Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women 1872–1926 ed. by Catherine A. Lundie (review)

260 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 which urban middle-class health became the focus of sanitary reformers. But the causes for this heightened sanitary surveillance - certainly wider and deeper than that the Prince of Wales alrnost died of typhoid in 1871warrant a more thorough scrutiny than Adams undertakes. Her study misses an excellent opportunity to contextualize the period in relation to the women's sanitary reform movement and to explore the class implications of anxieties about domestic management. Nevertheless, Architecture in the Family Way is a useful and informative study. In 'five broad essays on Victorian bodies and space/ Adams tackles the network of conflicting interests produced as the emerging field of sanitary science exerted its authority in associating disease and environment. She takes the reader on a fascinating tour of 'The Healtheries/ a grand 1884 exhibition of sanitary and insanitary places; she offers an account of the professional skirmishes between doctors and architects, showing how influential women and doctors werein matters ofdornestic architecture and its reform. The chapteron childbirth at home (confinement, attitudes to home preparation, and the postpartum body) nicely reveals how constructions of a noxious female body allowed for the persistence of medical ignorance and incompetence in the spread of puerperal fever. A fifth chapter on domestic architecture and Victorian feminism is interesting onhow female authority affected the lo~stics of family space and interior decoration. The overall strength of Adams's study is its wealth of detail and illustration from such sources as advice books and domestic manuals, advertisements, furniture catalogues, and plumbing rnanucils. (JILL MATUS) Catherine A. LWldie, editor. Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women 1872-1926 University of Massachusetts Press. x, 316. US $55.00 cloth, us $17.95 paper Restless Spirits brings together twenty-two supernatural tales, most ofwhich first appeared in the periodical press. Lundie's collection, which also offers a critical introduction and biographical notes on each author, makes a valuable contribution to the study of the ghost story and to the understanding of the relationship between feminism and literature. In her introdllction, Lundie argues that the stories allowed writers to explore feminist issues while protecting themselves from critical censure (the simultaneous insistence on and fascination with the rejection of feminine virtue and selflessness is particularly marked in this collection). But the stories may also have a certain agency of their own: regardless of the intentions of the author, ghost stories can 'giv[e] voice to the politica:l"otherJl of their [more overt] messages.' Lunclie critiques an approach to the ghost story that would follow the nineteenth-century logic of separate spheres, a logic that makes male- HUMANITIES 261 authored stories 'about' social and political conflicts and female-authored ones 'about' private experience. Intriguingly, the authors in this collection suggest that the supernatural is a kind of ghostly extension of the female realm, and this both complicates the logic of separate spheres and reinforces it. Nothing, it would seem, characterizes masculinity so much as a refusal to see ghosts ('[D]on't let us conjure up anything inexplicable/ says Allan in Olivia Howard Dunbar's JThe Shell ofSense' [1908]). It would be better if one's wife were mad. In Josephine Daskam Bacon's 'The Children' (1913), a young woman and her servant conjure up the ghosts of children who never existed, and this in the face of male reaso~ ' which would insist, first of all, that silence is preferable to illusion, and secondly, that one cannot lose what one has never had. In Dunbar's story, however (and this is one of many instances of a story's doubled relationship to gender ideology), the dead wife must learn feminine selflessness, but at the same time her husband must also receive an education, a lesson in the supernatural. He learns and comes to attest to the fact that there is indeed a reality that exceeds his comprehension. 'I can never understand, but I know,' he is forced to conclude. Restless Spirits also helps to demystify the distinction between what is in the canon and what American readers at the turn of the century actually read. Lundie's collection includes work by well-known writers (Wharton, Gilman, Chopin, Glasgow, Hurston), tales...