The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing Vision, Ideology 11.pdf

The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost StoryAuthor(s): Srdjan SmajicReviewed work(s):Source: ELH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1107-1135Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029915 .

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THE TROUBLE WITH GHOST-SEEING: VISION, IDEOLOGY, AND GENRE IN THE VICTORIAN GHOST STORY

BY SRDJAN SMAJIC

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century and their pervasiveness in the literary periodicals of the time, it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost.' This curious and persistent lack of scholarly interest, according to Julia Briggs, may in part be attributed to the elusive character of ghost fiction itself, a genre widely infamous for being "at once vast, amorphous, and notoriously difficult to define."2 That the generic boundaries of ghost fiction, as Briggs finds, inevitably collapse upon closer scrutiny is, however, something that may equally be said about any literary genre-the nineteenth-century realist novel is arguably even more vast and amorphous than the ghost story, even more difficult to grasp as a unified textual body-nor has the increasingly prevalent argument for the fluidity of generic markers and arbitrariness of generic classification sufficed to discredit terminally the usefulness of genre theory, which has over the past couple of decades demonstrated its compatibility with the methods and practices of historically and culturally focused literary criticism.'

It seems that a more daunting and discouraging obstacle for negotiating the ghost story's relation to nineteenth-century literature and culture has been the conspicuous omnipresence of the specter in Western literature. As Dorothy Scarborough remarked as early as 1917, the literary ghost "is absolutely indestructible. ... He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth-century fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion."'4 Since ghosts evidently belong everywhere in literature- and consequently, one might say, nowhere in particular-the ghost story appears better adapted to the climate of formalist or psychoana- lytic, rather than historicist, readings. In fact, the genre as such seems to validate precisely the type of criticism that downplays the signifi-

ELH 70 (2003) 1107-1135 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1107



cance of cultural and historical context and, instead, emphasizes the

immutability of certain mythic structures or psychological constants (the ghost as a classic mythic figure, the ghost as a haunting reflection of the Unconscious).5 Compared to other genres of nineteenth-

century literature, and especially the realist novel, the ghost story's ethos appears not only anachronistic for its time but even fundamentally ahistorical; ghost stories are probably the last place one would think to look for evidence of how industrialization, Darwinism, or colonial expansion affected Victorian society and culture. It is as if the

figure of the ghost demarcates the borders of an inhospitable, alien

territory where social and political consciousness, the sense of literature's historical and cultural embeddedness, the intricate network of ties that bind literary to nonliterary practices and discourses, are somehow mysteriously effaced-temporarily suppressed or for-

gotten-or, at best, are just barely visible, themselves made insub- stantial and spectral.6

That the nineteenth-century ghost story was "as typically part of the cultural and literary fabric of the age as imperial confidence or the novel of social realism," and that it is motivated by the impulse to orchestrate a particular kind of spectral narrative-one substantially different from late eighteenth-century Gothic romances, and in which representations of the spectral are directly informed by contemporary philosophical and scientific debates about vision and

knowledge-become more apparent if we shift our attention from the ghost to the ghost-seer, from the spectral object of ghost-seeing to its human subject.' For if the specter is in some sense timeless, changing its appearance just enough to suit the sartorial fashion of the times, it bears repeating that theories of vision and ways of seeing are invariably contingent upon historical and cultural determinants.8 Michel Foucault's observations on the role of institutional surveillance in modern disciplinary regimes, Martin Jay's analysis of distinct and historically successive "scopic regimes" in Western culture, and

Jonathan Crary's description of the "dominant model" of the observer in the nineteenth century have suggested the need to insert the

spectator into a complex network of sociocultural practices and discourses.9 Contributing to this trend, a number of recent critics have turned to Victorian visuality for new assessments of the formal

properties and cultural agency of certain nineteenth-century literary genres, yet, in doing so, have typically set their sights on realist rather than supernatural fiction.'0 Elizabeth Ermarth, for instance, has

persuasively shown how the concept of perspectival vision was

1108 The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing



central to the organization of the English realist novel around a fixed, stable narrative point of view. More recently, Ronald R. Thomas has argued that Victorian detective fiction (one of realism's more particu- larized and generically systematized manifestations) is underwritten by the period's confidence in the readability of visual signifiers, amplified by the newly developing technologies of forensic science and techniques of surveillance." Although for different reasons, Ermarth and Thomas both maintain that the nineteenth-century discourse on vision, in the field of literary production as well as elsewhere, proved to be a powerful ideological agent in the construc- tion, reification, and dissemination of certain notions about truth and reality. While Ermarth convincingly argues that the apparently privileged access of the realist text to the phenomenal world is at bottom a matter of arbitrary consensus between author and audience about how reality is perceived, and how it consequently ought to be represented, Thomas effectively demonstrates how the institutional appropriation of new visual and forensic technologies enforced the sense of visible (and therefore supposedly real) racial, national, and class distinctions in the nineteenth century.

Ermarth's and Thomas's astute assessments of the ideological underpinnings of Victorian visual culture and discourse on vision, however, are compromised by their exclusive focus on the realist narrative and enforce the notion that certain ways of seeing in the nineteenth-century are more exemplary than others, because dominant or hegemonic. Yet while nineteenth-century realist fiction, and the detective story especially, everywhere displays signs of implicit faith in the epistemological value of sight and the universal legibility of visual signifiers, the ghost story, in contrast, provides a radically different perspective, both on the popular Victorian dictum that "seeing is believing" and the ideological dimensions of visuality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Unlike the fictional detective, who always knows what to look for and perceives hidden meanings at a single glance, the fictional ghost-seer is typically caught in a disconcerting double bind between instinctive faith in the evidence of one's sight and the troubling knowledge that vision is often deceptive and unreliable: a subject precariously positioned at the crossroads of ocularcentric faith and anti-ocularcentric skepticism.'"

Reading Sir Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber" as an early and representative example of the genre, I will argue in what follows that the ghost story's complex negotiations between faith and doubt in the epistemological value of sight are the result of an emerging

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crisis in early nineteenth-century discourse on vision, a crisis shaped by two related and concurrent developments: the rapidly declining influence of theology and metaphysical philosophy in forming popular thinking about visual perception, and the dissemination of ideas through physiological science about the fundamentally subjective character of human vision. While nineteenth-century physiological science could effectively rationalize the appearance of a specter as nothing more than a subjective optical effect-an ephemeral image that exists nowhere except in the deceived eye of the beholder, an illusion of evidence of the existence of an afterlife-the unsettling question that inevitably arose from such arguments, and which Victorian ghost-story writers often posed quite explicitly, was where precisely (if anywhere at all) to draw the line between objective and subjective perception in general, between optical fact and optical illusion. 13

What I am suggesting here, in effect, is that the ghost story brings to the foreground, in ways that realist fiction generally does not, the often neglected fact that the very definition of "seeing," in the Victorian popular imagination, was an ontologically contested issue. While the only acceptable model of vision for nineteenth-century materialist philosophy and science was of course the physiological one, vocal defenders of Christian doctrine such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin zealously argued for the primacy of spiritual vision and poignantly contrasted the limited capabilities of the bodily eye with the more valuable and permanent insights of spiritual and devotional spectatorship. Yet, if believing demands a certain kind of seeing-if to believe one has seen a ghost means, first of all, to believe that one's bodily sight can be trusted-it is precisely by dramatizing the dubious reliability of physiological sight, I will argue, that the ghost story covertly invokes a form of spectatorship that meets the ghost on its own spectral terms. This silent invocation, however, is in the end little more than a reflection of nostalgic longing and frustrated desire for a metaphysical, theological model of vision that no longer seems plausible and believable in what Scott aptly describes as "an age of universal incredulity."'14

I.

