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Spectres of Virginia Woolf: Rhythmic and Heterotopic Haunting in “A Haunted House”

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Abstract

In this paper I offer a reading of Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House” from the perspectives of hauntology and heterotopic spatiality. I argue that, initiating with this story, spectrality prevails in Virginia Woolf’s writing and haunts her literary corpus. By examining the mystical element rhythmic practice brings to the story, and by linking it to thencept of haunting and spectrality, I discuss the use of haunting and spectres to question modernity’s connection to the past. I emphasize that Woolf questions the relation of modernity to the past, which does not necessarily mean that the past has always negative connotations for her, but rather that she distrusts modernity and suspects that it might betray her. By focusing on the quintessential role of the house, I claim that the house transforms into a heterotopic place where boundaries between spaces and times blur and the past, the present, and the future merge, as a result of which the house becomes a space of encounter, which is a way of resisting the rigid conceptualizations of spatio-temporality.

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Notes

  1. This is the only volume of short stories published by Woolf herself and her own press, the Hogarth Press (Reynier, 2009, 4). In Virginia Woolf. The Complete Shorter Fiction (1986) Susan Dick published 46 works; seventeen short stories never published before.

  2. Virginia Woolf deliberates on the genre of her shorter fiction, but does not refer to them directly as “short story” because, as she explains in “Modern Fiction”, short story points out story telling which might not be suitable for modern texts (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, 1984, 161). This leads to another discussion on what to call her shorter fiction (See Reynier, 2009, 15). While Leonard Woolf opted to use the term “story” when he posthumously published A Haunted House and Other Stories, David Bradshaw first chose to use the word “fiction” in the title of the book he edited, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction and then the word “sketch” in Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches.

  3. Max Weber appropriated the phrase “disenchantment of the world” to describe the modern condition of Friedrich Schiller to explain the rationalized world. Weber’s explanation of the “historical process of rationalization has become a crucial reference point in diagnoses of the modern condition” as it “exemplifies the dilemma of humanity becoming lost in its objectified products that Schiller […] wishes to overcome” (see Angus, 1983, 141).

  4. Ghost story is a sub-genre of the gothic which was at the peak of its popularity in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century See Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story, 2011, 23.

  5. According to Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, the ghost story genre was to become a medium for daring literary experimentation and a way of redefining the boundaries of literary culture in the hands of Margaret Oliphant, Edith Nesbit, and Vernon Lee (Brewster and Thurston, 2018, 4).

  6. Emphasis in original.

  7. Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen chaired Carlyle Memorial Fund founded in December 31, 1894. Carlyle’s House was established as a museum in 1895, and Leslie Stephen helped establish the museum. He also wrote Carlyle’s biography in his The Dictionary of National Biography (Booth, 2016, 242).

  8. Georg Lukacs discusses modernist literature from this opposed view, too. See “The Ideology of Modernism”.

  9. Jean Guiget maintains that some of Woolf’s short stories lead to her novels. According to him, for instance, her sketches “Blue and Green”, “A Haunted House”, “Monday or Tuesday”, “Kew Gardens”, and “The String Quartet” lead to The Waves. (In Christine Reynier, 2009, 9). Guiguet (1962).

  10. For more, Thacker (2003) and Zink (2018, ebook).

  11. See Cassigneul (2018).

  12. Virginia Woolf’s expression in “A Sketch of the Past”: “From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art […]” (Woolf, 1989, 81).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. English Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Demet Karabulut Dede

  2. American Culture and Literature Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Haliç University, İstanbul, Turkey

    Demet Karabulut Dede

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Correspondence to Demet Karabulut Dede.

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Karabulut Dede, D. Spectres of Virginia Woolf: Rhythmic and Heterotopic Haunting in “A Haunted House”. Neophilologus 108, 311–326 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-023-09795-4

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