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By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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In her autobiography A Backward Glance she said, "To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless; but … with my intense Celtic sense of the supernatural, tales of robbers and ghosts were perilous reading."

She said this story had such a powerful impact on her that until she was in her late twenties she "could not sleep in a room with a book containing a ghost story" and "frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!"

Nevertheless, like several other American and British writers of her time, she tried her own hand at writing ghost stories. They have been collected in The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, a 276-page volume published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1973 and reprinted in 1985.

Accustomed as we are to the standards of horror set by writers such as Stephen King and Clive Barker, these stories have obviously lost any ability to terrify us.

But we do not necessarily have to come away from an account of the occult with nightmares and nausea to be puzzled and provoked. In fact, Wharton's ghost stories are more disturbing than one might think.

Since Wharton analyzed minutely the morals and mores of her peers in all her works, her ghost stories are not simple narratives of mischievous specters who briefly appear to frighten someone out of his or her wits.

Rather, they examine visitations from dead people or animals, or in one case simply a ghostly pair of eyes, acting as harbingers of some moral wrong or impropriety. It is the reader's job to discover which character they are sent to warn and why. This is no easy task as many of the stories have baffling, cliffhanger endings.

For instance, in the "Lady's Maid's Bell," why can an appearance by a dead lady's maid Emma Saxon frighten her former mistress Mrs. Brympton to death when it is Mrs. Brympton's husband who has been characterized by the new lady's maid, and narrator, to have been careless and corrupt? Both husband and wife see Saxon's ghost simultaneously. Is he evil enough to withstand the impact of seeing the ghost whereas she is not, or is she afraid the ghost will reveal a guilty secret she has kept from her husband?

In "The Eyes," Phil Frenham and the story's unidentified narrator listen to their dinner party host Andrew Culwin describe a pair of odious, life-size eyes which appeared to him while he was in bed trying to sleep on two separate occasions. He saw them first after he had proposed to Alice Nowell, a girl with whom he sympathized but did not love, and again when he encouraged the publishing ambitions of Nowell's cousin Gilbert Noyes even though he knew Noyes had no talent to be a writer.

The eyes seem to symbolize the hypocrisy of Culwin's attentions toward Nowell and Noyes since the eyes stopped appearing to him after he disassociated himself from these two people. But whose eyes were they? Why does Frenham hide his own eyes after Culwin has finished the tale and assured this shaken guest he has never since seen the eyes?

I remember being assigned to read this story in a literature class during my first year of college. My classmates and I were at a loss to explain the ending and extremely quiet when the professor asked us for our suppositions. Various theories were eventually proposed by the bravest among us — not me — but I do not think any of them were rendered acceptable.

However, not being able to logically explain the story's ending no longer bothers me. Certainly a writer would have failed to create an intriguing supernatural landscape if everything in it could be explained. Who knows? Maybe by rejecting my classmates' theories, the professor was subtly conveying that message.

My favorite stories from this collection are more straightforward in their presentation of ghosts and those ghosts' purposes. They are the ones in which Wharton most skillfully created the somber mood of a good ghost story and the intense emotional struggles of the characters to whom a ghost appears.

If you read nothing else from this collection, read "Afterward," in which a wealthy American couple buys the English manor of their dreams from an agent who warns them it contains a ghost which they will not recognize as such until long afterward. Equally compelling are "Kerfol," in which the ghosts of several dogs take revenge on a cruel master who murdered them, and "Pomegranate Seed," in which a woman apprehensively questions her husband about letters addressed to him in a handwriting which bears a strong resemblance to that of his dead first wife.

Wharton drew upon the legends and folklore of France, England, and the United States, using all three countries as settings for her stories. Typically Victorian houses, dark and isolated, provide the stages for the ghosts' appearances.

Wharton, a novelist known for her rich, vivid descriptions, perfectly captured these houses' chilling aspect in her stories along with the swirling autumn leaves, thick fog or blinding blizzards which alternate in preceding the appearance of a ghost. Shadowy black and gray illustrations by Laszlo Kubinyi are inserted strategically to accentuate Wharton's own word pictures.

If Wharton is not to your taste, several other collections of Victorian ghost stories are available to help you set the tone for a ghost train ride at Crossroads Village, a visit to a haunted house or any other events you are planning in celebration of Halloween.

These include Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, published in 1991 by the Oxford University Press, 497 pages.

Also available is The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies, selected and introduced by Peter Haining, Taplinger Publishing Company, 1967, 254 pages.

For children I recommend Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost, a delightful parody of the Victorian ghost story genre in which the legendary ghost of an old English manor gets a taste of his own medicine when a materialistic American family moves in and succeeds in frightening him away rather than the other way around.

An engaging picture book version of this story containing attractive illustrations by Lisbeth Zwerger was published by the Picture Book Studio in 1986.

Haunt your local library, where you will undoubtedly also find special Halloween programs and story times, for these and other ghost stories.

Kvasnicka was East Village Magazine news editor from 1985 to 1989 and has been the magazine's research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and has worked for the Genesee District Library since 1989.

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