"The Tapestried Chamber," first published in The Keepsake of 1829, describes the eerie nocturnal experience of a certain General Browne, whose tour of the English countryside accidentally leads




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him to the ancestral mansion of his long-lost friend Lord Woodville. Browne accepts Woodville's invitation to stay for the night, but the following morning appears much disturbed and informs his host that he must leave on urgent business. He eventually admits that the real reason for his departure is that he had been visited by an apparition, a spectral woman with a "diabolical countenance" and "a grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend."'5 As the other rooms had been occupied before Browne's arrival, Woodville was forced to reopen the allegedly haunted chamber, but Browne's unexpected visit, the nobleman later confesses, also "seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the unpleasant rumours which attached to the room." Browne, it turns out, had been the unwitting subject of an experiment, an ideal candidate for exorcising certain "unpleasant rumours," since his "courage was indisputable, and [his] mind free of any pre-occupation with the subject" ("T," 139). Unfortunately, for Woodville, these rumors appear to be true after all; before taking his leave, Browne visits the Woodville gallery of family portraits where, in one painting, he immediately recognizes his spectral visitant: "'There she is!' he exclaimed, 'there she is, in form and features, though inferior in demoniac expression to, the accursed hag who visited me last night.'" Woodville, previously a staunch skeptic on the subject of ghosts, is now satisfied that "there can remain no longer any doubt of the horrible reality of your apparition. That is the picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter-chest." The narrative concludes with Browne's hasty departure, and Woodville's well- advised decision to reseal the haunted chamber and "restore it to the solitude to which the better judgment of those who preceded me had consigned it" ("T," 141-42).

Seeing is believing, Scott's narrator unambiguously seems to suggest. But this suggestion is actually far more hesitant and equivo- cal than it appears, and the story is certainly not what Briggs calls "a comparatively straightforward tale of a miserable night spent in a haunted room."' In his essay, "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition" (1827), Scott explains that "[t]he marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought much into view. The imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified."" Supernatural fiction, Scott believes, should be subtly provocative rather than declarative, suggestive rather than bluntly explicit. What is "brought . . . into

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view," both literally (through visual imagery) and figuratively (through verbal explication), ought to remain just barely visible, glimpsed rather than fully seen. Such a narrative must occupy a liminal space between expressions of faith and doubt, belief and skepticism, and it is precisely to the extent that it manages to maintain this liminality that the fiction succeeds or fails to do justice to Scott's concept of the "marvellous." In "The Tapestried Chamber" Scott follows his own advice by carefully sustaining a sense of ambiguity concerning the most important facts. Key descriptions, for example, are purposefully vague; the tantalized reader is left to speculate-to imagine, that is, but also to engage in a sort of imaginative, interior spectatorship- what the spectral woman's "diabolical countenance" or the unfathom- able "grin which seemed to intimate the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend" might actually look like. The central image in the story is slightly out of focus, somewhat like a blurry photograph in which one can just barely discern the outlines of a person or object: "Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived" ("T," 136). The traces of certain unspeakable passions are clearly there to be seen-signs which, "imprinted" upon a textualized physiognomy, unmistakably attest to the woman's hideous past, and whose visibility and legibility have become accentuated in the afterlife-but seen by Browne rather than Scott's reader, who must therefore trust another's eyes and believe, as it were, without seeing. Scott chooses his words with deliberation and strategically avoids visual clarity, but also suggests that Browne's extraordinary vision lies altogether beyond the grasp of descriptive language: that the ghost is quite literally indescribable, and that to truly believe in it one would have to see it with one's own eyes.18 Like these moments of visual opaqueness, the narrative itself appears incomplete, punctuated by omissions and unfulfilled promises of explication. One would like to know what abominable deeds Woodville's ancestress, doomed to revisit the scene of her past crimes, had committed in the ill-fated chamber. The chest containing this dark secret of "vilest and most hideous passions" remains under lock and key--a part of the story that, we are told, already exists in writing, but which Woodville (for reasons of decorum) declines to share with Browne, or rather Scott (for purposes of effect) with the reader.

Yet the story's ambiguity regarding the most important question-did Browne, after all, really see a ghost?-is sustained not by withholding information but, on the contrary, by presenting a number of rational




explanations for spectral appearances that only further complicate the argument for believing one's own eyes. It is little known that Scott had published a shorter version of the same story in 1818, under the

nondescript title "Story of an Apparition."19 In rewriting and consid-

erably expanding the original text, Scott changed the characters names and the year of the event, and made the story, in some sense, more literary than it was in its previous anecdotal form by developing the plot and characterization, and by accentuating the elements of drama and mystery. Characteristically for Scott, the most significant revision in "The Tapestried Chamber" comes in the form of some-

thing that is stated obliquely and briefly: "Lord Woodville never once asked [Browne] if he was sure he did not dream of the apparition, or

suggested any of the possibilities by which it is fashionable to explain apparitions,--wild vagaries of the fancy, or deception of the optic nerves." Browne, the narrator informs us, "spoke with such a deep air of conviction" about his nightmarish vision, "that it cut short all the usual commentaries which are made on such stories" ("T," 138). Even

though both versions conclude with Browne's identification of the

spectral woman from a portrait and the author's suggestion that Browne indeed did see a ghost, this claim becomes far more dubious in "The Tapestried Chamber," where the reader is invited to consider a variety of "fashionable" explanations and alerted to "the usual commentaries of skeptics": the whole episode could have been a vivid dream, a fanciful construct of Browne's excited imagination, or, finally, an optical illusion.

All three theories would have sounded plausible to Scott's readers, but by 1829 the most fashionable explanation, as Scott knew, was

increasingly becoming the optical one.20 Early nineteenth-century research in physiological optics gave rise to a new type of scientific literature on the subject of ghosts, with which Scott was well

acquainted, and in which the specter was repeatedly described as a

perfectly normal optical effect rather than a dream-vision or bizarre

product of an overactive, unhealthy imagination. Compared to traditional theories that attributed ghosts to certain "wild vagaries of the

fancy," whether waking or dreaming, the physiological argument had the advantage of explaining how ghosts could appear to persons of sound mind and sound vision, even if they were convinced that what

they were seeing was only an optical illusion. The deeper epistemological implications of this argument, however, were often rather

disconcerting, as they pointed to a serious theoretical and method-

ological obstacle for modern empirical science. For although the

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immediate purpose of works such as John Ferriar's pioneering An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813) and Samuel Hibbert's Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824) was to burst the bubble of superstition with the fine point of scientific fact, and thus complete the Enlightenment project of exorcising the specter from the popular imagination, new theories about ghosts also effectively undermined the Enlightenment imperative for absolute scientific objectivity by foregrounding the subjective nature of sensory perception, especially sight, and the ensuing uncertainties of all knowledge derived from empirical investigation.

