NOTES
N o t e s I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. See Geoffrey K. Nelson’s “Modern Spiritualist Conception of Reality.” 2. In “Occupational Ghostlore: Social Context and the Expression of Belief,” Jack Santino explains that ghost stories may be more common in professions that include an element of danger, that “People who work on the edge of the uncontrollable seem to find supernatural interpretations of experience meaningful” (216).The Victorians were certainly living in a world of great change and social challenge—a setting that makes a belief in ghosts logical.We might extend this argument to say that there are social or personal “dangers” in every occupation and life that would call for notions of comforting spirits. Significantly, Santino indicates that in public settings, people often wish to appear “rational” and disavow a belief in ghosts, though they admit to them privately. Much of the skepticism we encounter in the uncertain world of the Victorians (and our own) may be a product of a desire to appear rational. Regardless of belief, the interest in ghost narratives often remains strong. 3.Witness the tragedy of mutual hatred evidenced by the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001; the U.S. policies, such as the placement of troops in Saudi Arabia and the support of Israel, which angered the groups that launched those attacks; the inflammatory rhetoric of the second Gulf War; the painfully dualistic PalestinianIsraeli conflict. 4. Perhaps this is one reason why Brian Cowilshaw argues that M. R. James saw reading the past/reading ghosts as “dangerous” and as having “frightening, destructive results” (36). While Cowilshaw reads James’s concern as one for the atavistic that we must “repress to progress” (41), I would argue that the “savagery” he identifies might equally be that which resists the normative culture: the seeming-past is more precisely the threat of a reconstructed future. 5. See Marcus Borg’s Getting to Know Jesus Again for the FirstTime for a fascinating scholarly-historical account of the kind of revolutionary shifts Jesus’s teaching created in his lifetime and after. 6. Gail Sidonie Sobat notes that, in African-American traditions, ghosts often represented “a source of strength and resistance” (169). She develops her discussion by 2 0 1 referring to Jung’s position that ghosts were “psychic facts” and one could not “interpret reality and the unreal as opposites but [must comprehend] them as a unity” (Jaffe in Sobat 169). My argument takes up these same implications: what happens if we stop asking about the reality of ghosts and begin attending to the fact that there were potent effects produced by those who believed (or seemed to believe) and that this might have provided an engine for social change. 7. See especially Catherine Berry’s Experiences in Spiritualism. 8. Cited in Medhurst and Goldney, 43-44. 9. See The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law, which argues that sensation fiction spoke to the “real” of domestic violence more effectively than realism, changing the shape of realism itself in its wake. 10. Jacques Derrida, whose work I discuss at greater length below, argues in Specters of Marx that when the ghost/Hamlet’s father’s ghost says,“‘I am thy Fathers [sic] Spirit’[, he] can only be taken at his word” because of the “visor effect”—that he can choose to see us without being seen himself (7). Even when the visor is raised, Derrida explains, the effect remains, in part because the visor may always be worn down and in part because of the power of the helmet, which confers authority. In other words, one must accept the ghost at his/her word because of the authority and powers of the ghost.The question for me, in the context of Victorian England, regards the work these ghostly presences did. 11. Charles Maurice Davies remarked that he had “given up valuable evenings through several consecutive winters to dark séances; have had my hair pulled, my head thumped with paper tubes, and suffered other indignities at the hands of the ‘Invisibles;’ and, worse than all, my friends have looked upon me as a lunatic for my pains, and if my enemies could have wrought their will, they would have incarcerated me as non compose, or made an auto-da-fe of me as a heretic years ago” (267). 12. Anthropological studies frequently reveal that it is “women who fall victim to spirit...
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