The Supernatural in Modern English FictionScarborough, Dorothy
History
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Scarborough, Dorothy
English fiction -- History and criticism; Supernatural in literature
Specters usually appear in the garments in which the beholder saw them
last in life. Styles seem petrified at death so that old-time ghosts
now look like figures from the movies or guests at a masquerade ball.
One other point to be noted is that women phantoms are frequently seen
in black or in white. White seems reminiscent of the shroud, as well as
of youth and innocence, so is appropriate, while black connotes gloom,
so is suitable, yet the really favored color is gray. Most of the
specters this season are dressed in gray. I scarcely know why this is
affected by shades, yet the fact remains that many wraiths both men and
women are thus attired. Gray is the tone that witches of modern tastes
choose also, whereas their ancient forbears went in black and red.
Modern ghosts are at a disadvantage in the matter of clothes compared
with the earlier ones, since the styles now change so quickly and so
decidedly that a ghost is hopelessly _passé_ before he has time to
materialize at all in most instances.
Examples of ghostly garments in later fiction evidence their variety.
Katherine Fullerton Gerould[91] shows us three ghosts, one of a woman
in a blue dress, one of a rattlesnake, and one of a Zulu warrior
wearing only a loin-cloth, a nose-ring, and a scowl. (We do not
often see the nude in ghosts, perhaps because they have a shade of
modesty.) _Co-operative Ghosts_[92] depicts a man clad in the wraith
of a tweed suit, mid-Victorian, "with those familiar Matthew Arnold
side-whiskers." In addition to Mr. Morley's coat-tail buttons which
we glanced through him to see, we observe that he wears ghostly
spectacles, a pig-tail, tights and boots, and a prim waist-coat. In
Kipling's _They_ we see the glint of a small boy's blue blouse, while
another Kipling youngster, a war-ghost,[93] struts around in his
comical first trousers which he would not be robbed of even by the
German soldiers that murdered him. Other children in the same story
are said to have on "disgracefully dirty clothes." I do not recall any
soilure on Gothic garments, save spectral blood-stains and the mold
of graves. Neither did I discover any child wraith in Gothicism save
the pitiful spirits of baby victims in _The Albigenses_ and the baby
wraiths in Hogg's _The Wool-gatherer_. The Englishman driven mad by
the apparition of the woman he has wronged in Kipling's story[94] is
described by him as "wearing the dress in which I saw her last alive;
she carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand and the same
card-case in her left." (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!)
Blackwood shows us a ghost in purple knee-breeches and velvet coat;
in _The Gray Guest_[95] the returning Napoleon wears a long military
cloak of gray and military boots, while Crawford has one dreadful ghost
coming back to wreak revenge in wet oil-skins. The eccentric spook in
Josephine Daskam Bacon's _The Heritage_ is dressed in brown and sits
stolidly and silently on the side of the bed with its back turned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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