Ferriar thus explains that, while "spectral delusions" may sometimes be attributed to "certain diseases of the brain, such as delirium and insanity," which effect a "peculiar condition of the sensorium," they are also frequently experienced by healthy persons under conditions favorable to the "renewal of external impressions."2' Apparitions, in Ferriar's opinion, are nothing more than occasional re-visions of things previously seen, past impressions that have temporarily been brought back to life. This means, though, that ghosts are more than just particularly vivid visual memories. The reanimated impression, Ferriar claims, affects the visual nerves in exactly the same way it had in the past, so that even though the perceived image is not what it seems to be (it does not correspond to anything actually present before one's eyes), the observer nevertheless really sees something. Hibbert discriminates more subtly than his predecessor between external and internal impressions, which he uses to distinguish between sensations and ideas, but reaches the same conclusion. Because "an idea is nothing more than a past feeling renovated with a diminution of vividness proportional to the intensity of the original impression," and since physiological science shows "that the susceptibility of the mind to sensations and ideas ought to refer to similar circumstances of corporeal structure," Hibbert maintains "that organs of sense are the actual medium through which past feelings are renovated." The bodily senses, in other words, are not merely passive receptors of external impressions, as it had been previously believed, since "the retina may be shewn, when subjected to strong excitements, to be no less the organ of ideas than of sensations."22

With the publication of David Brewster's influential Letters on Natural Magic (1832), the figure of the specter becomes integral to the physiological study of vision-as the quintessential example of the optical illusion and demonstration of the eye's inherently flawed




structure--but also to the popularization of physiological optics as the most efficient and scientifically rigorous approach to understand-

ing the complex phenomenon of human perception. Whereas Hibbert, at one point, suggests that specters are pictures painted in the mind's

eye, Brewster, in response, explains "that the 'mind's eye' is actually the body's eye, and that the retina is the common tablet on which both classes of impressions are painted, and by means of which they receive their visual existence according to the same optical laws.""23 For Brewster the specter is entirely an optical effect; to speak of

something as intangible and vague as the mind's eye not only unnecessarily complicates matters that can sufficiently be elucidated

by physiological optics, but also leads into that hazy sphere of inquiry where empirical science degenerates into obscure and imprecise metaphysical speculation.

But exposing the ghost as an optical illusion is, for Brewster, ultimately less important than vindicating the suspect notion that

seeing is believing. By better understanding the precise physiological causes that produce optical deceptions, Brewster implies, it will become possible to distinguish with greater certainty between sub-

jective and objective perceptions, and hence between subjective interpretations of reality and objective scientific facts. Brewster was aware that this position is more tenable if one regards vision as

exclusively retinal and questions of perceptual psychology as second-

ary.24 Other contemporary physiologists, however, such as Charles Wheatstone, found the objective-subjective distinction altogether arbitrary, since all sensory experiences "are subjective, i.e. in the mind; and were we, without qualification, to admit the classification of phenomena into objective and subjective, we should be unable to determine, with any degree of accuracy, where the objective ends or the subjective begins."25

For his adamant defense of the retinal basis of human vision, and the premise that objective and subjective perception are fundamen-

tally distinct categories, Brewster was in fact less indebted to the work of fellow scientists such as Hibbert (whose reference to the mind's eye in some ways anticipated Wheatstone's relativism on the

subject), than Walter Scott's widely read Letters on Demonology and

Witchcraft (1830).26 Although Scott acknowledges the effect of "the excited imagination acting upon the half-waking senses," and con- cedes that the "imagination, favoured by circumstances, has power to summon up to the organ of sight, spectres which only exist in the mind of those by whom their apparition seems to be witnessed," he

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nevertheless strongly prefers the physiological explanation over the psychological one.27

But the disorder to which I previously alluded is entirely of a bodily character, and consists principally in a disease of the visual organs, which present to the patient a set of spectres or appearances which have no actual existence. It is a disease of the same nature which renders many men incapable of distinguishing colours; only the patients go a step further, and pervert the external form of objects. In their case, therefore, contrary to that of the maniac, it is not the mind, or rather the imagination, which imposes upon and overpowers the evidence of the senses, but the sense of seeing (or hearing) which betrays its duty and conveys false ideas to a sane intellect. (L, 22)

Like a piece of faulty, unreliable equipment, in certain situations the organ of sight fails to function properly-or refuses to do so, as if it had a will of its own-and confuses the mind with misleading information. "In such unhappy cases," Scott goes on to explain, "the patient is intellectually in the condition of a general whose spies have been bribed by the enemy, and who must engage himself in the difficult and delicate task of examining and correcting, by his own powers of argument, the probability of the reports which are too inconsistent to be trusted" (L, 35).28 Scott's use of the military idiom (the duties and betrayals of the "bribed" sensorium) expresses his militant attitude toward specters: like spies, who seek to destabilize the body politic from within, ghosts must be identified and elimi- nated-or rather, their precise cause must be scientifically deter- mined so that the effects they produce (fear and superstition) may be dispelled once and for all.

But the claim that the ghost-seer is a pathological subject suffering from "a disease of the visual organs" (a disease that, like short- sightedness or glaucoma, may presumably be treated and corrected) is somewhat at odds with the physiological explanation that Scott endorses here. Scott himself admits as much when, echoing Ferriar and Hibbert, he observes that "[t]he same species of organic derangement" which causes certain individuals to habitually see apparitions "may occupy, for a brief or almost momentary space, the vision of men who are otherwise perfectly clear-sighted" (L, 35). The ghost, it seems, can never be wholly exorcised from the field of vision. A momentary lapse from objective to subjective perception-from veridical to perverted perception of "the external form of objects"- is not, properly speaking, a derangement or disease, but, as Scott




here suggests, a normal condition of the human sensorium. One may cease to believe in the existence of ghosts, in other words, having understood why and how they appear, but this does not mean that one will stop seeing them.

Yet Scott, it is important to note, is finally less anxious than Brewster to rescue physiological vision from the vicissitudes of uncertainty and doubt, and his insistence on pathologizing the ghost- seer in the end serves to support a very different kind of argument about seeing and believing.29 Scott's impatience with popular superstition indicates not the intolerance of a modern scientist toward metaphysical or religious concepts, but instead points to his deeply felt concern about the increasing lack of faith in what necessarily lies beyond the reach of the bodily senses: in things that must be apprehended intuitively rather than empirically, by relying on faith rather than reason and through other channels of perception than those of the body. The widespread belief in ghosts-and, more problematically, the belief that ghosts can be perceived with the bodily eye, and only with the bodily eye-exemplifies for Scott the decline of genuine religious conviction. "Unaided by revelation," Scott observes, "it cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason should be able to form any rational or precise conjecture concerning the destination of the soul when parted from the body" (L, 11). But revelations offered to the bodily senses are, not any less so than "mere earthly reason," precisely the wrong way to go about forming such conjectures, since the knowledge they give rise to will itself necessarily be conjectural, vague, and imprecise. No longer capable of intuitively grasping the divine nature of the universe and perceiv- ing things with the inner, spiritual senses, the modern spectator desperately seeks surrogate forms of proof that, in essence, conform to the evidential rules of empirical science: "[T]he conviction that such an indestructible essence [the soul] exists . . . must infer the existence of many millions of spirits who have not been annihilated, though they have become invisible to mortals who still see, hear, and perceive, only by means of the imperfect organs of humanity" (L, 11). The physiological sensorium is imperfect, Scott suggests, not only because it is difficult to separate objective from subjective perceptions, as physiological science had amply demonstrated, but, more importantly, because there are some things that can never be seen with the bodily eye nor heard with the bodily ear. It is, thus, not so much the concept of ghost-seeing itself that Scott so vehemently objects to here, and which he considers a symptom rather than the

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cause of the problem, but instead the kind of belief-an ineffectual, half-hearted, ghostly remnant of resolute Christian faith-that such spectatorship, bound by the physical body and bound to produce epistemological uncertainty, necessarily privileges. For Scott, the increasing impetus in the early nineteenth century to believe that ghosts can be seen with the bodily eye (if only occasionally and unexpectedly), registers, more alarmingly, other indicators of religious doubt: the profound crisis of the spectator's faith in things invisible, and the displacement of intuitive, faith-centered forms of human knowledge by the inflexible logic of Enlightenment rationalism and skeptical empiricism.

