Christmas, A Ghostly Time of Year: Part 1 – The Origins of the Literary Ghost

The dark of winter has descended over the northern hemisphere and the holiday season springs full upon us. For holiday revelers, the month of December ushers in a whirlwind of religious celebrations, gatherings with friends and family, office parties, decorations, carols of every musical genre assaulting the airwaves, open fires, and, for the materialist Western world, loads of shopping. Naturally for us here at the Journal of Weird Studies, the holiday season evokes different associations: namely, the time-honored, seasonal offering of the ghost story.

While ghosts in literature can be traced back to Homer, I suspect the true origins of ghostly tales extend far beyond the written record, down into the deep, dark ancestral well of prehistory, first raising its spectral form shortly after humanity became cognizant of death as a fact of life. The literary ghost story, however – a distinct form separate from true accounts of ghostly apparitions, fictional rewriting of true accounts or the use of ghosts as plot devices in literary works such as in The Odyssey or Hamlet – made its first appearance roughly two hundred years ago (1).

The question naturally arises: what characteristics comprise this distinct form? The best template I’ve found so far is from scholar Michael Cox’s introduction to The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories.

“The ghostly protagonists must act with a deliberate intent; their actions - or the consequences of their actions –rather than those of the living must be the central theme; and, most importantly of all, each ghost, whether human or animal phantom or reanimated corpse, must unquestionably be dead. From this it follows that there can be no rationalization of the ghost, no explanation of the events by natural causes.”

In other words, the ghost assumes primacy in the story; it’s conscious actions drive the plot and impact the fate of the story’s living protagonists. However, I would also put forth a few exceptions: (a) the ambiguous ghost - hauntings and encounters that could have a rational explanation, but which the author leaves purposefully open ended and uncertain; and (b) hauntings of the mind, where the ghost could also be interpreted as a manifestation of psychological elements warring within a character’s tortured psyche - conceivably a subcategory of the ambiguous ghost.

With these basic criteria in mind, the first true literary ghost story appears to be The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (2). Collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (published serially in 1818-1820, and in one volume in 1820), Irving’s tale of a gangly schoolteacher’s late night encounter with the ghost of a Hessian trooper is one of the most famous American stories ever, thanks in large part to Disney’s animated adaptation. Irving leaves the ultimate fate of Ichabod Crane a mystery, though one character conjectures the theory that rival suitor “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, disguised as the Headless Horseman, scared Crane out of town. Tales of a Traveler (1824) proves that Irving’s earlier outing was no fluke. Part 1 of the collection, subtitled “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman,” provides several fine examples of the form, the most successful being The Adventure of the German Student, a savage little tale with a gruesome denouement.

On the English literary scene, critics unanimously agree that Sir Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale, an episode inserted in the novel Redgauntlet (1824), was the first masterpiece of the genre, if not the first composed (3). Willie relates an account of his ancestor Steenie Steenson and his descent into hell in order to retrieve a rental receipt from his recently deceased landlord, Sir Robert Redgauntlet. Despite having several undeniable ghosts, the story falls squarely within the supernatural fantasy category, sharing characteristics of folk tales that deal with journeys to the realm of faery and of encounters with Satan (4). After being summoned to the hellish counterpart of Redgauntlet parlour, Steenson faces three tests, the failing of which leads to the loss of his soul; he refuses to consume offerings of food and drink (consumption of faery edibles always led to a mortal’s perpetual entrapment in the realm), declines a request to play a musical tune with satanic associations, and rejects Redgauntlet’s demand that he return in a year’s time to pay his master (presumably Satan) homage owed for his former landlord’s otherworldly protection. Six years later, Scott presented a work solidly situated in the ghost story genre. The Tapestried Chamber tells of a retired soldier, General Browne, who is scared out of his wits by a late night visitation from an evil ancestress of his host and good friend, Lord Woodville. Scott’s contributions to supernatural fiction, though remarkable, were surprisingly few in number. In general, he remained wary of using supernatural motifs in his fiction (possibly due to the stigma of his early association with “Monk” Lewis), preferring to keep his historical fiction grounded in realism.

