Conclusion: Ghosts and History

Abstract

As a genre, modern ghost stories are concerned with historical trauma, its remembrance and its lingering consequences. In these stories, the ghost is something that returns from the past, something that irrupts into the present, disrupting both the present’s presumed separateness from the past, as well as its stable inheritance of that past. There are two paradigmatic historical traumas that the modern ghost story responds to. The first is the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the consequent shift in power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. And the second is in effect a repetition of the first, as under imperialism different parts of the world experience the violent transition to modernity. Though the first transition, if it has a historical moment at all, happened some two hundred years earlier than the modern ghost story achieves its stable form, belatedness is consistently one of the characteristics of the modern ghost story. And regardless of whether that is an accurate or helpful model for understanding social change in the 19^th century, it is overwhelmingly the narrative that ghost stories tell, and these are the terms in which they tell it.