The Exorcism of Victorian Britain:

Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century

Ghost Story

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English and Creative

Writing in fulfillment of the unit ENGL 301.

Supervisors: Professor Keith Hanley and Professor Simon

Bainbridge
College: Lonsdale College
Word Count: 10,000 words

Holly ONeill

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Contents

Introduction

Spectres of Sexuality: Transgressive Desire in

Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories

Phantoms of Finance: The Economy and Social Class in

Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories

15

Haunted Houses: Sex and Gender in

Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories

26

Conclusion

39

Bibliography

42

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Introduction
My dissertation centres on Victorian ghost stories written by women in
nineteenth-century Britain. My main aim throughout this work is to contend the
notion held by many critics that women writers of the nineteenth-century ghost
story were purely invested in the genre for financial gain. Instead, I argue that
women writers of Victorian Britain recognised the potential of the form to
function as a vehicle for social criticism.
I will be discussing nine short stories within my dissertation. They are as
follows: Elizabeth Gaskells The Poor Clare (1856), Vernon Lees Amour Dure
(1887) and Winthrops Adventure (1881), Charlotte Riddells Walnut Tree
House, The Open Door and The Old House in Vauxhall Walk, (all published in
1882), Margaret Oliphants The Open Door (1882) and Old Lady Mary (1885),
and finally Mary Louisa Molesworths Lady Farquhars Old Lady (1873). I have
chosen to use these texts to represent three particular concerns of women in
nineteenth-century Britain. I will approach these concerns thematically in three
chapters. The first, Spectres of Sexuality: Transgressive Desire in NineteenthCentury Ghost Stories, deals with the work of Gaskell and Lee and explores
anxieties concerning the repression of sexuality and same-sex desire within
Victorian society. The second, Phantoms of Finance: The Economy and Social
Class in Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories, examines two of Riddells stories and
one of Oliphants in an exploration of how the ghost story was used by women to
express financial anxiety and issues concerning the class divide within Victorian
Britain. Lastly I will analyse three stories from Riddell, Oliphant and Molesworth
in Haunted Houses: Sex and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories. This

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last chapter examines how the haunted house narrative in particular disrupted
Victorian notions of gender and the females place within society.
I will briefly outline each story as they are bought up within the three
chapters as some of these texts are less well known. I will be exploring the
importance of feminist theory in bringing to light the gender concerns that are
inherent in womens writing. Likewise, as critics such as Julian Wolfreys and
Christine Berthin have affirmed the validity of psychoanalytic theory as having
an inherent connection to the Gothic, I will engage also with concepts raised in
Freuds essay The Uncanny.
Prior to the nineteenth-century there was a relatively small amount of
ghost fiction written by women. The Victorian period saw a huge increase of
women take to the realm of spectral fiction. Michael A. Cox points out in his
introduction to The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories that the reason why
women took to the ghost story so successfully is one of the great unasked critical
questions1. Cox proceeds with an answer which is one believed by many critics:
that women, relying on the ever-popular ghost story, sought only to profit
financially from their work. It is this widely accepted assertion that I wish to
contend throughout my dissertation. The general unawareness of the critical
world makes this area so important in an understanding of the Victorian woman
that was ghosted not only within society but within fiction also.

Michael Cox, Introduction, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. by Michael Cox and R.
A. Gilbert, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xiv.

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Spectres of Sexuality: Transgressive Desire in Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories

Although spectral presences characterise the stories I have selected to examine

in this dissertation, all of these stories are haunted by presences other than
ghosts. Elizabeth Gaskells story The Poor Clare describes the tale of Lucy
Fitzgerald, who has been condemned to live with her doppelganger as a
consequence of a curse set upon her by her grandmother. Resurrected when
least expected and desired, the past reminds the characters of things they
thought were better left buried and forgotten and takes on a haunting presence
within the text. I argue that within The Poor Clare the rampant sexuality of
Victorian society is not what is criticised by Gaskell. What is explored instead are
the constraints and limitations imposed upon her society by the times own set of
ideologies that deemed sexuality wholly inappropriate outside of the marital
sphere.
The role of the narrator in womens nineteenth-century ghost stories is
essential to the authors exploration of sexuality in the text. The narrator
represents the gendered views of many Victorian contemporaries. When his
suspicions are aroused concerning Lucys identity, the narrator assures the
reader: It was true that Lucy was shrouded in mystery; her name (I was
convinced it was not Clarke), birth, parentage, and previous life were unknown
to me. But I was sure of her goodness and sweet innocence2. Lucy takes on a
supernatural quality as a consequence of the mystery that surrounds her
character. The goodness and innocence that is represented in Lucys character is
2

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Poor Clare, in The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. by A. W. Ward, vol. v, (New
York: AMS Press, 1972), p. 341.

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what the narrator points to being the most highly valued assets of the Victorian
woman within his society. Contained within her narrators views about Lucy
Fitzgeralds purity is Gaskells implied criticism of a Victorian society that
considers a womans most prized assets her innocence and goodness.
Gaskell makes explicit the uncanny nature of the doppelganger in order to
exert her agency in criticising Victorian ideologies surrounding aggressive
female sexuality. The motif of the doppelganger is central to the realm of the
uncanny that is explorative of sexuality in Gothic Victorian literature and is
evident in texts such as Robert Louis Stevensons 1886 novella The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his 1919 essay The Uncanny, neurologist Sigmund
Freud relegates the uncanny to the realm of the Heimlich, (or homely), and
asserts that the terror of the double stems from the fact that the uncanny is that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar3. Lucys double represents the freer, sexual side of the seemingly
untainted Lucy and the narrator is evidently both horrified and attracted to her
simultaneously. It is the evil double that attracts him most powerfully: I could
not see the grave and tender Lucy- my eyes were fascinated by the creature
beyond4. The character of Lucy Fitzgerald herself recognizes this desire within
the narrator:
We dared not speak; for we could not tell but that the dread
creature was listening, although unseen -but that IT might appear
and push us asunder. I never loved her more fondly than now

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey, vol. xvii, (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 236.
4 Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 356.

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when- and that was the unspeakable misery- the idea of her was
becoming inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT.
She seemed to understand what I must be feeling. She let go of my
hand, which she had kept clasped until then5.
The passionate language in this paragraph connects the narrators sexual urge to
see the other Lucy, the shuddering he experiences on the thought of her
explicitly sexual. The relationship described between the narrator and the
doppelganger hints at an illicit affair, further suggested as Lucy lets go of the
narrators hand in an act of apparent jealousy. Women writers explored the
sexual standards of the Victorian male through the form of the ghost story. The
narrator in The Poor Clare comes to represent the Victorian male that cannot
accept this alluring self as a natural part of Lucy, just as he cannot admit his
attraction to this sexual other. At the time of The Poor Clares publication
prostitution was rife, with an estimated eight thousand six hundred fallen
women working the streets of London alone. The narrator in The Poor Clare
embodies this divide in the outer, moral self and the sexually repressed innerself. Through Lucys manifestation of what Freud termed a doubling, dividing
and interchanging of the self6 in the form of her doppelganger, the divided self of
the narrator is also exposed. Freud argued that the word heimlich could also
mean withheld from others7 and it is this sentiment that Gaskell implies
through her supernatural tale of a ghostly double- the idea that we all contain a
divided self.

