Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture 9781496815569, 9781496815576, 9781496815583, 9781496815590, 9781496815606

Table of contents :
Cover
Subversive Spirits
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit
CHAPTER TWO The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in England: The Woman in Black
CHAPTER THREE The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in the Americas: La Llorona
CHAPTER FOUR The Female Ghost and Feminist History: The Woman Warrior and Beloved
CHAPTER FIVE The Untold Story: The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace and Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol
CHAPTER SIX Being Human: The Female Ghost in Contemporary British and American Television
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Subversive Spirits

Subversive Spirits The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture

ROBIN ROBERTS University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2018 by Robin Roberts All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2018 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Cloth 978-1-4968-1556-9 Epub Single 978-1-4968-1557-6 Epub Institutional 978-1-4968-1558-3 PDF Single 978-1-4968-1559-0 PDF Institutional 978-1-4968-1560-6 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To my sisters—Gayle, Linda, and Kimberly Roberts —in gratitude for all their love and support

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

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Chapter one

The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit 18 Chapter two

The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in England: The Woman in Black 41 Chapter three

The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in the Americas: La Llorona 63 Chapter Four

The Female Ghost and Feminist History: The Woman Warrior and Beloved 87 Chapter Five

The Untold Story: The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace and Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol 110 Chapter six

Being Human: The Female Ghost in Contemporary British and American Television 132 Conclusion 160 Works Cited 164 Index

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a C k now l e d g m e n t s I am immensely grateful to Craig Gill from the University Press of Mississippi and the two anonymous reviewers for their belief in the importance of the female ghost and their suggestions on how to improve this book. The work that the copyeditor, Camille Hale, and the indexer, Kate Jacobson Dutro, did to make the manuscript better and accessible is much appreciated. My LSU colleagues Angeletta Gourdine and Carolyn Ware read many drafts patiently and provided excellent suggestions. Angeletta Gourdine’s perceptive essay on Beloved was very helpful for my analysis. Frank de Caro’s and Rosan Jordan’s work provides excellent models of scholarship, especially Rosan’s essay on La Llorona and Frank’s book, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. June Pulliam’s significant work on the supernatural has been an inspiration, particularly her chapter on ghosts in Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Fiction. My University of Arkansas colleagues Susan Marren and Yajaira Padilla helped me with the introduction. I am grateful for Yajaira Padilla’s suggestion to look at the story of La Llorona discussed in chapter 3. This book would not have been conceived without the many LSU in London summer programs I co-directed, where we always went to see The Woman in Black. For this experience, I am grateful to Les Wade and LSU. Students in two classes on the female ghost at the University of Arkansas provided inspiration and confirmation that the female ghost was a figure worth pursuing. I am grateful to the University of Arkansas English Department for providing financial support for this book through its Ray Lewis White Memorial Endowment. Dylan Wade correctly told me I needed to include the two Being Human series. Finally, I want to thank my family members, especially Les Wade, for love, support, and encouragement as I worked on this book. A portion of chapter 2 appeared as “‘The Untold Story’: The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace,” in the European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (February 2015): 35–51. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Studies in Theatre and Performance 34, no. 2 (August 2014): 126–39. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of these essays for their insightful comments, which helped me complete this book. ix

Subversive Spirits

introduCtion The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, wizards, and other fantastical creatures have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. The Untold Story brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. The female spirit is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. As Andi Zeisler notes, “The female ghost is an enduringly fascinating figure, and her presence in both history and pop culture holds a wealth of perception and stereotype in its clammy hands . . . [F]emale ghosts have what seems like a particular power to haunt our pop-culture memories” (2). While the phantoms discussed in this book differ from each other in the particular settings in which they disrupt patriarchal narratives, they share a similar function of exposure and cultural critique. Privileged with insights due to their shadowy, ambiguous position between life and death, female ghosts provide warnings not just to the other living characters in their narratives, but also to their readers and viewers. For every wraith, the difficulty of deciding how and where to speak and be heard is paramount. Sometimes literally voiceless, the female ghost reflects a struggle for women to be narrators and authors of their own lives (and deaths). Even the ghosts who serve as guides to heritage sites tell the stories of others, with their own narratives unknown or subordinate to a public, male-dominated history. As Kathleen Brogan explains, “as an absence made present, the ghost can give expression to the ways in which women are rendered invisible in the public sphere” (25). To correct this absence, this book presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the

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United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female spirit changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. (The vampire and the werewolf, for example, have transmuted from terrifying monsters into more sympathetic, even heroic and romantic, characters.) Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit). Terrifying and vengeful female spirits in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle). In the twenty-first century, this figure expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human, UK and US). While no other book focuses exclusively on the female ghost, critics have analyzed wraiths in many ways; these books provide helpful insights into the history and use of the supernatural. In Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, Jeffrey Weinstock makes a compelling case for looking at the use of ghosts by female authors from 1820 through 1920. Identifying a literary tradition of male and female ghosts, Weinstock argues that it is important to understand why American women writers made use of supernatural fiction and why this use has been ignored by literary critics. His book explores the ways that “supernatural conventions [function] as a form of cultural critique” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2). The themes he analyzes in this tradition, from the control and abuse of women to same-sex desire, provide a new way of looking at American writing. He states that the use of the supernatural by women authors declines after 1930 (194). While it may be true that literary production of ghosts declined, these figures appear regularly first in film and then in television in the twenty and twenty-first centuries. Ghosts rank sixth in an analysis of horror movie monsters from 1931 through 1984, leading Tom Ruffles in Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife to conclude, “[I]t is surprising that they [ghosts] have not been subject to intense scrutiny as a whole, unlike, say, vampire and zombie films” (3). Pointing to the flexibility of the ghost, Ruffles explains its appeal: “[W]hile the post-Stoker vampire is usually aristocratic, and the zombie has a working-class ambience, the ghost achieves a kind of universality” (2). Yet

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this universality does not escape the influence of gender. “The preponderance of female ghosts, benign or sinister, is in contrast to slasher films where females are menaced by a male with seemingly supernatural powers,” Ruffles explains (96). Ruffles’s observations point to the locus of the female phantom as empowering. Criticism that includes discussions of ghosts takes a variety of approaches and focuses, from nineteenth-century literature to folklore. A number of excellent studies have focused on supernatural beings in particular periods with a precise emphasis, such as Katherine A. Fowkes’s Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films; Tom Ruffles’s Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife; and Kathleen Brogan’s Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. The interest in the figure of the ghost is attested to by recent books such as The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities, edited by Lee Kroger and Melanie Anderson; Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Melissa Makala; Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature, by Brian Norman; Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from the Silent Era to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder; and Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Film, edited by Kate Griffiths and David Evans. Folklore ghosts are the focus of Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeanne Banks Thomas’s Haunting Experiences: Gender and Ghosts, and there are a number of excellent articles that deal with literary ghosts, such as those included in the ground-breaking Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, a collections of essays edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Many other ghost traditions have also received attention, such as the yurei in Japanese horror comic books (Dollase). However, no other analysis has examined the female ghost as depicted in English-language texts over a range of popular culture platforms over such a wide swath of time. Looking at the female ghost, as opposed to the female author, for example, reveals the ways that the character’s traits direct readers and viewers to the representation of the feminine. The Untold Story focuses on the depiction of adult female spirits, who differ significantly from the ghosts who appear in young adult literature. There are certain similarities in terms of setting—water imagery and rebirth appear in many young adult ghost novels and in the texts discussed here. However, the female ghosts I discuss are more radical and more overt in their resistance to patriarchy than the ghosts June Pulliam discussed (some of whom are male). As Pulliam explains, “the ghost enables the haunted girl

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to nurture her strengths in stealth” (19–20). As the chapters in the Untold Story reveal, adult female phantoms are disruptive, sometimes to the point of physical violence. In many cases, the female ghost’s activity is compelled by her exclusion from history and memory. In her influential work, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination Avery F. Gordon makes the case for considering the ghostly as a representation of living people whom sociology and history have forgotten and the experiences that have been left out of history. In making her argument, Gordon draws on two novels that feature wraiths, showing the centrality of fiction to the discussion of the ghost. The female ghost as a character directs us to social critique, but she also draws attention to the development of the feminine self. The female ghosts discussed in Subversive Spirits constitute a tradition, consistently and insistently exposing the ways that the feminine is silenced and constrained. At the same time, they offer alternatives to oppression, providing both positive and negative role models for readers and viewers. The female ghost’s insistence on being heard balances with the violence to which she often must resort. Yet in the final texts considered, Being Human (UK and US television shows), a twenty-first-century maternal vision offers an antidote to rage and violence. Even more striking is the vision in Being Human of the female ghost as savior of the world. The female ghosts examined in Subversive Spirits come from very different time periods, but they share certain features. First, the female spirit becomes engaged in a struggle for control of the narrative, often the narrative of her own life. Texts that focus on female ghosts, then, are about authorship: whose version of reality is told and whose perspective is explained and validated. In a number of instances, the contested narrative is that of history; in others, the texts provide a sympathetic backstory for what would otherwise seem inexplicably horrible acts, including infanticide. Whatever the frame, the female wraith creates an alternative narrative, even if she has to wrest authorship from a male figure. Second, class, race, and ethnicity play important roles in the stories of these spirits. Female ghosts react against the biases used to oppress them while they were alive, and their supernatural powers allow them to overcome the obstacles that blocked them. They do not divest themselves of their gender and ethnic identities but use these aspects of their cultural identities to empower themselves after death. That women’s success requires supernatural powers shows how oppressed real women are in the living world. These female ghosts share the unfinished business of addressing and often correcting social injustices created by prejudice and discrimination.

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Throughout the narratives discussed here, feminine concerns and metaphors for the feminine, especially that of motherhood, appear repeatedly in various forms. With the exception of the comedic characters discussed in the first chapter, female ghosts embody the maternal. First, the spirit engages in a struggle with patriarchal society for control of children. In this conflict we see a struggle over values identified as feminine and masculine. Although her maternal quest occurs after her own death, the female ghost models the struggles of living women for control and autonomy as mothers. Finally, the female wraith reverses the presentation of the maternal as a force to be excluded from society. As she writes her own life, the female ghost creates a sort of reverse kunstlerroman, in that after death she grows and develops her authorial skills. Because the female ghost changes emotionally over the course of most texts, I employ Mary Belenky’s insights on female psychological development from Women’s Ways of Knowing. To understand the broad cultural implications of the female ghost, I evoke French feminist theorists Hélène Cixous’s and Julia Kristeva’s ideas about the feminine. Each approach helps make sense of the journey of the individual spirit, and together these three perspectives help us understand the ways that the figure operates over time. Because female ghost stories customarily depict gender struggles that reveal aspects of psychological identity, American psychological and French psychoanalytic feminist theories situate this figure’s relevance for real life. The emergence of supernatural fiction, Weinstock points out, occurs “in conjunction with and gives expression to modern conceptions of human psychology” (8). Subversive Spirits builds on Weinstock’s work by expanding the genres and time periods covered and focusing exclusively on the female spirit. As the ghost moves through the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst, feminist psychology and psychoanalytically based philosophy help us understand how the figure changes. A psychoanalytical framework is useful for examining ghosts, for their characteristics evoke the idea of the unconscious, but an awareness of feminist psychology is vital for understanding the female ghost. Often unseen and unacknowledged, she, like the unconscious, is frequently denied. The ghost also represents the repressed, that which an individual or society fears. To examine female spirits, we must look at them from a perspective that acknowledges their femininity, such as that of feminist psychology. In an ethnography of more than a hundred and thirty women, psychologists Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule identified a specifically feminine path of development that emphasizes alternatives

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to traditional masculine views of epistemology. Their book, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, presents a path by which real women came to understand knowledge and authority in a new framework. The first stage in “women’s ways of knowing” involves confronting silence and voicelessness, a stage experienced by the female ghost when alive and often continued into her early ghosthood. At some point, however, the female ghost moves along a trajectory of empowerment. In a final stage, she parallels the pattern by acquiring constructed knowledge, the understanding of interconnectedness. After she rejects silence (and removal from the world), she develops subjective knowledge, the understanding that she herself has and can wield authority. After subjective knowledge comes the concept of separate and connected knowledge, where the ghost interacts with and affects living people. The last level of development achieves constructed knowledge and integrative knowledge that enables the female ghost to see globally and beyond her own individual experience. Many female ghosts follow a similar trajectory of development, moving from being silent, and as ghosts, literally invisible, to acquiring and integrating knowledge. This path sometimes occurs for an individual spirit, but it also appears in the development of the figure over time, over various genres. As this text will show, the comedic female ghost uses humor, and the maternal female ghost wields horror, but these figures merge into a ghost who mothers the entire world. One salient feature of female ghosts is their empathic ability, an important quality identified in women’s development in Women’s Ways of Knowing. Before the female ghost moves to the level of integration and collaboration, however, she can appear monstrous. Female ghosts are customarily presented as terrifying, in part because of their hideous appearance and their use of sound rather than words. Therefore, feminist theory that deals with the fantastic helps explore this dimension of the female wraith. French feminist theory, particularly the work of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, provides a basis for exploring the meaning of female ghosts, particularly as it pertains to language and narrative. Revising Jacques Lacan’s idea of psychoanalytical development, Kristeva and Cixous posit an alternative to a male-dominated, patriarchal symbolic order. For Lacan, language and the development of an individual identity are inherently masculine. To develop into an autonomous being, the male subject has to reject formlessness, fusion, and unbridled emotion and subordinate these aspects to a controlled and controlling language. Lacan’s identification of the mirror phase, during which the infant recognizes itself as a subject, is connected to that infant’s

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separation and rejection of the mother who has a lack, who is castrated. Lacan’s phallocentric view situates the symbolic order of culture in distinction to a disordered and imaginary nature, which is feminized. Rather than rejecting the feminine alterity, French feminist philosophers embrace and celebrate it, especially in terms of writing. Sharing an interest in “revolutionary” language, French feminist philosophers characterize a type of language that defies traditional patterns and hierarchies as “feminine,” stressing that this is a type of expression that may be written by male and female authors. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous reclaims the figure of the Medusa, who kills humans by petrifying them with her gaze. Cixous advocates for women to “write their bodies,” to see the female body as represented by the Medusa as joyful, laughing, and empowering. To cite just one example (discussed in chapter 3), author Sandra Cisneros reclaims the female folklore ghost, La Llorona. Revising La Llorona from a murderous female who represents death to an empowering figure whose laughter can be heard in a running stream provides one compelling example of how feminist authors can write the female body using a female ghost. The texts in The Untold Story provide examples of writers and characters who follow this paradigm, creating female ghosts who embrace and sometimes celebrate what traditionally has been depicted as the horror of the female body. While the female ghost is representation of a female body rather than a living form, the female ghosts discussed here all retain their female shape; in fact, their bodies, unbound by gravity, time, or space, are more powerful than when they were living. The most specific aspect of the female body that leads to repression and control is the gory maternal body. Consequently, Subversive Spirits employs Kristeva’s work on this subject to illuminate the female ghost. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, a book that has influenced much feminist criticism of the horror genre, Kristeva explores the depiction of the preverbal feminine as abject (that which is rejected by culture) and terrifying. She identifies the psychoanalytic experience of the abject in the weaning child’s rejection of the maternal body. The identification with and the necessary separation of the infant from the mother’s body lead to both the eroticization and the repulsion of the female body. In this frame, the maternal functions for patriarchy as the archetypal abject because of its uncontainable power over human life. “What we designate as ‘feminine’ far from being a primeval essence, will be seen as an ‘other’ without a name,” Kristeva explains (58). The dead body also represents a classic version of the abject that must be expelled. Ghosts, who emanate from a dead body, exemplify that which culture and

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individuals deny and repress. A dead female body is thus doubly abject, and the female ghost who emanates from such a body especially so. The necessity of separating from the mother’s body is part of what drives the idea of its horror. Kristeva’s Powers of Horror also examines the “phallic mother,” a figure unable to use language, only sounds. Focusing on the way that a child is inculcated into the symbolic order of patriarchy, Kristeva notes that the maternal stage is “preverbal,” during which the mother and child communicate without language. Without drawing on Kristeva directly, Brogan describes this alternative discourse in her discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The experience of this feminine language is ghostly, as Brogan explains: “For Paul D, listening to Sethe ‘was like having a child whisper in your ear so close you could feel its lips form the words you couldn’t make out because they were too close’” (78). The intimacy of this close contact describes the experience of the uncanny and the difficulty the female ghost finds in trying to communicate with the living. References to the motherchild relationship recur in the stories of female ghosts, culminating in Being Human’s female ghost serving as mother/savior for the planet. Yet her journey is a torturous and painful one, as Kristeva’s writing about the mother’s position in patriarchy reveals. As the historical context, female subjectivity, and maternal abject appear in female ghost narratives, certain tropes emerge. Female spirit narratives often include water imagery, present a version of “writing the body,” enact feminist justice, and depict a successful struggle on the part of the female ghost to be the author of her own story. While the female ghost narratives discussed here differ in terms of particular historical contexts and genres, they share a thematic focus on the maternal body expressed through womb and birth imagery. The female wraith often uses bodies of water, as depicted in The Woman in Black, the La Llorona narratives, The Woman Warrior, and Beloved. Female spirits frequently emerge from water, signifying their rebirth as ghosts. At the same time, the bodies of water represent the female ghost’s maternal focus. Water in the form of mist and fog also accompanies her appearances, stressing her liminal status, her suspension between the world of the living and that of the dead. The use of water as a defining characteristic also evokes the last event before birth, the amniotic sac breaking in the womb. Water imagery presents an alternative to the less fluid and more rigid control of discourse. At the same time, the female ghost rejects traditional uses of language and writes her body. Kristeva’s description of the transfer of power from the mother to the patriarchy reflects the plots that ensnare many of the characters

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who become female ghosts: “Discourse is being substituted for maternal care, and with it fatherhood belonging more to the realm of the ideal man” (45). The female ghost intervenes before fatherhood and discourse can take over. Trapped by discourse (law, custom, language), the living counterpart of the female ghost had been abused and confined. Once ghostly, however, she has the powers of the Othered feminine. Unable to speak or, in some cases, to be heard, female ghosts use their supernaturally empowered bodies and sounds to have an impact on the patriarchal world and male characters who marginalized them when they were alive. The ways that female spirits perform femininity may vary, but at the core these figures resist confinement and celebrate their outsider status. In “The Feminist Power of Female Ghosts,” Zeisler explains, “When you can pause for a moment between waves of stomach-turning heebie-jeebies, you realize that not only are these women sympathetic characters, but they’re all the more terrifying because they have every bit of anger that makes living women sources of fear, but none of the societal restrictions” (3). Being freed of societal restrictions allows the female ghost to enact justice on feminine terms. Once the female ghost accepts herself as an authority, she can use disruption and sometimes even violence to ensure that the patriarchal legal system is overturned. As part of this process, she wrests control of the narrative to present a sympathetic view of her plight. By implication, she also exposes the plight of all women, especially mothers, in a male-dominated world. Previous discussions of female ghosts, like Zeisler’s insightful article, suggest the depth and importance of this tradition. The female spirit is a hybrid figure, flitting not only between life and death but also among a range of genres. While many discussions of canonical novels by Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison subordinate the character to literary technique, the juxtaposition here of these novels with the popular tradition of the female ghost allows us to see the books differently. As Angeletta Gourdine explains about Beloved, too often the novel is read as being the story of the living Sethe, rather than that of the ghost Beloved. Her criticism applies also to The Woman Warrior. Reading the tradition of the female ghost across these sites allows us to see the figure’s continuance over nearly a hundred years. Seeing the female ghost as a reflection of living women’s concerns shows the importance of women’s ways of knowing as an alternative to patriarchal constructions of knowledge. Fundamentally, the female ghost is a harbinger of social change who affects other characters. In her profound ability to shock and challenge received ideas, she remains an optimistic figure. Although her own circumstances may be tragic (when alive), after death, she is freed and

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frees others. The female ghost’s development from an anarchic rebel to the world’s savior points to the ways that feminine knowledge has become more accepted in the time traced here. Subversive Spirits consists of six chapters, illustrating a range of female apparitions in novels, plays, films, television shows, and multimedia exhibits. How these figures morph and draw on the specific aspects of various genres is part of the focus of this book. Reviewing the appearance of female ghosts in multiple genres reveals that some are more radical than others, but all genres use specific features to create their power. Examining the various versions of female ghosts reveals both certain constants and historical change. Female spirits share disruptive prowess and expose gender bias, but the manifestations of resistance are defined by social context. Each chapter explores the development of a type of female ghost, and the chapters together produce a trajectory of increasingly powerful figures. The first chapter analyzes how film adaptations present the original literary characters from both America and England. Chapter 1, “Topper and Blithe Spirit: The Comedic Female Ghost,” explores Thorne Smith’s Topper novels (1926; 1932) and the film adaptations (1937; 1939; 1941), comparing them to Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit (1941) and its film version (1945). The female ghosts in Topper and Blithe Spirit provide more powerful female figures than those in contemporaneous screwball comedies, in which living women end up being domesticated, marrying at the end. Using wit, sarcasm, and playfulness as weapons, comedic female ghosts successfully destabilize gender roles. Like other female ghosts, the apparitions in Blithe Spirit and Topper challenge the power of male authors to script and control the lives of women. They reflect the fact that gender roles were changing due to the need in England and the United States to have women replace the men who were away fighting in World War II. Using female ghosts to address the very serious issues of gender conflict and death, these texts show how humor can be used to create serious social critique of the limitations and oppression created by patriarchal institutions from marriage to the law. The second chapter moves from humor to horror, with a focus on the depiction of the frustrated mother ghost in the United Kingdom. Chapter 2, “The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in England: The Woman in Black,” focuses on the extraordinarily successful West End play, The Woman in Black (the second-longest running play in London), Susan Hill’s short novel from which the play was adapted (1983), and the 2012 film version. Unlike a detective story, in which justice is served and the social order reinscribed, a female ghost story such as The Woman in Black does not allow the male storyteller

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to succeed. Instead, his every effort to control the narrative is frustrated. In a reversal of gender roles, his body and language are controlled by the female ghost. Despite the male narrator’s resistance and the activities of other male characters who attempt to eradicate her malign presence, the ghostly Woman in Black remains visible, powerful, and triumphant. While this apparition is compelling in all three versions, it is the stage play that most fully and concretely develops the female ghost’s power. In contrast to the usual lament about adaptations being frustratingly inadequate versions, in this case the play most vividly realizes the figure of the Woman in Black and most clearly illuminates the struggle for narrative control that defines the plot. Reading the novella and film in relation to the play illuminates all three texts, which exist in close relation to each other in time and adaptation, as they focus on the abject feminine. The specter of threatened masculinity hangs over all three texts, with World War I looming. (A 2014 sequel underscores the aspect of war by setting the tale during World War II.) A more sympathetic version of the maternal ghost in America is the focus of the third chapter, which addresses issues of folklore, literature, and television versions of the female ghost. Chapter 3, “The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in the Americas: La Llorona,” focuses on La Llorona, the Weeping Woman ghost. Also known as the Woman in White, this figure shares some features with the Woman in Black. The key to both ghosts is their status as mothers and the maternal feminine: both terrify other parents and kill children; both haunt and are characterized by water and watery deaths associated with the womb and birth imagery. While the English Woman in Black is the creation of a contemporary fiction writer, La Llorona has venerable roots in centuries-old Hispanic folk culture. A well-known figure, La Llorona remains active in Chicano culture at the same time that this female ghost has been appropriated for literature and television narratives. Its adaptations radically transform the misogynistic source text. The feminist appropriation of La Llorona’s story by renowned novelists Rudolfo Anaya in Bless Me, Ultima, Sandra Cisneros in Woman Hollering Creek, and Ana Castillo in So Close to God provides examples of the appeal and mutability of the female ghost. The authors’ feminist revisionings linger in the more recent use of the figure on television. Part of the explosion in the fantasy genre on television, this folklore ghost has also been the focus in episodes of the television shows Supernatural (2010) and Grimm (2012). La Llorona demonstrates both the impressive staying power of a female ghost over centuries and the specific ways that this female ghost functions in Mexican American culture. Like other female ghosts, La Llorona provides a figure through which women

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can write and, in some cases, rewrite their lives. While La Llorona shares some qualities with other female ghosts, her character also contains unique aspects that highlight colonization and migration specific to Mexico. Like the female ghosts in The Woman in Black and La Llorona texts, ghosts in the Chinese American and African American traditions cross genres, appearing in novels and films. Chapter 4, “The Female Ghost and Feminist History: The Woman Warrior and Beloved,” focuses on National Book Award winner Maxine Hong Kingston’ s groundbreaking memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel Beloved. In focusing on these texts, this chapter incorporates so-called high art into what is primarily a study of the female ghost in popular culture. Even today, with distinctions between elite and popular art becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, Kingston’s and Morrison’s books are canonical, appearing in required literature courses. None of the other texts in Subversive Spirits has such a privileged position. These female ghosts morph into mass culture, though, through the Disney movies Mulan (1998) and Mulan II (2004) and the film adaptation of Beloved (1998). The visual representations of female ghosts show the ways that popular culture can shape the figure. This chapter shows how literary texts that have female ghosts are weakened in the film adaptations. Both texts use the female spirit to present in compelling and painful detail the historical struggle and pain of women of color in a white supremacist nation. The deliberate historicity of Kingston’s and Morrison’s texts contrasts strikingly with a more promotional view of history as heritage (discussed in chapter 5). Kingston’s creative nonfiction memoir and Morrison’s novel use the flexibility of imagination to the private and habitual feminine experience neglected by history. Their female characters experience the pain of the Vietnam and Civil Wars, respectively. Both of these texts employ the female ghost to expose the voicelessness of excluded women; only through a spirit’s disruptive power can their stories be seen and remembered. That their female ghosts represent double oppression of not only the feminine but also the exploited immigrants and slaves is part of the writers’ challenge to traditional public history. Chapter 5 analyzes the appropriation of women who actually lived, recreated through technology to serve the purposes of tourism. “The Untold Story: The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace and Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol analyzes a multimedia exhibit at Blenheim Palace in England. The installation updates the site by using new media not to emphasize the great public triumphs of the men of the family, but instead to reveal private family relationships. Told by an apparition of the first duchess’s

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maid, Grace Ridley, the exhibit The Untold Story (2007) includes tourists in intimate, behind-the-scenes views of three hundred years of family stories. Blenheim Palace was gifted in recognition by a grateful queen to celebrate its owner’s victory over the French, and the family history reveals the interconnectedness of the wealthy and the British wars. The ghostly female narrator stands in for the tourist, a feminized outsider fascinated by the gossipy version of family history, the story untold by traditional history. A similar, much smaller exhibit, The Ghost of the Castle (2010), opened a few years later at the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Old State Capitol Building, with the narrator Sarah Morgan, who penned a famous Civil War diary. Both narratives or “experiences” feature a female ghost who guides tourists through history and heritage. The ghost appears through a mixed media presentation of film, with extensive framing that emphasizes self-reflexivity. At the same time, the literal framing of the narrator underscores feminine confinement. The Untold Story provides insight into gender negotiations within tourist sites. The use of new media to introduce a female figure into a heritage site as a guide and narrator illustrates how attractions respond to competition from other popular media, while at the same time revealing the role of the feminine narrator in history and heritage. While these ghostly female narrators use humor and charm, like the ghosts in Topper and Blithe Spirit, they also demonstrate feminine subordination to a grand master narrative of male-dominated history. The book’s concluding chapter looks at British and American versions of the same television show to explore how the recent female ghost brings together all the strands of this figure, from humor to horror. Chapter 6, “Being Human: The Female Ghost in Contemporary British and American Television,” focuses on two twenty-first-century popular television series that reveal the ongoing struggle of performing femininity. The female ghosts in the two versions of Being Human use a sarcastic, postmodern humor and physical comedy that evokes Topper and Blithe Spirit. They struggle with the maternal, but their role is one of adoptive mothers, presenting an alternative to the struggles of biological mothers and ghosts La Llorona and the Woman in Black. Like La Llorona and the apparitions in The Woman Warrior and Beloved, the ghosts in Being Human address ethnicity and race explicitly. And like the heritage ghosts, they take charge not only of their own narratives, but also that of others, including in the UK version, that of the entire human race. The struggle between supernaturals and humans, a kind of final war, is bracketed by the protagonist vampire’s role as a soldier in World War I (UK version) and the US Revolutionary War (US version).

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Introduction

Being Human originated as a BBC 3 series in England (2008–2013) and was adapted for American television on the Syfy channel (2011–2014). Both shows feature three young people, each supernatural, struggling to adapt to the human world. Two, a werewolf and a vampire, are male, and the third character is a female ghost. While the male characters struggle with their powers and predatory natures, the female spirit must learn to interrogate herself and her gender. In both series, the female ghost is played by a woman of color (UK, African Caribbean; US, South Asian Indian American), while the vampire and werewolf are played by white men, rendering explicit the impact of ethnicity and race on the ghost’s stories. The female ghost’s struggle is particularly difficult because unlike the vampire and the werewolf, she doesn’t even really understand why or how she became a supernatural creature. As a wraith, her situation reflects that of the feminine: sidelined, often (in her case literally) invisible, and passive. While all three of the characters undergo struggle and change, the female ghost’s is the most dramatic and feminist transformation. Her liminality as a woman and a spirit provides a strong contrast with her development from a housebound and timid wraith to a strong, assertive presence who makes her own decisions. Initially childless, this female ghost expands to mother a community and, in the UK version, to redeem all of humanity. Like the other female ghosts, Annie (BBC) and Sally (Syfy) must write their own stories, wresting authorship not only from a former fiancé, but also from the other male supernatural characters who seek to define and control them. Chapter 6 provides a fitting conclusion to this study of the female ghost, demonstrating not only the figure’s continuing relevance but also an important way that popular culture presents gender. Examining the female ghost over a wide range of genres and decades reveals her development from an indirect critic of patriarchal society to advocating for a new society. While the female ghost proves an adaptable figure, she nevertheless retains her critical commentary on gender roles. As an outsider to the living world, she projects an objectivity and omniscience that enables her to be a powerful voice for change. Her gender is crucial to this privileged position, for female ghosts serve as advocates for themselves and for living women. Examining the figure of the female ghost in British and American popular culture allows us to review a wide range of strategies for exposing and criticizing gender roles, from humor to horror. The female ghost shows the importance of authorship for women and provides a model for the development of subjectivity. By keeping sexism a central part of narratives designed to entertain, the female ghost presents audiences with an

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alternative perspective to male-dominated culture. Constant and compelling, the female ghost holds a secure place in our imaginations. Examining how and where she appears, and to what effect, allows us to see ongoing and deeply rooted gender tensions and, at the same time, illuminates popular culture’s role in critiques of the traditional feminine.

Chapter one

The Comedic Female Ghost Topper and Blithe Spirit As succeeding chapters will show, the figure of the female ghost can be terrifying and all-powerful. But one significant group is comedic and charming. Drawing on the figure of the New Woman, British and American popular culture promoted a heroine who was wealthy, beautiful, engaging, and reliably troublesome for the men who crossed her path. The resultant mayhem produced comic results for all involved. The most famous version of this female type appeared in so-called “screwball comedies,” films that emphasized the battle of the sexes, with a man and woman resisting, with humorous outcomes, their inevitable romantic relationship. While these female ghosts share some features with the heroines of screwball comedies, the dead female figures are, paradoxically, more powerful and disruptive than living women. This chapter begins with an analysis of two tremendously popular female ghosts who appear in Thorne Smith’s Topper novels and the films based on his books and Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit and its film adaptation. Despite or perhaps because of their tremendous popularity, there are few critical studies of these works. Dating from 1926 to 1941, these novels, play, and films demonstrate the ways that the figure of the female ghost criticizes contemporaneous gender roles. Their predominant tone is comedic, but, as this chapter will demonstrate, humor is employed to make trenchant social criticism of the ways that living women (and men) are confined by gender roles. Analyzing the feminist implications of the comedic female ghosts reveals humor’s radical potential. Drawing on French feminist theorists Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” and Nancy Walker’s and Regina Barreca’s deft discussions of the uses of humor by women, this chapter reveals the enchanting power of comedy to make serious points about gender. Katherine Fowkes’s work on comedy film also provides a valuable framework through which to consider the comedic female ghost. Analyzing Topper and Blithe Spirit in their various versions shows that the modern tradition of the female ghost began with engaging and charming ghosts. Later female apparitions, 18

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as we shall see, are much more terrifying and hostile. Yet despite a dramatic difference in tone, these comedic female ghosts share many features with their more frightening descendants. Like other female spirits, the humorous female ghost appears across genres in the texts discussed here: in two novels, Topper (1926) and Topper Takes a Trip (1932); three films Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1939), and Topper Returns (1941); a mainstream play Blithe Spirit (1941); and a mainstream film (1945), Blithe Spirit. This female ghost fits the time and context of the period between the two world wars. The early twentieth century saw women getting the vote and entering the professions, while during World War II, gender roles changed due to the need to have women in civilian positions to replace men in the military in both England and the United States. Changes in gender roles provide, as Fowkes explains, the perfect context for ghostly appearances. In her book on the supernatural in comedy films, Fowkes argues that “ghost comedies are emblematic of a cultural confusion with—or an insistence on working through—problems of gender” (12). This chapter first explores the subversive narratives of each group of texts, emphasizing how the various female ghost stories use the figure to create social critique. I conclude by exploring the critical similarities in the ways these female ghosts subvert patriarchal law, institute an alternative feminine justice, re-educate and feminize a human male, and finally provide a model of power and control through female authorship. These features provide a pattern of resistance not only for the characters within the texts but also for later female ghosts. Because they appear in roughly the same time period, Topper and Blithe Spirit engage similar concerns about gender roles, with the backdrop of women attaining suffrage in both countries, entering professions, and challenging middle-class Victorian ideas about the role of woman as the domestic “angel in the house.” In fact, the female ghosts, despite their supernatural status, are decidedly more devilish and disruptive rather than angelic. The female ghosts in the versions of Topper and Blithe Spirit share many features. (Both texts also spawned 1950s American television adaptations, but since the shows follow the texts closely, this chapter will focus on the source texts and the films.) One defining feature of all of these female ghosts is their ability to wrest narrative control from men. Examining these comedic female ghosts through the concept of “feminine writing” reveals the significance of the ghosts’ anarchic disruptive behavior. Celebrating the feminine as disruptive and powerful, Hélène Cixous called on women writers to draw on the anarchic feminine. “Woman must put

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herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement,” Cixous demands (875). What had been traditionally dismissed as “hysterical” femininity, Cixous reframes as empowering. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining “feminine writing” precisely, Cixous nonetheless evokes a practice that resonates with the figure of the female ghost: feminine writing will be “conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate” (883). Central to Cixous’s vision is the reclamation of female figures who have been defined as monstrous. Cixous praises the figure of the Medusa: “she’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885). The disruption and disorder of the feminine is extensive, according to Cixous. She describes feminine writing as “[j]umbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (887). The philosopher characterizes women’s resistance in words that evoke the literal actions of comedic female ghosts. Cixous describes a primarily analytical, intellectual process, but the female ghost can embody all the actions she describes. The comedic female ghost disrupts conventional plots and challenges heteronormativity by enacting the dis-order that Cixous sees as essential to claiming the feminine. In Topper and Blithe Spirit, the anarchic impulse of humor is harnessed to great effect: the female ghosts in these texts use physical comedy and the particular powers of ghosts not only to amuse viewers but also to ridicule sexist social conventions. While Topper and Blithe Spirit share some features with screwball comedies, including bizarre situations, slapstick humor, and inversions of the social order, the female ghost texts give their heroines more agency. Screwball heroines appear to create chaos inadvertently, while the female ghosts destabilize the social order deliberately. Specifically, the comedic female ghost first criticizes and then eventually challenges conventional ideas about marriage. While the comedic female ghost is invariably attractive, the romantic tension between the leads that characterizes screwball comedy is considerably diminished when the female lead is a ghost. Because she is disembodied, the prospect of sexual union disappears, strengthening the ghost’s power and removing the possibility of the “happily ever after” conclusion that diminishes feminine power. The subordinating significance of a marriage would have been particularly true during the time these texts were created, the 1930s and 1940s, when marriage meant women lost their legal autonomy. The plot of these texts is simple: dying young, a female ghost is called back to the world of the living. Uninvited, she takes command of the text, directing

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the action and disrupting the life of a male character or characters. However, while in the horror genre, a female ghost is more likely to be malignant and feared, the comedic female ghost operates with benevolent intention to humorous effect. Both types of female ghosts dispense justice, but in the case of the humorous female ghost, the justice is tempered by the comedic frame and the positive result that other characters’ lives are liberated from restrictive gender roles. The various versions of Topper and Blithe Spirit emphasize role reversals: male characters are subordinated and feminized through the female ghosts’ actions. The gendering of the characters is unambiguous. Despite the absence of the ghost’s physical body, ghost films depict gender in sharp, strong binaries. The feminine defines the supernatural, while masculine qualities define the living. As Fowkes describes it, “The supernatural in ghost and other occult films is almost always associated with feminine emotion, intuition, interiority, and mystery, while the masculine is typically portrayed as ‘normal’: natural, external, visible” (23–24). This gender binary helps explain the appearance and power of female ghosts. Rather than feeling exploited by the female ghosts, the male character is liberated by the gender-role reversal, either through gaining new knowledge or from the freedom to believe and act in nonmasculine ways. This transformation follows the patterns of “women’s ways of knowing,” as described by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule. First, the character must resist silence and voicelessness, then find authority within herself (or, in this case, himself) and integrate the knowledge of others. In the comedic female ghost stories, the figure develops, but she also educates others. The texts use humor to undercut the constraints of patriarchal society, showing how traditional gender roles limit both male and female characters. Male-dominated institutions—from the law to banking, science and medicine, and compulsory heterosexuality—are shown to be ineffectual before the power of the feminine, as exemplified by the female ghost. By the end of the narratives, the female ghost enacts feminist justice and corrects the wrongs done to the characters. The female ghost takes controlling positions as auteur/director, reverses gender roles, undercuts male-dominated institutions, and enacts feminist justice all in the context of humor. Humor disarms and cajoles at the same time that it makes serious points about gender inequities. While the male authors Smith and Coward could have used male ghosts, their choice of female spirits has a specific, more gender-disruptive, feminist impact. As Nancy Walker, Regina Barreca, and other feminist critics have shown, humor can create compelling criticism of restrictive gender roles. Through

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The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit

humor, an audience can be manipulated into laughing at gender stereotypes, as their ridiculous side is revealed. Walker identifies a humorist as someone “at odds with the publicly espoused values of their culture” (9) and explains that the humorist holds “a position of privileged insight” (25). A closeted homosexual, Noel Coward used comedy to expose heteronormativity’s problematic aspects. Thorne Smith, the author whose characters form the basis of three Topper films, similarly employs female ghosts to point to the ridiculous aspects of heterosexuality, especially its confinement of women and men in restrictive roles. Humor’s subversive elements allow the female ghost to undercut gender norms. Barreca assesses the power of humor as imagining alternatives to social structures: “[W]hen you see humor in a situation, it also implies that you can see how a situation could be altered” (19–20). With her unique perspective of disembodied femininity, the female ghost is particularly well suited to ridicule patriarchal social structure. Freed from conventional womanly behavior because she is dead, the female ghost can use her femininity to control other characters and to challenge the status quo. Because her playful attitude is engaging, she entrances not only reluctant characters inside the films, but also the viewers. That Smith’s successful Topper novels were turned into three films, with the final film featuring a new female ghost character, suggests that something in the character of the female ghost is appealing. While the representation of the feminine as terrifying Abject and Other is stressed in the portrayal of an evil female ghost, the comedic female ghost successfully employs wit, humor, and physical comedy to challenge the dominant heterosexual social order. The novels Topper and Topper Takes a Trip by Smith and the three popular films based on his characters show the possibilities of the female ghost to resist and expose femininity’s constraints. In Topper, the eponymous hero is a mild-mannered but restless forty-six-year-old banker, dominated by his wife. He purchases the automobile in which Marion and George Kerby, young wild people, had crashed and died. Haunting the car, they soon haunt Cosmo Topper, changing his life forever. Described as “a sophisticated spoof of middle-class morals and manners” by the novel’s contemporary editor (vi), the text creates humor in Topper’s wild antics. The reluctant bon vivant is led to have fun and flaunt convention by the female ghost, Marion. She reappears in the second novel and film, but a new female ghost replaces her in the last film, Topper Returns. In the novels, but even more overtly in the films, the female ghost rebels against a male-dominated world and drags an

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initially reluctant Topper along with her. By the end of the texts, however, Topper has fully embraced his feminine side. Noel Coward continues the humorous female ghost’s resistant potential. Indeed, Blithe Spirit has been described as “a cross between Private Lives [Coward 1930] and Topper” (DowdH5). The female ghosts in Coward’s 1941 play Blithe Spirit want revenge, but their creator employs a light touch, using humor and a camp sensibility to display feminine discontent with compulsory heterosexuality. The 1945 film directed by David Lean makes a significant change to the play’s ending: In the play, the male protagonist leaves his two ghostly wives in control of his house and walks out the door. In the film, we see him drive away in his car, which has been sabotaged by his wives. The car careens out of control and Condomine too becomes a spirit. This new ending emphasizes the power and authority of the female ghost. At first Elvira, the male protagonist’s dead wife, appears as a mischievous ghost, but by the play’s end, the second wife, Ruth, also becomes a wraith. Separately and together, the two expose the ridiculous and restrictive nature of conventional gender roles. Sympathetically portrayed, the female characters invite us to laugh with them at their situation. The female ghosts in Topper and Blithe Spirit use their supernatural powers to destabilize the patriarchal order; the female spirit in these texts becomes an author or an auteur/director. In relationships with male characters whose positions typify male dominance, the female ghosts direct the plot and action. While an emphasis on authorial control appears in the source texts and the film adaptations, it is more pronounced in the latter. In the films, the female ghosts assume the position of film directors, often physically moving the male characters from place to place and telling them how to act, what to say, what to do. In this way, they become authors, not only of their own stories but also of those of the male characters. In the Topper novels and films, the male protagonist seems to be the focus, as his name serves as the title, but all the action is generated by the female spirit. The female ghost succeeds in forcing the patriarchal male to subvert the institutions that enshrine him as a figure of power. In the novel Topper, the female ghost, Marion Kerby, gets prim and proper banker Cosmo Topper to break several laws (150). When he tries to subdue her, she tells him, “I’m the master in this house. From now on, I rule.” He concedes, “You are . . . stop tickling me” (153). The narrator makes Marion’s ghostly power over Topper absolute and emphasizes the gendered aspects of their struggle: “She withdrew from combat and stood looking down on the vanquished male” (153).