II.

The realization that physiological science was, in some ways, doing more to confuse than clarify the difference between optical illusion and optical fact became useful to the proponents of a radically different model of spectatorship. In Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833- 1834), the anti-hero Teufelsdr6ckh commits the fatal error of forsak- ing his divine gift of spiritual vision for the short-sighted eyes of skeptical empiricism. Teufelsdr6ckh's misdirected question, "Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him!," encapsulates for Carlyle the distressingly common error of seeking evidence of spiritual existence with the bodily eye.30 "Till the eye have vision," the misguided Professor eventually learns, "the whole members are in bonds" (SR, 146). With the re-opening of his inner eye, the Professor "becomes a Seer" in what Carlyle suggests is the true and original meaning of this word: "In a word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till one after the other, its earthly hulls and garnitures, have all melted away; and now to his rapt vision the interior, celestial Holy of Holies, lies disclosed" (SR, 187). As a result of Teufelsdrickh's reclamation of spiritual vision, which also marks the turning point in the reclamation of his soul, he perceives that all matter is ephemeral and the corporeal body itself nothing but a spectral appearance, a ghostly illusion of human essence: "Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once." Not only do ghosts walk among the living, then, but the living too are "[s]pirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air, and Invisibility" (SR, 194). As energetic an affirmation of Christian faith as one is likely to




find anywhere, Sartor Resartus may be read as, among other things, a sort of instruction manual for the modern ghost-seer, a timely response to writers such as Ferriar, Hibbert, and Brewster, whose

understanding of vision was far too restrictive for Carlyle's taste. If one wishes to catch a "glimpse of IMMORTALITY," Carlyle advises his readers, in language permeated with visual terminology and

optical references, one must learn (or rather relearn) to look with

altogether different eyes-otherwise "the white Tomb of our Loved One," like the optical ghost, will become nothing but "a pale spectral Illusion!" (SR, 192).

That the problem of the relationship between inner and outer vision would become central to spiritualist arguments in the second half of the century, and to the type of ghost story inaugurated by Scott, is already apparent in Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature (1848), one of the most popular studies on ghosts and collections of allegedly true ghost stories of its time. Empirical observation is, according to Crowe, at once the only legitimate mode of investigation in matters concerning ghosts and, paradoxically, the most unreliable method imaginable, since ghosts can be perceived only with the intuitive inner sense:

In the spirit or soul, or rather in both conjoined, dwells, also, the power of spiritual seeing, or intuitive knowing; for, as there is a spiritual body, there is a spiritual eye, and a spiritual ear, and so forth; or, to speak more correctly, all these sensuous functions are comprised in one universal sense, which does not need the aid of the bodily organs; but, on the contrary, is most efficient when most freed from them.31

Following Carlyle's lead, Crowe reminds her readers that in regard to "the term invisible world . . . what we call seeing is merely the function of an organ constructed for that purpose in relation to the external world; and so limited are its powers, that we are surrounded

by many things in that world which we can not see without the aid of artificial appliances and many other things which we can not see even with them" (N, 21-22). The urgent question, "whether the apparitions are subjective, or objective, that is, whether they are the mere

phenomena of a disease, or real out-standing appearances," must therefore be decided by considering the evidence of intuitive perception alone: by treating ghost-sightings as experiences that fall under the domain of "this universal sense, latent within us," and belonging to an order of "perceptions which are not comprised within the functions of our bodily organs" (N, 22-23).

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But if questions concerning ghosts can be conclusively settled only by appealing to the universal sense-which obviously contradicts Crowe's previous argument about the supreme authority of empirical evidence-the very existence of this hidden, intuitive channel of communication can be adduced in no other way than intuitively, and must consequently remain purely hypothetical, although "an hypothesis which, whoever believes that we are immortal spirits, incorpo- rated for a season in a material body, can scarcely reject" (N, 23). One of the numerous real-life ghost stories Crowe cites concludes with the ghost-seer's assertion that "it is impossible for me ever to doubt or to deny that which I know I saw" (N, 204). Seeing is believing, Crowe proposes to demonstrate through this and a host of similar examples, but this kind of spectatorship finally has very little to do with the privileged universal sense. If reported ghost-sightings are to have any evidential value whatsoever, Crowe admits that they must belong to the same order of verifiable observations that characterize rigorous empirical inquiry.32

By the time Ruskin, in an 1872 lecture titled "The Relation to Art of the Science of Light," turned his attention to the distinction between spiritual and physiological vision, it is evident that the strict separation between inner and outer senses demanded by Carlyle was no longer feasible. Ruskin asks his audience to remember "that the words fiat lux' mean indeed 'fiat anima,' because even the power of the eye itself, as such, is in its animation. You do not see with the lens of the eye. You see through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.""33 Responding to a comment made by a "great physiologist... that sight was 'altogether mechanical,"' Ruskin caustically replies that what these words actually mean is "that all his physiology had never taught him the difference between eyes and telescopes. Sight is an absolutely spiritual phenomenon; accurately, and only, to be so defined; and the 'Let there be light,' is as much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence, as the ordering of vision" (R, 194-95). True sight is "no mechanical vision," Ruskin insists, and this indisputable fact best accounts for the discrepancy between the higher "moral power" of human beings and their poor "mathematical" or "metric vision," when compared to the optical prowess of other creatures (R, 201). As with Carlyle's Teufelsdr6ckh, one kind of seeing is enhanced at the cost of another; their respective powers are mutually contingent but always diametrically opposed. If "the science of optics is an essential one to us," Ruskin adds, this is because it demonstrates that "exactly according to these infinitely




grotesque directions and multiplications of instrument you have correspondent, not only intellectual but moral, faculty in the soul of the creatures" (R, 200).

