Conclusion: The other/Other and Locating the Ghostly

Abstract

In its final and concluding chapter, the argument of Haunting Modernisms turns to thinking more broadly about the theoretical and ethical ramifications of modernist resistances to—or appropriations of—the ghostly. Carefully charting a distinction between Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan’s respective understandings of alterity, the argument reads closely two modernist short stories—Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House” (1921) and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Apple Tree” (1931)—to suggest that even if the absolute ethical voice may be muted in modernism, the key to survival for characters in these texts lies in engaging interminably with small others, whether they be dead or alive. This model, Foley argues, challenges an anti-consolatory experience of melancholia and instead brings to light productive and interminable passages of mourning in these texts that are represented in spectral registers.