Ghost-Wave Feminism: The Spectral Imagination in the Fiction of Nancy Wilson Woodrow and Ellen Glasgow

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Notes

¹ Leslie Fiedler’s revolutionary 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel poignantly asserts the significance of the Gothic’s psychological aspects in US literature. Other scholars, such as Eric Savoy, Goddu, and Morrison, have expanded on Fiedler’s ideas by locating national fears about race onto a Gothic Other that asserts itself as a reminder of past ills, more particularly slavery, which continually reasserts itself and reminds us of the moral blackness that haunts American history.

² See Dickerson “The Ghost of a Self,” pp. 79–80. One of the most significant studies in this genre is Carpenter and Kolmar’s Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. The chapters in this collection look not only at the diversity of ghost-infused texts, but highlight the editors’ thesis that women’s ghost stories explore areas of concern different from those treated in the male tradition, but refuse the latter’s inherent binary oppositions, taking the boundary between “natural” and “supernatural” as fluid rather than absolute. In these chapters, the dead, powerless, and censored in life speak to and act on the living as ghosts. Moreover, the fluidity of the ghost story’s moral, social, and metaphysical boundaries allows the admission of ambivalence about issues that women writing “realist” fiction feel pressured to treat more conventionally. Other scholarly works have recovered unjustly neglected ghost stories by American women, particularly Alfred Bendixen’s Haunted Women and Lundie’s Restless Spirits, from which the stories under analysis, “Secret Chambers” and “The Past,” are taken.

³ See Weinstock, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, pp. 1–25 and Bendixen, Haunted Women, pp. 5–7.

⁴ In an earlier article published in Women’s Studies, I begin this polemic by analyzing the ghostly and rebellious double in the fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Edith Wharton, arriving at the conclusion that the passive “angel of the house” is replaced by her rebellious Other—the New Woman. In the stories under discussion here, there is a type of reconciliation between these two poles of femininity that reveals even more the complexity and power of the female ghostly double and the necessity in acknowledging this subgenre of work. These two stories in themselves are quite unique to this subgenre of the female Gothic.

⁵ See specifically Emma Domínguez Rué’s work on Glasgow and the Gothic in her “Soul Sisters: The Doppelgänger and Female Anxiety in Ellen Glasgow’s Short Fiction,” and “Madwomen in the Drawing-Room: Female Invalidism in Ellen Glasgow’s Gothic Stories.”

⁶ In an interview with Miss Frances Willard, the well-known women’s rights activist claimed that a large section of men prefer a more intelligent and independent helpmate, “call them ‘new’ or what you like” and the interviewer responded “‘America’s great gain is that she has so many women of this kind, and England’s loss is that, as yet, she has comparatively so few” (qtd. in Patterson 138–39). This is a notable observation in light of the fact that the term New Woman and her many variations, such as the Gibson Girl, originated as a very American phenomenon.

⁷ Of course, there are elements in women’s literature of the New Woman as early as the 1870s, but the term itself was not coined until 1894 when it was used in a pair of articles written by the novelists Sarah Grand (born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke) and “Ouida” (the pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé) in the North American Review. Grand published an article titled “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” from which “Ouida” tookthe title of her essay—“The New Woman.” The focus of Grand’s piece was particularly pertinent to the rise of the New Woman, addressing as it did the double-standards inherent in Victorian marriages, which insisted on impeccable sexual virtue on the part of the wife but not on that of the husband. Once coined, the term became popular shorthand to describe the new breed of independent, more sexually aware, and educated women.

⁸ Woodrow changed her name periodically throughout her career, even taking on the pseudonym Jane Wade. One time in particular, Woodrow was confused with the wife of the then-governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. See Woodrow’s “Mrs. Woodrow, NOT Mrs. Wilson.” Mr. Woodrow felt this confusion a major source of embarrassment.

⁹ Curiously, Woodrow continued to publish most of her work under “Mrs. Wilson Woodrow,” even after her divorce was finalized. Ironically, in many of her interviews, she eschews the domestic true woman, while embracing what a true American woman is. See Wilson, “The American Woman.”

¹⁰ See Woodrow’s “New York’s Lure for the Novelist.”

¹¹ In American Women’s Ghost Stories in The Gilded Age, Downey notes in her introduction and in chapter 1 that in Woodrow’s fiction ghosts have no more power than the portraits they possess.

¹² In “Here Is the New Woman,” published in The New York World in 1895, the writer emphasizes that the New Woman is a composite of sorts, one that does not eschew her marital obligation, but also believes in her own fierce independence and tenacity (Patterson 47–48).

¹³ See Patterson’s assessment of what he considers a “growing public acceptance of at least some measure of the new morality’s emphasis on a woman’s right to experience sexual pleasure” and the “new expectations that marriage should be pleasurable as well” (17).

¹⁴ See, for example, Jones, “Burning Mrs. Southworth: True Womanhood and the Intertext of Glasgow’s Virginia, p. 32.

¹⁵ In “Invisible Things,” Raper acknowledges Glasgow’s interest in the Psyche as she had a library full of books on Freud and Jung. In analyzing “Thinking Makes It So,” the author shows how the passionate personality of Rose in the story is actually “the shadowy image of Margaret’s Personality” (14).

¹⁶ See Shapiro’s “The Mannish New Woman. Punch and Its Precursors,” specifically p. 512.

¹⁷ See Scura, p. xiv, where she points out that in the early part of the twentieth century, Glasgow participated actively in the women’s movement, but even more importantly, “she wrestled in all her novels with the role of women—all kinds of women—and with the values of the patriarchal culture that permeated her world.”