In another lecture, however, delivered three years later, Ruskin subverts his previous criticism of "mechanical vision" by instructing his audience to use their bodily eyes to judge for themselves whether certain theories advanced by contemporary science are well-founded or not. More precisely, Ruskin was responding to the claims of Charles Lyell and other geologists who ascertained that there are "three great demonstrable periods of the Earth's history. That in which it was crystallized; that in which it was sculptured; and that in which it is now being unsculptured, or deformed."34 Examining the same evidence Ruskin sees signs of permanence where geologists perceive change and progressive deterioration. To anyone who cares to observe nature attentively, he asserts, the shape of the landscape will appear "[u]nchanged, or so softly modified that eye can scarcely trace, or memory measure, the work of time" ("A," 120). One need only pay attention to the permanence of the landscape's contours to see that the geologists are profoundly mistaken. Seeing is believing, in other words, because the universal and unchanging book of nature, to those who have eyes to see, unambiguously testifies to the truth of religious doctrine. Religious belief is consequently predicated not on the intuitive revelations of spiritual vision, which looks beyond the questionable facts of material reality to apprehend a higher and more enduring order of truth, but on physical evidence brought to light through "mechanical vision." For Ruskin, the value of empirical observation lies not in contesting particular scientific theories, which can sometimes be refuted simply by looking at what scientists disingenuously prefer not to see, but, more generally, in demonstrat- ing the gross illusions and self-deceptions of materialist science. By adopting a double standard toward physiological sight, Ruskin ends up advocating the exercise of something like a double vision: the spectator who desires to see things in their true light must learn to switch back and forth between two ways of seeing, to alternate between two conceptual models of vision-or perhaps use both pairs of eyes at once, observing things simultaneously with "the lens of the eye" and "the soul of the eye."

The unmistakable sense of urgency in Ruskin's lectures to restore faith in the spirituality of sight, in part reflects his distressing realization that he is arguing for a lost cause, that spiritual vision as such belongs to an irretrievable cultural past and that modern

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religious conviction (if it is to be a conviction in any meaningful sense of the word) demands the reassurance of verifiable empirical evidence. Whereas for Carlyle spiritual and bodily vision are mutually incompatible and fundamentally antagonistic, Ruskin, like Crowe, finds he must negotiate more cautiously between the two models of

perception to construct a theoretical and methodological compromise between intuitive and empirical knowledge. Since a return to a

previous model of spectatorship requires a leap of faith that his audience may be unwilling or unable to make, Ruskin must concede that it is only through the external eye of the body that one can

perceive things with the inner eye of the soul. Ruskin's forced

compromise suggests that, certainly by the 1870s, and even for writers who refused to give up on the doctrine of intuition and inner vision, the physiological model of sight had become indispensable for

making seeing a plausible argument for believing. The most Ruskin can hope to accomplish, by making ample use of biblical references to strike a sympathetic cord in his audience, is to ask the spectator to read (or view) the book of nature from a devotional, rather than

skeptical and rigidly materialist, point of view.

III.

Nineteenth-century ghost fiction, as Scott's example shows, provides one of the earliest (if not most explicit) indicators of the

ascending hegemony of the physiological model and its increasing indispensability to theological arguments about seeing and believing. While Browne's reaction to his spectral visitant leaves us unenlight- ened about the varied emotional and intellectual responses to apparitions in the nineteenth century (not all ghost-seers were shocked and

appalled to encounter a ghost), in other ways Browne represents what one might regard as the quintessential ghost-seer-not so much, that is, because he hesitates to believe in the evidence of his

bodily sight, but rather because it is only this kind of seeing that Scott's spectator is capable of trusting or imagining. The scene in the haunted chamber, where Browne comes face to face with a figure that challenges (as only a ghost can) the limits of a materialist

epistemological and ontological frame of reference, is at the same time a scene in which this paradigm is enforced or implicitly endorsed on the level of the all important visual experience itself-

precisely that experience in the story which appears to testify (as only seeing can) that there is more to human existence than mere flesh




and bones, more to the possible range of human knowledge than what the physiological sensorium makes apprehensible and knowable. There is thus an ideological paradox of sorts to be located at the very center of this dramatic scene of spectrality and spectatorship- one that eschews an unequivocal pronouncement on the veracity or usefulness of bodily sight, and that in retrospect makes "The Tapestried Chamber" anything but a straightforward tale about haunting-or more precisely, a paradox that relocates the haunted site elsewhere than in the haunted chamber (which, after all, is only its incidental, architecturally confined stage, the place where it plays itself out in a particular but repeatable situation), and squarely within the larger discursive terrain I have charted above. What Scott describes in his Letters as "the imperfect organs of humanity," and which so often "pervert the external form of objects" that they can hardly be deemed trustworthy, function here as both an ineffectual surrogate for the inner senses and a means of legitimizing and verifying the theological argument for spiritual existence. Browne's vision of the ghost assumes the nature of what Scott describes as "revelation" the revelation of the existence and omnipresence of things unseen and unseeable- but a revelation that requires the intervention and mediating pres- ence of what can, after all is said and done, be seen with the bodily eye. To truly believe in the unseen means first of all to uncondition- ally believe in evidence of the seen.

The model of spectatorship that informs Scott's construct of the ghost-seer is, therefore, more directly in line with the investigative methods of nineteenth-century philosophical skepticism and evidential rules of materialist science than with Carlyle's, Crowe's, and Ruskin's metaphysically and theologically informed arguments for spiritual vision. And yet, what early nineteenth-century physiological science makes amply evident, inadvertently developing a counterdiscourse to its own rationalizing imperatives and ideological agendas, is that the validity of empirical evidence in general, and the evidence of bodily sight especially, demands the same kind of blind and somewhat irrational leap of faith that spiritualists like Crowe demanded for inner vision-faith in what turns out to be little more than a shaky hypothesis, an assumption that, in the end, must be accepted at face value if it is to be accepted at all. The cultural hegemony of the secular, physiological model-epitomized by that strictly optical or retinal encounter in "The Tapestried Chamber" between ghost and ghost-seer, specter and spectator-is paradoxically undermined (and not only in Scott's story) from within, that is by

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precisely those philosophical and scientific discourses which aimed to establish its exclusive purchase on reality and truth. "It is easy to

suppose," Scott writes in the last installment to his Letters, where he almost directly quotes from his own ghost story, that "the visionary has been imposed upon by a lively dream, a waking reverie, the excitation of a powerful imagination, or the misrepresentation of a diseased organ of sight" (L, 285). As in "The Tapestried Chamber," the optical explanation appears last in a list of plausible theories, not because it is the least likely one, however, but because Scott wishes to

emphasize, once again, the difference between traditional views on

ghosts, founded on a dubious understanding of human psychology, and more recent, compelling explanations drawn from physiological science-explanations which, while suggesting that ghosts are always and only subjective optical phenomena, bring into question the dubious distinction between optical facts and optical illusions. More than that, such theories inadvertently and invariably problematize the

impulse to equate a certain kind of vision with direct knowledge of facts and truths, thus exposing the deficiencies and contradictions of a rigidly mechanistic theory of sight and accentuating the possible epistemological limitations imposed on the subject of knowledge by the physiological sensorium.

