Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (review)

In Scare Tactics, Jeffrey Weinstock gathers and surveys what he calls "supernatural fiction" written by American women between 1850 and 1930 and reveals this neglected body of writing to be an important transatlantic parallel to the well-traversed British female gothic tradition. Weinstock's examination of these ghost stories also calls into question current periodizations and generic categories of American literature as he unfolds the tradition's crossings into sentimental, gothic, romantic, and realist territory. Gender, Weinstock maintains, inflects women's ghost stories in two notable ways: Women writers' ghosts are rarely horrific or sinister, and women writers are more likely to treat the natural and supernatural world as part of a continuum. More often serving as "an expression of the fear of the known rather than the unknown" (41), the stories suggest that women's lives could be more horrifying than supernatural terrors.

Weinstock's chapters illustrate the breadth and reach of his study by bringing anywhere from three to seven texts together under a thematic heading. Each chapter is itself a survey-within-a-survey, as Weinstock traces a topic across time and through the work of better- and lesser-known writers. The first chapter, "The Ghost in the Parlor," for instance, moves from Harriet Spofford's first novel, Sir Rohan's Ghost, to Anna Hoyt's "The Ghost of Little Jacques" and from Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House" to Edith Wharton's "Kerfol." In this chapter, as in others, Weinstock takes intriguing side trips, suggesting that Spofford's innovative narrative technique complicates generic conventions by implicating the reader and that Stowe's interest in a spiritualist continuum between this world and the next means her ghost points less to a distinctly supernatural event than to an instability in the nature of reality itself. These writers' critical interventions in generic convention are secondary, however, to Weinstock's interest in their legibility as part of a cohesive female gothic tradition.

Chapter two, "Queer Haunting Spaces," restores attention to two wonderful stories that Legacy readers will not want to miss: Madeline Yale Wynne's "The Little Room" and Elia Wilkinson Peattie's "The House That Was Not," both from the 1890s. In these two stories, "what haunts is space itself—space that is unstable; space that is inconsistent; space that is, as repeatedly emphasized by each of the two stories—'queer'" (57). In the story about a "little room" for solitary feminine retreat that uncannily appears as a china cabinet when sought by men or by married women, Wynne, Weinstock argues, makes the "unsettling assertion . . . that men and women occupy different—and mutually exclusive—realities" because "ideologies of gender construct different worlds for men and women" (69). Weinstock's insight here also develops a fascinating reflection on the unstable divide between the supernatural and the natural in the fiction he examines; this topic rightly attracts him throughout the book and constitutes one of the book's abiding interests.

Women writers are shown to use the ghost story to critique the capitalist matrix that undergirds class and gender oppression in chapter three, "Ghosts of Progress." In the fourth chapter, "Familial Ghosts," the ghost story is a malleable form for appraising marriage and the nuclear family from a variety of perspectives. Weinstock turns in chapter five, "Ghosts of Desire," from examining how domestic spaces and experiences structure hauntings in women's supernatural fictions to a consideration of how the supernatural provides a forum for the expression of nonheteronormative desire that has been "spectralized" by society. Weinstock reads stories by Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, among others, less as examples of decarnalized—because socially censored—desires than as positive erotic manifestations of nonnormative desire.

Chapter six, "Ghostly Returns," presents another intriguing deviation from previous chapters as it presents the dialogue of supernatural fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Bacon with aspects of the gendered literary history the authors confront. Gilman rewrites Hawthorne...