Abstract
Recent discussions about Edith Wharton’s contribution to the Gothic have opened the door for additional inquiry into Wharton’s other uses of this genre. For Wharton, setting her ghost fiction within a specific region meant she must also draw from that locale’s history: witches and vampires served that purpose. But to what end? This chapterconsiders the answer to that question, acknowledging the role Wharton’s own experiences among the grounds of her most beloved Berkshire home, The Mount, played in her Gothic fiction. The essay seeks to show how Wharton’s experiences in New England and knowledge of its very real “vampiric” history informed her treatment of witches and vampires that refuse to remain silent, especially as seen in Ethan Frome, “Bewitched,” and “All Souls.”
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Notes
- 1.
Besides the work referenced in this chapter, see also Horn, and Elbert, “Mirrors, Sickrooms.”
- 2.
Much has been said of Wharton’s contribution to the darker side of life, populating her fiction with ghosts that have been battered and bruised, only to emerge more whole with a communion of “spectral sisters.” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s Scare Tactics explores such issues in women’s literature of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, noting that women were indeed able to “haunt back.” What has not been addressed with any particular detail are the witches and vampires that control her ghost fiction, if not on the surface, then certainly below it.
- 3.
The actual cause of tuberculosis was not published until 1882, when Robert Koch presented to the Berlin Physiological Society the bacillus that was responsible for the disease and published his findings in “The Etiology of Tuberculosis.” His research, however, would have taken some time to circulate, hence the “vampire panic” in New England. See Thomas M. Daniel’s, “The history of tuberculosis.”
- 4.
A recent article in New England Today reports that in 1790 Rachel Harris from Manchester, Vermont was assumed to be a vampire; she exhibited the blood loss and wasted appearance typical of TB victims. When she died and her sister, Hulda, exhibited the same affliction, Rachel’s body was dug up and her organs burned so her sister would heal. Hulda died anyway shortly after and the 500 witnesses to the vampire exorcism assumed Rachel had actually been a witch instead. See Joe Bills’ “New England’s Vampire History.”
- 5.
Dodson’s “Frozen Hell” and Janet Beer’s “Edith Wharton, Literary Ghosts” provide excellent overviews of the role of setting and environment in the work of Edith Wharton. Collections editors Yang and Healey, Punter and Byron, Elbert and Marshall, and Elbert and Ryden are among the scholars who have demonstrated that landscape in the Gothic is more than mere backdrop to the story. For a detailed discussion of naturalistic forces and Gothicism, see Elbert and Ryden.
- 6.
Even Mattie resembles “a wheat-field under a summer breeze” (38), her brunette hair resembling “a drift of mist on the moon (41), while her whole body looks “like a broken branch” (52).
- 7.
See Bolté, and Philips.
- 8.
Nineteen-year old Mercy Lena Brown was a resident of Exeter in Rhode Island and this is the last recorded instance of exhuming, mutilating, and immolating a corpse to kill a vampire. See Bell.
- 9.
In A Backward Glance, Wharton recalls one summer in Newport with her Aunt Elizabeth, “a ramrod-backed old lady compounded of steel and granite, had been threatened in her youth with the ‘consumption’ which had already carried off a brother and sister” (29).
- 10.
The image of the beautiful and non-threatening witch began to appear in early 1900. See, for example, Martha Patterson’s analysis of the “Pears soap” ad in McClure’s Magazine (52). As Patterson points out, illustrations such as these helped to pacify anxieties about female sexuality, eliminating the female transgressor to create a more sanctioned trouble-maker.
- 11.
As scholars have noted, The Mount was a study in design set forth in Wharton’s coedited book, The Decoration of Houses (1897) that eschews the stuffiness of the trendy Gothic homes in favor of a more neoclassical look with clean lines. For a helpful discussion connecting the architectural design features in Decoration of Houses with Wharton’s Gothic fiction, see Darcie D. Rives.
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Murillo, C. (2021). A New-England Kind of “Fetch”: The Vampire-Witch in Edith Wharton’s Gothic Fiction. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_7
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