Numerous writers who followed Scott's example, and who contrib- uted far more prolifically than Scott to the ghost story's iconic cultural status in the nineteenth century, made the reference to optical illusions a staple of the genre. The narrator in Sheridan Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (1853), disturbed by the repeated appearance of an intrusive and not

very amicable ghost, takes comfort in the possibility that the apparition may have been "an ocular delusion," in other words, that the

ghost is "subjective (to borrow the technical slang of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external agent."35 The

ghost-seer in Amelia Edwards's "The New Pass" (1873), confronted

by a more benevolent apparition, similarly refuses to trust the evidence of his senses and prefers instead to believe that he "laboured under some kind of optical illusion."36 In both cases, however, certain details seem to verify the reality of the ghost-seer's vision. The recurrent ghost of the infamous hanging judge in Le Fanu's story finally appears wearing a rope around his neck and standing close to a banister where he had hanged himself several years before. In "The New Pass" the ghost is seen by both the narrator, Legrice, and the dead man's brother. Legrice describes the apparition in striking




detail, and his companion, who reenacts the role of Woodville in Scott's story, has good reason to insist on the reality of what they had seen: "[Y]ou described my brother Lawrence-age, height, dress, everything; even to the Scotch cap he always wore, and the silver badge my uncle Horace gave him on his birthday. He got that scar in a cricket-match at Harrogate." Legrice consequently muses: "Well- I would never disbelieve in hallucinations again. To that I made up my mind; but as for ghosts ... pshaw!"37

Legrice's flippantly dismissive attitude, even after his skepticism has been parried by apparently incontrovertible proof, calls to mind Scott's evaluation "of what are called real ghost stories," and where "the evidence with respect to such apparitions is very seldom accurately or distinctly questioned" (L, 285). While the evidential details in these allegedly factual narratives seem to speak for themselves, Scott maintains it is far more likely that the narrator, after being asked "some unimportant question with respect to the apparition," had provided "a feature of minute evidence which was before wanting, and this with perfect unconsciousness on his own part" (L, 285). Eyewitness testimony, Scott here suggests, is a highly unreliable form of evidence, not just because the alleged ghost-seer might unwit- tingly or deliberately fabricate parts of the story to lend it credibility, but, more importantly, because the organ of sight is so easily and habitually deceived that the testimony, no matter how impeccable the character of the eyewitness may be, should always be taken with a grain of salt. Legrice pushes this anti-ocularcentric skepticism to its limits. Having consulted "with more than one eminent physician on this very subject," and all but quoting from Scott's or Brewster's Letters in support of his argument, he adamantly sticks to his preferred "illusion theory." The fact that the alleged ghost appears just in time to prevent the two men from entering a perilous mountain pass, which soon after collapses, does little to change his mind, as Legrice ascribes their narrow escape to "the delay conse- quent upon my illusion" rather than to a benevolent spectral intervention.38

"The Tapestried Chamber" presents a prototype of the kind of ghost story later made popular by writers such as Le Fanu and Edwards, where the question of the ghost's reality cannot satisfacto- rily be decided either through the accumulation of coincidences and suggestive details (which can be rejected as precisely nothing more than that, coincidental and merely suggestive), or by weighing the eyewitness's testimony. If visions such as Browne's carry any eviden-

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tial import, it is, first of all, to suggest something about the difficulty of generating or substantiating belief from sensory perceptions, no matter how convincing and conclusive certain observed details may appear to be. What, then, are we to make of that second, arguably more important scene of spectatorship in "The Tapestried Chamber" where Browne identifies his spectral visitant from a painted portrait? The moment of identification (of "revelation") follows just shortly after Woodville's tourguide-like explanation of other notable portraits in the gallery:

Here, was a cavalier who had ruined the estate in the royal cause; there, a fine lady who had reinstated it by contracting a match with a wealthy round-head. There, hung a gallant who had been in danger for corresponding with the exiled court at Saint Germain's; here, one who had taken arms for William at the revolution; and there, a third that had thrown his weight alternately into the scale of whig and tory. ("T," 141)

The Woodville portrait gallery narrates both a personal and national

history, and depicts, through a chronologically ordered succession of

images, the memorialized places and moments where the two intersected, for better or for worse. But the images themselves would be mute without an interpretive voiceover-they would not be

images that are just (truthful and truth-telling) but precisely "just images."39 While it would seem that Browne's epiphanic recognition of Woodville's ancestress from a portrait ratifies the notion that

seeing warrants believing, it is none other than the ghost-seer himself who makes the crucial connection between apparition and portrait, the two separate appearances of what is ostensibly the same subject. If physiological sight is initially declared suspect in the story, by reminding the reader of the fashionable optical explanation of

spectral appearances, its subsequent vindication in Scott's story is

equally uncertain because the same spectator who had previously seen a ghost now identifies it with the image in the painting. Unlike so-called accidental colors-sometimes also referred to as phantasms or ocular spectra-which exist only in the eye of the beholder, one can reasonably assume that painted images are stable and exist

independently of the observer.40 But external (and externally perceived) images of any kind, Scott implies, never speak for themselves; the evidential value of any object in the field of bodily vision, whether

fleeting or fixed, spectral or physical, is always a matter of subjective interpretation.




Considering Scott's serious reservations about purportedly true

ghost stories, it is finally important to consider why he should have authored such a story himself. Scott even suggests that the narrative is based on actual events, "related, more than twenty years since, by the celebrated Miss Seward, of Lichfield," who "always affirmed that she had derived her information from an authentic source, although she suppressed the names of the two persons chiefly concerned" (L, 123-24). To dispel doubt in the trustworthiness of Miss Seward's account, Scott reports that he has since then learned the identity of the

persons involved and the precise location of the incident, but has

judiciously decided to let these particulars "rest under the same

general description in which they were first related to me" (L, 124). Whether Scott intended to present "The Tapestried Chamber" to The Keepsake's readers as a real ghost story or as a piece of fiction that ironically simulates, and thereby undermines the evidential claims of such narratives, perhaps becomes more clear if we consider it in light of Scott's effort to construct a type of supernatural narrative

significantly different from the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe. From an aesthetic point of view, Scott finds it difficult to commend

"the rule which the author imposed upon herself, that all the circumstances of her narrative, however mysterious and apparently superhu- man, were to be accounted for on natural principles at the winding up of the story" ("AR," 326-27). The conclusions to Radcliffe's novels are

disappointingly anticlimactic because "the imagination has been kept in suspense, and is at length imperfectly gratified by an explanation falling short of what the reader has expected" ("AR," 329). The vast machinery Radcliffe sets in motion is finally dissembled, toppling like a house of cards: "[T]he reader feels tricked, and, like a child who has once seen the scenes of a theatre too nearly, the idea of pasteboard, cords, and pulleys destroys forever the illusion with which they were first seen from the proper point of view" ("AR," 330). Scott contrasts Radcliffe's ineffectual strategy with that of

some modern authors ... who have endeavoured, ingeniously enough, to compound betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity. They have exhibited phantoms and narrated prophecies strangely accomplished, without giving a defined or absolute opinion whether these are to be referred to supernatural agency, or whether the apparitions were produced (no uncommon case) by an overheated imagination, and the accompanying presages by a casual, though singular, coincidence of circumstances. ("AR," 328)

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Such fictional narratives, Scott believes, entail a radically different

approach to the supernatural and spectral; indeed, they belong to an

altogether different genre of fiction, where ambiguity is sustained

throughout and no "defined or absolute opinion" is offered. In "The

Tapestried Chamber," it is not the imagination, however, but the dubious veracity of bodily sight-that single but centrally important reference in the story to a possible "deception of the optic nerves"- that makes it difficult for the reader to embrace without hesitation Woodville's final pronouncement. Scott remarks that this novel

strategy leads to "an evasion of the difficulty, not a solution," but nevertheless believes that,

upon the whole, this is the most artful mode of terminating such a tale of wonder, as it forms the means of compounding with the taste of two different classes of readers; those who, like children, demand that each particular circumstance and incident of the narrative shall be fully accounted for; and the more imaginative class, who, resembling men that walk for pleasure through a moonlight landscape, are more teased than edified by the intrusive minuteness with which some well-meaning companion disturbs their reveries, divesting stock and stone of the shadowy semblances in which fancy had dressed them, and pertinaciously restoring to them the ordinary forms and commonplace meanness of reality. ("AR," 328-29)

If not with "Story of an Apparition," which appeared pseudony- mously, then certainly after the publication of "The Tapestried Chamber," Scott would have had to include himself in this group of "artful" and distinctly modern writers of ghost fiction, who manage to

appeal to both the skeptic and the believer, courting rational explanations and drawing upon contemporary scientific theories only to show that these do not suffice to solve the mystery of the spectral.

