TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………5

Chapter 1

Ghost and Vampire in Wuthering Heights……………………………………… 38

Chapter 2

Ghosts, Mothers, and Female Servants in Gaskell’s Short Fiction………………95

Chapter 3

Ghosts as ‘Shadows’ in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Ghost Stories………………148

Chapter 4

Ghosts and Houses in Charlotte Riddell’s Ghost Fiction…………………………200

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………… 254

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………260

4
 Introduction

This thesis, entitled ‘Ghost Representation: A Study of Bodily Ghosts and

Materialisation of Mind and Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Female Writers’ Ghost

Fiction’, studies the representation of ghosts in the ghost fiction written by four

representative female writers over the period from the 1840s to the 1880s: Emily

Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charlotte Riddell. These

writers were all notable at the time for writing ghost narratives, and they contributed

to the development of the literary genre of ghost fiction in the Victorian period. The

thesis aims to clarify two things; how these four writers create physical bodies of

fictional ghosts in their ghost novels and stories; how their physical bodies materialise

the contemporary scientific ideas on human body. For this purpose, in each chapter, I

will first examine various ‘embodiments’ of ghosts in their representative works

through close reading of each text, particularly paying attention to the ways the ghosts

manifest their bodily forms, or in some cases the ways they foreground physical

significance and properties. Secondly, I will further argue how each type of

representation reflects and materialises each author’s concern with the idea of mind

and body, which was a popular scientific topic throughout the Victorian period. By

discussing these four writers chronologically in the following chapters, I finally hope

to be able to suggest an overall cultural shift in the representation of fictional ghosts

that runs parallel with the scientific shift of interest in mind and body from the

physiological to the psychological.

In this chapter of introduction, I will first briefly explain why Victorian debates

on human mind and body could be connected with creation of ghosts in the

contemporary literary texts, with an outline of a general transition of scientific trends.

Then the introduction is followed by four number of parts that discuss several

5
important contexts that surround Victorian ghosts and ghost stories, and the last

additional part provides a brief abstract of each chapter of this thesis.

The Victorian period was the time when ghosts and spectres came to be

positively linked with the contemporary physiological explorations of human mind

and body. This will be most distinctively shown in the increased popularity of

Spiritualism after the 1860s, which can be said as one of the most well-known

Victorian ‘embodiments’ of ghosts in cultural scenes. Although there was a dispute

even at the time whether the phenomenon belonged to the realm of science or

pseudo-science, or the natural or the supernatural, many Spiritualists sought to find

scientific evidence and even considered that séances could be offered as experimental

sites for other scientific disciplines, including physiology and physics. For example,

some Spiritualists argued that ‘spirits’ or ‘spirit beings’ consisted of some aerial or

ethereal aspects of human bodies, which was an idea that supported the medical

discourse of magnetic force flowing between humans and the external world. For

others, explicating how spirits manifested themselves could scientifically prove

‘natural order’, or some kind of celestial mechanics, that would exist mysteriously in

this world even though God’s Design was no longer certain. It can be said that various

kinds of ‘spirit manifestations’ in séances, which sometimes took a form of a

fully-formed human body, were believed and acknowledged because there was a

scientific endeavour behind the phenomena to demonstrate a mechanism that would

unite the physical frame of a human being and the ‘spiritual’ framework of the natural

world. Spiritualism was one of the results of ‘probing connections between the known

physical and the unknown “spiritual” forces’, and this exploration is also true to the

mid-Victorian physiological investigations into human mind and body. 1

1 Richard Noakes, ‘Spiritualism, Science and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in The
Victorian Supernatural, eds. by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.23-43 (p.31).
6
 Scientific studies of mind and body experienced a certain paradigm change in

the mid-nineteenth century, which is typically shown in ‘a terminological shift from

“soul” to “mind”’, as Rick Rylance comments.2 The concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ had

long been associated in the Western culture with ghosts and spectres, since one’s soul

or spirit was believed to survive the bodily death and its source to be a ‘vital principle

of life’, which most people believed to exist within the living human body

independently. By the early nineteenth century, such a viatalistic idea became a part of

the discourse that supported the special position of human beings in the great chain of

being, and people thought that the essential nature of human soul as well as its

existence would lie in the ‘superadded’ principle which was beyond enquiry and

recognition. The idea also succeeded a theological stance of the Enlightenment.

However, in the mid-nineteenth century when science more inclined to materialism,

people’s anticipation for a scientific solution to the soul’s ontological question

increased, and such a philosophical enquiry into soul came to be gradually replaced by

physiological and anatomical investigations into human bodies. Soul became

something that could only be approached and analysed in a positivistic process of

unravelling the system of a physical frame of a human being, and thus the interest in

‘mind’ increased as a replacement for a spiritual interest and metaphysical quest for

the superiority of the soul. The study of mind and body was incorporated into the

contemporary science of physiology and psychology.

This also means that the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’ of human faculties could

no longer to be opposed but only to be combined in many ways. Mesmerism and

hypnotism can be given as examples again; while both mesmerism and hypnotism

were practiced in medicine, what they particularly emphasised was the unique ‘power’

2 Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p.24.
7
of a human body, ‘a new form of invisible force which was yet to be identified’. 3 A

series of scientific studies on a complex relationship between the inner mind and

physical faculties were continued to be influenced by the trends of ‘spiritual’ or

philosophical discourse, although they branched out into several schools and

disciplines based on the trends of materialism. Significantly, with these seemingly

conflictual approaches combined, people’s scientific interest shifted into human mind

and body as faculties. Mind was severed from Nature and it later developed as ‘ideas’

and ‘consciousness’ along with the advancement of Victorian psychology. Body came

to be linked with the nervous system, and in some extreme arguments it was

understood as a form of machine in a similar way to the mechanism of Cartesian

dualism; or, in the later period, it came to be seen more often as a sensory system that

functioned autonomously with reflexive responses, or a system that retained some

other perceptions that could interact with the environment. Thus both mind and body

turned to be the direct objects of studies in these physiological and materialistic

approaches. These studies also constituted ‘the evolutionary study of the self as an

aspect of wider science of the organic world’, and for many Victorians, another critical

issue was what could make such a human ‘self’ respectable, coherent, and

rationalised. 4 On the other hand, what the advancement of physiological explorations

continued to reveal was somewhat more mysterious, unknown, and uncontrolled

aspects of human mind and body, which continued to draw public attentions. It is

noteworthy that this strange mixture of the mystified and the real converged at this

scientific exploration throughout the century, and that the mid-century showed this

complicated situation in particular.

3 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Reading the Mind: Introduction’, in Embodied
Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, eds. by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally
Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.3-7 (p.6).
4 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’, in Embodied Selves: An Anthology

of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, eds. by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.xiii-xviii (p.xiv). Italics are mine.
8
 Another important thing is that, along with this overall change in scientific

approaches, it can be maintained that the very nature of the supernatural changed for

Victorian people too. The spiritual and mysterious nature of ‘soul’ had long been

congenial with inexplicable and non-physical existence of supernatural beings

including biblical and folkloric creatures, but when scientific naturalism and secular

materialism began to influence culture and society, human body came to be a new

target and also to be linked with ‘ghosts’, which were mostly visible, material, and

considered to be positive revelations of the ‘supernatural’ of human beings. In the

field of physiology, human bodies were even more mystified than the spiritual soul.

This is the same for the general public too, and how human beings could survive the

death turned a matter of body, or a matter of the whole framework of mind and body,

which would change cultural meanings and roles of ghosts. I would argue furthermore

in this thesis that an overall shift into materialism could be reflected on fictional

ghosts in literary works. Hence, the thesis will focus on mid-nineteenth century

(specifically from the 1840s to 1880s), which shows a phase of multifaceted aspects in

this transition. I hope to show in the following chapters the way fictional and literary

ghosts turned to reveal themselves gradually as materialised and mechanic bodies. The

ghost creations by the four writers all represent in different ways the contemporary

interests in physical bodies of a human being.

I. The Gothic tradition and context

The period when theological and introspective attitudes of the intellectuals

gave way to their frequent adoptions of practical behaviour and cognitive knowledge,

and when people’s interest in natural philosophy, which used to separate mind and

body, declined and natural science emerged as ‘a more confident and assertive

9
 material science’, it was also the time when the Victorian middle class began to

emerge as a new group of intellectual informants through their interactions with the

popularised medium of newspapers and magazines. 5 The scientific mind of

professionals continued to influence the general public throughout the century, and

people kept a desire to explore their material world and attempted to explicate it

using secularised and rationalised terms instead of leaving it to the mystic and

metaphysical realms of knowledge and experience. For the middle class, novels are

among the chief media that informed and communicated a cultural change people

experienced after Romantic movements. The popularity of ghost stories after the

1850s was also connected with this rise of the middle class, and with their interest in

mind and body to no small extent. Victorian scientific explorations and discoveries

not only provided interesting themes and unique instruments for ghost fiction but

also made it a more suitable and useful site to present even much more mystified and

incoherent world in the age of materialism.

The mid-nineteenth century’s emergence of ‘ghost stories’ in new literary

magazines and periodicals has long been discussed and explained in terms of Gothic

inheritance, and they have often been recognised as a part of Gothic variations. The

four writers I will discuss in this thesis had enough literary education and knowledge

to be conscious of the Gothic tradition, and they were all familiar with the types of

spectres and phantoms that Gothic novels had continued to produce from the latter

half of the eighteenth century. Their literary devices are indeed much owed to the

Gothic. However, there is an important difference between the eighteenth-century

Gothic fiction and the Victorian Gothic fiction in general, which is often explained in

terms of the locus of ‘terror and horror’. The exotic and foreign settings in the Gothic

romance were replaced with modern cities and houses. The aesthetic senses of ‘terror

5 Rylance, p.41.
10
 and horror’ were now the real and psychological horror caused by criminals,

murderers, and the insane, all those who could likely live next door. While the horror

seemed intensified and sensed close at hand, supernatural factors and the fantastic

tended to be naturalised. What this particularly means would be that Gothic features

of excess and transgression did not have their original effects any more, which is to

be shown more in details in the following paragraphs. In this change of literary

trends, which is sometimes called ‘the domestication of the Gothic’, various types of

ghosts meanwhile appeared in literary magazines and periodicals to entertain readers

in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 6 Considering this tendency, literary

attempts that these writers made necessarily take on different aspects from the typical

Gothic world of excess and transgression and show something unique, which can be

especially found, I consider, in the physicality of ghosts.

Ghosts, spectres, and supernatural beings all appear more often than not in

Gothic romance and poems. In the traditional Gothic fiction, which started in the

latter half of the eighteenth century, ghosts are fundamentally the object of fear.

David Punter explains as follows:

It is a commonplace of literary history that, through the earlier part of the

eighteenth century, the ghosts and phantoms which had played so
important a part in earlier literature seemed to disappear, because there
was no room for them in the supremely rational world of the Augustans.
But they started to reappear with the Gothic revival, occurring often in
the old ballads, and from there they moved into Gothic fiction. The ways
in which they were presented were manifold […]. It is important,
however, to point out that in one sense this makes very little difference:
even if the ghosts are eventually explained away, this does not mean that
their actual presence within the text can be forgotten, and almost all the
Gothic writers used the fear of the supernatural for one purpose or
another.7

6 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p.26.
7 David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present
11
 In this way, the supernatural was firstly effective and useful to raise the sense of fear,

and for typical writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, passion and

feelings that would respond to the supernatural and even crush reason are important.

Hence, ghosts need to be overtly dangerous and frightening beings, and the dead

often appear to remind people of the moment of death or the state of mortality. Ghost

is not only necessary to emerge as Death for ‘memento mori’ but also to let readers

indulge in the state of fear and melancholy so that they can hopefully get over these

feelings to achieve any sense of the sublime. The excess of emotional life was

important in the traditional Gothic fiction. This kind of a frightening image of a ghost

was one of the features in Romantic works, too; such a typical example is a vampire,

which is a supernatural being that transgresses the law of mortality and works as a

symbol of excess. Vampires often appear as foul, dangerous, and untouchable beings,

but this Gothic image changes when it comes into novels, which I will further argue

in the first chapter by discussing the text of Wuthering Heights.

Ghosts in the traditional Gothic fiction are not only the frightful beings to raise

the sense of fear, but they notably developed as a literary device to represent

something more than the ghosts and their entities. Many critics have been discussing

various texts of Gothic fiction to reveal their uncanniness by means of exploring

ghost’s potential of symbolising and figurative functions, and now it is well

acknowledged that the Gothic played a crucial role in the development of the

twentieth-century psychoanalysis. This is mainly because Gothic ghosts are likely to

be treated as an artificial and artistic device. For example, Punter explains that, for

writers like Radcliffe and Lewis, phantom and illusion was ‘principally an apt

metaphor in which to convey wider thematic concerns’, such as ‘the complex

relations between solitude, society and the imagination’ or ‘the relation between the

Day, Vol.1: The Gothic Tradition (London: Routledge, 2013), p.10.

12
 individual and the environment’.8 To give another example from recent criticism,

Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the Gothic develops a specific art form. He maintains

that, by invoking Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’, ghosts and phantoms are

adopted as an art of ‘harbouring symbolic acts of “abjection”’, which is to ‘throw off’

pre-consciously ‘unresolvable contradictions at the heart of our psyches or societies

into fearsome mixed forms’. 9 ‘Ghostly fragments’ can thus be indicative of past sins,

and fictional female ghosts can indicate one’s subservience to the repressive social

structure. 10 These arts are necessary to keep away the ‘anomalies’, which can

manifest at any moment the underlying confusion and contradictions of human mind

and society in a strangely and abhorrently way.

It is true that this artificiality contributes to the later development and richness

of novels, but the problem of physicality and entity of these ghosts is rather

ambivalent in this Gothic world. For example, bloody ghosts and vampires are the

symbols of excess, which in most cases frighten young protagonists to death, but the

reality of the bleeding bodies is not so often the focus in the traditional Gothic fiction.

Even the Bleeding Nun in Lewes’ Monk, whose naturalistic description requires us

‘to see it before us, lurid and gory as a stage ghost’ and to assume its reality, is

nonetheless placed eventually under our suspicion that it might be a projection of the

character’s inner mind, of ‘paranoia and vulnerability’, a projection of ‘Raymond’s

guilt about elopement and his fears for Agnes’s safety’. 11 This kind of an apt scheme

that freely hovers the boundary between the reality and the supernatural is the feature

of the Gothic fiction. However, the nineteenth-century Gothic fiction comes to show

different aspects in that its narrative structure becomes more artful and refined so as

8 Punter, p.64.
9 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Gothic and the Nineteenth-century Novel: The Art of Abjection’, in The
Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, ed. by David Punter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2019), pp.310-20 (p.312).
10 Hogle, p.312.
11 Punter, p.61, p.68.

13
to assume the reality, and furthermore, supernatural beings within such a scheme are

complicated enough to reveal a contradiction of their own fictitiousness and

physicality.

This is distinctively shown in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which

presents a certain difficulty of creating a symbolic figure of the supernatural, and yet

it succeeds in creating the fictitious monster with psychological reality. The nameless

monster is not a phantom returning to the world but a living creature which is made

from the parts of dead bodies. It is a physical existence that develops human mind

and sentiment; nonetheless it is a supernatural existence destined to be exiled from

human society, and even from the world of Nature in the end. This creature can be a

symbol of excess and transgression, but as has often been said, the creature’s

condition is more associated with deviation and alienation caused by his ugliness that

makes him detested and miserable. Moreover, his body is a collection of

dismembered bits and fragments of physical matter which cannot fall into decay and

vanish, while most of the other characters surrounding Victor, the creator, are

destined to die or to be killed as mortal human beings. It is to be noted that, whereas

this predominance of the body tortures the creature, the creature also needs to be

there for its ultimate symbolic existence, standing for the very state of antinomy and

dilemma. The monster is ultimately charged with the symbolic role as a Gothic

image of spectre.

Written at the turn of the century, Shelley’s work is filled with Romantic

imagery and dreams, characterised by her frequent symbolic use of moon, fire, and

water. The monster is one of these figurations, and considering the period when

natural philosophy started to decline before the materialistic age, this monstrous

creature can also signify, in the context of the contemporary science, a rupture or

incongruity between human beings and Nature, or ‘a monstrous merging of unlike

14
 things, rather than a recovery of a lost unity’. 12 Maggie Kilgour points out to the

scientist Victor’s materialistic preference of analysis and dissection of nature in his

act of creation: ‘Victor’s creation of this monster suggests that the rational analytic

mind that divides absolutely can only imagine reconciliations as monstrous

regression to a state of undifferentiation’.13 An attempt to recover the unity between

human and nature by new science ends up revealing a state of confusion and chaos

left to be unresolved, which is ultimately represented by the ugly monster. The

Gothic demand of artistic figurations can thus only lead to the monster’s revelation of

a state of an aporia. During the eighteenth century when people believed science to

be an ideal principle to achieve freedom, Gothic figures were full of horror and terror,

set against reason and rationalism. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century,

Gothic embodiment of the supernatural shows itself a state of confusion, perplexity,

and contradiction, which is necessarily linked with the rise of positivistic science.

Before the coming age of doubt and materialism, Frankenstein presents difficulty of

coexisting the corporeal reality and the metaphysical significance in a supernatural

figure, whose existence is called for a certain purpose within the world of fiction.

This kind of difficulty may also be confirmed in the fact that Gothic techniques

of figurations were increasingly valued by the next generation of realist writers,

while Gothic fiction as a genre declined in the Victorian period as total immersion in

supernatural realities and excessive feelings became less significant. Victorian

novelists were generally conscious of the powerful effects of adopting Gothic devices

and elements, and their attempts to evoke supernatural agency and heightened

sensitivity within the framework of realism are indeed effective in implying hidden

meanings and repressed feelings confined and regulated within the society at the time.

For example, strange voices in Jane Eyre (1847), imaginary and premonitory

12 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1997), p.198.
13 Kilgour, p.205.
15
 footsteps in the Ghost’s Walk in Bleak House (1853), panic and fears intensified by

ghostly association in Cranford (1853), they all retain symbolic significance and

serve to bring a wider dimension to the domestic and social realism.

This is to say that these Gothic elements serve to expand the scope of realism

as a form of fiction. It is true that Victorian writers often created haunting scenes and

produced various types of phantoms and illusions in their realist works, but they do

not expand the world of the supernatural. This, in fact, applies to the genre of ghost

stories. The ghost story, which started to gain popularity in the 1840s-50s, is

basically different from the excessive world of the Gothic in that encounters with

ghosts are limited and tamed as Victorian material and empirical world tend to

support natural realism. As Fred Botting points out, the ghost story in this early

period ‘presents a more definite idea of reality in order to evoke a specifically

uncanny effect’.14 However, Victorian fictional ghosts do not always contribute to

support natural realism. They keep shaking the boundary between the supernatural

and the real, and their physical entities seem to be foregrounded so much as to avoid

being interpreted as symbols or metaphors. Significantly, these ghosts take on

different aspects from the traditional Gothic fiction and challenge literary

conventions. In such a case, ghosts are much more connected with their original

meaning of ‘the dead’, and they are not overtly and extravagantly frightful objects

and beings. They are the very embodiments of people’s interest in bodies.

