“Now I believe in them with delight, when before I but thought of them with terror”: Ghosts in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Short Fictions (original) (raw)

Abstract

Accounts of spectral appearances, or ghost stories, such as Cotton Mather’s narrative in Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) of a Bostonian who is visited by the ghost of his murdered brother who returns to indict his killer, occupy an ambiguous position within the framework of the eighteenth-century American theology and the culture of letters. In this brief narrative, Mather proposes the intersecting spheres of supernatural and criminal justice, harmonized by the pious narrative voice. In Possessions (2003), her study on the depiction of hauntings in the Hudson River Valley, Judith Richardson recently noted that a haunting always marks “an intervention, an occupation, a claim of priority and possession” (174). As such, ghost stories point to the common hermeneutical root of Puritan theology and British Common law while challenging the rationalist and literalist foundations of these systems of knowing. In the case of Mather’s narrative, the ghost story exposes the shortcomings of the contemporary legal culture while situating the events described within providential history by transfixing them in rationalist genre of legal testimony. Nineteenth-century authors carry on Early American writers’ attempts at synthesizing the ambivalent meaning of apparitions but do so in the medium of narrative fiction. Nineteenth-century short narratives, therefore, can help us account for the epistemological challenges ghost stories presented to Early American written culture. Authors of the 1800s problematize the tradition of political usage of ghost stories. Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow,” several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, and Herman Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table” ponder the strategic use of reports about apparitions as well as their potential fraudulent uses. In this paper I argue that ghost stories chronicle the opposition between deterministic, legal culture and more flexible, metaphorical forms of knowing in Early American writing. The reception of this rift in nineteenth-century short fiction makes transparent the complex ideological operations of Early American legal language. I will explore these contact zones by considering the hermeneutical operations involved in integrating supernatural apparitions into Puritan theology and, in a second step, the critical review of this process by subsequent generations of American writers. Works Cited Richardson, Judith. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.

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