Supernatural Specters, Normal Human Malice: On Edith Wharton's "Ghosts"

Edith Wharton | Ghosts | NYRB Classics | 2021 | 288 Pages

Edith Wharton was “twenty-seven or -eight” before she was able to sleep in a room that contained even a single ghost story. This is according to an unpublished manuscript portion of her autobiography, A Backward Glance. It’s a shocking admission from one of twentieth-century America’s foremost contributors to the genre, and surprising given the resemblances between Wharton’s ghosts and many of those residing in her personal library, dreamed up by her predecessors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and her close friend Henry James. Whatever it was that inspired her youthful terrors, though, she eventually got over them, becoming at last “a woman hardly conscious of physical fear,” as she puts it. It is this fearless vision of Wharton that appears on display in her collected ghost stories, which she set about arranging for republication at the age of seventy-three, in the last year of her life. 

Those stories—or most of them, anyway—have been recollected and republished under the title Ghosts and released as a new volume in the New York Review Books Classics line, which is produced by the New York Review of Books. With them is the Preface that Wharton wrote to accompany the original, 1937 release of her collected ghost stories, which first appeared individually in the Pictorial Review and other magazines of the day and were not presented together until that volume was published by Appleton—ironically enough—right after her death. The Appleton collection was published in multiple popular editions right up through the 1990s, making the newly launched NYRB Classics version a welcome, if not totally necessary, addition to Wharton’s larger oeuvre. But more on that in a moment; first, let us speak of the ghosts. 

The Ghosts volume brings together the whole, wide, splendid array of Whartonian takes on the supernatural. Here are “fetches” (ominous doppelgangers) of Celtic superstition, zombie mistresses rising from the grave, and ghost dogs, even. But for each of these paranormal threats there is an equally normal, equally mundane, and equally human villain attached to the story. In this way, Wharton’s Ghosts can be read and interpreted in concert with many of her better-known works, including novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, which tell stories of everyday human malice. Wharton’s supernatural specters, it is clear, function as richly costumed variations on a theme of all-too-human cruelty. 

Chief among those themes is greed. Wharton—like us, her readers living today—lived in greedy times. Stories like “The Triumph of Night,” in which a sickly young heir falls prey to his family’s schemes and is sacrificed in order to safeguard their fortunes, read as documents of Gilded Age America—dispatches from a time when greed was becoming a cornerstone of American success, and not an accidental byproduct of the quest for it. “The Triumph of Night,” which is less appreciated today (except among certain diehard Wharton fans), reads a lot like one of her more popular hits from this genre, “The Eyes.” That story is also about greed, centering on an “ogreish” old narcissist who is so lacking in self-awareness, he can’t even tell that he is the villain of his own ghost story. In both “Triumph” and “The Eyes,” evil wears the garb not only of greed but also of age; both show older, more privileged and more powerful men (always men) operating as quasi-vampires, sucking the lifeblood out of the youths who have been entrusted to their care. Where such malevolence is concerned, Wharton suggests, human nature is more frightening than anything supernatural. 

But this is not to say that Wharton, who was writing ghost stories well into her seventies, views age as a necessary source of evil. Several of her protagonists in Ghosts are aging individuals who are terrorized by the most average of all villains: loneliness. Wharton’s take on aging and loneliness is perhaps a bit dated, stemming from an era in which the houses of the upper class were peopled with servants, attendants, and caregivers. The last story she ever wrote, and one of my personal favorites, “All Souls” tells of an aging widow who wakes to find herself alone, abandoned by the people she pays to run her lavish household, on All Soul’s Day. She eventually draws a connection between her servants’ disappearance, the superstitions that surround the holiday, and the arrival of a mysterious personage annually on that day. The first time I ever read this story, I saw it as an insufferable tale of elite privilege (Oh no! Who will make up my fire and bring my tea?). Over the years, though, and through my repeated readings of it (I make a habit of reading it every year on November 1), I’ve come to see it as a metaphor for the particular kind of loneliness that haunts many peoples’ visions of old age. This specter of loneliness is something that rich people (like Wharton herself) can afford to ward off, at least for a while. But the message of the story, I think, is that loneliness comes for us all, eventually. It’s a fascinatingly sinister view of life and death from a woman who was on the verge of becoming acquainted with the latter. And, to me, it’s one of the most beautiful things Wharton ever wrote, full of rich autumnal twilight broken by shadows and “surging murmurs of life.”

In this edition of Ghosts, which has been known by other names since it was first published in 1937, including simply The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, “All Souls” leads the way. It’s positioned at the top of the table of contents and followed by some of Wharton’s more recognizable titles, including “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” which is also about loneliness. In other versions of the volume, this other story came first, owing to its popularity and its age. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” is the oldest story in the collection, having first appeared in Scribner’s magazine in 1902. And, like the last story Wharton ever wrote, it revolves around the people who are paid to provide care and company to those who can afford care and company. In this way, the story—which involves the ghost of a devoted servant, who seeks to protect her former mistress from harm and, it is hinted, domestic abuse as well—feels contemporary, even as the institutions and forms of caregiving it depicts might seem comparably alien. Servants are indispensable to these stories because of the way they are expected to both see and not see. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the ghost of the dead servant Emma Saxon helps the young Hartley, who has taken her place, to see the truth of her mistress’ wretched loneliness and recruits her to the task of concealing her mistress’ extramarital affair. 

