The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story

Abstract

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century and their pervasiveness in the literary periodicals of the time, it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost.' This curious and persistent lack of scholarly interest, according to Julia Briggs, may in part be attributed to the elusive character of ghost fiction itself, a genre widely infamous for being once vast, amorphous, and notoriously difficult to define.2 That the generic boundaries of ghost fiction, as Briggs finds, inevitably collapse upon closer scrutiny is, however, something that may equally be said about any literary genre-the nineteenth-century realist novel arguably even more vast and amorphous than the ghost story, even more difficult to grasp as a unified textual body-nor has the increasingly prevalent argument for the fluidity of generic markers and arbitrariness of generic classification sufficed to discredit terminally the usefulness of genre theory, which has over the past couple of decades demonstrated its compatibility with the methods and practices of historically and culturally focused literary criticism.' It seems that a more daunting and discouraging obstacle for negotiating the ghost story's relation to nineteenth-century literature and culture has been the conspicuous omnipresence of the specter in Western literature. As Dorothy Scarborough remarked as early as 1917, the literary ghost is absolutely indestructible. ... He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth-century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion.'4 Since ghosts evidently belong everywhere in literatureand consequently, one might say, nowhere in particular-the ghost story appears better adapted to the climate of formalist or psychoanalytic, rather than historicist, readings. In fact, the genre as such seems to validate precisely the type of criticism that downplays the signifi-