The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film Spectral Identities Edited by Lisa Kréger and Melanie R. Anderson UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS Newark‘www.rowman-com Marin i766 10 Thombury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, ie ‘of Daughters ofthe Dust reprinted with permission from Julie Dash, Contents Acknowledgm« Introduction The Gothic and the Ghostly 1. Haunted Narratives: Women Writing the Ghostly in Early Gothic Fiction Lisa Kroger 2. City of Ghost Stefania Porcelti 3. Those “Whose Deaths Were Not Remarked”: Ghostly Other Women in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Jana M. Tigehelaar beth Bowen’s Wartime Stories Il: Speetral Figures and Spectral Histories 4 These Ghosts Will Be Lovers: The “Cultural Haunting” of Class Consciousness in lan McEwan’s Atonement Karley K. Adney 5. The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy: Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching Amy K. King tion: Migrating Spirits and Australian n’s Vixen 29 47 59 Ba Karley K. Adnay 12 Making o 2004): 76 Haunting and the Sociological Imagination ot Minesota Pres, 1997), me Contemporary Fiction: 1. M. Costzee, Contemporary Fiction 48, no. (2006) gn and Sound 17,0. 10 (2007): 34, Chapter Five ; The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching Amy K. King If people are what they because the “dietary desire essences o pica when Dover—a sentient house possessed by supremacy. As the Dover house molds Miranda’s body, Miranda starts to crave something else to dietary desires regress from nutritious food, to no 39the metaphor that told teness was a sign of their superiority (0 er peoples.” This supposed raci ‘Warren Montag says, means ly eighteenth century, shness” had by this time become synonym debated the end of the transatlantic slave freeing a Other else- status is space is not free from extreme racism. Paul Britain the “new racism” attempts to Keep Others out by bodies would bers of the white rac suffer from emaciation—they do grandmother, grandmother, and mother have novel portrays whiteness in his 1997 text 7h ‘women [were] wl fe British middle-class women were the ly reveal “a hysteria” of to be policed because\é moulded. la belong to sor for gener Silver—Miranda’s great-grandmother—started eating acorn ‘and pebbles when she was about to move into the house in Dove s \dmother—ate her “tiny replica of a yew tree” and fear of slave uprisings, Haiti was a “dar ied States and to other Caribbean islands, as slave owners were terrified of the same ing on their plantations. Later, motions in the Unit- blacks to Haiti” and afterward “to protect or even " shows the “tangled plot of economic to Sheller adds s the oft-repeated ‘poorest country hhas become a ‘poster child” for the ills of trophe. However real desires that form after pica drain it explains that Anna Good ex enced pica before she was alone in the out."25 Likewise, before Miranda her grandmother or mother, as Mi ly transforms i c being. Why the house so favors Miranda to act on the ideals of ceptions peopl sesses over bl and any contact, Iver women, “We are hutely cannot have ny cost reveals the nature of white supremacy. mn of 29 Barton Road as a destructive British domestic space1ous undertones that appeal win brother, in the novel izes the common foot of Rapunze’s tower before the tower is does not want to acknow!- edge the desire he about other people’s perceptions of ‘The q blossom? At any rate sister, he thoughts here ieves they are connected beyond a platonic relationship. jot and Miranda clearly have a degree of sexual te between them as teenagers because hey try, “for some reason, fo hold each other flat feelings for Miranda get in id miscegenation are theoret reproduces sameness and about the incest trope in sameness of dark hair and whi hey have identical With their very ‘The Spinal Quvernons of White Supremay 68 | ig, the child would be a replica of them: wl bea symbol ‘once the house inge does favor white Brit woman after Miranda, Even thi house to find a suitable ‘of whiteness in the novel, unproductive ly cleans out her Waiting for \ which mysteriouslyas Miranda and Ore 's company. Also, because illing to embrace flexible ethnicities, sexualities, and gender roles as opposed to Britons by the Dover house pi as a reproductive body: her inal fluids. Even