Ibid, p. 382.
Freud, The Uncanny, p. 234.
7 Ibid, p. 223.
6

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In his reference to Lucys double as a creature and IT8, the narrator in
The Poor Clare relegates the doppelganger to the realm of the un-human, or
something that is not female. Early in the narration it is told that Her
fatherdrove her out like some monstrous thing9. Through the use of
animalistic terms, the male characters in the story categorize the voluptuous
sexuality of Lucys double as a trait that intrudes upon her gender. As Melissa
Edmundson Makala states: Apparitions defy categorization, and therefore defy
many of the social limitations placed on the living.10. The lack of categorization
that the female spectre experiences in this tale seems to be aligned with what
Jacques Derrida discusses in Specters of Marx. Derridas notion of the specter
focuses on a state that is between being and non-being so the IT that Gaskell
writes into her tale possess a critique of the status of womens identity in the
nineteenth-century.
Although Lucy despises her demonic other, she also recognizes her
double as self: In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind,
another wicked, fearful self so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me,
as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged11. Through
Freuds categorization of the fearful as simultaneously familiar, we see through
the character of Lucy and her double that the unheimlich is what was once
heimlich, familiar; the prefix un is the token of repression12. Lucys double
embodies the outer representation of something inner, something socially
8

Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 382.

Ibid, p. 332.
10 Melissa Edmundson Makala, Womens Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
(Wiltshire: CPI Antony Rowe, 2013), p. 59.
11 Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 385.
12 Freud, The Uncanny, p. 245.
9

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questionable and therefore fearful13 and therefore all that is repressed in her, in
the narrator, and in society, thus confirming that the self and Victorian society
became their own doubles.
The narrators reflective use of the word poor to describe Lucy implies
that he considers her character forever tainted by her sexuality. Lucy diminishes
as a character in the text as the narrator explains: I saw Lucy standing before
me, alone, deathly pale, and, I could have fancied, shrunk in size14. The
unevenness in narrative form demonstrates that Lucys explicit sexuality lessens
her as a woman and therefore invites a criticism of Victorian society where an
overtly sexual woman would be unable to comfortably exist. Through the use of
this form Gaskell hints that if unable to repress or lose this innate sexuality, a
woman in her society would also be forced to live under such a curse.
The exorcism of Lucys double provides another opportunity for the
author to criticise the status of women in the nineteenth-century. Margaret
Homans asserts that by becoming a Poor Clare, Bridget is forced to lose her voice
in order to lift the curse placed on her granddaughter15. I argue that Bridget also
loses her identity as an independent woman. This female character undergoes a
change in status throughout the text from The Coldholme witch16 to A Poor
Clare. The emphasis that Gaskell places on Bridgets transition to a nameless
individual also serves to further emphasise the uncanny nature of the divided
self. As Carol A. Martin asserts, there is an inherent connection between author

13

Makala, p. 60.
Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 367.
15 Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century
Womens Writing, (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 111.
16 Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 331.
14

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and character in this tale. The link between Gaskell and Bridget is, she
maintains, as women both defiant of the worlds opinion and yet fearing
itGaskell uses the possibilities of the ghost story to depict a powerful woman
who dares to defy heaven and earth, but whose power turns back upon herself
and makesher a victim17. The naming of characters is paramount to this end as
both Bridget and Lucy are given many different names within the text, denying
both a set identity. Lucy first appears as Miss Clarke and the closing line of the
story states: There lay a woman, -lay Sister Magdalene- lay Bridget Fitzgerald18.
The ending suggests the assurance of Lucy and the narrators imminent
matrimony, therefore promising Lucy yet another identity as the wife of the
narrator. Also promised is her fulfillment as a sexual being, contained within the
socially acceptable terms of marriage- all to unfold behind closed doors.
The stories of Vernon Lee also explore themes of errant sexuality. Amour
Dure concerns historian Spiridion Trepka and his research project in Italy about
a long-dead woman who was infamous during her lifetime for the seduction and
murder of her male lovers, Medea da Carpi. Driven insane by his love for Medea,
Trepka believes he has successfully managed to resurrect her from the dead.
When Trepka states: I had longedto come face to face with the Past19, the
reader sees the personification of the past through Lees choice to capitalise the
word. The past is not only personified through the reappearance of Medea, but
also sexualized through Trepkas ardent desire to connect with it.

17

Carol A. Martin, Gaskells Ghosts: Truths in Disguise, in Studies in the Novel, 21/1, (Spring
1989), p. 35.
18 Gaskell, The Poor Clare, p. 390.
19 Vernon Lee, Amour Dure, in The Snake Lady and Other Stories, ed. by Horace Gregory, (New
York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 41.

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From the beginning of Amour Dure Lee makes clear the seductive power
of Medea. Trepka states: Her magic faculty is to enslave all the men who come
across her path: all those who see her, love her, become her slaves; and it the
destiny of all her slaves to perish20. Spiridions statement sanctions apparent
acceptance of not only his own inevitable demise but also of the female sexuality
that Medea represents. Lee, unlike Gaskell, is therefore able to create a male
character that is wholly accepting of female sexuality. For Patricia Pulham,
Trepkas death at the end of the story could be read as a surrender to the phallic
woman: an acceptance of aggressive femininity21. After Medeas arrest in the
story she is locked away in a castle. Through the entrapment of Medea, Lee
implies that a societys attempt, (and more specifically a male attempt); to
repress feminine sexuality is futile. Medeas return as a ghost to reek revenge on
mankind exemplifies the futility of repression and aligns with Jacques Derridas
assertion that memory brings us to the reality of the present as well as
forewarning us of the future.22. The ghost of Medea embodies Freuds concept of
the return of the repressed and functions as a criticism of Lees society regarding
views on female sexuality. When Medea is executed under orders from Duke
Robert, Trepka records in his narration that Robert insisted that only womentwo infanticides to whom he remitted their sentence- should be employed for the
deed23. By emphasizing that the execution was carried out by two infanticides,
Lee suggests that only unnatural, unfeminine women could kill Medea, herself
viewed as unnatural supernatural. As Gaskells The Poor Clare also exposes, the
20

Ibid, p. 102.
Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lees Supernatural Tales (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008), p. 87.
22 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 95.
23 Lee, Amour Dure, p. 96.
21

