reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906), 328. Hereafter abbreviated "AR" and cited parenthetically by page number.
43. Scott, "The Tapestried Chamber," The Keepsake of 1829 facsimile (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1999), 136-37. The number was published in November 1828 for the following year. Hereafter abbreviated and cited parenthetically as "T. "
44. Briggs, 36.
45. Scott, "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann," in On Novelists and Fiction, ed. loan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 314.
46. Scott here anticipates Tzvetan Todorov's argument about the constitutive role of ambiguity in fantastic literature. The ambiguity, Todorov explains, "is sustained to the very end of the [fantastic] adventure: reality or dream? truth or illusion?" Once this question is settled either way, "we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. " The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), 25.
47. In The Keepsake the reader is provided with an illustration of the scene in the haunted chamber as a visual aid, but the image hardly does justice either to the specter's horrific visage or to Browne's expression of horror upon seeing it. As such, the image may be said to participate in the narrative's movement toward and away from visual clarity.
48. The story appeared in the April 1818 number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, signed with the initials "A. B. " For a comparison of the two versions, see Coleman O. Parsons, "Scott's Prior Version of "The Tapestried Chamber," Notes and Queries 9 (1962): 417-20.
49. See Castle for a different view of early nineteenth-century theories about spectral illusions. Castle acknowledges the importance of optics in such theories, but argues that the dominant explanation was the psychological one: "Once an apparition-producing faculty was introduced into the human psyche, the psyche became (potentially) a world of apparitions. Human beings continued to see ghosts, only the ghosts were now inside, not outside" (174).
50. John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), 14-15, 17.
51. Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, An Attempt to Trace Such Illusions to Their Physical Causes (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1824)
52. 287-88 ("an idea")
53. 288 ("that organs"; "susceptibility")
54. 291 ("retina").
55. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1832; reprint, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1842), 53.
56. In an 1830 article on optics in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Brewster asserts that "we know nothing more than that the mind, residing, as it were, in every point on the retina, refers the impression made upon it at each point to a direction coinciding with the last portion of the ray which conveys the impression" (quoted in Wade, 27).
57. Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision. No. I," in Wade, 249. Wheatstone is specifically referring to the objective-subjective distinction proposed by the Austrian physiologist Johannes Evangelista Purkinje in Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in Subjectiver Hinsicht (1919).
58. In the opening address to Scott, Brewster acknowledges that "it was at your suggestion that I undertook to draw up a popular account of those prodigies of the material world which have received the appellation of Natural Magic," and hopes that his contribution "shall be considered as forming an appropriate supplement to your valuable work," in Letters on Magic (13-14).
59. Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830; reprint, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 16, 13. Hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by page number.
60. It is hence appropriate - and could hardly be called a coincidence - that Scott should have given Browne the title of general: someone used to being obeyed without question, and presumably experienced in dealing with flesh-and-blood spies, but demoted to the humiliating and humbling rank of petty officer, as it were, when forced to evaluate the "reports" of the "spies" within.
61. For an account of Brewster's and Scott's shared interest in ghosts and vision, and the argument that Scott was less invested in the physiological explanation of spectral appearances than I have here suggested, see Frederick Burwick, "Science and Supernaturalism: Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott," Comparative Criticism 13 (1991): 83-114.
62. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 122.
63. Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848; reprint, New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), 20. Hereafter abbreviated N and cited parenthetically by page number.
64. "As I said before, observation and experience can alone guide us in such an inquiry; for, though most people have a more or less intuitive sense of their own immortality, intuition is silent as to the mode of it; and the question I am anxious here to discuss with my readers is, whether we have any facts to observe, or any experience from which, on this most interesting of all subjects, a conclusion may be drawn. " Crowe, 17-18.
65. John Ruskin, "The Relation to Art of the Science of Light," in The Works of John Buskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 22:194-95. Hereafter abbreviated R and cited parenthetically by page number.
66. Ruskin, "The Three Aeras," in Works, 29:117. Hereafter abbreviated "A" and cited parenthetically by page number.
67. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," in Classic Ghost Stories, ed. John Grafton (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 8, 4.
68. Amelia B. Edwards, "The New Pass," in Classic Ghost Stories, 82.
69. Edwards, 81, 83.
70. Edwards, 83, 85.
71. I am evoking here the famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard - "Not a just image, just an image" - and more specifically Ronald Barthes's desire for "an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image," Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 70.
72. Goethe calls them "physiological colors," and remarks that they "have been known from the earliest times, but since their fleeting quality could be neither caught nor held they were exiled to the realm of mischievous phantoms. " Theory of Color, in Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 168.