For while Scott recognizes in his Letters that the popular demand for ghost stories, especially those which purport to be veridical, reflects the growing need for empirical verification of things which

ought to be perceived and understood intuitively, he privately ac-

knowledges that a kind of ghost story in which the distinction between objective and subjective perception, between optical fact and optical illusion, appears entirely arbitrary may produce a produc- tively destabilizing effect: that such narratives can serve to challenge, if only indirectly and implicitly, the hegemony of the physiological model of vision and a way of seeing which always seems to promise more than it can deliver. The revelations experienced through bodily




sight are, at once, the only revelations Scott's readers, living in "an age of universal incredulity," can accept as trustworthy, as well as revelations of the manifest ineffectuality of bodily sight to provide a solid foundation for religious belief, for that supremely important knowledge of the final "destination of the soul." The soul that lingers in a haunted chamber, scaring visitors out of their wits, is a debased form of the human spirit, morally unfit for a Christian afterlife, yet one promising, nevertheless, that the afterlife is more than just an illusion. But, more to the point, Scott's ghost-seer in "The Tapestried Chamber" is also a debased, despiritualized spectator whose intuitive

sight is a dormant or lost faculty, a subject whose field of vision is obstructed by the hegemonic ideological and discursive structures that demand a certain kind of visibility from all objects. Browne's

departure from Woodville Castle, the spectator's flight from the scene of the ghastly and ghostly spectacle, may thus be read symboli- cally as signaling Scott's calculated departure from the type of ghost story in which everything in the end falls neatly into place.

Scott's rejection of Radcliffean supernaturalism, I am suggesting, is therefore more than just a matter of difference in aesthetic sensibilities. Nor is Scott's project underwritten by a thorough and

systematic critique of rationalism and materialism, of an epistemological and ontological paradigm which restricts the field of human vision and scope of human knowledge to "the ordinary forms and

commonplace meanness of reality," but rather, if more subtly and

imperceptibly, by a persisting ambivalence in the nineteenth century, registered early on by Scott, about both spiritual and physiological models of vision and ways of seeing. "The Tapestried Chamber," I have argued here, like Le Fanu's "Strange Disturbances" and Edwards's "The New Pass," foregrounds at once the ascending hegemony of the

physiological model of sight and alerts us to the ways in which the discoveries of physiological science problematized, as much as they enforced, this model's epistemological claims. Because Scott finally, if

reluctantly, accepts the notion that only bodily seeing warrants

believing, the ghost story's invocation of spiritual sight and intuitive

knowledge-audible as such only in the context of a more compre- hensive account of the nineteenth-century discourse on vision than recent histories of the subject have afforded-manifests itself as little more than a nostalgia for Carlyle's "Seer," Crowe's "spiritual eye," or Ruskin's "soul of the eye," a frustrated desire for the kind of

perception which breaks through the shackles of the physical body and corporeal sensorium to apprehend, without ever doubting, the

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divine origin of the universe and the human subject. This longing makes "The Tapestried Chamber" at once an ironic stab at supposedly factual ghost stories, and a sort of confessional narrative admit-

ting that the circulation of such stories is instrumental to preserving at least the final vestiges of faith in things unseen and unseeable.

Unlike in the realist novel or the detective story-where the

spectator's faith in the veracity of sight is an unspoken rule, a matter of general consensus regarding the intimacy between the visible and the knowable, enforced all the more efficaciously because rarely vocalized as such-in the Victorian ghost story vision reveals itself as a stumbling block in, rather than a foundation for, erecting stable

epistemological or ideological constructs: the site where nineteenth-

century ideas about truth, knowledge, and belief (as well as our historical accounts of them) are radically complicated. Were one to look for a figure that most closely embodies, in Crary's words, a "dominant model" of the observer in the nineteenth century, the

ghost-seer suggests him or herself as the most likely candidate for this

dubiously prestigious title-not so much because this spectator personifies any single, hegemonic model of vision, but because it is from the perspective of the ghost-seer that one perceives more

readily the working of a complex dialectic between the secular and the spiritual eye, between intuitive and empirical knowledge, and the

ways in which their individual claims and relations to each other were

continuously negotiated.

Tulane University

NOTES

I See Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917); Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (1952; reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1965); Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977); Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1978); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longmans, 1980), 314-45. As in Punter's The Literature of Terror, the nineteenth-century ghost story is often considered as only one (and often minor) chapter in the history of Gothic literature. The most notable recent contribution to the scant body of scholarship on specifically Victorian ghost fiction is Vanessa Dickerson's Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1996). Arguing that there is a substantial difference between male-authored and female- authored Victorian ghost stories, Dickerson suggests that women could more readily




identify with spectral figures than could men, because "the ghost corresponded ... to the Victorian woman's visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness, the contradictions and extremes that shaped female culture" (5). Whereas male- authored ghost stories, Dickerson argues, "tend to be more diagnostic, clinical, journalistic, vested in mensuration," for women writers the genre offered "a fitting medium for eruptions of female libidinal energy, of thwarted ambitions, of cramped egos" (7, 8).

2 Briggs, 7. Briggs thus opts for avoiding definitions altogether and broadens the category of ghost story to include narratives dealing with "possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the 'swarths' of living men and the 'ghost-soul' or Doppelgdnger" (12). While for Briggs, as for many other critics, the term "ghost story" is interchangeable and synonymous with "supernatural fiction," I will presume that stories dealing specifically with spectral appearances (or so-called visitations) may, at least in nineteenth- century fiction, be considered a distinct literary form, motivated by the need to negotiate a particular set of problems and concerns.

3 For examples of such readings, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:

Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), and Michael Gamer, "Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic," PMLA 114 (1999): 1043-54. For an effective deconstruction of the idea of generic purity, see Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1981), 51-77. For a recent optimistic reappraisal of the role of genre theory in Victorian studies specifically, see Carolyn Williams, "'Genre' and 'Discourse' in Victorian Cultural Studies," Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 517-20.

4 Scarborough, 81. 5 Describing the uncanny as that "something which is secretly familiar, which has

undergone repression and then returned from it," Sigmund Freud offers as the most consummate example of this phenomenon the reanimation of the repressed belief in the existence of ghosts: "Nowadays we no longer believe in [ghosts], we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation." Something may occur at any moment, Freud suggests, that will resurrect the repressed belief and give us reason to say: "'So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!' or, 'So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!' and so on." "The 'Uncanny,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 22 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 17:245, 247, 248. The indispensability of the Freudian uncanny to recent scholarship on ghosts and the Gothic is best evidenced by Terry Castle's The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), and Julian Wolfreys's Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002).

