American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age

D. Downey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137323989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.

1

‘Fitted to a Frame’: Picturing the Gothic Female Body

When the narrator of Edith Wharton’s ‘Miss Mary Pask’ (1925) goes to visit the eponymous spinster, an old friend, at her cottage in France, he is horrified to find himself confronted with what appears to be her specter. As he gradually recalls having read of her death several months previously, he remarks that ‘what had shocked me was that the change was so slight – that between being dead and alive there seemed after all to be so little difference’.¹ It transpires that the reports of her demise had been greatly exaggerated – although not before the narrator temporarily loses his sanity as a result of the encounter, during which she describes her ‘death’ (a cataleptic trance) and her grave to him, while wheedling him to join her there forever in her cold embrace. Nonetheless, the body of the story, and Miss Pask’s own depiction of herself as a ghost, strongly implies that an attempted seduction by the living woman would not have been or any less disturbing than by the dead one. The story therefore echoes Emily Dickinson’s poem 510 (c. 1862), which begins, ‘It was not Death, for I stood up. / And all the Dead, lie down – ’. Despite this initially confident assertion, the poetic voice nonetheless adds, ‘The Figures I have seen / Set orderly, for Burial, / Reminded me, of mine – ’. What prompts her to make this comparison is her awareness that her ‘Marble feet / Could keep a Chancel, cool – ’, in other words, that her body is no longer flesh and blood, but instead frozen, hard and unchanging. This implication is confirmed when the speaker observes that the situation feels ‘As if my life were shaven, / And fitted to a frame’, the poem as a whole asserting a disturbing contiguity between her supposedly living self and the appearance of a dead body.²

The common element between Wharton’s and Dickinson’s texts – the eerie proximity and resemblance between living and dead women – is taken up and dramatized by a startling number of ghost stories and gothic tales by American women writers in the intervening decades, and most noticeably around the very end of the nineteenth century in the period often known as the ‘Gilded Age’. In particular, these stories literalize the idea of being ‘fitted to a frame’, revolving around portraits, statues and photographs of women which prove dangerous to living women. Drawing on an American evangelical tradition in which the body and the material world are depicted as inherently sinful, placing the soul in peril by distracting it from the higher spiritual planes with the temptations of the flesh and of pecuniary desire, these stories center obsessively around women who marry artists, whose dead, often cruel and heartless, first wives were themselves transformed into portraits or statues. These beautiful, seductive images are repeatedly structured as morally suspect; and, like Dickinson’s poetic persona, who perceives that she has become one more of the ‘Figures [ ... ] / Set orderly for burial’, are frightening precisely because they suggest that the living woman could become all too easily another copy of the evil, painted, dead women whose portraits loom over her.

Perhaps the most straightforward example of this trope is Edna Worthley Underwood’s story ‘The Painter of Dead Women’ (1910), which begins as the narrator’s new Italian husband remarks on the number of young, beautiful, wealthy women who have gone missing in Naples over the last twenty-five years, before urging her to ‘“look particularly lovely”’ for his friends at a ball that evening. On the way to the ball, she is concerned that the driver has missed the way, and the mansion at which he drops her is deserted, horribly silent yet lit with a dazzling luminescence that leaves her cold with terror, a space that she feels is more like ‘a white and shining sepulchre’ than a place for a party.³ As her apprehension grows and she turns to flee, however, the door disappears, and she finds herself trapped, exposed to the ‘demoniac power of light’, which ‘sent from polished corners and cornice quivering arrows into my eyes.’ She soon becomes aware that ‘A powerful and dominant brain had touched my own. For one unconscious moment it had ruled it and set upon it the seal of its thought.’⁴ Seeing an elderly but regal man approach, she realizes that he is attempting to subdue her mind with a force that ‘crippled my will and dulled me as does that sweet-smelling death which surgeons call the anæsthetic.’ His gaze is emotionless and ‘impersonal’, and she somehow understands that ‘No mark of material beauty had escaped it. It was the trained glance of a connoisseur which measures accurately. I might have been a picture or a piece of furniture.’ Feeling that he can see right through her very flesh, she continues, ‘Somehow, then, I felt that the body of me belonged to him because of this masterly penetration which substance could not resist.’⁵