Over the next decade, two prominent authors associated with spectral fiction made their publishing debuts. Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu ranks as one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction from the Victorian era. By the time of his death in 1873, he had left behind a substantial body of work, including classic tales such as Schalken the Painter, Green Tea, Carmilla, Squire Toby’s Will, Mr. Justice Harbottle, and The Familiar, as well as the novel, Uncle Silas. In his best work, the natural and supernatural worlds are deeply entwined, inseparable forces linked within the consciousnesses and subtle perceptions of his protagonists. Noted scholar E. F. Bleiler observes that in Le Fanu’s work

“…The supernatural is an unconscious element in the mind and it may leap into emergence when the barriers protecting the conscious ego are temporarily broken down….the larger implications of the mind as a microcosm of the universe also loom out, and potentially evil mental fragments may become hypostatized into semi-independent existence, to ally themselves with larger evil forces of which we are fortunately unaware.”

Unlike many Victorian era writers of supernatural fiction, Le Fanu had a clearly developed aesthetic of how the supernatural operates in fiction. It wasn’t enough for his stories to have the trappings of ghosts, haunted houses and supernatural creatures. The important factor for Le Fanu was examining the subtle effects these visitations had on the states of consciousness of his characters. Le Fanu’s impact on the ghost story deserves closer study, an effort that falls outside the realm of this particular article.

Even today, almost 140 years after his death, Charles Dickens remains one of the most famous and best-loved authors in the world. His novels, with their vivid depictions of lower class characters and their struggles to survive in a harsh and uncaring England, struck an immense chord with his Victorian readership, granting him immense celebrity during his lifetime. It’s hard to imagine how the novel would have developed without his overshadowing influence. Though his impact on the ghost story will be examined more fully in the next post, it should be pointed out that he published five ghost stories in 1836 (5), as part of his serialized first novel, The Pickwick Papers. The last of the five, The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, published in the December 1836 installment, was, in retrospect, a foreshadowing of a future Christmas work to come.


Footnotes:

(1) Some scholars put forth Daniel Defoe’s story A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal (1706) as the first literary ghost story. In truth, the tale is little more than a fictional retelling of a then famous contemporary haunting. Defoe’s ghostly protagonist has the dubious distinction of being one of the chattiest ghosts in literary history, engaging in almost two hours of discourse with her good friend Mrs. Bargrave on topics ranging from Christian theology and the merits of religious verse to the nature of true friendship.

Later in the 18th century the Gothic novel, which shares more than a passing relationship with the ghost story, rose to prominence. These excessive and often quite sensational novels were steeped in supernatural trappings. More often than not though, the supernatural elements had rational explanations (the Scooby Doo cartoon mysteries have provided millions of children the world over with an excellent, albeit simplified, introduction to the common methods of plot resolution in Gothic novels, attributing the Scooby Gang’s run-ins with supernatural wonders such as UFOs, ghosts, vampires, and monstrous sea creatures to trickery employed to cover up the evil machinations of scheming old men hungry for money and/or property. Personally, I blame their encounters on the hallucinogenic properties of the Scooby snack). Acknowledged masters of the Gothic novel include Horace Walpole, Charles Robert Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis.

M. R. James posited the ballad form as “the direct line of ancestry of the ghost story,” and hesitated over bestowing first place honors to Sir Walter Scott’s verses, Glenfinlas and Eve of St. John, collected in the anthology, Tales of Terror and Wonder, edited by “Monk” Lewis.

(2) I’m sure British scholars will cry foul over this choice. How could an upstart Yankee possibly have composed the first undisputed entry in a genre typically considered as distinctly English?

(3) Note the publication date of Redgauntlet. Even discounting The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on grounds that the haunting could be explained rationally, Irving still shares primacy with Scott due to his undisputable contribution, The Adventure of the German Student, a minor masterpiece of the genre.

(4) Subtle distinctions between the various subgenres of supernatural fiction appear to be non-existent in the earliest parts of its history. The term “ghost story” is liberally applied not only to fiction containing actual apparitions of the dead, but also to stories that feature goblins, faeries, devils and other supernatural creatures. Perhaps these various beings were all considered denizens of different kingdoms within the immaterial (or spiritual) plane, thus accounting for their common grouping within the blanket term “ghost story.”


(5) These tales are The Lawyer and the Ghost, The Queer Chair, The Ghosts of the Mail, A Madman’s Manuscript, and The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.