America's ghost fascination follows changing culture
By BJS
Created 05/09/2005 - 07:51

For Americans, ghosts represent much more than just spooky specters,
says Central Michigan University English professor Jeffrey Weinstock.

Throughout time, ghosts in American literature have signified
representations of the American culture at large: a yearning to
reconnect with lost loved ones, a reminder of cultural dilemmas like
racism and slavery, or personal struggles like domestic abuse, according
to Weinstock.
Weinstock is the editor of Spectral America: Phantoms and the
American Imagination and currently is working on the book, Scare
Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women as a Form of Social
Protest.

Ghosts have remained an area of fascination, said Weinstock. But no one
had thought to try and actually examine in a book the importance of
Ghosts to American literature across time.
Through an examination of literature from the 19th century to the
present day for Spectral America, Weinstock has found that ghosts and
hauntings have played an important role for people over time.

During the period following the Civil War, for example, Americans were
excited by the idea of spiritualism, or the idea that the living could
communicate with the dead " a fascinating prospect for the thousands of
people who lost family members to the war.

When Weinstock looks at the differences between ghosts as told by male
and female writers, he has found striking differences.
For women writers, ghosts communicate a sense of unease about the place
of women in American culture, an anxiety, a sense of confinement,
Weinstock said.
In the 1892 story The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
the ghost trapped in a houses wallpaper reflects the womans role in
society as a confined and silenced being, trapped in a struggle for
freedom.

In ghost stories by women, what tends to be more frightening than the
ghost is the status quo, he said.
On the other hand, for men the ghost represents anxiety about a changing
world, fears of the unknown, said Weinstock.
From Central Michigan University