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Article Excerpt
Many Victorian suburban ghost stories address anxieties about class-linked space. This essay analyzes four themes in these narratives: the use of suburban setting to highlight class instability; the ghost as threat to middle-class culture; the middle-class male who nullifies the threat of the undomesticated/supernatural; and the ghost as disciplinary "overseer.
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The emergence of the Victorian suburb was a middle-class phenomenon, born of two competing desires: to escape contact with the urban lower classes, and to remain in close and necessary contact with the cash nexus located in urban centres. The suburb was further shaped throughout mid-century by an aesthetic sensibility borrowed from the upper-class country-house ideal and modified to the smaller living spaces of villas and semi-detached homes. This aesthetic grew out of the middle class's concern with reinforcing precarious class boundaries by physically marking suburban space as "classed." That this aesthetic was borrowed and replicated in new working-class and lower-middle-class suburban estates was a source of great anxiety to other middle-class suburbanites, particularly those who had just recently risen from the lower segments of Victorian society. This diffusion of an aesthetic meant to signify class membership made it increasingly difficult to determine the class of the inhabitants of a home or neighbou rhood simply by looking at it. And yet, because of the suburban emphasis on privacy, expressed both in architecture and in ideology, looking from the outside was often all that was possible. Despite its problematic nature (from a middle-class perspective), this adaptation continued virtually unabated throughout the greatest period of British suburban growth (1850-1880) and beyond, destabilizing class boundaries by allowing more and more newcomers to take on the trappings of middle-class living and irrevocably blurring what was intended to be a visible line between the working and middle classes.
As suburban building boomed and rents came down, more and more of the various strata of Victorian society were able to move out of rank and crowded city centres into homes that approximated middle-class villadom. This resulted in an increasing middle-class concern with the extent to which appearances and "reality" came together at any given social or cultural site, including the suburbs, and led to the great middle-class concern with "normality." As Michel Foucault points out in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, "normalization [became] one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age" (184), and throughout the nineteenth century, "normality," as defined by middle-class values, was the mark of social identification. As part of this process of "normalizing" class behaviours, Nancy Armstrong argues that fiction in general "helped to formulate the ordered space we now recognise as the household [...] and used it as the context for representing normal behaviour" (23). According to her, domestic fiction took on the task of taming "new domains of aberrance," which were beyond or above the law (163). Yet domestic fiction was not the only genre to take on this cultural task. A related and relatively unexamined genre, the suburban ghost story of the mid- to late-Victorian period, fulfills a similar function; its narrative structure is also concerned with ordering and "normalizing" domestic space. Unlike domestic fiction, however, where female agency is emphasized, the Victorian suburban ghost narrative provides a middle-class male hero the opportunity to order the space of a haunted house that has been disrupted by a specter, and, through a fantasy of excluding this specter, to reassert (the readers') middle-class values.
For many readers, the ghost story genre is partially or wholly synonymous with the Gothic tradition established earlier in the century by Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole in novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castle of Otranto (respectively). The defining elements of such supernatural narratives, where disembodied spirits haunt crumbling castle ruins, seems strangely at odds with the "modernity" of the Victorian suburb and the spirit of the nineteenth century in general. However, much as the earlier Gothic novels addressed contemporary cultural concerns of nationhood, civilization, and nature (see Anne Janowitz's England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape), the suburban ghost story of this period, of which there were many examples published in popular periodicals, addresses anxieties about the instability of suburban space during the time of the most uncontrolled and rampant suburban growth. The anxiety inherent in the instability of suburban space resonated with the anxiety traditi onally provoked by supernatural elements of ghost stories. In this essay, I analyze four main themes of suburban ghost literature in the middle third of the nineteenth century: the use of suburban setting to highlight class instability; the ghost figure as threat to middle-class suburban culture; the upwardly mobile middle-class male hero who nullifies the threat of both the supernatural and the undomesticated; and, the use of the ghost as a disciplinary force that can go where the middle-class eye could not. Whether it is the location or the inhabitants of the haunted house that contribute to its borderline status within the suburb, that liminality seems essential to the appeal of the suburban ghost story.
Understanding the context of Victorian suburbanization may help ground the discussion of "suburban" literature. The Victorians defined suburb quite broadly. In the case of London, some sources, such as Percy Fitzgerald's London City Suburbs as They Are Today (published in 1893), begin with Westminster and Chelsea, defining suburb as anything outside the City proper but within the limits of what came to be known as the London County Council. Others, such as James Thorne's Handbook to the Environs of London (published in 1876), ranged as far afield as Brighton and Cambridge, taking dormitory suburbs into consideration. Because there was no real consensus at the time about what exactly constituted a suburb, my working definition of suburb as the areas outside the City and Westminster, where recent building had been primarily residential rather than industrial or commercial, seems to be as accurate and useful as any contemporary definition.
The suburbs of London were the fastest growing areas in all of England in the 1870s (Briggs 324). In contrast to northern cities, the London suburbs grew 50 percent per decade between 1861 and 1891 (Dyos 19), with the greatest growth...
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