Ghosts without Depth: The Recognition of Jamesian Ghosts

Why is it that in The Portrait of a Lady both Isabel Archer and the reader experience Ralph Touchett’s death twice: first, watching him die; then, encountering his ghost? While ghostly encounters are a common occurrence in James’s stories, they have only recently returned to critical and aesthetic interest. Beginning theoretically with Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s controversial call for critical reading practices that “lets ghosts be ghosts” (“presences, not absences”), this paper examines the unique epistemic and ethical status of ghosts as fictive entities in James’s work.