Abstract
Elia W. Peattie’s story ‘The House That Was Not’ (1898) opens as Flora, the newly married protagonist, joins her settler husband, Burt, on his ranch on the Western plains. Looking around at the landscape, she feels ‘as if a new world had been made for her’, but her tranquility is broken when she notices a little house off to the west that Burt has never mentioned. Wondering why he has omitted it from conversation, worrying that he seems not to wish her to meet their only neighbors, she quizzes him repeatedly, until, reluctantly, he gives in, telling her in no uncertain terms that ‘“There ain’t no house there”’, that he himself had gone to investigate it and found nothing. He recounts how, confounded, he asked a neighbor for information, and is told that
‘[...] a man an’ his wife come out here t’ live an’ put up that there little place. An’ she was young, you know, an’ kind o’ skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on her an’ worked on her, an’ one day she up an’ killed the baby an’ her husband an’ herself. Th’ folks found ‘em and buried ‘em right there on their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th’ house was burned down. Don’t know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I guess it burned!’
‘You guess it burned!’
‘Well, it ain’t there, you know.’
‘But if it burned the ashes are there.’
‘All right, girlie, they’re there then. Now let’s have tea.’1
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Notes
John Beames, An Army Without Banners (1937), quoted in Carol Fairbanks, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 6.
Virginia Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 3.
Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 15.
See Susan J. Rosowski, Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), p. 505.
Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 50
Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1917), p. 63.
John Mack Farragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 14.
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (1967) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 24–25.
Bess Streeter Aldrich, Spring Came on Forever (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), p. 100.
Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 7–8.
Lackmann, p. 120; and William Wadsworth, The National Wagon Road and Guide (San Francisco: Whitton, Towne, 1858), pp. 140–141.
Dora Aydelotte, Trumpets Calling (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938), pp. 58–59.
John Ludlum McConnel, Western Characters, or Types of Border Life in the Western States (New York: Redfield, 1858), pp. 131–132.
Annette Kolodney, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 129.
Mary Hartwell Catherwood, The Spirit of an Illinois Town, and, The Little Renault: Two Stories of Illinois at Different Periods (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1897), p. 490.
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Loula Grace Erdman, The Edge of Time (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, s1950), p. 53.
Peattie, ‘The Three Johns’ (1896), in A Mountain Woman (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900), p. 84.
Farragher, pp. 70–71, quoting from Frances C. Peabody, ‘Across the Plains DeLuxe in 1865’, Colorado Magazine 18 (1941), 71–76
Paul Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 109.
Robert E. Abrams, Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49–50.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 127.
Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright (1824), in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Bergh (eds), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, Vol. XVI (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1904), p. 48. Jefferson is here closely paraphrasing Thomas Paine, ‘The Rights of Man’ (1791–1792), in Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (eds), Thomas Paine Reader (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 204.
Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p. 291.
Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882), in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 11.
David Mogen, Introduction to Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, eds David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders and Joanne B. Karpinski (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), pp. 16–17.
See A. Miller. See also John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 4
Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 59
Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery’, in John McCourbey (ed.), American Art, 1700–1960 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 108.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Brother Jonathan’s Lament for Sister Caroline’ (1861), in The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 vols., Vol. 12 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), pp. 284–286.
Davd C. Lipscomb, ‘Water Leaves No Trail: Mapping Away the Vanishing American in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales’, in Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (eds), Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 55–71
James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, ed. James Franklin Beard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 546.
Cooper, The Prairie: A Tale (1827) (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), p. 389.
De Tocqueville, ‘A Fortnight in the Wilderness’, in George Wilson Pierson (ed.), Tocqueville in America (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 178–179.
Sarah Orne Jewett, ‘The White Rose Road’, Atlantic Monthly 64 (September 1889), pp. 353–360
Perry D. Westbrook, Sarah Orne Jewett and Her Contemporaries (Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1981), p. 4.
Charles C. Nott, ‘A Good Farm for Nothing’, The Nation 49 (November 21, 1889), 406.
Jewett, ‘The Queen’s Twin’, Atlantic Monthly 83 (February 1899), pp. 235–246
See Kathleen M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), p. 46ff.
Ambrose Bierce, ‘A Watcher By the Dead’ (1891), in E.F. Bleiler (ed.), Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, (New York: Dover, 1964), p. 44.
See Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 48ff.
J.B. Jackson, ‘The Order of a Landscape: Reason and Religion in Newtonian America’, in D.W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 155.
Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 54.
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Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 71
Jewett, ‘The Landless Farmer’, Atlantic Monthly 51 (May 1883), pp. 627–637.
Cole to Asher B. Durand (Januray 4, 1838), in Rev. Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853) (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1997), p. 248.
Cole, ‘Lecture on Art’, quoted in Barbara Novak O’Doherty,’ some American Words: Basic Aesthetic Guidelines, 1825–1870’, American Art Journal 1:1 (Spring 1969), pp. 78–91
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© 2014 Dara Downey
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Downey, D. (2014). ‘Space Stares All Around’: Peattie’s ‘The House That Was Not’ and the (Un)Haunted Landscape. In: American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323989_6
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