In other words, the very gaze of the artist (who blurs uncomfortably with her suspiciously absent, equally image-conscious husband) here transforms the living woman into a thing, an immobile and defenseless object of his will. Admiring the narrator immensely, he tells her that he wishes to add her to his ‘collection’, but assures her that she need fear no sexual impropriety from him, since ‘‘‘I love only dead women. Life reaches its perfection only when death comes. Life is never real until then’’’.⁶ Calling it ‘sacred’, he tells her, in a distorted echo of Edgar Allan Poe, that Death ‘‘‘is the thing to be most desired by beautiful women’’’, because it saves them from old age and decay, freezing them forever at the moment of perfection – begging her, therefore, to allow him to kill her, so that he can preserve her as a ‘‘‘triumphant [ ... ] object of admiration”’.⁷ Chilling as his assertions are, he has a point: in an economy in which a woman’s looks are her future, no woman can afford old age, as evidenced by the many abandoned and dead wives in these stories. As an antidote to the social death of aging, he has replicated an ancient poison that causes a pleasurable, apparently painless death, while permanently arresting all signs of physical decomposition. Once she is injected with it, he tells the narrator:

‘your body will attain the hardness of a diamond and the whiteness of fine marble. But it is months, years, before the brain dies. I am not really sure it ever dies. In it, like the iridescent reflections upon a soap bubble, live the shadows of past pleasures. There is no other immortality that can equal this I offer. Every day that you live now lessens your beauty. In a way every day is a vulgar death. It coarsens and over-colors your skin, dulls the gold in your hair, makes this bodily line, or this, a bit too full [ ... ].’⁸

Showing her the other women to whom he has done this, including some surrounded by frozen peacocks and tigers, ‘dancing’ or reclining in various attitudes, he enthuses that as models they are ideal, allowing him to paint them for hours, and he casually mentions that some of them can still hear everything going on around them. His explanations of the effects he has sought to create with particular colorings of hair and skin are especially unsettling, testifying as they do to the extent to which the aesthetic impulse has usurped his ability to see these women as living, thinking individuals. Gleefully, however, the narrator outwits him before things can go too far, locking herself into a room as he leaves to get the poison, jumping out the window, and swimming off across the lake below, to be rescued by fishermen and reunited with her husband.

The story is clearly influenced by Robert W. Chambers’ ‘The Mask’ (1895), which centers around a sculptor named Boris who has discovered a poison with identical freezing qualities, and which he uses to preserve small flora and fauna, but into which Boris’s model, Geneviève, eventually throws herself as a result of a love triangle with his best friend, Alec (the first-person narrator). The artist’s model is therefore transformed into a statue herself, and, we are told, ‘“Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that never would have been except for her,”’ the statue and what should be her living model mirroring one another perfectly.⁹ As in Underwood’s story, it ends happily, with Geneviève reviving, but it is in many ways the more optimistic of the two, since Underwood’s villain lives to continue his diabolical art project with other, less resourceful women. And indeed, very few of the other fictional women who encounter male artists eager to produce precise copies of the female form are so fortunate.

The most famous instance of this attitude regarding women’s bodies is of course Poe’s assertion (alluded to above) that ‘the death [ ... ] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.¹⁰ As he outlined in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), the statement implies that a dead woman, removed from the world of human action and transience, is more available to the mind of a poet or artist for reinterpretation than a living one. The dead woman, reduced to an idealized memory, is little more than an object of contemplation, offering no obstruction to the artist’s attempt to transform her into a decorative, stylized aesthetic construction. This operation is made especially explicit in his short story ‘Berenice’ (1835), in which the narrator feels rather indifferent to his cousin ‘During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty’, but becomes increasingly obsessed by her as disease wastes her mortal frame to a mere shadow of its former blooming loveliness. As she disappears physically, she appears more and more to his mind’s eye, ‘not as a being of the earth – earthly – but as the abstraction of such a being – not as a thing to admire, but to analyse – not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.’ Even as he ‘shudder[s] in her presence, and [grows] pale at her approach’, he finds himself proposing marriage, and it is only when she finally seems to die, just before the anticipated wedding, that he initiates physical contact.¹¹ Somewhat predictably, this encounter takes the form of violence rather than affection; in a cataleptic trance, he gouges the teeth (with which he has become morbidly fascinated) from her yet-breathing mouth, killing her at the very moment that she has become most artistically and intellectually interesting to him.