In the literary history and criticism, both the eighteenth-century Gothic fiction

and Victorian ghost stories tend to be treated similarly in that they were the products

of writers’ diversion from more serious, mainstream work of realism. Gothic

romance originated with its self-awareness of its margin in the literary orthodox;

early writers of Victorian ghost stories were all experts in realist novels. Literary

14 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p.126.

16
 ghosts are always confronted by the serious question of reality and probability, but

for Victorian readers, ghosts are also familiar subjects because they are linked to

people’s interest in mind and body. Then, in the following section, I will discuss

more about their images of ghosts and the dead.

II. Victorian images of the dead and their fictional representation

The ghost story can be generically defined as ‘a story about the spirits of the

returning dead’;15 the principles followed in selecting Victorian ghost stories in

modern anthologies would be, first and foremost, stories which ‘reveal to the reader a

spectacle of the returning dead, or their agents, and their actions’ and in which ‘there

must be a dramatic interaction between the living and the dead’, not always but often

with ‘the intention of frightening or unsettling the reader’, as Michael Cox and R. A.

Gilbert mention. 16 When ghosts appear in Victorian fiction, they are likely to be seen

in a form of human beings, not quite the same as the living, but quite similar in that

they can be identified as a particular person or a human being; in other words, they

are ‘reproductions or simulacra of human beings’.17 There are certainly many other

types and variations of ‘ghosts’ whose forms are more like animals or monsters, or

folkloric witches and evil spirits, or airy and almost invisible substance like dusts,

and it is indeed very difficult to establish ‘the boundaries […] between the different

generic forms and transformations of the fantastic in Victorian fiction’. 18 And yet,

among them the ghosts of the returning dead are a primary concern for the Victorian

15 Julia Briggs, ‘The Ghost Story’, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp.122-31 (p.123).
16 Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories,

eds. by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.ix-xx (p.x).
17 Julia Briggs, p.124.
18 Lyn Pykett, ‘Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion

to the Victorian Novel: Second Edition, ed. by Deidre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), pp.211-30 (p.212).
17
 reader, as can be seen in the popularity of ghost stories and in the later cultural boom

in Spiritualism, and Victorian people are not only frightened or unsettled by ghosts

but also have a particular curiosity and show a zest for the possibility of their

existence.

This zest can be linked to the Victorians’ interest in death and is paralleled by

the ‘Victorian fascination with the trappings of death’ that include ‘the dark,

extravagant splendour of the funeral, the baroque richness of the cemetery, the

guilt-laden luxury of mourning’. 19 This highly ritualised death seems to have

developed uniquely from the Gothic culture. Alongside these elaborate Victorian

rituals and the solemn and memorable acceptance of death were the ‘notorious infant

morality rates, industrial accidents, [and] stark gaps between rich and poor’, and the

culture at its basis ‘knew death more familiarly than any modern period’. 20 The

culture experiencing death on a daily basis and thus yearning to know death and its

meaning turned its sincere attention to ‘the dead’, and what made them really

important, Francis O’Gorman says, was Victorian people’s interest in life, that is,

‘eternal life’: it was the time of ‘restless probing of theological conceptions of the

durability of the soul and the Christian notion of the resurrection of the dead’. 21 For

the Victorians of the early period, theological ideas on the immortality of the soul and

religious images of death were at the basis of their vision of the dead, and how they

should continue to ‘live’ was the matter of their own ‘life’, which further encouraged

scientific studies of ‘vital principle of life’. In the later period, people came to feel

the dead closer in a more vivid way by keeping them in memorial objects that would

work as their physical symbols, such as photographs, wax effigies, and plaster casts

of their body parts, and this indicates that the dead and their ghosts could be

19 Cox and Gilbert, p.ix.

20 Francis O’Gorman, ‘The Dead’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, ed. by
Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.255-72 (p.255).
21 O’Gorman, p.255.

18
 associated more often with tangible and accessible forms than with their mystic and

metaphysical revelation conceived from religious beliefs and teachings.

This cultural change of the Victorians’ attitude to the dead can also be

influenced by their scientific attitudes to human bodies. The conceptions of religious

miracles and the literal meanings of ‘resurrections’ and ‘reincarnations’ started to

lose credulity under the influential power of positivism and Darwinian ideas of

evolution; for those who believed in the power of materialistic science, moral faith

was not positive: ‘Comtean Positivists, empirical scientists and the new

anthropologists […] agreed that supernatural or metaphysical interpretations of

phenomena signified an immature stage of human intellectual development’. 22

Those who supported the idea instead used scientific language to elucidate such a

supernatural but miraculous agency and revelation, although their discourse often left

some room for mystery, particularly when it comes to Spiritualism. For example,

some Spiritualists treated ‘spirit’ as an ‘as yet undiscovered material form, which

await[ed] only new scientific discoveries for its true nature to be revealed’. 23 And

yet, they stressed its material form and often presented a unique idea of its

physicality using rhetorical expressions and somewhat metaphysical logic: the ‘spirit’

is ‘[m]ade up of an ethereal matter invisible to the living’ in which ‘some form of

spatial individuality’ of one’s self is kept, and so it can also assume ‘a form

resembling the mortal body’ and even retain an ability to choose to ‘clothe itself in

any other form of physical matter if it wished’.24 This kind of explorations into the

potential human form in the scientific discourse, which often involved cultural ideas

of the self and identity, promoted both conceptual and material forms of the dead.

22 O’Gorman, p.256.
23 Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’, in The Victorian
Supernatural, eds. by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.1-19 (p.7).
24 Jennifer Bann, ‘Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the

Nineteeth-Century Specter’, Victorian Studies, 51(2009), 663-85 (p.668).

19
 Conceptualisation of a potential human form, along with empirical research

into the physical mechanism of a human being, is thus combined with ideas of the

self, the identity, and the mind, being re-examined and reviewed during the

transitional period in the 1840-60s of scientific approaches from natural philosophy

to physiology, and from physiology to psychology. In the early period, the

‘materialist science of the self’, while sometimes maintaining the strict division of

‘mind’ and ‘body’, generally seeks to achieve a well-balanced identity of the ‘self’ by

means of achieving a harmonious unity between them. 25 This kind of an ideal

integration of mind and body in scientific debates on the self exerts much influence

on some literary writers in the mid-nineteenth century, and their works further

provide hints as to the potential human form through its representation in the form of

a fictional ghost for the reader. I consider that works of Emily Brontë and Elizabeth

Gaskell apply to this model, which is demonstrated in the first and second chapter of

the thesis. For Brontë and Gaskell, a ghost is a unity that embodies a revealed form

of the ‘self’, conceived to be an imagined integration of mind and body; it is different

from an elevated status of the ‘soul’, and it is rather like an organic unity. Their

approaches to ghost embodiments are different from each other, but what is

represented through their materialised ghosts is an idealized conception on how the

mind and body works for human beings and helps establish one’s identity.

This thesis also aims to show that the four writers selected here all attempt to

depict and represent their ghosts as ‘real’ entities in their own fictional world. The

early writers, such as Brontë and Gaskell, make their fictional ghosts as ‘physical’ as

possible, which is different form the fantastic and extraordinary being in the Gothic

romance. Their ghosts have their own ‘body’, as I will show in the thesis. On the

other hand, for the later writers, such as Braddon and Riddell, ghosts are less

25 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’, p.xiv.

20
 ‘physical’ than ‘natural’ in the fictional world. They are the dead whose beings are

natural enough to be there. These ghosts are more familiar beings and their

appearances often follow a certain pattern. Their visitations often take place in

domestic places, and furthermore, they often become something to be sympathised

with in everyday lives, being in need of comprehension, reception, and perception. In

this sense, they are also felt ‘real’ enough to be given much care and consideration in

their fictional world. These overall domestic and familiar tones in ghost appearances

and scenes are very different from the traditional Gothic fiction; Cox and Gilbert also

refer to them as ‘the distinct, anti-Gothic character’.26

Braddon and Riddell are the representative ghost-story writers after the 1860s.

The ‘reality’ of their ghosts further lies in a certain logic to make their appearances

more persuasive and powerful. Julia Briggs argues that what makes the Victorian

ghost story different from the Gothic romance is the ‘logic’, which is given as ‘an

alternative structure of cause and effect’; she explains that, in the ghost story, when

some kind of explanations according to the ‘spiritual law of action and reaction’ are

provided for the reader, they ‘do not operate to rationalise or demystify the

supernatural events, but rather to set them inside a kind of imaginative logic in which

the normal laws of cause and effect are suspended’.27 Here the focus lies in the

reason why ghosts are here, why they appear for particular persons, and in the act of

seeking potential answers and solutions. This does show a contrast to the Gothic

romance in which supernatural events tend to happen abruptly beyond a certain logic,

‘proliferate without explanation’, or otherwise to be ‘rationally explained away’ as

the works of Ann Radcliffe typically show.28 A certain logic behind an apparition is

important for Braddon and Riddell too; ghosts are naturally there because they have a

26 Cox and Gilbert, p.x.

27 Julia Briggs, p.123.
28 Julia Briggs, p.123.
21
 reason to be so, and finding out a certain logic behind their emergence provides the

reality of their existence.

Briggs discusses this ‘imaginative logic’ in terms of a kind of dark, animalistic

power, which is effected by a cause-and-effect sequence where one’s sinister wishes

and fears materialise themselves and eventually produce some physical effects in the

end. The logic pertains to the realm that reverts to the dark, primitive, and

unnameable state of human beings, and ghost stories often ‘deal with the most

primitive, punitive and sadistic of impulses’. 29 On the other hand, in the ghost stories

of Braddon and Riddell, the logic can often be reduced to superficial motivations,

and these motivations are not dark and sinister enough to reveal some hidden nature

of human beings. They are rather derived with personal intent, and ghosts appear in

an appealing way to share their personal feelings with the living. In this sense, ghost

is a reflection of human mind and psychology. Furthermore, the state of mind

represented in the material form of a ghost is necessarily linked with the state of its

body, whose phantom-like existence prompts the living to exercise their own

physical faculties. Sensations are important to detect the underlying logic. Hence,

these writers incorporate the contemporary ideas of psychology and unite the living

and the dead through the faculty of perception and recognition.

The fictional ghosts I will argue in this thesis all embody Victorian ideas of

human mind and body. Focusing on the physicality of these ghosts will reveal not

only the Victorian’s interest in bodies but also reaffirm the significance of the dead in

Victorian culture, the real people they lost; these ghosts do not belong to the realm of

the unknowable and intangible; rather they are the existence materialised in some

form, borrowed from the contemporary ideas on human mind and body. The real and

physical ghost can also be taken as literary challenges in the height of realism, which

29 Julia Briggs, p.128.

22
 was the flourished mode of literature in the Victorian period.

III. The literary context surrounding ghost fiction around the year 1860

The thesis will then propose and shed light on an important shift that can be

seen to take place in the latter half of the century in the trends of ghost fiction. By the

year 1860, ghosts and other supernatural or extraordinary beings had become one of

the entertainment tools not only for literary works but also for many other public

presentations, including mesmeric therapy and visions in clinical sites, spirit contacts

in séances, and visibly spectacular performances on stage with gimmicks and magic.

Ghostly appearances had become popular and familiar experiences for the public by

this time. In addition to this cultural background, I consider that around the year 1860

was particularly important as a transitional point for ghost fiction because of

well-known literary movements surrounding literary ghosts: the literary magazine

newly founded by Charles Dickens and the start of the genre of sensation fiction in the

same periodical.

Firstly, Household Words, which was launched in 1850, having been successful

in producing many unique ghost stories for the reader by featuring Christmas stories

in Extra Christmas numbers, was replaced by All the Year Round in 1859. This

periodical Dickens owned from the outset and had more control over its content and

topics. All the Year Round continued to feature ghost stories and circulate them in

special issues; however, it covered many stories and articles associated not only with

ghosts but also with other supernatural beings, mingled with horror tales and crimes.

By simply searching the titles online in both periodicals of Dickens with related

keywords, I found that the number of stories and articles concerning ‘ghostly’

apparitions increased about one and a half times in the first ten years, when compared

23
with his former periodical. The wide-ranging topics included dreams, superstitions,

premonitions, insanity, monsters, lightning, magic, spiritualism, etc. It can be said that

Dickens crucially led the popularity of ghost stories still after 1860, but they also

came to be much more blended with many other genres and phenomena reflecting his

interest in scientific technology.

It is true that Dickens sought truly unique and authentic ‘ghost stories’ for his

periodicals, but he foremost ‘collected ghost stories as an important source of enquiry

into the mysteries of the mind’. 30 His therapeutic interest in mesmerism was already

seen in Household Words, where different articles ‘discussed a range of sympathetic

mental phenomena and warned against uncritically attributing such phenomena to the

manifestation of ghosts’.31 His dislike of bringing unreliable grounds for attesting

ghosts’ existence continued in All the Year Round, which resulted in making the

periodical the arena of the scientific and technological debates on ghostly phenomena.

Consequently, ‘under misleading titles referring to “ghosts” there are to be found

articles that promote naturalistic concepts of mind, and explanations of the nature of

optical delusions and the aetiological causes of apparitions’.32 In this context it can be

understood that ghost stories in the literary circle of Dickens became the medium for

both scientific research and literary entertainment. For example, one of the Dickens’s

famous ghost stories published in All the Year Round, ‘The Signalman’ (1866), shows

that ghost is something to be perceived through its ‘signs’, and it is not to be

acknowledged only by its tangible human form. These ‘signs’ can be the signalman’s

illusion, but the story proves the ‘signs’ to be ‘real’ because they actually work as a

premonitory message to the living. Dickens had a great impact on later ghost-story

30 Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’, in The Victorian
Supernatural, eds. by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.44-63 (p.45).
31 Henson, The Victorian Supernatural, p.53.
32 Henson, The Victorian Supernatural, p.61.

24
writers, particularly in that he showed that ghost stories could be a site in which

the-state-of-the-art ideas on supernatural phenomena were to be further explored.

The year 1860 marked another literary movement. Wilkie Collins published

The Woman in White in 1860 after its first serialisation in All the Year Round, which is

considered to be the first sensation novel, particularly because there were many other

subsequent novels that followed his styles. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was certainly one

of the writers, and she admired him as her ‘literary father’ and ‘admitted that the plot

of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) owed much to The Woman in White’.33 Braddon also

admired Rhoda Broughton, another female writer of sensation novels who later

contributed to Temple Bar, which was edited by Braddon. Dickens, Collins, Braddon,

and Broughton were all united in a sense as literary co-workers who contributed to the

development of periodicals, where they all published their own ghost stories and

ghostly short fiction, too.

Victorian ghost fiction and sensation fiction have several things in common in

terms of their plot and style: they both aim to produce fear and frisson, laden with

gothic and uncanny atmospheres, and place secrets and mysteries at the core of the

plot. They also share popularity in sales, although sensation novels were more often

criticised and disapproved of, partly because the sensation novel, based in the real

world, treated actual social cases that shook the Victorian standards of morality,

mentality, and sexuality. They share their cultural background, too: ghost stories

developed in the 1850s along with the popularity of literary magazine and periodicals,

which played an important role in familiarising the style of short stories with the

Victorian reader, while sensation novels were also well aware of the development of

this magazine culture and made good use of their original serialised form.

Although it has not been much discussed, Victoria ghost fiction and sensation

33Mathew Sweet, ‘Introduction’, in The Woman in White, ed. by Matthew Sweet (London:
Penguin Books, 2003), pp. xiii-xxxiv (p.xix).
25
fiction influenced each other, particularly in connection with the matter of identity.

Since ghost stories came to be popular in the 1840s and 50s before the sensation novel

thrived, some points have been made to argue that the sensation novel partly inherited

some characteristics of the ghost fiction. Brittany Roberts points out that ‘the process

of detection in sensation novels’, which serves to underscore ‘the possibility of

restoring order and getting at “the Truth”’ in the end, is ‘a departure from the ghost

story paradigm’. 34 She also argues that the reader of the sensation novel should have

been familiar with the situation where people with evil intentions and desires would

occupy, almost ‘haunt’, the domestic place. Furthermore, ghost fiction had no small

effect on the occasional ghostly appearance in sensation fiction; although the ‘ghost’

in sensation fiction tends to be explained away, it still ‘serves as a caution against

believing too readily in the “reality” of what one appears to be seeing’. 35 The

uncertainty of identity, the mysterious logic hidden behind the apparition in the ghost

fiction is succeeded by the sensation novel.

Furthermore, I will argue that the emergence of sensation fiction in the 1860s

had a certain effect on the ghost story, which did continue to flourish in various

periodicals after the 1860s. When a series of sensation novels were published, they

were featured by the very ‘sensation’ which was harshly criticised at the same time;

they were considered to have a physical effect on the reader, making the body shudder

in fear and shock due to their horrific events and narratives and producing emotional

reactions; they were also viewed as inappropriate because their writers seemed to be

‘preaching to the nerves’ and ‘appealing to the reader’s animal instincts’. 36

Amplifying human sensations was the point at issue at the time, but the sensation

34 Brittany Roberts, ‘Ghost Stories and Sensation Fiction’, in The Routledge Handbook to the
Ghost Story, eds. by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp.59-68
(p.60).
35 Roberts, p.62
36 Pykett, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel: Second Edition, p.222.

26
novel generally calls attention to the body itself: ‘melodramatic tropes […] describe

the physical gesture of characters, convey their emotions, provide detailed accounts of

clothes, hair and objects as a means of calling attention to bodies within texts and to

the bodies of its readers’. 37 It was the prominence of body and its appeal to human

sensations within the narratives of crime and mystery that made some critics feel

disgusted with the sensation novel.

This reaction shows that by this time the body in literature was both a curious

concern and a cause of anxiety. The body came to be recognised as a sensational site,

where sensory faculties could work autonomously beyond one’s will and control, and

where one’s brutal and carnal desire could be detected and localised. In addition to the

public’s secular interest in the human body, sensation fiction made the body itself

objectified through its direct, sometimes explicit, way of presenting body parts. It has

been shown that in typical sensation novels female bodies often serve as the objects to

be read and interpreted. Furthermore, the desiring female body is another problematic

issue, which involve other important discussions on female sexuality and mental

health. Considering the increase of public’s interest and anxiety, sensation fiction

should have had a certain effect on a series of ghost fiction published around the same

period, and this I intend to show in detail by analysing Braddon’s ghost stories in the

third chapter. Many of Braddon’s fictional ghosts are actually not shocking enough to

make the witness and the reader ‘shudder’; they are rather presented in repeated

patterns in which the reader can easily expect and detect when and why they present

themselves. Riddell’s fiction also follows the same lines, and ghost revelations

sometimes do not succeed in emotionally overwhelming the living. These ghosts often

lose the significance of their physical return to the natural world and their bodily

37 Tatiana Kontou, ‘Sensation Fiction, Spiritualism and the Supernatural’, in Andrew Mangham,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), pp.141-53 (p.146).
27
existence in this sense.

