Victorian Ghosts In The Noontide

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More recently, criticism has moved away from arguing for the ghost story as a genre and towards a more detailed approach to the relationship between the texts and the society that produced them, examining the genre in terms of Victorian ideas of class and gender. This approach has not been limited to academic criticism in the strictest sense of that term; since Montague Summers published The SupernaturalOmnibus in 1931 and prefaced it with a lengthy introduction on the genre as a whole, a large portion of debate and discussion over ghost stories has taken place in the anthologies which collect and republish them. The preponderance of female ghost story authors during the nineteenth century, something largely ignored by many earlier critics…show more content…
Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide is more particular in its focus, but pays surprisingly little attention to supernatural fiction, dwelling instead on more mainstream texts such as Jane Eyre. Even these accounts are relatively scarce and considerably limited in , as Srdjan Smajic points out: ‘despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century’, he states, ‘it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost’ (Smajic 2003,…show more content…
The tendency towards more complete and psychologically complex ghosts started to become evident in the 1840s, with Wuthering Heights providing the most famous example of a deliberate ambiguity in the figure of the ghost. The apparition of the child Cathy that Lockwood encounters at the beginning of the novel is presumably a spectral illustration of a fragment of the adult Cathy’s personality. the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff rumored to walk the moors together might represent an echo of their previous life as well as a final union of souls beyond the grave; the reader is denied the knowledge of which, an illustration of the violently selfish exclusivity of the bond between the two as well as of the metaphysical boundary between life and death. The novel’s suggestion, however, leans towards the pre-Victorian presentation of ghostly existence as a compromise, an intermediate ground between this life and the next for those who do not belong in either. ‘Do you believe such people are happy in the next world, sir?’ Nelly asks Lockwood of Catherine’s death, having already related Catherine’s dream of being cast out of the heaven which ‘did not seem to be her home’, only to wake, ‘sobbing for joy’, on the heath above Wuthering Heights (202, 120-1). Heathcliff responds to Nelly’s concern over his unrepentant soul with a similar
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