It’s a sad story, perhaps even more than a scary one, which speaks to the torturous conditions of Wharton’s own life: in 1902, she was still a decade away from divorcing her husband and ending the story of her own unhappy marriage. Indeed, unhappy marriages are found everywhere in Ghosts, as they are in the rest of Wharton’s writing. In the celebrated short story “Kerfol,” an unhappy marriage is avenged by a troop of ghost dogs; in “Pomegranate Seed,” a controlling former spouse haunts her living replacement. While the individual stories differ, Wharton’s commitment to viewing the marriage contract as an endlessly fruitful site of terror ends up uniting them and lending consistency to the collection. But it also results in some noticeable overlaps. 

Three out of four female servants in these stories are named “Agnes,” and every Agnes is an immigrant. Together, this team of Agneses comprise a single, polyvocal link that connects the very modern, practical Wharton back to tales of the “old country,” thereby helping to excuse her indulgence in the supernatural. In contrast to their mistresses, who are usually cast as protagonists and permitted to know better, the Agneses stand collectively for the idea of folklore, importing the legends of their native lands and replanting them in Wharton’s American landscape. I know from researching Wharton’s personal library collection—held at The Mount, her historic home in Massachusetts—that she owned a copy of Margaret Murray’s 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, a spurious anthropological study that argued for the existence of a widespread network of pagan witches operating throughout Europe, especially in the Celtic isles. Though Murray’s ideas were later discredited, they continued to hold sway throughout the 1920s and subsequent editions of the book were even published by Oxford University Press. Wharton’s own ancestry was resolutely American, stretching all the way back of the time of the revolution, but she was clearly intrigued by white immigrant populations and their attachments to, as she saw it, the superstitions of their homelands. 

In the NYRB Classics edition of Ghosts, this intrigue is given greater latitude thanks to the inclusion of a story that was not originally a part of Appleton’s The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton volume. That story, “A Bottle of Perrier,” shows the darker side of Wharton’s ethnocentric tendencies and beliefs. It’s about an archaeologist who travels deep into the desert of an unspecified North African country (probably Egypt) in order to rendezvous with a colleague who, it turns out, is not home. As he waits for his host to return, he gets to know the servants, the majority of whom are Arab; they are overseen by another servant, a transplant from the British empire called Gosling. It is through Gosling that racist ideas are dispensed in this story and, significantly, not through Wharton’s narrator, who speaks Arab and tries to communicate with the servants rather than buying into Gosling’s view of them as untrustworthy liars who are “all alike.” But in thinking about Wharton’s influences, this story rings with echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The world beyond the archaeologist’s imperial home seems savage and wild, unknowable to the white traveler. What saves it, though only just, is his discovery of a malice that does not stem from that supposed source but, rather, from his absent host’s privilege and class pretensions. 

“A Bottle of Perrier” makes for an awkward addition to the Ghosts collection because it contains no ghosts at all. Where, in other stories, paranormal occurrences are revealed to have their roots in human behavior, here there is nothing strange or supernatural to deflect attention and delay that outcome. Instead, the threat rests in the supposition that the Arab servants ought to be viewed by default as the villains when, in fact, they are not. They are not aggressors in this story, but neither are they fully human in a story that is populated entirely by human characters. So why include it here? 

The answer has to do with the NYRB Classics line and its operational structure. Aside from its new name, this edition of Ghosts is more or less the same as the versions that came before it. And whereas the majority of NYRB Classics books are released with new introductions, usually written by famous contemporary authors, the Ghosts collection has only that short Preface that Wharton added to it some eighty years ago. It also lacks explanatory footnotes. For instance, Wharton’s reference in “All Souls” to the Mary Celeste, a mysterious cargo ship that was discovered abandoned and left adrift on the Atlantic Ocean in 1872, could benefit from a footnote—contemporary readers can hardly be expected to know its name. But this reference, and many others like it (by a writer who is known for her allusive style), goes unexplained. With no new introduction and no explanatory footnotes, we are left with a book that, despite its age, has been rereleased without soliciting a drop of fresh editorial labor. 

While the Ghosts collection shows Wharton at her most sinister and best, the NYRB Classics edition shows modern publishing at its most frugal and weakest. This becomes clear when one considers that over half of the contents of the newly released collection are now in the public domain. With the exception of four titles—Wharton’s Preface along with “All Souls,” “Mr. Jones,” and “Pomegranate Seed”—the volume’s contents are free of copyright. And, in fact, one story that appeared in previous versions of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, “The Looking Glass,” is missing; it was published in 1935 and so is still under copyright, in contrast to the majority of the rest of the contents. This situation is understandable given the pressures of modern publishing, but also disappointing. With all the attention that Wharton has received in recent years from high profile writers (including New Yorker writers like Jia Tolentino and novelists like Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, and Brandon Taylor), and the continually effervescent scene that is Wharton scholarship, commissioning a new Introduction would have been effortless. The same goes for the footnotes: I had to pause from my reading of “A Bottle of Perrier” to look up the word “velarium.” 

The publication of the Ghosts volume testifies to Wharton’s enduring cultural cachet. Her name alone, it appears, is a safe bet within the world of contemporary publishing; as a result, presses can afford to lightly repackage her century-old wares without investing in new labor costs, because they know those wares will continue to sell. Doing this helps to keep Wharton’s name in circulation, yes. But doing it cheaply also undermines the work of writers, editors, and scholars who have already been doing the same thing, for years. There is no doubt that Edith Wharton’s ghosts will continue to haunt and enchant us. But without publishers investing in the wider ecosystem that surrounds writing, editing, and authorship, it’s hard to imagine a future for her literary successors.