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

Abstract

Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories continues the work Gina Wisker has previously published on women’s gothic and the ghost story. It offers a critical view of works from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) to Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018). Although largely Anglocentric, works from Singapore and Malaysia are analysed at length, alongside brief discussion of other global literatures. Wisker makes reference to Emma Liggins’s The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 in the introduction and throughout, and this monograph feels like a natural progression from that work, bringing the research deeper into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and extending the discussion of ghosts beyond the haunted house. Wisker highlights how the ghost stories of women are often overlooked, although they “peel away the deadly cladding or torn wallpaper revealing abjection, dismissal to silence, and the liminal spaces of traumatic, oppressive histories and stories” (30). Wisker’s first theme is the women’s ghost story as warning against the dangers of traditional romantic values, whether imposed by patriarchal society or sustained by the hopes of women dreaming of escape, as in Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Wisker reminds us that although these ideals originate in a pre-war way of life, they persist in romanticised contemporary desire for domestic bliss as expressed in romantic fiction, and in reimagined fairy tales, a range of which are covered in the chapter “True Love As Possession.” As Wisker’s attention moves forward in time, she addresses novels that depict an old “romanticised England” (163) that refuses to move on and similarly holds back its characters with hauntings, such as The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Besides romantic ideals of lifestyle, Wisker examines romantic ideals of Empire and toxic nostalgia for an earlier age of comfort, and suggests that ghost stories provide a voice for those for whom the past is not a source of nostalgic comfort.