'Conjuring Up Ghosts'
Folkloristic Memorat in Fiction
Mid-October. The Washington hawthorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum) out front is heavy with bright orange berries and the elders are scratching to be let in. If permitted, they grow to the second story of our home. Wind gusts this morning ushered in cold air; it’s finally time to consider carving pumpkins (and turnips).
Autumn is my favorite time of year. This year, sadly, I feel agitated. Yesterday, I saw something on Notes: a fellow writer’s anxiety regarding the election which is being held here in the United States in November. Maybe that’s it. Maybe my inability to embrace the season is related to the swirling madness all around me?
Perhaps my Hallowe’en-themed Spotify playlist, pumpkin-carving, hot tea & biscuits will improve my mood? All of these things are planned for the coming week!
‘We’re dismal enough without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us.’ These words, spoken by Nelly Dean (the most annoying unreliable narrator in the history of literature), bring me to my latest Wuthering Heights-related reading:
Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives' Tales in Wuthering Heights (JSTOR)
Oh! this journal article published in Victorian Literature and Culture (1998) appeals to my folklore-loving heart! Author Paula M Krebs discusses each narrator—Lockwood and Nelly Dean—as folklorist and ‘old wife,’ respectively.
Krebs informs readers that the field of folklore studies came about in the Victorian period. Further explaining, Nancy Armstrong observed :
The growth of Victorian folklore studies helped construct the “folk”—especially Celts and rural northerners—as Other.
“Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore and Photography,” Novel 25 (1992): 245-67.
“The folk,” according to Krebs, “were relegated to the margins…a symbol of a cultural past that the English had transcended.” In the 17th century literacy had supplanted the fairy stories and superstitions of the so-called, “poor people.”1 By the time Lockwood meets Nelly Dean at Wuthering Heights, an educated man from the city would should know better than to believe in ghosts!
Here in 18th and 19th C Pennsylvania, Germans were also relegated to the fringe…so much so, they were initially valued by the English settlers solely to buffer against the so-called, ‘savages,’ already inhabiting the area. Viewed as uncivilized and rustic, the Pennsylvania Germans were considered ignorant, superstitious and suspect. Plus, our folklore and superstitions aligned with that of the other European Other—Celts and rural northerners.
When I arrived here at Substack I wrote about folklore. The folklore of specific folks—my recent ancestors, the Pennsylvania Germans. They brought with them to America, the folklore of Old World Europe. Much of the superstition and folklore Emily Brontë included in her novel is familiar to me. Not to mention, I LOVE the classic novels of the Hallowe'en season—my favorites include, of course, Dracula and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
Ah! but Brontë has not written a Gothic novel filled with occult episodes…
The stories of encounters with ghosts in the novel read like those in nineteenth-century collections of folklore. They are folk memorats, or first-person narratives of encounters with the supernatural. Brontë resists early Victorian folklorists’ nostalgia for their own culture’s past by making use of the substance of folkloric writing but embedding that material in fiction.
I love this distinction—because I think it is exactly what makes the novel so realistic for me. While the northern inhabitants of the Heights are English (not German), their culture of stories and superstitions reminds me so much of my own ancestors’. We’re a culture of believers—believers in ghosts, in curses, in folk healing and folk magic.
Within my lifetime, the descendants of Pennsylvania Germans were still referred to as, “dumb Dutch.” However, by the end of the 1970s our folkways earned (respected) scholarly attention after renowned folklorist Don Yoder helped forge what is now considered the American Folklife Movement.
In 1801, when Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights he is disturbed to learn that his landlord, Heathcliff, believes in the existence of his beloved Catherine’s ghost. Krebs explains:
For Lockwood, the ghost could only have been a dream. Yet the inhabitants of the region around the Heights, the people Nelly calls “country folks,” see ghosts and are not ashamed to admit it. Why should we be surprised that lurking just behind the sophisticated exterior of the cultured Lockwood is a man who would be terrified and threatened by a dream that would link him with ghost-believers. People like him had only recently risen above that kind of superstition.
As someone who was raised on ghost stories, I am firmly among the ghost-believers.
Emily Jane Brontë’s use of ghost memorat is my cup of tea. Last year I wrote an essay over on Ridge & Valley Rooted about soul windows—seelenfenster—windows added to the houses built by Pennsylvania Germans, from which disembodied souls may exit.
In British Colonial Pennsylvania, my ancestors from the Palatinate did not recognize Hallowe'en, but they retained their folk beliefs in ghosts and wandering spirits. Here, wandering spirits are woven into the tapestry of place.
Pennsylvania State University professor, Yvonne Milspaw, once acknowledged:
[Souls] are tied to places they have loved, usually their homes.
She went on to explain that some eighteenth century traditional homes had small, cleverly hidden windows built into parlors and bedrooms. The seelenfenster or soul window, was opened at the precise moment of death and closed a short time later. It was believed a spirit is so attached to place, it must be encouraged to move on.1
If a departed soul attempts to return to the home using the same way it exited, the secured window will discourage the spirit. In many places it is supposed that the departure of life is delayed so long as any locks or bolts in the house are fastened, as they are supposed to hinder the soul in taking leave of the body.2
The idea of unlocking windows and doors and a seelenfenster fascinate me. Are these excluded ghosts wandering souls? Do souls return to their homes on All Hallows’ Eve? Hallowe'en was not celebrated in early Pennsylvania, so I can only assume the spirits were assumed to have moved on to a higher place…
Beliefs regarding departed souls becoming intermediaries between humans and God held that those who lived good lives became saint-like in death, blessed with abilities which allow them to intercede on behalf of, and in the daily lives of, their loved ones.
The ghost-at-the-window memorat is central to the function of Wuthering Heights as a liminal text, a text between folklore and literature.
Lockwood, attempting to stop fir-bough from rattling against his window, finds the door locked. Frenzied in his need to stop the clattering, he punches through a glass window and seizes not a wily branch but, “the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand.”
Catherine’s ghost pleads to be allowed inside and despite recognizing the figure as a child, Lockwood nonetheless, explains:
Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes.
Krebs deftly points out:
The scene is not a conventional literary encounter with a ghost. We do not read this episode as we would a self-contained literary ghost story or Gothic tale, in which the ghost frightens us. Catherine’s ghost is not scary. Lockwood frightens us.
“Piling up books in a pyramid against it,” slicing the wrist of a wailing ghost-child, Lockwood uses literacy and violence to fight folkloric superstition. The ‘old wife’ and unreliable narrator, Nelly Dean, (though well-read) is still country folk, she is a rustic.
Lockwood is the folklorist-masculine to Nelly’s folk-feminine.
When Lockwood encourages Nelly to tell him stories of The Earnshaws, The Lintons, Cathy and Heathcliff, he becomes folklorist to the servant’s ‘old wife.’ Krebs explains:
When Nelly tells the tale of Catherine and Heathcliff, she gives Lockwood access to the folk-feminine from which his male, middle-class positioning has excluded him.
Wuthering Heights is filled with ghosts. Blackened with witchcraft, vampires, fiends and devils, Brontë’s dark fiction initially disturbs readers. Close examination of the story, however, reveals little which can be described as supernatural. Mortal human cruelty, ignorance, xenophobia and a desire for vengeance engender darkness.
Immortal love—illuminated—only seems supernatural. ♡
Dorson, Richard. The British Folklorists: A History. London: Routledge. 1968.
Cover Image: Speak! Speak!, 1895, John Everett Millais