The less manifestation of bodies in ghost fiction might reveal the writers’

uneasy feelings about their reputation and criticism in publishing their works. It might

further indicate that what matters for both the writer and reader at the time is not the

physiological ideas of human mind and body, but the body which is disrupted and

disconnected from such a whole framework of mind and body that constitutes a

human being. The time when sensation fiction became popular was also the time when

‘psychology’ emerged as one of the distinctive scientific disciplines for the general

public. Various ideas and concepts concerning the human form, including an

integrated state of mind and boy, a coherent unity of the self, and coordinating

functions of faculties within the whole physiological systems would be replaced by

some other concepts of human bodies and their relations to psychology.

In this literary context and background, I consider that there was a certain shift

both in the literary trends of ghost fiction and the scientific interest in human mind

and body. Furthermore, the presumption that literary ghosts might have lost the impact

and significance of their bodily nature around the 1860s can be supported by the fact

that, while it was the time when the ‘ghost’ in Spiritualism persisted in taking the form

of the human body, showing its own agency to move around to communicate with the

living, ghost fiction stood apart from such a materialisation of the ‘spirit’. Spiritualism,

a cultural movement ‘reaching new heights of popularity in the 1860s’ in Britain,

started off from the experience of spiritual contacts by the Fox family in Hydesville,

New York in 1848 38; then, the spiritualistic exercises and phenomena, including

clairvoyance and table-rapping, ‘arrived in England from America and the Continent

in late 1852’. 39 Among the varied spiritual manifestations followed on, bodily

materialisations of ‘spirits’ continued to be popular, at least into the early 1870s, and

38 Noakes, p.23.
39 Noakes, p.26.
28
‘most spectacular of all, the materialisation of fully-formed spirits’. 40 When such a

form of ‘spirit’ appeared, ‘the medium would withdraw into a cabinet, fall into a

trance and produce a materialised spirit, automatic writing and direct voice

phenomena (writing and speaking through a medium)’. 41 Hence, during the period of

the 1860s and 70s, the full-body figure was one of the visualised images that attracted

people’s attention as a form of a ‘ghost’, until some other ‘more mental, psychological

aspects of communication [took] precedence in the 1880s’ in Spiritualism. 42 In

contrast with this popularity, Jennifer Bann notably points to the fact that ghost stories

after the mid-century did not make many references to Spiritualism as might be

expected: ‘With its plethora of séances, materialisations, ectoplasm, and

table-rappings, spiritualism is strangely omitted from the ghost stories with which it

shared decades of popularity’.43 There are certainly some stories that refer to a group

of Spiritualists in their narratives or parody the scenes at séances, and it cannot be said

that the rituals and spiritual manifestations of Spiritualism did not provide any

imaginative source for ghosts in Victorian ghost fiction; however, specific scenes and

phenomena recalling those of Spiritualism were not much reproduced in ghost fiction,

at least until the end of the century. This would suggest that literary ghosts took their

own course and ghost stories went against the cultural fashion which welcomed the

full-formed, bodily materialisation.

In this light my study of the four writers will offer another different angle to

Bann’s important contention in her article that there is a shift in the representation of

literary spectres from the limited dead to the free-moving ghost or ghostly figure in

the latter half of the nineteenth century. She says that the origins of this shift lie in the

cultural representations of the supernatural, particularly in ‘the active, powerful

40 Noakes, p.27.
41 Kontou, p.143.
42 Kontou, p.143.
43 Bann, p.664.
29
figures of the séance room’, and she also comments that ‘[i]n the supernatural fiction

of the later nineteenth century, death began to bring freedom: shackles, silence, and

regret were cast aside, and ghosts became active figures empowered rather than

constrained by their deaths’.44 Free from the earthly restraints, the dead as ‘spirits’

gain power to move around, which turned them into ‘the more-than-human characters’

from ‘the less-than-human apparitions of earlier narratives’.45 I agree with Bann that

many of Victorian literary ghosts reveal their potential strength and power by their

physical manifestation and they become increasingly more active and ‘natural’ as if

they were living and walking freely on earth. The dead return to the world with

‘more-than-human’ properties in this sense. However, focusing on the body and its

representations will reveal an opposite tendency toward its depersonalisation,

disconnection, and dysfunction. Ghosts’ free agency of mobility paradoxically

suggests their body’s material and mechanical aspects, which not only distinguish

each individual character but also brings its disintegration with the mind. The body is

not something to gain access to the self, but some incomplete, material substance.

Whereas the active, full-body figure of the ‘ghost’ prevails in cultural manifestations

of the supernatural, the substantial body of literary ghosts loses its physicality.

Thus, considering the role of periodicals as a site of scientific debates, and the

popularity of the literary and cultural forms that drew people’s attentions to human

bodies, the year 1860 is considered to be a turning point of ghost representation. The

literary trend generally changed from the long style of three-decker novels to those

issued in serials and periodicals, and the proliferations of narratives and stories

constantly challenged ghost writers, who kept producing many ghosts. It was difficult

for the ghost writers to prevent their ghosts from being stereotyped, and in the later

part of the century some of them explored the ways of their de-familiarisation by

44 Bann, p.665.
45 Bann, p.665.
30
reviving and parodying the Gothic tradition for the new recognition of the body.

IV. Female writers and ghosts

Before providing a brief abstract of each chapter, the reason for my selection

of the ghost fiction written by the four female writers should be given. First, it is

already a known fact that Victorian female writers played a leading part in the rise in

the popularity of ghost stories and their increase in number. There are many reasons to

consider this happened. From the beginning Gothic romance and supernatural

narratives attracted female readers, and their reading taste and practice in childhood

would have had much influence when some of them later became eminent Victorian

writers, such as the Brontës and Gaskell. The Brontë sisters were reared in the literary

culture of Romanticism, and they were familiar with Gothic romance, too.46 Emily

Brontë created one of the most famous ghosts in her work Wuthering Heights (1848),

and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a fine ghost story called ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852),

which featured a wandering ghost in the wilds whose image was thought to be

influenced by the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw/Linton in Wuthering Heights.47 Both

Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell were conscious of the tradition of Gothic fiction,

but I consider that they were, at the same time, more conscious of departing from the

supernatural gothic and created the ghost with its physicality. Brontë created it in the

framework of realism, and Gaskell, who is one of the first female contributors of ghost

stories in a periodical form, created it in the new style of short fiction.

46 Regarding the Brontë sisters’ reading experience of Gothic romance, Charlotte Brontë mentions
in her letter that she enjoyed reading The Lady’s Magazine in her childhood, which had belonged
to her mother or her aunt. Gothic romances in the magazine were chiefly ‘intended to appeal to a
female audience’ (The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, p.288).
47 For example, Miriam Allott says that Gaskell received from Charlotte Brontë a copy of

Wuthering Heights in 1850, two years before ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ was first published in
Household Words, and it is fairly certain that the work’s ‘Gothic atmosphere of thrills and chills’
took a hint from the novel. (‘Mrs Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story”: A Link between “Wuthering
Heights” and “The Turn of the Screw”’, Notes and Queries (March, 1961, p.101)
31
 Besides the literary tradition, early Victorian female writers seemed to be

comfortable with spiritual and supernatural happenings, including oral tales and

folkloric superstitions such as ghosts and apparitions, dreams and presentiments, and

spirits and black arts, as can be seen in Catherine Crowe’s exploration into those

mysteries. Furthermore, such a writer increasingly contributed to magazines and

periodicals. In the 1840s, Isabella Romer, who was intrigued by mesmerism, is known

to have contributed her story called ‘The Necromancer’ (1842) and some other stories

to Bentley’s Miscellany. In the 1850s, an increasing number of female novelists,

writers, and journalists contributed their ghost stories, or ghost-associated stories, to

Household Words: Catherine Crowe, Harriet Martineau, Eliza Lynn Linton, Louisa

Stuart Costello, Dinah Craik, and Elizabeth Gaskell, to name a few. Dickens

encouraged female writers to write ghost stories; Craik’s work was praised by him as

‘the best Ghost story […] that ever was written, and with an idea in it remarkably

new’48; Gaskell was famously called ‘my Scheherazade’ by him and created many

ghost and ghostly stories for him. Some others seem to have written stories of horror

and terror, including ‘Mrs Bell’, whose works ‘all have an atmosphere of mystery and

terror’49, and some spiritualists, including Anna Blackwell, contributed their verses

and articles in this periodical.

Among these female contributors to Household Words, Elizabeth Gaskell is

important in that she is now considered to be one of the forerunners who produced the

literary work of a ghost in the form of a fictional ‘story’, which was different from a

folkloric tale and a supernatural anecdote, or even different from an earlier mode of a

supernatural tale that was inserted as an episode in a longer story. It is true that most

of her ghostly stories assume a form of folkloric tale or Gothic tale by preparing a

48 Anne Lohrli, Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859: Conducted by Charles Dickens:
Table of Contents, List of Contributors and Their Contributions Based on the Household Words
Office Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 381.
49 Lohrli, p.205.

32
storyteller to narrate his/her story and making it associated with an oral history ready

to serve as a tale to be told around the fireside, but each of them is treated as an

independent, complete, and ‘self-sufficient’ story when published. 50 Gaskell created

the ‘authentic’ ghost fiction together with Dickens, which was a kind that displayed a

different taste from that of Crowe, who ‘was the first to write about ghosts, not as

spooks, Christmas spirits, moral exempla, or occult avatars, but as scientific

phenomena’. 51 If Romer and Crowe are considered to be the ‘scientific’ experts of

spirits and ghosts as representative female writers, Gaskell is the female forerunner of

‘authentic’ ghost stories.

My interest is in the trends of ghost fiction as literature, and because I intend to

analyse ghost representation carefully in each text, I limit the number of writers and

their texts, although I consider there to be a linkage of literary influence among the

four writers I have selected. Brontë and Gaskell are contemporaneous writers who

began to write their novels in the 1840s, and although Brontë did not survive to see

the popularity of ghost stories and their currency in the form of periodicals, her new

creation of the bodily figure of a ghost in literary work would have been influential to

her family’s friend, Gaskell. These two writers are female representatives of the

literary ghost writers who attempted to raise the physical ghost in their works during

the 1840s and 50s.

On the other hand, Braddon and Riddell are the writers of a new age who

worked as family breadwinners and aimed to be economically independent by their

professional writing, both not only working as contributors but also as female editors

of several periodicals and magazines. Braddon began to publish her ghost stories in

the 1860s, Riddell in the 1870s. They also experienced the emergence of a new

50 Julia Briggs, p.125. Briggs uses this term of ‘self-sufficiency’ to refer to the aesthetics of Edgar
Allan Poe’s short stories in her explanation of his influence on European liteature.
51 Nina Auerbach, ‘Ghosts of Ghosts’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32(2004), 277-84

(p.283).
33
literary style of ‘short fiction’ and made use of it for their literary experiment, or even

as an outlet for their voices calling for social reform and economic activity. The

historical significance of ‘short stories’ has been argued as follows: ‘the short story’s

contemporary written form did not emerge alongside the establishment of the novel,

but rather flourished through the medium of the periodical’; 52 and the Victorian

periodical offered a discursive space to readers and its ‘public forum […] allowed

literature to take part in the construction of social meanings’, displaying the unique

and potential capacities of ‘short fiction’ different from those of novels and

nonfiction. 53

The short story especially appealed to Victorian female writers: ‘[d]ue to its

qualities of symbolic suggestiveness, intensity, and rejection of novelistic premises

and structures, the short story provides women a venue in which to represent their

alienation from dominant ideologies of femininity’.54 Gaskell also brought forward

some social issues of family and domesticity by contributing to the periodicals already

in the 1850s and early 60s, and in this sense Gaskell, Braddon, and Riddell were all

involved in the development of ‘short fiction’, which served as both ‘social

commentary’ and ‘aesthetic experimentation’ during the period, and these short stories

later experienced further development in the age of modernism. 55 Exploring the

representation of ghosts created by these four female writers would suggest that their

fictional ghost is not only a device for popular entertainment and consumption but

also one of their artistic devices, and this enables us to note that ghost fiction also

helped to promote a new literary trend.

Diana Wallace says that ‘[t]he short story has long been associated with the

52 Kate Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930: Reclaiming Social Space
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.11.
53 Krueger, p.10.
54 Krueger, pp.3-4.
55 Krueger, p.11.

34
marginalised—Irish, black, post-colonial and, especially, women writers’. 56 Indeed,

Victorian ghost stories have long been ‘doubly marginalised’ because they deal with

fantasy and the supernatural in the unconventional form of short fiction. 57 Since the

late twentieth century, criticism has had a tendency to discuss Victorian female ghost

writers in the lineage of the literary tradition of ‘women’s writing’ that can be traced

back to the female Gothic writing in the eighteenth century. The term ‘female Gothic’

is still important and influential in women’s writings of ghosts, fantasy, sensation, and

the supernatural, since it has revealed what has been the most important themes and

critical matter for Victorian women and women writers, that is, women’s fears of and

escape from ‘the physical and psychological confinements of the domestic and of

femininity as conventionally defined’. 58

However, although my thesis focuses on female writers, I do not intend to

reveal women’s repressed desire that lies in the deep structure of the text, as has much

been explored in Vanessa Dickerson’s influential book on Victorian ghost novels and

stories. She powerfully argues in her book that it was ‘not men’s but women’s ghost

stories that truly treated the return of the repressed and the dispossessed’ and that

ghost stories were ‘a fitting medium for eruptions of female libidinal energy, of

thwarted ambitions, of cramped egos’. 59 Ghosts symbolise women’s fears and fantasy

of escape, which are typically expressed in the gothic story where ‘the seduced,

betrayed, persecuted, wronged, or dispossessed return to right or avenge their wrongs

or repossess what has been taken away’, thus uncovering ‘unequal power relations’.60

The form of short fiction, with its very qualities of dreamy structure and

56 Diana Wallace, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 6(2004),
57-68 (p.58).
57 Wallace, p.57.
58 Pykett, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel: Second Edition, p.217.
59 Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p.8.

60 Pykett, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel: Second Edition, p.216.

35
illogical time frame, has also been associated with the ‘fitting medium’ to represent

those female desires. I agree with the criticism asserting that Victorian ghost fiction

has served historically for ‘women’s writings’ that helped create ‘a public discourse

for voicing feminine concerns’.61 However, my interest and subject in this thesis lies

in physical bodies of ghosts and their transition. The body of a female ghost, or the

ghostly body of a woman, will be the subject in my discussion, but it is not for

identifying it with the actual female body or treating it politically or metaphysically.

My aim is to explore in detail how each author treats the human body and transforms

it into the ghost’s body, or how the ghost’s body can illuminate each author’s idea of

the human body. Ghosts can be the women’s wielding power of ‘revenge’ that

‘mirror[s] their creator’s own desire to avenge a keenly felt deprivation’ in her society,

but the point is how such a body can have the material and physical substance.62 I

hope to show the materialistic body of ghosts represented by the four writers.

From these viewpoints, I propose that there is a certain shift in the physical

representation of literary ghosts in the mid-nineteenth century. In my attempt to clarify

this, I will focus on the ghost fiction published during the 1840s-80s and look into the

texts chronologically. The first chapter, titled ‘Ghost and Vampire in Wuthering

Heights’ focuses on Emily Brontë’s representation of ghosts in relation to the figure of

a vampire. The second chapter, titled ‘Ghosts, Mothers, and Female Servants in

Gaskell’s Short Fiction’ argues the significance of bodies in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost

fiction, extending the argument to the representation of female bodies in her other

ghostly stories and novella. The third chapter treats Braddon’s ghost stories, and as the

title ‘Ghosts as “Shadows” in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Ghost Stories’ shows, I

discuss the less bodily figure of the ghosts and its relation to emotion by referring to

61 Dickerson, p.6.
62 Dickerson, p.146.
36
her sensation novels. The last chapter, ‘Ghosts and Houses in Charlotte Riddell’s

Ghost Fiction’, studies Riddell’s ghost stories. Her ghosts are less frightening and

increasingly more ‘natural’ in their appearance to the witnesses, and I consider that

Riddell’s physical ghosts no longer function by manifesting their bodies and that the

significance of their bodies is redirected to the physical structure of old houses, which

works in vain to have a frightening and sensational impact on the person who

witnesses ghosts in these houses. In this chapter I do not focus on the physique of

ghosts but instead discuss how Riddell uses the conventional literary tradition of the

Gothic and how she conceptualises ghosts in the systems of housing and finance.

Each chapter’s argument is based on textual analysis, and I choose the limited

number of fiction and scenes for this purpose. Ghost fiction is a genre that observes a

certain principle in terms of making plots, setting situations, and creating an

atmosphere. Most of the ghost fiction I choose observes this basic principle, and my

textual analysis will reveal how each author follows it. However, it is not to confirm

the principle, but to realise how small depictions and effects of dramatisation reflect

each author’s interest in ghosts and their literary representations. I intend to note some

words or expressions that might have been overlooked so far and look into some

subtle and small depictions concerning the ghosts’ appearance. I will also combine the

textual analysis with social and historical discussions by inserting biographical details,

referring to the contemporary scientific or aesthetic issues, and comparing the fiction

with the other genre of novels. The following chapters provide the detailed examples

of what I have argued in this introduction, and they aim to provide a clue to one of the

changes that happened in the ghost representation around the mid-nineteenth century.

37
 Chapter1

Ghost and Vampire in Wuthering Heights

Many scenes in Wuthering Heights feature Nelly Dean referring to Heathcliff

by the names of literary and supernatural creatures, such as ‘fiend’, ‘goblin’, and

‘Eastern prince’, which exemplify her rich literary resources and knowledge of

legends. Although Heathcliff is a human character, his unknown origin and dark

potential to cause many misfortunes and deaths induce Nelly to associate him with

supernatural creatures, at one point calling him a ‘vampire’, as is shown in the

quotation below. Again, this suggests a wide range in her reading experience, which

might include series of literary texts written by Romantic writers. Two days before

Heathcliff dies, Nelly associates him with a vampire after she watches him for a while:

We heard him mount the stairs directly; he did not proceed to his
ordinary chamber, but turned into that with the panelled bed—its window,
as I mentioned before, is wide enough for anybody to get through, and it
struck me that he plotted another midnight excursion, which he had
rather we had no suspicion of.
“Is he a ghoul or a vampire?” I mused. I had read of such hideous,
incarnate demons.1

It is understood that Nelly imagines Heathcliff as such from her own ‘reading’

experience and knowledge of vampires, not from the oral tradition of Yorkshire

supernatural stories with which she, as a nurse and housekeeper, should be more

familiar. Nelly is proud of her new literary knowledge from books after her move to

Thrushcross Grange, saying to Lockwood, ‘You could not open a book in this library

that I have not looked into, and got something out of also’. 2 It is thus implied that

1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.330. Italics mine.
2 Brontë, p.61.
38
Nelly reads many books in the library of the Grange, a place that creates a contrast

with Wuthering Heights, representing a realm where the written tradition and literature

outweigh and surpass oral tradition and supernatural lore. The Grange is where

Edgar’s mastery is considered to be ‘contained in books, wills, testaments, […]

documents, languages’ and Romantic literature, in particular, as Susan Gilbert

suggests, appearing to favour female education, since Catherine’s stay there affects her

decision to marry Edgar, thereby effectively ‘indoctrinating her with the literary

romanticism deemed suitable for young ladies’.3 Nelly may also have been influenced

by this literary tradition after moving to the Grange.

