The Cultural Anxieties in the Ghost Story by Edith Nesbit ‘From the Dead’ (1893)

The article examines the representation of the phenomenon of ‘the new woman’ in the ghost story From the Dead (1893) by Edith Nesbit. The study focuses on social and cultural anxieties in the period of Victorian fin de siècle connected to the shifting gender boundaries as well as provoked by transformation of the traditional woman’s image that had previously been associated with ‘angel in the house’. The principles governing Gothic literature extend the situation of unresolved crisis and emphasize ‘the otherness’ of ‘the new woman’ within traditional Victorian ideology. Moreover, depiction of female figures in ghost stories presupposes victimized position and functions as coded criticism of public institutions that guarantee subordinated female status. The Gothic short story abounds in Biblical allusions which help to see the roots of the inner conflict; in addition, through depicting the materiality of the dead body Nesbit exploits the repulsion expressed by the protagonist to stress the out-of-place ‘new woman’ and demonstrate how the new forms of female subjectivity are excluded and kept peripheral. ‘The new woman’ represented in the form of the reanimated dead takes the place of the abject and threatens traditional social order. Thus, gothic conventions function as markers of non-articulated negativity connected with institutions that are supposed to be central for patriarchal culture and express triumph over rational cause. The paper concludes that the narrative pattern of a Gothic tale presupposes the situation of unsettled conflict which points out a problem of exclusion of ‘the new woman’ from the social realm. The act of separation serves as criticism of Victorian gender codes that are based on female obedience and subordination. The topic of female empowerment is presented through the metaphor of a highly material but still transgressive image of the dead.