1 - Contextualizing the ghost story

Summary

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century, evidenced by their pervasiveness in the most widely circulating periodicals of the time, it appears that we are as unlikely to see new critical assessments of the genre as we are to see an actual ghost. Although the ghost story, as Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert remind us, was “as typically part of the cultural and literary fabric of the age as imperial confidence or the novel of social realism,” Nina Auerbach is right to observe that, while anthologies such as Cox and Gilbert's The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories are abundant, “serious scholarship on ghosts in fiction and film is … surprisingly sparse.” This lack of attention is no doubt due in part to the preference among literary scholars for realist fiction, which is to say the sort of writing that embraces the mandate to grapple with pressing social, economic, and political issues, and is committed, in George Eliot's memorable words, to “the faithful representing of commonplace things” instead of “things as they never have been and never will be.” Compared to realism's ambitious social-reformist agenda, its imperative to address and (as much as it is in literature's power) to redress the wrongs suffered by “real breathing men and women,” narratives dealing with ghosts, fairies, or incubi can come off as a form of unconscionable escapism, an irresponsible flight from what is real and what really matters. By twisting reality out of shape and often insinuating the existence of a happier Elsewhere, tales of the supernatural are, in Marxist terms, a dangerous opiate that dulls critical thinking about the Here and Now.