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The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit

Of course, her ghostly ability to levitate and disappear means the combat is inevitably unequal, the advantage with the female ghost. Her power is intensified as she isolates her husband, George, from patriarchal society. After George disappears early in the novel (at her instigation), Marion and Topper escape to a bucolic country house by a lake. Having Topper to herself, Marion educates him and makes a new person of him. The first film, also entitled simply Topper, emphasizes the female ghost’s conscious decision to direct Topper’s life. In this film, the still-living Marion saunters into Topper’s private office and asks him, “Why don’t you stop being such a mummy?” Seeing Topper’s potential, she tells her husband, “I feel as if I could pull him apart and put him together again and he’d work much better.” But she must become a ghost before she will have the opportunity and the power to wield her authority. As Fowkes explains, the spirit’s “invisibility” will become a “key to understanding how the fantastic qualities of the ghost elicit a comedic rather than a horrific response” (12–13). The comedic female ghost exerts her power through writing her body. She cannot be heard by anyone other than Topper, so Marion uses her body to communicate with people. The first film details in several sequences Marion’s pugnacious physicality, as she pummels and moves other characters around, always in a comic frame. As a ghost, she has no compunction about attacking men who criticize or attack her or Topper. For example, in one scene, an elevator operator calls the deceased Marion and George “the crazy Kerbys,” not knowing their ghosts are present and listening. George ignores him and enters their penthouse, but Marion stays behind to unnerve the operator by a stinging and mysterious slap from nowhere. Later, when she and George drag an inebriated Topper from their apartment to the car, a crowd gathers, and a fight breaks out. A temporarily visible Marion leaps into the fray, wielding an umbrella left and right in a crowd of men throwing punches. One of the men describes her to a reporter as “a swell-looking doll but plenty tough.” When they are under surveillance at a resort hotel, she throws mail and paper registrations into the air, knocks over glasses on tables, and pushes people over. Unable to defend themselves, the other characters’ bewilderment and erratic movements provide the film’s slapstick humor. As Fowkes explains, the “invisible manipulation of objects and people causes chaos and confusion” (162). At the same time, however, the female ghost’s actions embody Cixous’s description of feminine writing as “[j]umbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside

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down” (887). Symbolizing challenges to the social order through physical actions allows the film’s viewers to visualize the impact of the feminine. The second film is in many ways a reprise of the first, with the ghost Marion leaving Topper with renewed determination not to be trapped by conventional gender roles. In the third film, Topper Takes a Trip, the physical power of the female ghost expands beyond the United States, to France. The increasing sphere of influence of the female ghost can be seen in the individual spirit’s development. These portraits of individual female power are augmented, as more female ghosts appear in novels and films. In part, the popularity of the character requires the individual female ghost to assume even more authority, to justify another film. Marion reappears because Topper’s wife, Clara, is taking him to divorce court, naming Marion as co-respondent. While the case is thrown out of court because a female ghost isn’t legally actionable, Mrs. Topper travels to Europe to seek a divorce and a new love there. All of the subsequent action is guided by the female spirit. Marion, not Topper, decides that they will follow Clara to France. Marion physically forces Topper out of the divorce courtroom, creating a fast exit that is amusingly preposterous. Even more than in the first film, Topper is pushed hither and yon, in ridiculous positions, as the ghost Marion physically propels him about a dance floor, in a car, on the sidewalk, in a ballroom. His puppet-like actions provide a visual reminder that the female ghost is directing his behavior and the plot. Once they arrive in France, Marion shoves an insulting cab driver and demonstrates her fluency in his language. Topper, of course, doesn’t understand a word of French, so Marion’s linguistic as well as ghostly powers are vital to foiling the plot of the hotel owner and Mrs. Parkhurst to get Mrs. Topper’s money. Significantly, the female ghost uses her own body to control not only Topper but also his wife. When Mrs. Topper is taken up by an exploitative gigolo called the Baron, Marion again directs the action, ensuring that Topper, a much shorter and older man, defeats the Baron. “I’ll fix that male lizard,” she tells Topper. In a scene taken from the novel but inverted in terms of gender, Marion removes the younger man’s swim trunks while he is buried in the sand, thus entrapping him. (In the novel, Marion steals a female character’s bathing suit.) When they see him later in the ballroom, Marion orders him to “[g]o over and punch that Baron in the nose.” When Topper stands up, Marion praises him, “Good boy, Topper, I’m right behind you.” Moving his arm, Marion directs Topper to punch the Baron twice, and as the scuffle continues, an invisible Marion peels him off Topper, holds the Baron’s arms,

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The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit

Marion and her ghost dog, triumphant on the wing of an airplane. Topper Takes a Trip.

and allows Topper to triumph. She and Topper make a grand entrance into the ballroom, as Topper dances fantastically, apparently by himself, to applause of the assembled crowd. She repeats her physical mauling of the Baron again on the dance floor, slapping him and knocking him over. After this escapade, Topper and his wife have to leave France, and as Marion stands on the wing of their plane, she triumphantly says, “I did it, all by myself,” and then vanishes. The film has developed Marion’s ascendency, literally by showing her on an airborne plane wing but even more thoroughly by detailing the power of her actions throughout the film. The control exerted by the female ghost is emphasized through genderrole reversals, with the commanding male figure taking a subordinate role to the female ghost. Isolated from the masculine power structure, the lone male figure relinquishes his power to the female ghost, and the result is humorous, and mostly positive. An unhappy Topper is grateful for the opportunity to escape the constraints of his bank position. Although stuffy and bound by convention, Topper is forced by Marion to behave differently and is even feminized. The result is a much happier, liberated character. Marion’s example and instigation lead Topper to have a number of feminine experiences, from crying to dancing and to empathizing with women. At one point, the narrator of the novel explains, “Topper had only a hazy idea about fallen women, but he imagined he felt very much as they did when adversity had forced them

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to return to their hometowns” (94). Topper’s feminization is presented as a positive, life-affirming transformation. The novels’ narrations make the positive interpretation of Topper’s liberation from a repressive manhood explicit. After several days at the lake, “[i]t had occurred to him that he had not spoken to a man for several days” (157). This isolation from other men has positive effects on him. The novel’s narrator comments approvingly on Topper’s new persona: “Mr. Topper, in spite of his disorderly life, or rather, because of it, had become a better member of society; more self-reliant, more capable and far more interesting. He discovered in his heart the first faint whispering of pure Christianity” (177). As the narrator explains, “throughout the uneven progress of the journey, Topper was more helped than helpful” (154). His transformation occurs through reeducation by a female ghost. As Marion tells Topper that she must leave him, he tells her: “You’ve created happiness in me. You’ve awakened dreams and left memories. You’ve made me humble and you’ve made me human” (209). As she begins to fade away, Marion tells him, “It’s almost like leaving a son—my own creation” (215). The female ghost claims the power of a mother over Topper, even though he is much older and served as her financial advisor. Changed forever, Topper ruminates: “Life would never get him. He would use it differently now. He was a different man” (218). Placing Topper in numerous ridiculous situations, forcing him to have fun, Marion educates and frees him from conventional masculinity. Alone with the ghost, Topper poignantly states, “I think I could learn how to live.” In the novels and the films, Marion succeeds in getting Topper to open up and realize his feminine side. Inhaling her handkerchief in his office, Topper is too distracted by the scent to dictate the bank memo he is trying to finish. At the resort hotel, he drinks a series of “Pink Ladies,” gets in a cat fight with an older woman, throwing her fur back and forth until she calls Topper “You witch, you!” As Fowkes explains, “Slapstick humor . . . fulfills the movie’s screwball mission to dismantle traditional notions of dignity and acceptability” (163). In this case, the notions of dignity and acceptability are those of conventional masculinity. One of the primary ways that Marion liberates Topper’s feminine side is by forcing him to be in touch with his emotions and with his body. The female ghost educates the male character how to create “feminine writing.” (It is relevant here that Cixous and other French feminists claimed that men could create feminine writing.) Topper is often maudlin and stressed out over the course of the plots, and Marion tickles him to get him to laugh and enjoy

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himself. His hysterical, uncontrollable laughter is engaging, and symbolically, it represents feminine hysteria, the body taking over the controlling masculine repression. Altered forever by “the laugh of the Medusa,” Topper is not turned into stone, as in the classic myth, but liberated, freed. The films provide visual images that reinforce the gender-role reversals experienced by Topper and the female ghost. In the second film, in her last act to expose the Baron who is trying to seduce Topper’s wife, Marion appears wearing the Baron’s pajamas in his suite and then vanishes, leaving the male pajamas on the floor. The male attire signifies the female ghost’s commanding position. In a reverse of traditional gender roles, especially during the 1930s and 40s, the female ghost also takes over the control of money, serving to underscore the control of the text by the feminine. Topper the banker has to rely on Marion to supply him with money (his assets were frozen by his wife’s lawyers). The female ghost isn’t constrained by the masculine, capitalistic economy. As Fowkes explains in Topper, “a preoccupation with money and status is repeatedly mocked” (171). Marion doesn’t need a bank or a job to get cash; instead, she merely uses her supernatural powers. Topper and Marion go to the casino, where she ensures his number (13) comes up on the roulette wheel time after time. In yet another gender-role reversal, she provides him with the money he needs for a luxurious suite in the hotel. Because its ghost is a single sassy female, the final film in the series, Topper Returns, provides even more of a resistant frame to traditional gender roles and heterosexuality than Topper or Topper Takes a Trip. In this way, the third film is closer to the novel’s radicalism than the first two films, even though those movies retain more of the same characters and plot from the novel. In Topper Returns, the Kerbys are gone, replaced by a young woman murdered at a nearby estate. As in the novel and previous film, automobiles play a key part in identifying the gender struggle. With one exception in the concluding scene, only men are shown driving, from the taxi driver in the first scene to the chauffeur and Topper. The haunted car is key again, as the young women force Topper to give them a ride, and Gail Richards, the murder-victim-to-be, sits in Topper’s lap, much as Marion did. The enforced intimacy of the car seat establishes a relationship between the two characters. Gail progresses from sitting in Topper’s lap to driving herself (as an invisible ghost). Her agency is further reinforced when Topper and Gail need to take a small dingy out to a larger boat, to rescue her body. “Oh, Toppy, you’re horrible at rowing a boat,” the ghost tells him. “Get up front and let me do the rowing,” she orders him. Topper complies, with the hilarious result that the chauffeur observes with

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horror the mysterious agency of the invisible female ghost, swiftly moving the boat across the water. In addition to using the car and boat to represent feminine ascendency, the film reminds viewers of the female ghost’s physical power. No shrinking violet, Gail is determined to find out who murdered her. While she enlists Topper’s aid, she directs his actions and doesn’t shy away from physical force if necessary. Like Marion Kerby, Gail is an aggressive female ghost, who is “plenty tough.” Unencumbered by a husband or boyfriend, she climbs into Topper’s bed and tells him she won’t leave unless he agrees to return to the mansion to find her body and the person who murdered her. Gail directs the operation, boosting Topper (a short man) up the wall so he can get into the house through a window. Taller than Topper, Gail dominates from when they first meet, and she sits on his lap, towering over him. As a ghost, she appears higher than him—not only because of her superior height but also because of her ghostly ability to levitate. When he sits on a sofa, she perches on its arm, increasing her ability to look down upon him. When he gets in trouble, she locks him in the kitchen icebox. When a critical forged note is thrown into the fire, Gail grabs it out, unconcerned, as a spirit, about burning her fingers. When the officious policeman who is directing the official murder investigation annoys her, Gail slaps him hard, not once but twice. There is never any doubt in the film that the female ghost is in charge not only of Topper, but also of the investigation. The female spirit succeeds in controlling the narrative. In part, she does so by manipulating the much older Topper through her force of personality, her ghostly powers, and her ability to harness the feminine to expose the limitations of conventional gender roles. The humor that results from her wielding her powers in ways that amaze, astound, and terrify the other characters positions the spectators as knowing insiders, rooting for the female ghost to rebuke the pompous (Topper, the police, the servants), the officious and sexist (the police, Ann’s father, the servants, Mrs. Topper). The female ghost’s agency is confirmed as the plot develops: by the end of the film, Gail has recovered her body, identified and exposed the man who murdered her, and saved the lives of her friend and a taxi driver. Trying to escape, the murderer crashes the car and also becomes a ghost. Gail stands over him, slaps him, and dictates a confession that he pens. Delivering the letter to Topper, the ghost Gail Richards has not only directed the action but written it. The centrality and authority of the female ghost are emphasized in the novels and the films because she defeats male-dominated legal institutions: judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and policemen. Not only does the female ghost

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subvert the law, but she also enacts justice on her terms. In the first novel, Marion shoplifts with impunity, threatens and repels a property guard, and breaks speed limits while driving the car. Traveling to France, she behaves in the same fashion, evading gendarmes and French law with ease. Through all the Topper texts, the female ghost resists the subduing, negative, and controlling forces of the law and convention. She follows the call of Hélène Cixous for women “to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (888). In the first film, Topper, Marion and George have no respect for the serious business of the bank and the police. In fact, Marion propels Topper to have a fistfight with the crowd around their car, landing him in court before a judge. In the words of a member of Topper’s bank staff: “I never expected Mousey [Topper] to break out.” Before the judge, Topper behaves crazily, or at least appears to do so, as Marion straightens his hair and gives him advice (invisibly). Similarly, Marion encourages Topper to contravene the hotel detective who is convinced that Topper has illegally snuck a woman into his room. Marion confounds the detective by disappearing. Pompously, the detective proclaims, “I’m in charge here,” but it very clear that Marion is the one in charge. The hotel detective calls the police, but with Marion’s help, Topper eludes ten uniformed officers. Thanks to Marion’s protection, Topper escapes the punitive hand of the law. In Topper Takes a Trip, Marion completely disrupts the court proceedings to the consternation of the judge, bailiff, and lawyers, again demonstrating the female ghost’s ability to defy patriarchal law. She writes Topper a note that reads, “Dear Toppie, I’m here to see you get a fair trial, even if it’s crooked.” Lifting the paper up in the air, Marion discombobulates the bailiff, lawyers, and the judge. Overwhelmed by ghostly meddling, the judge dismisses the case. Topper faints when he realizes Marion is back, a gender-role reversal that again indicates Marion’s ability to overwhelm male bastions like bank president Topper. At the bank, Marion has the opportunity to befuddle and outwit the law, in this case the police, who converge on the bank that they think contains robbers. A phalanx of police officers, weapons drawn, approach the vault, but an invisible Marion glides past them, propelling an apologetic Topper out of the bank. A final anarchic sequence features Marion taking on the French gendarmes and the law again. Topper has been arrested and is in jail for disturbing the peace through his fight with the Baron and for throwing stones through the windows of the hotel. Marion, of course, directed Topper’s unusually aggressive behavior. He is despondent at being in jail, but prison bars are no problem for Marion. She announces, “We’re

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going to have a jail break,” and she gleefully says, “This is like opening a box of candy.” Marion frees Topper and all the other prisoners. Her anarchic disruption of law and order appears to have an effect not only in the United States, but also abroad. In the Topper texts, the female ghost is the one who sees justice served. Her feminine justice offers an alternative to patriarchal rigidity that takes into account emotion and ensures that female characters are protected and revenged. In Topper, Marion administers blows to those who offend or threaten her worldview. Antiauthoritarian, antilaw, Marion is determined to liberate Topper from his conventionally masculine straitjacket. In Topper Takes a Trip, Marion repeats her successful campaign to feminize Topper and expands that to free all the prisoners in the French jail. Finally, in Topper Returns, the masculinity of the murderer’s chosen weapons—a gun and a knife—adds to the gendered aspect of the struggle. That the murderer is finally caught and brought to justice by a female ghost points to the power of the disembodied, spiritual feminine. Blithe Spirit takes the features of the female ghost and strengthens them significantly. Like the Topper narratives, Blithe Spirit uses humor to ridicule patriarchy, employs the technique of a female “writing the body,” and educates a male character into “women’s ways of knowing.” To this pattern, Noel Coward’s play and film adaptation emphasize competition between men’s and women’s authorship. Because the texts feature two female ghosts and supportive living women characters, Blithe Spirit also promotes sisterhood as a way to combat sexism. Finally, and perhaps most important, Blithe Spirit rejects compulsory heterosexuality. While Topper doesn’t have sexual relationships with his ghostly female friends, the female spirit promotes heteronormativity. Marion helps Topper reconcile with his wife, and Gail arranges for her friend to meet a romantic partner. The Topper films and movies show how, in only a few years, the female ghost grows in strength and makes more wide-ranging gender critiques of gender roles. While the Topper films are considered classics and often appear on television, Blithe Spirit holds an even more prominent place in popular culture in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Even more well known than the Topper novel and movies, the play Blithe Spirit has been performed frequently since its 1941 premiere, not only on Broadway and London’s West End, but also in hundreds of community, college, and high school theaters. Ongoing and contemporary interest in Blithe Spirit marks the text as part of contemporary fascination with the female ghost. Blithe Spirit displays many similar qualities to the Topper series: a

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The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit

female ghost displaces a male author, claiming authorship for the feminine; the female ghost acts as an auteur/director; the texts reveal many gender-role reversals; the spirit (and mediums) displays disdain for male-dominated power; and, finally, feminist justice triumphs. Blithe Spirit expands upon the figure of the female ghost as seen in the Topper texts. One of the twentieth century’s most renowned playwrights, Noel Coward wrote several tremendously popular comedies, some of which, like Blithe Spirit, were turned into successful films. Premiering during World War II in London, Blithe Spirit focuses on Charles Condomine, an author living in the country with his second wife, Ruth. As part of his research for a novel he is writing, Condomine invites a local medium, Madame Arcati, and a local doctor and his wife, over for dinner and a séance. Apparently unintentionally, the ghost of Condomine’s first wife, Elvira, appears, and mayhem and mischief ensue. At first Ruth doesn’t believe in or see Elvira, but by the end of the play, the two female characters join forces to hound their husband. Before the play’s conclusion, Ruth, too, has died and become a ghost. In this disembodied marginal position, both women act as poltergeists, damaging the home that each presided over in life. At the end of the play, Condomine is advised to flee his home for his own safety by Madame Arcati. As he does so, his dead wives destroy the house. Despite what may sound like a rather grim plot, the play is a comedy throughout, with the battle of the sexes and the battle over Condomine expressed through physical comedy and witty repartee. The play is set before World War II, but the shadow of the war hovers over the action. As Maureen Dowd reminds us, “At the London opening, theatergoers picked their way through the rubble of the war-torn capital to see what critics called ‘a light comedy about death’” (H5). The serious context of death both inside and outside the play text exposes the constrictions and problems with conventional gender roles. This play, like the Topper novels and movies, introduces a powerful male figure who will be educated by female ghosts into understanding the power of the feminine. This version of “women’s ways of knowing,” however, is more forceful and destructive, setting the stage for later female ghosts, who terrify and even kill many other characters. The murderous side of the female ghost doesn’t appear until the end of the play. In Blithe Spirit, the main character, Charles Condomine, at first appears to be the dominant figure; witty, urbane, wealthy, and a successful author, he bursts into the living room, making his presence felt. As he and his wife discuss the evening’s dinner plans, it is clear that Charles is the director, gathering people to his home for his own

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benefit so that he may research spiritualism for a novel he is writing. Like a playwright, he assembles a cast of characters and directs the action, at least initially. Both the main plot (the arrival of Charles’ dead wife and the problem she poses) and the subplots (a young maid who has yet to be properly trained and Madame Arcati’s interactions with the Condomines) unfurl in such a way as to point to the inefficacy of the male head of household. The female characters work together, if somewhat inadvertently, to create feminine writing that resists and finally destroys this figure of male authority and authorship. As Cixous describes in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” these female characters write their bodies by becoming “at will the taker and the initiator” (880). By taking over the play’s action from the male protagonist/ author, the female characters use their bodies and supernatural powers to direct and create. By depicting the wives, the medium, and the maid, Edith, sympathetically, Coward and the film’s director, David Lean, endorse the feminine as powerful and likeable. The female characters are witty and engaging, or, at least, very amusing. The characterization of the feminine as engaging appears in the actual female ghosts, as well as in the female medium who interacts with them, an apparently incompetent young maid, and the medium’s seven-yearold girl ghost contact. The medium’s qualities reinforce the power and knowledge of the feminine. Unmarried and devoted to her work, Madame Arcati is an enthusiast and, as the play shows, successful in her work as a medium (though perhaps without great control of the spirits she calls up). She is implicitly a competitor of Charles, as she is also an author. Charles explains, “We originally met as colleagues, at one of Mrs. Wilmot’s Sunday evenings” (9). Although Charles has planned to use Madame Arcati as a character in one of his books, she ends up turning the tables on him and controlling his narrative. (She literally turns over his table while in a trance.) While Ruth originally agrees with Dr. Bradman’s diagnosis of Madame Arcati as suffering from “hysteria,” by the end of the play Madame Arcati’s powers have been triumphantly confirmed. Like Cixous’s Medusa, Madame Arcati has become beautiful, and her laughter is powerful. Like the Topper series, Blithe Spirit emphasizes a gendered struggle for authorial control and voice. Madame Arcati wonderfully embodies this gendered struggle for control of the narrative. In considering her importance, the history of mediums and spiritualism as a movement is relevant. Widespread and extremely popular, spiritualism was a strong movement from the midnineteenth century well into the 1920s, especially in the United States and Britain. The Fox sisters

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were credited with starting the movement, and most of spiritualism’s bestknown mediums were female. It was believed that women’s feminine qualities brought them closer to the unseen world. As Ann Braude explains in Radical Spirits, some of the most famous and influential mediums in the nineteenth century were also women’s rights advocates. Women mediums were not only successful financially, but they also received respect and power in ways that women, who at that time could not vote or hold the same property rights as men, did not have customarily. Just as actual mediums used their positions to promote a feminine worldview, so does the play use the spiritual world to demonstrate the power of female characters. The female characters, both living and dead, show the importance of women working together. Daphne, Madame Arcati’s control or guide on the Other side, as it is called, is a young girl not yet seven. Her capriciousness foreshadows and reinforces that of Charles’s wives, especially Elvira. And in the play’s final humorous twist, it turns out that Edith, whom Charles had planned to keep as a servant, is an unconscious medium who had materialized his wives into the house. Edith refers to him as “the master,” but the play shows that Edith’s psychic power completely undercuts Charles’s title of household authority. The action in both the play and film versions stems from the female characters with supernatural powers. After almost two thousand performances, Blithe Spirit was successful enough to merit a film adaptation. The film closely follows the play script, with only a few minor changes and one major alteration, the conclusion. Instead of running away from his beautiful home in Kent, Charles is inveigled and assisted in packing and leaving the house by his ghostly wives. But their interest is hardly benevolent, as his car has been sabotaged (as it was when Ruth died in a car crash). The two female ghosts sit side by side on a stone bridge and watch Charles’s car careen down a winding road. Seconds later, a gray and ghostly Charles suddenly appears between them on the bridge. He has not escaped, and his ghost wives have had the last laugh. In an interview on the Blithe Spirit DVD, Barry Day suggests that the ending was changed to suit the movie censor, who did not approve of Charles escaping from his bad behavior. But as I will show, the ending fits the play’s theme of feminine power and furthermore appropriately involves the film’s use of motor vehicles and gender in way that would be impracticable for a stage play. Moving scenes into a motor vehicle addresses the play’s commentary on gender roles. As in the Topper films, cars and driving are associated with male dominance. In every instance save one, Charles is in the driver’s seat, and at no point is he a passenger. As he drives, Charles’s speeches emphasize his

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need to be in control. Even Charles’s friends and séance guests, Dr. Bradman and his wife, play a part in establishing the automobile as a masculine site of control. In the first appearance of a car, we see Dr. Bradman driving to the Condomines’ house, while Mrs. Bradman solicitously lights her husband’s cigarette. Emphasizing his putative control of his wives and the narrative, most of the visible driving is done by Charles. While Ruth takes the car twice, once to her death, we only see her get into and out of the car. Charles, by contrast, has long scenes of dialogue while he drives the automobile. These sequences show Charles as decisive and in charge. In the next sequence, he drives Elvira back from a nearby town as Ruth exits Madame Arcati’s cottage. Later in the film, Charles takes the wheel, this time to drive all three women (Elvira, Ruth, and Madame Arcati) back to his house. Ruth and Elvira sit in the rumble seat, disgruntled and dejected, with their arms crossed and grimacing, the stormy weather reflecting their out-of-sorts spirits. In his final drive, Charles again uses a motor vehicle to assert his mastery. As he tells his ghost wives that he is going a long way away, where they will be unable to follow, they assist him by materializing two suitcases, his hat, and his coat. They even open the door and start the engine for him. But, of course, this is Charles’s final drive, for the car careens out of control, sabotaged by the women. The female ghosts sit together amicably on the bridge, as the automobile crashes, and Charles lands between them on the bridge, a ghost now himself and not in the driver’s seat. It is wryly appropriate, then, that Charles’s masculine command of the car results in his death, as arranged by the female ghosts. His demise underscores the ineffectuality of technology and man-made machines against the feminine. This pattern reinforces the historical context in which the play was written and first produced. As Penny Farfan explains, modern drama, including Coward’s work, draws on historical changes in sexual identity. “The emergence of modern drama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century,” she contends, “was integrally linked to the development of modern sexual identities, and Noel Coward’s career was at once shaped by and definitive of this larger historical development” (677). While Farfan focuses her argument on the play Private Lives, what she describes applies equally well to Blithe Spirit. Coward’s play, she argues, “pass[es] as light entertainment . . . [but] is not as straightforward clear-cut and unambiguous in its representation of gender and sexuality as it might initially and superficially seem” (678). In part, Blithe Spirit resists the traditional narrative of comedy, which, as Farfan details, has “been premised

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The Comedic Female Ghost: Topper and Blithe Spirit

The husband, now also a ghost, bracketed by Elvira and Ruth. Blithe Spirit.

upon a narrative drive toward reproductive heterosexual union and social continuity” and has “typically had little tolerance for non-compliance with that drive” (680). Blithe Spirit’s female ghosts resist the traditional comedic plot, embodying instead a feminist model that Susan Carlson describes: “The status quo is disrupted, and in the upheaval of role reversals the women characters acquire uncharacteristic dominance” (17, cited in Farfan note 4). While the female ghosts and mediums carry the majority of the assertive feminist action, even Violet Bradman, Dr. Bradman’s wife, fits into the gender schism between men and women. Dr. Bradman complains that his wife is always interrupting him (see Anderson for an overview of studies that show this idea as a communication misperception). Elvira and Ruth do more than interrupt Charles’s conversation: they disrupt and dismantle his illusion of male dominance and destroy his comfortable domesticity. The dialogue makes his dependence on them quite clear. Ruth reminds him, as they discuss Edith, “I have to run the house and you don’t” (33). At the end of the play, Elvira expostulates to Charles: “We’ve waited on you hand and foot—haven’t we, Ruth? You’re exceedingly selfish” (76). The female ghosts’ sisterly solidarity doubles the power of the female ghost as seen in the Topper narratives.

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Emphasizing the male protagonist’s sexism highlights and justifies the female ghosts’ actions against him. Charles’s authoritarian nature and dismissive, oppressive attitude toward women is displayed humorously, but underneath, he repeats misogynistic attitudes toward women of all classes. He tries throughout the play to assert his dominance, but the actions of the female characters, from the maid to his wives, reveal his lack of control. The maid who was Edith’s predecessor left suddenly due to pregnancy, and in one of the few lines noted to be delivered “seriously,” he tells Ruth, “We must keep Edith in the house more” (2). After Elvira appears as a ghost, an angry Ruth berates him at breakfast. Irritated, Charles yells, “Women! My God what I think of women!” Ruth responds, “Your view of women is academic to say the least of it. Just because you have always been dominated by them, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you know anything about them” (35). While Charles asserts, “I’ve never been dominated by anyone,” Ruth contradicts his statement through her actions and her words. Crossing the room while he remains seated emphasizes Ruth’s authority, as she tells him: “You were hag-ridden by your mother until you were twenty-three, then you got into the clutches of that awful Mrs. Whatever-her-name was” (35). In a pattern seen in other female ghost stories, Ruth and Elvira take control of Condomine’s home. Trapped by the domestic, they are determined to destroy it and its master, Condomine. To escape his vengeful dead wives, Charles has to abandon his home. The interior space is completely destroyed by his irascible ghost wives; in the most recent London production, they literally brought the roof down, after breaking vases and violently removing paintings from the wall and dashing them to the ground. The complete destruction of the domestic space provides a visual sign of the female ghosts’ resistance to traditional femininity. At least by the play’s conclusion, the male protagonist has learned to respect female power and knowledge. Like Topper, Condomine has been educated in an alternative feminine knowledge, “women’s ways of knowing.” From being a skeptic, he has had a conversion experience, sagely predicted by Madame Arcati on the night of the séance: “I am quite used to skeptics,” she says. “They generally turn out to be the most vulnerable and receptive in the long run” (16). Having planned to exploit her for his book, Charles is reduced to having to consult Madame Arcati as to how to escape his ghost wives. He has to listen to her tell him, “I must say, if you will excuse my bluntness, that you are a damned fool, Mr. Condomine” (65). The play’s criticism of compulsory heterosexuality is unambiguous. While his wives married for love, their romances are disastrous. The play undercuts

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popular culture representations of romance through the ironic use of the Irving Berlin song “Always.” A lovely warble by a female singer, “Always” has lyrics of undying love: “I will be loving you, always” is its refrain. Madame Arcati tells her audience that she needs music for the séance, and she selects “Always” from a stack of records. Charles objects, without giving a reason and then concedes, telling Madame Arcati, “Have it your own way.” Only later do we find out that the song was Elvira’s favorite. Edith, who is also fond of the song, sings it to banish the female ghosts at the play’s conclusion. Warbling the lyrics in a quavering voice, Edith sings: “I’ll be loving you, always. With a love that’s true, always. When things you plan, need a helping hand, I will understand . . . always.” By the end, Charles is weary of the ghosts, and the last thing he wants is for them to always be around. As the film’s surtitles ironically comment, the fairy tale of heterosexual marriage cannot be sustained. The saccharin lyrics of everlasting love contrast with the male protagonist’s weariness of both of his wives. The play hints at the women’s potential sisterhood from the beginning, suggesting they have more in common with each other than with their husband. As Ruth describes Charles’s outlook as “supercilious,” he tells her, “That’s exactly what Elvira used to say” (5). Both Ruth and Elvira are attractive, spirited, and well-dressed young women. The most recent London production emphasizes their parallels, especially after Ruth dies, with similar clothing, lipstick, and red fingernails. From initially bickering and having to rely on Charles’s “modified interpreting” of their verbal exchanges, the women begin to support each other and work together. When he taunts them that he is leaving the home for good, they attack Charles verbally, each riffing off the other’s language. An ironic fairy tale introduction to the movie furthers the play’s critique of conventional heterosexuality. With its opening text, the movie comments on the idea of romantic love. A white castle appears, with flags flying from the towers, framed with vines, flowers, birds, and animals, real and imaginary. Deer, a black cat, a dragon, a unicorn, and diverse birds contain these words: “When we are young / We read and believe / The most Fantastic Things / When we grow older and wiser / We learn, with perhaps a little regret / That these things can never be.” The screen goes dark, as Coward states theatrically: “We are quite, quite, wrong.” An exterior of a beautiful English house appears in bright sunshine, as Coward’s voice continues: “Once upon a time, there was a charming country house, in which lived a very happily married couple.” The scene shifts to an interior, with a maid scurrying up a grand staircase. The music box tune

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playing, the stylized medieval images, and Coward’s words an intonation alert the viewer that this pretty picture will soon be punctured. Even before viewers meet the female ghosts, they have been introduced to the idea that heteronormativity is an unrealistic fantasy. This explicit commentary through surtitles is reinforced by the film’s visual representation of gender differences. As in the movie versions of Topper, the film adaptation of Blithe Spirit uses the language of film economically to create the gender tensions. The film opens with the couple discussing the evening’s coming séance in their bedroom suite. This opening reinforces the play’s sense of a sexual farce, as well as the representation of the gender codes of masculinity and femininity. We watch Charles and Ruth dress, with the gender disparity clear. Ruth takes longer getting ready, examining herself in a hand mirror and a larger triptych mirror at her dressing table. First she carefully applies mascara, then lotion. Holding the hand mirror, she applies powder to her face and then slowly brushes her hair. She carefully makes up her face, using the mirror to examine and discipline herself. In the play, she looks at herself in a mirror over the mantelpiece, so it is the same action, but one intensified by the more extensive makeup session in the film. By comparison, Charles’s activity is much simpler. Without examining himself at all, he puts on his clothes. Charles isn’t shown getting into his pants or shirt, but we see him put on his shoes, tie, suspenders, and jacket. He is dressed more quickly than Ruth, who needs his help to zip up her dress. This intimate scene allows them to discuss the evening’s schedule, but it also establishes Ruth’s feminine construction in contrast to Charles’s more self-assured, less constructed masculine self. This difference is reinforced by his striding about their bedroom suite while Ruth remains seated in front of all her mirrors. But the film also shows Charles putting his hand through Elvira’s arm and a living Ruth clambering through ghostly Elvira as she sits on the staircase. Despite Charles’s palpable body, he will be buffeted by the insubstantial female ghosts. The visual expanse and special effects of film also allow the director to reinforce the connections between Elvira and Ruth, especially after Ruth’s death. These visual similarities further clarify the power of the feminine, even after the female body is gone. The play also uses costume to depict them as ghosts: they are dressed in off-white or gray, with pale makeup and bright red lipstick. While the living Ruth changes clothes throughout the day, the female ghosts leave such self-fashioning behind. Clothes and hair are unchanged and simplified. The cinematography and direction reinforce the sisterhood of Charles’s wives, even a visual twinning of Elvira and Ruth. Their

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connection is especially noted after Ruth becomes a ghost. Camera angles allow for overview of Ruth and Elvira lying side by side on the sofa, head to foot. They sit side by side in the rumble seat of the car. Evenly matched in size, the women’s hair also matches after death, Ruth’s hair turning a platinum blonde like Elvira’s. In shot after shot, the women sit side by side, and Charles perches between them. Before death, they line up: Charles, Ruth, with Elvira behind Ruth. (These angles wouldn’t work for the stage, due to the need to project and have the actors’ faces visible.) Film, then, uses specific generic features to underscore the bond between the two women, based on their shared feminine perspective. Madame Arcati’s presence literally looms larger in the film than in the play. A plum role, as evidenced by all the stars who have played the character, the role of the medium involves a great deal of physical acting and dramatics. In the film, the part is played by Margaret Rutherford, who also originated the role on stage. Appropriately enough, the actress herself believed in spiritualism and had to be persuaded that the play was sympathetic to spiritualism before she agreed to take the part. According to Barry Day, she said of the play, “I don’t see it as a comedy. I think it is nearer to a tragedy” (Interview DVD). Climbing on ladders, wildly gesticulating, and speaking grandiosely, Madame Arcati’s ideas about the afterlife are proven correct, and the men in the play and film would do well to heed her advice. Before the séance begins, director Lean has the light cast a gigantic dark shadow of Madame Arcati on the wall, looming and ominous. The shadow provides a visual clue that the text has a very serious element to it. The Blithe Spirit play and film and the novel and film versions of Topper convey just as effectively as the more typical malignant female ghosts that feminine power is to be taken seriously. As the two sets of narratives reveal, the female ghost grows in strength over time, both within the texts and across genres. In all the texts, the female ghost directs the action, enacts gender-role reversals, and destabilizes patriarchal society. That the female spirit can accomplish so much while at the same time engaging and amusing the audience only strengthens her impact. As feminist theorists of humor note, humor wielded by female characters reinforces their privileged insight, and as the audience laughs at the ridiculous situations, we also laugh at, and undermine, the hidebound gender conventions being spoofed. Quite seriously, the female ghosts have written their feminine bodies, showing the power, as Cixous describes it, of “the unconscious, that other limitless country is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffman would say fairies” (880). Substitute “ghosts” for fairies, and you have an apt synopsis of the comedic female ghost.

Chapter two

The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in England The Woman in Black The comedic female ghosts discussed in chapter 1 do not have children; their frivolity depends on their autonomy and freedom from child-bearing and child-rearing. As it does for a majority of women, motherhood defines these characters’ lives. Motherhood also provides a cause for their afterlife existence. If the comedic female ghosts have as their progenitor a reimagined Medusa, the horrific female ghost evokes the Medusa as an abject figure of a mother, also reconsidered. The maternal female ghost is engaged in a deadly struggle for the control of children. She wants to save them from patriarchal society, but in so doing, the children die. A sighting of “the Woman in Black” inevitably prefigures the tragic death of a child. Through her silent presence, she underscores the silencing of working-class women/mothers. Her reproductive power, and her ability to take children away from their parents creates profound terror. The popularity of the evil maternal female ghost suggests that this contradictory figure reveals the issues created by mothering in a patriarchal world. This chapter focuses on one of the most popular of maternal female ghosts, the Woman in Black. Based on an English novella by writer Susan Hill, the play The Woman in Black is the second-longest-running play in the West End theater district in London (comparable to New York’s Broadway). The Woman in Black’s history of genre-shifting, moving from a novella to a play and, most recently, into a commercially successful film, reveals the flexibility and ongoing appeal of the malevolent female ghost. The narrative’s widespread popularity and its continued place in popular culture over four decades, in three different genres, attest to its success in presenting the threat posed to patriarchal society by the repressed feminine. Because the Woman in Black affects and kills the male offspring of a lawyer, a representative of male authority, and the son of a writer/actor/director/performer, she challenges two critical features of patriarchy: the law and the word. Neither confines her nor limits her power. While the plot’s overt warning is to fear

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and avoid ghosts, the underlying message is that the repressed feminine cannot be completely contained. From this lesson emerges the narrative’s horror, expressed through the story of a malevolent female ghost, who, having lost her child, terrorizes a village. Every time the Woman in Black is seen, a child dies in horrible and mysterious circumstances. This outcome is depicted as revenge for the female ghost’s mistreatment when she was a living single mother. The novella, play, and film are set around the beginning of the twentieth century. While the comedic female ghost draws on the tradition of the New Woman and the flapper, these English texts evoke a murky Victorianism. The Woman in Black, the source novella, was published in 1983, and its plot reflects 1980s feminist ideas about motherhood, particularly those of French feminists who had been recently translated into English. While the previous chapter employed Cixous’s revision of the Medusa to analyze the comedic female ghost’s resistance to patriarchy, the maternal female ghost has a broader elucidation, that of the culturally abject. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (translated in 1982), this chapter explores the ways that the maternal female ghost can be understood as standing outside of patriarchal culture. While Kristeva, a philosopher, writes in abstraction about the maternal female body, the writer Hill has created an “embodiment” of the concept. Hill’s Woman in Black enacts the reversal of the abject, as it defies the exclusion and marginalization of the feminine. In closely following the source text, the play and film reenact the plot, in which a female ghost disrupts patriarchy and writes her body by commandeering authorship of the narrative. Of critical importance is the fact that this female ghost’s body is maternal. Kristeva locates the psychoanalytic experience of the abject in the weaning child’s rejection of the maternal body. The infant’s identification with and need for the mother’s body lead to both the eroticization and the horrification of the female body. As Kelly Oliver explains, “Kristeva claims that the social is set up against the feminine, specifically the maternal. Kristeva’s analysis of the abject feminine as being part of horror aptly fits this ghost story, in which an unwed mother is repressed and denied her maternal role. The Woman in Black is ‘The Woman,’ and her malevolent haunting results from her pariah status as an unwed mother” (xx). The play adaptation, written by Stephen Mallatratt, became an immediate sensation, moved to the West End, and has been a mainstay of the British theater scene ever since. The novella and play have been a mainstay for English school children, and an authorized “Education Pack” devises activities for a

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variety of school disciplines. Capitalizing on the play’s popularity, a successful British film appeared in 2012, with a sequel featuring little of the original plot, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, following in 2014. (Because the sequel differs substantially from the other texts, it is not included in this chapter.) In all three versions of The Woman in Black, the terrifying maternal ghost wrests authorship from the masculine. In doing so, the female ghost follows the trajectory described by Belenky, of moving from voicelessness to accepting the self as an authority/author. At the same time, the Woman in Black uses her supernatural powers to school male characters. This process is the same as that executed by the comedic female ghost, but with a difference. The Woman in Black terrifies, rather than charms or tricks her male opponents into seeing the world from an alternative, feminine perspective. Another important difference in the terrifying female ghost is her maternal side, which is accompanied by her desperate, often deadly struggle for the control of children. These aspects represent a significant expansion of the female ghost’s powers. Unlike a detective story, in which justice is served and social order reinscribed, a ghost story like The Woman in Black does not allow the male storyteller to succeed. Instead, his every effort to control a narrative is frustrated. Despite the male narrator’s resistance, and the activities of other male characters who attempt to eradicate her malign presence, the ghostly Woman in Black remains visible, powerful, and triumphant. While this apparition is compelling, it is the stage play that most fully and concretely develops the female ghost’s power. In contrast to the usual lament about adaptations being frustratingly inadequate versions, in this case the play most vividly realizes the figure of the Woman in Black of all three versions. However, reading the novella and film in relation to the play illuminates the ways that different genres present the resistant qualities of the abject feminine. Representing the feminine as it exists in society, the Woman in Black cannot overturn but does disrupt the patriarchal society that confined her in life. The story told by the novella, play, and film is her story, and the ghost wrestles for authorship by refusing to let the male narrator re-create her as he desires. Exemplifying the conundrum of female authorship in a patriarchal society, this female ghost is both present and absent. Kristeva’s concept of the abject, an alternative feminine construct against which the dominant male-oriented society defines itself, provides a key to the Woman in Black’s terrifying appeal. The abject is the reviled object which society casts out. In the conventional binary of masculine/feminine, the abject is the uncontrollable, hysterical, destructive, and irrational feminine. For Kristeva, the maternal female body

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embodies the abject. The Woman in Black’s power lies in her ability to terrify while resisting traditional framing of the feminine. While there is little scholarship on The Woman in Black, Val Scullion published an insightful essay about gender in the play and novella, and, more recently, Kelly Jones deals with the play in a perceptive article about contemporary ghost plays and authorship. Focusing more sharply on the figure of the female ghost, as this chapter does, expands and complicates what Jones has to say about this play’s anxiety of authorship and what this reveals about the play’s representation and interrogation of the abject. Gender makes a difference in the representation of the apparition and female authorship. As the title The Woman in Black suggests, the dominant figure in the play is the female ghost. Her appellation denies her specificity at the same time that it suggests her role as a representative for the feminine generally. Her shadowy, liminal role is underscored by the absence of a credit for the actress who plays the Woman in Black on the stage. While we do learn the Woman in Black’s actual name, the persistent use of the descriptive phrase “the Woman in Black” and characters’ unwillingness to utter her given name confirm her remarkable power and her function as a version of abject but powerful femininity. The horror in this ghost story emerges from the texts’ acknowledging the powerful female ghost who defies the gender and class oppression that kept her powerless in life. The female spirit remains outside of the control of patriarchal law and order, but the laws and customs that kept a living unmarried woman from her child have no effect on her as the ghostly Woman in Black. The character points to the arbitrariness and vulnerability of patriarchy’s reliance on rationality and legality. This point is emphasized in the film version when a constable (a representative of the law) sputters and cannot even name her, as another young child affected by the wraith dies in his office. Despite adding a benevolent married maternal ghost (a woman in white), the film’s faithfulness to the Woman in Black’s story emphasizes the power of the excluded feminine and the inherent instability of masculine law and order. The same plot appears in all three versions, with a frame narrative separating the novel and play from the film. A deceptively simple ghost story, The Woman in Black focuses on an older man’s recounting of a devastating encounter with a female spirit that occurred when he was a young man. Following the traditional English Christmas Eve pastime of telling ghost stories, a family turns to their stepfather, Arthur Kipps, the narrator, to tell a story. He refuses and instead writes down his experience. A skeptic before

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his encounter with the Woman in Black, like Charles Condomine in Blithe Spirit, Kipps is initially contemptuous of the idea of a female ghost, seeing it as part of a backward, rural community’s superstition. His story, then, is a conversion narrative and a cautionary tale. By writing the story, Kipps tries to appropriate the Woman in Black’s narrative, with the express purpose of exorcising her. His story attempts authorial cooption, but the Woman in Black resists his efforts at control. The story of the haunting (the same in all versions) is that a young solicitor, Kipps, is sent to a remote village to oversee the closing of the estate of Mrs. Drablow, a wealthy elderly woman. Mrs. Drablow had lived in a large mansion, isolated from the village by a tidal marsh. Sixty years before, Mrs. Drablow’s sister, Jennet Humfrye, had been forced to give up custody of her infant son to her respectable, married sister. The child died at a young age in the marsh and then Humfrye herself died and returned as a ghost. That plot alone would be horrible enough, but the Woman in Black also haunts and brings death to the beloved children of the male characters unlucky enough to cross her path. Kipps does not heed the locals’ veiled warnings about an evil female ghost haunting the house. Sent by his law firm to the decaying mansion, Arthur Kipps does not realize at first that the Woman in Black is an apparition; his worldview cannot comprehend the supernatural. The alternative worldview discussed in Women’s Ways of Knowing is relevant here. Like the real women Belenky and her coauthors discuss, the Woman in Black has female experiences and a woman’s point of view antithetical to a solicitor’s legalistic, rational world. “Women’s ways of knowing” emphasize an awareness of self and the necessity of moving on from a position of voicelessness. The Woman in Black, living, had trouble asserting herself as an authority. But in her ghostly life, she valorizes subjective knowledge and herself as an authority. The female ghost’s power is strong enough to overcome the apparatus of patriarchal language and law. Kipps and the other male figures represent patriarchal knowledge through their legal authority and mastery of written documents. Sent there to review and destroy all documents, Kipps’s job as a solicitor is to eradicate her by destroying the record of her life. The Woman in Black never speaks directly; her story is told through the paperwork that Kipps wearily examines and through her desperate, violent effect on the living. In his own role as father and stepfather, Kipps also represents the legal power that fathers rather than mothers hold over offspring. As feminist historian Natalie McKnight affirms, “[f]or much of the nineteenth century

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fathers [in England] had primary legal rights to their children” (6). While alive, Humfrye was at the mercy of a society that denied her identity and agency as an unwed mother. She was never permitted to acknowledge her child, serving instead as a nursemaid to the boy. Moved to a working-class position, Humfrye lost her child. The legal records and letters reveal that her sister’s husband had the means and authority to adopt the child. As the wife of a wealthy, propertied man, Alice Drablow had access to class privilege denied her unmarried sister. Class here joins with gender to create the Woman in Black’s exclusion. Both the living and the ghostly Jennet Humfrye embody the maternal abject; she exists on the margins, impoverished, despised, and denied her identity as a mother. Watching and unable to intervene when the child tragically drowned, Jennet Humfyre never recovered from the tragedy and wasted away, terrifying the village even when she was alive with her pale face and emaciated body clothed in black mourning. But in her supernatural state, the Woman in Black has powers that eventually triumph over gender inequities and class privilege. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes the abject as not the unclean or polluting, but rather that which “questions borders and threatens identity” (Oliver 225). This perspective aptly characterizes the Woman in Black, whose ghostly existence breaks down the boundaries between death and life, masculine notions of individuality and subjectivity, and the community and the individual in ways that are destructive and horrifying, especially to the male characters. This female ghost’s specific quality of being outside—of patriarchal society, life, individuation—makes her representative of the feminine excluded from society. As a ghost, she is treated by the villagers as she was in life. As Kristeva explains, the abject is “on the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me” (Oliver 230). They attempt to deny her existence by never speaking her name or acknowledging her. The villagers refuse to tell her story, placing Kipps in danger and forcing him to learn her history from old documents. The villagers also decline to go out to the house she haunts, but she haunts them in the village, appearing in the cemetery (novella and play); hovering behind the narrator (in all three versions); and in their homes and workplaces, behind locked doors (novella, play, and film). She appears abruptly and without reason, and her appearances are all the more disturbing because of their unpredictability. Denied the power of words, law, and language, the female ghost demonstrates that the preverbal feminine discourse, her physical appearance alone, can be horribly destructive and disruptive.