On the other hand, Nelly’s folkloric imagination also keeps haunting her and

many other characters in Wuthering Heights, for example, the servant Joseph, who is

obsessed with shadows of demons, witches, and goblins that he thinks can snatch

away one’s body and soul. Catherine and Heathcliff are brought up with local

supernatural tales that fuel their childhood play and entertainment and also feed

Catherine’s wild imagination on her deathbed. Nelly is frightened of ghosts and

goblins, as the local people, ‘country folks’, normally are. In the text of Wuthering

Heights, at least two genres of supernatural and imaginary creatures coexist, one of

which springs from a literary association with Romantic literature, which further

extends to foreign legends and anecdotes, for example, the story of an Eastern ghoul

and prince. The other arises from the folkloric and oral superstitions tied to goblins

and fairies, which are bound to the locality of Yorkshire. Nancy Armstrong’s article,

one of the earliest to use an approach of cultural studies to Wuthering Heights,

identifies the narrator, Lockwood, as a Victorian tourist and folklorist who describes

Yorkshire people and their culture from his own aesthetic viewpoints and frames them

3 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000),
p.277, 281.
39
into ‘a peripheral territory’ in the mind of the educated.4

Supernatural creatures and ghosts in Wuthering Heights are mostly derived

from these two different sources, and these creatures help support and reinforce the

binary opposition in the world that the text displays, the Heights and the Grange, the

oral and written traditions, the folkloric and the literary, or ‘labour and culture,

bondage and freedom, Nature and artifice’, as Terry Eagleton names, which all appear

as entities that should not intersect as ‘dialectical negations’.5 However, just as these

oppositions find a subtle way of settling into the form of the resolution of a happy

marriage between Hareton Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, and the ‘negations’ of each

appear to be at once ‘subtly matched, mutually reflective’, so these sources of ghosts

cannot be easily demarcated and differentiated.6 Particularly, by way of exploring the

most profound enigma in the text, that is, the mysterious apparition of Catherine to

Lockwood, which I will explore closely in this chapter, it can be understood that

Catherine’s ‘ghost’ reveals itself in this text as an ambivalent manifestation of a

creature that crosses the boundary between the literary and the folkloric.

Catherine’s ghost has long been discussed in its relation to the Gothic tradition

and seen as one of the fantastic forms that represses some dark power that might

threaten the rational world. Catherine’s supernatural existence appears in a sudden

transformation from a tree branch to icy fingers, and this event happens in the

innermost room within the isolated house of the Heights; this fantastic transformation

from a tree to a human child in such a secret part of the house can be seen as one of

the Gothic characters. Furthermore, framed within the solid structure of realism, the

event’s ‘uncanniness’ likely has been treated as the ‘otherness’ lurking in the text,

4 Nancy Armstrong, ‘Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and
Photography’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 25 (1992), 245-267 (p.256).
5 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (New York: Palgrave, 2005),

p.105.
6 Terry Eagleton, p.105.

40
indicating some unspoken or unarticulated world somewhere beyond the realistic

narratives of Lockwood and Nelly; for example, it can be the ‘otherness’ of a woman’s

repressed emotion and unfulfilled desire to be free from social confines; or it can be

an alternative voice to the male writing confined within the symbolic order.7

Catherine’s ghost has been seen working in the tradition of the ‘female Gothic’ that

‘enacts fantasies of female power in the heroine’s courage and enterprise, while

simultaneously, or by turns, representing the female condition as both confinement

and refuge’.8 Throughout such criticism, Catherine’s ghost is likely to be viewed as

the symbolic pivot of the ‘uncanny’ power that subverts the existing system, that is, as

‘the return of the past’, and, thus, it always has been a spectre charged with

metaphorical significance. Because of the complicated structure of the novel, the

empowerment of the ghost has been interpreted metaphysically.

On the other hand, the time when Wuthering Heights was published was also

the time when there was a surging popularity and proliferation of ghosts in the

fictional world, and as Jennifer Bann argues, these literary ghosts were beginning to

be empowered to act physically, free from the ‘long tradition of the limited dead’.9

Victorian ghosts began to ‘walk’ as agents, with their own power and physicality,

showing the potential for their ‘existence’ after death. Hence, this chapter aims to

provide a different aspect on the ‘power’ of Catherine’s ghost and to show that the

embodiment not only succeeds the Gothic literary tradition but also reflects the

contemporary views of ghosts and the dead.

7 There are many books and articles which treat Catherine’s ghost as a figuration of a female desire,
starting with Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic; among them, for example, Margaret
Homans argues that the nature, from which Catherine’s ghost appears, belongs to mothers and that
it is the object of mothers’ yearning, represented as the threat that is posed to ‘articulation within
the symbolic order’ (73). (Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1986)
8 Lyn Pykett, ‘Gender and Genre in “Wuthering Heights”: Gothic Plot and Domestic Fiction’, in

New Casebooks: Wuthering Heights, ed. by Patsy Stoneman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993),
pp.86-99 (p.90).
9 Jennifer Bann, ‘Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the

Nineteenth-Century Specter’, Victorian Studies, 51(2009), 663-85 (p.663).

41
 This chapter consists of two parts: the first part discusses a process in which

Nelly comes to identify Heathcliff with a figure of a vampire. Her moving to

Thrushcross Grange provides her with a new source of imagination, and following the

process will reveal a certain shift in her imaginary figurations of the dead. I will first

show that the vampire she particularly associates with Heathcliff is fundamentally

different from other supernatural creatures she has in mind, and then will follow the

shift in detail. Some of the sections in the first part offer the detailed explanation of

folkloric creatures and any other associations related to death, but it is for highlighting

the idiosyncrasy of the vampire that is achieved after accumulating various images of

the dead in Nelly’s mind. It is also to show that the folkloric and the literary are not

easy to demarcate in this new figure. The second part explores the mysterious bodies

of Heathcliff and Catherine; one is the dying body and the other is the ghost’s body. I

will argue that the contemporary ideas of materialistic bodies are reflected in these

representations, which have a certain connection in terms of vampiric features.

The chapter aims to explore Catherine’s ghost by examining popular images

and ideas concerning death during the time when secularism and materialism were

still in the bud before the power of Victorian science really manifested itself among

the lives of ordinary people. I consider that Emily Brontë is a crucial writer in that she

revives the literary meaning of ‘ghosts’ as ‘the dead’, representing the material

existence of ‘body’. Nelly’s curious reference to a ‘vampire’ will be an important clue

to the unique representation of the haunting ‘ghost’ in the world of Wuthering Heights.

I. From a Goblin to a Vampire: A Change in Nelly’s Conception of the Dead

1. Nelly and Romantic literature

A vampire is one of the supernatural creatures with which Nelly particularly

42
associates Heathcliff. Although Heathcliff is not an imaginary being, Nelly is often as

terrified of him as she is of ghosts and goblins. For her, Heathcliff is something

mysterious and uncontrollable. However, Nelly associates Heathcliff more often with

figures of ‘goblins’ during his lifetime because these creatures are known for being

malicious and violent. Nelly’s images of Heathcliff first derive from traditional

folkloric sources, such as ominous animals and dark fairies, which are invoked by her

imagination and grounded in her familiarity with local tales. Other people often call

Heathcliff simply a beast (for example, Isabella calls him ‘a brute beast’10), while

Nelly particularly compares him to supernatural creatures that have some sinister

evocation, rather than just wild and savage animals. For example, when Isabella falls

in love with Heathcliff, Nelly warns her: ‘[h]e’s a bird of bad omen: no mate for

you’.11 In the folkloric tradition, some birds are thought to be sacred; a robin, for

instance, is thought to be ‘ominous of death if he taps at a window or comes into the

house’.12 Things actually occur as Nelly has feared and prophesied, and Catherine dies

after Heathcliff is allowed to enter the house. While Catherine is dying, Heathcliff’s

violent behaviour is compared to ‘a mad dog’, and he not only ‘gnashed’ and ‘foamed’,

but also ‘gathered her [Catherine] to him with greedy jealousy’. 13 The Black Dogs of

English folklore have violent features, such as large teeth and claws; for instance, a

hellhound called Barghest in tales from northern England is said to have these features.

Nelly also avoids contact with Heathcliff, as can be seen typically in the scene when

she is shocked to see Heathcliff on the threshold of Wuthering Heights instead of

Hindley, running away from him and ‘feeling as scared as if I [Nelly] had raised a

goblin’.14 An intruder into the family like Heathcliff is easily taken to be an

10 Brontë, p.170.
11 Brontë, p.103.
12 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1977), p.80.
13 Brontë, p.160.
14 Brontë, p.110.

43
incarnation of evil fairy, or rather, a messenger of death, and this kind of association is

not uncommon among working-class people, whose ideas are likely to be influenced

by local superstitions and folkloric tales.

It is not until Heathcliff experiences some change, ‘a strange change

approaching’ near his end, that Nelly associates him with a vampire.15 For some time

before he dies, Heathcliff starts going out at midnight to seek something and then

refuses to eat food. Furthermore, Nelly becomes conscious of Heathcliff’s physical

appearance, rather than his avenging behaviour. She particularly notices his ‘teeth

visible, now and then, in a kind of smile’ and explains, seemingly perplexed, his

body’s unnatural and convulsive movements: ‘his frame shivering, not as one shivers

with chill or weakness, but as a tight-stretched cord vibrates—a strong thrilling, rather

than trembling’.16 She further notes his unnatural breathing, accompanied by a deep

breath that almost sounds like a groan.17 Nelly detects some features that are quite

new to her sensations, inspiring her imagination and her memory of reading on the

figure of a vampire.

It should be noted that the late eighteenth century and the turn of the

nineteenth century, when Wuthering Heights is set, and the first half of the nineteenth

century, when author Emily Brontë lived, are very important time for the vampire

movement in Britain, an era when vampire figure’s popular appearance shifted from

folklore to literature. According to James B. Twitchell, the folkloric origins of the

literary vampire go back to some ancient tales and legends from Eastern Europe,

particularly in the areas of Hungary, Greece, and Turkey, and the first scholarly

research started in Germany and France in the early eighteenth century. The English

word ‘vampire’ first appeared during that time, and the word gained currency because

15 Brontë, p.323.
16 Brontë, p.328.
17 Brontë, p.332.

44
of the influence of the ‘great wave of vampire mania in Central and Eastern Europe in

the 1730s’, where many serious discussions about the vampire’s existence and

characters flourished in local reports, treatises, and literature. 18 Although the word

‘vampire’ seems to have been soon introduced in Britain, the same ‘mania’ did not

really reach that far at the time, and the legends of vampires still remained in the

‘dreamscapes of folk consciousness’.19 Twitchell explains that ‘the immediate

predecessors of the English literary vampire were German’ and that it wasn’t until the

turn of the nineteenth century that the first result of the continental influence was

materialised in Britain.20 It is commonly said that ‘Robert Southey’s epic

poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) arguably features the first vampire in English

literature’.21 The work also contains Southey’s ‘copious gloss cover[ing] vampire

practices in Hungary, Greece and Turkey’, which was ‘the most encyclopaedic prose

description’ at the time.22 Vampires appeared in this way in ballads and poems around

the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain, and they came to be one of the famous

literary inventions through a series of works by Romantic poets and prose writers.

Byron’s ‘The Giaour’ (1813) has been interpreted as representing the literary

prototype of vampirism, and John Polidori, who wrote The Vampyre (1819), is

considered to be his successor.

Hence, even though the early nineteenth century was a period when the study

of folklore became an established academic field in England, the vampire was viewed

as more of a literary product and more continental and exotic than something folkloric,

18 James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1981), p.7, p.33. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word
first appeared in 1745, although its second edition set its date at 1734. (Oxford English Dictionary
<http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/>[accessed 30 August 2017].
19 Twitchell, p.103.
20 Twitchell, p.33.
21 ‘Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians: Collections items’ in British Library <

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-appearance-of-the-vampire-in-english-literature>[accessed
30 August 2017]
22 Twitchell, p.36.

45
and thus it was differentiated from other supernatural creatures, such as goblins and

fairies. This suggests that Nelly’s idea of a vampire is based on her reading of

Romantic literature. The common literary depiction of vampires details a cruel and

vengeful figure, an image influenced heavily by the solitary dark figure of a Byronic

hero. Byron’s name first popularised this continental monster; he ‘constructed the

skeleton that would support the vampire in its many reincarnations’ and had a huge

influence on the establishment of its physically and bloodily featured images, such as

the cursed body reviving in a tomb and the act of sucking the blood of loved ones.23

The ‘ghoul’, the other supernatural creature that occurs to Nelly’s mind, originates

from the Eastern stories of the Arabian Nights, and it is also associated with Byron

because he names it in ‘The Giaour’ as a kind of the same family of a vampire.

Romantic references cannot be avoided when Nelly notices Heathcliff’s mysterious

behaviour and physical change, who is soon to die from an unknown cause.

2. Nelly’s status in Wuthering Heights

Thus Nelly’s association indicates a new phase and development at the sight of

Heathcliff’s physical changes. Although vampires and goblins are both associated with

dead people and they are both monstrous incarnations, it should be noted that they

have very different origins in their cultural contexts. As for the permeation of

continental folklore and tales into English lore, Katharine M. Briggs explains the

Eastern influence on English fairies, and she argues that, whereas the introduction of

The Arabian Nights Entertainment into Europe was a great success in France in the

late seventeenth century and that some of the stories were ‘soon naturalised into

English nurseries, and reproduced in chap-books’, Eastern spirits, such as ‘jinns’, in

the tales ‘had no influence on the English fairies, and in no way modified them […];

23 Twitchell, p.75.
46
the tradition was too alien’.24 If the English goblin and the continental vampire really

did not happen to merge, then it follows that Nelly actually goes through a certain

process of change in her visualisation of dead people and images of ‘death’ after she

moves from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange.

Since Nelly grows up from a teen girl into a mature woman, from a nursemaid

to a housekeeper, in the course of the novel, while facing many instances of death and

parting, her final acquisition of an image of a vampire at Heathcliff’s deathbed shows

a summation of her knowledge and imagination on death and the dead, and this

process certainly reveals the complexity of her mind. In the criticism to date, Nelly’s

narration has been discussed in many ways, and it is now understood that she is a

somewhat unreliable narrator who not only lacks the position to be able to see and

understand everything from an omniscient perspective, but also can be intentionally

secretive and does not necessarily tell the reader everything. She tries to be moral and

wise, but she has her own principles and ambitions, as well as prejudices and

intolerance. Although she starts out as a nursemaid, she appears to remain distanced

from her own social class. She seemingly has a desire to manage not only the work of

housekeeping at the Grange but also various other domestic affairs, including the

family’s finances, property management, nursing and guardianship, and

re-organisation of family relationships as a representative of the house. The kind of

studies that foreground Nelly’s ambition and inwardness have revealed her

individuality as one of the main protagonists in the novel.

On the other hand, Nelly’s overall character has been still viewed as an enigma,

or a revealing contradiction. Her underlying motives are partly detected by the

superficial integrity of her narration, but they are also complicated by her essentially

ambivalent (or incompatible) status involved by living with the two families. Nelly is

24 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, p.178.

47
a contradictory figure in the text, who is ‘both servant and family, unschooled and

well-read, rustic and intelligent’.25 She originally serves as a local, lower-class

nursemaid, but she speaks with ‘a few provincialisms of slight consequence’ and can

read literature, presumably including high literature. 26 Paula M. Krebs points to the

liminal status of the text of Wuthering Heights and argues that ‘[f]olklore and fiction

[of this text] uncomfortably meet in Nelly, and the intersection produces the central

tension’.27 As Krebs argues, it is true that Nelly’s variance in her positions suggests

the tension that is led to produce a certain disruption of the text, and a further act of

exploring this tension might lead to reveal her contradictory status as an individual

character. However, what I will argue in this chapter is based on the idea that Nelly’s

personal experience and perceptions can also be considered tokens of her own

development and self-cultivation, and that they can work as one of the many clues that

allow readers to interpret the enigma lying in the figure of Catherine’s ghost.

Following Nelly’s personal ideas and examining a certain change in her conception of

the dead would provide a hint to the power that the ghost embodies.

3. Conceptions of the dead

3.1. Conceptions of the dead: folkloric images in Wuthering Heights

In terms of the imaginative figuration of the dead, there are two principal types

of figures in the text of Wuthering Heights: one is the image of ‘goblins’ that

particularly governs the people who are raised in or continue to inhabit Wuthering

Heights, and the other is the image of restful ‘spirits’ that the people living in

Thrushcross Grange more generally associate with in thinking about the dead.

For the people living in Wuthering Heights, one’s soul is not peaceful after

25 Paula M. Krebs, ‘Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives’ Tales in Wuthering
Heights’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 26 (1998), 41-52 (p.48).
26 Brontë, p.61.
27 Krebs, p.48.

48
death, always haunting the family with its different shapes and forms. Goblins, imps,

witches, and demons, whose existence is associated with the underworld, are the main

figures to which most people in the Heights occasionally refer. In the world of folklore,

these goblins, or the ‘ancient gods or devils’, are often thought of as ‘ghosts’, since

‘the distinction between the fairies and the dead is vague and shifting’. 28 Generally,

goblins are considered to be dark fairies or evil spirits, but among them, brownies and

hobgoblins are often identified as ghosts, as they always haunt the family and/or their

house.

According to Katharine Briggs, there are two main types of English ‘haunting’

fairies: ‘the ancestral fairy who is attached to a family, and who most commonly

bewails coming tragedy or occasionally gives advice […], and the Brownie or

hobgoblin who performs tasks, and attaches itself sometimes to a family and

sometimes to a place’.29 The children raised in the Heights are familiar with these

types of fairies and goblins haunting the family or the place as an ancestral ghost or a

domestic ghost. For example, on Christmas Eve, Heathcliff’s ‘cakes and cheese

remained on the table all night, for the fairies’; these fairies probably belong to the

latter type of the domestic fairy, since it is known that brownies do some domestic

chores in exchange for food.30 In Scottish folklore, it is a popular belief that ‘brownies

are semi-human and often assist in household chores in exchange for bread and a cup

of milk’.31 As another example, when Catherine is in delirium, she is frightened by her

own face reflected in the mirror, which can be associated with the legend of the female

Banshee, one of the typical ancestral ghosts in Irish folklore, foretelling the coming

death of her mortal kindred. It is also a general belief that ‘evil spirits could come to

28 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, p.51.

29 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, p.25.
30 Brontë, p.54.
31 Monica Germanà, ‘The Ghost and the Brownie: Scottish Influences on Emily Brontë’, Women’s

Writing, 14 (2007), 91-116 (p.109).

