Synopses & Reviews
Dara Downey explores how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales that range from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, she offers a new perspective on an old genre. Rather than seeing the spectres that stalk the pages of women's writing in Gilded-Age America as mere hallucinations or signs of mental disturbance, Downey examines the unusual motif of haunted houses without ghosts. Rarely appearing as ghosts, the dead women in the tales studied here hide away in the patters of furniture and wallpaper, offering a radical critique of the male gaze that reduced female bodies to alluring objects. Covering murderous nightcaps, haunted boarding houses and spectral china closets, it allows the object matter of the ghost story to, almost literally, come out of the closet.
About the Author
Dara Downey is Lecturer in American Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the co-editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and has published on Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Mark Z. Danielewski.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. 'Fitted to a Frame': Picturing the Gothic Female Body
2. 'Handled With a Chain': Gilman's 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' and The Dangers of the Arabesque
3. 'Dancing Like a Bomb Abroad': Dawson's 'An Itinerant House' and the Haunting Cityscape
4. 'Solemnest of Industries': Wilkins' 'The Southwest Chamber' and Memorial Culture
5. 'Space Stares all Around': Peattie's 'The House that Was Not' and the (Un)Haunted Landscape
6. 'My Labor and My Leisure Too': Wynne's 'The Little Room' and Commodity Culture
Afterword