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The Woman in Black acts out the part of the abject by threatening the characters within the texts and their readers and viewers. In the novella and play, the ghost appears in London to terrify Kipps and his family. In the play and film, she malevolently turns her direct gaze to the audience in the twenty-first century, warning viewers of her malign power in the here and now. Her anger and rage exist for centuries, creating horror. Kristeva sees the differentiation, the separation between mother and child, as a cause of such archetypal terror. “The abject confronts us . . . within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release hold of the maternal entity, even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language . . . The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (and being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm” (Oliver 239). The Woman in Black can be read in this light as representing the terror that all children (but especially male children) experience, the psychological necessity of separating physically and emotionally from the mother. The Woman in Black’s power to disrupt appears in numerous instances in all three versions, where male characters are physically overcome by her presence. While the novella’s narrator describes the male characters’ collapse, the play and film audiences see the male characters blanche, shiver, and even fall to the ground. The solicitors strive to make an orderly closure of the estate of the Woman in Black’s sister, but they cannot do so. When Kipps mentions to the local solicitor, Mr. Jerome, that he has seen a woman dressed in black with a wasted face, the effect is immediate and terrible: “Mr. Jerome looked frozen, pale, his throat moving as if he was unable to utter” (Hill 52). As Kipps points to where the Woman in Black was standing, Jerome responds by appearing “about to faint, or collapse with some kind of seizure” (52). When Kipps suggests that he leave Jerome to seek medical help for him, Jerome “almost shrieked” a negative, due to his fear of being left alone. Jerome’s extreme, nonverbal and physical response to the mere mention of the Woman in Black provides graphic testimony to her power over male characters. Gradually Kipps, too, falls under the Woman in Black’s aura and realizes she manifests a “desperate, yearning malevolence” (65). Alone in the ghost’s former abode, Kipps experiences a similar incapacitation: “[M]y knees began to tremble and my flesh to creep, then to turn cold as snow . . . [M]y heart . . . gave a great lurch” (65–66). Unable to do his work, he is no longer in control of his life or even his body. These vivid descriptions of the novel are performed in the play and film, as the actors playing Jerome and Kipps display horror on their faces, and their bodies crumple to the stage floor. These scenes evoke Topper’s more playful education in “writing the body,”

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Kipps, overcome by the emotions of the female ghost. Photograph by Tristram Kenton. By permission of P.W. Productions.

but where the comedic ghost’s power is welcomed by the male character, the men in The Woman in Black are devastated by her power over the body. The gender conflict between male characters and the Woman in Black shows that the feminine abject will always overpower the masculine. Her mobility, contrasting strikingly with the male characters’ paralysis, is a central performative feature. Her ability to appear in the isolated house, in the town, and at the graveyard ironically reverses the Woman in Black’s silence before society and law when she was alive. Audiences are startled and even shriek when she appears suddenly and without warning: behind Kipps, in a window, on the edge of the stage, in the audience in the theater, in the back of the frame in the film. Her appearances disrupt the narrative flow and are startling and disturbing because they interrupt his viewpoint, his actions, and, most significantly, his control of the story. The play provides the most graphic version of reaction; a live, usually very expressive audience (many children on school trips) vents surprise with screams. The reader and the audience have a welcome distance from the Woman in Black, but seeing the negative impact on Kipps, we are warned to respect the feminine. A theater audience who sees the Woman in Black can remain safely in seats, grab a friend’s hand, close eyes in group solidarity. In contrast, the character Kipps is alone, and he is overwhelmed and collapses. He sees

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the Woman in Black in various places around the village and in the house, culminating in a terrifying encounter at the mansion’s nursery. He falls desperately ill, and suffers nightmares for several days. After he recovers, Kipps leaves for London, but he is fated to see the Woman in Black one more time, years later, at a park with his son and wife. As it has for so many others, his son’s (and wife’s) death follows, in a pony trap accident in the park. The horrified Kipps looks on, unable to help. In the concluding words of the novella and penultimate speech in the play, he says, “I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had had her revenge” (Hill 160; Mallatratt 50). Reenacting her tragedy, the male character experiences the Woman in Black’s despair. Through his account, the audience also vicariously suffers. The Woman in Black controls the story and resists the male characters’ attempt to achieve narrative closure by shutting down the estate and by banishing the ghost. By destabilizing plot and characters, especially those who challenge her control of the narrative, the Woman in Black asserts her control and the inability of the male upper middle-class characters to dominate her. Without words of her own, only uttering sounds, the character is primal, animalistic even. In her lack of language, the maternal female ghost seems beyond mankind, beyond the boundaries of argument and conventional reason. Her power emanates from a raw and powerful energy that is nonrational and, from a masculine perspective, nonhuman. Again, the Woman in Black personifies the abject in this feature of being nonhuman. “The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal” (Oliver 239), explains Kristeva. Her words aptly characterize the terrifying female ghost. The female apparition is all the more menacing because her negative emotion is too strong to be put into words. Instead, Kipps feels what she feels and then he and the other male characters experience her rage, which then produces their terror. The power and strength of the female ghost’s frustrated maternal potential typify the inefficacy of patriarchal language to express the maternal. As Kristeva describes it, “the maternal anguish . . . [is] unable to be satiated within the encompassing symbolic” (qtd. in Oliver 239). There are no words powerful enough to represent the Woman in Black’s violent “mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost” (241). The Woman in Black, then, represents not only a patriarchal ethos that denied unmarried women the right to be mothers but also, more generally, the exiled, outsider status of the maternal feminine in patriarchal society. Despite the male characters’ initial belittlement of her preverbal feminine power, they all eventually accede to the Woman in Black’s ability to disrupt

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normal life. In her total absorption in pure emotion, she is not only beyond their control but also able to control living men. For example, in the novella, when Kipps enters the nursery where the ghost has been, he is overcome. “I felt I was a small boy again,” he explains. He is unable to rationalize his experience: “I tried desperately to provide a rational explanation I had been so aware of . . . at that moment I began to doubt my own reality” (Hill 125). Again, these words can be read as directions to the actor, who, without special effects on the play, must use his facial expressions and body to convey his terror. Instead of asserting masculine order and logic, Kipps is overwhelmed by the Woman in Black’s loss: “I felt not fear, not horror, but an overwhelming grief and sadness, a sense of loss and bereavement, a distress mingled with utter despair.” These devastating emotions, he explains, “all but broke me. . . . [I]t was as though I had, for the time I was in the room [the nursery] become another person, or at least experienced the emotions that belong to another” (128). This forced empathy is short-lived, but it provides another example of the Woman in Black’s power over male characters. It is the power of the abject feminine. For a time, she is able to cause male characters to experience the pain that she suffered and in so doing wrests an acknowledgment of the injustice she experienced when alive. As “the Woman,” she also symbolically represents all women’s oppression. By forcing others to experience her alienation, she causes others to feel the suffering created by repressing the feminine. Although she never speaks, the Woman in Black dominates the texts. She reflects a feminine power of the preverbal, a Medusan power to paralyze through fear, as described by Hélène Cixous’s call for women to write their bodies. To call the play, as one reviewer did, a “two-handed piece [a play performed by two actors],” ignores the importance of the title character, the Woman in Black. This reviewer seems to fall into the error of the characters, in neglecting, at least at initially, the importance of the feminine. Val Scullion suggests that the Woman in Black “terrifies readers because we recognize the potential for similarly barbaric behavior in ourselves” (302). I agree, but there is more to the plot’s moral than that it is “sobering,” as Scullion says. Instead, all three texts can be read as the triumph of the repressed feminine, a warning not merely of the dangers of the barbarity within all, but more specifically, the dangers of excluding and repressing the feminine at all. Marginalized, the feminine uses that marginalization to commandeer the narrative. The different genres present the female ghost’s command of the text in a manner specific to each form. The novella, play, and film use different generic features to create an understanding of the oppressed and alienated

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mother-ghost. In the novella, the reader identifies with the narrator’s strong emotions and sense of loss. In the play, the audience watches the deterioration of the actor playing Kipps, and many react viscerally as the actress playing the Woman in Black glides through the audience. In the film, we see and hear the ghost’s guttural moans of sadness and see her dead child. In the novella, Kipps’s narrative makes clear that his encounter with the Woman in Black has led to his being sadder and wiser, especially more so than his stepfamily, who make light of ghosts. Susan Hill uses the setting in the countryside and descriptive language to convey the narrator’s sadness. In the play, the audience is included in the horror and the marginalization of the ghost. We see her when the actors cannot. And in the film, it is only by dying himself that the narrator escapes the repressed feminine, by joining it. While the father and son are killed by a train because of the Woman in Black, the visuals show a happy father and son; their deaths are not tragic to them. They join his dead wife and walk off out of the living world. Like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, or Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, The Woman in Black’s plot implies that the only escape from a class- and gender-bound society is death. In the film, a harassed and lonely single father, Kipps yearns for his wife and is unconcerned about his career and social advancement. Even though his death is an extreme solution, it provides Kipps with an escape from his miserable life. By killing both Kipps’s son and Kipps himself, the film’s ending makes a radical critique of patriarchal society. This cinematic ending suggests how deeply the repression of the feminine impacts society. As all three versions of the story make clear, however, there is an address to the readers and audiences. This aspect is redoubled by the choices made by play and film scripts and the respective directors to involve the audience in seeing the Woman in Black. The different texts emphasize the male character’s defeat in genre-specific ways. In the play, the Woman in Black appears, unbeknownst to the actors, but in the audience’s sight. Her sudden appearances evoke Kristeva’s description of the abject: “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness” (Oliver 230). Her appearance is threatening and disrupts the characters’ fantasy within the play that this story of a malevolent female ghost is only a performance. Her appearance breaks their narrative, as she breaks down the fourth wall. This theatrical feature enhances the emphasis on the Woman in Black’s power, and it is a feature generic to the stage play; novella and film do not have a fourth wall. Scullion’s analysis focuses primarily on how Hill’s novella is amplified by the play: “In addition to the final ‘silencing’ of the terrorized Kipps by the ghost of the woman in black, his authority as a male narrator is also

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undermined throughout the novel[la] by its dialogic structure” (297). Adding a frame that brings the Woman in Black into the present expands her power to include the audience. The novella does not move back to the original framing device and time, when Kipps is an elderly man, as the play does. This use of flashbacks reinforces the Woman in Black’s ability over time and space: “The particular horror of The Woman in Black is that the ghost is still not laid to rest. In the last pages she is still at large, having ranged freely across two centuries unbound by geographical constraints and driven to bring misery to families again and again” (Scullion 298). In the play and the film, by implication the audience, who have also now seen the Woman in Black, should also fear for their children’s lives. Merely seeing her, as the narratives make clear, “whenever she has been seen . . . however briefly, and whoever by, there has been one sure and certain result. . . . In some violent or dreadful circumstance, a child has died” (Hill 149; Mallatratt 47–48; film). Her direct gaze at the viewer, in spotlight on stage and in extreme close-up in the film, reveals the gaze of the Medusa, threatening us. While all three texts emphasize the cost of ignoring the abject feminine, the novella and play, however, emphasize a metafictional and metadramatic frame that places the conflict in sharper relief. These gendered conflicts play out in the context of contested authorship. In the novella, Kipps is asked to tell his story at the family gathering; he refuses and walks out into the countryside, eventually deciding he will communicate his tale in writing. His stated hope: “[T]o banish an old ghost that continues its hauntings is to exorcise it. . . . I should tell my tale. . . . I would write my own ghost story. Then perhaps I should finally be free of it” (Hill 22; Mallatratt 6). His stated desire, then, is to take over the Woman in Black’s story and use the narrative to expunge her power. In the play, the frame presents the story as Kipps’s tale but also shaped by his hired theatrical professional. Yet the fiction of a play being created is disrupted by the Woman in Black’s physical presence. The same occurs in the film, as the audience sees her when the characters don’t, and she turns her threatening, deadly gaze on the audience in both play and movie. Having the Woman in Black triumph not only over a male narrator, but also over the theater and screen, enhances and expands her power of authorship. All the texts emphasize a conversion of the male narrator/author to respecting feminine power. Initially, Kipps reduces the idea of feminine supernatural power to mere prejudice and ignorance: “[A]ny poor old woman might be looked at askance; once upon a time, after all, she would have been branded a witch” are words repeated in both novella and play (Hill 43;

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Mallatratt 16). The Woman in Black demonstrates a powerful alternative, a version of women’s ways of knowing that undercuts a male Londoner’s suppositions about the world. The female specter’s ability to disrupt patriarchal order appears as her presence silences the male characters; Kipps make an initial mistake of thinking the male characters’ fear of her is unjustified and unmanly. The local lawyer Jerome’s extreme reaction to hearing Kipps has seen the Woman in Black causes Kipps to disparage the man’s masculinity. Kipps thinks to himself that Jerome has “been weakened and broken, by what? A woman?” (Hill 90). This thought is underscored in both novella and play, when a wealthy landowner, Mr. Daily, warns Kipps about the Woman in Black but first qualifies his warning: “I’m not going to fill you up with a lot of women’s tales,” he says (Hill 98; Mallatratt 35), but the narrative itself becomes a women’s tale. Dramatizing the novella presented the playwright, Stephen Mallatratt, with a creative opportunity to create a metatheatrical frame that emphasizes the patriarchal inside versus the feminine outside. Showing how stories are created on stage foregrounds the Woman in Black’s defining presence, as well as the attempt by the male characters to define/confine her in words and on a stage. In order to justify the narrator’s story appearing on a stage, Mallatratt has Kipps commission an actor to assist him in bringing the story to life. As in the novella, Kipps has been asked to tell a ghost story, and he writes down what has happened. But the resultant manuscript is too long—the actor’s professional assessment is that it “will take five hours to read.” Kipps insists that he wants it communicated for his family and “for those who need to know” (Mallatratt 4), and agrees with the actor, who insists, “No matter how horrible, if your tale is to be heard, it must be offered in a form that is remotely palatable” (6). The play is performed by two male actors, with a woman playing the silent role of the Woman in Black. The emphasis on the constructedness of the narrative, as a story and then a play, is deconstructed by the Woman in Black’s appearances. The very opening of the play, then, alerts the audience to the effort of mounting a stage production, for Kipps explicitly mentions payment to the actor. The actor attempts to take over the Woman in Black’s story for profit. The play’s use of only three actors intensifies its message that gender is a competitive performance. Kipps plays the parts of the other male characters, while the actor plays the role of Kipps as a young man, a doubling that places the actor in the same jeopardy from the Woman in Black. Significantly, both men have children, and in this regard, they alone are appropriate subjects of the Woman in Black’s ire. They enjoy the power of parenting denied her. In

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this artistic birth of a play, they evoke again the Woman in Black, who resists their version of her life and haunting. In front of the stage audience’s eyes, the story is transformed from a long-winded, handwritten account into a live performance. That the play’s title is her appellation reveals the centrality of this silent but powerful figure. Her power stems from her exaggerated femininity: no language, only female attire and unabated maternal desire. The character is a silhouette, if not a caricature, of a nineteenth-century woman in deep mourning. The Woman in Black’s costume consists of sweeping black skirts, shawl, bonnet, and veil. The play’s dialogue evokes the setting, and each character’s struggle with expected gender roles reveals his or her anguish. Kipps laments his inability to be manly, brave, and the female ghost reveals her struggle to retain her son in a world that denies an unmarried woman that right. In contrast to the play, much of the film’s narrative is communicated through visuals. But the same message of abject feminine power is conveyed. The film is shot with one light source, with “pools of dark and light all throughout the film,” as the director Watkins describes it. He emphasizes that “locations are very much characters in their own right” (Watkins Commentary). Wide-sweeping establishing shots, aerial shots, and other pull-back views of the landscape and house provide the context that words provide in both the novella and the play. For example, bird imagery associated with captive and subordinated women (Moers), a commonplace in Victorian literature, here reinforces feminine weakness, from the decorative birds on the play tea set seen before three young girls jump to their deaths, at the command of the Woman in Black, to the bird in a cage in the inn, to the birds in Eel Marsh itself, a baby bird out of its nest, and threatening crows. The film contains a long sequence of almost twenty minutes with no dialogue (as Kipps explores the house). This silence mirrors the Woman in Black’s experience in patriarchy; no words exist that can break her isolation and horror. The play’s overt and self-conscious references to dramatic construction— at one point, the actor chastises Kipps for his weak and too-fast delivery, for example—draw the audience members’ attention to the fact that they are being manipulated by very simple effects. Yet, somehow, acknowledging the stagedness does not weaken the impact. The effects are all basic, traditional, spare theatrical devices: a spotlight on a turning doorknob, a creaking door, a wildly rocking chair, smoke generated by dry ice. While they are achieved very simply, they nevertheless rivet the crowd. The audience, in school holidays in particular, is chiefly comprised of school children and

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families, used to the film industry’s expensive special effects. Yet decades of audience members have been mesmerized by the play; the play’s impressive run attests to its impact and appeal. The poverty of resources on the stage, then, has the desired effect of immersing characters and audience more into an imaginary nonmaterial, ghostly world (and, at the same time, evokes Humfrye’s poverty and marginalization). While the initial design owed more to the necessity of a quickly produced Christmas play in a regional theater, the inclusion of recorded sound effects and their novelty to Kipps shows the actor’s impulse to do more with the piece and amplify the importance of having a voice. Kipps and the actor attempt to exorcize the Woman in Black by shaping and thus controlling the narrative of the experience. But the story continually escapes their control; the Woman in Black appears and breaks the narrative. The male characters stop their performance, and the Woman in Black receives the spotlight and the audience’s full attention. Exhausted by his encounters with the Woman in Black even in recitation, Kipps collapses. The effect of the maternal abject is overwhelming to the male character. Again, Kristeva’s description explains the power of the mother, here presented as a ghost, over the male, also presented as a ghost: “Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother” (Oliver 233). The elemental and lopsided struggle between masculine and feminine forces can be seen even in the play’s promotional materials. Advertising stills for the play show the extreme reaction of the two male performers to the Woman in Black. The various males huddle together against the threat she poses. Bundled up against the cold, with heavy coats and scarves, they seem outside of their element, exposed despite their winter attire. In several of the shots, they futilely hold up a lantern (or single candle) against the darkness, the small flame only accentuating the darkness and the men’s solitude. The men’s gestures, frozen expressions, and physical repulsion from what they perceive demonstrates the physicality of the horror the ghost produces. A similar reaction occurs in the audience, as numerous reviews attest: “I have never witnessed an audience jump and gasp in such genuine shock as they do here” (Daily Telegraph 2002). A reviewer for the Independent describes the play as “send[ing] shock waves through the auditorium with splendid thrills and chills . . . [O]n more than one occasion the entire audience screamed in terror” (Independent 1998). When the Woman in Black glides through the audience, artificial smoke creates an illusion of the marsh, obscuring her actual physicality and leaving the impression that the actress is a specter. In a review celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the play, a reviewer comments on

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the actress’s performance, “[T]he Woman in Black . . . scar[es] the audience witless by appearing and disappearing unexpectedly throughout” (BarnsdallThompson). The wordless reactions of both the male actors and the audience reflect the power of the Woman and replicate her experience. The metaplay generates fear in audiences not only through theatrical effects, but also through its harrowing reminder that men’s attempts to conquer their fear of the feminine are futile. The Woman in Black is created simply: a black-clad woman wearing a bonnet, with white stage makeup and a malevolent expression on her face. As she glides through the stage or audience, the figure cuts through the words of the male characters. Kipps and the actor experience her presence as a horrific epiphany of mortality and their children’s mortality. This appalling realization of powerlessness against death provides a moment of negative catharsis. In the dialogue between Kipps and the actor who is helping him craft his tale, there emerges a sense of order that is defied by the eerie and silent presence of the female ghost. This play, then, operates both at the level of the specific—exposing the oppression of women as subjects—and also a fundamental psychic and social dynamic, in which the maternal is demonized. The Woman in Black resists closure, and by the conclusion in all three texts, the audience is reminded that the Woman in Black still exists and still threatens. The Woman in Black demonstrates that even when financial concerns and audience-pleasing are paramount considerations, a play can nevertheless achieve profound effects. While inexpensive, the minimal stage set actually enhances the feeling of fear and intimidation and increases the audience’s sense of the Woman in Black’s power. The creation of intensity occurs through a spare set, consisting of a coat rack, a wicker chest, a door, stairs, and a backstage set of a child’s bedroom, with a rocking chair. Dramatic effects are achieved using sudden lighting—the stark, theatrical, white face of the silent Woman in Black illuminated by a spotlight, a dropped flashlight. A door on the side and a full backstage curtain create the bleak and depressing feeling that underscores the grim plot. The Daily Telegraph reviewer explains the power of this simplicity: “This is a classic example of less meaning more in the theater. A change of coat means a different character, an old wicker basket does duty for a desk, a train carriage and a horse and cart. Even the coups de theatre couldn’t be more simple or more effective” (Daily Telegraph 2002). That the Fortune Theatre itself has changed little inside since it opened in 1924 adds to the sense of periodicity and simplicity. The theatrical smoke that evokes the marsh and fog is similarly venerable, having first been used in a play in 1934.

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By the same token, having only three actors creates the classic triangle of gender tension in drama. There are only two speaking parts. The Woman in Black’s words are read by Kipps, as he discovers her letters. Yet even this act of reading is taken over in the play, as a woman’s voice urgently and emotionally describes her desire for her biological child. His “translation” of her experience underscores the mediation of the feminine by the masculine, which controls the law (Kipps’s profession and his reason for being at the estate). The metadramatic aspect of the play, in addition to its live performance and physicality, is what separates the novella from the staged version. The abject is appropriately enacted through the stage play’s clever use of sound effects, their very use foregrounded in the actors’ dialogue. Throughout the theatrical production, the audience is provided with explanations of the stage scene as the performance moves forward. Kipps and the actor explain that they are on a stage, and they ask for lights, move props around, and acknowledge the artificiality of the setting. Significantly, the theater audience hears the tragedy performed, with the full sound effects of a screeching cart, the calls of Jennet Humfrye, the yell of the cart driver, and the horse’s scream. These sounds evoke again the silent Woman in Black and the abject feminine: it is the space of the preverbal, where without words, experience is communicated. Kipps describes them as “dreadful noises . . . horrors” (Hill 146; Mallatratt 46). With minimal props and set, the play’s emphasis lies on the actors and the prerecorded sounds. The simplicity reinforces the emphasis on the abject feminine as being preverbal. As Kaja Silverman explains, “sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema’s sound regime as well as its visual regime” (viii); the impact of sound is even more marked in Mallatratt’s stage play. As Silverman goes on to explain in her book, The Acoustic Mirror, in classic cinema, the female “voice also reveals a remarkable facility for self-disparagement” (31). In contrast, the play includes a female voiceover, very rare in film, “a voice which speaks from the position of superior knowledge” (48). In addition, the screams and utterances of the Woman in Black are, as Silverman describes in films, “culturally gratifying . . . the acoustic equivalent of an ejaculation, permitting the outpouring or externalization of what would otherwise remain hidden or invisible” (68). In The Woman in Black, the acoustic mirror reflects the abject, maternal suffering and loss in a patriarchal world. While the acoustics provide an opportunity for female utterance, the audience has a unique omniscient view of the actions. This view allows us to sympathize with the Woman in Black. We are able to see that despite their

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belief in the control of the story, the male actors are being watched and directed by the Woman in Black. Kipps’s narration very closely follows the novella, including much of the dialogue verbatim from the source text. While remaining faithful to the source text, the play adds a layer, that the Woman in Black continues her terrible power. The actor sees her, and he too has a young child; the implication is that now that child is threatened. By playing the role of Kipps, the professional actor has now also fallen under the Woman in Black’s purview. The representation of authorship and its contestation appear in each genre differently: in the novella, the first-person male narrator; in the play, the actor and director; in the film, the auteur (director) and the camera. But while the point of view of the narration differs, the ability of the Woman in Black to control is the same in all three texts. While the novella and play differ only in the framing device of a theatrical performance of the story being rehearsed, the film, in part due to the demands of the medium, makes some significant changes. The intense focus on three live bodies on the stage disappears in the 2012 film version of The Woman in Black. The novella is cited in the credits, but not in the stage play: the film employs only a few of the play’s devices, and only a small part of the dialogue from play or novella survives in the screenplay by Jane Goldman. Goldman’s script and director James Watkins’s direction emphasize the cinematic, with panning shots providing visuals that replace the vivid and creepy descriptions of the landscape, house, and female ghost. A commercially successful film, it received strongly positive reviews, with few critics commenting on the popular play version or even the source novella. Successful on its own terms, the process of cinematic adaptation highlights the novella and stage play’s emphasis on the power of the abject feminine. While the power still exists in a fearsome and unforgiving Woman in Black, her power is ameliorated in the film version. Significantly changing the timeline so that Kipps has already lost his wife in childbirth (in the novella and play the two are only engaged), and the son survives, the film undercuts the feminine. Kipps’s wife appears throughout as a ghost, but she is a positive counterpoint to the Woman in Black. Like the evil female ghost, Kipps’s wife never speaks, but her essential goodness is telegraphed by her appearance all in white, even with a white veil that appears bridal. In contrast to the angelic-looking, bridally attired dead wife, the Woman in Black appears even more monstrous and evil than in the novella or play. In all three versions, the Woman in Black exudes a dominating presence through her heavy Victorian mourning attire, completely black with a black veil. Only her hideous and angry face is white—the white in

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the novella and play indicating the “wasting disease” that killed her. In the film, by contrast, the Woman in Black hangs herself. Kipps’s wife dying in childbirth and the Woman in Black’s suicide both undercut the abject power of the feminine, but placing the Woman in Black in numerous frames allows her to be seen as inhuman but visible, emphasizing her power. The actor and screenwriter have acknowledged the centrality of Kipps’s masculinity to the plot. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Kipps, describes the contrast between his character’s passivity and the Woman in Black’s aggression: “Arthur is someone who has been just pushed into complete inaction by the death in his life, while the Woman in Black’s bereavement has made her become murderous and vengeful even after death.” Radcliffe further explains that his character has to “man up and get on with being a dad” (Watkins Extras). Goldman reinforces this in the commentary, explaining the first scene with Kipps shaving is an “association . . . with becoming a man” (Watkins Commentary). In the film, this feminine power is inherently self-destructive, as the Woman in Black has hanged herself, rather than died of a strange, unnamed disease. Kipps himself is motivated differently in the film than he is in the novella and the play. In those two texts, he desires to do well in the assigned job for his own sake, so he might be rewarded financially and thus be able to marry his fiancée. The context is direr in the film: his job at Eel Marsh is his last opportunity to retain a job he has neglected since his wife’s death. His boss is not the sympathetic supervisor of the novella and play, but a harsh master, threatening him with dismissal. This alteration weakens the gender emphasis on the masculine rational protagonist, as Kipps is even more of a subordinate, feminized figure in the film. Similarly, Samuel Daily, a stalwart figure in the novella and play, becomes more feminized in the film. In the film only, Daily has lost a son and has to cope with a wife who has been driven insane by losing her child. Mrs. Daily even becomes possessed by spirits twice during the film, collapsing and gibbering. She is an additional female figure who represents female weakness rather than the power of the Woman in Black. In the novella and the play, the Woman in Black represents the feminine; this significance is underscored by her prominence as the only female character of note. By adding other female characters (including a landlady who has a scene with Kipps), the film undercuts feminine power. Yet, even in the film, the Woman in Black defies the male characters’ attempt to resolve her story and curtail her power. Kipps and Daily have interred her son’s body in her coffin, and they imagine she will now be placated. But as Kipps rushes to the train station to meet his son and the

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The happy ghost family. The Woman in Black.

nursemaid, the specter appears again. The little boy walks onto the tracks and into the path of an arriving train. Kipps jumps to save him, and both are killed. Kipps’s son asks his father, “Who is that lady?” and we imagine that he is pointing to the Woman in Black. Instead, it is his mother, dressed in white, and the nuclear family, reunited in death, walk off down the train tracks, hand-in-hand. In the novella, Kipps remains alive, an Ancient Mariner–like figure, warning about the abject feminine. In the play, the effect is intensified, as both the actor helping Kipps with the tale and the audience have seen the Woman in Black. The implication is that she is still wreaking havoc and that we are all at risk for having seen her. The film, then, provides a happy ending, for Kipps’s family at least, who are joined in death. However, at the end of the film, the Woman in Black dominates the frame, as she does in the stage play, directing her gaze at the audience. The film, then, in cinematic fashion, and despite character and plot alterations, does conclude with the malevolence of the Woman in Black. The female ghost’s impact stems in part from the skillful use of her shadowy, liminal position. In his “Adaptor’s Note” to the play, Mallatratt is quite clear that the Woman in Black should not be center stage or seen in full light, as “[f]ew things could have been less frightening” (np). He explains, “Darkness is a powerful ally of terror, something glimpsed in a corner is far more frightening than if it is fully observed.” He calls for “the simplest of simple effects,” a call that the film, by its cinematic nature, resists. We are given scenes where a child goes up in flames, where the Woman in Black’s son is pulled from the marsh, a black and scary corpse. Daily and Kipps even open her grave, and we see her skeleton quite clearly. In addition, the action is defined by omniscient aerial shots, both from far above the land and even inside the house. The camera as narrator works effectively for the film,

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The Woman in Black, still dominating the frame. The Woman in Black.

but as a replacement for the male narrator’s voice in the novella and play, it reduces intimacy and liveness. In emphasizing the visual representation of the Woman in Black, the film ironically weakens her. Yet an essential dynamic remains consistent across all three genres: the Woman in Black demonstrates a feminine agency that cannot be contained. Her anger at the loss of her son extends to all, and the male characters literally collapse in her presence. The play’s skillful use of dark, light, and shadow is maintained, and the very basic stage tricks of a rocking chair moving violently by itself, doorknobs wildly turning, and doors creaking have similar chilling effects. The film does a good job of creating tension by point-of-view shots from the ghost’s perspective, shot/countershots with Kipps. These are a clever way of paralleling the tension created by audience perspective of the Woman in Black, unseen by the actors on the small stage set. All three versions of the text, then, perform the essential plot of the feminine abject, relying on different media to create the performances. Susan Hill uses a narrator and traditional ghost story recitation; Mallatratt adds a metatheatrical frame, which expands the haunting to the audience, bringing us closer to the threat; and, finally, Watkins supplants dialogue and language with the grammar of film. While both the novella and film have been critical and popular successes, the stage play’s remarkable run of decades suggests that its complexity and liveness provide the longest-lasting, most indelible way to communicate a major tension in our society: the female ghost exemplifying the angry, terrifying, and completely uncontrollable maternal power that overwhelms the attempt of male authors to contain it. The terrifying maternal female ghost retains many of the features of the earlier comedic ghost. The Woman in Black presents an alternative women’s way of knowing, educates male characters into this subversive perspective,

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takes control of the narrative, and enacts justice on her own terms. Adding the abject maternal to her character, though, makes the female ghost more powerful than her light-hearted progenitor. The revelation of the frustrated mother’s rage stresses much more than earlier ghosts, the painful nature of women’s oppression and the threat that it can lead to violence.