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female is relegated to the position of the sub-human or animalistic as a
consequence of her extroverted sexuality. Trepka is also simultaneously
repulsed and attracted to Medea: The mere thought sets my blood in a whirl, not
with horror, but withI know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies me, but it is
delicious24. The specter is an emanation of Spiridions own hidden desires as he
notices when viewing a portrait of Medea that she is kneeling, baring her breast
for the victor to strike, but in reality to captivate him25. Here the divided selfone that simultaneously wishes to vanquish but yet sexually conquer explicit
female sexuality- is exposed within Lees writing.
Lee questions notions of defined gender roles in the Victorian period
through Trepkas abandonment of his career. His transition from historicist to
novelist through his fervent documentation of Medeas legacy is, Ruth Robbins
argues, an act in which Medea unmans him by robbing him of his professional
masculine status26. This culminates in what Pulham terms Trepkas intellectual
castration27, which exemplifies a symbolic feminizing of the male in order to
allow a doubling between himself and Medea. As Pulham further acknowledges,
the fluid sexuality made possible by the process of doubling allows an
expression of same-sex desire via a model of erotic exchange that is superficially
heterosexual28. The blurring of gender roles that Pulham describes in this
extract relates to the authors own life as she, Violet Page, wrote under the male
pseudonym of Vernon Lee, blurring gender divisions in her very own pen name.
24

Ibid.
Ibid, p. 97.
26 Ruth Robbins, Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lees Androgynous Specters, in
Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth-Century, ed. by Ruth
Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 198.
27 Pulham, p. 125.
28 Ibid, p. 126.
25

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As a lesbian writer, Lee celebrates a sexual deviance through her
supernatural tales that admits transgressive desires, and permits the negotiation
of a fluid identity29 in such stories as Winthrops Adventure. Lee lived within a
society where even the suspicion of homosexuality was enough to condemn a
man not only in the public eye but also to his closest male friends30 and
prominent Victorian homosexual writers such as Oscar Wilde were being
imprisoned for their sexuality. Despite heavily imposed sexual ideologies, Lee
continued to write for a minority group of readers who were interested in
expanding the conventional limits of masculinityby envisioning ties between
the male body and beauty, homoeroticism and culture- by imagining other ways
of being a man in Victorian England31. Although my dissertation focuses solely
on the works of female writers of the nineteenth-century ghost story, I feel that it
is important to realize that their writings were not necessarily ascribed to a
specifically feminist agenda. Writers such as Lee sought to explore the issues
facing all members of the population including the repressed homosexual male.
The decision to include Lees homoerotic tale Winthrops Adventure recognizes
the undeniable validity that queer theory now has on readings of late Gothic
literature, despite many of these works being produced within a time where
homosexual desire was a love that dare not speak its name32.
Portraits are used to great effect in both of Lees tales in order to create
ghostly presences within the texts. Winthrops Adventure details the narrators

29

Ibid, p. 146.
Andrew H. Miller, Sexualities in Victorian Britain, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), p.
153.
31 Ibid, p. 142.
32 H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19 th Century, (London: I. B. Tauris &
Co., 2003), p. 1.
30

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obsession with the portrait of the late opera singer, Ferdinando Rinaldi. As Mary
Patricia Kane states of Lees fiction: The relations that her characters have with
the subjects of portraits reveal more about the characters themselves than the
objects of their gaze; the narrative of haunted portraituretells the story of the
constitution of the self through the other33. Portraits of the dead Medea and
Rinaldi lead the narrators of both stories to a compulsive desire to resurrect the
deceased. Through her use of the motif of portraiture, Lee feminizes the
character of Rinaldi in order to blur gender boundaries as she did in Amour
Dure to explore same-sex desire. As a castrato Rinaldi is feminized by both his
occupation and the effeminate description of his portrait: The features were
irregular and small, with intensely red lips and a crimson flush between the
transparent bronzed skin; the eyeswere beautiful, brown, soft, like those of
some animals, with a vague, wistful depth of look34. Winthrops confusion about
his depth of feeling for the long-lost Rinaldi is a projection of his own desire onto
the portrait. Here, as in The Poor Clare, the narrators language is most
passionate and erotic when describing the object of his desire. There is an
unconscious fetishisation of the male body as Winthrop mentions Rinaldis
beautiful plump, white, blue-veined hand35. When Winthrop gazes at the
portrait, he comes to the realization that both himself and the painted face of
Rinaldi share the same expression. The portrait becomes a mirror and reflects
Winthrops own state of mind and repressed desires. As Makala asserts: This
elusive, sexual indeterminacy represents Winthrops own unacknowledged
33

Mary Patricia Kane, Spurious Ghosts: The Fantastic Tales of Vernon Lee, (Rome: Carocci, 2004),
p. 23.
34 Vernon Lee, Winthrops Adventure, in Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers, ed. by
Richard Dalby, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), p. 124.
35 Ibid.

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sexual desires which haunt him throughout the story just as much as Rinaldis
ghost does36. The climax of homoerotic feelings within the narration arrives
when Winthrop endangers his own life to stay at Rinaldis villa where he was
murdered. Lee conveys the symbolic penetration of the villa and its barricaded
rooms in sexual terms to further enhance Rinaldis femininity as the object of
male penetration. Winthrops encounter with the ghost is further sexualised;
with a vigorous push Winthrop enters the bedroom and stood on the threshold,
trembling and breathless37. Listening and panting38, the climatic language of
the encounter between the two male characters continues: I stood spellbound,
incapable of moving, as if all my blood were frozen and my limbs paralyzed,
almost insensible save that I saw and I heardhim alone. The wonderful, sweet,
downy voiceburst out into a rapid, luminous shake39. Claire Kahane asserts
that Rinaldi can be interpreted as a hermaphrodite, arguing that the Gothic
emblem represents a desired transgression of boundaries. For the response to
the hermaphrodite as a literary image derives from ambiguity: from what is
virtually obscure yet demands to be seen, from what is impossible but true, from
what is wished for and feared40. Although in agreement with this claim, I argue
further that the status of the hermaphrodite as categorized by Kahane shares the
status of the ghost. Although seemingly impossible, ghosts become true within
these stories ultimately to teach the ghost-seer about their hidden selves and
desires.
36

Makala, p. 80.
Lee, Winthrops Adventure, pp. 130-131.
38 Ibid, p. 131.
37
39
40

Ibid, pp. 131-132.

Claire Kahane, The Gothic Mirror, in The Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic
Interpretation, ed. by Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether, (London: Cornell University
Press, 1985), p. 347.

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Phantoms of Finance: The Economy and Social Class in Nineteenth-Century

Ghost Stories

In this chapter I will discuss how women writers utilized the form of the ghost
story in order to discuss anxieties concerning matters both social and financial.
Although I argued in my introduction that women writers were not invested in
the ghost story for purely financial gain, that does not mean to say that these

ONeill 15
stories are not very much bound up with ideas regarding matters of finance and
economy. Within these stories, spectral trouble is a direct result of monetary
trouble41, and as Edward Copeland states: Gothic terror in womens fiction is
unremittingly economic42 . The implication is that the mismanagement of
wealth becomes a source of haunting within these tales.
Charlotte Riddell, author of Walnut Tree House and The Open Door,
wrote within a time where it was more common for women to have
responsibility within the working world: By mid-century, it was normal to have
a woman editing a magazineas women moved into the public world, concerns
about money naturally followed. In other words, money became a direct concern
both inside and outside the ghost story43. Riddell herself was part owner and
editor of both Home and St. Jamess Magazines, being paid sums of up to eight
hundred pounds for works such as George Geith of Fen Court (1864). In 1851 she
met William Blackwood and was invited to contribute to his publication,
eventually writing over one hundred articles in her lifetime.
Within both Walnut Tree House and The Open Door, Riddell makes
explicit the class divide and lack of social mobility that she believed to be so
prevalent within her society. The specters in her stories function as
representatives of this divide. Walnut Tree House describes a young man,
Edgar Stainton, coming under the ownership of his uncles property. It is
written that his clerk did not in the least understand this rich man, who treated

