Ghosts and (Narrative) Ghosting: Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison

Abstract

A great deal of work has, by now, been published on the gothic (including the female gothic), but until recently relatively little of that has focused upon the role played by the contemporary ghost story as a way of exploring female subjectivity. From the start this task may appear an atavistic one. In one of his characteristically sweeping statements, Freud confidently asserted in 1919, “All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits”, but this is not to say that he advocates their redundancy as objects of phantasy. On the contrary, he acknowledges:

… the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation … Considering our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather inquire what has become of the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny.²

As is well known, what Freud goes on to argue in his essay is that the mother’s body is the ultimate taboo which deflects us away from a recurrent confrontation with the dead, the mother’s genitals forming the all-pervasive embodiment of the uncanny: “what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-’] is the token of repression”. Though the origins of life, for Freud the castration complex reconfigures the mother’s body as the space of death to the phallus and hence death in general.³ Freud’s analysand/protagonist in this essay is presumed to be male. What happens in the context of fiction when both protagonists (the alive and the dead) are female?

It was not I that answered, I was not there at all. I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last. Her features were blurred, her colouring indistinct, the setting of her eyes and the texture of her hair was still uncertain, still to be revealed.¹