“Nothing is ever seen, nothing is heard. As far as I can find out, people just have the horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to hospital afterwards.”
From No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince by Ralph Adams Cram
Yes, But What is it About?
A common criticism I’ve heard of ghost stories is that they’re not about anything. There’s a haunted house, a suspenseful build-up, and eventually the ghostly encounter which the hauntee either survives or doesn’t. That’s it. Such tales are spooky and diverting, but that’s about all there is to them. Well, that may be true in some cases, but I’d say most writers, no matter what the genre, would rarely write a story if they had nothing at all to say. And one of the best champions of the writer, and their intentions and purposes, is the masterful Stephen King.
Danse Macabre is Stephen King’s fascinating treatise on the horror tale, which includes a section on the ghost story. King talks about what he calls ‘phobic pressure points’, and these, he says, apply to both the psychology of the individual and the broader anxieties of society. His theory is that when they are pushed and probed in horror fiction, they operate at a symbolic level that helps us understand and deal with our real and very deepest fears. King explores the fear of our own mortality, of the outsider, of the machine, of what’s under the bed, of disfigurement, of the night, of secrets uncovered, of disease, of madness, of a bad death, of sex, of otherness, of isolation, of technology, of the animal within us, plus the fear of whatever it is that we individually fear, be it spiders, snakes, rats or whatever. As King puts it, “You try to catch the madness in the bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better.” And it’s easy to see how many of these fears tie in with the ghost story genre.
King acknowledges there’s a paradox in paying to feel uncomfortable, but for King horror tales are ultimately life enhancing because by showing the miseries of the damned they help us rediscover the small joys of living. He also argues that those who refuse to engage with fantasy tales because they’re not factual simply lack the ‘muscles of the imagination’. Yet, says King, the idea of story must always be paramount over theme, symbol and message, or, as he puts it in typical Stephen King parlance “I like my stories without billboards.”
King’s references are extraordinarily broad. He argues, for example, that The Book of Job is a ‘classic horror’ because its existential theme is that bad things happen to good people, highlighting the fact that like life, horror tales are often unfair and unjust and that we live in a tooth-and-claw world. Bringing us more up to date, King considers how the ghosts in the stories of Henry James and M.R. James so often reflect in some way the soul of those who behold them and in this context he sees Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as a tale about how the sexual anxieties of Eleanor manifest themselves through the strange house she finds herself in. But surely these are the exception rather than the rule. I mean, you couldn’t claim the same about Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Or could you? Is Blithe Spirit simply a silly supernatural comedy-of-manners or is something more complicated going on? Blithe Spirit creates a situation where a man encounters a former spouse whose sexual magnetism is clearly greater than that of the new wife. Sounds familiar? Well it should because that’s exactly the same plot as Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Sexual jealousy, fears of inadequacy when compared to a former lover are at the heart of both plays and it’s a theme that’s there too in other plays, notably Design For Living. Yes, Blithe Spirit may be a ghost tale, but it’s very much about living people and their relationships.
Theme, suggests John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist (1983), is simply another way of saying what the character’s main problem is. And an example of this in the ghost tale is loneliness and grief. In Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Unbolted Door (1929), the ghost of a son lost in the Great War returns in order to reconcile his unhappy parents, in what is a tender tale of loss and acceptance. In fact there are many supernatural stories that don’t aim to scare the living daylights out of you, but rather offer an insight and understanding into loneliness. And Marjorie Bowen’s The Crown Derby Plate, A.M. Burrage’s Playmates and Rudyard Kipling’s They are fine examples.
All stories need disorder but the nature of the ‘What if…’ at the heart of many ghost tale allows the writer to explore ideas and situations which reality fiction couldn’t allow. Take the ghost tales of Sheridan Le Fanu. It’s true they are macabre, sensational, and occasionally voyeuristic, and, yes, they appeal to those of a prurient nature, but there’s something else going on too. Often in a Sheridan Le Fanu tale the central character is an abuser of power who uses his social position for evil pleasure and personal gain. Such people were recognisable in Le Fanu’s time and although it would be pushing it to say that his stories are polemic or political, they do use the dark secrets of the past as a way of exploring contemporary injustice. In such tales, the ghost is the literal past disturbing the present so that historic crimes and hidden sins can be exposed.
On a lighter note, ghost stories offer a way of looking at social and cultural changes as past and present collide with each other. Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost is a comic example of this, where the clash is between the ancient and modern and the very contrasting cultures of Britain and America. Ghost tales also can be fables and most fables have a moral. W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey Paw is a careful-what-you-wish-for morality tale. As the sergeant-major who carries it says the holy man who put a spell on it “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.”
Arthur Miller used to say that as soon as he discovered what a play was about he would type it out in one sentence and then pin it to his typewriter to make sure that everything in the story was about that. And it’s fair to say that most ghosts tales are about something other than ghosts. The Story of Clifford House explores sibling rivalry, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Story of the Brown Hand looks at colonialism and reparation, and Edith Nesbit’s In the Dark digs deep into human psychosis of guilt (“He said I shouldn’t be able to get rid of the body. And I can’t get rid of it. I can’t I can’t.”) And V.S. Pritchett’s A Story of Don Juan (1941) is simple about hot sex. Have a read to discover why it gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase ‘laying the ghost’.
Writers often have overarching themes in their work. With Henry James it’s identity, with Robert Louis Stevenson it’s our dual nature, with Algernon Blackwood it’s the natural world’s capacity to unsettle us, with Margaret Oliphant it’s the nature of spiritual redemption and with Robert Aickman it’s simply the ever puzzling strangeness of life. E.F. Benson’s tales I would say are harder to pin down but I would offer this observation from a character in The Horror-Horn as the Benson guiding principle – “In us all I suppose looks some inherited germ of that ineffable bestiality, and who knows whether, sterile as it has apparently become in the course of centuries, it might not fructify again.” Benson was the archetypical Edwardian gentleman of impeccable good taste and manners, but read his stories and you’ll find he knows the beast within.
