The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James

197 Pages·2016·4.46 MB·English

by  Zoe Lehmann Imfeld (auth.)

THE
VICTORIAN
GHOST
STORY AND
THEOLOGY
FROM LE FANU TO JAMES
ZOË LEHMANN IMFELD
The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology

Zoë   Lehmann   Imfeld
The Victorian Ghost
Story and Theology
From Le Fanu to James
Zoë   Lehmann   Imfeld
University of Bern
Bern, Switzerland
ISBN 978-3-319-30218-8 ISBN 978-3-319-30219-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30219-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940610
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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Cover illustration: © Illustration by Gustave Doré from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’.
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And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and
that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the
wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains
an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds
and vapors trouble the fi eld of the telescope most when it reaches farthest.
John Ruskin, Stones of Venice

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this book was made possible by a Marie Heim-Vögtlin
Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The MHV
grant is aimed at female scholars who are balancing an academic career
with family commitments. As the mother of very young children, I cannot
describe the value of such a grant, and I think it should be considered the
jewel in the crown of the Swiss academic system.
I give my enduring thanks to Virginia Richter, who when I turned
up on her academic-doorstep took me under her wing, and has provided
guidance and support ever since. Her advice and insight have been invalu-
able from the conception of this research idea to its fi nal manuscript. I
am also indebted to Alison Milbank, whose careful and thoughtful advice
at various stages of this book made me examine and re-examine both my
literary criticism and use of theology to produce something sound.
This book has also benefi ted from many and repeated readings by my
colleagues at the University of Bern, who were incredibly generous with
their time and offered comments and suggestions that greatly improved
the resulting work. Likewise thanks go to my ‘Emeritus-RA’, with whom
many a theological discussion has taken place over ‘extraordinary’ after-
noon teas in Oxford. Long may they continue.
I must of course also give my sincere thanks to William Desmond and
Charles Taylor, whose writings provide fundamental background to my
theoretical claims, and both of whom were kind enough to provide feed-
back and suggestions to early parts of this book.
I am very lucky to have been on the receiving end of a great deal of sup-
port from Ben Doyle and his team at Palgrave Macmillan. My thanks also
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
to Francesca Lehmann and Lobsang Gammeter for carefully proofreading
the manuscript.
Last but of course not least, this book would not have been possible
without the support and patience of my husband Bruno, and my children
Toby and Sophie, who will hopefully one day read ghost stories with as
much glee as I do.
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: Rethinking the Victorian Ghost Story 1
Rethinking Victorian Agnosticism 2
Rethinking Victorian Society 4
Reviving Theological Ghosts 6
A Journey through the Stories of Machen, MRJ,
Le Fanu and Henry James 7
2 Haunted by the Ghost of God—Reading Theologically 13
God as Ghostly: The Relegation and Return of Meta-Narrative 14
Being as Ghostly: The Christian Meta-Narrative of
the Ghost Story 26
3 ‘Strangely mistaking death for life’: Arthur Machen 39
Anglo-Catholicism and Arthur Machen’s Sense of Mystery 4 1
Machen’s Thomist Anthropology 4 6
‘The White People’ 47
Man without Christ in ‘The Great God Pan’ 5 5
Aesthetic Nihilism in The Three Impostors 59
Conclusion 70
4 ‘What is this that I have done?’: M. R. James 79
M. R. James, Anglican Dogma and the Moral Authority of Text 8 0
MRJ’s Theological Anthropology 8 4
ix