49
reside in the reflected image’ and haunt the dying.32 A doppelgänger is another

common type of sinister fairy, and in Yorkshire, the ‘waff’ is the name of such ‘a

wraith or double’ that is ‘believed to be a death token and may be seen either by the

doomed man or by a friend’.33 Catherine and Heathcliff, during their childhood, not

only play around Penistone Craggs, searching for fairies and fairy-like small animals

under the caves, and they also search for ‘ghosts’ in Gimmerton Kirk: ‘[w]e’ve braved

its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them

to come’.34 Their search in the churchyard is treated the same as their hunt in the caves,

and their notions of ‘ghosts’ are necessarily influenced by their images of these

‘haunting’ fairies.

It is evident that Nelly’s images of ghosts are initially based on these haunting

fairies because she is brought up in Wuthering Heights. Nelly is considered to be

around the same age as Hindley. She describes her own childhood as follows: ‘I was

almost always at Wuthering Heights; because my mother had nursed Mr. Hindley

Earnshaw, that was Hareton’s father, and I got used to playing with the children’. 35 In

her childhood she often played with Hindley at their favourite spot, which was near

the stone pillar of a guidepost. A certain strange event related to this memory of

playing with her quasi-brother Hindley is once told to Lockwood, while she excuses

herself for not being much connected with the affairs in concern; it occurred when she

visited the spot after she moved to the Heights:

I gazed long at the weather-worn block; and, stooping down,

perceived a hole near the bottom still full of snail-shells and pebbles
which we [Hindley and Nelly] were fond of storing there with more

32 Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), p. 58.
33 Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other

Supernatural Creatures (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p.425.

34 Brontë, p.126.
35 Brontë, pp.34-35.

50
 perishable things—and, as fresh as reality, it appeared that I beheld my
early playmate seated on the withered turf, his dark, square head bent
forward, and his little hand scooping out the earth with a piece of slate.
“Poor Hindley!” I exclaimed, involuntarily.
I started—my bodily eye was cheated into a momentary belief that
the child lifted its face and stared straight into mine! It vanished in a
twinkling; but, immediately, I felt an irresistible yearning to be at the
Heights. Superstition urged me to comply with this impulse—supposing
he should be dead! I thought—or should die soon!—supposing it were a
sign of death!36

Nelly believes, even momentarily, that she saw a figure of a boy, ‘as fresh as reality’,

playing in the same way as Hindley used to play. This episode illustrates her tenacious

belief in folklore and local superstitions because she describes the scene as if it were

an encounter with a goblin or a doppelgänger, the ‘waff’. The child stares straight into

her face, then vanishes in an instant, which makes her think it should be a sign of

death. This figure should be taken by Nelly to be one of the ‘haunting’ fairies, as it

appears to Hindley’s ‘early playmate’, one of the ‘family’ members who would think

of her as his ‘sister’.

For Nelly, these folkloric creatures are particularly associated with death and

the dead. When she lives in the Heights, she is quite frightened with them, and she

once confesses to Catherine that she is annoyed by ‘ghosts and visions’:

“Oh! don’t, Miss Catherine!” I [Nelly] cried. “We’re dismal enough

without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us. […]” […] I was
superstitious about dreams then, and am still; and Catherine had an
unusual gloom in her aspect, that made me dread something from which I
might shape a prophecy, and foresee a fearful catastrophe. 37

Even with Catherine, she almost conjures some sinister incarnation. The reason why

36 Brontë, pp.108-9.
37 Brontë, pp.79-80.
51
Nelly fears this kind of haunting and dreams is that they will make her possessed by

inauspicious visions of the future. Although she is reasonable enough to dismiss the

folkloric tales and creatures as mere superstitions, she cannot dismiss what she thinks

she saw, what she thinks that visited her, such as dreams and goblins, as mere illusions

or fancy. Goblins and ominous dreams are something to be taken as material signs of

the unknown future.

Some ‘haunting’ fairies in England and Scotland have been considered to be

‘the souls of unbaptised children’, and some folkloric spirits as Will o’ the Wisp are

told to be the wandering souls that ‘can get entry into neither Heaven nor Hell’. 38 The

Banshee, as an ancestral ghost, sometimes assumes the form of a girl who died young,

or of a woman who died in childbirth. 39 All are considered to be ghosts, that is,

‘incarnated’ ghosts wandering around without peaceful souls. It is implied that most

people from the Heights associate not only death but also dead people with these kinds

of ‘incarnated’ ghosts, and they are inevitably frightened by their sinister appearance

that retains some forms of bodies. When the inhabitants of the Heights see terribly

horrifying people, they are likely to name ‘goblins’, typically represented in the scene

when the baby Hareton, at the sight of his drunken father, suddenly starts ‘screaming

as if I [Hindley] were a goblin’, or in the scene when Nelly is frightened with the

aforementioned appearance of Heathcliff standing at the door.40 It can be understood

that goblins are mostly referred to as a typical example of a visual incarnation and a

threatening other to be expelled.

Imps and demons are also named as the existence that haunts the living and

lure inhabitants to their underworld. Joseph and Hindley often refer to imps, devils,

and witches to curse someone: Joseph threatens the children, saying ‘owd Nick would

38 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, p.52.

39 Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, p.15.
40 Brontë, p. 73.

52
fetch us as sure as we were living’, and his religious fanaticism is an outcome of his

own fears of superstitions handed down through the family, as well as his piety based

on his Bible reading.41 Joseph particularly fears the malignity of witches and demons,

which could appear at any time to drag people to their netherworld. Cathy Linton

(referring to the daughter Catherine) takes advantage of his fears and tells him that she

knows the Black Art, threatening him by a warning, ‘Are you not afraid of being

carried away bodily, whenever you mention the devil’s name?’ or ‘I’ll ask your

abduction as a special favour!’42 Cathy, who grows up in the Grange, knows well that

the Heights is the space surrounded by haunting creatures inspired by old tales, the

den ‘swarming with ghosts and goblins’, and that it can be controlled by taking

advantage of their nameless fears.43 She also threatens Hareton, who rebels against her

in spite of the class difference between them: ‘I hope his [Lockwood’s] ghost will

haunt you’, which suggests that Heights residents view ghosts and goblins similarly.44

Goblins are thus ominous and fearful creatures that should be avoided, as they

bring death and can snatch away one’s whole body, carrying it into their current

habitat. The place can be a fairy world or a netherworld, whichever place would be

farthest away from the heaven of Christianity and not far from, or rather contiguous

with, the living world. Theses visions of incarnated ghosts wandering and haunting

around the living world continue to be influential in shaping Nelly’s later conception

of the dead, which I will argue in the following section 3-3. For family members at

Wuthering Heights, these incarnations are sources that fuel their notions of death and

their imaginings of the dead, whose wandering souls and bodies could be found any

time close at hand, in the liminal space between the human world and underworld.

41 Brontë, p. 20.
42 Brontë, p. 13.
43 Brontë, p. 25.
44 Brontë, p. 15.

53
3.2. Conceptions of the dead: ‘spiritual’ images in Thrushcross Grange

On the other hand, for the upper-class people in Thrushcross Grange, fairies

only belong to the world of children, and they are not as influential on their images of

the dead. The books in the Grange library certainly educate these people, who do not

confuse supernatural tales handed down in the oral tradition with their general faith in

Christianity, in which the ‘spirit’ is more of a concern than the body. Their common

image of the dead is a peaceful ‘spirit’, which is evident in Edgar Linton’s views of

Catherine’s death. After Catherine dies, Nelly describes Edgar’s state of mind

compared with that of Heathcliff:

But he [Edgar] was too good to be thoroughly unhappy long. He

didn’t pray for Catherine’s soul to haunt him. Time brought resignation,
and a melancholy sweeter than common joy. He recalled her memory
with ardent, tender love, and hopeful aspiring to the better world, where,
he doubted not, she was gone.45

Whereas Heathcliff believes in the ‘ghost’ as something wandering the earth and

haunting him, Edgar avoids the idea of the soul’s haunting so as not to add to the

agony of the pain he already suffers from the loss of his wife.

Heathcliff’s firm belief in ‘ghosts’ and their ‘existence’ can be understood in

such expressions as his painful crying for Catherine: ‘Catherine Earnshaw, may you

not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me, then! […] I

believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any

form—drive me mad!’46 He does yearn for the ‘existence’ of Catherine’s ghost,

whatever ‘form’ she might assume, whatever pain he may suffer bodily and mentally.

Thus, Heathcliff’s image of ‘ghosts’ is deeply associated with the ‘form’, some

45 Brontë, p. 183.
46 Brontë, p. 167.
54
material embodiment to be visualised for human beings, or some bodily incarnation

that can be at least perceived and experienced like creatures of ‘goblins’.

Monica Germanà argues that ‘ghosts’ in Wuthering Heights are influenced by

Brontë’s familiarity with Scottish folklore and fairy legends, especially with some

supernatural motifs found in James Hogg’s fiction, which she would have acquired

from reading Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Both Hogg’s texts and Wuthering

Heights are characteristic of ‘[t]he combination of supernatural elements pertaining to

oral and folk tradition and the careful psychological handling of such inexplicable

events’; and the ghostly apparition of Catherine, which appears as something very

‘real’ to Heathcliff, ‘challenges the boundaries of human consciousness as the place

where the two possibilities [of the “real” and the “imagined”] ultimately merge’.47

That is, Heathcliff’s image of the dead and ghosts is such a realistic one appealing to

his sight and senses that it easily can deceive or madden his own perceptions and

consciousness; their embodied ‘forms’ apparently remain on earth and ‘walk’ like

semi-human goblins and fairy creatures.

On the other hand, Nelly, when she starts working at Thrushcross Grange,

seems to side with Edgar when Catherine dies, sympathising with him and learning to

accept that the ‘ghost’ of Catherine could neither be embodied nor visualised. This can

be a contradictory belief against Catherine’s will, since she affirms she would not rest

when she dies, exclaiming ‘they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church

down over me, but I won’t rest till you [Heathcliff] are with me’.48 Even so, her

peaceful soul, Nelly considers, should have gone to heaven, like that of any other

good Christian. While watching the chamber after her death, she observes her dead

face as being ‘of perfect peace’:

47 Germanà, p.105.
48 Brontë, p. 126.
55
 Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a
smile, no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared; and
I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay. My mind was never in a
holier frame than while I gazed on that untroubled image of Divine rest. I
instinctively echoed the words she had uttered, a few hours before.
“Incomparably beyond and above us all! Whether still on earth or now in
Heaven, her spirit is at home with God!”49

Whether Catherine’s ‘body’ is lingering on earth or almost reaching heaven, her

‘spirit’ goes directly to the heaven of God, a notion that Nelly is convinced of from the

‘untroubled image of Divine rest’ on Catherine’s face and body in death.

This idea of Nelly’s can be understood as a representation of the common

image and conception of the ‘spirit’ of the dead during the Victorian period, when

middle-class people in particular began to create an ideal image of the ‘spirit’ as

something conciliatory, a spirit that rests in peace after the body dies. Michael

Wheeler points to the significance of Victorian expressions of ‘death’ as ‘sleep’ that

people should not disturb. Their ideal death is ‘a quiet death in [their] own bed’, which

is revealed, Nelly considers, in her dear mistress’s death. 50 Gerhard Joseph and

Herbert F. Tucker, in their article discussing Victorian cultural forms and the social

construction surrounding death, explain that there was an obsession with death during

this period and that the ideal view of death (as well as its doubt) is shown in some

stylised narrative shapes whose habitual rendering is considered to be much

influenced by both Romantic aesthetics and Evangelical beliefs. Among these

aesthetics and beliefs, the ‘beautiful death’, as can be seen signified in the very angelic

face of Catherine, is such a death as ‘something to be eagerly awaited and orchestrated

into the sort of deathbed finale’.51 This notion of death has divine or aestheticised

49 Brontë, p. 164.
50 Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p.62.
51 Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Passing on: Death’, in A Companion to Victorian

56
solemnity, with a full hope for joy in death. Nelly does interpret Catherine’s final

words of ‘incomparably beyond and above us all’ as the exultant and glorious

achievement of hers that finally leads her ‘spirit’ to be with God, and that would have

been fulfilled infallibly upon her death.

The other ideal death to be named during this period is the Evangelical ‘good

death’, which is to be realised at the moment when the dying pass into ‘gleams of that

state of spiritual salvation’ toward ‘a heaven peopled by the loved ones that had died

before them’.52 To guide people to such a ‘good death’, there were ‘numberless

evangelical tracts’ and old instructive works of Christian devotion and virtues used as

references in Anglican homes.53 In these ideas about the ‘beautiful death’ and ‘good

death’, the ‘spirit’ of the dead is evidently something conceptualised rather than

something visualised or incarnated. The hour of death that typifies the Victorian

mainstream, Joseph and Tucker argue, ‘might indeed be worse conceived than as an

habitually rehearsed passage from the one moment to the other, a current from sense

to soul connecting—or hoping to connect—the fleshly with the metaphysical’.54 The

soul goes to heaven, ‘incomparably beyond and above us all’, and the body where it

used to inhabit is ideally turned into something ‘beyond and above’. The real flesh of

the body may fall into decay, but the ‘body’ in heaven ever remains (or is hoped to

remain) beautiful, sacred, and at peace with the soul. In this sense, the body of the

dead in one’s sight cannot be faced directly as it is, and it is rather fictionalised

aesthetically; the dead body cannot retain its literal meaning. On the other hand, the

‘body’ of the ‘spirit’, incapable of being embodied in whatever secular form, is kept

out of sight to keep it beautiful and true; it is placed somewhere afar in ‘silence’ in this

Literature and Culture, ed. by Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 110-24
(p.114).
52 Lutz, Relics of Death, p. 65.
53 Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker, p.114.
54 Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker, p.114.

57
idea of the dead being a ‘spirit’.

Upon Catherine’s death, both Edgar and Nelly thus do not adopt the idea of the

folkloric ghosts. It does not follow that Edgar and Nelly do not believe in the

possibility of the fearful existence of some kinds of ‘ghosts’ somewhere in the world,

but they would not come into line with the common belief of ‘the country folks’, who

‘swear on their Bible that he [Heathcliff’s ghost] walks’.54 In terms of notions of death,

both Edgar and Nelly differentiate themselves from the belief of the lower class. The

image of ‘ghosts’ as goblins or some type of incarnation belongs to local superstitions;

thus, it can be reasonably thought of as preoccupying the minds of the lower class.

This is also paralleled by the sinister meaning of death pertaining to the Victorian

working class, which ‘was decidedly grimmer matter than for their social betters’. 55 In

those times, the idea of happy death with the peaceful ‘spirit’ was influential among

the upper-middle class, people like those living in Thrushcross Grange, although it

could not be avoided in reality that this Evangelical idea was also shared throughout

society and filtered through other classes. For people like Edgar, who is described as a

typical Christian gentleman raised in the literary and cultural tradition of the

Romantics, being ‘hopeful aspiring to the better world’, one’s peaceful spirit must be

something invisible and intangible, placed far away.

It is also noticeable that Edgar’s act of remembering and mourning the dead

again shows a typical example of middle-class behaviour toward the dead. While

remembering Catherine, which can be seen in the description quoted above, Edgar

accepts ‘resignation’ and he seems, as it were, to be in the process of ‘forgetting’.

Catherine is already the object to be ‘recalled’ in his memory, and in a sense, he rather

54 Brontë, p.336.
55 Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker, p.116. Body-snatching was certainly a horror for the
poor and paupers at the time, and their fears in the possibility of their bodies to be gutted for parts
after death and of them to be buried half-living suggest that the meaning of death for the working
class was a matter of their own material bodies.
58
eliminates her from this earth to ‘the better world, where, he doubted not, she was

gone’. How to display one’s private grief in mourning was another obsession during

the Victorian period, and the act of mourning was actually a significant form of

self-preservation. The blessed ‘spirit’ of the loved one has gone to heaven and is safe,

so what people left on earth need to do is to face their own danger of losing their

self-identity; they might fall into deep anguish, or crave the lost one, or they simply

might keep struggling in vain to fill the absence of the lost time and space once shared

in what was thought to be an unbroken continuum of their ordinary lives. Mourning is

paying respect to the dead while disassociating the dead from this world and securing

one’s own identity in society. Joseph and Tucker say mourning has an aspect of being

‘consolatory and restorative’, and they mention regarding the roles of Victorian female

mourners that ‘once the specified period of mourning was past, there set in a no less

binding expectation that the [female] mourner speedily reactivate her discarded social

identity’.56

Edgar also values two things that ‘time’ has brought: ‘resignation’ and

‘melancholy’. This ‘melancholy’ he calls ‘a melancholy sweeter than joy’, and he

seems to be happy while experiencing it. This is also the form common in the

emotional and sentimental rites of Victorian mourning. Victorian people faced such

melancholic feelings and periods by enshrining the dead in their memories. They

dedicated themselves very often to memorial events and other rituals, which are the

means of remembering the dead by transforming them into something material. Death

mementos were treasured personally around that time, and these objects were viewed

as substitutes for the lost bodies. Deborah Lutz explains on the backgrounds and says

that it was the boom during the Enlightenment period of collecting ‘historically

important objects, such as art and antiquities’ that led to the relic culture in the

56 Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker, pp.118-19.

59
nineteenth century: ‘[n]ot only did the collecting of valuable items become common

practice, but […] the collecting of personal bric-a-brac […] became more and more

fashionable throughout the Romantic period, peaking during the mid-Victorian era’.57

Hence, when facing death, private objects associated with the deceased replaced loss,

and then merged in life: ‘[r]elic culture expressed a willingness to dwell with loss

itself, to linger over the evidence of death’s presence woven into the texture of life,

giving that life one of its essential meanings’. 58 These objects were necessary for the

bereaved to continue with their lives, and furthermore, to keep in distance the real and

literal body of the deceased.

3.3. Conceptions of the dead: Nelly’s own ideas

Edgar thus represents one of the typical notions of death and follows the

common forms of mourning, which became popular among the middle class and

upper-middle class from the Romantic period to the mid-nineteenth century. Nelly

also learns this idea and formality, in which the ‘spirit’ is conceptualised and the

‘body’ is unseen and silent. She now appears to have disassociated herself from the

folkloric world and exorcised the haunting creatures and the fearful visions they raise.

In her reply to Lockwood, who says after Heathcliff’s death that the Heights would be

‘[f]or the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it’, Nelly denies such an image of

ghosts by saying, ‘No, Mr. Lockwood, […] I believe the dead are at peace’. 59

However, it seems that she is still unable to get rid of the idea of the embodied and

incarnated ghost completely, and she hopes for a certain embodiment and materiality

to be realised also in heaven. While observing Catherine’s deceased face, she feels ‘an

assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the Eternity they have

57 Lutz, Relics of Death, p. 31.

58 Lutz, Relics of Death, p. 8.
59 Brontë, p. 337.

60
entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in

its fulness’.60 Here, she imagines the afterlife as something analogous to her living

world, where the dead can have their ‘lives’, and love is represented by ‘sympathy’.