41

Makala, p. 97.
Ibid, p. 45.
43 Ibid, p. 95.
42

ONeill 16
him as an equal44. Through her social critique of the clerk, this sentence marks
Riddells creation of a class divide within the text that is highlighted further with
the introduction of the child specter. Upon Staintons first encounter with the
young ghost, his immediate reaction is to notice how neglected the little child
looks: His plaid little frock, which he had outgrown(was) soiled and crumpled,
tied behind with strings broken and knotted45. The ghost of the neglected child
comes to represent the lower classes of Victorian society. The class divide is also
made explicit in her tale The Open Door which concerns a young man who is
asked to resolve a suspected haunting at Ladlow Hall in return for money. The
most prominent example of the class divide appears within the text as the
narrator introduces his aunt: She had married so dreadfully below her that my
mother refused to acknowledge the relationship at all46. Shortly afterwards in
the story, the narrator states bluntly: I wanted money badly47, making explicit
the condition of many within his society, in keeping with Robert Lee Wolfs
declaration that No other nineteenth-century novelist so precisely conveys to
the modern readerthe atmosphere in which so much of Englands economic life
was conducted48.
Riddell herself, although profiting financially from her work as a writer at
the time of the publication of Walnut Tree House, in her ghost stories stirred
British social consciousness by exposing the social tension and inequalities that

44

Charlotte Riddell, Walnut Tree House, in The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell, ed. by
E. F. Bleiler, (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 151.
45 Ibid, p. 157.
46 Charlotte Riddell, The Open Door, in Weird Stories, (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2009), p 31.
47 Ibid.
48 Robert Lee Wolff, Two Irish Novels by Mrs. J. H. Riddell, in Maxwell Drewitt, vol. i, Ireland:
From the Act of Union to the Death of Parnell, 1800-1891, ed. by Robert Lee Wolff, (New York:
Garland, 1979), p. vi.

ONeill 17
existed for those who were on the margins of society (namely women, the poorer
working classes and minorities)49. No stranger to being one of those on the
margins of society herself, Riddell frequently used ghosts to further her views
about financial problems in England. Her fathers death left her family in
surmounting debt and considerable anxiety about finance and when her
husbands business enterprise failed, the writer was left to support her family on
the profits of her writing alone. As Stainton comes to realise that the young
ghost haunts Walnut Tree House as a consequence of a misdoing it has
experienced, he approaches the subject with his lawyer, Mr. Timpson. As a
representative of the upper classes, Timpson replies:
What is the use of troubling your head about a child who has been
lying in Lambeth Churchyard these dozen years? Take my advice,
have the house pulled down and let or sell the ground for building.
You ought to get a pot of money for it in that neighborhood. If there
were a wrong done it is too late to set it right now50.
The lawyer is unable to see the importance of the lower classes suffering over
his own concerns of profit. The fact that Stainton must seek answers to the
problem of this haunting from lower members of society implies that, as a source
of knowledge, they are more stable than the upper classes51. Riddell implies
through her protagonists refusal to allow the ghostly childs suffering to
continue that the problems of class divide within her society must too be
acknowledged.

49

Makala, p. 5.
Riddell, Walnut Tree House, p. 160.
51Makala, p. 108.
50

ONeill 18
The opening passage of The Open Door functions as an
acknowledgement of Victorian societys ignorance regarding the upper classs
neglect of the poor: There are persons who even affect incredulity concerning
that open door at Ladlow Hall. They say it did not stand wide open; that the
whole affair was a delusion; that they are sure it must have been a conspiracy52.
If the door that refuses to remain shut at Ladlow Hall is a metaphor that
symbolises the door between the classes, then the opening of this story is a
metaphor for the ignorance of the Victorian population concerning this very lack
of social mobility within their society. The imagery of entrapment that occurs
frequently within the tale also further heightens the sense of social entrapment
that Riddell express many people were faced with: I looked around me- doorsdoors-doors- I had never before seen so many doors together all at once53. To
this end, Ladlow Hall itself functions as a metaphorical space for the class dividethe very architecture of an upstairs and a downstairs highlights the division
between the upper and lower classes.
After undergoing and overcoming a period of social instability within the
stories, Riddell makes the presence of specters in her texts financially beneficial
to her characters. Stainton learns of the miserliness of the wealthy family that
previously inhabited his uncles property. The previous housekeeper tells him:
After the old gentlemans death the children were treated shamefulshamefulhalf starved and neglectedHe turned regular miser. Hoarding came
into the family with Mrs. Lancelot Stainton54. The author shows the use of

52

Riddell, The Open Door, p. 28.

Ibid, p. 42.
54 Riddell, Walnut Tree House, p. 106.
53

ONeill 19
money for power and control that can replicate itself dangerously through each
generation like a disease55. The result of the familys miserliness sees a
separation between themselves and their community. Unlike Stainton in Walnut
Tree House, the narrator of The Open Door goes in search of spectral presences
not for the sake of familial ties, but for financial gain as he states within his
narration: For ten pounds, or half the money, I would have faced all the
inhabitants of spirit land56. As a consequence of the narrators ghostly
intervention, he is rewarded with the monetary prize he first sought in the
beginning of the tale. Makalas assertion that the presence of the boys ghost
provides the link Stainton needs to discover his familys own history, but also
provides him with the impetus to spend his inheritance more wisely57 is
confirmed with Staintons profound statement: Was this all wealth had done for
his people and those connected with them?58. Riddell conveys that it is not just
the importance of money that she explores in her ghost fiction, but also the
exploration of how to use it correctly. As Makala asserts: Money itself haunts
the texts and its misuse-signified by the ghosts- directly impacts the characters
in each of the stories. The extent of this impact is made evident with Staintons
closing statement: I will not so misuse the wealth which has been given me59,
and the reader sees that Riddells lessons about the management of wealth have
been headed by this character at least. Stainton is then able to use his wealth to
oversee the revival of Walnut Tree House: on the drive grass grew no longer- too

55

Makala, p. 110.
Riddell, The Open Door, p. 37.
57 Makala, p. 110.
58 Riddell, Walnut Tree House, p. 163.
59 Ibid.
56

