"One Need Not be A Chamber-to be Haunted-": American Women's Supernatural Fiction

Abstract

It has long been recognized that in the nineteenth century, the literary possibilities of the supernatural were capitalized on by representatives of the "American pantheon,"1 Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. The supernatural provided them with a forum in which to investigate other- wise unapproachable moral and psychological issues. Yet these men were not alone; countless women writers also had enormous success with super- natural writing. Harriett Beecher Stowe, Harriett Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are just a few of the women who wrote ghost stories in Victorian America. Their exclusion from critical discussions of the American ghost story is somewhat odd, and can perhaps be accounted for by a general critical prejudice against nineteenth- centuiy American women's writing. Twentieth-century critics have a long history of equating "popular nineteenth-century American woman writer[s]" with "sentimental nonentity."2 The omission is doubly distressing in light of the fact that British women writers of the supernatural have never lacked for partisans. As Jessica Amanda Salmonson notes, "women's dominion over the ghost story in Victorian England has been widely acknowledged." And, she adds wryly, "though few seem to have noticed it, this was true in the United States as well" (1989, xii).3 With very few exceptions, however, American anthologists of the ever-popular ghost story continue to margin- alize women writers, or to exclude them from their collections altogether.4