So, here goes:
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. (Disclaimer: I adore James as I do EM Forster, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and most of the Modernists. I assert that I am a Modernist trapped in a Post-Modernist's frame of reference, which is a ghost story in itself.) The Turn of the Screw is the story on which the movie The Others was based, although the movie takes the plot and its sub-text in a different, more existential (more Post-modern) direction. James' version shows the preoccupations of the time, in which people were searching for transcendence and finding only traces of it in nature, human interaction and even human psychology. Also touching on the dichotomy of male and female, and sexuality. There is so much written about hysteria that I won't even touch on it here. Let me just say that this book made me a little jumpy.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The same issues that haunt James' story haunt this novel. Bronte's symbolism is rich and its sexual metaphors far juicier. However, unlike James' story, this mystery is solved. But even this solution brings in more questions, about the role of women in a household and in relation to men. Again, there is so much written about the Madwoman in the Attic that I won't go into it here. But once you have read Jane Eyre, read the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a post-colonial novel that unpicks the psyche of the Woman. Then consider, by comparison, whether Bronte's novel is proto-feminist, or perhaps not. That's my ghost here.
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Even if you haven't read the novel, you must have heard of Heathcliff and Katherine and their violent love. They spend their lives haunting each other in various forms: torturing each other, being tortured by memories and what-ifs, and finally a literal haunting in a setting that seems conducive to these kinds of things. Their longing for each other is so extreme that it seems almost to take on physical form. Wuthering Heights is an ancestor to Twilight and self-destructive/abusive relationships. But, in the former, there is meat that Twilight lacks and that lingers with you.
- Other Rooms Other Voices by Truman Capote. Mr Capote is my latest find, and I wonder what took me so long. His writing is always haunted by something, perhaps a mocking voice, a cynicism that is without the failed idealism that most cynics have. In this novel, a young boy whose mother has died is sent to live with his father, who no one knew was still alive. The boy is filled with hope at all his dreams coming true. However, all he finds are the ghosts, physical and metaphysical, that anyone must face if they are to mature, evolve. This is a coming-of-age novel that rings with the uneasy truths of Catcher in the Rye. There is a theory about the presence of the orphan in the great coming-of-age stories: Cinderella, Snow White, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady. We all as children had the fantasy about being orphans and the steerers of our own ships. Perhaps there was some greater truth here than just an interesting psychological fact: perhaps our parents do have to die in order for us to grow up.
- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Ok, I know I keep going on about this novel, but it is great and I did warn you that I was lost in it. (To be precise, I am lost in a cornfield with a dog in front of me and a fire raging behind me.) There are a few ghosts in this novel, apart from the obvious one (the boy's father). There is a second ghost, of a farmer, who haunts a shed that Edgar is cleaning out and who tells a love story - two, actually. Then there is the ghost that Edgar becomes and who returns home to exact vengeance. There are the ghosts of the conflict between the Sawtelle brothers, a man named Henry, who is the ghost of his own life, and a dog named Forte.