ONeill 20
many footsteps passed that way for weeds to flourish60. Thus, by the end of the
story, life is once again permitted to thrive as the management of wealth and the
responsibilities of the upper classes have been set to rights.
The haunting within Oliphants 1881 story, (also titled The Open Door),
is again connected to a doorway which similarly symbolizes a doorway between
two social classes. The story concerns the owner of a Scottish estate and deals
with issues similar to those explored within Riddells fiction. The narrator,
Colonel Mortimer, is a wealthy businessman whose son Roland is taken seriously
ill after he hears a ghost near Brentwood House. As Margaret K. Gray asserts:
Mrs. Oliphants beings from beyond the grave have a mission to help mortals in
some specific way, or attempt to bring humans to a clearer understanding of the
inevitable consequence of their present way of life61. As is the case in Riddells
Walnut Tree House, the lower classes are consulted about the suspected
haunting. The lower members of society have an important role within
Oliphants fiction. The groom and rightful owner of Brentwood House, Mr. Jarvis
and his wife, are consulted firstly about the haunting. It becomes apparent that
although being aware of the haunting, they have kept it a secret in order to
maintain the financial profit that is from renting Brentwood House. Matters of
the social and economic take priority over the fear of the specter and the
narrators disgust over the matter becomes evident: My heart was full of
bitterness against the stolid retainers of a family who were content to risk other

60

Ibid, p. 170.
Margaret K. Gray, Introduction, Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural,
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. xi.
61

ONeill 21
peoples children and comfort rather than let the house lie empty62. Within the
narrators discussion with the Jarviss, the scorn that the lower members of
society are met with becomes evident: An unlearned person doesna ken what to
think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face63. Margaret
Oliphant provides a justification of Mrs. Jarviss observations on the
interconnecting function of the supernatural and the economic.
The latter half of the narration charts Mortimers gradual acceptance of
the ghost and the lower classes of society. In the beginning of the narrative
Oliphant depicted Mortimer as an insufferable and arrogant snob:
I thought I heard someone moaning among the tress, and clenched
my fist at him (whoever he might be) with fury. Why had the fool
of a woman at the gate allowed any one to come in to disturb the
quiet of the place? I should havegot out to see what tramp it was
that hadchosen my grounds -when my boy was ill! - to grumble
and groan in. 64
As the narration continues, however, we see how Mortimer is exorcized,
so to speak, of his narrow views towards the working classes by his
encounter with the ghostly spirit that haunts his estate and his family65.
As a consequence of this, the doorway begins to reform symbolically
because of Mortimers increased sympathy with the spirits continued

62

Margaret Oliphant, The Open Door, in Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers, ed. by
Richard Dalby, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), p. 162.
63 Ibid, p. 163.
64 Ibid.
65 Makala, p. 123.

ONeill 22
suffering and frustration at his own powerlessness to ease it66. It
transpires that the ghost is a long-dead child whose mother worked
under employment as a servant living at Brentwood House. When the
mother passed away, the boy was left outside to die, hence his lingering
cry: Oh, mother, let me in!67. As Makala asserts: this doorway between
the two worlds- not only of the living and the dead, but also between the
wealthy and the working classes- begins to open68 as Mortimer says, It
seemed to call up visibly a scene any one could understand- a something
shut out, restlessly wandering to and fro Oh, mother, let me in!- every
word was clear to me69. As Mortimer states: I did not know if it was
man or woman; but I no more doubted that it was a soul in pain than I
doubted my own being; and it was my business to soothe this pain- to
deliver it, if that was possible70. The very fact that the boys ghost is not
a visible apparition makes its symbolic representation of the working
classes all the more powerful. As the only character in the story who is
able to identify the voice of the ghost as belonging to the long-deceased
servant boy Willie, Simson identifies with the ghost as a member of the
working class himself: It was no ghost, as I fear we all vulgarly
considered it, to him (Simson)- but a poor creature whom he knew under
these conditions71. Colonel Mortimers views of the specter gradually
align with those of Simson: The spirit in pain, - if it was a spirit, - this

66

Ibid, p. 121.
Oliphant, The Open Door, p. 169.
68 Makala, p. 168.
69 Oliphant, The Open Door, p. 169.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid, p. 180.
67

ONeill 23
voice out of the unseen, - was a poor-fellow creature in misery, to be
succored and helped out of his trouble72. It is the sympathy that Colonel
Mortimer expresses here that ultimately saves his son Roland from an
untimely death. By the end of The Open Door, even though the door is
shut on the past and the ghost of the servant boy ceases to haunt the
ruined building, the door is at least partially open between the social
classes. Both father and son improve their opinions of those socially
beneath them because of their encounters with the ghost child and their
time spent within the servants quarters73.
Oliphants spectral child warns a Victorian readership about the dangers
of ignorance concerning the lower strata of society. Arguably the most prolific
nineteenth-century writer of the Victorian ghost story, Charles Dickens also used
ghostly children in his fiction to a similar effect. Oliphants article Charles
Dickens in the April 1855 Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine recognizes the issue
of social class in Dickenss writing74. Although it was not until more than a
century later that Dickenss fictional works were scrutinized for their social
commentary of Victorian Britain, Oliphant names Dickenss social criticism in her
article as the very reason for his fictions popularity within the nineteenthcentury. She writes of Dickens as one of the advocates in the plea of Poor versus
Richhe isperhaps more distinctively than any other author of the time a class
writer75. This article makes explicit the influence that Dickenss social

72

Ibid.
Makala, p. 123.
74 Richard J. Dunn, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Charles Dickens's David Copperfield,
(London: Routledge, 2004), p. 41.
75 Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, April 1855, p. 451.
73

ONeill 24
commentary must have inevitably had on Oliphants writing, and how the
criticism of Victorian society contained within his supernatural works especially
may have influenced her own. As Oliphant herself argued: Instead of standing
on one broad common ground as human creatures, brothers and sisters to each
other, we are allinhabitants of such and such a street, keeping so many
servants, and paying such a rent for our houses76. The following line, taken from
Oliphants The Open Door, seems to be an explicit reference to Dickenss most
famous ghost story of all: It seemed to be to him (Simson), that image of blank
ignorance and wonder, that we were praying77. The ignorance and wonder that
are mentioned in this extract seem inextricably linked to the spectral characters
of Ignorance and Wont in Dickenss 1843 ghost novel A Christmas Carol:
They are Mans, said the SpiritThe boy is Ignorance. The girl is
Wont. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all
beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
unless the writing be erasedHave they no refuge or resource?
cried Scrooge. Are there no prisons? said the Spirit, turning on
him for the last time with his own words. Are there no
workhouses?78.
Exemplified by Riddell, Oliphant and Dickens is the nineteenth-century ghost
story that has financial and social concerns at its core.

76

Ibid, p. 452.
Oliphant, The Open Door, p. 183.
78 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, (London: Vintage, 2009), pp. 77-78.
77

ONeill 25
Haunted Houses: Sex and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Ghost Stories

The final chapter in my dissertation concerns the ghost tales of Charlotte Riddell,
Margaret Oliphant and Mary Louisa Molesworth in an investigation into how
women writers of the nineteenth-century ghost story used their fiction to
question Victorian notions of gender and the females position within society.
Makala states within her text that: As authors, Riddell, Molesworth and Oliphant
inhabit the domestic house- a place traditionally seen as a womans realm- and
make it an important part of the Female Gothic tradition79. I argue that the motif
of the haunted house is one that is primarily utilized by these ghost-writers to
inject into their tales of the supernatural an implicit social criticism. As John H.
Ingram stated in the preface to his text The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions
of Great Britain (1884): Many historic tales of apparitions and supernaturally
disturbed dwellings are imbedded in British literature80. My argument here,
however, is that unlike their male contemporaries, women writers of the
Victorian ghost story did not use their fictional specters to drive out inhabitants
of their haunted households. Male written ghost stories, such as Algernon
Blackwoods The Empty House (1906), used malicious specters to frighten away
ghost-seers. Instead, women tend to focus more on reconciliation within their
haunted houses81. There is a desire within these tales to enter the haunted
house, as opposed to flee it.

