Visualizing the Unseen in the Victorian Ghost Story

Abstract

Abstract The Victorians were preoccupied with vision and visuality, a fascination that has been taken up by many critics working on nineteenth-century literature. Supernatural fiction has been considered a prime location for the expression of Victorian preoccupations with the reliability of sight, as well as with the latest developments in the science of vision. While much previous criticism explores the cultural and historical significance of literary representations of vision, this chapter returns to the ‘surface’ of seeing—what is seen, what is unseen in Victorian ghost stories. The literary ghost provides opportunities for narrating the experience of seeing what is not there: Victorian ghost stories are full of haunted spaces that should be empty, but are not. This chapter explores some of these narratives, examining how ‘nothing’ becomes visible to foreground the ways in which the Victorian ghost story depicts the seen and unseen.