Published in 2014
224 pages
Dara Downey is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and a Trinity Access Programme tutor. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014), editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and Vice Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies.
What is this book about?
Dara Downey explores how closely late nineteenth-century American women’s ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales that range from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, she offers a new perspective on an old genre. Rather than seeing the spectres that stalk the pages of women’s writing in Gilded-Age America as mere hallucinations or signs of mental disturbance, Downey examines the unusual motif of haunted houses without ghosts. Rarely appearing as ghosts, the dead women in the tales studied here hide away in the patters of furniture and wallpaper, offering a radical critique of the male gaze that reduced female bodies to alluring objects. Covering murderous nightcaps, haunted boarding houses and spectral china closets, it allows the object matter of the ghost story to, almost literally, come out of the closet.
“Downey’s readings would be valuable for any instructor or student studying the ghost story, American gothic, or gender in the Gilded Age. Her clear discussions of literary and historical context make the book accessible and engaging for advanced and undergraduate scholars alike, and her productive use of repetition and a reflective format make it useful as a whole or in teachable excerpts.” (Laura R. Kremmel, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 15, 2016)