79

Makala, p. 130.
John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain, (London: Allen and
Co., 1884), p. iii.
81 Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural,
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 8.
80

ONeill 26
In Mary Louisa Molesworths Lady Farquhars Old Lady (1888),
Margaret, or Lady Farquhar, tells the tale of her encounter at Balleyrina estate
with the ghost of Miss Fitzgerald. Margarets description of the ghost is far from
those of the terrifying specters of earlier Gothic fiction as she states: I cannot
now describe the features beyond saying that the whole face was refined and
pleasing, and that in the expression there was certainly nothing to alarm or
repel82. Through her characterisation of her specters as agreeable, Molesworth
risked boring many of her contemporaries who were used to the terrible
specters of Gothic fiction. One review of her collection Four Ghost Stories (1888)
in Literary World magazine went as far as to assert that Mrs. Molesworths ghosts
are of an unremarkable sort. They do nothing, say nothing, prove nothingin no
way serving to clear perplexities from the paths of the living or in any way to
instruct them83. I argue that although specters that feature within Oliphants
fiction are much less excessive than those of pervious decades, the ideas and
anxieties that they express through their resurrection are far from what her
contemporaries deemed unremarkable.
Lee Kovacs, in his work The Haunted Screen (1999), argues that: Haunter
and haunted live in different spheres; they cannot relate, they cannot connect84.
The deep connection between Margaret and the ghost in Molesworths tale
completely disproves Kovacss assertion; instead the bond that Margaret shares
with her ghost is stronger than the one that she shares with her family. Alive and
dead characters have much in common- both are female, both are unfamiliar to
82

Mary Louisa Molesworth, Lady Farquhars Old Lady, Four Ghost Stories, (London: Macmillan,
1888), p. 5.
83 Literary World, (26 May 1888), p. 170.
84 Lee Kovacs, The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film, (Jefferson: McFarland &
Company, 1999), p. 3.

ONeill 27
Balleyrina and are isolated from their families as a consequence of their
interactions. The friendship between woman and ghost is strengthened
throughout the narration as Margaret comes to think of the ghost as her Old
Lady85. The larger issues in the story, (and what apparently interests
Molesworth more as an author), are the similitudes between the two women that
go beyond their corporeal, class and national differences86. As feminist critic
Hilary Grimes asserts in her article The Haunted Self, the female characters in
Molesworths stories demonstrate, alongside a sense of fear of the ghosts that
appear within their pages, an affinity with them, a sympathy for the ghostly...The
ghosts they see are only reflections of themselves and their own frustrated
desires and ambitions87. The fact that Margaret cannot bring herself to speak to
the ghost represents unspoken plight within her own life. Through its presence,
she is actually seeing her own problems that she cannot articulate. Her
experience with the ghost allows her to express these anxieties to her friends
later in life88. Through the naming of the ghost as hers, Margaret ultimately
acknowledges that when speaking about her ghost, she is of course speaking
about her own tribulations. As Makala asserts: Molesworth creates a haunted
house that is uncomfortable because of the narrators own pre-existing feelings
of despairthat are made real by her interaction with the ghost of Miss
Fitzgerald, who can be thought of as another version of Margaret herself89.
Although I agree with Makala on this statement, it is her next assertion that I find

85

Molesworth, Lady Farquhars Old Lady, p. 2.

Makala, p. 115.
87 Hilary Grimes, The Haunted Self: Visions of the Ghost and the Woman at the Fin-de-Sicle,
Victorian Newsletter 107, (March 2005), p. 1.
88 Ibid.
89 Makala, p. 115.
86

ONeill 28
problematic: both women (one living, one dead) are assisted in finding their
own voices and speaking to each others loneliness90. I would argue instead
that it is the very silence between the women in the story that further heightens
Molesworths criticism of a society that gave little or no voice to women. All of
the female ghosts that are encountered within these texts are silent. This is
symbolic of the voicelessness that Victorian women felt within a society that was
very much dominated by the male voice. Molesworth, writing her first two
works of fiction under the pseudonym of Ennis Graham, was herself denied a
female voice while working under the guise of a male writer.
Molesworth characterizes even the living Miss Fitzgerald as ghostly
through her criticism of forced female emigration. The character of Mrs. Gordon
explains that after suffering financial ruin, Miss Fitzgerald and her sisters were
forced to sell their property: They were too proud to remain in their country
after this, and spent the rest of their lives on the Continent, wandering about
from place to place91. It is obvious from this elucidation that Miss Fitzgerald
would have obviously preferred to remain at Balleyrina. The desire to remain at
her home in Balleyrina is, as Vanessa Dickerson asserts, a notion that invites the
return of the repressed and demonstrates a more universal willingness of the
female to readmit that which the dominant culture officially casts out92. Makala
asserts that women writers of the nineteenth-century truly brought ghosts
home- in all senses of the phraseGhosts on British soilmade those specters
matter to the British reading public in a body of literature that reflected fears

90

Ibid.
Molesworth, Lady Farquhars Old Lady, p. 37.
92 Dickerson, p. 1.
91

ONeill 29
that were as real as they were supernatural93. The evidence of this argument
within the text is confirmed as Miss Fitzgerald regains entry to Britain after her
time in Europe.
Although the foreword to Lady Farquhars Old Lady- (A TRUE GHOST
STORY94) - implies that this story is in fact true, Molesworth seems to suggest
through the prelude that what is in fact true are the problems that the women
face within the tale that are representative of those that real Victorian women
encountered. Lady Farquhar states: my own opinion is that what you call true
ghost stories are very seldom told at all95. This again seems to be an implication
from the author that although the condition of women within Victorian society
was largely ignored, these problems must be acknowledged through the form of
the ghost story at least. As Clare Stewart claims in her article Fits of the
Horrors:
The ghost story proved an ideal discourse for hidden agendas and
deeper textual levels, as well as representing womens own
marginalization, like the supernatural, to the realm of the
irrational/Other. The more the subject is examined, the more it
seems that Victorian society, womens reading and writing, and the
ghost story are irrevocably intertwined96.