though Miranda and Ore cannot procteate together, and the threat of miscegenation does not apply, the house views Ore as a very real menace to the “purity” of the house, Miranda, and—thus— ide of those not “igh the side outside the consensus by value of reproductive Futurism, ing for the children,” politics cor en, depend on the ig must be done to ensure present no Romanow, that Miranda goes against clear when not contribute the house is molding Miranda to its purpos impse of a “perfect person,” someone whom Miranda bel her “but perfect” to spark the desire that consumes her after the girl's jagged notable and that she searching for what teeth provide a hint for what kind of food inda returns to the Dover house after she Cambridge, 29 Barton Road remarks on exaggerated repli be used by the house. roams under the cover of darkness and looks for “newcomers"—imm grants—to harm, Soucouyant myths exist in numerous ct soucouy; to feast on jures and usually entail that the ancest cance of gender in the colonial contexts of is clear that the evil and comrupi and only through the mother, because= Amy K King ‘Anatol points to the specific ro in the framework of: previously stated, the mat i as it show: is soucouyant myth mythos in a yucouyant-like being called “the good- that plays on her great-grandmother’s maiden name ly not “good.” Instead, Anna Good first the house Blacki ers." Anna Good, who was “afi vampire form—down Anna Good's lady,” a soucouy- ” with the sharp ly work, she apprentices Mi by giving her the desire to consume immigrants, beginni ed one sequence of events that is probably a hal (a room of the house where GrandAnna, ing around a food are av: “all [the food] prefer, there, s0 |s make Miranda hungrier for what terms of symbol ‘actual mate mans into them, As rothes” grows more refined. AL oe po a i -art while she sleeps,®! thus desiring t ibes. According to 15 among so called ‘primitive’ people, the heart of a getting looser” ) and ‘out of Ore’s body (“As we kissed 1 ied hard to breathe, harder the reader seesn Amy K. King the vampire precisely because he is an outsider. In other words, it may be f consider Stoker's compelling and frequently retold story terrae cial sexual competition.”* This particular telling of the vampire myth thus depicts Victorian yant leg Us for Witchin the mythos influenced by Dracula, As Miran- ike teeth, she has become the vampire; s ng to Gerry dda grows vampii to be feared. Accor colonial/posteol scends upon and feeds off Indiginous peoples (neatly reversing the cannibal- ism stereotype).”6 While the setting of White Is for Witchin erland, not the colony, the novel’s representation of the id mmigrants in order to expel ng reflects what Dean MacCam feral incorporation of otherness. It deal irect way, not merely by doing awa , transforming it into shit, and eliminating ise takes in black “others,” puts them to work, uses cold racism—"White is for witching, a ‘ou, So that you may use ‘MacCamell’s depiction of lustrates how the house operates as an agent of the nat -. White Britain, according to the novel, knows only how to consume—and if this continues, White Is for et is related to a woman who blood, then bit .. . and suck| ies to feed her blood to the very young Eliot and Miranda.”? Importantly, Miranda’s last vampiric desire is t0 attack and feed off of Eliot—to “strip him down to true red.” Although Miranda feels empowered by the harm she could presumably inflict on Eliot, to “see red,” to consume her own brother's blood and life, c firms the ungovernable destruction that white British supremacy entails for The Npwetral Qunernena uf White Suprema save” her.” The tropes of pica, incest, and vampi llustrate how nonproductive and, ultimatel . .. As White Is for Witching reveals, the haunted house of It on very shoddy foundations that do not stand up t0 ss, 2109), 366. "bi, 362 63, Race of Men’: Blood, Boundaries, and Mi (1995): 803. ribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Rout-"“ Amy K King i Awakening of the American Iiversity Press, 1980), 126-27 (Durham, Ne: in Queer Space and Time (Newcastle couyant: Us (200 32. 53. sa 55 56. 37 3a 3, and Resistance,” Durham and Douglas M. Media and Cultural (Malde lon Stevenson, “A. Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PALA 103, no. 2 (1988) Fanon, “Terorism,” nd Mudrooro’s Vaan= m Race and Empire, ed, Alfred 3