Chapter three

The Terrifying Maternal Ghost in the Americas La Llorona La Llorona, the Weeping Woman ghost, differs from the Woman in Black, most obviously in that La Llorona is known as the Woman in White. But like the Woman in Black, La Llorona is terrifying, a specter whose distinctive attire heralds death and destruction. Also like the Woman in Black, La Llorona is a female figure of power, an apparition who is feared. Both are defined by their revision of maternity: both are the opposite of the nurturing, caretaking mother. Yet the context of their hauntings evokes birth through water imagery. But while the Woman in Black originates from the mind of a twentieth-century English writer, La Llorona has more diffuse and more influential history. A centuries-old Hispanic folklore figure, La Llorona has innumerable redactions, most recently feminist retellings by American writers and appearances on US television series. This specific context affects the meaning of both the ghost and the feminist narratives that reclaim her. La Llorona shares many features with the ghosts discussed in the first two chapters, but she expands upon them. First, she shows the power of the abject feminine to disrupt patriarchy, but her abilities and geographical range are larger, and she exists over a much longer time. Second, La Llorona enacts a gender conflict between masculine and feminine, but in addition to contesting the power of male characters, she struggles to wrest control of children from a male-dominated society (not only to kill them). Finally, this female ghost displays the duality of the abject feminine, both its demonic and its angelic sides. While La Llorona is as powerful as the Woman in Black, the texts that feature her contain moments of levity. This lighter tone serves the same function as humor in the comedic female ghost stories: to entertain and, at the same time, to expose misogyny. This chapter traces La Llorona’s more recent appearances, from a brief evocation in Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972) up to twenty-first-century uses of La Llorona on the television shows Supernatural and Grimm. These discussions bracket an analysis of feminist reappropriations

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of the figure by acclaimed writers Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo. The political and cultural context of La Llorona is complex, but her commonality with other female ghosts is significant. Like the Woman in Black, La Llorona has some terrifying features, but contemporary retellings of her story show a sympathetic view of her. La Llorona’s importance in providing resistance to an oppressive view of the mother in patriarchal society becomes clearer when she is analyzed through the frame of Kristeva’s and Cixous’s ideas. Their depictions of feminine power and monstrosity reclaimed allow us to see more clearly how La Llorona is an empowering figure. At the same time, narratives that evoke La Llorona raise the other themes seen both in the comedic female ghost and in the English Women in Black, particularly the disruption of patriarchal narratives and the reclaiming of authorship and voice, paradoxically once again by a specter who has no voice or pen. La Llorona has been the subject of considerable anthropological and folklore inquiry. Michael Kearney describes it as “[o]ne of the most widespread Mexican folktales themes. . . . [T]he antiquity of the story cannot be determined, but it is evident from early Colonial texts that the theme is pre-Hispanic” (199). Pamela Jones demonstrates that “the Llorona myth is an endlessly changing legend, modified by storytellers to address themes central to their own pyscho-social development and lifestyles” (qtd. in Simerka 50). Barbara Simerka cites the considerable feminist scholarship on La Llorona that indicates the revisionist possibilities of this female ghost: “Jaqueline Doyle, Elizabeth Ordonez, Jean Wyatt and Gloria Anzaldua all point to the ‘borderlands’ inhabited by the chicana as a space which presents unique opportunity for redefinition of Anglo and Latino patriarchal values” (54). Domino Renee Perez documents that the story of La Llorona has been a part of her family “for more than five generations” (100), attesting to the longevity of this tradition. Perez cites “Chicana cultural theorist Tey Diana Rebolledo,” describing La Llorona as “tied up in some vague way with sexuality and the death or loss of children: the negative mother image” (101). La Llorona remains active in Chicano culture at the same time but at the same time, she has been appropriated by literature and television. La Llorona appears at a critical juncture in Rudolfo Anaya’s 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima (though she is omitted from the 2013 film adaptation). Two decades later, this female ghost plays a significant role in the title story “Woman Hollering Creek” in Sandra Cisneros’s important collection of short stories of the same name (1991). La Llorona also makes an appearance in Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from God (1993). Part of the explosion in the fantasy genre on television, the folk figure has also been the focus of episodes of the television

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shows Supernatural (2005) and Grimm (2012). These uses of this folklore figure demonstrate both the impressive staying power of a female ghost over centuries as well. While La Llorona shares some qualities with other female ghosts, the specific ways that she functions in Mexican and Mexican American culture highlight colonization and migration. At the same time, however, La Llorona evokes the abject maternal figure as described by Julia Kristeva. Defined by but also resisting traditional depictions of the ideal mother, La Llorona disturbs and complicates traditional femininity. That this figure has crossed over from folklore into popular culture reveals something about the timeliness and ongoing tensions about maternity in American culture. Like the Woman in Black, La Llorona is a figure from an earlier time period, one in which roles for women were far more limited. While she only appears briefly in Bless Me, Ultima, her role is a critical one, and like the Woman in Black, La Llorona changes the male characters’ lives. As Perez describes, in Chicana literature, La Llorona “functions primarily as a threat to men” (107). “Recasting” her “outside of the boundary of tragedy” (110), as Perez analyzes her contemporary appearances, La Llorona becomes “a transgressive figure strong enough to penetrate the consciousness of an entire culture” (109). More geographically wide-ranging than the Woman in Black, La Llorona nevertheless shares many features with her. While the Woman in Black is kept from her son and watches him drown from a window, La Llorona kills her own children, in some versions as revenge on an unfaithful husband, or in other versions, to save the children from some other fate worse than death. Most versions of the La Llorona legend depict her dressed in white, weeping as she searches for her children by waterways or, in more contemporary accounts, roads. While she appears to be beautiful, she can abruptly transform into a hideous hag, and her appearance is ominous, portending death; she drowns other children, often in natural bodies of water, symbolically returning them to a womb. While La Llorona has been interpreted as a patriarchal warning to women (Jordan 42), more recent versions and interpretations have stressed the subversive and resistant aspects of La Llorona’s story. The specific features of this female ghost evoke the maternal in a specific political context. The eerie and uncanny aspect of La Llorona is her (at least temporarily) attractive appearance, her association with water, her crying, and her plaintively calling out for her lost children. Perez explains the political implications of La Llorona crying out “Ay, mis hijos!” as an evocation of the “Spanish invasion of Mexico that included a female voice crying out in the night, “Mis hijos, estamos perdidos!” (103). The gendered and nationalistic

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interpretations of this female ghost are intertwined and interdependent. As Perez explains, Jose Limon “theorizes that encoded in La Llorona’s story are the ideas of female resistance, subversion of negative female sexuality, and the reclamation of lost Chicana identity and territory” (105). La Llorona’s maternity defines her, whether she is mother to human children or to a culture. An ambivalent figure, she typifies the abject and the excluded maternal: she can be beautiful, but it is her monstrous aspect and her ability to take life as well as give it that defines her. Goddess-like in her powers, she represents the maternal abject’s threat to reabsorb the individual. Without using words, La Llorona lures children to her; again, she represents the preverbal, the mother who does not use masculine language, but the language of the body, especially gestures and sounds. Her crying moves people towards her, wanting to help her, but this attraction can turn deadly. The sounds of the weeping of La Llorona first evoke a figure to be pitied, but she always becomes a female who wields power. This female ghost’s primary form of communication, weeping, can be read as a version of the French feminist call to write the feminine body. Not only is crying associated with the feminine, but lachrymosity also evokes the defining feature of the feminine body: the watery womb. The fascination with La Llorona reflects the fascination with, as Kristeva describes it, the “desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body” (Powers 54). This female ghost’s ability to move over time and through space reminds us of Kristeva’s characterization of gender differences: “[W]hen evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history [which are coded as masculine]” (“Women’s Time” 445). La Llorona exemplifies the feminine because she remains free of conventional rules and constraints. Because she exists over centuries, she also embodies the French feminist interest in mythical figures like the Medusa. Like Cixous’s laughing, beautiful Medusa, La Llorona can use her powers to expose and punish but still remain an attractive figure. An award-winning and canonical novel, Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya is a beloved classic of American literature. While the appearance of La Llorona occupies only a few pages in the novel, her presence is significant and compelling. Most of the novel focuses on the relationship of Antonio, the main character, with the title character, Ultima, a curendera or traditional healer. An elderly woman when she comes to live with his family, Ultima teaches Antonio about nature and spirituality, functioning as a counterpoint to the negative legend of La Llorona. But in her very existence as a wise

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woman, Ultima corroborates the existence of a supernatural realm where women wield power. Both Ultima and La Llorona confirm the existence of a profound gender binary that shapes Antonio’s worldview. In a pattern repeated in other texts that use the figure of La Llorona, Bless Me, Ultima shows a struggle between feminine and masculine worldviews and values, presented through characters’ attempts to control a child. In this novel, the child is the protagonist, Antonio. Antonio provides an example of how the female ghost affects other characters. Soon after Ultima joins the young boy’s household, he witnesses a drowning. As he falls asleep, disturbed by the tragedy he observed, he has a vision of La Llorona: “Along the river the tormented cry of a lovely goddess filled the valley. The winding wail made the blood of men run cold. It is la llorona [sic], my brother cried in fear, the old witch who cries along the river banks and seeks the blood of boys and men to drink!” The boy imagines La Llorona calling for him: “La Llorona seeks the soul of Antonioooooooooo.” Yet, in his dream, his brothers identify a doomed neighbor, Lupito, as the female ghost’s victim: “It is the soul of Lupito, they cried in fear, doomed to wander the river because the waters washed his soul away” (26). At this point in the novel Antonio’s brothers are grown men, away fighting in World War II, so their fear of La Llorona makes her power all the more palpable and terrifying to the boy. But the novel presents a positive version of feminine power. By speaking to the “presence in the river,” an unnamed but powerful natural force, Antonio comforts himself and banishes this terrible nightmare. Ultima heals him of the scratches he sustained running away from Lupito’s death scene. Antonio’s awareness of feminine supernatural power embodied in nature is heightened. Empathic and concerned for Lupito’s soul, he worries that “perhaps he was doomed to wander the river bottom forever, a bloody mate to La Llorona” (28). The awareness of the feminine power represented by nature is accompanied by a gendered struggle for Antonio’s future by his parents. Already aware of gender struggles between his parents over their conflicting goals for him—his mother wanting him to be a priest or a luna, a farmer, and his father wanting him to follow his lineage as a vaquero, a cowboy—Antonio conceives of the supernatural gender conflicts mirroring those in the daily world. Yet the novel counters La Llorona’s fearful power with that of Ultima and the natural world. Antonio’s awareness of the supernatural and the threat of La Llorona is balanced by the knowledge that the other “presence in the river,” the natural world, is a beneficent feminine force. Antonio realizes that

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“now when I walked alone along the river I would always have to turn and glance over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of a shadow—Lupito’s soul, or la Llorona, or the presence of the river” (28). The appearance of this traditional female ghost in this novel shows the critical spot she occupies in Chicano culture. Through Antonio’s growth in alternative, feminine knowledge, the novel projects Belenky’s “women’s ways of knowing.” Antonio must first find his voice and then become aware of and accept subjective knowledge and the self as an authority. Finally, with Ultima’s help, he sees the interconnectedness of knowers and knowledge, but his journey of education begins with, and is shaped by, La Llorona. Antonio, a precocious male child, like Topper and Kipps before him, becomes feminized by a female ghost. Two decades later, La Llorona appears in the work of two women writers who expand the ghost’s feminist potential. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros focuses on the experiences of Chicanas, sympathetically portraying the tensions and complications for immigrant women and second-generation Mexican Americans. Discussing her worldview, Cisneros says she could “see the myth in a new way” (qtd. in Doyle). What Cisneros has said about another book of hers, The House on Mango Street, applies as well to “Woman Hollering Creek.” Cisneros uses language that evokes Belenky’s stage of voicelessness and the need to move beyond this stage: “The unrecorded lives of the powerless, the unheard voices of ‘thousands of silent women,’ are some of the ghosts that haunt The House on Mango Street” (qtd. in Doyle 53). Her description evokes feminine writing as described by Cixous: “[T]he other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure or death” (889). Like Anaya, Cisneros shows La Llorona in relation to other forms of feminine power, including the Virgin and curenderas. But where La Llorona is a more fearful, terrifying figure in Bless Me, Ultima, in “Woman Hollering Creek,” she comes to the aid of a woman suffering at the hands of her brutal husband. Less directly magical than in other texts, the female ghost here provides inspiration for other women to be comadres, to intervene and to assist the protagonist, Cleofilas. Born in Mexico, Cleofilas has been married to Juan Pedro, who has taken her to America, far from her family. Cisneros explores the brutal machismo culture that has not only trapped Cleofilas but also has resulted in the death of one of her neighbors, a woman who was shot by her husband because she attacked him—with a broom. Escaping without punishment, this killer provides a context that elucidates Cleofilas’s inability to leave her abusive husband. Economically dependent on him and without access to English, Cleofilas has no way to navigate an American legal system. But as she does

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in Topper and The Woman in Black, the female ghost in this text will provide an alternative to the laws of an oppressive patriarchal society. The protagonist shares similarities with the female ghost, reinforcing the ghost’s relevance to the main character. Cleofilas, like La Llorona, is a mother; she has one small child and another on the way. Without a television, Cleofilas is denied the escape of the telenovelas, except when her neighbors share the plots with her. Yet Cleofilas recognizes that like the telenovelas, her own life is a tragedy. Her husband cheats on her, leaving evidence of his infidelities in their home. His beatings are severe and damaging. Like many battered women, she summons the courage to find help when the beatings threaten the life of her unborn child. She has often thought of her father’s words—“I am your father, I will never abandon you” (43)—but he is far away in Mexico, and she has no way to contact him. Patriarchal figures will not provide Cleofilas with a way to escape the patriarchal institution of marriage and heteronormativity. Instead, like the other living women assisted by female ghosts, she relies on a new form of knowledge and a female community to free her. As it does for Antonio, the natural world, especially running water, provides support to Celofilas. Associated explicitly with the feminine and La Llorona, the water reflects and soothes her. As a coping mechanism, Cleofilas finds herself drawn to the creek behind her house, known as “La Gritona,” “woman hollering” in English. The ambiguity of the name, the narrator explains, is intensified, because “no one could say whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain” (46). A quiet woman, Cleofilas is drawn to a name very much her opposite. “[S]uch a funny name for a lovely arroyo” (46), it is “a name no one from these parts questioned, little less understood. Pues, alla de los indios, quien sabe—who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name” (46). In their reference to Native Americans, the townspeople evoke even older myths and legends, even more powerless and silent voices from history. As Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson suggest, ghosts “often signal eruptions that deconstruct . . . methods reified by Western rationality and reason. Perhaps this is why so many horror novels and films involve cases of native haunting that offer to uncover alternative versions of history” (viiii–x). Yet, as Cisneros will show, the name and the power in that name evoke La Llorona and deeply affect Cleofilas’s life. As Doyle describes it, “Haunted by the legendary wail of La Llorona, Cleofilas seeks a language to articulate her own story and the stories of mute feminine victims of male violence in the newspapers” (54).

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Cisneros uses the story of La Llorona to explain Cleofilas’s transformation from victim to survivor. Initially, Cleofilas doesn’t appreciate the power of the feminine, but she eventually embraces it to escape patriarchy. As a newlywed, crossing the bridge with her husband, Juan Pedro, Cleofilas laughed at the name. But she stopped laughing, as her life deteriorated under her husband’s abuse. The story vividly depicts Cleofilas’s shock and horror as her husband strikes her the first time: “She had been so stunned, it left her speechless, motionless, numb. She had done nothing but reach up to the heat on her mouth and stare at the blood on her hand as if even then she didn’t understand” (48). Popular culture provides her with no help: the narrator explains that Cleofila “didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things on the telenovelas” (47). The weeping women in the telenovelas did help prepare Cleofilas for her situation in another way, though, as Jacqueline Doyle argues: “[I]mmersed in romance novels and the telenovelas, Cleofilas is initiated into a culture of weeping women, the tale of ‘La Llorona’ retold in countless ways around her” (56). Popular culture provides reminders of the power of the feminine, but the signs have to be interpreted. The appearance of a feminine alternative occurs in the natural world, as the creek and folklore about it provide Cleofilas with the means to escape. Through this portrayal of La Llorona as a figure of resistance to domestic violence, Cisneros suggests that there are important supernatural narratives that can be of use to contemporary women. It is the overtly evil female ghost that generates strength and resistance for Cleofilas. Cleofilas’s rescuer, Felice, says, “Did you ever notice . . . how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she’s the Virgin. I guess you’re only famous if you’re a virgin” (55). Resisting this narrow role for women, La Llorona and her natural haunting space, a creek or river, by their very nature are mobile and changing, even powerful and dangerous at times. The water’s movement contrasts strikingly with Cleofilas’s limited mobility. She thinks that “the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. . . . There is no place to go” (50–51), except to the neighbors “[o]r the creek” (51). The neighbors warn her, though, that the creek is “mal aire” (51). It does appear to have a dark side, and Cleofilas ominously thinks that “La Llorona is calling to her. She is sure of it. La Llorona. Wonders if something as quiet as this drives a woman to darkness under the trees” (51). But these brooding thoughts are followed in the narrative by a much more common occurrence of a man murdering his wife, instead of a mother killing her children out of desperation.

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There is a strength and even companionship in the creek for the battered wife, as the river’s sounds reflect the preverbal feminine. Fed by the rain, the creek has become “a good-size alive thing, a thing with a voice all its own, all day and all night calling in its high silver voice” (51). This voice is echoed by Felice, the woman who owns her own pick-up, and who, at the request of a woman who works at the health clinic, whisks Cleofilas and her young son to San Antonio, so she can return to her family in Mexico. As she drives them over the creek, Felice startles Cleofilas by “open[ing] her mouth and let [ting] out a yell as loud as any mariachi” (55). Apologizing, Felice explains, “Every time I cross that bridge I do that. Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering” (55). Freed from her prison, Cleofilas herself echoes the sound of the river, in the final words of the story: “It was gurgling out of her own throat, a long ribbon of laughter, like a river” (56). This laughter is like the preverbal feminine language that Kristeva hypothesizes. Cisneros’s story offers an example of what Cixous explains must happen for women to be free: “women’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence the shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression” (Cixous 880). The preverbal is not only specifically feminine, but also liminal and ghostly. La Llorona has been transformed into Hélène Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa,” revealing the transformative power of the feminine. The creek and the woman driver create the laughter of the Medusa evoked by Cixous. Without a shared language, English, Cleofilas and her female rescuer can still communicate. This characters’ situation resonates with Cixous’s words about feminine language, saying that it comes “from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language” (889). Cleofilas and her rescuer communicate at a basic and primeval level of laughter and sound. Allied with the feminized natural world, La Llorona has not only the power to destroy, as she does in the traditional folktale, but also the power to liberate. Cisneros reclaims La Llorona for an explicitly feminist narrative, as do other writers. In So Far from God, Ana Castillo creates a world more resonant with magic than Cisneros’s character-driven, realistic stories. Focusing on a New Mexican family of four daughters and a mother, the novel emphasizes the strength of Chicano women. Sofia, the mother is a figure of power and strength, and the daughters nurture and support each other, even after death. The novel opens with the miraculous return to life of the youngest daughter, afterwards known as La Loca. Misdiagnosed as dead after an epileptic fit, she emerges from her coffin a magical presence, sensitive and hyperaware. Her

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bodily transformation is that of feminine language, “writing the body.” The novel follows all the daughters as they grow and develop their talents, to their tragic deaths. Each daughter encounters a dangerous aspect of American culture, from corporate exploitation of workers and the environment to the then incompletely understood AIDS epidemics and the Gulf War. These deeply damaging events are depicted as the illnesses of a male-dominated society, and each represents a terrible threat to the women of the novel. Fortunately, the novel shows the women seeking alternatives to the diseased patriarchal society around them, creating a powerful female community that is promoted by La Llorona. The family is befriended by a curendera (as Antonio is in Bless Me, Ultima), and Sofia is a figure of strength and power as she raises her daughters. Sofia organizes her community and provides economic alternatives, a collective, to counter the exploitative nature of the US economic system. At the end of the novel, she becomes the presidenta and founding member of a group called “Mothers of Martyrs and Saints” (247). Her experiences in raising her daughters, especially Loca, have made her the inevitable leader of such a group. Evoking an alternative that recalls not only French feminist theory but also its American cognate, Belenky’s “women’s ways of knowing,” the novel shows knowledge and sharing by the female characters. All of the characters go through stages of epistemological perspectives, from rejecting voicelessness to understanding themselves as authorities. Eventually, each woman sees the interconnectedness of knowledge and knowers. The female ghost is essential to this trajectory. Within this frame, the story of La Llorona resonates. Sofia’s children experience near-death tragedies, beginning with La Loca’s “resurrection,” suggesting a worldview in which life and death are intermingled and porous, rather than existing as completely antithetical and inimical states of being. Sofia had been taught the story of La Llorona, but she had not shared it with her daughters because “the idea of a wailing woman suffering throughout eternity had not appealed to Sofia. . . . Unlike her sister, Sofia was not afraid to go to the rio alone to swim; she didn’t mind the acquia [irrigation canal] running so close to her home, either” (160–61). Sofia’s rejection of the tale is based on her understanding of women’s experience: “Sofia had not left her children, much less drowned them to run off with nobody. On the contrary, she had been left to raise them by herself. And all her life, there had always been at least one woman around like her, left alone, abandoned, divorced, or widowed, to raise her children, and none of them had ever tried to kill their babies” (161). However, Sofia has a sympathetic understanding of the rare instance where a mother had killed her children, understanding that

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“the mother was only human and anyone is capable at some point when pushed into a corner like a rat to devour her babies in order to save them, so to speak” (161–62). Rejecting conventional patriarchal notions of mothering, Sofia presents a sympathetic reading of La Llorona. The novel shows the importance of understanding and sharing La Llorona’s story. As a result of Sofia’s silence about La Llorona, when the ghost appears to La Loca, she does not know her name or her history. Loca spends time down by the acequia because after her near burial as a three-year old, she cannot bear to be around other people. Loca explains to her mother that La Llorona (who she refers to as “She”) “has been coming to see me since I was little” (162). The narrator explains, The land was old and the stories were older. Just like a country changes its name, so did the names of their legends change. Once, La Llorona may have been Matlaciuatl, the goddess of Mexico who was said to prey upon men like a vampire! Or she might have been Ciuapipiltin, the goddess in flowing robes who stole babies from their cradle . . . or Cihuacoatl, the patron of women who died in childbirth, who all wailed and wept and moaned in the night air. (161) Rather than being presented as a threat, La Llorona is presented positively; she brings knowledge to the female characters. The female ghost communes with Loca, providing her with companionship. Loca’s sister Esperanza, a journalist, had been covering the Gulf War and has been missing for many months. La Llorona proves more knowledgeable and considerate than the US government, for she brings the news of Esperanza’s death to Loca, who informs her mother and sisters. Fe, one of the sisters, doesn’t believe Loca, but Loca is proved correct later when the US Army delivers an official letter with the same news. More important than being first, however, La Llorona communicates the message of the death because Esperanza had wanted her mother to know. The novel reifies women’s ways of knowing as more accurate than male-dominated institutions like the military. In this regard, La Llorona demonstrates a feature common to the comedic female ghost, who enacts justice more effectively than the male-dominated police. The female community is strengthened by the wisdom and perspective of La Llorona. The community of women that is Sofia’s family is joined by La Llorona, as the narrator explains the appropriateness of this union: “Who better but La Llorona could the spirit of Esperanza have found, come to think of it, if not a woman who had been given a bad rap by every generation of

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her people since the beginning of time and yet, to Esperanza’s spirit-mind, La Llorona in the beginning (before men got in the way of it all) may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess” (163). Esperanza herself has become a ghost, seen not only by her sisters Loca and Caridad, and her mother, but also by her recently returned father. Castilla imagines the feminine creating sister-ghosts for La Llorona, but having a devastating effect on male characters. Like the Woman in Black, the Woman in White has a mesmerizing, Medusalike effect on male characters. The effect of the ghost on the father is startling: “The first time he saw Esperanza down by the acequia conversing with Loca and another equally dubious figure in a long white dress, his fingers, holding the venetian blinds apart at eye level, froze, and Sofia found him a half-hour later, as still as a statue in that position and dry-mouthed” (163). The father’s paralysis evokes the traditional result of the Medusa’s gaze, freezing men in place. After her second death, La Loca appears as a ghost herself. This family’s communion with La Llorona presents her as a beneficent feminine figure. That not only La Llorona but also the dead sisters can return and speak to the living shows her to be a figure that defies life and death and who enables other women to do the same. The feminine finds a way to triumph over death, as one of the sisters becomes a ghost herself. Esperanza is able to return as a ghost to her mother and to “cuddle up to her as she had when she was a little girl and had had a nightmare” (163). Esperanza is able to have long conversations with her sister Caridad about politics and the injustice of the war. So while the sisters’ deaths are sad, that they, like La Llorona, and through her help, can still communicate with each other and their mother, is redemptive and hopeful. Like Cisneros, Castillo revises the figure of La Llorona, taking it out of the hands of the “men who got in the way of it all” (163) and presenting her sympathetically, as a figure whose story has been distorted and corrupted by patriarchal society. A decade after her appearance in women’s writing, La Llorona still terrifies boys and men, but she has now moved to the mainstream popular medium of television. Appearances of La Llorona in the television shows Supernatural and Grimm, underscore her ubiquity as well as her mobility across different genres. These contemporary fantasy shows demonstrate an alternative for the passive, suffering feminine as depicted in telenovelas. In Supernatural and Grimm, this female ghost holds her own not only against humans, but also against other supernatural beings. Supernatural features two brothers who hunt monsters and supernatural creatures; their mother was killed

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by an unknown supernatural creature when they were small children, and their father raised them to hunt for her killer and to destroy other predatory supernatural creatures. While the show is serious and spooky, it also contains moments when the brothers use humor to cope with their bizarre upbringing and unusual occupation. La Llorona’s appearance in the pilot emphasizes the struggle between the feminine and the masculine for control of children and stresses the association of the feminine and domesticity with fiery and unnatural forces. The episode makes the connection with the legend of La Llorona explicit, but by setting the story around Halloween, the show situates La Llorona with other spectral apparitions. The younger brother, Sam, attends a Halloween party with his girlfriend, Jessica, and the older brother, Dean, breaks into Sam’s apartment to tell him their father is missing. Reluctantly, Sam joins Dean to try to find their father: to do so, they must follow him to his latest crusade, in this case, to exterminate a female ghost who has been killing men. The female ghost is cast as evil, and the brothers and their father describe what they do, killing supernatural creatures, as “hunting.” Their father has identified a pattern of killing: ten men over twenty years, all disappearing on the same stretch of road in Jericho, California. Dean plays Sam a voicemail from their father, but in the background static, Dean hears an eerie female voice saying, “I can never go home.” The recording evokes sympathy for the ghost’s liminal position—unheard, unamplified, ignored, and plaintive, speaking in a feminine tongue. As she does in other narratives, La Llorona here represents feminine disorder to its opposite, masculine order. Defying the authorities for decades, ghostly Constance Welch kills with impunity, leaving no evidence for the police to find. She escapes their limited legal power. Only after Sam figures out what the female ghost needs—to be reunited with her children—and makes it happen, does Constance depart. La Llorona’s restless wandering also reinforces the association of the feminine with domesticity. She kills, in part, because she is an exile, a wanderer, lost. Reentering her home allows her to vanish literally into it, becoming at rest finally. In contrast to feminine domesticity and interiority appears the masculine association with travel. The brothers recommit to a life of wandering the roads, reasserting the masculinity of hunting the supernatural and being rootless and homeless. Their mother, Jessica, and Constance Welch all abandon the brothers, leaving them in an all-male family. Their providing surcease for Constance Welch points to death as liberation/reconciliation/absorption itself as being feminine:

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La Llorona, beautiful and alluring. Supernatural.

the female characters die and disappear, but the brothers are left to live and struggle on. This pattern reinforces the gender dichotomy that associates the feminine with the afterlife and the masculine with quotidian life. As she does in Topper, Blithe Spirit, and The Woman in Black, the female ghost serves justice on male characters. The episode cuts from the brothers in pursuit of their father to show the female ghost preying on men who seem to deserve their fate. While the brothers get in Dean’s car to drive to Jericho from Stanford, the episode cuts abruptly to the haunted stretch of road. We watch a young man encounter the female ghost. Standing by the side of the road, the ghost appears in La Llorona’s typical guise: a young woman with long, dark hair, dressed in white, looking sad and distressed. As he drives, the young man is explaining to his girlfriend over the phone why he can’t visit her that night. Another feature of the traditional La Llorona legend, an unreliable and unfaithful male, indicates this man is in danger. When he sees La Llorona, he pulls over and offers her a ride, saying suggestively, “[A] girl like you shouldn’t be alone.” She exposes her upper thigh, and her torn white dress provides a clear view of her breasts. When she asks him, “Will you come home with me?” he enthusiastically replies, “Oh, yeah.” He has failed the test of faithfulness to the feminine. As the female ghosts do in Topper and The Woman in Black, this female ghost allows male characters to realize and express their emotions through their bodies. She directs him to her home, a creepy, abandoned old house. Looking pathetic, she says, “I can never go home” and vanishes from the front

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seat. Frightened by her sudden disappearance, the man jumps in the car and drives away screaming. The female ghost suddenly appears in the back seat of the car, and she apparently takes control of the vehicle as it drives wildly onto a nearby bridge. As in Topper and Blithe Spirit, cars are shown to be masculine technology that cannot protect men from the feminine. More screaming occurs, and blood spatters the inside of the vehicle’s windows. The ghastly scene evokes the abject-maternal, with the blood in the enclosed space of the car trapping the male body as in a womb. The next day the police are investigating the car, now empty and bloodless, when Dean and Sam pull up to the scene. The episode’s story arc shows Sam and Dean learning to understand feminine knowledge. They have to learn that technology alone will not suffice. Since the show is set in contemporary time, they naturally go to the local library to use a computer. Knowledgeable about specters, Dean Googles “murder,” explaining that “angry spirits are born out of violent death.” Coming up with no results for Jericho, California, and murder, Sam suggests they search for “suicide.” The story that uploads is about Constance Welch, a mother who reportedly left her children alone in the bathtub in 1981. When she returns to find them drowned, she is despondent and jumps off the bridge to drown herself. In this version, the female ghost does not murder her own children, so she appears as a more sympathetic character. While this La Llorona is more sympathetic than the folklore version, she nevertheless threatens the brothers. Like the female ghosts in Blithe Spirit, Constance appropriates their car. She does not kill the brothers, but she performs the female ghost’s role reversal in commandeering technology against men. Rushing to rescue her when she reenacts her dive from a bridge (though they know she is a ghost), the brothers leave their car. Almost immediately, the car revs up, driving straight toward them and forcing them to jump off the bridge. By appropriating the brothers’ car and using it against them, the female ghost turns the tables on these male ghost hunters. Sam manages to hang onto a railing and pull himself back up, but Dean falls into the river. He survives by dragging himself onto the bank. Emphasizing the gendered conflict, Dean gasps, “That Constance chick—what a bitch.” The dialogue contains moments of humor in deadly situations that reinforce the gender conflict but also provide comic relief for the viewers. Dean’s flippant attitude, however, is shown to be ineffectual compared to Sam’s more empathic approach to Constance’s trauma. The female ghost has already defeated their father, which should suggest to his sons that using traditional methods will not avail them against a female

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ghost. When the brothers check into a nearby hotel, they discover that their still-missing father had already checked into the same hotel. His room looks like a police briefing room, with maps and sketches about the crimes. Along with newspaper articles about the many disappearances of male victims, there are illustrations and drawings of a Woman in White. The brothers realize that their father had been searching for Constance Welch’s corpse to destroy it to end the hauntings. In an echo of the photograph of the female ghost with her two dead children, Sam and Dean’s father has a photograph of himself with his two sons as young boys. The images and the narrative set up a conflict between the murderous mother, the negative mother figure, and the absent but helpful father figure. Ultimately, the episode presents the female ghost sympathetically; like Cleofilas, Constance was trapped in an oppressive marriage. Posing as a journalist to ferret out where Constance’s body is buried, Sam queries the husband, Welch, about his marriage. As the sullen husband resists answering, Sam provides the folktale context. As he explains the ghost story to Welch, Sam is also explaining the context to the television audience, some of whom would not be familiar with this frightening female ghost. “Did you ever hear,” Sam asks the husband, of “a Woman in White or sometimes Weeping Woman? It’s a ghost story; well, it’s more of a phenomenon, really,” Sam states. “They’re spirits. They’ve been sighted in dozens of places for hundreds of years: in Hawaii, Mexico, lately in Arizona, Indiana.” Trying to help the husband understand the connection, Sam continues, All these are different women, you understand, but they all share the same story. When they were alive, their husbands were unfaithful to them. And these women were basically suffering from temporary insanity. They murdered their children. Then they realized what they had done; they took their own lives. So now their spirits are cursed, walking back roads and waterways, and if they find an unfaithful man, they kill him. Welch acknowledges his complicity, mumbling, “Maybe I made some mistakes.” His begrudging statement reinforces our sympathy for the female ghost. Supernatural expands the female ghost’s power from one spot to the entire country. Knowing the context of La Llorona’s story (without her Spanish appellation) also begins the process of interpretation and sympathy for the female ghost. Sam tells the story, kindly explaining La Llorona’s infanticide

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La Llorona, terrifying and hideous. Supernatural.

as “temporary insanity,” a contemporary defense for an age-old folk figure. Sam’s sympathy soon proves critical to saving his own life and providing resolution and peace for Constance Welch’s ghost. Dean soon gets arrested for interfering in the investigation, so Sam must drive the haunted stretch of road alone. While the last victim had stopped to pick up the female ghost, Sam, talking to his brother on the phone, actually drives through her. Suddenly she appears in the car’s backseat, asking him to “take her home.” Sam refuses. She locks the car doors and takes control of the vehicle, driving it to her abandoned home. As the car pulls up to the house, Sam implores her, “Don’t do this.” Climbing on top of him, the female ghost attempts to kiss him. He avoids her lips saying, “You can’t kill me—I’m not unfaithful.” “You will be,” she intones sardonically, reflecting her experience with her other male victims. Her words also add a touch of black comedy to this scene. As she kisses him, Constance demonstrates another feature of the traditional La Llorona: she turns into a death’s face hag. She reaches into his chest to pull out his heart, but Dean arrives suddenly, shooting silver bullets at Constance, and she disappears, momentarily. Again, using masculine technology against a female ghost is shown to be ineffectual. Despite the silver bullets, the female ghost is not so easily dispatched. Sam has more empathy for the female ghost and her plight. Having figured out that bullets will not banish her, Sam tells the female ghost, still hideous and skeletal, “I am taking you home,” and he stamps on the accelerator to drive Dean’s car through the front door of the house. She

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attempts to kill the brothers who are now out of the car by pinning them with furniture. Her use of domestic objects as weapons reflects their use by other female ghosts, such as the female ghosts in Blithe Spirit and Beloved, discussed in the next chapter. Like them, Constance “chang[es] around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (Cixous 887). But as the brothers struggle to free themselves from the heavy chest she has hurled at them, water begins dripping on the floor, and two ghostly children appear at the top of the nearby stairs. “You’ve come back to us, Mommy,” the children say, and abruptly they are holding onto her downstairs. Fire appears, and the figures all melt together and disappear into the floor. Sam has succeeded in reuniting the mother with her children. This version of La Llorona is softened by the somewhat happy resolution. Rather than destroying her corpse, as their father had planned, the brothers reunite the mother and children. Their actions resolve the hauntings and deaths, at least of this particular La Llorona. The episode suggests a way to end the conflict between the betrayed female ghost and traditional masculinity. Switching the emphasis from masculine unfaithfulness to the other cause of the female ghost’s suffering, her separation from her children, mitigates the suffering experienced by the living mother. Less tidily resolved is the situation of the brothers, still representing themselves as the rogue male (Dean) and the empathic, younger, feminized alternative who resists being a supernatural executioner (Sam). Proving that he is indeed faithful and connected to feminine values, Sam demands that Dean drive him back to Stanford, where he will reunite with Jessica. As Sam lies in his bed, however, blood begins dripping from the ceiling, evoking the abject, messy, and bloody female body. Recoiling in horror, Sam sees his girlfriend dead and pinned to the ceiling, in the same way as his mother had been killed twenty-two years earlier. Her body bursts into flame, and Dean rushes in to drag Sam out (as he had done when they were children). The end of the pilot episode then repeats and reinforces the La Llorona narrative, as the brothers, missing their mother and father, and Sam now lacking his supportive girlfriend as well, have to wander the world, searching for the killer of their father, their mother, and Jessica. The brothers, then, have essentially replaced La Llorona as wanderers searching for justice. Like female ghosts, they have to create an alternative justice system, one that rejects the traditional authorities, such as the police and the law school that Sam was to have attended. Not only do the police lack the tools to perceive and understand the maternal feminine, but they are also in denial about

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the existence of a feminine supernatural being. Their foolishness inevitably results in more deaths and tragedies. As in other texts with female ghosts, the La Llorona narratives expose the inefficacy and obliviousness of patriarchal law and order. Grimm, another popular television series, features a male Buffy-like police officer named Nick Burkhardt who is a “Grimm,” a human charged with protecting humans from supernatural creatures. His wholly human partner, Hank Griffin, assists him, and they have other supporters and friends who have supernatural powers. While the show’s name suggests a world in which Grimm’s fairy tales are real, the series draws upon fairy tale characters loosely, often using other folktales, like the story of La Llorona. The female ghost has her own episode in season 2, entitled “La Llorona.” In contrast to the episode of Supernatural, this episode of Grimm explicitly identifies and honors the source of the folktale. Like of Supernatural, the scene is set around Halloween and features the core elements of La Llorona: a woman with long, dark hair, dressed in a flowing white dress, crying for her lost children. This La Llorona also is a serial killer, operating over many years. But while in Supernatural, the female ghost kills unfaithful men, here La Llorona abducts children and drowns them. While the two brothers in Supernatural confront Constance Welch by themselves, in Grimm, the two male officers, Nick and Hank, need the help of Valentina Espinosa, a former police officer. This version of La Llorona is more nuanced and less an extreme gender stereotype, as a female neighbor and a female translator also figure centrally in the plot. The feminine is here expanded to be powerful both in the supernatural and in the everyday worlds. The complete integration of Spanish into the episode marks the series’ acknowledgment of its source text and culture. The first scene takes place entirely in Spanish. English subtitles provide the setup: “It’s Halloween in Portland and a series of bizarre abductions lead Nick to a ghost story that may be a reality.” After the title “La Llorona” appears, these words follow: “On many a dark night people would see her walking along the riverbank and crying for her children.” An overhead shot of the river and bridge leads the viewers to a father and son setting up to fish from a bridge. In the background, a woman with long, dark hair in an old-fashioned, white dress appears, crying. She walks into the river with accompanying sounds of eerie music. As the woman sinks under the water, the father rushes to rescue her. He dives under the water repeatedly where he saw the woman submerge. Emerging from his final dive, he looks up in horror to see the Woman in White walking away with his son, holding the boy’s hand. Running frantically up the path,

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La Llorona, beautiful and sad. Grimm.

the father asks everyone in Spanish if they have seen the woman who has taken his son. The struggle for control of a child here becomes quite literal, with the female ghost using her supernatural powers to spirit the child away. That the child’s own mother is also dead (as we find out later) reinforces the gender binary and struggle for control of children that takes place between feminine and masculine forces. The angel-devil duality of the female ghost is presented powerfully through the changing appearance of the female ghost. The episode cuts dramatically to an image of the woman, floating in water. Attractive for the moment, she turns into a blood-riddled hag as soon as she opens her eyes. Cut to a real woman, former police officer Valentina Espinosa, whose nephew, we later find out, had been abducted in a similar fashion five years before. Since then, Valentina has been hunting La Llorona. Her hunt is complicated by her own supernatural powers; as she hears the story of Rafael’s abduction as an Amber Alert, Valentina’s eyes turn yellow and feral, and her face morphs into that of a wer-tiger. Like Supernatural, Grimm is set in a world where the unreal and uncanny exist. In Grimm, however, the feminine is given even more primacy: the female ghost can only be defeated by another feminine supernatural. Paralleling the existence of human and supernatural worlds is the world of Anglo and Spanish speakers. This real-life parallel reinforces the relevance of the supernatural characters and story for the real world. As the investigation of Rafael’s abduction begins, the police need a translator, for the father

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speaks only Spanish, and the officer investigating has only limited Spanish language skills. They call on another woman, Juliette, to translate, introducing a second important female character on whom the male officers will rely to solve the case. Only feminine knowledge can rescue the child; the father is depicted as raging and ineffectual. That he is a single parent, as often appears in La Llorona narratives, is stressed by the context of Halloween. This holiday is depicted as a family event, one that even the supernaturals can enjoy because for one day, they do not need to hide their true natures (werewolves, wer-tigers, etc). This sad scenario of a single parent whose son has been abducted is punctuated by numerous jokes and pranks played by one of the neighbors and children. Drawing on the context of Halloween, the supernaturals can display some of their own rituals and actual appearance. Many of the children’s costumes feature exaggerated gender roles, including princesses, zombies, witches, and so on. Showing the children receiving treats sets up the serious underlying theme of gender performance. The children’s games, including hide and seek, evoke the comedic female ghost’s use of her body through physical pratfalls. But at the same time, feminine knowledge of the supernatural is presented as life-saving. Feminine knowledge appears in the form of a neighbor and an avenging police officer. The neighbor enters the house, and she and the father have a dispute, in Spanish. The neighbor tells Juliette in Spanish, “You must tell your police that I know who took Rafael.” The father responds by telling the neighbor to shut up, “silencia,” and says the word “loco.” He attempts to discredit the woman, saying, “She doesn’t know—she’s not helping.” The father denies the supernatural, but the female neighbor claims it, telling Juliette: “If you believe what I tell you, it will save a life.” The episode bears out the neighbor’s claim. This episode evokes Belenky’s concept of women’s ways of knowing, with the father and the police rejecting the feminine knowledge at first. With increasing close-ups of Juliette’s and the neighbor’s faces, and shot/countershots, the camera brings us into their exchange. Looking sadly at Rafael’s father, the neighbor nods her head and leaves the house. The next sequence shows Valentina, also privy to insider knowledge about the supernatural, striding into the police station, insisting that the police listen to her warnings. Again, the feminine is valorized, for through her study of La Llorona, Valentina can accurately predict that two more children will be abducted, approximately where they will disappear, and that the children will be drowned by midnight. Like the female neighbor, Valentina will be discredited by the police lieutenant, who checks her credentials and finds that

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she has been dismissed from the police in Albuquerque for being obsessive about tracking La Llorona. He has her arrested and imprisoned. His folly reflects that of male authority and law. Before her past is discovered, Valentina provides the La Llorona narrative. Again, putting the story in the mouth of a female character who is also a supernatural creature alters its impact in contrast to Sam’s recitation in Supernatural. Valentina explains that La Llorona has been active for at least five years. At the intersection of two rivers, three children disappear and are later found drowned, before Halloween. “You know the story,” she tells the other police officers. “It’s a ghost story. The mother drowns her three children in revenge because her husband leaves her for a younger woman. I think our killer believes she is La Llorona.” At this point, Valentina denies the woman is a ghost, but by the end of the episode even Valentina believes in ghosts. The episode, then, performs the stages of feminist psychological development; the female character learns and accepts her own knowledge and integrates it with that of other knowers. The male detectives’ education also follows this same path. The show depicts the foolishness of pursuing only masculine sources of knowledge. Research into the folk legend of La Llorona occupies the male detectives. Foolishly, they don’t trust Valentina’s advice, thus risking the life of another child who is abducted. Nick and Hank look into Nick’s ancient manuscript of supernatural creatures (Grimm’s archive). There they find illustrations of the woman they have seen in the video-taking Rafael. While Hank tells Nick, “I thought we didn’t believe in ghosts,” Nick replies, “We didn’t,” with the emphasis they must now accept the reality of ghosts. The dialogue is played for laughs, but the acceptance of a feminine power is quite serious. The drawings of the woman in white and the descriptions tally precisely with her appearance and actions. She has apparently been abducting children for centuries. In Spanish, the manuscript describes “a weeping woman who steals children” in “1519.” Hank reads on to find an English translation that he can understand. In a moment of recognition, Hank says, “The FBI has no idea what they’re dealing with.” Again, not only the local but also the national police are shown to be inadequate. Realizing masculine authority will not save the missing children, Hank and Nick rush back to the precinct to free Valentina and to get her help in stopping La Llorona. As they explain to Valentina the results of their research, she insists, “This woman is real,” and Hank replies, “Real is a relative term around here.” Valentina helps the officers identify where La Llorona appears, the Spanish description of the “river’s embrace.” It takes all three to understand the power of the female ghost.

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La Llorona, terrifying and hideous. Grimm.

The episode depicts La Llorona sympathetically. Despite her impending murder of the three children, La Llorona appears beautiful to them and to the viewers. We see her sadness at the loss of her own children. As the three detectives rush to rescue the other children, we see La Llorona, hand-in-hand with them, sing a lullaby and walk them to the river’s edge. In Spanish, with English subtitles, she says, “My children. Please come back to me. Please forgive me.” Three ghostly figures of children emerge from the river, and she tells them, “I have brought you three to take your place.” At this moment, the three officers appear, and La Llorona transforms from a sad but beautiful woman into a bloody hag, as she has done in the female police officer’s vision. While Hank and Valentina take the children, Nick, in his role as a Grimm, grapples with La Llorona, wrestling with her underwater as she tries to drown him. He strikes her, and she becomes beautiful again, slowly wafting deeper underwater. Emphasizing the female ghost’s beauty and human appearance allows us to see her as less than pure evil and more as a woman damaged by a patriarchal society. The water reflects feminine elusiveness, as the male detective cannot maintain his grasp on her body. He slowly gets out of the water, exhausted and perplexed. “I had her, and then she wasn’t there.” “Where is she?” asks Valentina, to which Nick replies, “I don’t know.” After the children are joyfully reunited with their parents, Hank turns to Valentina and asks, “Do you believe in ghosts now?” Having seen for ourselves La Llorona’s ghostly qualities, the viewers know the answer is yes. In her disappearance into the

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water, La Llorona becomes one with nature, a specter who is both everywhere and nowhere, speaking in the language of moving water. It is left unclear whether La Llorona will appear again elsewhere. The episode, though, valorizes the use of female characters and feminine knowledge as a way of combating the dangerous female ghost. Listening to female characters and availing themselves of their knowledge is what allows Nick and Hank to save the children. The episode itself shows the existence of this particular female ghost to be real and powerful and a threat to patriarchal society. While La Llorona is vanquished in this episode, she is not banished forever. Instead, the viewers are left with the unsettling knowledge that the injustices that La Llorona experienced, from male infidelity to the betrayal of a nation, still need acknowledgment and resolution. The fluidity of the La Llorona ghost explains her appeal and frequent appearance in popular culture. Her essential narrative—that of a betrayed woman who threatens children—usually begins ominously, but, as we have seen, twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts reveal sympathy for her situation. This centuries-old folktale resonates with current gender conflicts, particularly a struggle between feminine and masculine worldviews for the control of children. As the plots reveal, it is only by empathizing with La Llorona’s exclusion and suffering that the threat she poses can be curtailed. The La Llorona episode of Grimm shows how children can be rescued but leaves the female ghost out in the world, able to return. La Llorona’s continued existence, like that of the Woman in Black, serves as a warning. The vexed, violent, and inherently incompatible values of feminine and masculine must be acknowledged and addressed. The lesson of La Llorona and other female ghosts remains the same: the repressed feminine can be denied only at great cost. These various representations of La Llorona show the development of the figure of the female ghost. While she shares many features with the ghosts in chapters 1 and 2, La Llorona has become more powerful and more popular. The female ghost has also become explicitly feminist in her objections to patriarchal society, exposing domestic violence and war as problems that develop from a masculine worldview. The female ghost helps other characters resist sexism and misogyny and provides a critique for readers and viewers. This figure is only temporarily banished at the end of Supernatural and Grimm, and her appearance in two mass culture television programs extends her reach to millions of viewers.