93

Makala, p. 21.
Molesworth, Lady Farquhars Old Lady, p. 1.
95 Ibid.
96 Clare Stewart, Weird Fascination: The Response to Victorian Womens Ghost Stories, in
Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities, ed. by Emma Liggins and
Daniel Duffy, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 114.
94

ONeill 30
Women writers such as Oliphant in her tale Old Lady Mary (1885), use their
silent spectral figures to embody the lack of opportunity to voice their own
opinions as a female within their society. The story centers around the dying
character of Lady Mary, the owner of a large estate who refuses to write a will.
After her sudden death, Lady Mary is full of remorse about not having left any of
her wealth to her young ward, Little Mary. Returning from the dead in spectral
form, the ghost of Lady Mary seeks to point out to Little Mary where she hid her
unofficial will in the house before she died, thus restoring Little Mary to a
position of financial security. Lady Marys frustration at not being able to
communicate with the living is made tangible within the narration: She called to
a neighbor who was passingand the two stood and talked in the dim air, not
conscious of the third who stood between them, looking from one to another,
astonished, paralyzed97. Another similarly frustrating obstacle that the ghost of
Lady Mary experiences is that she is unable to be seen by anyone but the child
character of Connie: but to be thus left outside of life, to speak and not be heard,
to stand unseen, astounded, unable to secure any attention!98. The invisibility
that the ghost of Lady Mary experiences yet again is reflective of a similar
experience of the Victorian woman. Dickerson asserts that Lady Mary serves as a
lens through which to view the economic invisibility of women during the
period: (Oliphant) wishes the reader to sympathize with this invisibility,
voicelessness, and helplessness that may well have constituted a significant part

97

Margaret Oliphant, Old Lady Mary: A Story of the Seen and the Unseen, in Margaret Oliphant:
Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural, ed. by Margaret K. Gray, (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press, 1985), p. 76.
98 Ibid.

ONeill 31
of the experience of many Victorian women who were less literally angels in the
house99.
Dickersons mention of angels in the house in the previous quotation
engages directly with Coventry Patmores 1845-1862 poem The Angel in the
House, which sought to promote sexual purity, a strong sense of Christian
morality, and unrelenting duty to the family and the home as the prize virtues of
the ideal Victorian woman. Women writers of the Victorian haunted house ghost
story complicate these notions by haunting the very realm of femininity that the
Victorian home was supposed to embody. As feminist critic Anne Hogan states in
the introduction to Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in
the House (1998): Womens appropriate sphere of influence was seen as
domestic, and with this a clear line was drawn between the female values
expressed in the well-run Victorian Christian middle-class home and the male
public values of a fast-expanding capitalist economy100.
The emergence of the intersection of the domestic and the Victorian
Gothic is documented by Michael Cox in his introduction to The Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories (1992), where he states that: Where the Gothic tale of
terror had been indulgently heroic and ostentatiously fictitious, the Victorian
ghost story was typically domestic in tone and inclined to blur the boundaries
between fact and fiction101. Indeed, within Old Lady Mary there is a desire on
the part of the author to firstly situate the woman within the domestic realm of
the home but to then complicate this stereotype. In earlier Female Gothic plots,
99

Dickerson, p. 129.
Anne Hogan, Introduction, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the
House, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. 1.
101 Cox, p. x.
100

ONeill 32
the pursued and persecuted heroine seeks to escape the stifling confines of the
patriarchal house. The characters in nineteenth-century ghost stories written by
women, however, do not want to escape their homes. Instead, they want to reenter them, want to regain the houses and property, (and thereby identity), that
have been denied through the socio-economic mismanagement, (symbolized
through the hauntings), that drives them out of these dwellings102. This idea is
made explicit by Oliphant in Old Lady Mary through her ghosts literal desire to
reenter her property: Presently she found herself entering her own house. It
was all shut and silent- not a window lighted along the whole front of the house
which used to twinkle and glitter with lights103. The peacefulness of the
narration is interrupted, however, by Lady Marys frustration at being barred
entry to other domestic spaces:
She felt an impulse to fly wildly into the dark, into the night, like a
lost creature; to find again somehow, she could not tell how, the
door out of which she had come, and beat upon it wildly with her
hands, and implore to be taken home104.
Women writers complicate popular Victorian fantasies of the home as the centre
of peace and domestic bliss. Instead, they furnish their Gothic houses with
issues that question this Victorian ideal. In so doing, they replace the angel in
the house with the ghost in the house, a far less stable and comforting presence
which haunts rather than reassures the inner workings of the Victorian

102

Makala, pp. 130-131.

Oliphant, Old Lady Mary, p. 87.
104 Ibid, p. 93.
103

ONeill 33
household105. Lady Mary is forced to fulfill her repressing role as an angel in the
house by disappearing into the woodwork to watch over the household106, but
at the same time complicates this role through her haunting presence within the
house.
The desire to enter into the domestic space in an act of female
empowerment is also expressed by another character within Old Lady MaryLittle Mary. It is written that she wanted to go there unseen, to look up at the
windows with their alien lights, and to think of a time when Lady Mary sat
behind the curtains107. Little Mary becomes another ghostly figure in the text as
her name explicitly links her to the ghost of her forbearer and she takes on her
own haunting of the household. As women in the Victorian period underwent a
transition from outdoors to indoors, so too did the ghosts in Female Gothic
Victorian literature. Little Mary becomes a ghost in her fictional world as she
undergoes financial ruin and is pushed to the margins of society. As Diana
Wallace argues, The Female Gothic is perhaps par excellence the mode within
which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about
womens powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy108. In giving their
audiences something entertaining to read, while at the same time examining the
personal and public issues that affected their characters, the authors found a
workable vehicle for advancing social issues109. The ghosting of women within
Victorian society was reflected in the ghost stories written by women at the time.
105

Makala, p. 131.
Dickerson, p. 4.
107 Oliphant, Old Lady Mary, p. 101.
108 Diana Wallace, Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic, in The Female Gothic: New
Directions, ed. by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p.
57.
109 Makala, p. 130.
106

ONeill 34
The fact that Old Lady Mary is narrated from the viewpoint of Lady Mary makes
this tale one of the few to be narrated by a ghost, giving the reader a rare insight
into not only Lady Marys troubled experiences but also those of the real
Victorian women she comes to represent.
Dissimilar to the previous two stories in terms of the characterization of
the female specter is Charlotte Riddells The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (1882).
The story describes the tale of Graham Coulton, a young man who, after falling
out with his wealthy father, is left both penniless and homeless. Coulton finds
shelter after his old friend William allows him to stay in his unrented property.
On discovering how cheap the rent of the house is Coulton is confused as to why
William and his family do not want to live in the house. The reason becomes
apparent as a female ghost soon disrupts Coultons respite. This story, set in
what appears to be Victorian London, can be seen as belonging to what Robert
Mighall termed the Domestic or Suburban Gothic that centered its storylines
not in ruined abbeys or castles but instead in cityscapes110. Fred Botting, who
comments on the change in setting that the Gothic genre underwent in this
period, states: its depths were less romantic chasmsthan the murky recesses of
human subjectivity. The citybecame a site of nocturnal corruption and
violence; the family became a place rendered111.
The ghost in this story, Miss Tynan, is very unlike the ghosts we have
previously come across in this chapter. Her description in the text by Coulton is
as followed:

110

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic: Mapping Historys Nightmares, (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 92.
111 Fred Botting, Gothic, (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.

