Spectral Femininity

‘Spectral Femininity’ examines the troubling spectres of femininity that have haunted the Gothic imagination since the eighteenth century. Etymologically related as much to the field of looking as to the realm of phantoms, the ‘spectre’ occupies a vital place in the Gothic’s vocabulary of haunting, revenance and (in)visibility. From the repressed daughters and buried mothers of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to the infernal images of wraithlike women in the macabre imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, femininity is peculiarly susceptible to ‘spectralisation’. With reference to the Freudian uncanny, Derrida’s notion of spectrality and the work of Terry Castle, Munford analyses Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ali Smith’s Hotel World, in all of which images of spectral femininity are used to explore questions of historical dispossession, experiences of social invisibility, and anxieties about sexual identity and generational conflict. As Derrida reminds us, the spectre ‘begins by coming back’; never fully exorcised, the spectral is always that which refuses to be laid to rest. The chapter concludes that, while images of spectral femininity often function as sites of dread and anxiety, they also work to signify powerful images of irrepressible female desire and agency.