She also asks Lockwood, ‘Do you believe such people are happy in the other world,

sir?’61 To this question that asks as if the dead lived somewhere in the same way as the

living, Lockwood does not answer because her words ‘struck me [Lockwood] as

something heterodox’.62

Lutz argues that Nelly’s idea of death is much influenced by Evangelical

beliefs, which became prevalent in a reaction to the ‘Catholic-inflected revival of the

1830s and 1840s’ and ‘spread across all classes and influence the daily lives of

ordinary people’ more widely than the high church movement.63 In these beliefs in the

soul’s salvation, there is an afterlife awaiting us, where loved ones all gather to meet

us again. Lutz further argues that Catherine’s body, or her corpse, works as evidence

of the existence of an afterlife: ‘Nelly finds in the cadaver itself a kind of link to that

place where Catherine seems to still exist’. 64 In these beliefs, the remains locate ‘an

afterlife that kept them enlivened, vigorous, and hence sources of consolation’. 65

Nelly watches Catherine’s deceased face and body and imagines her material

existence, whereas Edgar shuns confronting her body and practices an act of mourning,

which is a process of ‘forgetting’ and distancing her real flesh and figure. For Edgar

the ‘body’ is sacred and unseen, whereas for Nelly the corpse is an object that works

as a source of imagination.

Then it can also be said that Nelly, who might be an average believer in

Evangelicalism, is still under the influence of the folkloric idea of the ghost as goblin,

60 Brontë, p. 165.
61 Brontë, p. 165.
62 Brontë, p. 165.
63 Lutz, Relics of Death, pp. 65-66.
64 Lutz, Relics of Death, p. 66.
65 Lutz, Relics of Death, p. 10.

61
which has been far more familiar to her from childhood. Although her notion of death

should now have been closer to the religious one, since she needs it for her

consolation, the physical image of the dead is thought to be inherited from that of

goblins and fairies. In this way, Nelly’s image and concept of death are complicated

and ambivalent, and it runs parallel to her ambivalent status of being a nursemaid in

the Heights and a housekeeper at the Grange. At least it can be said that in the same

way that she had once imagined that incarnated ghosts wander around somewhere

close at hand and occasionally give her signs of death, she is now convinced, by her

religious mind, that the dead are at peace, living perfectly somewhere else while

retaining their whole soul and body. Moving away from the idea of the sacred and

glorious ‘spirit’ that is restful with the God, and rather relying on the beliefs in the

soul’s salvation in the afterlife, she imagines the body of the dead as a source of

envisioning the afterlife. The body is conceptualised as a physical frame that contains

and guards one’s soul, and at the same time it is the locus of some potential power to

survive the death and maintain its vigour.

3.4. Conceptions of the dead: Nelly’s new image of a vampire

Examining these complicated processes and interactions between Nelly’s ideas

of death and images of the dead provides an impression that her sudden image of a

vampire near the end of Heathcliff’s life is something fundamentally different and new,

although it partly succeeds her ideas on the dead. In a very simple definition, vampires

are the living dead or the living body, but they rather show a different level of

figuration and embodiment; they do not belong to the English folkloric fairies, so they

are not incarnated ghosts; they are certainly not conceptual ‘spirits’ whose ‘bodies’

rest in peace. Nelly’s image of a vampire, which does foretell Heathcliff’s death, is

predicated on her concern with his ‘living’ but ‘dying’ body.

62
 Nelly starts worrying that something weird and anomalous is happening when

she witnesses Heathcliff’s ‘change’, which includes his adoption of a series of new

habits as well as his physical changes. Near his end, he seems to disarm his vengeance

and tends to be away from the house during the day. Then he starts his midnight

excursions and remains awake until dawn; he refrains from eating and drinking and

seems to lose any interest in this secular and material world, as can be seen in his lost

obsession with money and property, when he exclaims, ‘how to leave my property, I

cannot determine! I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth’. 66 At first,

Nelly worries that Heathcliff might be seriously ill, as he refuses to eat anything and

spends all day with a little sleep. It is true that Heathcliff’s symptoms actually suggest

one of the most rampant diseases of the era, ‘consumption’, because he looks very

pale, gaunt, and feverish, losing appetite and suffering from insomnia; Nelly once

advises Heathcliff, ‘Do take some food, and some repose. […] Your cheeks are hollow,

and your eyes blood-shot, like a person starving with hunger, and going blind with

loss of sleep’.67 She also notices difficulty or irregularity in his breathing: ‘I noticed

he breathed as fast as a cat’, or ‘his heavy sighs succeeding each other so thick as to

leave no space for common breathing between’. 68 Paleness, shivering, difficulty in

breathing, loss of appetite and weight, and fatigue are all general symptoms of

tuberculosis. However, in making careful observations, Nelly cannot help noticing his

strangely energetic movements, too, noting ‘You look uncommonly animated’. 69

Heathcliff almost endlessly keeps walking, not only repeating his night-walking, but

also seeming unable to stop walking even inside the house, ‘restlessly measuring the

floor’;70 everyone also notices his ‘bright and cheerful’ looks, ‘a strange joyful glitter

66 Brontë, p.333.
67 Brontë, p.333.
68 Brontë, p.327, p.332.
69 Brontë, p.328.
70 Brontë, p.332.
63
in his eyes’, looking ‘rare and pleased’; Heathcliff himself denies feeling ill, saying

‘I’ve neither cold nor fever’, and boasts of his ‘hard constitution, and temperate mode

of living’.71 This hyperactivity does not even exclude the possibility of his suffering

from a certain disease or disorder, but his body maintains such a strength that makes

Nelly have second thoughts: ‘he’ll be alright, to-day!”72 It is this paradox of the

weakened body’s ‘animation’ that provides Nelly with new association and

imagination, a new supernatural creature which has a body of both ‘life’ and ‘death’.

Heathcliff’s body no longer demands any physiological needs, even the basic needs of

drinking, eating, and sleeping, which inevitably should elicit death and dysfunction.

Nonetheless his flesh and strong physique are sustained invariably, even without any

nourishment from his external environment. Heathcliff’s ‘change’ is so peculiar that

Nelly starts thinking of him as a kind of a ghost, but not a ‘goblin’ (although she once

refers to him as such in this condition before she named him a vampire) 73, concluding

in the end that his mysterious existence is akin to that of the ‘ghost’ living in the

continuum between this world and the otherworld, whose body is nearly dead but still

able to maintain life.

It has often been said that the Byronic heroes in Romantic literature by which

Nelly might have been inspired are likely to suffer from insomnia and anorexia, as

they are destined to physically torture themselves by way of flight from everyday

concerns, which is also a way of being free from their own intolerable existence. For

example, Lutz argues in her book, discussing Byronic influences on Victorian

narratives, that Byronic love always has to be ‘impossible’: [t]he Byronic hero in his

purity can […] never be redeemed by becoming a couple […]. He is the tormented

melancholy failure who nears success and then fails and experiences the eternal loss,

71 Brontë, pp.326-28.
72 Brontë, p.330.
73 Brontë, p.329.
64
the repetition of the impossibility of bliss’. 74 Heathcliff also shares much similarity

with the Byronic lovers. Physical violence inward and outward, conflicts between love

and vengeance, dark propensities and designs such as necrophilism, all are

characteristics associated with Byronic heroes and their ‘vampirism’, and all dovetail

with Heathcliff’s life and character. This ‘vampirism’ should lead Nelly to associate

him with a Romantic figure, and she should imagine his body by mixing what she

observes in reality and what has been inspired by the Romantic figurations.

Heathcliff’s cannibalistic and necrophiliac forms of revenge are reinforced in her

imagination by his outrageous behaviours and vocal intimidation, such as can be seen

in the expressions where he threatens that he will tear Edgar’s heart out and drinking

his blood; 75 such vampiric features are readily invoked when she witnesses

Heathcliff’s ‘sharp, white teeth’ on his deathbed. 76

However, it is also important to note in this association of Nelly’s that

Heathcliff’s body does not entirely fall into the Romantic ‘impossibility’ of

achievement; that is, this body appears to resolve the contradiction. At least it

embodies what should be impossible for the body of an ordinary human being and

resolves the distinction of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Then it can also be said that Nelly

witnesses the ‘vampire’ in its very essence, that is, the body both living and dying; she

observes the body that is approaching death, moving toward its cessation and failure,

but attaining its ‘heaven’ on earth; Heathcliff declares to Nelly, ‘I tell you, I have

nearly attained my heaven’. 77 Facing unnatural power and strength in Heathcliff’s

dying body, Nelly thinks of the ‘vampire’, and it is one of her solutions to the mystery

and the incomprehensible nature of what has happened to Heathcliff’s body, while at

74 Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century
Seduction Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006), p. 52.
75 Brontë, p.148.
76 Brontë, p.335.
77 Brontë, p.334.

65
the same time it works again as a source of mystery concerning death, making her

wonder about and reflect on the matter of the afterlife in her beliefs.

This is the new image of the ‘ghost’ for Nelly; it is differentiated from both the

incarnated goblins and the immaterial spirits, manifesting the sustenance and

materiality of the body while hovering the boundary between the earth and heaven.

This ‘vampire’ is produced, or reproduced, by mixing the reality based on her careful

and empirical observations of the human body and an imaginative response based on

her experience of reading about vampires and vampirism.

This ‘vampire’ should have been a deviation even for the Victorian reader of

Wuthering Heights, too, among all the common supernatural creatures, such as fairies,

goblins, demons, witches, and spirits. Although the Romantic vampire movement

thrived in the early nineteenth century, its figure was still new and in development,

aiming to break out of folkloric tradition and get more familiarised with middle-class

readers just entering the literary market. For example, Varney the Vampire, one of the

serialised stories about a vampire in ‘penny dreadfuls’, just started its serialisation two

years before Wuthering Heights was published. Considering this movement, Nelly’s

association actually shows a new stage not only of her conception and imagination but

also of the text of Wuthering Heights itself. Along with Heathcliff’s final change, the

text shows something new in terms of the representation and conception of death, the

dead and the ghost. Andrew Elfenbein argues concerning the Byronic influence on the

Brontës that the Byronic prototype is not really distinguished in Heathcliff, and

considering the period of the 1840s, when the straightforward Byronic modes

‘appeared hopelessly dated’, Emily Brontë uses this older mode to provide a new

figure that is beyond any literary mode: ‘[t]he novel uses and critiques Byronism and

anti-Byronism at the same time and revises contemporary literary possibilities without

announcing a program of its own. […] Her reaction […] permitted the voice from the

66
margins to be the voice of innovation.’78 Then it can be suggested that the vampire,

one of the more mysterious and dangerous characters that came out of the Romantic

tradition, is also used in an attempt to represent a new type of a ‘ghost’ in the novel.

Nelly’s association is thus crucial in that it not only implicates her growing

imagination and literary knowledge through her reading in the library, but it also

provides a hint of what the ‘ghost’ in Wuthering Heights seeks to represent as the

summation of its bodily existence. It is this image of the ‘vampire’, which deviates

from people’s common images of ‘ghosts’ but comes to Nelly’s mind from her reading

experience, that can function as a clue as to the new representation of the ‘ghost’ in the

whole text of Wuthering Heights—in the centre of which lies the ‘ghost’ of Catherine.

II. Bodily Ghost: An Embodiment of Materialistic Ideas of Body and Blood

1. A link between Catherine’s ghost and Heathcliff’s dying/dead body

Further enriched images involving this new ‘vampire’ in its association with

Heathcliff’s dying body are produced in this text to intensify and substantiate the

haunted world of Heathcliff and Catherine. The scenes of Heathcliff’s ‘change’ and his

actual death, which occurred as if it were a natural sequence in his body’s dying

process, not only raise the image of the vampire in Nelly’s mind but also give readers

an inkling of the ‘existence’ of the haunting ghost of Catherine. Readers must go back

to the beginning of the novel to understand the life-charged body of the ‘ghost’,

although it is kept marginalised as a man’s mere dream, or dislocated beyond the text

as unreality. It should be noted that there is an interesting contrast between

Heathcliff’s death scene and Catherine’s appearance at the window, which Lockwood

confronts during his first night in the Heights. Catherine’s ghost tries to get inside the

78 Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century

Literature and Culture 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.151, p. 168.
67
house, out of a snowstorm, and Lockwood famously pulls her wrist onto the broken

windowpane and ‘rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the

bedclothes’. 79 Heathcliff dies in the very same room, also with his hand lying on the

pane, which is grazed by the window ‘flapping to and fro’ and with his ‘bed-clothes

dripped’ by water. Nelly describes this scene as follows:

I could not think him dead—but his face and throat were washed with
rain; the bed-clothes dripped, and he was perfectly still. The lattice,
flapping to and fro, had grazed one hand that rested on the sill—no blood
trickled from the broken skin, and when I put my fingers to it, I could
doubt no more—he was dead and stark! […] They [his eyes] would not
shut—they seemed to sneer at my attempts, and his parted lips and sharp,
white teeth sneered too! ’80

Nelly’s fingers feel the coldness and starkness of his dead hand, and she is shocked as

much as Lockwood when ‘[his] fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold

hand’.81 The two scenes share similarities not only to give readers physical sensations

tied to each body, but also to show contrasts, as if suggesting that there was some

contact or exchange between Heathcliff and Catherine. It would be also important to

note that there is a paradox here in terms of the conditions of their two bodies. That is,

one is a ghost with its own body that even drips blood, and the other is a dead body,

from which no bleeding occurs. Catherine’s ghost seems to be alive as if it regained

blood, whereas Heathcliff’s body seems to have lost all blood, even before it reaches

the time of death and stops its full activities, because ‘no blood trickled from the

broken skin’ of his hand, which had been resting for a while on the windowsill. If this

could suggest or symbolise a kind of blood ‘transfusion’ in the fictional world between

Heathcliff and Catherine, then her haunting body contains vampiristic elements in that

79 Brontë, p.23.
80 Brontë, p.335.
81 Brontë, p.23.
68
it is ‘revived’ with blood; her body in the form of a ghost represents the body of a

vampire, which can gain energy from blood to haunt the living.

Some features of a female vampire have often been argued based on the fact

that Catherine’s ghost attacks the male Lockwood. Her bleeding is often associated

with her ‘contact’ with Lockwood, and the blood has symbolic meanings that work in

Lockwood’s ‘dream’. I will argue that the ghost not only has symbolic features of

vampirism but it is the ‘vampire’ itself in that it has its own dead body that contains

copious and exuberant ‘blood’. That is to say, in the same way that the wasting

Heathcliff is ‘vivified’ with the new status of his attained body, which would dissolve

the disjunction between ‘life’ and ‘death’, Catherine’s ‘dead’ body also becomes

‘alive’ and activated with the running blood that has disappeared from the dead body

of Heathcliff, a mysterious void in the text. Heathcliff’s blood remains a mystery

within the logic of realism. It is true that there is no trace of blood trickling down from

Heathcliff’s broken skin, and realist explanations will ascertain that his body was dead

long before when the lattice grazed his skin. However, the very trace of his wound

also implies that the body was ‘alive’ for a while, and then the blood comes to be seen

as the absence in the text. The mystery might be able to be resolved by searching a

way to fill the absence, and then the ‘body’ of Catherine’s ghost that contains ‘blood’

can be seen as a missing link that resolves the contradiction of the text and further

connects the world of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Within the logic of realism, Catherine’s ghost

can only exist in Lockwood’s dream and fancy, and her appearance serves to explore

his subconscious. However, the contrast and analogy between the mysterious and

unnatural bodies of Heathcliff and Catherine suggests a supposed connection and

continuity, thereby serving to imply the world beyond the text and ‘existence’ after

death, and more importantly, to give them their own new, reproduced ‘bodies’.

Particularly, the ghost of Catherine as a ‘vampire’ can be revealed only by its

69
contrast and analogy with the dying/dead body of Heathcliff that Nelly sees with her

own eyes. With this boundary between life and death across the window, an

‘impossible’ reversion takes place in which the dying/dead body on earth loses its

reality and physicality, and the ghost body is then materialised. The traces of this

transfusion or transition would never appear on the realistic level, but the reversion

can be understood if blood can be seen as playing a crucial role in the materialisation

of the ‘body’ and its connection to ‘life’. For the ‘body’ to be revived and reproduced

from being a literal corpse in the fictional world, blood is the sign of the life-charged

embodiment, and Catherine’s ghost activates and substantiates the supernatural world

of the novel through its bodily form with blood. The ‘vampire’, closely intertwined

with the matter of death, body, and blood, provides a significant clue to this

representation of Catherine’ ghost as the bodily form.

2. Materialistic representation as against the conventional images of foul vampires

Before looking closely into the functions of blood in the ghost materialisation,

I will look into some of the distinctions made between the Romantic images of

vampires and the roles of blood and those provided in Wuthering Heights, in an

attempt to show that the text’s new representation of the bodily ghost as a ‘vampire’

could have been derived from Emily Brontë’s contemporary interest in the scientific

and medical investigations into the body of ‘vampires’, or vampiric symptoms in the

human body. The Brontë family regularly read Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,

from which they were informed about the latest social concerns, including politics, the

economy, science and literature; then Emily’s ideas about a vampire and its body

appear to reflect contemporary ideas about bodies and blood. Hence, the following

sections will also examine one of the contemporary ideas on human bodies, which is

offered in an article in the magazine, and will also explore Emily’s own interest in

70
health care.

As I have shown above, Nelly appears to be intrigued by the Romantic

expressions and descriptions of cursed and revengeful vampirism, such as can be seen

in her report of Heathcliff’s night-walking, grave-digging, and violent assaults with

his sharp teeth. However, it is also to be noted that her descriptions of dying Heathcliff

focus on his physical changes more than his vampiric behaviours, and she cannot but

notice some strange movements in the body itself, which look mechanical, yet

animated. This observation notes a pattern that deviates from the Romantic

conventions in representing a vampire. Romantic vampires are generally bloody

because of their habit of blood-drinking and their bodies retain foul and cursed

appearances. For example, in ‘The Giaour’, the cursed vampire’s ‘gnashing tooth, and

haggard lip’ will drip ‘wet with [his] own best blood’.82 In Southey’s Thalaba the

Destroyer, Thalaba’s dead lover stands before him as a form of a ‘fiend’ with ‘livid

cheeks and lips of blue’. 83 The foul and monstrous image of a vampire inherited from

the Romantic tradition is typically shown in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, that is, in

Jane’s image of the mad woman, Bertha. When Jane is asked by Rochester to explain

the features of what she witnesses that night, she depicts it as much more terrifying

than the common ghost:

‘Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.’

‘This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed;
the black eye-brows widely raised over the blood-shot eyes. Shall I tell
you of what it reminded me?’
‘You may.’
‘Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.’84

82 Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 207-47 (p.227).
83 Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004),

p.119.
84 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p.317.

71
Michael Mason notes that this German spectre refers to the ‘vampire-as-bride’ in

Goethe’s ‘The Bride of Corinth’, who wanders from her grave to seek her betrothed to

drink his blood.85 Jane describes Bertha as a horribly ugly monster, with a purple face,

dark and swollen lips, and blood-shot eyes, all of which seem to be caused by too

much blood-drinking. The purple and dark colour of her features is also associated

with her foul blood, as if it went through her whole body and made her look swollen

and bloated. The Romantic imagination calls much attention to the foul image of

blood and its circulation. The image of fluid is central to the implied process of both

vampiric transformation and sexual energy in the Romantic tradition. 86 This is also

expressed in Jane’s representation of Bertha, too, as something dangerous lurking

within, representing her dark-pooled energy, or ‘coagulated’ passion and rage that can

be developed into a monstrosity. Charlotte Brontë typically utilises the dark and

monstrous element of the Romantic vampire, which was viewed as one of the

imaginary creatures of horror.

