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  • Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse
  • Elizabeth Wein
Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. By Gillian Bennett. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 223, introduction, five appendices, notes, references cited, index.)

Alas, Poor Ghost! revisits Bennett's earlier work, Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural (Pelican, 1987). Although her revised material draws on the early case studies analyzed in Traditions of Belief, the new title appropriately desexes the content; Bennett's informants are women, but her conclusions apply to both sexes. Bennett believes that there is still widespread belief in the supernatural on an informal level, a level that remains unacknowledged by official or technical channels, but which is encouraged and supported by a commonality of experience. Bennett's object is neither to support nor to refute such grassroots belief in the supernatural, but to "explore the relationship between narrative and belief" (p. 3).

Alas, Poor Ghost! does much to organize and formalize the literature and terminology surrounding narratives of the supernatural. For example, Bennett uses the specifically defined term memorate for the narratives she has collected. She replaces the loaded term haunting [End Page 513] with visitation, and instead of ghost she uses witness (in the positive sense) or "THINGS in houses" (which has negative connotations). She argues that belief in supernatural visitations may be more common than previously recorded, due in part to the reluctance of informants to admit to a belief in ghosts, a term freighted with unpleasant significance. In addition to laying out a clear lexicon for her study, Bennett has amassed a sizable bibliography of the relevant scholarship, although she feels this area has been largely ignored by the academy in the past.

Most of Bennett's raw data comes from a series of interviews done in a podiatrist's clinic in Manchester, England, over five months in the early 1980s, supplemented by a series of interviews conducted with the assistance of Kate Bennett in Leicester in 1997 and 1998. The samples are small, but it is probably fair to say that they are representative of a general section of the population. Bennett's collection and transcription techniques, along with brief descriptions of her informants, are laid out in the extensive appendices, which make interesting reading on their own.

Bennett focuses on what she calls "two intellectual traditions, the rationalist and supernaturalist," which "offer competing world views on which to base interpretations of experience" (p. 6). The scholarly debate over these two views is captured in one of several historical cameos in the final chapter, where Bennett examines a lively conversation between the Victorian folklorists Andrew Lang and Edward Clodd (pp. 150-152). The women Bennett interviewed are able to draw on both traditions to tell their stories and form their arguments; they catalogue the rationalist arguments against their supernatural experiences as though attempting to beat the opposition to the punch. Bennett examines the way "personal experience is transmuted into narrative form and shaped into philosophical debates between the narrator and an imaginary opponent" (p. 6). She also examines the "underlying themes and assumptions" of her informants' memorates by analyzing the number of times particular words are used and where they recur in the stories. Considering the structure of the memorates, she finds that they contain three parts: scene setting, a description of the event, and a resolution.

The volume closes with several case studies that provide a historical context for traditions of belief similar to the ones considered here. Curiously, Bennett has found that both now and historically, belief in the continued influence of the dead is connected to a close involvement with family and family life. "Visitations" are most likely to come from close family members, who make their visitations not randomly, but with purpose (p. 50).

Bennett concludes that belief in the supernatural is alive and well in middle-class Britain and, by extension, also in the rest of Western civilization. Her case is convincing, partly because she is able to apply her theoretical findings to more generally known stories of the supernatural, such as "The Vanishing Hitchhiker." Nowhere do such beliefs appear stronger than when they are connected...

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