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A Haunted House
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Background
Literary Context: Modernist Experimentation
“A Haunted House” appears in the first collection of stories of Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday. This collection contains several stories without a clear plot that sometimes share qualities with both poetry and prose. The stories epitomize Woolf’s approach to writing, which challenged the old dogmas of realism and naturalism and favored experimentation. Major cultural, technological, and political change in the early 20th century (including monarchy-ending revolutions, the rise of cinema, and increasing gender equality) coexisted with artistic developments, as artists and writers (now considered “modernist”) sought to capture the subjective experience of the modern world and break away from their predecessors.
Woolf was a key figure in this literary movement. After her father’s death, she moved in 1904 to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district in London, at the age of 22. There, she helped to form an artistic group called the Bloomsbury Group. This was a group of intellectuals close to Woolf who sought to meet and discuss hot topics of the artistic and political world of the day. Among its members were John Maynard Keynes, who would change post-war economics, and E. M. Forster, a prominent author whose theory of character sphericity is still used and taught. Most members of this artistic circle were independently wealthy due to inheritance and therefore were at liberty to experiment with their art rather than produce art for commercial success. One of the group’s participants was Leonard Woolf, to whom Virginia Woolf married. The couple founded Hogarth Press, which published most of Virginia Woolf’s books, including Monday or Tuesday and the later collection A Haunted House. Such literary endeavors, as alternatives to mainstream publishers, were key to the circulation of experimental work in this period.
“A Haunted House” is an example of modernist literary experimentation; it has no clear, linear plot, and the narrator is not identified other than as an inhabitant of the titular house. It demonstrates the characteristics of literary impressionism, since it conveys a subjective experience of different sensory impressions such as sounds (creaks of the house or the wood pigeons), images (the sun peeking through trees), and even more intangible senses (sensing ghosts who aren’t there). Objects are not described in detail, like they are in realist fiction, but rather are portrayed obliquely: The narrator sees reflections of the garden in the window, for example, but never directly describes what the garden looks like.
Literary Context: The Ghost Story
The title of the work immediately brings to mind ghost stories. At the time of publication of the short story, ghost stories were very popular among readers and profitable for those who published them, whether in books or periodicals. Writers such as W. W. Jacobs could make a living out of writing entertaining ghost stories. This lowbrow kind of writing was often criticized by other artists; H. G. Wells, for instance, condemned writers such as Jacobs for writing “merely to serve the purpose of the slippered hours” of light reading for bored people (Wells, H. G. An Englishman Looks at the World. Cassel and Company, 1914, p. 150). E. M. Forster tried and failed to publish a ghost story and concluded that it was because his writing was “too refined” (quoted in Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 121). Forster satirizes their popularity in his novel The Longest Journey (1907) when a publisher asks the protagonist to stop writing highbrow stories and write a ghost story instead. In “A Haunted House,” therefore, Woolf subverts the expectations of such a title and writes in a very different register to the kind of ghost stories that would have been popular at the time.
Ghost stories derive from the 18th-century Gothic, a very popular literary genre in that century. After having seen a decrease in the number of works that used Gothic devices as a model, the genre was reborn through Bram Stoker’s work, especially Dracula (published in 1897). The success of Dracula opened ways for other artists to create narratives in which the supernatural was a main device. In “A Haunted House,” the supernatural merges with new modernist ideas of breaking with past styles and allowing space for experimentation. It is an example of a reworking of old Gothic themes adapted to a new view of the world. This can be seen in the nonlinear narrative structure. While it begins with common literary traits that pertain to a ghost story—namely, doors closing or windows opening—there is no conventional climax and denouement; that is, there is no attempt to uncover or explain the truth of the supernatural happenings. Woolf does not even explicitly identify the dead couple as ghosts but rather describes them as “ghostly” (3). The change from a noun to an adjective (ghost to ghostly) gives an aura of spectrality to the couple and emphasizes that this is not a typical ghost story, rather a story that focuses on the senses and emotions of people who have lived in and loved their life in one house and experienced loss. Rather than conventional figures designed to represent a negative idea (death, violence, turmoil, etc.), in Woolf’s story, the ghosts are looking for the light of love, a long lost trace of their previous relationship.
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By Virginia Woolf