ONeill 35
An old, wrinkled hag, her clothes poor and ragged, a mob cap
barely covering her scant white hair, her cheeks sunken, her
nose hooked, her fingers more like talons than aught else as
they dived down into the heap of gold, portions of which they
lifted but to scatter mournfully112.
In her physical appearance this ghost defies Victorian conventions of femininity
that are tied to physical beauty. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, authors of The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979), identify the trend of nonconformist women in
nineteenth-century supernatural fiction. Gilbert and Gubar assert that women
writers constantly reproduced images of the monstrous, transgressive woman
throughout the period- in figures such as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847) and
Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights (1847)- as a means of both appearing
to confirm to patriarchal values and simultaneously rebelling against them, by
identifying with these apparently mad women113. Through Riddells
characterization of her specter in The Old House as possessing talons, the
female in this story is once again relegated to the sub-human; the animalistic.
Julian E. Fleenor also picks up on this trend: the Gothic andfemale experiences
have a common schizophrenia, in that the form and the women both want to
undermine patriarchal violence towards women and yet also endorse the
patriarchal system which holds women in a place of subordination114. While the
ghost of Miss Tynan functions as a vehicle through which Coulton may learn
valuable lessons concerning his society, she is a character that is never herself
112

Charlotte Riddell, The Old House in Vauxhall Walk, in The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H.
Riddell, ed. by E. F. Bleiler, (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 92.
113 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, (New York: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 213.
114 Juliann E. Fleenor, Introduction: The Female Gothic, in The Female Gothic, ed. by Juliann E.
Fleenor, (London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 5.

ONeill 36
redeemed. Andrew Smith labels Miss Tynan a female version of Scrooge115, yet
she is denied the redemption that Dickens offers his miser. Although the ending
seems to conform to notions of the Victorian patriarchy, through her
denouement Riddell only seeks to heighten further the plight of women as the
gender implications of this suggest that the woman is lost, or denied, at the
exposure of male entry in the public sphere116. Gilbert and Gubar assert that the
monstrosity of the uncontrolled woman may be finally exorcised by the end of
the text (thus apparently making safe patriarchal bourgeois value-systems), but
by this stage the transgressive nature of the monster has radically destabilized
traditional, patriarchally controlled spaces117. The conservative ending of the
tale, therefore, is undermined and Riddell succeeds in subtly furthering
heightened awareness of the plight of the Victorian woman within her ghost
fiction.
The very existence of ghosts in texts such as these questions the
ownership of the properties themselves. Miss Tynan successfully succeeds in
driving out Williams middle-class family. He states: it was my wife's fancy not to
like it118'. Miss Tynan fulfills Dickersons characterization of the transgressive
female119 as an anti-nurturing spinster who is more interested in money in place
of family. The desire for money has transformed the demure angel into a fury
that the male can barely control120. As Sharon Marcus argues, women writers of

115

Andrew Smith, Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism, Empire and the
Gothic: The Politics of Genre, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2003), p. 7.
116 Makala, p. 75.
117 Gilbert and Gubar, p. 174.
118 Riddell, The Old House in Vauxhall Walk, p. 87.
119 Dickerson, p. 139.
120 Ibid.

ONeill 37
the nineteenth-century ghost story depicted homes that were uncomfortable,
riddled with noise and dirt; and they set in motion ghosts who attacked the
middle-class homes status as an insular, individuating single-family
structure121. Ghosts such as Miss Tynan come to replace the nuclear family in
these texts, themselves becoming what Marcus calls the urban definition of the
domestic ideal122.

121

Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 122.
122 Ibid.

ONeill 38
Conclusion
As I stated in my introduction, the main reason for my research into womens
ghost fiction of the nineteenth-century was to contend the widely accepted
notion among critics that women were purely invested in the Victorian ghost
story as a means of gaining financial security. Many of these authors entered
into the realm of the ghost story with no promise of monetary gain. These
women were able to not only conjure specters within their fiction for the reading
public, but also to see them within their society.
As a form, the short ghost story gave these women a way to connect with
the past in a period within which society was facing great uncertainty- to
converse from one world with another. The short story in particular seemed to
be the most functional form for these women to criticise society as the stories
were generally less scrutinised than their longer fiction counterparts in terms of
social critique. This meant that women were able to both produce titillating tales
for a Victorian readership as well as simultaneously criticising the society that
both author and reader were a part of. Gaskell, though well known for her realist
novels such as North and South (1855) that dealt with themes of social class and
anxieties concerning the rapidly increasing industrialism within Victorian
Britain, was able to use her ghost stories to explore themes of errant sexuality.
Many of these women writers were able to explore different themes from those
that featured within their longer fictions through the use of the Female Gothic
genre. Molesworths childrens fiction was well received before her endeavors in
the Victorian ghost story and was able to, like Gaskell, explore the themes of
gender that were much less scrutinised within her girls fiction. The ghost fiction

ONeill 39
of this age also prefigured the future of Female Gothic. Through her blurring of
gender boundaries and focus on the body, Lee anticipated the Modernist and
Aesthetic movements. In this way, women were able to transcend the Gothic
genre to criticise Victorian ideologies surrounding sexuality, same sex-desire,
social mobility and gender within their society. These issues were what I
discovered to feature most prominently within womens ghost fiction of the
nineteenth-century. Another avenue of criticism that I did not explore in my
dissertation although I came across the idea frequently in my research into
Victorian ghost stories written by women was their criticism of British Empire
and colonialism. Although my research centers on issues raised by women
writers solely within Britain, it became obvious through my studies that women
took issue with anxieties that also concerned Victorian women oversees.
I feel that this is an area of literature that has yet to be explored as
expansively as I feel it should be, given that these tales, although not always
positively received by contemporaries, are vital in their complex criticisms of
Victorian ideologies surrounding sexual repression, financial anxiety and gender.
Although widely available to most as a consequence of the mass-circulated
magazines and collections that featured many of these stories within the era of
their publication, womens Victorian ghost stories are, unfortunately, much less
accessible to the modern reader. Defining collections of womens ghost stories
such as those edited by E. F. Bleiler and Richard Dalby, (both of which I have
referred to as part of my research), have been out of print for years. As a
consequence, sparse critical attention has been paid to this area. What I have
learnt, however, is that a slow revival in womens nineteenth-century ghost

ONeill 40
literature seems to be underway with the publication of such texts as Roger
Lockhurts Late Victorian Gothic Tales (2005) and Michael A. Coxs Oxford Book of
Victorian Ghost Stories that, although do not centre solely on the ghost fiction of
women, do recognise the validity of the works by women as a means of gaining a
greater understanding of the period and its literature. With increased
accessibility to womens nineteenth-century ghost fiction comes the promise of
further studies and appraisal of the genres place within the larger Gothic
tradition and the importance of womens voices within that tradition. An area of
research that I think would be productive alongside an exploration of womens
ghost literature in the nineteenth-century is one that centers on the way that
women were inherently linked to the supernatural. Through the act of
menstruation, childbirth and lactation, the female sex has always been viewed as
Other, or more closely linked to the supernatural than their male counterparts.
Research into this area could, I feel, produce another valid argument as to why
women were so drawn to the ghost story in the nineteenth-century.

ONeill 41
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ONeill 42
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