On the other hand, Nelly’s description of the last Heathcliff emphasises his

whiteness, his ‘bloodless hue’.87 His ‘sharp, white teeth’ even feature his paleness.

This whiteness causes Nelly’s suspicion over his illness, which makes her beseech

him to eat something, but Heathcliff declines because he now needs a strong will and

determination to eat, saying ‘I hardly remember to eat and drink’. 88 Without his

volition, he can never recall the body’s physiological needs, and this condition

indicates Heathcliff’s total dependence on the body’s autonomous functions and

movements, which would operate sustainably even without his will: ‘I have to remind

85 Michael Mason, ‘Notes’, in Jane Eyre, ed. by Michael Mason (London: Penguin books, 1996),
pp.503-33(p.522).
86 Twitchell, p.87.
87 Brontë, p.328.
88 Brontë, p.323.

72
myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a

stiff spring’. 89 The body without the effect of one’s will and desire approaches its

physical failure and death, but it also means that the body reaches a condition in which

one’s will cannot be effective anymore, as it is almost felt hard and immovable like ‘a

stiff spring’.

It is known that Emily Brontë believed in medical self-help, and the robust and

powerful constitution of the young characters playing around the moor in the novel

surely implies her belief in the idea that one’s will can sustain the body. Janis Caldwell

argues that Brontë even ‘moves beyond a doctrine of medical self-help to the view

that individuals will themselves to health—or to illness’, that ‘strong bodies […]

signify strong wills, and […] both health and illness […] obey personal volition’.90

However, at this stage of life for Heathcliff, this wilful effort to control his physical

needs and empower his body’s nervous system appears to be a difficult path, and he

seems inclined to abandon his volition to govern the body and leaves the body to work

by itself. He just keeps walking and moving about, keeps watching surrounding

objects and yielding to sensory reactions, as can be seen in Nelly’s observation: ‘[t]he

fancied object was not fixed; his eyes pursued it with unwearied vigilance, and even in

speaking to me [Nelly], were never weaned away’.91 Even though he wants to speak

to Nelly, the ‘unwearied vigilance’ can never stop; his body maintains its functions to

attain something, regardless of his will.

It can be said that these strange behaviours rely heavily on the body’s

mechanics, and it lies beyond the effects of his natural desire and will. When he

shivers, his body ‘vibrates’ as if it were a ‘tight-stretched cord’. Using metaphors such

as ‘spring’ and ‘vibrating cord’ also indicates the body’s autonomic and mechanical

89 Brontë, p.325.
90 Janis McLarren Caldwell, ‘Physical Health’, in The Brontës in Context, ed. by Marianne
Thormählen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.335-43 (p.338).
91 Brontë, p.331.

73
movements. In this way, Nelly’s observation uncovers the functions of Heathcliff’s

body that are in the status beyond one’s conscious control. It seems that Heathcliff’s

energy comes from this self-sustaining body, which possibly can be seen as going

through the in-between process of life and death, presenting the uncanny power of

animation and activation preceding its death and decay. Thus, Heathcliff’s vampiric

condition is more grounded on this materialistic concern of the body than the

traditional Romantic imagination of the foul blood and its circulation through the body.

3. Mechanical body

3.1. Exploring vampires with the materialistic mind

This kind of scientific interest in the body actually parallels scientific

explorations into the identity of the vampire toward the mid-nineteenth century, when

there were some attempts to explain, from anatomical and medical points of view,

how the vampire arose in the folk tradition by exploring testimonies on unusual

conditions of human bodies. For example, one Blackwood Edinburgh Magazine article

in 1847 tries to persuade readers that the vampire is a popular delusion, and the writer

first provides its definition in the folk tradition:

A vampyr is a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which

it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the
living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition, instead
of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies. 92

A vampire is clearly defined as ‘a dead body’ in this definition, which the writer

apparently quotes from the work of Georg Conrad Horst, a well-known German

theologian in the early nineteenth century, who is known to have studied occultism.

92Mayo Herbert [‘MacDavus’], ‘Letters on the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions. II.
Vampyrism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 61 (1847), 432-40 (p.432).
74
This definition follows the typical and general Romantic image of a vampire, while it

also hints at a scientific interest by referring to it literally as ‘a dead body’ that should

have ‘decomposed’, yet not placing particular emphasis on the dark and unholy action

of blood-sucking and the vampire’s horrifying body. This article is written with the

aim of exploring the identity of a folkloric vampire by way of seeking material

evidence that would have made people believe in its existence, and the article’s author,

Herbert Mayo, a physician and physiologist, is known for discovering the functions of

facial nerves in the 1820s. 93 He is also known to have supported the medical

application of mesmerism. 94
For these ‘scientific’ minds of the early and

mid-nineteenth century, the existence of folkloric or literary vampires was viewed as a

mere product of local gossip and superstitions, and they focused on whether there was

any material evidence to support these beliefs. Mayo says that ‘[f]or what has been

believed for ages must have something real at bottom. There can be no prevalent

delusion without a corresponding truth’, then continues to say that if there was a

fabulous dragon on earth, there would be respectable reptiles. 95 He provides his

opinions through empirical viewpoints.

Mayo then argues in the article that the ‘rise’ of vampires in the folk tradition

should have been related to the spread of diseases and their contagious effect on

human bodies. Many people died in a very short time during epidemics, which

evidently caused confusion and rumours among the public. Furthermore, the article

93 Mayo Herbert is also known to have a ‘dispute over the description of the separate motor and
sensory functions of Cranial Nerve V and Cranial Nerve VII’ (both nerves related to facial nerves)
with Charles Bell, physiologist and neurologist (James Bradley, ‘Matters of Priority: Herbert Mayo,
Charles Bell and Discoveries in the Nervous System’, Medical History, 58 (2014), 564-84
(p.565)).
94 John Elliotson, who was ‘interested in developing animal magnetism as a therapeutic technique’

was originally influenced by Baron du Potet, French mesmerist, who had been ivestigated by
Herbert Mayo (Roger Luckhurst and Justin Sausman, ‘The Lancet on John Elliotson’, in Victorian
Science and Literature: Marginal and Occult Sciences (vol.8), eds. by Roger Luckhurst and Justin
Sausman (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), pp.69-72 (p.70)).
95 Mayo Herbert [‘MacDavus’], ‘Letters on the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions. I. The

Diving Rod’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 61 (1847), 368-74 (p.368).

75
attempts to explain that there were some cases found in which dead bodies showed a

certain post-mortem reaction in the coffin when they were exhumed. This is because

people sometimes were buried half alive, especially during epidemics, when speedy

funerals often took place, and it was not easy to know whether the people were really

dead when some strange bodily reactions happened, for instance, a sort of fits and

convulsions. From this example, it can be understood that early Victorians with

‘scientific’ concerns thus deduced legendary notions about the vampire from their

examination of the human body which, likewise, held so many mysteries that the

power of imaginative analogy was one of the key scientific methods used to unveil

them during this period. Moreover, this kind of exploration into the body contributes

to a further expanded formation of literary and fictional vampires, which is based

more on their materialistic figurations than the conventional representation of their

unworldly monstrosity and uncanniness. Human beings can be ‘vampires’ with their

own mysterious bodies and their astonishing functions, and it is not the vampire itself

that is the object of horror and mystery. Although at the time scientific examination

and empirical methods were applied to materialistic ideas on the matter of body and

soul, a human body was still recognised as retaining some strange or unnatural power

that works to maintain and even govern the whole function of body.

This new figuration of the vampire is grounded on ‘scientific’ observations and

evidence, but nonetheless assumes some mysterious and imaginative power that exists

in human body. For example, the article further explains the case of the half-living

body in relation to the ‘nervous system’. The body in concern seems to be able to keep

its shape without decomposition in the coffin and even bleeds when disinterred. This

happens when there is firstly a direct impact or reaction on the ‘nervous system’

before the person dies that causes a sudden arrest of the system, followed by the

‘suspension’ of all other bodily functions, such as heartbeat and blood circulation:

76
 So may we presume, that in the singular cases we are considering, the
body is but in another and deeper fit, which suspends the vital
phenomena, and reduces its vitality to that of the unincubated egg, to
simple life, without change, without waste or renewal. The body does not
putrefy, because it is alive; it does not waste or require nourishment,
because every action is stilled within it. 96

Behind this presumption about the body sustaining itself without any nourishment lies

the idea of a mechanical body, the body that, in part, keeps working like a machine.

The whole body can start operating again after a short period of ‘suspension’, because

the source of ‘life’ is preserved in the form of ‘simple life’; its energy and engine can

be retained within for a while without any waste or decrement. This body resembles

that of Heathcliff, as if in ‘suspension’ from its ordinary reactions and functions, but

able to maintain its ‘life’ without any nourishment. The article also refers to the

‘nervous system’ as a machine, interpreting its ‘suspension’ as ‘being brought to a

complete stand-still, the wheels of the machinery locking, as it were, of a sudden’. 97

This machinery system has a role in preserving vital functions of the heart, breathing,

and blood circulation by filling the role of switching the body on and off,

interconnecting all the functions, as if to hold a separate entity from physical organs,

such as the heart, lungs and arteries. The ‘nervous system’ is thereby treated as

something that organises the organs and their functions, and it is more recognised as a

mechanism that works independently with its own sustainable power, adjusting and

controlling the form of ‘life’, not just a part or component within the organic complex

of a human frame that interrelates each unit and function. In other words, the body as

a whole is more associated with some sort of original strength and ‘life’ that keeps it

sustainable, and its principle is imagined to be something systematic and

96 Herbert, ‘Letters, II. Vampyrism’, p. 437.

97 Herbert, ‘Letters, II. Vampyrism’, p. 437.
77
self-regulating, rather than something like a single spiritual energy source or some

external element that can be associated most simply with a ‘soul’. The body has

something like ‘life’, but it is incorporated into the mechanical system of the body.

The last stage of Heathcliff’s body can be taken as an embodiment of this

extraordinary power of ‘life’, which leads to the rise of the new image of a ‘vampire’.

3.2. Scientific creation of a vampire: analogy and imagination in materialism

This original and sustainable power of ‘life’ is, in a sense, the product of

imaginary reflections on the body and mind, analysed through a ‘scientific’ process.

Although the classic notions of ‘vitalism’ and ‘mechanism’ and the debate over the

matter of body and mind entered a new stage in the early nineteenth century, the

human body was still a mysterious object for both scientists and lay people during the

period, when clinical methods and physical examination were still in the process of

development, especially in Britain. It can be said that during this period the matter of

body and mind came to be examined from a different perspective, apart from the

conventional ideas where human body and soul had been taken to be separate and

divided entities, and it instead leaned toward the idea of interrelation, particularly by

way of treating the traditional ‘soul’ as material existence and reframing the body as a

site in which its source of ‘life’ is mechanically incorporated. Regarding the matter of

‘soul’ at the time, Caldwell explains in her book about Victorian medicine and

literature that there was a huge debate among the groups of supporters of ‘vitalism’ in

the early nineteenth century, who came to have a large influence on physiological

fields, and it is said that they caused a certain ‘regression’ in scientific development in

the field of pathology. They sought to find ‘vital principles’ of life in human beings

and discussed whether ‘life’ should be attributed to an invisible, ‘superadded’

substance that was analogous to ‘electricity’, or a purely physiological function that

78
resulted from the exercise of each function of the body. 98 The source of ‘life’ was, in a

sense, conflated with the ideas of ‘mechanism’, and what Mayo attempts to

demonstrate is also that its source lies in the ‘system’ of the body, which is, for

example, represented by the ‘nervous system’ to control both body and mind.

Shuttleworth also says that the ‘nervous system’ was the ‘site of mental life’, which

‘was placed firmly within the workings of body’. 99 Early Victorian ideas proposed

that mind and body were regulated and operated by the self-regulating and modulating

system that sustained ‘life’, creating the conception of the human body as a whole and

inspiring the concept of vampire’s body.

The body and its mysterious power were thus integrated into a material entity;

however, the manner of integration was imaginative. Mayo attempts to connect the

mysterious link between ‘life’ and the ‘system’ by intertwining the metaphor of an

animal’s ‘unincubated egg’ and that of a non-living entity of a ‘machine’, associating

‘life’ with a simple and initial form like an embryo, which can easily be transformed

and modulated by some mechanised operation. Caldwell discusses this tendency to

imaginative understanding found in both medical diagnostics and literary

representations at that time, calling it ‘Romantic materialism’. This is a way of

understanding the world of nature that inherited the conceptual structure of natural

theology, in which science and religion were combined for the purposes of

interpretative explorations. Although it was the tradition in natural theology to

interpret the world through both ‘the Book of Nature’ and ‘the Book of Scripture’ by

applying one text to the other, ‘Romantic materialists’ sought to find a provisional

interpretation by contrasting two ways of reading in an effort to ‘organise a set of

common structural patterns’ that would be offered by a unique mixture of materialism

98 Janis MacLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary
Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.26.
99 Shuttleworth, p.42.

79
and transcendentalism. 100 Paraphrasing this, it can be said that they viewed the world

through both close observation and profound insight, with evidential facts and an

imaginative scheme, using some literary techniques from hermeneutics, typology, and

analogy in order to attain an answer to what they seek for.

Mayo is also self-conscious about his own method of argument in the article,

which is based on both ‘facts’ and ‘stories’, using phrases such as ‘What is wanted is

direct scientific examination […]. In the absence, however, of recorded observation,

let us imagine how the thing might come about’; ‘Now it is analogically by no means

very improbable that […]’; ‘Nor would it be contrary to analogy that […].’101 In this

way, ‘analogy’ was an interpretative method that was often used in Victorian science,

part of which is succeeded by Darwinism, as Gillian Beer suggested.102 The analogy

between body and machine was not only a metaphoric approach, but also a practical

inference. ‘Life’ is a crucial term for the ‘scientific’ body, and at that time people

sought to find it through materialistic evidence that could be corroborated by

imaginative insights.

Thus, where the ‘scientific’ body is concerned, the actual gap between

mechanism and life is a significant matter enough to influence the representations of

body in other genres. If ‘Romantic materialism’ was one of the phenomena that

combined scientific/medical explorations and literary methods, it can be also said that

it was a general trend of thought in common subjects and that people tended to believe

that truth lay in scientific scrutiny and literary manifestation. As the article in

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine indicates, the public’s tendency to believe in

vampires is often mixed with people’s interest in human bodies, and when a strange

100 Caldwell, Literature and Medicine, p.14

101 Herbert, ‘Letters, II. Vampyrism’, p. 437. Italics mine.
102 Gillian Beer certainly argues in her influential book Darwin’s Plots on the strain of ‘Romantic

materialism’ in Charles Darwin’s impulse to substantiate metaphor and find physical evidence in
the natural order, and further outlines the history of using analogy and metaphor in the formation
of scientific theory.
80
human body is witnessed and observed, it is easy to connect the figure with literary

counterparts. A scientific interest in a body creates a vampire, and this new figure is

conceived in order to fill the mysterious gap between mechanism and life. The power

of a body-system machine can equal the life energy of something monstrous and

supernatural. From the viewpoints of the ‘body politic’, Chris Baldick explains that

modern ‘monstrosity’ is something made not by nature, but by human ‘arts’, and it has

a power to dismember the old body and reassemble the parts to create a new prospect

both in politics and cultural life. 103 Along with this ‘scientific’ interest among the

general public, the modern human body can also be seen as a site that retains dynamic

force to recreate something new.

4. Blood as the life embodiment

4.1. Brontë’s interest in health care

The strange and mysterious body that Heathcliff displays is a curious object

for Nelly, who apparently has a scientific and medical concern as a ‘nurse’. She not

only raises the children but also is in charge of their health care. Nelly is actually

confident about having the necessary medical knowledge and ability to care for

‘patients’. She serves regularly as an attendant nurse and takes care of the family

members when there is no need to call their family doctor, Dr Kenneth, as can be seen

in her caring role when all the children in the Heights catch measles. She is proud to

have been praised by the doctor for her principal contribution to their cures.104 She

also prescribes ‘bitter herbs’ to Lockwood, who is sick all the time when she tells her

story to him. 105 On the other hand, although she is closer to Dr Kenneth than any

family member, she certainly does not have progressive mind for medicine, but rather

103 Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p.16, p.20.
104 Brontë, p.37.
105 Brontë, p.154.

81
she seems to have her own way of treating and nursing, sometimes not even following

doctor’s orders. She uses bitter herbs from her folkloric resources, whereas Kenneth

prescribes pills and draughts to Lockwood. Nelly has a curious mind and combines

any facts and knowledge she can gather, from the fields of science, folklore, and

literature, but it can be maintained that her medical interest is among the sources of

imagining this new figure of a vampire, which is different from a goblin or a restful

spirit, even different from the conventional Romantic vampire.

It is now known that Emily Brontë also had her own treatment methods for

physical health, and she particularly exercised her will to maintain her health and cure

diseases. Her rejection of doctors until the moment of her death should be associated

with her pride in managing her health. 106 She liked to take care of domestic affairs as

well, such as cooking and embroidery, and she continued such works during her

severe illness as if she thought that she could manage her ailing body.107 Even on the

day she died, she dressed herself, combed her hair, and came down to the ground floor

all by herself. 108 Although she rejected any medical treatments, she seems to have

relied much on the strength of her body. Along with all other Victorian women whose

‘repressive self-control became a goal in its own right, and internal pain a source of

pride’, it can be said that Brontë pursued the Victorian female duties with rigidity. 109

However, whereas maintaining mental health without falling into female hysteria and

106 Influenced by her father who encouraged self-help in medicine, Brontë demonstrates on
various occasions ‘her grounding in medical self-help’ as well as her belief in volitional power to
manage her health; famously, when she was dying, ‘she repeatedly refused medical assistance […]
until she was beyond any help’ (Caldwell, ‘Physical Health’, p.338).
107 According to Charlotte Brontë’s letter which describes her sister’s severe illness and the state

of her last few months, ‘she [Emily] will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not
one of her ordinary avocations will she voluntarily renounce’(Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in
Letters (London: Viking, 1997), p.212). It is considered that Emily’s daily routine is mostly spent
in the kitchen, and such a routine including needlework largely influenced her own writing (Ann
Dinsdale, ‘Domestic Life at Haworth Parsonage’, in The Brontës in Context, ed. by Marianne
Thormählen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.18-26 (pp.22-23)).
108 Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix Giants, 1994), p.576.
109 Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p.24.