Chapter Four

The Female Ghost and Feminist History The Woman Warrior and Beloved While the previous chapter focuses on versions of a folklore ghost, this chapter moves to texts that create their female spirits from actual history. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved engage with history by imagining the ghosts of actual women. Kingston’s memoir focuses on her dead aunt, and Morrison’s novel imagines the ghost of a young girl killed by her mother to prevent a return to slavery. In both instances, the explicit link to the real world provides an opportunity to retell history from a feminist perspective. While Subversive Spirits is primarily a study of the female ghost in popular culture, I include these two novels to demonstrate the ways that canonical texts such as The Woman Warrior and Beloved can be understood in another context, that of the tradition of the female ghost. By employing this figure, Kingston and Morrison avail themselves of the character’s numerous feminist qualities and demonstrate her importance for women writers. Focusing on the female ghosts in these books allows us to see more clearly these critically acclaimed texts’ connection to, and use of, popular culture. At the same time, these books and their related films show how the female spirit haunts not only popular culture but also a canonical literary tradition. Literary critics have tended to focus on the living characters to the detriment of the female ghost. That both writers have been honored for their excellence as writers and that these texts occupy a hallowed place in criticism and the classroom means that The Woman Warrior and Beloved have been somewhat unmoored from their reliance on the popular figure of the female ghost. Focusing on the female wraith in these books allows us to move the figure from margin to center, as both writers, I will argue, intended. Kristeva and Cixous help situate the female spirits in these texts, for like the Woman in Black and La Llorona, these two historically based ghosts commit desperate acts of infanticide. Kingston’s and Morrison’s apparitions share with other female ghosts an association with water imagery, the experience

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of writing the feminine body, the struggle against being treated as abject, and an ability to control the narrative. For Kingston’s and Morrison’s female ghosts, however, the struggle focuses on having their rightful place in history restored. The reality of the source material makes these female ghosts more poignant and compelling. While the other female ghosts have to struggle with and move beyond their own voicelessness, for Kingston’s and Morrison’s spirits, a writer must articulate a voice for them. Both texts use a female ghost to present in compelling and painful detail the struggle and pain of women of color in a white supremacist nation. They provide instances of how the female ghost is used to address that which is denied and excluded, both women and people of color. As Kathleen Brogan explains in her study of ghosts and ethnicity, “the contemporary American ghost story [is] a pan-ethnic phenomenon, registering a widespread concern with questions of ethnic identity and cultural transmission” (4). While the time period in The Woman in Black is deliberately left vague, and La Llorona flits over centuries, the spirits in The Woman Warrior and Beloved draw on specific historical female figures and eras. The deliberate and concrete historicity of Kingston’s and Morrison’s texts contrasts strikingly with a more promotional view of history as heritage discussed in the next chapter. Heritage, like history itself, is selective, viewing a site and its inhabitants through a particular lens. As Tony Bennett explains, history focuses on “a gendered time in which linear, largely male, and public time . . . is contrasted to the private, cyclical, repetitive, and habitual time of everyday time that has classically been represented by women” (55). Kingston’s creative nonfiction memoir and Morrison’s novel illuminate the habitual feminine experience neglected by history. That their female ghosts represent the oppression of the feminine allied with that of exploited immigrants and slaves is part of the writers’ challenge to traditional white male-focused public history. While the female spirits in other chapters indirectly challenge the traditional history of elite white male public figures, Kingston’s and Morrison’s ghosts tackle history’s erasures directly. Rather than heritage, The Woman Warrior and Beloved present their female ghosts as a part of history. Through their inclusion of vivid detail and immediacy, the books and films discussed in this chapter insist that we pay attention to the compelling experiences of women of color. These writers use the female ghost to tell another “untold story.” The Woman Warrior and Beloved draw on vividly detailed and painful history to ground and locate their ghosts’ trauma. Like the ghosts discussed in the preceding chapters, Kingston’s and Morrison’s spirits expose

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gendered oppression, but they also provide the context of specific voluntary and involuntary immigrant experience. Where class shapes the lives of the Woman in Black and those of the dead wives in Topper and Blithe Spirit, the pain endured by the female ghosts in The Woman Warrior and Beloved is exacerbated by a racist context. Exposing the ways that racism and sexism intersect, these narratives use the female ghost to emphasize an alternative history that includes the horrors of racism. While it is true, as Diana Wallace argues, that “the ghost story as a form has allowed women writers a special kind of freedom . . . to offer critiques of male power and sexuality which are often more radical than those in more realist genres” (57), Kingston’s and Morrison’s ghosts are grounded in the concretely identified history of racial exploitation. While historical plantation homes and railroad museums laud the beauty and achievements of their respective industries, they omit the suffering and death of the people who labored, involuntarily and under terrible conditions, to create such monuments. What Angeletta Gourdine has written about the female spirit in Beloved applies also to Kingston’s narrative: “Beloved’s physical and psychical reincarnation is necessary to remind the living that a future built upon the buried and forgotten pain of the past is never secure, will always be haunted by that past” (17). Both Kingston and Morrison create female characters who, as Wallace discusses in nineteenth-century ghost stories by women, evade the marriage plot (58). Going even further, Kingston and Morrison use the female ghost to show that, as Ross Poole describes, “the home, the arena of family life turns out to be, not a refuge from the uncanny, but an exemplary case of it” (127). Family history and national history are connected in a specific time and place that is remembered but also cast out. Both Kingston’s nameless aunt-ghost and Morrison’s Beloved lack personal, individual names. Denied specificity, both ghosts come to represent female experience in a specific place, time, and nation. Both horrific experiences have to be cast out through writing, but not, as in the case of the Woman in Black, the ghost’s own writing. Instead, the female spirits’ daughters (metaphorically, in subsequent generations) must create biographies that make sense of the horror but also allow the stories’ readers to accept and expel the horror. At the same time that these female ghosts expose the supernatural and horror in a domestic space and tradition, this domesticity is shaped and defined by racism. Using a supernatural figure, as a number of critics have noted, allows writers to deal with the horrors of racism: Ruth Jenkins explains “that formal realism can neither portray nor contain sufficiently” (61). She also says that analyzing “significant connections between the supernatural and the female

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voice” allows Kingston “to articulate an alternative story from those endorsed by patriarchal cultures” (62). Through her use of the supernatural, Jenkins further argues, Kingston exposes the limits of realism, Anglo-American canon, and patriarchal history, which fails to record women’s voices. Peter Ramos cites history’s silence about the horrors of slavery, quoting Doris Sommer: “[E]xperience of the unspeakable is a categorical limit of language” (n 47). As Kingston’s and Morrison’s books show, language cannot express the unspeakable horrors of racism and slavery. Kingston’s aunt is never even allowed a name, let alone the chance to speak. Morrison’s Beloved similarly lacks a first name, and while she haltingly uses language, she is never fluent or easily understood. These ghostly silences point to the extreme horror of their experiences. At the same time, however, these female ghosts follow the pattern of the figure in popular culture. Their ghosts develop from voicelessness to greater self-knowledge and awareness, in the path of women’s ways of knowing. While neither of the female ghosts reaches a level where she demonstrates a sense of constructed knowledge, her effect on other characters (and presumably readers) promotes an epistemological awareness in them. Like the female ghosts in popular texts, Kingston’s and Morrison’s specters demonstrate the importance of voice, self, and mind for a feminine worldview as articulated by Belenky and colleagues. At the same time, the female ghost’s use of sounds evokes Kristeva’s conception of maternal, preverbal communication. The function of the female ghost in these literary masterpieces, then, is to represent the unrepresentable and to introduce racism itself as creating specters. These female ghosts stand in for all the women of color who left no imprint on recorded history because their lives and experiences were deliberately erased. Because the facts of their lives cannot be uncovered through traditional history, archives, photographs, or paper records, their existence can only be re-created and reimagined by their writers, who are haunted by the legacy of their unknown female forebears. These books move the presence of actual women from mere mentions in brief, unofficial records into the public sphere. The complex narrative of Beloved requires, as Gourdine argues, “a movement from the readers’ safe space into the haunting space Beloved creates” (16). So, too, does the powerful and troubling story of No Name Woman. The blithe humor of the midcentury white female ghosts in Thorne Smith’s Topper and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit seems eons away. Reimagining actual historical women, as both Kingston and Morrison do, and re-creating their lives in fiction, weigh heavily on these authors. While Coward and Smith can imagine playful and engaging female ghosts, late

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twentieth-century feminist writers bear the weight of history and representation. Only the maternal anguish of the fictional Woman in Black and folkloric La Llorona come close to the oppressed female ghosts in Kingston’s memoir and Morrison’s novel. Grounding their ghosts in history gives Kingston’s and Morrison’s ghosts a weight and seriousness that affect the narratives and readers’ responses to them. These books have been extensively studied (and lauded), but analyzing them together in the tradition of the female ghost helps us see the centrality of this figure in both books. Kingston’s and Morrison’s ghosts share qualities with the popular culture female ghost. Like the ghosts examined in previous chapters, Kingston’s No Name Woman and Morrison’s Beloved draw on qualities of feminine power as described by French feminist theorists. While one is about a mother who kills her child (No Name Woman) and the other about a daughter killed by her mother (Beloved), both texts evoke Julia Kristeva’s idea of the maternal abject. Kristeva’s description of the abject in patriarchal society as intrinsically feminine fits these two female ghosts, as it does the others. Uncontrollable, hysterical, destructive, the maternal female body terrifies in its ability to absorb and dominate the child. In this psychoanalytic perspective, the child’s need to differentiate itself from its mother provides the source of horror. This dynamic is particularly pronounced for male children, which explains, in part, why female ghosts haunt male characters in many texts. In The Woman Warrior and Beloved, however, those most haunted by the ghosts are themselves female, complicating the gender-role reversal that defines many other female ghost narratives. The first section of The Woman Warrior, “No Name Woman,” and Beloved focus on female characters, who, haunted by ghosts, must confront and learn from the ghosts how to live. As the previous chapter on La Llorona demonstrates, the specific cultural context, especially national and racial politics, shapes the character of the individual female ghost. Kingston depicts a variety of uses of the ghost in Chinese American culture, from the amusing but pointed nomenclature of “ghost” for white people, to the most powerful and serious ghost, the protagonist’s unnamed aunt, who had committed suicide, drowning herself and her newborn child in a village well. Like the Woman in Black, the aunt defied cultural tradition by becoming pregnant by someone other than a husband. Sharing death with her child by drowning is not the only quality these two malevolent female ghosts share. Both are denied voice, the opportunity to speak their stories. But while novelist Susan Hill gives the Woman in Black a name, letters she has written, and most powerfully, the ability to kill, Kingston’s aunt operates far more indirectly. In telling the aunt’s story in multiple

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versions, however, the narrator gives the aunt the voice so long denied her, and the story then operates to help Kingston liberate herself from sexist and racist strictures. As it does for the Woman in Black and La Llorona, the female ghost’s backstory criticizes the misogynistic culture that leads to the mother’s murder of children. Sympathetically depicted, the aunt No-Name Woman had become pregnant after her husband had already emigrated with other village men to America. The narrator recounts her mother’s version of the tale; it is told as a warning to young Maxine when she has her first menstruation about what happens to women who break social custom. The timing of the story lets its listener and the memoir’s reader understand the horror of the uncontrolled female body, the abject maternal. Yet the narrator turns the story around, imagining different scenarios, from love to rape, that might have produced the pregnancy. She imagines that the aunt took her child with her to spare her the pain of growing up hated and abused. She imagines the child was a girl, because “there is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (15). This first story about a ghost sets the tone for the use of ghosts to mirror and refract the immigrant experience of racism and sexism. In contrast to most other ghost stories, this one is set in a specific place, a few years after 1924. Grounding the tale in history, the mother asserts its reality and also provides the context for understanding what happened to Maxine’s aunt. While the tale is presented as fact, the first words of the book set up its pathology and secrecy. “‘You must not tell anyone,’” Kingston’s mother commands (3). These words introduce the idea of a hidden history, a women’s version of the past that is shameful but important, passed on from mother to daughter. As with the Woman in Black, No Name Woman’s story must be heard. But while the Woman in Black acts to have her story told, No Name Woman relies on Kingston’s brave act of imagining and retelling for commemoration and remembrance. Despite her mother’s adjuration to keep silent about her aunt, Kingston tells the story of No Name Woman and does so in a way that honors her life and choices. Kingston retells the story despite her mother’s horrible warning: “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born” (5). Kingston acknowledges the importance and impact of family/ cultural stories like that of No Name Woman. Characterized as part of the second-generation experience, she asks, “[H]ow do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, . . . your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is movies?” (5–6).

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From the memoir’s beginning, then, Kingston describes how the immigrant experience is intertwined with popular culture. Figures of female ghosts allow Kingston to interrogate the stories she is told; amorphous and without their own voices, the female ghosts are permeable. Kingston can and does use their shapelessness to tell her own sympathetic, feminist version of No Name Woman’s life. Like La Llorona, No Name Woman commits infanticide, defying traditional maternal roles of the mother as protector. Understanding and making this terrible act understandable is Kingston’s task (as it is also for Morrison). Rather than accepting her mother’s version of her aunt, the narrator begins to sketch alternative scenarios for No Name Woman’s experiences, almost like movie treatments for the drama. The first imagined scenario is that the aunt had been a victim of a male rapist, someone who took advantage of women’s subordinate position in Chinese culture. Pointing out that her arranged marriage was not much different from a rape, Kingston comments: “The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders: she followed” (7). While the immigrant Chinese men could flout convention, the woman, left at home, had to uphold tradition. To subvert this sexist reality, however, Kingston turns to imagining her aunt in love, or that she was “a wild woman” (8). Imagining her aunt’s longings, Kingston provides her with choices. In addition, the narrator stresses that No Name Woman kept her secrets, taking her lover’s name to the grave with her. Finally providing historical context to explain the harsh punishment inflicted on the aunt, Kingston lets the readers know that the incident occurred in a time of famine and disease and that “adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food” (13). The alternative scenarios provide examples of feminine writing as characterized by Hélène Cixous: “jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up” (887). Her aunt’s ghost allows Kingston to create the feminine disruption that Cixous describes. Her aunt “wrote her body” through her sexual activity and suicide, but left no written record. It falls to Kingston to use words to challenge misogyny, both on behalf of her aunt and herself. Kingston’s memoir contains a strong defense of the female ghost’s actions, explaining the infanticide in terms that provide a sympathetic context. “She would protect this child as she had protected its father,” the narrator claims. “Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise, abandon it. Turn its face into the mud. Mothers who love their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (15). Kingston also

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expiates her own guilt at not telling her aunt’s story earlier and not seeking out further details about her. A heinous crime against the aunt is not only the raid on her in her house by masked villagers who destroy her belongings and terrorize the pregnant woman, but also in the family and culture denying her existence. Kingston thereby embodies feminine writing in Cixous’s terms. “Women must write herself, must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies,” Cixous explains (875), using words that seem to describe the narrator and her aunt. The female ghost haunts Kingston, but by telling her story, Kingston allows her to live and be remembered. Yet like the Woman in Black, No Name Woman is a frightful ghost, angry at patriarchy and at her unfair treatment. Kingston explains, “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her” (16). The chapter “No Name Woman,” like the story of the Woman in Black, is a cautionary tale for the reader. Water repeatedly appears in female ghost narratives, as it does in The Woman in Black. As Kingston explains in the beginning of her memoir, her aunt’s story belongs to a specific tradition associated with water: “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute” (16). Linking her aunt’s death to a folklore tradition connects her to other traditional female ghosts, like the Mexican La Llorona or the dead who live underwater in some African belief systems. Beloved’s eponymous ghost also emerges from a body of water, in the film, weighed down by a confining nineteenth-century dress. Since both texts focus on the maternal, their association of the female ghost with water makes symbolic sense, evoking amniotic fluid and the maternal womb, the terrifying abject feminine as characterized by Kristeva. The aunt-ghost in The Woman Warrior was punished for defying conventional controls on women’s sexuality, and while the tale is initially presented as cautionary to the young Maxine, she celebrates her aunt’s resistance in her own memoir. Kingston’s unnamed aunt violates her village’s rigid control of women’s sexuality. Their terrifying enactment of shaming and exclusion, in Kingston’s vivid and compelling retelling, explains the aunt’s radical act of destruction of herself and her child. As in other feminist texts, No Name Woman demonstrates the extreme punishment of women who transgress. Pushed out of society and out of life, the horror of these women’s suffering cannot not be repressed. In telling the story of No Name Woman to Kingston,

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her own mother keeps the ghost alive. Presenting the tale as a warning to her now-adult (menstruating) daughter makes a connection between Kingston’s menses and that of her aunt. Kingston’s sympathy for and imaginative re-creation of the aunt’s experiences form the talk-story, the narrative that reinforces and keeps the ghost present by insisting on her specificity and individuality. The tale of No Name Woman as told by her niece provides an example of what Cixous describes: “[I]n woman, personal history blends with the history of all women” (882). This section of The Woman Warrior is the most frequently anthologized of this influential text, and rightly so, for it encapsulates the themes of Kingston’s own life, as she too struggles with racial and gender oppression. Rather than exorcising the ghost of her aunt, Kingston embraces her story not only by sharing within her family, but also by publishing it in her memoir. In so doing, Kingston rejects her mother’s strategy of keeping silent, only whispering the story and forbidding her to retell it. Her conscious decision to write the repressed disrupts the silencing of the feminine. Kingston’s act of defiant writing of her aunt’s female body resists internalized oppression. This experience also allows Kingston to move beyond the first stage of women’s ways of knowing, voicelessness, for herself and for her ghostly aunt. Acknowledging No Name Woman enables Kingston to break through cultural strictures and explain and explore gender in her Chinese American experience. A medium tells Kingston that “a girl who died in a faraway country follows [her] wherever [she] goes.” Kingston says the medium tells her, “This spirit can help me if I acknowledge her” (52). That Kingston does so by writing a memoir provides a way to repulse the misogyny of Chinese and American culture. As she explains, “There is a Chinese word for female I—which is ‘slave.’ Break the women with their own tongues” (47). By telling No Name Woman’s story, and then her own, Kingston resists the control of women through language and plot. The metaphor of writing as resistance appears in the memoir’s next chapter, about the fabled family Woman Warrior, whose parents write their need for revenge on her skin, with sharp blades. As Kingston explains, she identifies with the Woman Warrior as well as No Name Woman. All three of them carry their pain on their bodies. Of herself, Kingston writes: “[T] he reporting is the vengeance . . . And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin” (53). Her story and those of her mother and her aunts contradict the constraints placed on the women. As Gayle K. Fujita Sato explains, the stories of No Name Woman and that of the Woman Warrior are inextricably connected: “But if rescuing

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the aunt’s ghost is Kingston’s primary act as a woman warrior, at the same time, she must possess knowledge of ghosts in order to become a capable warrior” (200). The female ghost of her own story provides a key to unlock and analyze sexism and racism, to both criticize and appreciate Chinese culture’s extremes of women. From No Name Woman, to her opposite, the folk heroine the Woman Warrior who becomes a fighter who expels the Mongols from China, these female characters expose racism and sexism. Kingston’s own mother, who became a doctor in China but who also owned a slave girl who was her nurse-assistant, also provides a model of feminist resistance to sexism. By the end of the memoir, Kingston explains her own identification with ghosts, as a Chinese American girl, raised in a ghost country. Her parents provide only partial Chinese context and culture because their children “had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like” (183). Yet as Kingston’s memoir shows, the liminal state of being a female ghost provides flexibility and freedom at the same time that it seems to be a marginal state. Because of her sympathy for No Name Woman, Kingston finds the courage and ability to resist racism and sexism and to use her writing to expose and analyze them. The female ghost, then, provides a figure who enables and supports the second-generation immigrant in what her mother describes as “a terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away” (104). Significantly, all foreigners (except the Japanese), are considered ghosts by the Chinese, Kingston explains. Acknowledging and dealing with ghosts, both their own and foreigner-ghosts, shapes and defines Kingston’s gendered immigrant experience. In reclaiming her ghost ancestors, Kingston herself becomes a woman warrior, fighting to reclaim and revise her family and cultural history. No Name Woman provides, as do the comedic ghosts, the Woman in Black, and La Llorona, an alternative feminist perspective. The movies that draw on Kingston’s text also deserve brief analysis. The Disney movies that deal with the Woman Warrior folktale have affected a generation of young women. In these films, Mulan and Mulan II, the narrative focuses on the folktale of a military heroine, a literal woman warrior, depicted in “White Tigers,” the chapter that follows “No Name Woman.” The 1998 movie and its 2005 sequel focus primarily on the story of the young woman who cross-dresses to become a soldier, winning a battle to protect China from invaders. While in Kingston’s version, the warrior woman’s parents write the story of suffering onto her back with knives, in Mulan, the young woman writes a list of qualities she should strive for, to be a perfect and docile bride, in ink on her own arm. Not surprisingly, for these movies

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The female ancestor ghost. Mulan 2.

are intended for young audiences, the brutality of the folktale is softened. Yet in the Mulan films, ghosts, ancestors, and honor are important, as they are in Kingston’s memoir. Like Kingston, Mulan resists traditional Chinese femininity. Uninterested in makeup, dresses, and tea ceremonies, Mulan is a tomboy, preferring to be outdoors and to be active. In Mulan, the matchmaker screams at the eponymous heroine, “[Y]ou are a disgrace—you will never bring your family honor!” Nontraditional, defying social rules, Mulan risks death when she cross-dresses to take her elderly father’s place in a conscripted army. She prays to ancestors in a family shrine before taking such a bold step, and the ghosts appear after she leaves. One ancient female ghost castigates Mulan as being “a troublemaker,” while another elderly female phantom defends her, saying, “[S]he’s just trying to defend her family.” In contrast to the Woman Warrior, Mulan has a troop of nine ghosts, who send one small comical dragon ghost to assist her. The film thus splits up and depoliticizes the figure of the female ghost. The challenge to traditional gender roles is therefore moved from the female ghost to Mulan herself, thus marginalizing the overwhelming supernatural power of the feminine. The second film shows that Mulan has become a role model for the girls in her village, who all want to be able to fight as she does. This movie deals with unarranging the marriages the emperor dictates for his daughters and showing Mulan learning to negotiate and share power. In contrast to the ghost of No Name Woman in Kingston’s memoir, the ghosts in the Mulan movies directly help the main character defy traditional gender

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roles. The Disney film’s contrast with Kingston’s sad story of an arranged marriage and an unsanctioned pregnancy that leads to death could not be more striking. Like Kingston, Disney rewrites the history of ancient China to make it more flexible. The ancestor ghosts serve mostly as a frame, with only two of the ghosts being female, and none of them directly affecting Mulan’s life and decisions. The final scene of Mulan II shows Mulan and her husband defying custom together by combining their family temples (customarily, the husband’s ancestors would replace the wife’s). Mulan’s ancestral ghosts remain in power, in Mulan’s family temple, instead of being displaced by the husband’s ancestors, an egalitarian conclusion accomplished by the dead, not the living. The Disney version simply revises the historically male-dominated society to provide a nostalgic vision of happy but compulsory heterosexuality. While this version of the Woman Warrior is not surprising because it is a film geared toward children, reading the memoir and a Disney film together emphasizes the power of the original text and the importance of focusing on a female ghost. Kingston’s mother’s words about the United States being “a terrible ghost country” could apply as well to the African American experience embodied in Morrison’s novel Beloved. In a recent foreword to the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison explains the historical case of Margaret Garber that prompted her creation of the female ghost Beloved. While working as an editor at Random House Publishing, Morrison had worked on The Black Book, a history that included a newspaper account of “a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation. Her sanity and lack of repentance caught the attention of Abolitionists as well as newspapers” (xvii). Morrison explains that “the historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but to a novelist, confining. . . . So I would invent her thoughts, plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in essence” (xvii). Very like Kingston’s reimagining of her aunt’s life, Morrison’s act of creation caused her, in the author’s own words, to figuratively “pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts” (xvii). Inspired by Garner’s reallife story, Morrison envisions an embodied female ghost, a young woman called Beloved, walking out of the water (xviii). As Morrison explains, she wrote “to invite readers (and myself) into the repellent landscape (hidden but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten)” (xvii). While Kingston imagines her long-dead aunt’s experiences, not the baby who dies soon after it was born, Morrison imagines the young child: “[T]he figure most central to the story would have to be her, the murdered, not the murderer,

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the one who lost everything and had no say in any of it” (xviii). Giving birth as she fled slavery, Sethe had crossed the Ohio River to freedom with her newborn daughter, Denver. Sethe had sent her young daughter Beloved and two sons ahead to their freed grandmother’s house. Tracked down by slave catchers, Sethe tries to kill her children to prevent them from being returned to slavery. Sethe succeeds in killing only Beloved, and Morrison’s point (and Gourdine’s) is that it is the story of the murdered Beloved that needs to be the main focus, and not that of the survivors—Sethe, Denver, and her sons. Angeletta Gourdine’s insightful reading of the novel, written before Morrison’s explanation of the source for Beloved, highlights the fact that so many readers see the novel as Sethe’s story instead, resisting and denying Beloved again. “Beloved’s voice is silenced,” Gourdine explains, “in critiques that focus on Sethe” (18), a reading reinforced by the film version discussed later in this chapter. If, as Gourdine argues, readers tend to focus on the character of Beloved, the novel’s resemblance to other female ghost narratives becomes even more pronounced. The female ghost has to become aware of “women’s ways of knowing” and move from voicelessness, to self-knowledge and authority, and to constructed knowledge. At the same time, Beloved “writes her body” and speaks through preverbal language. Beloved represents all enslaved in the United States. Her very namelessness—the appellation is a term of endearment, not a specific name—points to her amorphousness and larger representation of all those who suffered and died in slavery. Beloved lacks a given name, and her tombstone lacks a surname. Her name, genderless, reinforces the ghost’s symbolism. Morrison dedicates the book to “sixty million and more,” the number of Africans enslaved. The novel’s epigraph comes from the Bible: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved (Romans 9:25). The letter to the Romans from Apostle Paul stresses that God’s love and redemption are available to all people, not exclusive to the Jews. As Russ Poole notes, Beloved’s name “is a term which, in other contexts would be an affirmation of emotional commitment, is here a signifier of sexual debasement” (138). Without money and under indictment for her child’s death, Sethe barters her body so that her dead child will have an engraved tombstone. Beloved is described by the narrator as “an epithet, used to express a fleeting emotion aroused by brutal desire, but repudiated in the light of day” (137). Like Kingston’s aunt-ghost, No Name Woman, Beloved is a dangerous ghost who threatens the living. As a poltergeist spirit disrupting the house by disturbing objects and making sounds, Beloved keeps the legacy of her

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death and slavery alive through her feminine expression of anger. Her specific actions evoke those of the female ghost in Topper and La Llorona, as all three spirits destroy domestic spaces. Her haunting of the house indicates the repressed history of slavery, not mentioned, horrors not told, but still present and disturbing. In 124, their home, they “wage[d] a perfunctory battle . . . against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air” (4). Beloved’s disruption of the domestic space reflects Cixous’s understanding of the repressed feminine; like the abject feminine who writes her body, female ghosts “take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (887). Sethe, Beloved’s mother, and Denver, her sister, have come to terms with the poltergeist, accepting her presence in the house because “they underst[an]d the source of the outrage” (4) from the murdered child. She projects a “pool of red and undulating light” (10) that scares Paul D, a man who had been enslaved with Sethe and whom she had not seen for eighteen years. The house moves and shakes; the ghost also injures the family dog, throwing Here Boy (his name) against a wall and injuring him. After the red light disappears, “a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been” (11). Denver describes the ghost as “lonely and rebuked” (16). Sympathetic but disturbing, the ghost is banished when Paul D moves into 124 with Sethe and Denver, but Beloved soon appears in another, embodied form. First only an invisible poltergeist, the child reappears as a young woman who says her name is Beloved. As a poltergeist, Beloved does not have a body, but her gender is clear to her sister and mother. However, after Beloved appears as a young woman, her femininity becomes a defining feature of her ghostliness. Her inhabitation of the house, including the red light, evokes the traditional reading of a house or home as womblike, but in contrast to conventional notions of the home as refuge, 124 is terrifying and destructive, causing Sethe’s male children to run away. Like Constance Welch in Supernatural, Beloved controls the feminine, domestic space. Like No Name Woman’s child, drowned in a well by her mother, Beloved has been killed by her mother, to protect her from the abuses and torture of being a slave. While Kingston imagines No Name Woman’s protective intentions in taking her child with her to a watery death in a well, Morrison’s depiction is more contradictory. While it is clear that Sethe loved Beloved and still loves her in her ghostly form, Beloved herself needs to extract demonstrations of that love. Beloved’s attachment to and demands of Sethe ultimately threaten Sethe’s life. While No Name Woman drowns

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herself in the village’s well, perhaps a “spite suicide,” ruining the village’s water, Sethe’s community rallies around her to save her from Beloved’s smothering attachment. As Gourdine explains, “when [the other female characters] do decide to reconcile themselves to Sethe, it is at Beloved’s expense” (23). This unification speaks to the strength of a living female community, as well as their desire to repress a painful past. Also like the Woman in Black and the La Llorona ghost, Beloved’s appearance is marked by overtly feminine imagery of a river and water. Beloved’s appearance emerging from the river evokes birth and baptism. As Beloved appears, fully clothed and soaking wet from the river, Sethe reenacts birth, as her waters symbolically break. Soaking her own clothes, Sethe thinks of Denver’s birth and how her water broke: “The water she voided was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on, she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born” (60). Beloved’s unworldly presence is indicated in various details. The presumably male dog Here Boy runs away. Beloved doesn’t know her own name; speaks in an odd, gravelly voice; has no lines in her hands; can hardly walk; and cannot tie her own shoes. Her skills are those of a toddler, not a young woman. Beloved asks about Sethe’s earrings that had been given to her by her mistress, and she can sing the lullaby that Sethe made up and only sang to her children. When Denver and Beloved save Sethe from being choked by a mysterious presence, “Beloved [is] so agitated she behave[s] like a two-year old” (116). Physically, Beloved is the age that the murdered child would have been, had she lived. As occurs with other female ghosts, Beloved’s liminal state disturbs the other characters. Beloved is outside conventional attachments and restraints. She doesn’t appear to belong to any family or to any man. Her independence models the abject feminine, and the other characters react with trepidation to her. Beloved’s inexplicable behavior and sudden appearance unsettle Denver, Sethe, and Paul D, who only finds out that Sethe had murdered her child when cornered by the slavers who had abused her after Beloved has appeared in human form. He asks, “[W]hat if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise?” (141). The relationship between the female ghost and her living mother exemplifies Kristeva’s notion of the preverbal feminine language. The power of the preverbal is compelling, allowing Sethe to recognize and know her child in this new ghostly form. Both Beloved and Sethe use an alternative form of language, accessible only to them. Beloved hums a song that Sethe recognizes as a lullaby she created for her children and sang to no one but the children. In addition to the lullaby, Beloved exists an alternative way of

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expressing the trauma of her experience and, by extension, that of slavery: “The ghost’s fragmented, heavily repetitive language which provides a rough verbal equivalent for atemporality, reflects the traumatic nature of the experience it describes” (Brogan 75). Withdrawn from the world and others, Sethe cannot explain the death of her child to a male auditor. As Brogan notes, “Sethe breaks off her narrative, shifting abruptly to static, wordless mental pictures of the murder scene” (78). These two instances typify the intensity and alterity of the ghost’s relationship with her mother, as it does for the Woman in Black and La Llorona. Like them, Beloved uses her body and strong, overpowering emotion to communicate. Without naming Kristeva, Brogan’s analysis evokes a rejection of patriarchal discourse: “Morrison seeks knowledge of American slavery that escapes documentary evidence, including, curiously, those records produced by slaves themselves” (62). Morrison’s creation of the female ghost, though, goes beyond rejecting official documents to presenting the female body speaking as an alternative source of communication. Other characters in the novel, such as Stamp Paid, describe the haunting in words that evoke Cixous’s description of feminine writing: “the resonance of fore-language . . . the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure or death” (889). Paid hears “a conflagration of hasty voices . . . all speaking at once . . . something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn’t describe or cipher . . . Just that eternal, private conversation” (Beloved 202–3). Brogan describes the “haunted language in Beloved’ as “a traumatic language, distinguished by its repetitiveness, fragmentation, unhinging of vocabulary, and at times, odd dislocations of syntactic logic” (79); in other words, it is a feminine language, disassociated from the symbolic order and patriarchal discourse and incomprehensible to the male characters, Paul D and Stamp Paid. While Beloved discomfits the male characters, she has a more positive effect on her sister, evoking the relationship of the two wives in Blithe Spirit (discussed in chapter 1) and the sisters in So Far from God (chapter 3). A tightly knit family of females forms around the female ghost, and the sympathy for the female ghost is multigenerational and expansive. Denver remembers what her grandmother had said: “[I]t was a greedy ghost, and needed a lot of love, which was only natural, considering” (247). Denver herself cares for Beloved tenderly, until Beloved and Sethe coalesce into an unhealthy and isolating obsessive relationship. Once Sethe identifies Beloved as her child, “who had no choice but to come back to me in the flesh” (236), Sethe loses the boundaries between herself and Beloved. In an inversion of the maternal

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abject, the child absorbs the mother’s body. Sethe, like the Woman in Black, loses herself. Like No Name Woman and the child she takes to its death in the village well, Sethe and Beloved seem destined to die together. Encountering the female ghost forces Denver and Sethe to confront their sources of knowledge and to move beyond voicelessness, the silence that they had embraced about slavery and about the murdered Beloved. Denver’s role reverses from Beloved’s first appearance: “[T]he job she started out with, protecting Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from Beloved” (286). Like Kingston in The Woman Warrior, Denver must tell the story to others, to enlist their help. The community, which had spurned Sethe and been spurned by her, responds to Denver’s call. She finds a job, food, and emotional support. When Beloved drives Sethe to try to kill the white man, thirty women prevent Sethe from doing so by grabbing her and taking a knife away from her. This sisterly solidarity has been generated by Beloved’s appearance. Embodying the abject feminine, Beloved is now visibly pregnant and naked. In her fecundity, Beloved exemplifies the maternal abject, growing from demanding infant to reproducing womanhood. Having demonstrated her abjectness completely, Beloved disappears, never to be seen again, except by a young boy, who says he saw, in the woods, “a naked woman with fish for hair” (315). The description evokes a more benign Medusa; Beloved has returned to our symbolic mother, the Earth. The novel sends her back to a watery grave, back to nature, as a way of signaling her supernaturalness. Beloved’s tale, told in this novel, is as the last few pages remind us, “not a story to pass on” (323). The novel’s conclusion eerily echoes the tale of expulsion and punishment of Kingston’s No Name Woman, as the sentence “It was not a story to pass on” is repeated twice, with text in between that reifies the loneliness and isolation of the exiled memories and dead women. “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her when they don’t know her name?” (323). Although Beloved is forgotten by the characters, she is not forgotten by the narrative, which describes her loss and longing, and ends with her appellation, “Beloved.” The film shows the ways in which depicting the female ghost can undercut the impact of the figure. Directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese, and Adam Brooks, the movie follows the book very closely, ending with a down-screen view of the house and the word “Beloved.” Effectively and disturbingly graphic, the film vividly portrays the female ghost’s depredations and the horrors and tortures of

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slavery, paralleling the two. Beloved, after all, exists as a ghost because she was sacrificed by her own mother to keep her safe from slavery. The film begins in black and white, to evoke the sense of history and the past, but moves into bright Technicolor to portray the blood and gore of slavery and, to a lesser extent, the blood and terror produced by the female ghost. While the film is visually compelling and provides a strong critique of slavery, its literal faithfulness weakens the female ghost’s evocative resistance. In reading the novel and film in the context of the female ghost tradition, we can see more clearly what is omitted from the movie. In contrast to the choices made by the director of The Woman in Black, Demme has in some ways acted as Gourdine complains many critics of the novel do, presenting the narrative as about Sethe rather than Beloved. Moving the emphasis to Sethe, played by Oprah Winfrey (who produced the film), makes sense from a commercial perspective, but finally makes the film less radical and less feminist than the source novel. The film begins by evoking the ghost’s power: framing the narrative is the tombstone with “BELOVED” written on it. Away in the corner, by the fence in the cemetery, Beloved seems to have been forgotten, but we see almost immediately that she lives on in 124. The opening scene depicts crockery, tables, and the family dog whirled around in the air, the latter hitting a wall with a sickening thud. We see the dog’s considerable wounds, hear him whimper, but unmoved, Sethe calmly sets about stitching his wounds, pushing his eye back into his head. The dog’s horrible injuries are the last straw for Sethe’s young sons, who hurriedly pack food and clothes to leave the house for good. Taunting them as one attempts to take a cake, the female ghost places two small handprints in the icing on the top of the cake. A mirror falls and breaks, and as the boys leave, one hugging Denver goodbye, the household becomes all female: Sethe, Denver, and the female ghost, Beloved. In part because the role of Sethe is played by the famous Oprah Winfrey, and Beloved by a lesser known actress, Thandie Newton, the film reifies the centrality of Sethe in the narrative. This disparity in casting is reinforced by Newton’s performance, which was scathingly criticized by many critics as being too animalistic (Wadl 514), though director Demme’s choices were also questioned. The all-female household of mother, daughter, and daughter-ghost achieves a stability that is undercut by the appearance of Paul D, whom the mother had known during slavery. The ghost’s displeasure at a male presence is immediate and palpable. The film not only shows the turmoil through special effects, but also conveys Paul D’s reaction through extreme close-ups. A hellish red light infuses the house, causing Paul D to ask, “What

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kind of evil you got in here?” Through eerie music and side-angle shots, the director pulls the viewer into the disorder caused by Beloved. The entire house shakes, to ominous sounds of creaks and snaps. As Sethe explains that the ghost is not evil, but sad, mournful music reflects her characterization, and Denver falls into her mother’s arms, sobbing. As Sethe describes how the schoolteacher who came to run the farm named Sweet Home sexually abused and tortured her, a baby’s cry is heard, and the house moves as though there were an earthquake. Sweet Home’s name suggests an idyllic place, but despite the overtly more benign slavery practiced by the farm’s first owners, slavery is always dehumanizing and soul- and body-destroying. The ghost reflects the pain and anger at being killed as well as the slavehood that Sethe and Paul D experienced. The film does not shy, however, from depicting the ways that the female ghost dominates male characters. Paul D’s reaction is to push back against her power, literally, when a table almost pins him up against a wall, but he loses his fight with her. The frenetic scene provides strong images of Cixous’s description of the feminine disruption: “breaking them all up” (887). Like the ghost-wives from Blithe Spirit or Constance from Supernatural, Beloved controls the domestic, feminine space and is unafraid of destroying it to express her rage. Paul D yells at the invisible wraith, “You want a fight?” and all becomes calm. By the end of this scene, however, the kitchen is a disaster, with tables overturned, dishes broken, and shelves shattered on the floor. The biscuits that Sethe had been making are burnt, but Denver shows her acceptance of all this disorder by calmly picking up half of a plate, finding some jam, and going out on the porch to eat. Although this disturbing sequence is drawn directly from the novel, scholar Anissa Janine Wadl points out that “adapting the novel to the silver screen results in a problematic and unsettling transformation even as it adheres faithfully to the source” (514). Wadl’s criticism is that the visuals present us with a Beloved who is less sympathetic than she is in the novel. The visuals only echo the idea of writing the body. Like Sethe’s extensive and horrible scarring, which is compared to a tree carved on her back, and the writing on the Woman Warrior’s and Kingston’s skin, Beloved’s scar, which appears in several close-up shots, evokes the female body in pain. The sounds of a carnival cut in, as the film moves to follow Paul D, Sethe, and Denver at the carnival, where the sideshow attractions and even the barker’s call, “Come inside! Don’t be afraid,” foreshadow what they will find at home. Wadl sees the carnivalesque and the graphic, unsubtle portrayal of Beloved as the major problem with the film: “[T]he on-screen Beloved

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Beloved, grimacing. Beloved.

recalls the representation of colonized people who were routinely portrayed as animalistic, childlike, dangerous, and inferior” (514). In the case of Beloved, the portrayal extends into the “pornographic” (522), with many disgusting and graphic actions and gratuitous visuals of the character’s pubic hair, which underscore the objectification of the character. In part, these moments may emerge from the difficulty of depicting the abject feminine. Recall the adjuration of Steven Mallett in his directions for the play The Woman in Black: the ghost should be seen only in dim light. Or, as Wadl admits, “Beloved herself defies cinematic representation” (513). At the beginning, Beloved embodies voicelessness, the first stage of women’s ways of knowing, as well as the preverbal feminine language. Beloved’s vivid otherness evokes the child she had been: gasping for breath; eating greedily and messily like a baby; unable to take her own shoes off; falling asleep suddenly; her vacant expression and persistent drooling. She has to be told to slow down as she eats, and she soils the bed like an un-toilet-trained baby. Her characterization in the film makes palpable the otherness of the female ghost in Morrison’s text. Beloved embodies feminine “writing the body,” as described by Cixous: “She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death” (889). Her voice is gravelly, squeaky, and ill-modulated, like a child learning to speak. Like a toddler with separation anxiety, Beloved yearns for Sethe, and after she begins to speak more clearly, she articulates her obsessive love for Sethe. “She [Sethe]

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the one I need. She the one I have to have,” Beloved tells Denver. The film reinforces Beloved’s obsession by frequently showing Sethe’s face from below, in extreme close-up, as though a child were looking up at its mother’s face. Her life cut short and erased from history, Beloved represents all those denied their existence. Her hunger for details and stories evokes Kingston’s imagining No Name Woman’s experiences. While Beloved is (temporarily) embodied, her lack of experience and knowledge keeps her hungry for narrative, for stories to reinforce and provide validation of her and her mother’s existence and experience as slaves. While odd and strange, Beloved is often unthreatening and endearing, both in the novel and in the film, where we see her play with Denver and caress Sethe. The women’s acceptance of Beloved helps her maintain her presence. At the same time, however, her strong and terrible need to be present connects Beloved to all the other female ghosts in popular culture. Like the Woman in Black or La Llorona, Beloved has paid a terrible price for sexism and racism, and that price must be acknowledged by those still living. Beloved’s existence, like that of other female ghosts, has an ironic but positive effect on the other characters. As she struggles to come to terms with her own brutal death, Beloved challenges the other characters to confront their silences, their horrors, and to move beyond them. Beloved’s effect on Denver is the most profound, in the film particularly. While in both the book and the film, Denver has withdrawn from the world, including school, as a result of her mother’s status as a child killer, in the movie Denver accomplishes more than she does in the book. This alteration reinforces the film’s shift in focus from the female ghost to living women. Still, the novel shows a remarkable turnaround for Denver: reclusive and unable to leave the property, she recognizes Beloved’s danger to her mother and reaches out to the community for work and support. The female spirit affects other women’s lives positively, as she does in other female ghost texts, from Topper to So Far from God. Beloved’s appearance and her mother’s devolution into a destructive obsession to compensate Beloved for her death forces Denver to mature and to find connection within the community. As Sethe becomes childlike and babies Beloved, Denver grows up and becomes a woman. In a conclusion that is almost heavy-handed in its insistence on Denver’s social success and assimilation, the film depicts Denver dressed in fine clothes; Denver tells Paul D that she may go to Oberlin College. The film adds an attractive and well-dressed beau, who escorts Denver down the street. The reintegration of Denver leaves her attachment to Beloved and her memory of Beloved’s (and slavery’s) pain and horror

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behind. The pain will not be forgotten, as it is also for Kingston’s narrator, but the acknowledgment of the pain forced by the ghost breaks the trap that had held Denver in 124. Yet there is an unease at this happy ending, somewhat forced, as it is in Mulan. The female ghost tradition features the feminine alone, not compelled into compulsory heterosexuality, which is depicted as causing so many of the female characters’ plights. While Sethe and Paul D do not achieve material success and transformation, Beloved’s departure, made possible by Denver’s contact with the community’s women, brings Sethe and Paul D back together in a loving and supportive relationship. While Beloved tested their relationship by seducing Paul D, using magical, ghostlike powers reinforced by the red glow and sounds that were the preembodied Beloved’s signature, at the end of the film, Paul D props Sethe up, praising her strength and courage in escaping slavery. As Sethe mourns again the loss of Beloved, exclaiming, “She leave me—she my best thing,” Paul D supports Sethe, telling her, “You, you’re your best thing, Sethe—you are.” These happily-ever-after endings for the other characters allow the viewer to forget Beloved. In creating the stereotypical romantic ending, Demme undercuts the power of the female ghost. Contrasting the Woman in Black staring out at the viewer at the end of her film to Beloved’s disappearance is revealing. In the movie The Woman in Black, the ghost still exists, able to return and wreak havoc again. In the novel Beloved, she is banished, but she is seen again and also could return. In the film, Beloved is vanquished. Demme would have his viewers forget Beloved and focus on the living women. As Gourdine points out about the novel, “instead of directing our anger at the institutions that restrict, we instead scapegoat alien bodies that share our restriction. . . . Beloved’s excision should be disturbing to us” (26–27). The film exhibits what Gourdine calls upon readers to resist—the expulsion of Beloved. But as Wadl points out, the film directs viewers to read Beloved as thankfully obliterated from memory. “While the novel expressly reveals the need to remember, despite the suffering involved in doing so, the film viewer yearns merely to forget the nightmare that intrudes upon what promised to be the makings of a happy family. This disparity occurs because the film does not accommodate Beloved as a redemptive source” (523). In their powerful evocation of the experiences of dead and forgotten women, Kingston and Morrison use narrative to retell history in a powerful and moving fashion. Their ghosts are not amusingly frightening. Instead, they are palpable memories. While their purpose is more serious and ambitious than some of the other female ghosts in this book, No Name Woman and

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Beloved draw on many of the same tropes: the depiction of the female ghosts as evoking the maternal/abject; the use of water to evoke the maternal; the appearance of the ghost to wreak retribution and to redress silence and oppression; the depiction of writing the body; and the use of the female ghost to show that the marginalized and oppressed are never completely eradicated, but are floating at liminal margins, waiting to return. Yet the power of the female ghost can be emphasized, as it is in Kingston’s memoir and Morrison’s novel, or this figure can face erasure again, as in Demme’s film Beloved. It remains for the audience to keep the female ghost alive, as the tradition of this figure suggests that this powerful female figure can only be temporarily exorcised.

