Abstract
Referring to Derrida’s term, “hauntology,” which is a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, and applying his theory, Ayres investigates the iconic haunted house in neo-Victorian literature as a metaphorical conceit that describes the processes of writing and reading in the pursuit of knowledge. Storytelling, for the neo-Victorian, is layered and rarely linear, in contrast to the traditional Victorian novel. Reality and assertions or presumptions about right and wrong, good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable were endemic depictions in the nineteenth century when novels were entrusted to be social purveyors of morality and preceptors of decorum. Neo-Victorian ghost stories, instead, suggest that, at best, writers and their readers might discover clues to reality and truth from a myriad of physical and preternatural means embedded in the text, but knowledge is a spectre that assumes a variety of forms that can be deceptive and allusive. The “haunting” of narratology in neo-Victorian ghost stories set in Victorian times analysed in this chapter are Home Before Dark (2020) by Riley Sager and The Whispering House (2021) by Elizabeth Brooks.
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Notes
- 1.
The idea of ghost writers is very popular. Google the term, and you will find a lengthy list of books by that title.
- 2.
Here she is responding to Jameson’s theory about history in his “Postmodernism” (1984, 67).
- 3.
The two stories of Lazarus in the Bible from which Eliot makes reference is apropos to this chapter on ghosts. The first story is when Jesus entered the tomb of his good friend Lazarus and raised him from the dead (John 11:1). The second is when Jesus tells a parable of Lazarus, a poor man who went to heaven, but a rich man was sent to hell. Dives (from the Vulgate which means “rich man” from originally meaning, “favored by the gods”) begs Abraham to let Lazarus come to him to “dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool [his] tongue; for [he is] tormented in this flame.” He also begs Abraham to send Lazarus (like a ghost) back to earth to warn Dives’ five brothers about the reality of hell, that they should repent of their sins. Abraham did not see the value in doing this because they heard Moses and the prophets and did not repent, and if visited by “one rose from the dead,” they still would not repent (Luke 16:19–31 KJV).
- 4.
Although Irigaray makes this point in several of her works and also emphasises that women can be linear in their thinking as well, see Sexes and Genealogies (1993 [1987], 99) in which she ascribes the “linear” to “penile thrust,” whereas women “whirl about in different directions: toward the outside, toward the inside, on the border between the two” (99; emphasis in original). Helene Meyers, however, warns against essentialism when it comes to gender, and writing and reading the Gothic (2001).
- 5.
The “meeting of the minds” made possible by this agreement between the reader and the writer is more fully explain in its entirety, that the author’s “endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (1835 [1817], 365).
- 6.
Specific references to Catherine’s reading of Radcliffe are 50, 127, 131, and 242 (Austen 1903 [1817]).
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Ayres, B. (2024). The Hauntology/Narratology of the Neo-Victorian Ghost Story. In: Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32160-3_2
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