“Haunt me, then!”: Haunting as Symbolic Survival in the Gothic Literary Consciousness

By Olivia Whitelaw

Author Biography:

Olivia Whitelaw is a recent graduate of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Her primary interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century lesbian literature. She is currently the editor-in-chief of an Edinburgh-based publication for queer women and non-binary people, Butch—Femme Press, and is undertaking an MScR in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in September 2023.

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“Haunt me, then!”: Haunting as Symbolic Survival in the Gothic Literary Consciousness

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For Terry Castle, “to become an apparition was also to become endlessly capable of

appearing” (63). Gothic literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century places

the undead, somewhat paradoxically, at the beating heart of its fiction. The spectral figure, Jacques Derrida suggests, “represent[s] our world’s capacity for fluidity and non-stasis” (Derrida, qtd. in Price, 46). Treading the preternatural line of (non)-existence, the ghost occupies a similar topography of textual limbo within works of literature. Crucially, this space is defined by Sigmund Freud as uncanny: a spaciotemporal context in which “something repressed recurs” (241). We might consider the spectre, then, a paradigm of both Derrida’s hauntology—an ambiguous, polymorphic entity—and Freud’s uncanny—capable of reinvocation, the “return of the dead” (241)—in its proclivity to recur across time and space. A pioneer of this trope, Emily Brontë, in her 1847 Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, makes presence of absence through the characterisation of Catherine Earnshaw. Haunting, be it physically or spiritually, is Catherine’s primary condition. She disappears in death, only to return: through the topography of the Heights, through the limerent imagination of Heathcliff, through loving memory and remembrance. Likewise, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca does invoke its titular antagonist without ever truly depicting her. Rebecca is an allusion, a passing thought grown to obsession, a ghost. With the help of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930), this work identifies and expands upon the metaphysical quantification of the ghosts of Gothic fiction: making visible the vanished, bringing the ghost back to life.