Chapter Five

The Untold Story The Mediated Female Ghost in England’s Blenheim Palace and Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol While the female ghosts discussed in the first four chapters have been either entirely imaginary (Blithe Spirit, Topper, The Woman in Black), based on folklore (La Llorona), or creative explorations of real women (The Woman Warrior, Beloved), the ghosts in this chapter purport to be actual historical women. Imaginary female ghosts have been a popular feature of public entertainment for centuries, but the appearance of the female ghosts within historical exhibitions and sites at the beginning of the twenty-first century requires some explanation as a phenomenon. Reading these historic female ghosts in the context of fictional ghosts reveals some shared features, but also some salient differences. The historical site’s emphasis on a specific place and history suggests part of the ghostly narrator’s function. The female ghosts in heritage sites narrate the stories and present an alternative to maledominated history. In these actions, they resemble other female ghosts, but they are presented in ways that make them less effective as critics of sexism. While the trajectory of the female ghost overall leads to an increasing sense of strength and power, the female heritage ghosts seem trapped in their historic sites. Thus, they reflect some limitations of the female ghost as seen in Demme’s film Beloved. Two historical sites separated by an ocean, one British and the other American, employ a female ghost based on a real woman to guide tourists through a heritage site. Blenheim Palace has its origins in a famous victory of the British over the French in the eighteenth century, and the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was occupied and burned during the Civil War by US troops. Both narratives employ multimedia techniques, and publicity for both characterizes them as “immersive theatrical presentations” (OSC website). This unusual configuration reveals another aspect of the female ghost: her utility as a mediator of history. Both exhibits are also shadowed by military conflict. Yet while these events are alluded to, the public military 110

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history becomes subordinated to the more personal, feminized narratives told by the ghosts. While these female ghosts haunt very different spaces, their resistant qualities are partially subordinated to serve a patriarchal view of history through heritage tourism. As the title of the Blenheim Palace exhibit, The Untold Story, suggests, the female narrator provides a secretive, personal, not to mention gossipy, perspective on public history. In contrast to vengeful maternal ghosts, these female ghosts, while not comedic, are also nonthreatening. As single women who have devoted themselves to the buildings whose history they narrate, the female ghosts replace the figures associated with the sites, usually a family. These female ghosts continue the association of the feminine with a building, reinforcing the gendering of domestic space. While the known history of the sites is cited, it is important to note here that Blenheim Palace and the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Old State Capitol, and The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle, specifically, focus on heritage, not history in the academic sense of the word. As David Lowenthal explains, “heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a program of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes” (x). Lowenthal traces the appeal of heritage to nostalgia and insists that “modern media magnify the past’s remoteness” (8). Since Lowenthal wrote those words in 1996, however, heritage sites have responded to the competition by media histories. Incorporating new media, sometimes at great cost, heritage installations attempt to compete by imitation. The exhibit’s emphasis on telling a story, in addition to presenting the buildings, contents, and gardens, speaks to the desire to compete with other attractions for the tourist time and money. As Martin Hall explains, “the key danger in the experience economy is the ‘commoditization trap’—the disillusionment of customers because things stay the same” (78). The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle incorporate novelty through their combination of a traditional figure, the female ghost, with the latest technology. By using female historical figures projected through video, these exhibits amplify their liminal ghostliness at the same time that the use of media reinforces the ghosts’ omniscience. These heritage female ghosts, then, project an ambivalent sense of feminine power. Reading the heritage ghosts in the context of a female ghost tradition, however, allows us to see more clearly the ways that using the feminine inevitably involves resistance to the grand master narrative of patriarchy. While the ghosts discussed in this chapter are multimedia creations, they nevertheless share with other female ghosts an emphasis on the femininity

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of their ghostliness. Not abject maternal, but prettified, these ghostly projections serve as heritage hostesses. Yet their ability to traverse time and space, their uncanny floating bodies, evokes the power of the ghosts discussed in previous chapters. Their lighter touch recalls the comedic female ghosts, and like them, the heritage female ghosts amuse and entertain their viewers while creating narrative and spatial disruptions. While The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle do not employ their powers to create violence, the installations control the audiences by opening and shutting doors, manipulating lights and sound effects (apparently), and most importantly, controlling the narratives. While both exhibits use a historical figure, liberties are taken with what can be documented about the real women. These authorial choices make the female ghost more nonthreatening to the spectators. As narrators, these female ghosts have lively and engaging voices, directed at a twenty-firstcentury audience. Performed by uncredited actresses, the female ghosts are exceptionally attractive, with bright white teeth and skin that don’t represent the actual appearances of women in this time period. Making history into heritage glosses over the real hardships that both women experienced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most significantly, their real-life experiences are appropriated to sell a romanticized view of specific historical sites. While the time periods covered differ, there are remarkable similarities in how the figure of the female ghost is used. First, the narratives suggest that the buildings the spirits “haunt” were the love and focus of their lives, though in neither case did the woman have any ownership of the building. Second, the female ghosts present themselves almost like beauty pageant contestants: perky, happy, and oblivious to sociopolitical realities. This attitude is strikingly at odds with Blenheim Palace’s Grace Ridley’s experience as a lady’s maid, subservient to a woman documented as being unpleasant and controlling (The Untold Story), and Sarah Morgan’s experience living through the Civil War in Baton Rouge (The Ghost of the Castle). Finally, the odd combination of narrative power and the liminal, literal emphemerality of the female ghost expose the central position of the feminine in heritage sites. Opening within a few years of each other, these two exhibits span the range of size and cost, with Blenheim Palace’s The Untold Story (2007) dwarfing the much more modest presentation in Baton Rouge (2010). However, the common figure of the female ghost narrator reveals structural and ideological similarities. Comparing the two female spirits reveals the domestication of the much-wilder female ghost in folklore, fiction, film, and television.

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Designated a World Heritage site, Blenheim Palace demonstrates the increasing use of technology in tourist destinations. The site serves as an excellent example of what Martin Hall describes as “Britain’s massive heritage industry, with its emphasis on the combination of education and entertainment’ (82). Like many tourist sites, Blenheim Palace, which is owned and managed by the Duke of Marlborough, must pay careful attention to its local and international visitors’ interests and needs. Because the estate is self-supporting, the charge for entry is considerable: in 2014 a child’s ticket is twenty-one pounds, and regular visitors pay fifty-four pounds for a day’s entry to the palace and the grounds (though the adult entry fee has recently been reduced to twenty-four pounds). To justify an ever-increasing entry fee, the Palace must continue to offer cutting-edge exhibits and new material that keep its storied history relevant, engaging, and profitable. While many heritage sites have incorporated new media, it is worth examining this specific site for what it tells us about gender and the repackaging of cultural sites. With its foundation in a military victory and its ongoing legacy including that of Winston Churchill, Blenheim Palace’s presentation is massive and ostentatious in its array of impressive grounds, magnificent buildings, and collected treasures. An aggressive display of public power and authority, the site emphasizes England’s political and military power throughout, from the spectacular series of tapestries depicting the Battle of Blenheim, to ceremonial cannons, to paintings depicting male family members in military attire. In a larger sense, the tremendous acquisition of wealth displayed in the palace is a tribute to Britain’s colonial, military-based power. Like all such estates, Blenheim is entailed, being inherited by a male heir. These circumstances all point to the site’s very masculine character, yet the exhibit’s ghostly narrator is a lady’s maid. Her pivotal role as guide and author reveals the ways that the feminine provides an alternative to traditional masculine history of great men. Guided by an apparition of Grace Ridley, the lady’s maid of the first duchess, the exhibit addresses the tourists by including them in intimate, behind-the-scenes views of three hundred years of family stories. The ghostly female narrator stands in for the tourist, a feminized outsider fascinated by the gossipy version of family history, the story untold by traditional history. This new installation provides insight into the interaction between narrative, technology, and contemporary performance. Appropriately for her feminine containment, the ghost appears through a mixed media presentation of film, with extensive framing that emphasizes self-reflexivity. The tour emphasizes the ghost’s contained nature by presenting her through

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The female ghost, Grace Ridley, projected and framed. Courtesy of Blenheim Palace.

projections, in mirrors, in picture frames, and on video screens. The owners of the property, the titled Marlborough family, in contrast, appear mostly as animated mannequins. The titled family is embodied, while the ghost figure remains liminal—a video projection in a frame on the wall. This exhibit’s narrator is embodied through video technology, and her presence shapes the exhibit, providing a gendered entrée into the history of a fabled estate and British history. By the design of this exhibit, the creators acknowledge that more than the magnificent physical space is needed to attract visitors. In its soap-opera emphasis on sexuality and family oddities, The Untold Story suggests that humanizing a palace involves telling women’s stories. But how do the women’s stories, beyond being salacious, contribute to the heritage and history of the place itself? Through its inclusiveness and acknowledgment of human foibles of those who lived and worked on the estate, The Untold Story adds a layer of complication and twenty-first-century awareness to the tourist experience. The exhibit draws attention to the lives of working-class people and the human side of a wealthy and powerful family. The absence of documentation about working-class lives presents difficulties in telling the story

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of Blenheim Palace’s workers. However, the creation of a ghost based on a real female servant shows how new media can fill in what is otherwise an “untold story.” Yet, since the story is still financed and told by the elites, in order to maintain their palatial estate, the untold story still retains many of the biases and purposes of traditional history, to celebrate and reinscribe the authority of the powerful. Equally important to the consideration of gender is the feminization of the tourist and the attempt to create a more family-centered, female-focused narrative. The selection of a ghostly female servant as the narrator signals a recasting of the more traditional, patriarchal presentation of a great English estate. Grace Ridley’s role could not as easily be taken by a valet—a gentlemen’s gentleman (of course he would not tell because men don’t gossip, runs the stereotype). The Untold Story provides a compelling instance of what Tony Bennett describes as “a gendered time in which linear, largely male, and public time . . . is contrasted to the private, cyclical, repetitive, and habitual time of everyday time that has classically been represented by women” (55). Bennett’s words recall Cixous’s characterization of feminine time; this characterization of the gender binary of masculine/public and feminine/private defines the female ghost’s place. But as the exhibit reveals, while the feminine may be hidden, it also contains important knowledge. The Blenheim Palace ghost’s gender is inextricable from her class position. (While male servants were also class-bound, being female added another layer to women servants’ subordination.) As lady’s maid to the first duchess, the character of Grace Ridley is privileged and privy to inside information about her master and mistress and the palace’s construction. But this inside information is augmented over centuries, as the ghost spies on subsequent generations, appearing at significant moments in the family’s and nation’s history. Her insider knowledge, garnered by her abilities as a ghost who haunts the palace, parallels her real-life insider knowledge as a servant. Ridley shares not only the gossip about her mistress, but also that of subsequent generations (though the current occupants’ relationships are left unexplored). Ridley displays what is depicted as a natural curiosity about the fate of her mistress’s descendants. Significantly, the maid’s own biological family is never mentioned. Like other subalterns, the ghost identifies with the titled Marlboroughs. Standing in for the presumably equally inquisitive tourists, the female ghost tells an “untold story” of family eccentricity and sexual proclivity. The Untold Story responds to another aspect of heritage, that it is seen as “traditionally a man’s world, inheritance largely a matter of fathers and sons” (Lowenthal 48). Repositioning the female servant Grace Ridley as a guide

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and central to Blenheim Palace, The Untold Story recasts the palace’s history to include a feminine perspective that emphasizes family and relationships, and in so doing, the exhibit complicates Lowenthal’s description of a commonly-held view “that women are part of heritage, not sharers in it” (48). Yet, despite its emphasis on Ridley and female members of the Marlborough family (whose surname is Churchill), Lowenthal’s description of elites and heritage still applies: “Elites offer a paternalistic gloss on gulfs dividing squire and serf, master and servant, propertied and destitute” (91). Grace Ridley’s obsequious devotion to the family that employed her reinforces the idea that the Churchills merit devotion from those that they employ, even after the servant’s death, even as centuries pass. The female ghost-servant narrator is an apt stand-in for the tourist. To some degree, tourism itself can be seen as feminized activity. While class plays a pivotal role in making travel and thus tourism possible, gender also plays a part in terms of the subordination of the well-off tourist to the knowledge and power embodied in the heritage site. The tourist is a pilgrim, seeking novelty and knowledge from a place with a demonstrated history and importance. By definition, the tourist is an outsider and subordinate to the place and its owners and/or creators. By charging a fee, the tourist site wrests from its visitors a recognition of its value. Like the souvenirs that they purchase, the tourists themselves are fallen objects, pieces of a whole, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett says of ethnographic objects, “[I]nformed by a poetics of detachment . . . we make fragments” (18–19). At Blenheim Palace, for example, tourists only see a portion of the rooms, accompanied by guides, placing them in a position similar to that of the palace’s servants. Ridley, tourists share a gossipy preoccupation with the family’s relationships. As lady’s maid to the Duchess of Marlborough, a member of one of the richest families in England at the time, Ridley had a standard of living much higher than that of the villagers. In her intimacy with her mistress, she had an unusual position of supportive sisterhood, somewhat like that of the two female ghost wives in Blithe Spirit. Also not a member of the upper class, Ridley was in a liminal position—like the tourists whom she guides. Like the tourists, Ridley has access to the house, but not the ownership, wealth, or associated political power. Therefore, positioning her as the tourists’ guide makes perfect sense. She reminds visitors of their liminal, provisional position in the palace. Like ghosts, tourists cannot affect or touch anything in the house. By including the ghost-narrator as a stand-in for the tourist, peeking behind the scenes at an illustrious family’s secrets, tourists become temporarily a part of the “experience.”

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By using new media to present the narrator as a ghost, The Untold Story intensifies the feminization of the narration. By definition, a ghost is a liminal figure, powerless and hazy. A ghost has the power of observation, but not usually the power to act. Grace Ridley’s placement as a marginal figure reinforces her feminized position as a servant, a lady’s maid. Gender is such a dominant category that almost any struggle or conflict has a gender dimension. Because gender is so much a part of our daily life, it appears, as Judith Butler argues, as “free-floating artifice” (6). Butler explains that as “a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific relations” (10). While the selection of a female ghost is significant, this selection should also point to the operation of gender more broadly in the site. Drawing on Butler’s understanding of gender, we can see that in terms of a culture relationship, the tourist stands, like a female servant ghost, in subordination to the masculine-identified heritage site. Looking at Blenheim Palace from a gendered perspective is, however, a shift in its public emphasis. From its inception, there have been critical female influencers, from Queen Anne, who granted the first duke the enormous funds to create the estate, to the American heiress Jennie Randolph, whose marriage to the seventh duke bestowed the fortune that kept the estate from financial ruin. But female figures are not the same as the gendering of the place and relations. Considering the gendering of the palace and the tourist allows us to understand what shaped the narrative and decision to add The Untold Story to Blenheim Palace. This reinvention is substantial in terms of both its reframing of a site and its cost. The Untold Story features rooms previously never opened to the public so that the physical space and the spectacle are presented as new. Created at a cost of one-and-a-half million pounds, this thirty-five-minute interactive exhibition recounts a feminized version of the estate’s history; the narrative demonstrates the ways that places become gendered as feminine, identified and coded by the gender of the representative, defining narrator. Traditional history focused on the public figures of powerful and politically important men of wealth. One reading of The Untold Story is that the title refers to social history, the experience of those traditionally left out of history, women and servants. Yet, at the same time that the narrator is promoted by the position of telling the “untold story,” she is simultaneously contained and marginalized by her liminal position as a ghost. While Ridley appears physically on the margins—projected on a wall, in a frame, or to the side of the main action—she also remains a constant presence over centuries

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of family history, holding the story together through her narration. In this important regard, the heritage female ghost shares a feature with all other female ghosts: the authorial impulse. While the other characters may be more significant from the standpoint of public history, the female ghost has the privileged position of narrator. The Untold Story contains more than one female apparition, expanding the power of the female ghost in sisterhood. At the installation’s conclusion, Grace Ridley is reunited with her mistress in the twenty-first century, and they are depicted in the concluding video walking off hand-in-hand into the sunset. This arresting conclusion presents their mistress/servant relationship as intimate and primary. The women’s closeness evokes the companionability of the wife-ghosts in Blithe Spirit. The intimacy may also, as Weinstock describes in his analysis of literary ghosts, hint at same-sex desire. But the moment is fleeting and not overtly sexual. In the ten rooms between the introduction and conclusion of the exhibit, Grace Ridley appears on video screens and interacts with other historical figures; she also interacts with the visitors, directing them to move, to look at particular spots in the rooms, all the while providing a running commentary. Ostensibly a flibbertigibbet, foolish and easily frightened by changing mores and technology, Grace Ridley nevertheless directs the show and the visitors’ movements. Her experience and viewpoint shape the snippets of family, social, and political history that the visitors see. The experience is tightly controlled: each of the rooms has doors that open and shut automatically (presumably by her ghostly hands) so that the visitors have to follow the sequence and timing of Ridley’s narration. She alerts the visitors when doors are about to open and warns them to move quickly. Following her verbal directions, hundreds of years of Blenheim Palace’s history are filtered through her reactions to the history of the palace and its family. The new installation in Blenheim Palace meets the need of contemporary museums to create an “experience” for its visitors. In an ever-escalating effort to draw visitors, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, “[A]ttractions [compete] within a tourism economy that privileges experience, immediacy, and what the industry call adventure” (7). Attractions have responded to the competition of other activities (movies, theme parks, etc.) in part by creating performances: “[E]xhibitions are fundamentally theatrical . . . perform [ing] knowledge” (3). It may not be a coincidence that the palace’s architect, John Vanbrugh, was also a playwright, who, when he was selected to design Blenheim Palace, was completing the construction of the Italian Opera House in Haymarket, London. His palace continues to have a performative,

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theatrical side. An analysis by Samuel J. Rogal of the palace’s troubled history asks, “What, therefore, is the role of history in keeping alive the human aspects that might otherwise remain hidden behind the façade of a splendid building?” (303). In his rhetorical question, Rogal specifically refers to the political history and the conflict between the architect and the first duchess. This story occupies the first few rooms of the installation, but in The Untold Story, the conflict between builder and duchess is subordinated to the framing relationship of the duchess and her maid. That Blenheim Palace has added to its offerings a female ghost and female mannequins fits in with patterns in literature and tourism. In “Authorizing Female Voice and Experience,” for instance, Ruth Jenkins valorizes “the authority of ghosts and spirits to articulate an alternative story from those endorsed by patriarchal culture” (61–62). In “Highland and Other Haunts,” David Inglis and Mary Holmes explain that “female phantoms generally are readily employed to promote . . . [tourism], sexualized images of women being a very popular way of selling all types of commodities, from haunted castles to automobiles” (57). The Untold Story adds to this pattern not through its innovative use of words or hired actors to present the ghostly, but through its use of new media to depict the female body. Augmenting the video versions of a female ghost are a number of female mannequins, whose use reinforces the exhibit’s focus on the feminine. The Untold Story therefore exemplifies the hybridization that Philip Auslander describes in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture: the exhibit mixes of live actors (filmed) and animatronic robots. The robots mimic “liveness” through their movements and simulated breathing. The actor’s voices are miked in; in one room, a robot of the Duchess sits at a dressing table, looking in a mirror into which a projection of the actor’s face is displayed. The Untold Story emphasizes female liveness, connecting it to a continuum of using female bodies as attractions. The dominating movement of the The Untold Story, however, is not the mannequins (compelling though they are), but the many iterations of the ghost. The ghost’s ability to travel through time and space allows her to convey the family and house history from its inception to the present. The figure of the female ghost in popular culture—plays, museums, and other public media—raises questions about her appropriateness and usefulness as a narrator of the past. Recent English examples include the tremendously successful play and now critically praised film version (2012) of Susan Hill’s novella, The Woman in Black (discussed in chapter 2), and Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn (2010), which features the eponymous character as a ghost,

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explaining her view of history. The power of the female figure is domesticated in these two versions, as it is in The Untold Story, by the female character’s liminal position as a ghost. That the English, whose heritage industry defines their tremendous tourist draw, would be fascinated by ghosts surely can be explained by the country’s emphasis on its glorious past. But female ghosts depict a particular inflection, one that through gender emphasizes some of the tensions inherent in glorifying past achievements. As Michael Mayefeld Bell notes, “ghosts also help us constitute the specificity of historical sites, of the places where we feel we belong and do not belong, of the boundaries of possession by which we assign ownership” (813). Addressing a number of specific historical sites, Bell points to the failure in some institutions, including the Tower of London, to invoke ghosts successfully in a narrative of place. He points to the inadequacies of “costumed guides” (829) to convey a sense of place. Written in 1997, Bell’s insightful analysis of ghosts and place predates the recent use of mixed media to create a ghostly presence or narrator associated with a specific site. Acknowledging that ghosts can “be unsettled and scary,” he also emphasizes that ghosts “can also be rooted, friendly, and affirming” (816). It is this second mode that characterizes the ghostly female narrator in Blenheim Palace. This spirit can be interpreted as a response to modernism and market forces that “vigorously pursue[s] the new, the mechanical, the universal” (Bell 830). Bell explains that “the rise of the heritage industry may suggest . . . that we are coming to miss our old ghosts, to resist the loss of the sentimental and social connections to places” (830), and he insists that, “ghosts are a ubiquitous aspect of the phenomenology of place” (813). A palace with a storied history like Blenheim Palace would have a special affinity for reinforcing its sense of place through a ghost-figure. While Bell’s analysis provides a helpful frame to consider the significance of the narrator’s ghostly state in The Untold Story, the spirit’s gender remains critical to understanding her function. The centrality of female mediums and ghosts to nineteenth-century spiritualism provides one telling antecedent to the female heritage ghosts. Like spiritualism, heritage emphasizes knowing and connecting with what is past and lost: the desire to link directly to a primary source, a real figure. As a historical character, Grace Ridley lends the illusion of authenticity to The Untold Story. We do not have any testimony from her, or first-hand knowledge about her or other servants in the Palace. As a result, contemporary writers can create a persona to shape their narrative. But the writers’ creation of a character gains validation from the actual existence of Grace Ridley, both underscored and erased by factual information

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about her. That an image of the actress who performs the role of Ridley appears in the exhibit case with information about her compounds the blurring of the fictional narrative and personae with history. The use of an actress’s photo in the case exemplifies the framing of history being used by a heritage site. The exhibit case featuring an actress’s photograph as the image of Grace Ridley with authentic servant artifacts (bells, buttons) illustrates the unsettling mixture of the inauthentic and the real. The case provides an example of what Michael Hall describes in other installations, where “the authentic artifact . . . serves to anchor the simulacrum” (93). The Churchills, by contrast, have actual portraits, letters, and other documents that maintain their authenticity. The degree to which history, class, and gender impact the historical record is elided as The Untold Story fills in the gaps with new media and imagination. Like Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and other television shows and films that feature British estates, The Untold Story creates an attractive and nostalgic look at gender and class in a heritage site. Telling the story of a great estate through the first duchess’s lady’s maid authorizes the tourist’s similar prurient curiosity about the family and their scandals. At the same time, this interest is tamed by its putative family connection. As part of the family—even to receiving a substantial legacy from her mistress—the maid, Grace Ridley appears to care about the Churchills and to see her mistress’s descendants as connected to her. As has been suggested about Downton Abbey (Zhong), The Untold Story feeds the touristic desire to have a positive narrative, to minimize the exploitation inherent in the servant-mistress relationship. After all, the rooms we tour are the grandly and richly appointed family rooms, not the cramped servants’ quarters. Ridley’s narrative implies a close connection to the family she served, one that persists even after her death. This connection presents a stable social order in which the workingclass servants enjoyed their positions and saw themselves as part of the family that they served. In this way, then, the myth of the great estate as a happy family is still being promoted. Initially, The Untold Story was heralded with a media splash: numerous stories announced the new attraction. Since its opening in 2007, however, media coverage of the exhibit has gone relatively quiet, with a new publicity push in 2010, connected to the success of the BBC drama, Downton Abbey, that also features a palatial home, a titled family, their servants, and their intertwined lives. As a Daily Mail article touted, “If the inner workings of Downton Abbey have you hooked, then you’ll find a trip ‘below stairs’ at Blenheim Palace hard to resist” (“Family Day”). Blenheim is not easily reached by train from London, but can be reached by bus or hired car.

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A walk through the exhibit reveals the ways that an emphasis on female characters and the ghost narrator emphasize a feminized view of history. In The Untold Story, visitors are guided through a maze of rooms by the voices and projected images of the ghost. A series of vignettes cover three hundred years of the estate. In between, we spy on scenes of the family interacting; in most cases, Ridley enters the scene, asking questions about the family to situate the tourist in history. Her questions are invariably personal, about the family’s situation. The first vignette introduces Grace Ridley’s affection for her mistress, as she sympathizes with the duchess having to oversee the estate, since her husband is away on royal business. At the same time, however, the Duchess’s virago behavior contrasts strikingly with Ridley’s pleasant demeanor, thus reinforcing, from the onset, stereotypical ideas about the negative effect of power on women’s personalities. The contrast also sets up the female ghost’s likeability, as it does for the comedic female ghosts discussed in the first chapter. The tour moves from spectral to embodied femininity, as guests see the mannequin of the duchess, posed in front of a mirror that displays a video projection of an actress’s face. Writing a letter, the duchess laments her husband’s absence and proclaims her affection for him. Again, the emphasis is on a female figure, but her actions subordinate her to the absent husband. Her love and devotion to him are stressed as a voiceover enunciates the duchess’s regret at her husband’s absence. The figure of the duchess moves; with her back to the tourists, we feel that we are spying on her, or standing behind her as a lady’s maid would do. A daughter of the house directs an amateur theatrical in the next room, again emphasizing the agency of a female character. A servant struggles to read his lines for the play, directed by his mistress, one of the daughters of the family. The exchange suggests again a more familial personal relationship between mistress and servant, a nostalgic view of class relations that is more conducive to promoting the estate in a positive light. Again, the tourist is included in the scene, like Grace Ridley and the servants in the play. Those actual historical performances were not open to outsiders, but performed by family, servants, and invited guests staying at the palace. Projected video shows us figures on a stage, life-size, as tourists are directed to benches, becoming the audience for the behind-the-scenes look at family theatricals. Grace Ridley comes on stage and expresses wonder at such an occurrence in the palace. The tourist stands in the same relation as Grace Ridley, spying in on a family event.

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Grace Ridley’s wonderment at changes runs a constant thread through the exhibit. As a servant, she marvels at the exploits of the family founders. She models the awe and appreciation that the tourist should come to experience. The tour then goes back to a time before John Churchill (not yet a duke) and the first duchess married. Here a naked female mannequin, mistress to the king, lies in bed, with fruit strewn about the linens. The female mannequin seductively pulls the covers up to her breasts, not quite covering them, drawing attention to her nakedness through her very movements. John Churchill is described as hiding in the cupboard, as the king catches him and the mistress in flagrante delicto. But this story (obviously) had a happy ending, with the king forgiving his friend, and the mistress providing John Churchill with five hundred pounds, a huge sum of money at the time. The function of female characters is to promote and maintain the estate and its male founder. As the lights fade, Grace Ridley is projected on the paneled wall, again commenting on the action and directing tourists to move to the next room. Her movements across and around each room provide a focus and a frame for tourist engagement. In addition to the video ghost, the exhibit provides a combination of video and more traditional museum displays in cases. Artifacts and display cases in the next room contain information and items from actual servants in the household. Continuing the intertwining of fact and fiction, a glass exhibit case presents facts about the real Grace Ridley, but displays the photograph of the actress who plays her in the video projections. The same case also includes a photograph of a servant’s hand bell, exterior photos, and a detailed map of servants’ living quarters. Here it is explained that, ironically, the duchess left Grace Ridley a fortune, sixteen-thousand pounds (a million and half pounds in today’s money), and that she entrusted Grace with burning the family letters. Subsequent rooms depict the eighth duke, who was an amateur scientist, using a telephone and electricity and referring to the family fortune being compromised by his expensive experiments and by the previous dukes’ high living. Appearing in the next room is the American remedy for this, Consuela Vanderbilt, the heiress who married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, Charles Spencer-Churchill. Sounds from World War II fill the room. Like the king’s mistress a few rooms earlier, is an illustration of a female character whose role was to provide for the estate. In this vignette, Consuela has returned to Blenheim after divorcing the duke to spend time with her children during the war. Here her role in producing the next heir is not so subtly referenced.

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Grace Ridley’s “photograph” in a display case. Courtesy of Blenheim Palace.

This room ties in with the Winston Churchill exhibit, reminding viewers of his historical importance and connection to Blenheim (he was a cousin to the duke, born here, and visited many times). Rather than the family who lived in the palace, Churchill is featured due to his fame and achievements. Only the first duke, with his spectacular victory over the French at Blenheim, has anything comparable to his credit. The very last sequence depicts the current duke, thanking visitors for touring his home and family history. But before his closing words, Grace Ridley and a confused Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough, are reunited. They walk out hand in hand, into a sunset on the palace grounds. There is an abrupt cut to the current duke, and then visitors are directed to walk out of the exhibit, through The Untold Story gift shop, featuring mostly high-end, expensive souvenirs. (Several other gift shops through the palace offer less expensive merchandise.) Grace Ridley’s devotion to her mistress and her interest in her mistress’s family provide the motivation for her journey through time. Evoking the

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nineteenth-century spiritualism that featured ghosts through female mediums, The Untold Story gives us tantalizing bits of information from beyond the grave. Yet the emphasis remains on Grace Ridley’s narration; handouts translate the content for non-English speakers so that they too can follow the ghost-narrator. This apparatus reminds all viewers of the international appeal of the palace and that its history affected that of many European nations. The exhibit’s structure is like that of a play: the handouts are the playbills; each room is given a title; and there is even a play within the play in a room dedicated to theatrical performances. The handouts refer to the women characters by their first names; John Churchill is presented with his surname. The informality of using the female characters’ first names makes them more intimate and less threatening to the audience. Yet, the prevalence of Grace Ridley in all rooms and the conclusion, which reunites mistress and maid, suggest that the women’s story is a central, connecting narrative. Throughout, the exhibit emphasizes the human aspect of the palace, the story not merely of wealth and power but also of personal quirks and foibles. Yet, the reason that Blenheim Palace was selected as a World Heritage site by UNESCO is the magnificence and opulence of the buildings and grounds, not the human “untold story.” It is perhaps not a coincidence that Downton Abbey (2010–2016), the latest international success from British television, similarly dramatizes the tensions and complex relationship between servants and those being served. For example, Raymond Zhong explains, “This nonjudgmental embrace of the highborn life has exposed the show to criticism, leveled widely, that it celebrates Edwardian opulence without due regard for the period’s inequities” (129). Class structure has always been a significant feature of British culture, and its presentation in The Untold Story reifies the sentimental and selfjustifying view depicted in mainstream British popular culture. That it does so through a female ghost-narrator and the use of contemporary technology demonstrates the ways that the heritage world can incorporate and appropriate both new ideas and new technology. At the same time, The Untold Story reveals another permutation of the female ghost’s place in popular culture. Baton Rouge’s Old State Capitol exhibit, The Ghost of the Castle, functions similarly to The Untold Story. In some ways, comparing the two exhibits is unfair, as The Untold Story cost almost $3 million to create and occupies thousands of square feet. The Ghost of the Castle is a far more modest enterprise, consisting of a short video in a few rooms. Consequently, The Ghost of the Castle occupies less room in this chapter. Yet comparing the two reveals a fundamental similarity of outlook and a similar portrayal of

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The Ghost of the Castle. Printed with Permission of Louisiana’s Old State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

the female ghost for heritage purposes. Like Grace Ridley, Sarah Morgan, the eponymous narrator of The Ghost of the Castle, was an actual historical figure. But unlike Ridley, who was presumably illiterate, Morgan was a member of the upper class who kept a diary during the Civil War that was published after her death. She had left her diaries to her son, with the admonition that they be destroyed. This request reflected feelings of reticence, especially for an upper-class woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the title A Confederate Girl’s Diary, the first four volumes of her six-volume work appeared in 1913 (the complete work was published in 1991). Sarah Morgan was a professional writer sporadically, as her economic circumstances dictated: her articles were published in a South Carolina newspaper before she married, and later, after her husband died, she wrote short stories and translations of French literature. The source character, then, is one of the few women who did not struggle with the first stage of women’s development, voicelessness, as characterized in Belenky’s Women’s Ways of Knowing. A figure privileged by race and class, she experienced war, but from a safe sideline.

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Unlike Grace Ridley, then, Sarah Morgan does not present the creators of an exhibit with a blank slate. Articulate and a professional writer, her own words are available, yet the exhibit quotes very little of her famous diary. Instead, Sarah Morgan describes her decision as a ghost to “move in permanently” to the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Given that the historical Sarah Morgan lived in South Carolina and Paris, dying in France in 1909, her teleportation back to the Old State Capitol is a convenient fiction. Inaccurately, she explains that she and the castle “grew old together.” The exhibit cleverly uses film, sound effects, and shadowy moving silhouettes projected onto four walls to create a multimedia experience. As in “The Untold Story,” the female ghost appears on a film screen and in a frame. The Ghost of the Castle received an Award for Excellence in 2012, for “Cultural Heritage Attraction on a Limited Budget,” from the Themed Entertainment Association. The Ghost of the Castle uses the female ghost as both guide and narrator, justifying the ghost’s association with the heritage site. Like Grace Ridley, Sarah Morgan directly addresses the audience, telling them, “Haven’t I seen you before? Your secrets are safe with me, provided you keep taking care of my castle.” Her use of the pronoun is as odd as Grace Ridley’s possessiveness about Blenheim Palace, but at least Grace actually lived and worked in the palace. Morgan did mention the “castle” in her diary, and there is a familial connection, as her father donated the land on which the State Capitol Building was erected. Yet her strong personal attachment is a convenient fiction that explains her decision to haunt the edifice after her death. She explains its appropriation during the Civil War, when “Yankees captured Baton Rouge and used my castle as a common barracks.” Describing this use of the Capitol Building as the “darkest hour before the dawn,” her own figure begins to dissolve slowly into an image of the building. This image reinforces the connection between the feminine and a building, as it does for Blenheim Palace’s ghost and Blithe Spirit’s ghost wives. This visual merging of the female ghost with the building mimics the appropriation of the feminine for the heritage narrative. Even a higher-class position does not protect Sarah Morgan from being put, more than a hundred years later, to the service of a tourist site. The narrative promotes the site as important to Louisiana culture, and the building is the focus, not Morgan. In a small, but perhaps telling detail, the actress playing Sarah Morgan appears to have blonde hair (like the actress who plays Grace Ridley), even though we have actual photographs of Morgan showing her to be a brunette. Perhaps the apparently blond locks are meant, as they do in the film Blithe Spirit, to suggest the afterlife. The ethereal projection of Sarah Morgan is appealing,

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not threatening like the Woman in Black or La Llorona. While the actual Sarah Morgan was a mother, that fact is not mentioned in the video. At hourly intervals, a guide ushers tourists into a room with wooden chairs, all facing a large mirror, flanked by a framed drawing of the Old Capitol and a large photograph of Sarah Morgan. All three sport ornate gold frames, evoking the splendor of pre–Civil War Baton Rouge. Abruptly, the lights dim, and a spotlight focuses on the portrait of Sarah Morgan. Like Grace Ridley in Blenheim Palace, this ghost represents the liminal, controlled position of the female ghost in heritage sites, her position marked by the literal confinement in ornate gold frames. The use of video projection provides a truncated history, with an emphasis on the social interactions in the building. As ghostly lights appear in the mirror, the spotlight moves to the image of the Old State Capitol, and Sarah Morgan describes its history. Morgan’s projected head and shoulders appear in the center of the mirror, and the effect is quite spooky, for the room is completely dark. As our ghostly female narrator evokes the splendid parties and dances held in the building, projected shadows of dancers, attired in nineteenth-century dress, appear on all four walls, accompanied by waltz music. Then, as her narration moves to the events of the Civil War, even larger, more ominous shadows of armed soldiers appear, again, on all four walls, and ominous sounds of guns and marching feet fill the room. Finally, the lights come up as images of fire are projected on the front mirror and wall. Larger than the mirror, the flames overshadow a white family pictured at their dining room table. The conquest of Baton Rouge by the Yankees is described as terribly destructive. With a ghostly figure of Sarah Morgan to its right, the Old State Capitol is depicted as a shell in the mirror-screen. Her figure moves within the frame to the left, and we see the exterior restored. With only twelve minutes of running time, the video moves quickly over the building’s history. Morgan explains the building’s neglect, describing the illicit parties held there by LSU students while the building was abandoned. Morgan then lauds its eventual restoration by civic-minded citizens. The narrative, however, shows the female ghost breaking the frames of space and time—and interrupting male narrators. Like other female ghosts, Morgan commandeers the narrative. Despite the emphasis on Morgan’s image, she does not open the “experience”; instead, a bland male voice begins to recount the building’s history. As the narrator mentions Sarah Morgan’s name, however, the recording emits static, the lights sputter off and on, and the masculine voice of authority fades away. This interruption of a male narrator, wresting control of a story from him, typifies the actions of female

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ghosts. While the actress who plays Sarah Morgan warbles in a light, sweet voice, she moves quickly from querulousness to assertiveness. After the disruption of sound and light silences the male narrator, Sarah Morgan speaks and then appears. “Who called my name?” asks a plaintive feminine voice with a pronounced Southern accent. Sarah herself directly addresses the audience. Morgan criticizes Mark Twain for daring to make famously negative comments about the Louisiana State Capitol Building. Twain disliked the building, describing it as “pathetic . . . a white-washed castle with turrets and things,” “a little sham castle” that should not be restored. Instead, Twain suggested, “let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began” (historicalbatonrouge.blogspot). Sarah only references a few words from the quotation, before dismissing the famous American author as “that old windbag.” Morgan’s dismissive words demonstrate an alternative view of history presented by the female ghost. Morgan’s appearance is one the few images of any woman in this historic site. The Ghost of the Castle represents rare female presence in the Old State Capitol, now restored and repurposed as the Museum of Political History. The other permanent exhibits feature a number of Louisiana’s male governors, with portraits, artifacts, and recordings, called Louisiana Governors: Leadership in the Pelican State; an exhibit on Governor and Senator Huey P. Long’s life and legacy; and a portrait gallery of the state’s seventy-five governors, only one of whom is female. Sarah Morgan’s words appear in a small room, in her own handwriting, blown up to be legible, with printed versions beside them. Reproductions of her diary fill a case in this room next to the room where The Ghost of the Castle shows. The juxtaposition of traditional public—masculine—history with a female ghost contrasts strikingly with that of the white male governors, suggesting once again, that there is another history behind the public view. Throughout the narration, Sarah Morgan, like Grace Ridley across the ocean, presents an intimate look at a large public space. And also like Grace Ridley, Sarah Morgan assumes a familial relation to the audience, a highly demonstrative, personal tone. Repeatedly, she refers to the building as “my castle.” At times jocular and other times prim (when discussing the illicit parties), Sarah Morgan invites the tourists to see themselves, like her, in relationship with the building that is in need of her protection and our funds. This personalization of a building feminizes it, too. The viewers are entreated to see the castle as a beauty, abused not just by time, but also by ill-use. This view of the building as beautiful and important presents it as heritage rather than history. Morgan provides an opinionated view of Louisiana

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history. As she did in her actual journal, she (like Grace Ridley) has a privileged position as a ghost from which to pass judgment. She castigates 1930s Louisiana Governor Huey Long for neglecting the building and lavishes praise on the tourists and preservationists who restored it. Hyperbolically, she echoes the language of PBS or NPR, explaining that her beloved building survived “thanks to people just like you.” “Louisianans refused to give up. You never stopped believing in our castle or the greatness of the state of Louisiana.” She describes the early twenty-first-century restoration efforts: “But we never gave up hope. Everyone in the state pitched in to restore our castle.” The narrative ends with the image of the restored Capitol Building, with beautiful fireworks and dramatic sounds of their explosions. While far less elaborate (and much less expensive—entry only costs three dollars), The Ghost of the Castle employs the female ghost similarly to The Untold Story. Using multimedia projections to make the female ghost (played by an uncredited actress) appear, these sites use her figure to make an august imposing site more personal and inviting. The gossipy, informal tone feminizes a public, masculine space and provides intimate details of people using the space. It employs a quintessentially heritage-style approach to history; for example, Sarah Morgan describes Huey Long’s decision to build a new Capitol Building as being his response to being threatened with impeachment by Morgan’s own cousin. This approach resembles a long infomercial, promoting the site as a heritage destination rather than as a place of traditional historical interest. The female ghost, here, then, is a figure who mediates the past in a particularly feminine way, with intimate details and “untold stories,” meant to titillate and include the tourists in the space’s narrative. The figure of a filmed female ghost, directly addressing the tourist, provides the illusion of inclusiveness necessary to promoting heritage sites. The female ghost’s liminal, boundary-breaking presence draws on her unique combination of insider knowledge and exclusion from the public events—legislation and politics in the case of the Old State Capitol—and elite power and control in both the Capitol and Blenheim Palace, from which the actual historical women, Grace Ridley and Sarah Morgan, could have had no part. These heritage female ghosts occupy a particular position in the tradition of the female ghost. While the female ghost, by definition, has no body, these exhibits use technology to give her flesh and figure. In so doing, the exhibits’ creators maintain more control over this specter than do the literary authors. Just as heritage is a domestication of history, so the female ghost in a heritage site is more contained and less threatening. As in the play The Woman in Black, there are no credits for actresses who perform the roles

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of the female ghosts. That both are cast as conventionally attractive blonds and dressed like Disney princesses creates another level of inoculation. At the same time, the heritage female ghosts show that narration is an essential feature of this figure, appearing even in contexts that otherwise limit the female ghosts’ power. While Ridley and Morgan are nonthreatening, they both still demonstrate an alternative feminine way of knowing. In presenting this feminine epistemology as valuable, the heritage sites reify a key feature of the female ghost. The collaborative nature of these female ghosts, brought to life by writers and video specialists, sets up a striking contrast with the television ghost discussed in the final chapter. Combining fictional characters, the power of the latest technology, and a more overtly political message, the ghosts of Being Human reveal the depth lacking in heritage ghosts.