6 The case is precisely the opposite with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which has often been read as an overt commentary on late nineteenth-century anxieties about crime, cultural atavism, and degeneration, as well as the dubious ethics of British colonial- ism. For examples of such readings, see Ernest Fontana, "Lombroso's Criminal Man and Stoker's Dracula," The Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984): 25-27; Daniel Pick, "'Terrors of the Night': Dracula and 'Degeneration' in the Late Nineteenth

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Century," Critical Quarterly 30 (1988): 71-87; Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45; David Glover, "Bram Stoker and the Crisis of the Liberal Subject," New Literary History 23 (1992): 983-1002; Troy Boone, "'He is English and Therefore Adventurous': Politics, Decadence, and Dracula," Studies in the Novel 25 (1993): 76-91.

7See Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert's introduction to Victorian Ghost Stories: An

Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), x. 8 The phrase "ways of seeing" was popularized by John Berger in the small, but

remarkably influential, book of the same title: Ways of Seeing (London: BBC, 1972). Berger succinctly expresses what has since been reiterated by historians and cultural critics many times over: "The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe" (8).

'I will continue to use the term "spectator" rather than "observer" because I wish to underscore the etymological link to "specter." The connection is reinforced countless times in nineteenth-century studies on ghosts, where the popular phrase "ghost-seeing" always accentuates the mediating role of vision in encounters between the living spectators and the specters of the dead. See Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1996), for a useful distinction between spectacle and surveillance in the nineteenth century. Lalvani rejects Michel Foucault's separation of the two concepts under different regimes of vision, and instead argues that "modernity is the constitution of individuals who are both subject-spectators for the spectacular consumption of images and observed-observers within the regime of surveillance: individuals who engage the abundant field of the visible and are in turn made visible, at each instance producing knowledge and power" (171).

10 One notable exception to this rule is Audrey Jaffe's "Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol," in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995): 327-44. Jaffe describes how A Carol links "visual representation to the production of individual sympathy, and thus, ultimately, to social harmony," and presents "a definition of spectatorship as a means of access to cultural life" (328-29).

'"Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988): 3-23; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth

Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983); Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). See also Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), for the

argument that nineteenth-century realist fiction "equated seeing with knowing and made visual information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal narrative" and, more specifically, the claim that "to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world of objects that either had been or could be photographed" (7).

12 An indispensable work on the subject of anti-ocularcentrism is Jay's Downcast

Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993).




13 The most important contributions to the development of physiological optics in the nineteenth century came from British and German scientists. David Brewster's and Charles Wheatstone's shorter works on vision have been collected in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (London: Academic Press, 1983).

J. W. von Goethe's, Johannes Miiller's, and Hermann von Helmholtz's major contributions were, respectively, Theory of Color (1810, translated into English in

1840), Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen fiir Vorlesungen (1834-1840), and Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (1855-1866). See Crary for a discussion of how

physiological optics gave rise to subjective theories of visual perception in the first half of the nineteenth century.

14 Sir Walter Scott, "Mrs. Ann Radcliffe," in The Lives of the Novelists (1821-1824;

reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906), 328. Hereafter abbreviated "AR" and cited parenthetically by page number.

15 Scott, "The Tapestried Chamber," The Keepsake of 1829 facsimile (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1999), 136-37. The number was published in November 1828 for the following year. Hereafter abbreviated and cited parenthetically as "T."

16 Briggs, 36.

17 Scott, "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann," in On Novelists and Fiction, ed.

Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 314. Scott here anticipates Tzvetan Todorov's argument about the constitutive role of ambiguity in fantastic literature. The ambiguity, Todorov explains, "is sustained to the very end of the

[fantastic] adventure: reality or dream? truth or illusion?" Once this question is settled either way, "we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows

only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event." The Fantas- tic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), 25.

18 In The Keepsake the reader is provided with an illustration of the scene in the haunted chamber as a visual aid, but the image hardly does justice either to the

specter's horrific visage or to Browne's expression of horror upon seeing it. As such, the image may be said to participate in the narrative's movement toward and away from visual clarity.

19 The story appeared in the April 1818 number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, signed with the initials "A. B." For a comparison of the two versions, see Coleman O. Parsons, "Scott's Prior Version of "The Tapestried Chamber," Notes and

Queries 9 (1962): 417-20. 20 See Castle for a different view of early nineteenth-century theories about

spectral illusions. Castle acknowledges the importance of optics in such theories, but

argues that the dominant explanation was the psychological one: "Once an apparition-producing faculty was introduced into the human psyche, the psyche became

(potentially) a world of apparitions. Human beings continued to see ghosts, only the

ghosts were now inside, not outside" (174). 21 John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and

Davies, 1813), 14-15, 17. 22 Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, An Attempt to

Trace Such Illusions to Their Physical Causes (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1824), 287-88 ("an idea"), 288 ("that organs"; "susceptibility"), 291 ("retina").

Srdjan Smajic 1133



23 Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1832; reprint, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1842), 53.

24 In an 1830 article on optics in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Brewster asserts that "we know nothing more than that the mind, residing, as it were, in every point on the retina, refers the impression made upon it at each point to a direction coinciding with the last portion of the ray which conveys the impression" (quoted in Wade, 27).

25 Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision. No. I," in Wade, 249. Wheatstone is specifically referring to the objective-subjective distinction proposed by the Austrian physiologist Johannes Evangelista Purkinje in Beitrdge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in Subjectiver Hinsicht (1919).

26 In the opening address to Scott, Brewster acknowledges that "it was at your suggestion that I undertook to draw up a popular account of those prodigies of the material world which have received the appellation of Natural Magic," and hopes that his contribution "shall be considered as forming an appropriate supplement to your valuable work," in Letters on Magic (13-14).

27 Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830; reprint, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 16, 13. Hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by page number.

28 It is hence appropriate-and could hardly be called a coincidence-that Scott should have given Browne the title of general: someone used to being obeyed without question, and presumably experienced in dealing with flesh-and-blood spies, but demoted to the humiliating and humbling rank of petty officer, as it were, when forced to evaluate the "reports" of the "spies" within.

29 For an account of Brewster's and Scott's shared interest in ghosts and vision, and the argument that Scott was less invested in the physiological explanation of spectral appearances than I have here suggested, see Frederick Burwick, "Science and Supernaturalism: Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott," Comparative Criticism 13 (1991): 83-114.

3oThomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrbckh in Three Books (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 122.

31 Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848; reprint, New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), 20. Hereafter abbreviated N and cited parenthetically by page number.

32 "As I said before, observation and experience can alone guide us in such an inquiry; for, though most people have a more or less intuitive sense of their own immortality, intuition is silent as to the mode of it; and the question I am anxious here to discuss with my readers is, whether we have any facts to observe, or any experience from which, on this most interesting of all subjects, a conclusion may be drawn." Crowe, 17-18.

33John Ruskin, "The Relation to Art of the Science of Light," in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 22:194-95. Hereafter abbreviated R and cited parenthetically by page number.

34 Ruskin, "The Three Aeras," in Works, 29:117. Hereafter abbreviated "A" and cited parenthetically by page number.

35 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," in Classic Ghost Stories, ed. John Grafton (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 8, 4.




36 Amelia B. Edwards, "The New Pass," in Classic Ghost Stories, 82. 37 Edwards, 81, 83. 38 Edwards, 83, 85. 39 I am evoking here the famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard-"Not a just image,

just an image"-and more specifically Ronald Barthes's desire for "an image which would be both justice and accuracy-justesse: just an image, but a just image," Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 70.

40 Goethe calls them "physiological colors," and remarks that they "have been known from the earliest times, but since their fleeting quality could be neither

caught nor held they were exiled to the realm of mischievous phantoms." Theory of Color, in Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 168.

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