The more disembodied she becomes, the more the narrator succeeds in subordinating her to his own abstract notions, as death permits her mortal frame to function as a passive vehicle for his imagination. By no means unique to Poe, the male artist’s reduction of a living woman to a frozen, depersonalized objet d’art is paralleled by the discourses pervading American visual and material culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the aestheticized female figure became the pressure point for tensions surrounding issues of superficiality, factitiousness, and moral depth.

Policing the feminine surface

As the century drew to a close, the spirit of reform in American culture, particularly in the arena of women’s rights and women’s suffrage, converged with a series of economic crises and a concomitant drive on the part of manufacturers and advertisers to bolster consumption. The new commodity culture, and the explosion of colorful, seductive imagery harnessed to drive it, ‘celebrated metamorphosis, the violation of boundaries, and the blurring of lines between hitherto opposed categories – luxury and necessity, artificial and natural, night and day, male and female, the expression of desire and its repression, the primitive and the civilized.’¹² Exuberant as this culture was, it existed in tension with the long-standing association in American Protestant culture of worldly desires with self-indulgence and spiritual barrenness.¹³ The result of this clash of ideas was ‘a thinly veiled social hysteria, channeled into evangelical crusades and pulpit jeremiads against wealth, warning that the nation was recapitulating the familiar historical cycle’; America, many believed, was becoming infected with the material and sensual decadence that destroyed the Roman Empire.¹⁴ Specifically, the exponential growth of commodity culture made what were once luxuries more readily and cheaply available to a broader swath of the population, to the point where clothing and domestic interior decoration ceased to function as reliable markers of class or ‘respectability’. American culture therefore sought to control and order the visual and the imaginative, by assigning specific meanings to specific images, in an attempt to reduce the chaos of multiple semantic possibilities that could all too easily lead to a parallel social chaos.

Protestant squeamishness regarding the visual, the material and the physical gained added impetus with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, an explosion in social mobility that resulted in profound societal upheaval.¹⁵ The privileging of the moral over the physical, and of the internal over the external, is part of a nexus of long-standing, particularly religious, assumptions in Western culture about the transience of the flesh and the material trappings of this world, which the Christian individual must readily cast off in favor of the eternal pleasures of heaven. Taking the form of Puritan sumptuary laws, which regulated the form and decoration of individuals’ clothing, in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Flesh and the Spirit’ (1678), for example, the Soul resists the Flesh’s offers of gold and jewels, asserting,

Thy flatt’ring shews I’ll trust no more.

How oft thy slave hast thou me made

When I believ’d what thou hast said

And never had more cause of woe

Than when I did what thou bad’st do.

I’ll stop mine ears at these thy charms

And count them for my deadly harms.

Thy sinful pleasures I do hate,

Thy riches are to me no bait.

Thine honours do, nor will I love,

For my ambition lies above.¹⁶

This emotionally freighted language, in which a triumph over worldly and physical desire determines the fate of one’s immortal soul, collapses the body and the external world together, relegating everything but the interior of one’s soul to the pits of hell. This idea was extended in Edward Taylor’s ‘A Fig for Thee, O Death’, in which the poetic voice tells Death that, while his soul will escape mortality’s grasp,

My Body, my vile harlot, it’s thy Mess,

Labouring to drown me into Sin’s disguise

By Eating and by drinking such evil joys

Though Grace preserved me that I ne’re have

Surprisèd been nor tumbled in such grave.¹⁷

Taylor’s poem here feminizes the body, which, as in Bradstreet’s, is associated with satanic temptation, with the spiritual death that yielding to such temptation guarantees, and with the ‘disguise’ fabricated by Satan, the Father of Lies. The physical and the external are here reduced to illusions, false surfaces that are not merely deceitful but actively dangerous – and, vitally, associated with femininity. From the eighteenth century onward, however, the sheer number and range of commodities to which an ever-increasing proportion of the population had access both undermined and gave added impetus to the doctrine of unworldliness and incorporeality. Wealth, and the outward appearance of respectability that wealth could procure, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Fitted to a Frame: Picturing the Gothic Female Body
• 2  Handled with a Chain: Gilmans The Yellow Wall-Paper and the Dangers of the Arabesque
• 3  Dancing Like a Bomb Abroad: Dawsons An Itinerant House and the Haunting Cityscape
• 4  Solemnest of Industries: Wilkins The Southwest Chamber and Memorial Culture
• 5  Space Stares All Around: Peatties The House That Was Not and the (Un)Haunted Landscape
• 6  My Labor and My Leisure Too: Wynnes The Little Room and Commodity Culture
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index