Recent American literature often concerns itself with haunted houses. From Beloved to The Shining, contemporary authors structure their narratives around sites where supernatural activity reveal histories that have been erased, misremembered or repressed. Instead of focusing on the ghosts, some popular haunted houses narratives zoom in on the structure-as-entity, as an organic protagonist with work in the world. These works of fiction reveal how haunted houses are not always structures of demonic revenge but rather agents of historical awareness and self-actualization. Within these novels, the haunted house becomes a teaching tool that aids historical recovery and discovery.
This paper proposes to explore popular haunted house narratives set in and around the haunted plantation house; this is a unique site for ghosts of the past to manifest in the present. Using fictional museums and historic houses, these popular novels incorporate historical narratives within familiar tropes of gothic haunting. I will focus on four recent novels, all set in the South: Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season *(2013), Tiya Miles’s *The Cherokee Rose (2015) and Barbara Michaels’ Houses of Stone (1993) and Be Buried in the Rain (1985). Each novel uses increasingly volatile and gendered ghosts to gesture from the past toward injustices in the present; they also utilize independent, academic-minded female protagonists to propel the ghost from its shadowy existence. These storylines argue that the past is not so removed from the present, histories simmer just below the surface, and excavation is necessary for future growth and edification.
About the presenterMariaelena DiBenigno
Mariaelena is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary. After several years as a middle school teacher, she completed her English M.A at the University of North Carolina Wilmington; her thesis concerned the relationship between folklore and tourism in the coastal Carolinas. Other research interests include connections between spectrality, memory and public history; popular American narratives about war; and death commemoration in the United States.