Chapter six

Being Human The Female Ghost in Contemporary British and American Television The female ghost has reached an apotheosis in two popular television series. Weaving together humor and violence and emphasizing ethnicity and race, these television shows depict the female ghost as a formidable figure and reveal how she has matured. While the other female ghosts discussed in this book have been firmly located as fantasies, Being Human, as Monica Germana notes in an essay on the UK series, is firmly located in a twentyfirst-century reality. “The drama,” Germana explains, “challenges concepts of humanity and blurs conventional categories of otherness, pointing to dehumanization, alienation, and broken relationships as central to twentyfirst-century human experience” (57). Appropriately, then, this text concludes with a discussion of the British and American versions of Being Human. In some sense, the television shows’ title encapsulates the struggle of the female ghost—to be seen as human despite being a supernatural—but also, just as significantly, to be considered fully human despite being female. Being Human originated as a BBC 3 series in England. Running for five seasons, the show featured three young people, each supernatural, struggling to adapt to the human world. Two are male, a werewolf and a vampire, and the third character is a female ghost. The vampire, John Mitchell, and the werewolf, George Sands, both white Britishers, have renounced their predatory supernatural powers, and they move together to live in a flat in Bristol. The house is haunted by Annie Sawyer, a young British woman played by an actress of African Caribbean descent who died there and who is not certain why she has remained as a ghost. The series pursues Mitchell’s and George’s struggles to refrain from killing and their developing relationship with Annie, as they help her understand her past. The UK series ran thirty-seven episodes from 2009–2013 and was critically acclaimed, winning the 2009 Writer’s Guild Award for best television drama (Clarke 25). Reviews of the show praised it as “warm, witty, sexy, and very human” (The Guardian); “one of the best new British series” (The Independent); “a series that is as much 132

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about human nature as it about spookiness and bloodsucking—and that’s why it works” (The Daily Telegraph) (M2PressWire). An American version of this popular show was made for the Syfy network. One of Syfy’s most popular shows, Being Human appeared from 2011 through 2014. At first the series followed the BBC3 show closely, but in part because American television shows run more episodes per season, the Syfy series soon deviated from its progenitor. By the time it ended in April 2014, the American Being Human comprised fifty-two episodes. Both shows feature the female ghost, though the British series, with its emphasis on fewer characters, gives her more time and space. In both series, however, the female ghost is the linchpin character, critical to the plot. Also in both series, the female ghost expands from an insecure, invisible character to a supernatural force that affects the entire world. Despite these fundamental parallels, there are differences in how the figure is used. In both series, the female ghost completes the trajectory of female psychological development. These female spirits model the stages of women’s knowledge, as described by Mary Belenky and colleagues in Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. This book traces women’s relationship to knowledge, from voicelessness, through the discovery of the self as an authority, to the integration of separate and connected knowledge. Annie and Sally follow this trajectory, modeling the growth from subordination to transcendent knowledge for the viewers. The show also reveals the importance of expressing and understanding emotion. The female ghosts’ deaths serve as a warning about violence against women, but their ghostly lives present a path to justice and knowledge. Both Annie and Sally build on the traditional features of the female ghost, including resistance to the sexist norms of patriarchal society, a sympathetic version of an alternative maternity, and a successful struggle to control their own narratives. The shows’ use of voiceovers, especially for the pilot episode, allows the female ghost to assume narrative control. At the same time, however, both versions of Being Human expand the female ghost’s humanity by adding the specific crime of domestic violence to each spirit’s backstory (as occurs in “Woman Hollering Creek” discussed in chapter 2). Following the pattern of other female ghost stories, the conflicts created by the abject maternal/feminine provide the frame that shapes these characters’ existences. These television shows provide an apt final chapter for the story of the female ghost for a couple of reasons. First, because the United States and England each have a version of the same show, the series allow us to see cultural differences in the portrayal of the figure. Second, the ghosts of Being Human

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incorporate aspects of all the female spirits from previous decades. Being Human employs humor, including physical humor, recalling the comedic female ghosts of Topper and Blithe Spirit. The terror evoked by the justifiably malignant Woman in Black and La Llorona also emerges and similarly is treated sympathetically. Specific ethnic and cultural histories, so central to The Woman Warrior and Beloved, also appear in the African Caribbean British and South Asian Indian ghosts of Being Human. Like the guides of The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle, Being Human’s ghosts identify with and are trapped (initially) inside specific houses. Finally, and perhaps most important, Being Human presents female ghosts as the central figures in the narrative; they are the guiding forces. In their positive presentations of female ghosts creating change, these television shows promote the possibility of a woman-led, feminist future. While the female ghosts encounter many difficulties, their eventual understanding of gender roles allows them to free themselves and others. The female ghosts in both versions of Being Human share key qualities with the other female ghosts discussed in this book. Self-deprecating and charming at first, they employ humor to point to gender inequities. Like other female ghosts, these two struggle to control the narrative of their lives, past, present, and future. While neither Annie (UK version) nor Sally (US) is a biological mother, they assume critical maternal roles, including, when necessary, brandishing violence to protect their young charges and their families. Uninvolved in public wars, the ghosts nevertheless are affected by war, as the vampires in their households were soldiers when they were turned (UK version, WWI; US, Revolutionary War). Yet their untimely deaths can be traced to another struggle, that of women’s oppression by men. Eventually, both Annie and Sally become leaders, reconciling the conflicts not only within their families but also worldwide. In both texts, supernaturals and humans face an apocalyptic extermination of their species. To transform themselves and their worlds, both female ghosts must learn to embrace the abject/maternal, which as young women, they had been taught to reject. As the title of one episode of the US series indicates, the ghosts have to learn how to deal with “The Panic Womb” (season 4, ep. 4). This episode’s title reveals the show’s use of humor to deal with the power of the feminine and its negative stereotypes, such as hysteria. In a later episode (also the US version), Sally describes her process of empowerment: “I need to find out what I am, what I can do, besides yanking weapons out of menstrual blood [using magic spells]” (season 4, ep. 3). Learning to accept their supernatural powers and using them appropriately allows Annie and

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Sally to create narratives of female strength and empowerment. In “writing their bodies,” these female ghosts embrace their feminine and ghostly alterity. Both spirits evoke otherness through their ethnicities—African Caribbean and South Asian Indian—accepting and embracing their cultural identities even though they no longer have physical bodies. Supernaturals inevitably evoke the specter of race. Vampires, werewolves, and ghosts function as minorities, beings who are human but are socially constructed as other, persecuted and treated as abject by humanity. The issue of passing is critical for supernaturals, for like that of other oppressed groups, it is only by passing as humans that vampires, werewolves, and ghosts can be accepted. The worst outcome they fear is the eradication of their species. Both versions of Being Human stress the importance of blending in, and the bonding that goes on between vampire, werewolf, and ghost reinforces their survival instinct and a world that would deny them the right to exist. In casting the female ghosts to be played by women of color, both series emphasize the double oppression of gender and race as social constructions. In addition to being disembodied and feminine, the female ghosts show that race is another category to be denied and defeated. In contrast to many other fantasy and science fiction texts that depict white men as the leaders and heroes, Being Human puts at its center female ghosts of color. That both ghosts dress in gray only serves to emphasize the idea of their own “coloredness” as living beings. The color gray connotes, as it did in Blithe Spirit, the women’s ghostliness. In both series, ancient vampires known as “Old Ones” view humans as slave chattel, as property. The twenty-first-century vampire, werewolf, and female ghost fight and defeat the Old Ones, rejecting their “racist” beliefs in their own “interracial” solidarity. In one episode in the UK version, Annie helps a werewolf/ghost couple from the 1950s overcome their belief that their supernatural status and race (the werewolf is an older black man, the female ghost, a young white woman) mean they will be separated in the afterlife (season 4, ep. 2). As Annie explains, “Humanity isn’t a species. It’s a state of mind. It can’t be defeated” (season 3, ep. 1). In the US series, Sally also comments on her racial identification. The female ghost gives her werewolf female friend Nora a wedding gift, her “something borrowed,” which is Sally’s grandmother’s necklace, “a necklace that Indian women wear at their wedding” (season 3, ep. 12). Sally’s gesture shows that the supernaturals are each other’s family (and species, despite their supernatural differences). When a ghostly Sally briefly works for and dates a funeral director, his ghost mother makes racist comments until finally Sally asserts her ethnicity proudly shouting, “I’m Indian!” (season 3, ep. 5). At

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one point, while occupying another human’s body, another character warns her it won’t last and that she’ll “have to be Sally ethnic-last name again” (season 3, ep. 4). Yet these brief reminders of socially constructed differences serve only to point to the ridiculousness of using race to discriminate. The powers of the feminine wielded by these female spirits reveal that no one should dismiss the power and importance of women of color. Annie and Sally display the abject feminine through their physical appearance, visually embodying Kristeva’s and Cixous’s descriptions of the terrifying feminine body. Both undergo terrifying and gory transformations as they wield power, with Annie’s eyes turning an otherworldly blue, her hair flying, with an aura of light surrounding her. She is a twenty-first-century version of the Medusa. Sally’s abject appearance is more bloody and maternal, as her body decays and transforms. Both female ghosts terrify humans with a look; both embody Cixous’s description of feminine power. Cixous explains that “women’s imaginary is inexhaustible . . . their stream of phantasms is incredible” (876); both embody what Cixous ironically describes for the feminine: “her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble” (876). The female ghosts encapsulate these French feminist ideas about how the feminine resists patriarchal order and control. Here, however, one difference in emphasis emerges, as Annie remains attractive in her abject feminine, while Sally appears as a decaying corpse. Often less subtle in its visuals, the US series uses more special effects than the UK show. Another significant difference is the degree to which the female ghost appears initially to be insecure. The US show’s dialogue sets up Sally as extremely self-critical. While both Annie and Sally are insecure, Sally’s words are more pathetic and less appealing than Annie’s. For example, in the first episode, Sally reassures Josh, “Relax, I can’t even move dust.” Her fear of leaving the house is more pronounced than Annie’s. She worries out loud: “If I do step outside, what if I just blow away?” Sally is always apologizing to Aidan and Josh. When she is unable to help Josh protect his sister, Sally says, “I’m really sorry. I tried. I just couldn’t” (season 1, ep. 2). Sally also relies more on her housemates; for example, she asks Josh to tell her fiancé to stop ignoring her. She repeatedly tells them, “I’m lonely” (season 1, ep. 2, 3). An anxious Annie reveals her loneliness by brightly greeting the vampire and werewolf when they return home, but Sally verbalizes in a very plaintive way. “Is my energy so awful?” (season 1, ep. 3) she asks Aidan, demanding reassurance that it isn’t. “Am I a jerk?” Sally asks Josh twice, hoping to be told she is not (season 1, ep. 4). While Sally’s insecurity is more pronounced, its

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Annie, watching from inside the kitchen. Being Human UK.

main effect is to emphasize her transformation into a subject who accepts self-knowledge and authority. It is primarily a difference in degree, rather than in tone. Gender is critical to these characters’ supernatural abilities, with the various supernatural beings embodying versions of the feminine or masculine. While there are female vampires and werewolves in each show, these creatures inherently embody hypermasculinity, and both series focus on a male vampire and a male werewolf. Large, fearsome, aggressive, blood-thirsty, dominant, they roam without rivals through the city and through the forests. Concomitantly, Annie and Sally embody traditional femininity: the female ghost is domestic, passive, querulous, attractive, and subordinate. At first, the ghosts rarely leave the house, and only a few people, mostly other supernaturals, can even see them. The plots reinforce but also interrogate gender roles and stereotypes. The supernatural characters exist on a continuum, with the male vampire as the most masculine and active, and the werewolf in between, as androgynous as he is empathic and passive (when he is not a wolf). The female ghost, on the other hand, behaves in a stereotypically feminine fashion, at least initially. But by the shows’ conclusions, the female ghost transmutes into an omniscient goddesslike figure with tremendous powers. The two male characters, but even more so the female ghost, must learn to interrogate themselves and their gender roles. Annie’s and Sally’s struggles are particularly difficult because unlike the vampire and the werewolf, the female ghost doesn’t even really understand why or how she became a supernatural.

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As a wraith, her situation reflects that of the feminine: sidelined, often (in her case literally) invisible, and passive rather than assertive or aggressive. While all of the characters undergo struggle and change, Annie and Sally provide the most dramatic and feminist transformation. Their liminality as female ghosts provides a strong contrast with each woman’s development from a house-bound and timid character. By the end of each series, the female spirit has become a strong, assertive presence who not only makes her own decisions, but also saves all of humanity from a war of supernaturals and humans. As it does for the other female spirits, Annie’s and Sally’s ghostliness underlines the subordinate and marginal status of the feminine in a patriarchal culture. Each character’s qualities, such as invisibility and the inability (at first) to make others hear her, reflect the marginalization of women in a maledominated world. That she cannot be seen particularly pains Annie, who yearns for human contact. While other female ghosts, from the Woman in Black to La Llorona and Beloved, strike back at the human world that treated them so badly, Annie wants to help the living. But she can do so primarily for other supernaturals, as they are the only beings that can see and interact with her as though she were alive. Mostly trapped in the house, Annie spends her time in domestic tasks, cooking and cleaning for her roommates and visitors. Despite the obvious futility of her performance of traditionally feminine domestic chores, Annie defends her actions, saying, “I like my routine. It makes me feel normal” (season 1, ep. 2). In the first episodes, Sally is so weak that she can’t even turn the page of a newspaper and must content herself with reading whatever George, the werewolf, decides to read. Sally’s limitations make her an extreme version of a housebound homemaker. Stereotypical femininity, as the show reveals, is self-defeating and dangerous. As Annie’s and Sally’s stories unfold, they expose the dangers of embracing the traditional feminine role, in part by exposing the dangers of heterosexual relationships. Although Annie and Sally themselves, and perhaps many of the viewers, don’t realize it until well into the first season, both ghosts have been victims of domestic violence, killed by their possessive, abusive fiancés. As Annie struggles to find her purpose as a spirit, she turns to traditionally feminine gender roles, but they fail to bring her surcease or clarity. She focuses on the loss of her connection with fiancé Owen and tries to rekindle it, albeit with the limitations of being a ghost. She explains that she wants to be Owen’s “guardian angel.” With another ghost’s help, Annie goes to Owen’s house, delivers a casserole, and performs several other domestic chores, from helping him find his keys to ironing his favorite shirt. Annie sets up a

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photograph of the two of them on construction paper and doodles hearts all around the image. The extreme and girlish infatuation and gestures for an oblivious Owen (he still can’t see her) parody conventional romance. That Owen has moved on with a new relationship with a woman named Janie, whom Annie dislikes, undercuts the standard tropes of compulsory heterosexuality. Unable to make herself seen or heard, she takes shaving cream and writes, “Happy Anniversary, Tiger” on the mirror. An angry Owen hurriedly wipes away the message while he yells at his new partner. Annie’s fantasy of being an angel to this man comes to naught, and the series shows that such a vision of a traditional male-female intimate relationship is dangerous fantasy, not reality. In a very similar fashion, Sally clings to her abusive partner, Danny, thinking that she has become a ghost and is confined to their former home because of her love for him. But as with Annie’s situation, the truth is more complicated and ugly. Sally’s fiancé starts a relationship with Sally’s best friend since childhood, Bridget. Bridget appears to be sensible and sensitive, so Sally’s jealousy seems misplaced. After talking to her roommates, though, Sally relents and whispers in Bridget’s ear that her relationship with Danny has her blessing. There are, however, ominous indications that Danny will also be controlling and abusive to Bridget, for like Sally before her, Bridget ignores Danny’s fits of anger. The shows demonstrate the ways that traditional femininity can be used to reinforce abusive and controlling men’s power over women. Annie and Sally exhibit many of the qualities of victims of domestic violence: low selfesteem; isolation by a partner; investment in the fantasy of romantic love; and repression of the partner’s controlling and violent behavior. From denying her fiancé’s violence to protecting Owen’s new female partner, Annie finds her voice (literally); ultimately, she wreaks appropriate vengeance for her own murder. Sally does the same. Annie’s and Sally’s journeys of self-discovery remain a strong plotline throughout the first season of each show. The female ghosts have a specific, marginal position in the world, not only in contrast to other humans, but even in relation to the vampire and werewolf. The directors emphasize their tentative boundary statuses through camera angles and blocking. Annie and Sally also appear visually as liminal. Their positioning represents their femininity, as they are depicted in extreme close-ups, often crying. The female ghost literally lives on the margins, peering from behind curtains, around corners. Her placement on the edge of the screen reflects her position on the boundary of life and death. This directorial decision reflects the traditional status of spirits, for, as Kroger and

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Anderson explain, “[g]host sightings frequently occur betwixt spaces of the home: doorways, windows, even stairwells” (ix). But these spaces are doubly appropriate for the feminine, in their domesticity and liminality. Like other female ghosts, Annie and Sally have a specific voyeuristic position that parallels that of the television viewers. Like Grace Ridley in The Untold Story, the female ghosts can spy through closed doors. For example, Annie expresses her curiosity at George’s transformation into a werewolf, asking, “Can I watch?” He demurs, but Annie insists, pointing out that he cannot hurt her, “and you’ve seen me since I died, so I think the rules of privacy have got muddled.” Annie functions as a stand-in for the viewer, also pruriently curious. Like her, we “just want to see what happens” (season 1, ep. 3). After she suddenly appears in George’s room, he complains, “Does a locked door mean nothing to you?” (season 2, ep. 3). As we watch her watching George turn into a wolf, we see Annie watching through a mirror, again, reflecting her distance from life, even the supernatural life of a werewolf. Sally, too, functions as a voyeur, even to the extent of watching the vampire Aidan’s feeding and sexual encounters. Like Annie, Sally is not confined by her body, so she can go anywhere in the house at first, and later anywhere, materializing and watching without being seen. This omniscience valorizes the power and knowledge available to the female ghost. Women’s ways of knowing have many parallels to ghostly ways of knowing. Although she remains mostly housebound and invisible, the female ghost nevertheless plays a central role in this trio of supernaturals. In this regard she occupies a familiar feminine place, as a mediator between two males in an implicitly homoerotic relationship. The vampire and the werewolf have trouble expressing their feelings, but through their relationship with the female ghost, the two learn to express compassion, concern, and love. Annie enables her flatmates and other male characters, including another male ghost, Gilbert, to feel and express emotion. As the female ghosts grow in self-knowledge, they are better able to connect with their roommates and better able to help the other supernaturals understand self and other. Like Topper and Blithe Spirit, Being Human contains a domestic comedy, finding humor in human relationships, especially in nonsexual male-female relationships. The humor calls into question traditional gender stereotypes. The shows’ humor relies on the playful interaction between the three leads, a knowing self-awareness of gender stereotypes, and that staple of romantic comedies, sexual tension and jokes. Added to these comedic staples is a plethora of humor about their supernatural states. The combination of three young roommates, two male and one female, naturally leads to humorous

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gender conflicts. For instance, in the UK series, George finds himself irritated that Annie remains, unseen, as he tries to entertain a young woman he wants to date. Despite her disembodiment, Annie still suffers from premenstrual syndrome, putting it on the flat’s calendar and weeping and yelling at George and Mitchell. Both she and Mitchell make jokes about George’s “time of the month” when he transforms into a werewolf. While referring to George’s monthly cycle might feminize George, that he can actually kill people during his “period” as a hypermasculine animal leaves the character very male-identified. When George is forced to undergo his transformation in the flat (when his “safe space” is unavailable), Annie complains that she has just vacuumed and that George’s transformation into a wolf results in the destruction of all their belongings, as the wild beast rages in the confined space. She certainly has many other frustrations, though. Annie breaks down crying because as a ghost, she can never change her clothes. In another fit of weeping, Annie is sad because she will never get to use a special engagement present, a parsley shredder, to make a meal for her fiancé, Owen. Of course the young men have never heard of a parsley shredder and have to ask what the strange-looking instrument is. Sprinkled through every episode, these moments show the absurdity of feminine (and also masculine) stereotypes by taking them to a humorous extreme. When Annie becomes a poltergeist, she asks, “Do you think I can channel [the refrigerator]? I have been dying to pull that fridge out and clean behind it” (season 1, ep. 4). Humor works similarly in the US series, though with an American inflection. Episode titles often contain puns and comic references to popular culture. “Always a Bridesmaid, Never Alive,” refers to Sally’s status in an episode from season 3, for example, and other titles reflect an ironic, cynical sense of humor. “Ruh-Roh” refers to the cartoon dog Scooby Doo’s exclamation of worry (and alluding also to the werewolves) (season 3, ep. 13); “If I Only Had Raw Brain” (season 3, ep. 11) is the title of an episode involving zombies; and “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” (season 2, ep. 13) refers to Sally’s plight again, a riff off the 1960s-era popular song by Lesley Gore. Sally frequently makes jokes about her own status as a ghost, invisible and trapped (at least at first in her house). “This ghost is dressed for success” (season 3, ep. 12), Sally quips, noting her frustration at being stuck in the clothes in which she died. When two teenage ghosts taunt her, she tells them that they “look like human maxi pads” (season 3, ep. 8). Confronting a room of hostile vampires, Sally lightly implores them: “Boys, boys, penises down” (season 3, ep. 9). In both series, the female ghost’s ability to manipulate objects and people while invisible leads to pratfalls and physical comedy, as it did in the early

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twentieth-century texts Topper and Blithe Spirit. And the humor is employed to the same ends, to ridicule stereotypical gender roles. Like those comedic female ghosts, Sally and Annie eventually take over control of the narrative, the other characters and the episodes’ structure often emphasizing their importance. Like the Woman in Black or Grace Ridley, Annie serves as the narrator in the pilot episode. As the storyteller, Annie provides a sympathetic understanding view of the supernatural characters of Mitchell and George, as well as herself. The first image we see is a close-up of dead Annie’s face. She lies at the bottom of the stairs, crumpled but still very attractive. She looks surprised rather than horrified by death. Her voice typifies the feminine in its hesitancy and lack of authority, but it remains engaging and compelling. “Everyone dies,” she states, and then breaks off: “Eh, can I start again? Everyone deserves a death. I was going to die of old age” (season 1, ep. 1). Annie sets up the premise for the show: “So here we are, overlooked and forgotten. Unnatural and supernatural. Watching the dance from the sidelines” (season 1, ep. 1). Poetic and evocative, her words encapsulate the female ghost’s experience and the experience of the feminine in a patriarchal culture. One of Mitchell’s opening voiceovers makes the gendered relevance of Annie’s story clear. “Labels are forced on us,” he says. “They set us apart, like ghosts, just drifting through other people’s lives. But only if we let the labels hold” (season 1, ep. 4). These words emphasize the importance of resisting gender stereotypes. In this episode and the two following, particularly, Annie consciously resists the labels that have been placed upon her by Owen and a patriarchal society. Ironically, as a ghost, she has more of a life than when she was alive. As Mitchell explains, “it’s when you have worked out who you are that you can really start to live” (season 1, ep. 4). While Annie first appears in the kitchen, as she does in most of the preceding episodes, we begin to see a change. While she is sweeping up broken crockery, she is the one who has made the mess and so is taking responsibility for her own actions rather than taking care of another’s untidiness. As she talks to Mitchell, cabinet doors and drawers open and shut rapidly and roughly; the lights go off and on with an unpleasant buzz. She explains, “This could be perfectly normal. You find out your fiancé murdered you, you become a throwing-thingsabout ghost” (season 1, ep. 4). As Germana explains about the character of Annie, “as a poltergeist her rage manifests itself in the subversion of domestic bliss” (59). Here the female ghost occupies the familiar place as described by Cixous, with the feminine “taking pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and

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values” (887). This poltergeist behavior is especially understandable because Annie eventually remembers that she was killed by her fiancé. The female ghost starts to come into her own, with the plot emphasizing the development of feminine knowledge and agency. At this point, Mitchell still functions as an advisor to Annie, but their roles will soon be reversed. Mitchell points out that Annie is still coming to terms with her discovery that Owen murdered her, and he suggests gently, “Maybe cleaning the kitchen isn’t the best way to go about it” (season 1, ep. 3). Not ready to change her ways completely, Annie makes a funny face, and the jar of coffee explodes. While this incident fits in with the series’ use of humor to undercut gender roles, the kitchen mess signals a very serious change in Annie. In episode 4, however, Annie has only partial control of her poltergeist qualities. However, later in the same episode, she demonstrates her developing sense of authority when she challenges Mitchell for the first time, confronting him about having kept a vampire snuff video that he had been sent in an attempt to bring him back into the vampire fold. Similarly, Annie comforts and counsels George, finding a parallel in their single status. Like Marion Kerby in Topper, Annie provides comfort and guidance to her male companions. Later in the same episode, Mitchell and George lose a co-worker, a woman George fancied, to a vampire named Lauren, who feeds on her and kills her. The three supernaturals sob together in the alley. George and Mitchell want to take Annie out to the pub, to distract and console her, but she relishes their alternative domesticity, saying, “No, I want to stay in the house now. In the kitchen. I feel safe here” (season 1, ep. 3). Annie walks over to Mitchell and pats him, as she nurses a mug of tea. The pilot episode valorizes the relational bond these three share; it is a nonsexual but loving, supportive relationship. The supernaturals’ supportive relationship suggests an alternative to traditional heterosexuality by contrasting sharply with the abusive, controlling example of domestic violence. This alternative, nonsexual relationship provides a strong contrast to Annie and Owen’s relationship (while she was alive). Finding strength from her companions and her increasing awareness of how abusive Owen was, Annie disengages in steps. First, when Owen comes over, she starts destroying objects, throws books around, and turns the lights off and on. Annie decides Owen cannot be in the house: “I can’t have him here. I will burn this house down,” she warns. She slams the doors and protests that his presence is “like he’s killing me all over again” (season 1, ep. 5). When he brings over his new girlfriend, Janie, and she starts measuring rooms, Annie still resents her. She screams (unheard by Owen and

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Janie), “You’re not stealing the whole life I planned as well!” (season 1, ep. 5). Distraught, she brings down a light fixture. Owen plans to evict Mitchell and George and take over the house himself, but Annie vows to stop him. “I was dead before I even met Owen. A whole life just wasted on trivia and routine. Not now. Now I have a purpose, a reason to be here. Owen has taken everything from me. He’s not taking you two or this house . . . [I have] never felt more alive” (season 1, ep. 5). Annie’s words echo those of battered women who killed their abusers and who are in prison: “I feel freer [in prison] is a frequent refrain” (St. Gabriel Prison, Louisiana, interviews). The series highlights the positive nature of Annie’s rejection of her abuser. As Annie grows in confidence, she also gains the freedom she so desires. Annie goes out into the yard and burns the photos of her and Owen in a large metal garbage pail. A close-up shows the photo that she had decorated with hearts. The slow dissolving of the photo and its consumption by the flames makes a vivid visual of Annie’s renunciation of the romantic narrative that kept her captive in an abusive relationship. This action is followed by a dramatic change in Annie’s status as a ghost. As Annie leaves by the front door, she becomes visible to people: an old woman sees and even speaks to her. Turning her back on her former role as a cowed and subservient woman leads to her literal visibility. Visibility alone, however, doesn’t make her immediately able to punish Owen. The series emphasizes that escape from domestic violence is a process. More important than scaring Owen is Annie’s attempt to protect other women. After talking to George and Mitchell, Annie finds renewed strength. She decides she has to warn Owen’s new girlfriend and summons the courage to go to Owen and Janie’s house. Janie is frightened, sure that Annie has come to hurt her. After Janie runs into the bathroom, slamming the door after her, Annie and Janie sit on the floor on either side of the door. Their blocking as equals stresses the parallel in their situations. Annie tries to explain the danger Janie is in. Like Annie earlier in the series, Janie clings to the idea that Owen loves her. As a former victim of domestic violence, Annie knows how to reach Janie. Annie says, “If you tell me he’s never laid a finger on you, not even for a second made you feel scared, I’ll walk away right now.” Crying, Janie says, “Sometimes he gets . . .” But at that moment Owen returns. The viewer sees Owen’s skillful manipulation of Janie, as he denies that Annie exists, calls her “it,” and swathes Janie in romantic blandishments. At the same time, Owen continues his campaign of destroying Annie’s self-confidence even after her death. Looking directly at Annie, he tells Janie that Annie “was always so bitter. Bitter towards people who were

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cleverer. She would just stand at the side and swipe and bitch. . . . [She would] never participate, never risk. She lived her life at the periphery. Like a ghost” (season 1, ep. 5). The batterer’s words show the relevance of the female ghost’s plight for real women, in this typically victim-blaming view used to justify violence against women. Just as Annie has modeled the impact of verbal abuse, she also shows the way out of this collapse. At first she says, “He’s beaten me. I can’t move. Owen’s won. He just keeps killing me.” But George will not let Annie remain defeated. Giving her one more chance, George tells her, “If you can’t do this, then you have done to yourself the one thing Owen could never do. You have finally died” (season 2, ep. 2). Annie comes back stronger from her defeat, starting with her encounter with the vampire standing guard at the funeral home where Mitchell is being kept prisoner. Dismissively, the vampire asks of her, “What the cock is that?” and Annie cheerfully replies, “I’m a ghost, actually.” Ignoring her, the vampire attacks George, but Annie eventually grabs a chair and hits the vampire hard. While she does apologize to the vampire, her behavior is ground-breaking. As she explains, “that was my first actual fight.” They rescue Mitchell and run away, back to their house. This episode in particular shows the importance of a woman’s rejection of misogyny and her self-empowerment. After rescuing her friend, Annie is able to finally turn the tables on Owen. When Owen shows up again, Annie is buoyed by her “first actual fight,” and this time, she can defend herself and defeat Owen. “You’re an amateur,” Annie tells Owen. “I am going to tell you the very worst thing in the world, something only the dead know.” Moving abruptly close to him, she whispers in his ear. When he protests, “That’s not true,” she tells him, “I saw it.” The viewer never gets to hear what she says, but it is powerful and disturbing and completely unnerves Owen. In answer to George’s query, she will only say, “I told him a secret” (season 2, ep. 2). The female ghost has become so powerful with language that she can cow her former abuser with a few whispered words. Annie’s self-knowledge and awareness continue to grow, demonstrating that she is moving on Belenky’s path of women’s psychological development. Annie, George, and Mitchell sit around the table, as equals. Annie has given up cleaning and making tea, as they discuss what will happen next. Another vampire comes to their home and stabs Mitchell, and Annie and George must take turns protecting their dying friend at the hospital. When it appears that George will leave Mitchell (restored by a terminally-ill former girlfriend’s lethal donation of blood to him) to fight the villain vampire Herrick again by

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himself, Annie says she won’t meet George at the train station, but “maybe I will stay and fight” (season 2, ep. 1). With this episode, Annie has moved far from the housebound ghost, to an assertive agent protecting her friends. As she decides to act, Annie’s powers increase even more. She becomes the transcendent feminine force that Cixous imagines. Annie discovers her formidable ghost powers, opening doors and throwing powerful vampires around like they are tiny doll figures. She rescues the humans who had been imprisoned as feeding stock by the vampires and leads them out of their dungeon-like prison. She appears to support Mitchell in his fight, but when Herrick doesn’t appear, they both realize that George has decided to challenge the vampire in place of Mitchell. After helping George and freeing Mitchell, Annie asks, “So what happens next?” Mitchell, who by virtue of being more than a hundred years old and a vampire, knows more than George and especially Annie, has no quick answers. Instead, he praises Annie’s uniqueness. “You turned down death. No one has ever done that. It’s like it opened something in you, a whole new skill set” (season 1, ep. 7). The first season concludes with the three sitting amicably at their kitchen tables, a trio of equals. This image crystallizes the interconnected knowledge available to women who move, as Annie has done, from voicelessness, to subjective, and finally to integrated knowledge. A critical part of Annie’s development is her assumption of the abject feminine-maternal role. This development not only shows the value of feminine knowledge integrating with others, but also begins the exploration of Annie as the abject feminine. After Annie makes peace with her mother, she is handed a ghost baby to care for, another indication of Annie’s maturation and growing responsibility. While she is initially reluctant, Annie does a wonderful job of caretaking, prefiguring her critical role as a mother for an orphaned living child in season 4. A female ghost, having heard of Annie’s good deeds for other spirits, shows up with a ghost baby. At first perplexed, Annie soon gets the hang of child-care and begins doting on the baby. Appropriately, Annie quiets the baby not with lullabies but by telling it ghost stories. This episode sets up Annie’s role as mother-mentor for Alex, another female ghost, in the final season. Stressing their bonding as female spirits, the two spend much of their time in the kitchen, with Annie teaching Alex skills such as moving objects (season 4, ep. 8). Annie and Alex’s relationship echoes the similar ghostly sisterhood seen in Blithe Spirit and some of the La Llorona redactions. The fourth season continues the expansion of Annie’s importance, showing the potential power of the feminine. In subsequent seasons, Annie

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expands her horizons, taking a job at a pub, mentoring other ghosts by helping them identify and resolve their unfinished business. As she does so, each ghost finds the door to the afterlife. One ghost, Saul, whom Annie has been dating, has been corrupted by unidentified malign forces, and he attempts to drag Annie through his door. A stronger, more assertive Annie resists strenuously, and Saul relents. Not only is Annie physically stronger, but she is also emotionally strong, able to tell George, who is depressed after his girlfriend has left him, that he should try to talk about it, warning him, “Depression is anger turned inward” (season 2, ep. 3). George and Mitchell object to Annie’s insistence that they all talk, and George complains, “We don’t need to turn this into an episode of Oprah” (season 2, ep. 3). Despite George’s fear of feminization, the plot shows that Annie’s “women’s way of knowing” is correct. Valorizing a feminine model of communication and cooperation, the series uses the female ghost to model an alternative to patriarchal control and violence. This feminist alternative is particularly striking when one considers the genre, television fantasy, which far more often promotes superpowers that are used to dominate and kill. While initially the female ghost seems much weaker than the vampire and the werewolf, by the penultimate season, Annie manifests new, greater power to resist death. Unbeknownst to the supernaturals, they are being stalked by an evil priest called Kemp who wants to kill them. Kemp and his henchmen try to force Annie through the door to the afterlife, but she resists and escapes a third time. Spirits that may be connected to the evil Kemp keep trying to manipulate Annie and Mitchell through the television, but Annie resists, turning off the television set. At the end of the multiepisode plot, Annie saves the day by dragging herself with Father Kemp through the door to the afterlife, where he will face judgment. In this action Annie again breaks the rules; as she explains to Mitchell and George through a television monitor, “[T]hey’re really angry at me for getting Kemp. Because there isn’t a rule for that” (season 2, ep. 5). Mitchell goes to rescue Annie from purgatory, and she returns to the living world in the third season. While Mitchell guides Annie out of purgatory, he makes it clear that she “saved him, too,” from being an inhuman monster. The use of the television is ironic and self-referential, pointing to the show’s self-conscious efforts to communicate. Its use both implies a criticism of other television shows, with their evil, seductive messages, and also presents Annie as in control of the medium. She is able to resist the TV set’s blandishments and turn it off. Annie can also commandeer the television to use it to communicate with her friends when she is trapped in purgatory.

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Annie’s ability to speak and be heard provides an example of feminine writing, writing the body. Like other female ghosts, Annie is stronger than manmade technology and can even use it to her advantage. The show makes Annie’s centrality as ethical center and supernatural leader explicit through voiceovers. In one, Annie declares her identity, her self-affirmation serving as a mission statement for her friends and the show: “My name is Annie Clare Sawyer, and two years ago I died. But in so many ways, that’s when my life began. In the company of horrors, I learned about friendship and loyalty, sacrifice and courage (season 3, ep. 1). Annie’s central role is this family as their “guardian angel” (season 3, ep. 2). While Mitchell warns Annie that he and George and Nina may not always be here and that she should stop defining herself by what she does for other people (season 3, ep. 2), the series offers Annie’s role as critical for protecting not only her friends but also the entire world. She models an alternative way of being as described in Women’s Ways of Knowing, modeling a feminine process of developing a self, voice, and authority. As Belenky and others discuss in their book of the same name, women’s relationship to knowledge presents an alternative frame of feminine values. These values promote community over the individual and stress nurturing and caring. The series provides numerous examples of Annie behaving in a way that models this feminist alternative to patriarchy values of individual achievement. In the third season, Annie continues her role as mediator and healer. For example, she communicates with other ghosts for a medium who has a psychic blockage. As she helps these ghosts communicate to the living, Annie’s own mother appears in the audience, and Annie helps her mother accept her daughter’s death, taking her to her grave, and telling her the death wasn’t her fault and that Annie will always love her. But Annie’s caretaking skills go far beyond nurturing individuals. She also enacts justice, as she helps a female detective, Nancy Reed, discover who murdered dozens of people on a train. As occurs with other female ghosts, this female specter enacts justice from a uniquely feminine perspective. The female ghost uses her knowledge and ghostly powers to save people. While in the series’ beginning, Mitchell guides and directs Annie, who at that time is completely ignorant of her past life and powers, by season 3, it is the active and guiding Annie who discovers Mitchell’s crime and helps him accept responsibility for the murders (thus saving his humanity). Annie also saves Detective Constable Reed from being killed by another vampire. Tricked back into purgatory by Lia, one of Mitchell’s victims, Annie teaches her that “revenge kind of sucks” (season 3, ep. 8). Having helped this spirit, Annie is rewarded by being freed to return

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once again to the living world, to save the life of George’s girlfriend and to be with Mitchell in prison. As occurs in the Topper narratives, here, too, the female ghost supersedes the masculine authority of the law. Having surpassed her supernatural roommates and guided them, Annie creates a new family and moves from helping others to protecting the whole world. This apotheosis occurs in the context of adoptive maternity, where Annie uses her powers to protect an infant girl and, at the same time, saves the planet from becoming a Nazilike, vampire-controlled world. Mitchell’s and George’s deaths leave Annie to protect George’s daughter, Eve, who a prophecy states will be humanity’s savior. In addition, Annie ends up reconstituting a supernatural household, taking in and guiding another werewolf and vampire, as well as other ghosts whom she assists in passing over. The plot sets up Annie’s awareness of the feminist mantra that the personal is political, that individual choices and actions can have profound effects on others. Annie’s awareness of the interdependence of humans is accompanied by her full realization of her supernatural powers, which she uses to save humanity. The fourth season witnesses Annie’s triumphant realization of her “unfinished business” as a ghost. While other ghosts have to experience love, accept guilt, forgive a loved one, Annie’s business is much larger: to save the world. She does so by acting as mother to a female child and to all species. At the same time that it valorizes women’s ways of knowing, the show exposes and criticizes traditional masculinity, which is associated with vampires and werewolves as predators who want to control the humans. For example, Annie confronts her new roommates, Hal, a vampire, and Tom, a werewolf. She calls them on their macho posturing: “You think you’re men, do you? You think you are big and brave? You’re dancing around your pain, both of you. Facing it head on, that takes real courage. I’m not blaming you because I’ve done it myself ” (season 4, ep. 2). The men follow her lead so that at the end of one episode, Annie declares: “I feel strong here, stronger than I have ever felt. Right now I feel like I could take on a whole army with Tom here and Lord Harry by my side” (season 4, ep. 3). In the final episode, “The War Child,” the series reveals a fundamental premise of the relationship of the supernaturals to humanity: “[W]e are on the outside of humanity to guard it” (season 4, ep. 8). Annie’s role, however, is the critical one, as Hal tries to kill the malevolent ancient vampires with a suicide bomb, but they stop him, using mind control. While the head vampire cradles baby Eve, Annie’s eyes turn electric blue again, her hair blows wildly in an unseen wind, and she screams, “Give me back my fucking baby!” (season 4, ep. 8). The cry and

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Annie saving the world from the vampires. Being Human UK.

