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Victorian & Victorianesque Ghost Stories

The Yellow Wallpaper

Feminist? Yes.
EARLY feminist? Ahem!
Just off to pedants' corner, me...
 
Re: The Yellow Wallpaper

Jaybee said:
Feminist? Yes.
EARLY feminist? Ahem!
Just off to pedants' corner, me...
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Er, before you go.

Unless I'm missing something really obvious or just being thick I'd say 1892 was pretty early for a piece of self-consciously feminist literature.
 
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) ?

Feminism aside, whether conscious or not, it seems obvious that a stereotypical Victorian-type ghost story requires the following ingredients:-

a) most importantly a victim - preferably vulnerable - possibly a child or young woman - highly imaginative and/or suggestible,

b) a motive for scaring that person - and the reader!

c) a suitably creepy setting,

d) not necessarily a happy ending,

e) an element of cruelty.

Has anyone also read/seen late-Victorian Gothic plays? They are like Grimms' fairy tales for adults - very moral, in that the baddies are always hideously punished, but definitely not for the faint-hearted!

Heather.
 
DanHigginbottom said:
Ah...MR James once more. If I may bore everyone who's heard me say this a hundred times, Oh whistle and I'll come to you, my lad remains the greatest ghost story ever.
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Got to agree with you there, Dan! And the excellent B&W film version starring Michael Hordern.

Carole
 
Jaybee said:
Mary Wollstonecraft?
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Aphra Behn (1640-89)?

Okay yeah - hoist by my own petard. Can’t complain - I’m a bit of a pedant myself when it suits me.

I was kind of using “early” as a relative term - as in early in the surge of late nineteenth and twentieth century political and intellectual feminism that successfully campaigned for womens suffrage and experienced its zenith in the 1960’s and 70’s with the likes of Greer and Friedan.

Back on thread - Seems there are many M R James fans around. I’ve probably mentioned this somewhere else but there is a magazine devoted to him that has a website here.

Incidentally I recently re-read Charles Palliser's novel The Unburied. Although it's not a ghost-story the atmosphere is distinctly, possibly intentionally, Jamesian. I suspect anyone who likes M R James would enjoy this novel.
 
Innocents

ARGH! I saw part of the Innocents on AMC and I want to see the whole thing, but it's only available on VHS! I'm not spending $15 for a movie I have to rewind!

Anyone else made it all the way through Melmoth the Wanderer? Some parts were tough going, but all in all I thought it was really good. Incredibly horrific.

Am currently reading a collection of Algernon Blackwood, whom I've never read before.
 
George Eliot's short story "The Lifted Veil" is a good Victorian supernatural story. If you like James check out Le Fanu - Green Tea is excellent.

For stories with a more modern feel, have a look at "The Picador Book of the New Gothic", edited by 2 people, one of whom is Patrick McGrath. It's actually not all that "grand guignol" gothic and contains a McGrath story called "The Smell" which is more Poe than Poe. Also has some Peter Straub in it.

Finally, McGrath's novel "Martha Peake" again is set in a very post-Gothic/Enlightenment environment, but contains many extremely Victorian devices . . . the frame of the story, in a Turn of the Screw style, is phenomenal. It really is a book that can't decide whether or not it's a story about revolution, or a story about this tale being told in a desolate manor on a horrid moor . . .
 
hg wells wrote the story called "the mirror"(?)

iirc. the story about this bloke who has to stay at this rundown farm house over several nights(?) and in his room, he notices some spots on the mirror, which he then dismantles, to find nothing (?). lots weird things happen, like a giant sow laying across the bed while he in it, he talks to a father and son. he leaves gets home and over the next nights, he notices the same spots on his mirror

would this story count as a victorian(esque) ghost story?

i also prefer the pyschological stories (just like the early b&w "horror/terror films") much better that splatt stories
 
reading fast as heading off.... apologies if this is already posted:

yellow wallpaper on line

link

Kath:)


stu edit - big link fixed
 
Innocents Found

Yay! I finally was able to tape the Innocents off AMC. Haven't watched it all yet, but it's great so far.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Anyone read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Very creepy indeed. When I was at university it was held up as a work of feminist fiction - which it probably is. First and foremost though it's a bloody good "spook story" as EF Benson would say.
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I was just reading about this on Wikipedia, because it was mentioned by somebody was one of the great horror novels of the period. I thought this aspect of the article was interesting:
As with many works of fiction, "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be and has been subject to several interpretations and interpretive methods.

The story has been interpretated by feminist critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of 19th century medical profession. The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, that she should engage with society instead of remaining isolated, that she should attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as an irrational being and, therefore, not qualified to offer ideas about her own condition. Gilman indicated that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient. Other feminist readings have pointed out the inequality of the marriage described in the story.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness. It has also been published in collections of horror fiction, which has led some to speculate that the women in the wallpaper were actually ghosts bent on driving the narrator insane, and not hallucinations. The strong feminist statements in the work itself, as well as those of the author, do not lend support to this interpretation.
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I find it interesting that according to this it can't both be a strong feminist work AND a ghost story.

And this is the IMDB to a current film version of the film, which looks kinda cool:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790788/

Official Site
 
The Yellow Wallpaper is super and I thought was fully recognized as a feminist piece of work - wasn't Gilman very active in that realm? And didn't she actually go through something like the cure in the book (and subsequently ccorresponded with the doctor who pioneered it)? I never thought of it as a ghost story though, just a very effective work of terror.

Whoever it was ages ago who mentioned EF Benson was spot on, one of his stories was, I think, The Room in the Tower, which still gives me the willies. MR James is great at spooky stories, as are Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, and The Monkey's Paw really can't be bettered for a full-on crap-your-pants, careful-what-you-wish-for ghost story.
 
I downloaded some readings of old ghost stories to listen to on my 'pod at the gym. :D
 
This might spark a number of purchases.

From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel. This lecture pursues the gift of Gothic to later novelists, seeing how great Victorian novelists like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were entranced by the supernatural. Finally, it looks at how the possibility of supernatural explanation energises contemporary novelists like Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters.

A lecture by John Mullan.

Edit: The comparison of Ann Radcliffe with Scooby Doo is... original!

 
Ghost Stories

If we're going to narrowly limit the field to 'ghost stories proper', my predictable favourite is probably one of the obvious ones by M R James or Algernon Blackwood—both masters of the form.

Another strong contender is 'The Signalman' by Charles Dickens, but we've all read/seen that.

One that particularly grabbed me when I read it for the first time (on a cold and snowy day) is 'The Phantom Coach' by Amelia B Edward:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605591h.html

One whose images I found genuinely chilling (I generally 'enjoy' the romance of ghost tales; they don't frighten me) is 'Et in Sempiternum Pereant' by Charles Williams:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800821h.html
 
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