82
madness was one of the goals that Victorian middle-class women strived for, it was

often more closely related to maintaining physical health as well. Brontë was

vigilantly concerned about her body’s health, taking regular walks on the moors for

exercise and ‘controlling her own meagre diet’. 110 According to Anna Silver,

disciplining the body by controlling food or fasting appeals to women’s desire to take

control over their lives and to their ‘self-denial enshrined within the Victorian

ideology of femininity’. 111 During the Victorian period, when an ideal, integrating,

and harmonic balance of mind and body was sought, disciplining and strengthening

one’s body as well as controlling one’s will was equated with well-being and

self-improvement. Both realms of body and mind were to be explored. Brontë, who

consistently rejected professional advice, would be an extreme case, trying to control

her dying body by exercising her will, to free herself from the physical pain she

suffered, and then to yield to the power of ‘life’ in the unknown realm of the dying

body. She might have believed in the unlimited possibilities of her disciplined body

and its physiological functions, which would keep working beyond the pain and

sickness until the end of her life. Like Heathcliff’s death, Brontë leaves her life to the

potential power of the body.

4.2. Representations of healthy bodies and blood in Wuthering Heights

Furthermore, for Brontë, it appears that not only the body as a whole but also

its blood is an important symbol of ‘life’, a potential energy that the body retains. In

Wuthering Heights, blood is often shed from a ‘healthy’ body. For example, when

Edgar Linton asks Catherine the fatal question of whether she could give up either him

or Heathcliff, driving her into a frenzy and into an unnatural figure, with ‘her hair

110 Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p.94.
111 Silver, p.91.

83
flying over her shoulders, her eyes flashing, the muscles of her neck and arms

standing out preternaturally’. 112 She grinds her teeth and drips blood, which makes

Edgar frightened and shuddered and leads him to shout, ‘She has blood on her lips!’113

This is actually the beginning of Catherine’s change and ‘illness’, which is called

‘delirium’ by Nelly. However, until this moment Catherine has been well, maintaining

her health after recovering from shock when Heathcliff was gone. These

‘preternatural’ descriptions contribute to the novel’s symbolic and melodramatic

effects, and blood here is often taken as a metaphor for her eruptive passion or

abnormal rage. However, considering the realistic plane on which Nelly stands, this

emotion is something that can only be expressed by such a fierce movement of her

bleeding body. In Victorian times, discourses of female hysteria refer to the fact that a

certain mental shock could cause a violent reaction of women, leading them to

exercise their bodily power; for example, ‘the muscles are thrown into disordered and

energetic motions, and all the vascular and nervous actions become irregular or

tumultuous, and assume the form of hysteria or of epilepsy’. 114 Catherine’s physical

energy also flows to the limit, and Nelly regards her condition as ‘delirium’ and says

‘her delirious strength much surpassed mine [Nelly’s]’.115

However, in this novel, it is not only ‘delirious’ characters who fall into these

kinds of conditions, and the bodies often need to be healthy and robust enough to let

out the energy within. Heathcliff, who is healthier than any other characters in this

novel, also sheds blood at a crucial moment, when he discovers that Catherine has

died and sinks into a deep sorrow. His hand and forehead are stained with blood and

112 Brontë, p.118.

113 Brontë, p.118.
114 John Conolly, ‘Hysteria’, in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890,

eds. by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.184-7
(p.186) (first publ. in The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine: Comprising the Nature and
Treatment of Diseases, Materia Medica and Therapeutics, Medical Jurisprudence, 4 vols (1833-5),
ii. 568-9, 572-3, 575-6).
115 Brontë, p.126.

84
the tree around him is spotted with ‘splashes of blood’. 116 Cathy (the daughter

Catherine) also falls into a ‘wild’ condition when she is full of anger and grief. The

following scene is when Cathy is angry with Linton:

[S]he made me [Linton] come to the window and showed me her cheek
cut on the inside, against her teeth, and her mouth filling with blood: and
then she gathered up the bits of the picture, and went and sat down with
her face to the wall, and she has never spoken to me since; and I
sometimes think she can’t speak for pain. I don’t like to think so! but
she’s a naughty thing for crying continually; and she looks so pale and
wild, I’m afraid of her!117

Cathy is a healthy girl, and she bears this abnormal condition of imprisonment with

physical expressions that never are followed by speech. White teeth and red blood

scare Linton, who is depicted as much more physically weak and mentally timid than

Cathy. All these vampiric images and outrageous behaviour scare people, but it is

neither madness nor a strange mental condition, but a sound and powerful body, that

causes blood to run.

Bleeding in this novel is not something to be terrified of because it is one of

the physiological functions of a healthy body, and the novel seems to show an

opposite attitude to the traditional ideas of humourism, or humoral medicine, in which

the condition of being sanguine is diagnosed as having too much blood. The basic

ideas of humourism continued to be prevalent until the mid-nineteenth century, and it

was generally believed that an excess and imbalance of bodily fluids can lead to both

physical and mental disorders.118 Catherine can be seen as a victim of the traditional

116 Brontë, p.167.

117 Brontë, p.281.
118 The conventional vision of physicians was to restore their patients to ‘equilibrium, both within

their own bodies and with the external natural world’ (Janet Oppenheim, The Other World:
Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), p.228. In this medical context, some conditions of menstruation were also considered
to be a cause of insanity, and doctors often monitored menstrual discharge ‘to make sure it passed
85
view that extreme physical reactions originate from a bodily imbalance. Nelly takes

Catherine’s behaviour for ‘delirium’, and, guided by old-fashioned medicine at least

until the time when she takes care of her, helps strengthen the disordered image of her

mistress’s body and connects blood with illness, madness, and a monstrous nature.

However, bleeding in this text is not only metaphorically alluded to, but it also proves

to be a wholesome physical function that will bear any pains and suffering, as can be

seen in the examples of the sanguine and healthy figures of Heathcliff and Cathy.

Although their violent and self-tormenting behaviour indicates a condition that is far

from an ideal balance of mind and body, their running blood at least physically proves

the body is actively struggling to live.

4.3 Blood for sustaining life: a medical debate over bloodletting

Emily Brontë adored nature, especially wild animals, and observed their

competitive but powerful world. For her, blood is not only a symbol of energy but also

evidence of life. Many of her poems and juvenile essays show her great interest in

relationships between the individual lives of creatures and the whole system of nature

that seems to control their life and death.119 Like Brontë’s dog, Keeper, which was

often observed to bleeding, animals can heal their wounds by licking and leaving them

for a while. All animals have physical strength to survive, yet they are also weak

enough to be easily killed by other stronger animals, which wholly explains the

the tests of quality and quantity’ (Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Sexual Body:
Introduction’, in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, eds. by Jenny
Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.165-8 (p.165)).
119 It is well known that Brontë liked to be outdoors and observe nature while she also liked to

engaged in domestic works; ‘Emily always remained deeply attached to the domestic space of her
home, as she did to the wild beauty of the moors which surrounded it’ (Lyn Pykett, ‘Emily Brontë’,
in The Brontës in Context, ed. by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), pp.68-74 (p.69)). Her Belgium essays are known to demonstrate her own ideas of nature,
which are mostly about competition and survival in the natural world; for example, her devoir on
‘Le Papillon’(1842) suggests ‘a dog-eat-dog natural world’, which fundamentally exists on a
principle of destruction of nature (Barbara T. Gates, ‘Natural History’, in The Brontës in Context,
ed. by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.250-60 (p.251)).
86
hierarchy of nature. Each life is controlled by this system, but bleeding is evidence of

the struggle against it. While Brontë admired nature as a universe, it should be also

noted that she had medical concerns as a daughter of a rural clergyman who often

attended to patients and dying people in their village. Brontë could have had medical

knowledge about blood, the function of which elicited debate among doctors

regarding medical treatments at the time.

From the early to mid-nineteenth century, to bleed either by leeches or

bloodletting was thought to be still useful in curing diseases, particularly many forms

of fever. It is probable that Brontë was sceptical about this harsh treatment, the effects

of which were grounded in humoral theory and other vitalistic views in which excess

and congestion of blood was considered inflammatory and deteriorated, which is

shown in the quotations below.

In Wuthering Heights, which is set mostly in the late eighteenth century, most

of the characters dislike the local doctor Kenneth. For example, Heathcliff refuses the

doctor’s visit before he dies, even though Nelly insists. Lockwood, a city-dweller, also

complains about Kenneth’s treatment. He even welcomes the visit by Heathcliff, who

brings him a brace of grouse, saying ‘how could I offend a man who was charitable

enough to sit at my bedside a good hour, and talk on some other subject than pills and

draughts, blisters and leeches?’120 It can also be understood from this quotation that

the doctor treats people with blisters and leeches. Kenneth also attempts to cure

Catherine with bleeding when she becomes seriously sick for the first time:

It proved the commencement of delirium; Mr. Kenneth, as soon as he

saw her, pronounced her dangerously ill; she had a fever.
He bled her, and he told me to let her live on whey and water gruel;
and take care she did not throw herself down stairs, or out of the window

120 Brontë, p.90.

87
 […].121

The doctor also only gives her some watery concoction for nutrition. A. H. T.

Rob-Smith describes the medical situation around this period as follows:

The early part of the nineteenth century revealed a definite regression

in the study of function of blood and many of the eighteenth century
achievements were forgotten. This was partly due to a misdirected
enthusiasm for chemistry […]. [In some vitalistic philosophies in
medicine] life depends upon irritation and in particular heat, which
excites the chemical processes of the body. Disease was due to a
localised irritation of some viscus and should be treated by a powerful
antiphlogistic or weakening regime, which consisted of starvation and
blood letting. 122

Still at the turn of the nineteenth century, a harsh treatment like ‘starvation and

bloodletting’ was adopted, which were believed to subdue excesses and irritation, and

it can be deduced from the novel that local doctors and medical lay practitioners used

these methods.

Bloodletting was actually used as a treatment until the mid-Victorian period,

but not because there was any modern discovery about blood constitution. As

mentioned above, blood was a subject of medical debate, particularly over theoretical

problems. On one hand, blood was regarded as a source of inflammation because it

caused congestion and excess that had to be removed quickly from a patient’s body;

on the other hand, it was thought to be a vital and energetic substance that was needed

in proper amounts in order to maintain the body. Peter H. Niebyl explains that in the

1810s a group of physicians who fiercely defended bloodletting attacked medical

121 Brontë, p.87.

122 A. H. T. Rob-Smith,, ‘Unravelling the Functions of the Blood’, Medical History, 6 (1962),
1-21 (p.15). According to Rob-Smith, there was another vitalistic view like that of John Hunter,
who considered that the blood was ‘alive’, ‘the blood’s consciousness of its being a useful part of
the body’(p.14).
88
scholars. Bleeding was an established method to cure patients with any kind of fever,

which was prevalent under the general term ‘typhus’, although bloodletting had long

been a dispute among the academics since the eighteenth century. When medical

progress cast doubts on the traditional concept of the relation of one’s humours and

blood, this bloodletting group insisted on its efficacy from the viewpoints of empirical

physicians who relied on statistical evidence. They insisted on removing copious

amounts of blood and sometimes even operated on jugular veins. 123 The scene of the

blood flowing from the wrist of Catherine’s ghost is horrifying to modern readers, but

for Victorian readers it might have been an ordinary scene in a typical household,

since it was an era when local doctors visited patients’ home and performed operations

there. According to Niebyl, in the 1840s and the 50s, bloodletting declined quickly,

along with the idea that bodily weakness might come from external contagious agency.

Bleeding was not an effective cure, especially when the patient was weak.

Bloodletting could have debilitating effects on the body. Blood thus came to be

considered important for maintaining physical health.

The Brontë family lived around the time when this shift happened. However,

apart from the optical surgery for Patrick Brontë, it seems that the medical treatments

for the Brontës relied much on local prescriptions and the medical book called

Modern Domestic Medicine (1826), which Patrick Brontë read. It was not until Anne

Brontë became seriously ill that Charlotte Brontë tried a modern remedy whose source

mostly came from London. In 1848 Emily Brontë herself was advised to try the

treatment called ‘homeopathy’, which came to be accepted as a new remedy that could

replace traditional harsh treatments, such as bloodletting, blisters, and purges.

However, she refused, saying that ‘[h]omoeopathy [sic] was only another form of

123 Peter H. Niebyl, ‘The English Bloodletting Revolution, or Modern Medicine before 1850’,
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 51 (1977), 464-83(p.473).
89
Quackery’.124 She seems to have considered most therapies to be delusions. Charlotte

Brontë further wrote a letter to ‘an eminent physician in London’, Dr. Epps, who sent

Emily medicine, but she even refused that.125 According to Beth Torgerson, who

points to the significance of medical anthropology in the Brontës’ works, the debate

between ‘contagion’ and ‘anti-contagion’ was one of the most important medical and

political issues in the first half of the nineteenth century. 126 Supporters of

‘anti-contagion’ promoted the miasma theory, which was the most general explanation

for causes of diseases at that time, triggering some new remedies such as homeopathy.

Polluted air and infected wind were said to transmit cholera and other diseases that

would cause general symptoms, such as colds, headaches, coughs, and fevers.

However, Emily Brontë, unlike her sisters, who complained that the wind was always

affecting their ‘nervous system’, thought it as a ‘dry uninteresting wind’. 127 In

Wuthering Heights, although Nelly thinks that the cold wind would kill Catherine, in

her ‘delirium’ she insists on opening the window to have fresh air. 128 Actually, the

miasma theory and these ‘anti-contagion’ sources led to renewed support for

bloodletting because supporters considered that miasmas caused blood inflammation

and congestion. According to Niebyl, specific diseases and fevers came to lose their

identity under the influence of the bloodletting groups.129 This came about because a

specific contagion in the external environment was not acknowledged as a cause, but

only a change agent that elicited blood inflammation. Blood inflammation, or an

image of foul blood, was thus still a prevalent view among the lay public before

modern bacteriology theory was born. Not only diseases but also female menstruation

124 Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p.213.

125 Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p.215.
126 Beth Torgerson, Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.10.

127 Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p.167.
128 Brontë, p.124, 126.
129 Niebyl, p.465.

90
were also considered to be ‘dark drains’.130 Retention of blood was thought to lead to

excess contaminated flow within a woman’s body, creating ‘polluting and disruptive

forces of sexual energy’. 131 Blood was generally understood as a critical medium in

illness, conveying sickness throughout the whole body.

Brontë should have called this image of blood into question, since for her,

blood is evidence of physicality and life. Blood is not something contagious that

causes evil and wrong; on the contrary, it proves that the body works and functions for

life. In the novel Catherine once says to Edgar, ‘Your cold blood cannot be worked

into a fever—your veins are full of ice water—but mine are boiling, and the sight of

such chillness makes them dance.’132 Nelly and Edgar take this symptom as evidence

of blood inflammation and conclude that she is ill; on the other hand, Catherine

herself regards it as her physical reaction against the mental shock she has received.

Her body naturally works to resist the mental blows and protect herself for life.

Catherine’s blood frightens Edgar since he considers blood to be ominous and foul.

However, Brontë shows that healthy and tough people can fight through struggles with

blood and the novel rather distinguishes ‘cold-blooded’ Edgar and his nephew, Linton,

as both mentally weak and physically fragile. Blood thus demonstrates the body’s

strength and power.

Brontë’s antagonism to local medicine should have risen from a contradiction

that exists in the relationship between blood and health. Along with the emerging

importance of blood in bodily maintenance, it can be considered that blood not only

came to be a necessity for the mortal, body both sick and healthy, but also signified

sound physicality. This understanding of blood shows the difference from traditional

humourism and miasma theory, in which all physical conditions of life centre around

130 Shuttleworth, p.88.

131 Shuttleworth, p.97.
132 Brontë, p.117.
91
the imbalance or disharmony between the external environment and the physical body.

It is also different from the mainstream of vitalistic ideas, in which the essence or

principle of life exists as an independent or elevated form. For Emily Brontë, blood is

a substance that is needed for bodily maintenance, a vital part of the body and its

entire system. Furthermore, it is not only a barometer of one’s health and strength in

terms of health care, but also a testimony to the body that is conceived as one potential

entity. Fierce reactions in the body might be blamed on extremity and excess colliding

with the environment, but it rather demonstrates the body’s self-sufficiency and

sustentation. Thus, blood is needed to complete the integrity of the conceived body.

Blood works as a kind of material metaphor for such a conceptual mechanism of the

human body that is partly imaginative, but grounded in empirical knowledge of the

human body.

4.4 The bodily ghost of Catherine: materialisation of ‘life’ in the supernatural world

Blood in the text of Wuthering Heights thus works as visible and material

proof of ‘life’ that the body is supposed to retain. Losing blood either in accidents or

from treatments leads to weakness and exhaustion of the body. Both Catherine and

Heathcliff, who seem to lose much blood after all, eventually need to die, although the

text does not attempt to clarify the actual causes of their death by providing

pathological explanations. However, losing blood not only signifies bodily

consumption in the text, but also implies the potentiality to ‘regain’ the ‘life’.

Catherine indeed loses much blood before she dies; she is bled for her treatment, and

moreover, she delivers her child just before she dies. During Heathcliff’s final stage in

life, he tests his body to the limit and eventually behaves like a vampire, gradually and

mysteriously losing his blood and thus coming to an end, his body cold and bloodless.

For these strong characters in Wuthering Heights, they do not shed blood in vain.

92
Catherine’s mentioning of the body’s ‘shattered prison’, in which she is ‘tired of being

enclosed’, shows that her goal of ‘that glorious world’ lies through and beyond the

consumption of her body.133 This yearning for ‘life’ results in the representation of the

bodily figure through the supernatural ghost. Catherine’s ghost at first appears to

present a paradox in that the ghost ‘regains’ blood. However, if losing blood means

consumption and the end of the living body, ‘regaining’ blood means reproducing the

ghost body. The window that connects Heathcliff’s bloodless arm and Catherine’s

bleeding wrist is the site where reality and the supernatural interflows by way of

exchange and reversion. Something lost forever is regained in the haunting world. In

this way, blood testifies to the reproduction of a body in the figure of the ghost. The

bodily ghost is an embodiment of ‘life’ in a physical form.

Thus, Catherine’s ghost exists to represent and embody the hope and idea of

human existence. Most supernatural creatures in Wuthering Heights could be grouped

into the folkloric, literary, or cultural sources. However, Catherine’s ghost is the ‘dead

body’ itself. Since the ‘body’ contains blood, it can be labelled a horrifying ‘vampire’,

but it is different from the conventional production of the Romantic vampire, in which

blood works as a cannibalistic metaphor as a source of nutrition. The ‘ghost’ Brontë

creates amounts to the ideal form of a sustainable body, a physical form of ‘life’ in the

afterlife, which is conceived through the scientific and medical exploration into the

human body with literary imagination. The human body itself is the mystery that has a

powerful mechanism with a sustainable system of ‘life’. Heathcliff’s vampiristic

figure and Brontë’s suggested ideas of mechanical body demonstrate the body’s

potentiality, which is conceived through a process of philosophical imagination based

on knowledge of natural science. Nelly’s sudden association of Heathcliff with a

vampire and her complicated images of death, the dead, and the afterlife all converge

133 Brontë, p.160.

93
in this new figure of the bodily ghost, which is, itself, a literary reproduction of the

ghost challenging the conventions of the Romantic tradition. The bodily ghost

represents a new idea of ‘reincarnation’ that seeks to resolve the complex relationship

between the human and supernatural in Victorian times. The potential and imaginative

power of the human body flows through blood, which radically turns out to be the

‘flesh’ of the ghost.

94