Annie’s appearance are both humorous and deadly. The vampires all freeze, petrified by Annie’s power. Annie is Cixous’s feminist Medusa and Kristeva’s maternal abject, reclaiming her child. Her powers show the extent of the female ghost’s development into a superpower. Supported by Alex, the female ghost whom she has mentored, Annie completely destroys the much older, ostensibly more powerful vampires. In this struggle for humanity’s future, the female ghosts triumph over the hypermasculine vampires. Telling Alex to whisk Hal to safety, Annie detonates the bomb, sending herself through flames to purgatory. There she finds a beautiful, unharmed (though dead) baby Eve, who coos at her. The adult Eve appears briefly, thanking Annie. “You did it Annie. That was your unfinished business. All you had to do was save the world,” adult Eve says with a smile. Eve tells Annie to go through the next door, saying, “They’re waiting for you,” presumably Mitchell, George, and Nina. Eve can’t go because, as she explains, pointing at baby Eve, “that’s the only me.” Annie whispers, “I’m sorry,” but Eve reassures her with a smile, “Don’t be. You saved us all” (season 4, ep. 8). A fifth season of the show includes the trio of a new vampire, werewolf, and the female ghost, Alex. By following Annie’s example, all three defeat a Satanic plot and, as a result, become literally human again. The American version of the show began airing in 2011. Some differences in the two series follow innately from differences in television in each country. The BBC series had no commercials, as the network is supported by subscription. As a result, each British episode is about ten minutes longer than

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the American forty-four minutes or so. In addition, the BBC season is six or eight episodes to the US thirteen shows. These structural differences have an impact, even though the creator of the BBC show, Toby Whithouse, was involved in the importation/adaptation of Being Human. More characterdriven and with greater emphasis on dialogue, the British show benefited from not having to shorten and break up its narrative for commercials. The US show devoted more effort to special effects and focused on depicting visual horror of vampirism and werewolf transformations. Both series were similarly successful, drawing in well over a million viewers, over 3 million with repeat airings, good viewership for smaller channels like BBC3 and Syfy (M2pressWIRE; Umstead). In addition, the Syfy series was notable for its large female viewership; it was “the most viewed Syfy series among women, with an audience that was 53% female” (Umstead). While the president of the Syfy channel, Dave Howe, stated that the series would not “slavishly replicate the British version” (Andreeva 2), the first season, especially the first episodes, followed the British version very closely in terms of plot. Some of the reviews of the first season were critical of the shift in focus, comparing it unfavorably to the BBC series (Hale). Yet because the US show had so many more episodes and perhaps also because of its focus on action, the American Being Human introduced a larger number of characters, from the werewolf ’s family to more of a backstory for the vampire. Even the female ghost has more ghostly boyfriends. The characters’ names were also changed: the vampire is Aidan, a nod to the actor who played the role on the BBC3 show; the werewolf is Josh; and the female ghost is Sally. Casting is very similar, with the vampire dark and brooding; the werewolf earnest, awkward, and blond; and the ghost a woman of color, an American of continental Indian ethnicity. Both female ghosts make jokes about their situations and their roommates’ supernatural powers, but Sally has fewer humorous lines than Annie. In part, this change is one that also affects the male characters. The American series devotes more time to visual horror and less to the playful relationships among the three characters. Sally’s clothes mirror those worn by Annie: a gray, baggy sweater and leggings. The ghostly gray reinforces Sally’s liminal, tentative position, not only as a ghost, but also as an insecure and (initially) passive spirit. Where Annie was featured prominently in the first episode of the BBC3 show, including a dramatic voiceover and close-up, the first US episode gives the narration to the vampire, Aidan, a switch that reveals his even more central status in the adaptation. By the end of the first season, Sally’s appearances and lines are subordinated to those of the two

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Sally watching, trapped insider her house. Being Human US.

male characters. The homoerotic nature of the vampire-werewolf friendship is more pronounced and less subtle than in the UK version. Yet the three characters occupy roughly the same positions on a gender continuum: Aidan hypermasculine; Josh androgynous; Sally extremely and traditionally feminine. Aidan’s dominance is strengthened as he has been promoted to the higher paying and higher status job of nurse, while Josh remains an orderly, and Sally has no job at all. Sally and her antecedent ghost, Annie, are depicted in very similar ways, with camera angles and perspectives stressing their femininity. Both are shown often in extreme close-ups, often crying or tearing up. While Sally spends more time on the sofa, and Annie, in the kitchen, they share similar postures. Both female ghosts appear most frequently sitting, legs pulled up to their chests, hugging themselves tightly. In shot after shot, they curl up, clutching their pain and insecurity through body language. Both spend most of their time on the stairs where they died. Both are unsure why they are ghosts, why they cannot move on. Both want to be seen and to be able to move freely, and both eventually discover the power to do so. Most significantly, both ghosts were killed by their fiancés, and they must understand, accept, and wreak justice before they can stop being spirits. Structurally, Sally appears weaker than Annie. At first, neither female ghost has any power to act in the real world, but in the US version, Sally cannot even turn the pages of a newspaper, while British Annie can make tea and busy herself in the kitchen. Within the house, Annie has more power than Sally does. While both female ghosts disrupt the plumbing, Annie’s panties

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have caused the blockage, while Sally has carelessly let her engagement ring slip down the bathroom drain. In both instances, the blocked plumbing evokes the internal plumbing of the female body, spewing and uncontrollable, mysteriously erupting and creating messes. Both items typify the feminine, but while Annie’s thong panties get thrown away, Sally appears mesmerized by her ring, playing with it. This one change sets up a number of others that present Sally as a less effective spirit than Annie; however, by the end of the first season, Sally’s character makes some dramatic turns that highlight her development into a more assertive and powerful ghost than Annie. The structural changes that at first diminish the female ghost are, in part, the effect of adding more female characters. The US show includes many more female characters, lessening the emphasis and screen time for Sally. Sally also takes longer than Annie to develop an ability to be active, to influence objects and people in the real world. Sally, on the one hand, has to have people who are open and willing to see a ghost. Annie, on the other hand, can materialize and be seen by strangers and nonsupernaturals. In a series that emphasizes the bloody aspect of horror, Sally is at a disadvantage. The show features Aidan’s blood and gore as part of being a vampire and Josh’s hideous transformation into an animal, but Sally seems more sidelined initially because she can’t take action, only appear and talk. The other vampires even belittle her by calling her “Caspar the Ghost,” referring to a benign and ineffectual ghost from the animated series Caspar the Friendly Ghost. The special effects associated with Sally are swirling smoke or lights, tiny tendrils that stress her dissolving. Even the special effects illuminate her passivity and ineffectuality. Annie’s sudden appearances and disappearances without the visual of dissolving are far more dramatic and powerful. Yet by the last two episodes of the much longer US first season (thirteen episodes to the UK version’s six), Sally develops into a more powerful female ghost. These changes are signaled through alterations to Sally’s physical appearance and to the plot. As mentioned previously, both Annie and Sally are women of color, with long, dark hair, wearing casual gray clothes that emphasize their ghostliness. And both characters comment on how they feel trapped by having to wear the clothes in which they died. But Sally faces a trauma that Annie doesn’t—exorcism by a medium hired by the fiancé who killed her, from which Sally barely escapes. The medium calls Sally evil names, characterizing her in ways that the viewers know to be untrue: “dark element” and “unclean spirit.” The exorcism is unnecessary, as Sally points out. “Why are you doing this? I left you alone: you win!” (season 1, ep. 11), she yells. This addition to the plot forces Sally to become stronger. The medium’s

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rituals trap Sally inside the house (by a barrier of salt) and then her spells decay Sally’s appearance into hideousness. Her face turns gray, her eyes swell and redden, and her skin begins to crack and darken. She suffers, writhes and moans, beginning to resemble a hideous corpse, like La Llorona (discussed in chapter 4). Although she doesn’t actually need air, she starts gasping, as though she is suffocating. The other characters still can’t see her, but viewers watch the appalling disintegration of this character that they have grown to like. That the exorcism is perpetrated by the man who killed her reinforces our sympathy for Sally. Sally’s possession of the female medium’s body stresses the afterlife and ghostliness as feminine arenas. Desperately, Sally rushes the medium, temporarily taking over the medium’s body. In the process, the medium gains the knowledge of how Sally died and, for a brief moment, has Sally’s face. In Sally’s image still, she screams at Danny, “You did this to me!” Danny grabs the medium by the throat, choking her, yelling, “It was accidental, you crazy bitch!” “I’m going to end this right now,” Danny threatens, and he throws the medium against a wall with great force. Appalled, the medium refuses to continue the exorcism, telling Danny, “You—I know what you are. . . . You deserve whatever she does to you.” When Danny protests that Sally is lying, the medium turns to face him and declares sternly: “[T]he dead don’t lie.” As she exits the house, the medium kicks through the line of salt, freeing Sally. Bridget follows the medium, apologizing, “I’m sorry, Sally” (season 1, ep. 11). As traumatic as the experience has been for all, it has opened Bridget’s eyes to Danny’s perfidy. This plot emphasizes a critical feature of the female ghost, present in all incarnations, to open characters’ (and viewers’) eyes to misogyny. As Cixous’s and Kristeva’s descriptions of writing the feminine body would suggest, Sally “writes” the cathartic experience on her body. The experience physically changes Sally. When we see her in the next episode, her physical deterioration remains, accentuated by the disturbing and uncanny opaque white of her eyes. Instead of the attractive and charming young woman she has been, Sally looks like a zombie, disturbing even Josh the werewolf. He complains to Aidan that “she looks like she’s ready to eat our entrails.” Aidan reassures Josh that Sally will recover, but Josh remains perturbed, joking, “Have like a me-day, maybe some skin cream!” (season 3, ep. 11), as he leaves to go to work. Sally disappears to haunt Danny as he shaves, forcing him to cut himself with his straight razor. “That’s what it feels like to die,” she tells Danny, her reflection in the mirror ghastly—her skin gray and cracked, her eyeballs white and opaque. This version of Sally literalizes the

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feminine abject: viscerally horrifying. As Danny grimaces, Sally is restored to her everyday attractive appearance. Following Danny to the emergency room at the hospital where Josh and Aidan work, Josh sees Sally and comments on her improved looks, “Great! No more zombie Sally” (season 3, ep. 11). Sally’s posture reinforces her restoration and her strength. She stands next to Josh, arms by her side, as his equal rather than a subordinate, cowed female. As Sally grows in her awareness of misogyny and domestic abuse, she has to learn not to internalize the patriarchal values of dominance and violence. While enacting revenge has brought her back, Josh warns her against murdering Danny. The new Sally may be stronger, but she is also disturbing. Josh continues to joke about Sally’s transformation, but he is concerned. He tells Sally, “You sound like you are interning for Hannibal Lector” as she describes cutting Danny and wanting to decapitate him. Josh also warns Aidan that “Sally is like the full-on murdering ghost now.” Danny returns to the house with gasoline, planning to burn the house down, disposing of Sally forever. Because her strength has returned, Sally can trap him in the house, shutting the door and holding it so he cannot leave. She tells him, “If you’re burning down this house, you’re going with it. Maybe this is the best way.” Her threats intensify as she warns Danny, “We both go. End this craziness but not before I torch your nuts and shove them down your throat” (season 1, ep. 11). While Sally’s power has grown, she will continue to struggle with this internalization of masculinity, which later in the series is made physical: masculine and feminine versions of Sally struggle for control of her consciousness and power. What saves Sally from the fate of an angry, predatory male is her supportive relationship with her roommates. Sally’s growth includes integrated knowledge because she respects and listens to the other supernaturals, who warn her of the evils of masculinity, which they also are trying to resist. Sally is saved from becoming a murderer as her roommates return and put out the fire. Aidan is about to kill Danny when Josh points out that Danny will then haunt Sally forever. Josh appeals to Sally not to kill Danny, pointing out, “We’ve all killed here, except you. We have all killed someone. Do not do this. You do not want to do this.” Sally has a moment of self-recognition, and she tells Danny, “No one deserves to die more than you, but I am not like you” (season 1, ep. 12). Danny finally sees Sally, and she is backlit by white light, more like an angel than a ghost. As the firefighters and police arrive, a shaken and chastened Danny confesses to the murder of Sally. Justice has finally been achieved. As in the original series, the three toast Sally’s success, and as they do, her portal, the doorway to the afterlife, appears in their

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home. But as Annie does, Sally turns down her opportunity to depart to help her roommate-vampire after he has been attacked by another vampire. This decision shows her commitment to love and support rather than the negative harmful emotions of revenge that Sally entertained briefly. The values of “women’s ways of knowing” have triumphed. Sally has developed tremendously from the highly insecure female ghost who was invisible and voiceless. After this similarity, though, the plot of the US show deviates sharply, providing Sally with opportunities to develop her powers parallel to, but differently than Annie does. A wounded Aidan has to fight his maker and rival vampire to the death. In the UK series, the werewolf tricks the vampire into going to the wrong place for the duel; the werewolf takes the vampire’s place and kills the evil vampire and protects his friend. In the US version, Sally plays a far more active and important role. The werewolf imagines that he is tricking his friend, but instead Sally and the vampire protect the werewolf, trapping him in a dungeon, while Sally and the vampire confront the evil Bishop. To keep the werewolf from sacrificing himself, Sally has to use her newfound powers not only to teleport but also to move physical objects, in this instance a heavy metal door. Sally locks Josh inside and then transports herself to assist Aidan in his duel-to-the-death. As in the hospital, Sally’s position and body language reveal her new confidence and power. She appears strong and confident, beside Aidan rather than behind him and standing instead of crouching on a floor, sofa, or landing, as she has done so many other times in the first season. Mostly, Sally watches as the two vampires battle viciously and bloodily in an abandoned warehouse. But as Aidan appears defeated, collapsed on the floor and writhing in pain, Sally picks up a sharpened stake and threatens Bishop with it. He belittles Sally, taunting her, “You know you can’t do a damn thing. Hand it over, little girl” (season 1, ep. 13). Sally drops the stake as Aidan, recovered, jumps on Bishop and decapitates him with an iron chain While some viewers might have liked to see Sally stake Bishop, the last episodes made clear that she is not a killer. Nevertheless, she has protected Josh and helped Aidan. In this regard, Sally is a far more active and assertive ghost than Annie from the original series. After Bishop dissolves in ash, Sally and Aidan stand side by side, positioned equally and seeing each other as partners. This final episode of the first season reinforces their equality, as the three sit at the kitchen table, all at the same level, discussing their future plans. Josh and Aidan discuss redecorating the house (which after the fire Danny started certainly needs it) and ask Sally what she plans to do. Emphatically,

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The two Sallys. Being Human US.

she tells them, “No more waiting. I’m going to do something with my time and we’re all going to be supernatural crime fighters” (season 1, ep. 13). To underscore how far Sally has come, the episode ends with a flashback, as the newly dead Sally stands trapped in the doorway, watching her body being taken away by paramedics. Sally’s dead zombie body and her ghostly self appear side-by-side, emphasizing the powerlessness of the organic body to the beauty of her ghostly self. Sally has journeyed far from her death and her passivity, learned about the limitations of traditional femininity, and moved far beyond those boundaries. Like Annie, Sally uses the house as her body, especially before she learns to control her supernatural powers. Like Beloved, she shakes the house, hurls bodies around, wrecks the plumbing, and disrupts the lights. And also like Beloved, both Annie and Sally leave their homes, escaping the trap of domesticity and possessions. The house at first exists as an extension of their bodies, but they eventually leave the house behind. This important movement underscores the series’ promotion of an alternative femininity beyond the gender stereotypes of female domesticity. The female ghosts must escape the domestic and become agents in the public sphere. Sally does so in part by associating with another figure of female power, absent in the British series, a witch. Sally befriends Donna, a witch who tries to exorcise her and who helps her find peace. Using a magical necklace that protects the soul, Sally exposes herself to that danger, giving the necklace to her friend Bridget and then later another to Nora as she marries Josh. Apparently, frivolous feminine accessories have power and import and are

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also culturally weighted: Sally’s Indian necklace helps protect and cement Nora’s safety. In subsequent seasons, Sally develops even more powers: she wields magic; travels through time; possesses live bodies; and returns from the afterlife, rescuing two other ghosts. The US version of the show takes the gender conflict present in all female ghost narratives but projects it internally into one female ghost. This decision makes the conflict between masculine and feminine knowledge and worldview even clearer. Sally confronts a negative alter ego, a male version of her called the Reaper. Confronting and defeating this patriarchal internalization of predation, Sally exposes gender stereotypes. Through her actions, not only are her male roommates, the vampire and werewolf, reconciled, but she also prevents a major war between their two species, a war that would have devastating consequences for humans as well. While Annie takes ghost baby Eve with her to the afterlife, Sally revels in the children that her former werewolf roommate has. She also reconciles with her biological mother, when both are ghosts. The peace and engagement of mother-child relations end up providing the surcease for the female ghost. But it is a maternity that embraces the preverbal, maternal body and glories in it. These series suggest that it is only by knowing and accepting the feminine fully that there can be peace. The unfinished business of these ghosts is no less than that of humanity, to understand and be human, including being feminine. As Sally’s new roommate Josh explains, “Sally is very serious about the whole balance of the universe thing” (season 3, ep. 1). This balance can be read as Belenky’s characterization of integrated knowledge, combining self and other. Both versions of Being Human, then, analyze and expose the limitations of traditional gender roles. The shows’ use of the figure of the female ghost is particularly compelling, working in some ways as nineteenth-century literature sometimes did: showing that from a feminist perspective, death is preferable to the pain and limitations living as less-than-human, as a confined woman. But where nineteenth-century novels such as The Awakening ended with the death of a resistant, rebellious female character, Being Human and the other texts discussed in this book use the qualities of fantasy to imagine what a female ghost might have to tell us, the living. Annie’s and Sally’s lessons about relationships and gender roles illustrate both warnings and models. The warning is about the dangers of heterosexual relationships and domestic violence. Owen and Danny are classic examples of male batterers, using charm, isolation, and verbal abuse to keep their partners subordinate. However, Annie and Sally provide models of how to recognize abuse and how to combat it. As the vampire and werewolf have to come to terms with

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difference, symbolically racial and sexual orientation differences, they also have to learn to respect and work with gender difference as embodied by the female ghost. In their efforts, the characters embody the title of the show and what it means to be feminine while being human.

Conclusion As the preceding chapters demonstrate, the figure of the female ghost has a long and fascinating history in both the United Kingdom and the United States. A shadowy but constant presence in popular culture, she reflects cultural anxieties about gender and feminine authority. Gender continues to define these female figures even after death eliminates their bodies, showing, as so many feminist critics have noted, that gender is an inescapable cultural concept. The persistence of the female ghost in popular culture over a long time period and in many genres suggests that this figure provides an effective outlet for deep cultural concerns. The narratives covered in this text reveal that although the female ghost is by definition disembodied, she encapsulates the feminine body, especially the power of the maternal body. The female spirit confronts issues of narrative control and language, with the figure presenting an alternative to male-dominated discourse. Relationships between women living and dead develop, promoting the idea of feminine solidarity. And male characters are educated, usually against their will, into an understanding of alternative path to knowledge, as defined by Mary Belenky as “women’s ways of knowing.” While there are some salient differences between female ghosts from different time periods and genres, these core features remain a significant pattern. Aesthetic choices can weaken the female ghost, but she retains her subversive qualities. The figure herself seems to assert control (as she does in the plots), such that the writers, directors, and so forth that employ the female ghost end up making similar points about feminine authorship, the maternal body, and the oppressive nature of male-dominated society. In general, the female ghost has grown in power and influence from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century, suggesting that she escapes periods of backlash against women’s rights. Entertaining and lighthearted in the comedies, the female ghost has gradually come to wield power more forcefully and over a greater space. Her use of violence develops, but it is tempered by her psychological development, which leads to the integration 160

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of self and others. In this way, the figure models both a feminist monster/ abject and an epistemology that is characterized as feminine. While other supernatural figures, such as the vampire, can be female, it is the female ghost who most directly addresses the feminine. Through the deployment of the female spirit, authors, actors, and directors create narratives that correspond to feminist psychology (Belenky) and French feminist philosophers (Cixous and Kristeva). While the sources of the female ghost vary from folklore to fiction to historical women, the female ghost herself functions similarly: she reclaims the hidden feminine and models disruption and resistance to patriarchal restrictions on women. The female ghost materializes psychological functions of the feminine in culture. The comedic female ghost appears in novels, plays, and films as an anarchical force. The madcap actions and physical comedy created in the many versions of Topper and Blithe Spirit reveal the importance of entertainment in mass culture. At the same time, however, comedy is used for a very serious purpose, to criticize traditional roles of masculinity and femininity. The inviting sense of play that punctuates these early twentieth-century texts reappears in the twenty-first-century television shows Being Human. The British and American versions of this series bring the female ghost back to her very successful, humorous roots. A more well-known use of the supernatural, the horror that shapes The Woman in Black, the La Llorona texts, The Woman Warrior, and Beloved, allows us to see the representation of the abject feminine as embodied in the power of the maternal. Without physical bodies, these female ghosts terrify other characters as they show what culture fears and hides: the gory, life-giving body of the mother. While the comedic ghosts impart wisdom and enact justice outside of the legal system, the terrifying female ghosts wreak vengeance on patriarchy. Finally, history itself can be reexamined through the eyes of the female ghost. The two heritage sites discussed here, Blenheim Palace and the Old State Capitol Building in Louisiana, mostly succeed in co-opting this figure. Yet their overt attempts to exploit the female ghost show the seams of their appropriation. As each exhibit alters or invents the historical woman to suit contemporary ideas, the female ghost raises questions for her viewers about the ways that women are represented. In the case of The Woman Warrior and Beloved, the historical figures are given a voice in fictional reimaginings of their lives. Acknowledging and naming their source figures, Kingston and Morrison make explicit the value of the female ghost as an inspiration for authors.

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It is authorship that links all these female ghost narratives. In the female ghost texts, the figure struggles to speak. In a pattern that shapes this figure, the female spirit moves through stages of women’s psychological development, both individual and social. In so doing, she models for her audience the oppression inculcated in the traditionally feminine, as well as the ways that femininity can be used to resist this oppression. The female ghost presents an alternative epistemology and narrative pattern that is profoundly feminist in its impact. Claiming authorship means that the female ghost must develop a voice. The ways that the figure develops include moving beyond voicelessness to speaking, including wresting control from male characters. Silenced and excluded, at least initially, she must develop confidence in the hard-won knowledge usually generated by her death. Speaking up, the female spirit challenges the direction of narrative and traditional aspects of male-dominated society, especially the law and the word. Because the female ghost has become a specter due to some great injustice, she becomes a sympathetic figure. Her other side, the presentation of the feminine excluded from culture, promotes another emotion: horror. While the female ghost is always a figure for whom we feel empathy, she also terrorizes the other characters and audiences. She displays tremendous supernatural powers and anger at women’s oppression. At the same time, the female ghost reminds us of her abjectness through supernatural powers and often an extremely ghastly physical appearance. Her terrifying visage and body evoke the feminine that is banished from polite society. In her centrality in the text, however, the female apparition provides a strong reminder that humanity would not exist without the bloody maternal. In this physicality, the female ghost evokes other powerful negative female figures, like the Medusa. But as Cixous has characterized a recasting of the feminine-monster, this creature “is beautiful and she is laughing.” Why study the female ghost? She has been overshadowed by hypermasculine supernaturals, especially the vampire and the werewolf. But as this study shows, the female ghost has a long and venerable tradition. She provides an alternative to the masculine supernatural that often merely reifies the world as it is: misogynistic and oppressive. Even though the female ghost is deceased, her existence and her actions provide reason for optimism. By exposing sexism and misogyny, the female spirit in popular culture models a trajectory of knowledge that is relevant for her living readers and viewers. She reveals that popular culture has room for feminism, if we only know where and how to look.

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A recent novel by Natashia Deón, Grace (2016) attests to the female ghost’s continuing presence and utility. Its African American female ghost narrator follows the pattern of voicelessness to self-knowledge, to integrated knowledge. Like Kingston’s mother in The Woman Warrior, Grace’s ghost reminds us that “there are some stories that mothers never tell their daughters—secret stories” (1). The female ghost story is a forbidden story that must be told, but to appreciate its resistant narrative, it has to be seen as a part of its own tradition. As the female characters in Grace learn, interpretation, understanding, and sisterhood are essential to healing and empowerment. What the female ghost would tell her daughter is what all the female ghosts in this book are trying to tell their readers/viewers. Naomi, the mother ghost explains, “If I could talk . . . I’d tell her to always enjoy the present. To live in it” (133). The message of hopefulness is that “You aint alone” (135), tempered by her example of “I won’t let my pain be my excuse to give up” (181). Because Naomi lives in slave times and has experienced rape and murder, her optimism may seem unjustified. As her friend Bessie explains to Naomi, “Aint no justice. Only grace” (186). As the female ghost Naomi struggles to protect her child from beyond the grave, she models the struggle of women to protect future generations. The female ghost, then can show us what “being human” means. The female ghost entertains and can be thought-provoking, forcing readers and viewers to think about gender struggles and the meaning of the feminine. It is my hope that this book will contribute to other studies of popular culture that ask us to take female figures seriously. The female ghost thus represents a fundamental aspect of feminist commitments, that the creation of a female self is valuable. After the female ghost discovers and validates her own subjectivity, however, she invariably turns to other females, living and dead, to challenge restrictive gender roles. That men as well as women stand to benefit from this challenge appears in most of the narratives. Finally, despite her status outside of the living world, the female ghost provides a place for optimism. That her character has survived in so many narratives up to the present tells us that there is a place for feminine rebellion.

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index Page numbers in bold indicate an illustration. abject femininism. See feminine abjection abject maternalism. See maternal abjection “Always” (Berlin), 38 anarchic feminism, 19–20, 29–31, 34–37 Anaya, Rudolfo, Bless Me, Ultima, 13, 64, 66–68 Auslander, Philip, 119 authorship, 6, 16, 19, 23, 31–32, 33, 42, 43–44, 52, 58, 64, 74, 84, 162. See also narrative control automobile symbolism, 23, 28–29, 34–35, 77

161; Aidan, 136, 151, 154, 156; alternative maternity in, 133, 134; Danny, 139, 153–55, 158; domestic violence in, 133, 138–39, 154–55, 158; and gender roles, 137–38, 140, 142, 158; humor in, 134, 140– 42; Josh, 136, 151, 154–55, 158; mediums in, 153–54; and narrative control, 133, 134; necklace, 157–58; oppression in, 134, 135–36, 162; and patriarchal resistance, 133, 136, 138, 155; racism in, 135–36; Sally, 134–42, 151–58, 157; supernaturals in, 137, 155, 156–57; Syfy run, 133, 151; Toby Whithouse, 151 Belenky, Mary. See women’s ways of knowing Bell, Michael Mayfield, 120 Beloved (Morrison), 10, 11, 14, 161; Demme adaptations, 103–9, 106; Denver, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107–8; and domestic disruption, 99–100, 104–5; and expulsion, 101, 103, 108; and female community, 101, 102–3; gender oppression in, 88, 89, 100; history, 88, 89, 90–91; immigrant experience in, 88, 89; and infanticide, 87, 99, 104; Margaret Garber, 98; motherhood/maternalism in, 91, 99, 101–3; Oprah Winfrey, 104; Paul D, 100, 101, 104, 105, 107–8; racial oppression in, 87, 88–89; Sethe, 99–103, 104–5, 107–8; and slavery, 99–100, 102–3, 104, 105; water imagery in, 87, 94, 98, 101, 103 Bennett, Tony, 88, 115 Berlin, Irving, “Always,” 38

Bancroft, Tony, and Barry Cook, Mulan, 96–98 Being Human (UK), 6, 10, 15–16, 150, 152, 156, 158–59, 161; Alex, 146; alternative maternity in, 133, 134, 146, 149–50, 158; Annie Sawyer, 132, 134–50, 150, 152–53, 152; awards/reviews for, 132–33; BBC 3 run, 132, 150–51; domestic violence in, 133, 138–39, 143–45, 158; and gender roles, 137–38, 140, 142, 143, 152; George Sands, 132, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 148–49; humor in, 140–43; Janie, 143–44; John Mitchell, 132, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 149; and narrative control, 133, 134, 142; oppression in, 134, 135–36, 162; Owen, 138–39, 143–45, 158; and patriarchal resistance, 133, 136, 138, 147, 149; racism in, 135–36; supernaturals in, 135, 137, 140, 145–46, 149–50; and television symbolism, 147–48; Toby Whithouse, 151 Being Human (US), 6, 10, 15–16, 137, 157, 169

170

Index

bird imagery, 54 birth imagery, 10, 13 Blenheim Palace, 14–15, 114, 124, 161; and class roles, 114–16, 121, 126; Charles Spencer-Churchill, 123; Consuela Vanderbilt, 123; Duchess of Marlborough, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124–25; Duke of Marlborough, 113, 114, 123; and gendering of domestic space, 111, 117, 130; Grace Ridley, 15, 112–25, 114, 124; heritage of, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 120–21, 125; heritage ghosts at, 14–15, 110–25; history, 110, 113, 114, 117, 121, 123, 124, 130; and narrative control, 112, 118; and new media, 14–15, 111, 113–15, 117, 119, 130; publicity for, 121; and tourism, 14–15, 113–16, 118–20, 125 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 13, 64, 66–68 Blithe Spirit (Coward), 12, 18, 21–22, 23, 31–40, 161; authorship, 23, 32, 33; automobile symbolism, 34–35; Blithe Spirit, anarchic disruptive behavior, 19–20, 34–35; Charles Condomine, 23, 32–33, 34–35, 36–38, 36, 39–40; control over men, 37; costuming, 39–40; Daphne, 34; destabilization of patriarchal order, 23; Dr. Bradman, 33, 35, 36; Edith, 33–34, 35, 37; Elvira, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36–38, 36, 39–40; gender roles, 18, 19, 21–22, 23, 34–35; humor, 19–22, 31, 32, 40; Lean adaptation, 23, 34–40, 161; Madame Arcati, 32, 33–34, 35, 37–38, 40; marriage, 37–38; Ruth, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36–38, 36, 39–40; sexual identities, 35–36; sisterhood, 31, 36, 38, 39–40; special and visual effects, 39–40; spiritualism, 33–34, 40; Violet Bradman, 35, 36; women mediums, 33–34; World War II, 32 Brogan, Kathleen, 3, 10, 88, 102 Butler, Judith, 117 Castillo, Ana, So Far from God, 13, 71–74 Chinese culture, 91, 92–93, 94, 95–96, 97 Churchill, John, 123, 125 Cisneros, Sandra, Woman Hollering Creek, 13, 64, 68–71

Cixous, Hélène, 7, 8–9, 19–20, 24–25, 33, 40, 68, 93–94, 95, 102, 105, 106, 115, 136, 142–43, 146, 162. See also feminine writing; “laugh of the Medusa”; Medusa; writing the body class, 22, 41, 44, 46, 51, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127; roles of, 6, 114–16, 121, 125 Coward, Noel, 21–22, 23, 32, 35–36, 38–39. See also Blithe Spirit (Coward) cultural bias, 6 Demme, Jonathan, Beloved, 103–9. See also Beloved (Morrison) Deón, Natashia, Grace, 163 Del Ruth, Roy, Topper Returns, 28–31 domestic violence, 68–71, 133, 138–39, 143–45, 154–55, 158 Downton Abbey, 121, 125 Farfan, Penny, 35–36 fathers, 45–46, 51, 67, 69, 74, 75, 77–78, 80, 81–83 female ghosts: alternative justice for, 10, 11, 21, 29–30, 31, 76, 80–81, 148–49, 155, 161; appearance of, 39–40, 46, 54, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 65, 76, 78, 82, 82, 85, 85, 127–28, 135, 151, 153–55, 157, 157, 162; bodies, control of, 143, 147–48, 155, 157; children, control over, 41, 43, 63, 70, 75, 81–82, 86; and costuming, 39–40; and domestic disruption, 6, 11, 20, 24–25, 37, 80, 99, 100, 104–5, 112, 142–44, 157; and feminization, 26–27, 68, 115, 147; and heritage ghosts, 14–15, 110–31; and historical ghosts, 14, 88–109; as horror/ terror, 8, 12–13, 44–62, 63–86; as humor/ comedy, 12, 15, 18–40, 134, 140–43, 162; marginalization of, 11, 32, 42, 46, 50–51, 55, 87, 109, 117–18, 138, 139, 145; men, power over, 22–23, 25–26, 28, 30, 37, 47–51, 53, 57, 77, 79, 105; and motherhood/alternative maternalism, 7, 13, 15, 16, 41, 42–43, 49, 51, 66, 73–74, 80, 133, 134, 146, 149–50, 158; optimism of, 11–12, 162–63; others, control of, 24, 25–28, 29, 30, 50, 112, 119; patriarchal rejection

Index

of, 5, 22–24, 27, 29–30, 37, 41, 69, 72–73, 75, 86, 95, 102, 111, 133, 136, 138, 147, 149, 155, 161, 162; as savior, 11–12, 15, 146, 147, 149–50; and technology, 23, 28–29, 34–35, 77, 79, 111, 113–15, 117, 119, 125, 127, 128, 130, 148; violent disruption of, 24, 25–26, 29, 75, 80, 145 feminine abjection, 9–10, 43–44, 48, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58–61, 63, 94, 101, 103, 133, 136, 146, 155, 161 feminine language, 10, 71–72, 101–2, 106 feminine power, 20, 34, 40, 49–50, 52, 54, 59, 64, 67, 68, 70, 81, 84, 91, 111, 135, 136, 146–47, 158–59 feminine subjectivity, 3, 10–11, 163 feminine writing, 19–20, 24–25, 27, 33, 68, 93–94, 102 feminist psychology, 7–8 feminist theory, 8–9 films: Beloved, 103–9; Blithe Spirit, 34–40, 161; Mulan, 96–98; Mulan II, 96–98, 97; Topper, 12, 18–30, 16; Topper Returns, 28–31; Topper Takes a Trip, 25–26, 26, 30–31; The Woman in Black, 43, 51, 54, 58–61, 60, 61 Fowkes, Katherine, 18, 19, 21, 24 Fujita Sato, Gayle K., 95–96 Garber, Margaret, 98 gender roles, 6, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21–22, 23, 26, 28–30, 34–35, 54, 67, 97–98, 115, 117, 121, 137–38, 140, 142, 143, 152, 158, 160–61, 163 gendering of domestic space, 111, 117, 127, 129, 130, 139–40, 157 Germana, Monica, 132, 142 Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (Ruffles), 4 Ghost of the Castle, The. See Old State Capitol (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Gordon), 6 Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 6 Gourdine, Angeletta, 11, 89, 90, 99, 108 Grace (Deón), 163 Grimm, 13, 65, 81–86, 82, 85

171

Hall, Martin, 111, 113 Hall, Michael, 121 heritage, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 120–21, 125, 127–31 heteronormativity, 20, 22, 31, 39, 69 heterosexuality, 21, 22, 23, 28, 31, 37, 38, 98, 108, 139, 143 Hill, Susan, 41, 42, 51, 61. See also Woman in Black, The (Hill) Holmes, Mary, 119 immigrant experience, 88–89, 92–93 infanticide, 6, 65, 72–73, 87, 91–92, 93–94, 98–99, 100–101, 104 Inglis, David, 119 Jenkins, Ruth, 89–90, 119 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 116, 118 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 8, 9–11, 42, 43–44, 46, 49, 65, 66, 91, 101, 136. See also feminine abjection; maternal abjection La Llorona (Woman in White), 9, 13–14, 63–86, 76, 78, 82, 85; alternative justice for, 69, 71, 80–81; Ana Castillo, 64; angel-devil duality of, 82; and automobile symbolism, 77; in Bless Me, Ultima, 13, 64, 66–68; in Chicano culture, 64, 68; Constance Welch, 75–81, 79; and control of children, 75, 80, 81–82, 84; curendera, 66–67; as folklore, 64–65, 68, 73, 78, 84; Grimm, 13, 65, 81–86, 82, 85; in literature, 64–74; and infanticide, 65, 72–73, 78–79; and motherhood/maternalism, 63, 65, 66, 69, 73, 78; on television, 64, 74–86; and patriarchy, 69, 70, 85, 86; in So Far from God, 13, 71–74; in Supernatural, 13, 65, 74–81, 76, 79; and water imagery, 63, 65, 66–68, 69, 70–71, 84–86; weeping of, 65, 66; Woman Hollering Creek, 13, 64, 68–71 Lacan, Jacques, 8–9 “laugh of the Medusa,” 9, 28, 33, 71 Lean, David, 23, 34–40, 161. See also Blithe Spirit (Coward) Lowenthal, David, 111, 116

172

Index

Mallatratt, Stephen, 42, 53, 60. See also Woman in Black, The (Hill) marriage, 20, 37–38 maternal abjection, 9–11, 43–44, 46–47, 55, 57, 65–66, 77, 91, 92, 103, 133, 134, 146, 150, 161 McLeod, Norman Z., Topper Takes a Trip, 25–26, 26, 30–31 mediums, 32–34, 40, 153–54 Medusa, 9, 20, 28, 41, 50, 52, 66, 71, 74, 103, 136, 150, 162 Morrison, Toni. See Beloved (Morrison) Mulan (Bancroft and Cook), 96–98 Mulan II (Rooney and Southerland), 96–98, 97 narrative control, 3, 6, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 29, 33–35, 40, 43, 45, 48, 50–52, 55, 58, 71, 88, 90, 92, 93–94, 112, 115, 117–18, 120, 127–29, 131, 133, 134, 142, 160, 162. See also authorship new media, 14–15, 111, 113–15, 117, 119, 127, 128, 130 novels: Beloved, 10, 11, 14, 87–91, 98–109, 161; Bless Me, Ultima, 13, 64, 66–68; Grace, 163; So Far from God, 13, 71–74; Topper, 21–23; Woman Hollering Creek, 13, 64, 68–71; The Woman in Black, 42, 47–52, 58–61; The Woman Warrior, 11, 14, 87–98, 108–9, 161 Old State Capitol (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 14–15, 110–12, 125–31, 126, 161; and gendering of domestic space, 111, 129, 130; heritage of, 127–31; and heritage ghosts, 14–15, 110–11, 125–31; history, 110, 126–27, 129; Huey Long, 130; Mark Twain, 129; and narrative control, 112, 128–29; and new media, 14–15, 111, 127, 128, 130; Sarah Morgan, 15, 112, 126–31, 126 oppression, 6, 12, 14, 44, 46, 50, 56, 86, 88–89, 91, 95, 100, 134, 135–36, 162 out-of-marriage births, 45, 46, 91–95

patriarchy, 3, 10, 11, 12, 21, 31, 45–46, 49, 69–70, 81, 84, 86, 94–95, 138 Perez, Domino Renee, 64, 65–66 plays: Blithe Spirit, 12, 18, 23, 31–40, 161; The Woman in Black, 42–43, 48–61, 48 Poole, Russ, 89, 99 Pulliam, June, 5–6 race, 15–16, 88–90, 92, 96, 135–36 racism, 89–90, 92, 96, 107 Rogal, Samuel J., 119 Rooney, Darrell, and Lynne Southerland, Mulan II, 96–98, 97 Ruffles, Tom, Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife, 4 Rutherford, Margaret, 40 Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (Weinstock), 4, 7 Scullion, Val, 50, 51–52 Silverman, Kaja, 57 sisterhood, 31, 36, 38, 39–40, 71–74, 101, 102–3, 108, 116, 118, 146 slavery, 88, 98–100, 102–3, 104, 105 Smith, Thorne. See Topper (Smith) So Far from God (Castillo), 13, 71–74 special effects, 39–40, 50, 54, 104–5, 153 spiritualism, 33–34, 40, 125 Supernatural, 13, 65, 74–81, 76, 79 television shows: Being Human (UK), 6, 10, 15–16, 132–53, 150, 152, 156, 158–59, 161; Being Human (US), 6, 10, 15–16, 132–42, 137, 150–59, 157, 161; Grimm, 13, 65, 81–86, 82, 85; Supernatural, 13, 65, 74–81, 76, 79 Topper (Smith), 12, 16, 18–30; anarchic disruptive behavior in, 19–20, 24–25, 29– 31; and authorship, 23–24; automobiles in, 23, 28–29, 34–35; the Baron, 25–26, 28, 30; Clara Topper, 25–26, 28; Cosmo Topper, 22, 23–31; and destabilization of patriarchal order, 23; Gail Richards, 28–31; gender roles in, 18, 19, 21–22,

Index

23, 26, 28–30; George Kerby, 22, 24; ghost’s control of others in, 24, 25–28, 29, 30; humor in, 19–22, 25–26, 27, 29, 40; justice in, 29–31; Marion Kerby, 22, 23–28, 28, 30–31; Topper’s feminization in, 26–28, 31 Topper Returns (Del Ruth), 28–31 Topper Takes a Trip (McLeod), 25–26, 26, 30–31 tourism, 14–15, 113–16, 118–20, 125 Untold Story, The. See Blenheim Palace visual effects, 39–40, 56–58 Wadl, Anissa Janine, 105–6, 108 Wallace, Diana, 89 Walt Disney Studios, 98. See also individual titles water imagery, 10, 13, 65, 66–68, 69, 70–71, 84–86, 87, 94, 98, 101, 103 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, 4, 7 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros), 13, 64, 68–71 Woman in Black, The (Hill), 42, 47–52, 58–61; Woman in Black, 12–13; Alice Drablow, 45, 46; Arthur Kipps, 45–50, 48, 51–56, 57–60; and authorship, 43, 52, 58; bird imagery in, 54; and control of children, 41, 43; Daniel Radcliffe in film adaptation of, 59; dramatic and visual effects, 56–58, 60, 61; fourth wall, 51; gender roles in, 54; haunting, 43–44, 45, 46, 47, 56, 57; Jennet Humfrye, 45–46, 49, 57; Mallatratt stage play, 42–43, 48–61, 48; motherhood/maternalism in, 41, 42, 47, 49, 61; Mr. Jerome, 47; Mrs. Dailey, 59; narrative control in, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51–52, 55; nuclear family, 60, 60; plot, 44–46; power over patriarchal language and law, 45, 46, 47–48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 61; presence, 47–48, 50–52, 53, 55,

173

56, 58–59, 61; promotional materials, 55–56; repressed femininism, 42, 44, 46, 50–51, 56, 61; Samuel Dailey, 59, 60; setting, 51; Watkins film adaptation, 43, 51, 54, 58–61, 60, 61 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 11, 14, 87–98, 108–9, 161; Chinese culture in, 91, 92–93, 94, 95–96, 97; gender oppression in, 88, 89, 92, 95; history, 88, 89, 90–91, 92; and immigrant experience, 88, 89, 92, 93; infanticide in, 87, 91–92, 93; motherhood/maternalism in, 91; No Name Woman, 92–96, 108–9; and racial oppression, 87, 88–89, 92, 95; as warning, 92, 95; water imagery in, 87, 94; and women’s sexuality, 94 women’s ways of knowing, 7–8, 11, 21, 32, 37, 43, 45, 53, 72, 73, 83, 86, 90, 95, 99, 103, 106, 126, 131, 133, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146–49, 155–56, 158, 160, 163 writing the female body, 9, 10, 24, 31, 47–48, 72, 88, 93, 105, 106, 135, 148, 154 Zeisler, Andi, 3, 11 Zhong, Raymond, 125