Article 13 – Ghostly Interpretations
Ghostly Interpretations in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved
By Taylor Flett
In most novels of Gothic literature, the element of the supernatural often appears in the forms of ghostly apparitions, haunted spaces of homes or buildings, monstrous creatures or unexplained manifestations that bring terror in the lives of characters within Gothic stories. Then there are some Gothic novels which in the ending of the story have found a rational explanation of the supernatural element. Upon discovering the true nature of the unknown it is implied that the supernatural is a figment of the characters’ imagination. It is also suggested in certain works that the supernatural element may have actually been the psychological breakdown of the hero or heroine’s mental health. However, there are novels within the Gothic genre that blur the lines between the natural world and the supernatural. This is seen in the novels of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The two stories on the surface are completely different from one another but share similar Gothic features of supernatural elements.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts is a story that blends autobiography narratives and Chinese folktales centring on an American born daughter to Chinese immigrants. Beloved is a story that explores the effects of slavery on the mental health of Sethe and her family. Both works have an element of the supernatural particularly that of ghostly apparitions and even monstrous creatures. The supernatural within the novels functions as either the manifestations of past horrific trauma or a symbolic projection of women’s oppression in society. It is through the horror of the unknown that urges the characters within the novels of Kingston and Morrison who have to reconcile with their own realities. In Beloved, Sethe is forced to acknowledge the past trauma of slavery and her guilt by the ghostly arrival of her child, Beloved. With The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, the narrator finds courage in her voice when she exorcizes the ghosts in her life by discovering the logic behind the unknown. The elements of the Gothic within the two works by Kingston and Morrison function as a way for the characters to confront the oppression and trauma in their lives to start living in the present rather than the past.
Over the last two centuries, Gothic literature has proven itself to be one of the most enduring fiction genres to be read and studied. The most common themes found within the Gothic literature are the madness and the unnaturalness that have been heavily influenced by significant historical and cultural moments since its inception. It is important to understand the subject and history of the Gothic literature before delving into both works of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. To begin with, is to examine the origins of the genre and its meaning such as the formation of its name. The word ‘Gothic’ does not just refer to a literary mode. Instead, the word means many different things and in different historical moments. It could refer to an ancient Germanic tribe known as the Goths from the third century or it could refer to an architecture style that follows “a medieval aesthetic” (Smith 2). The style of the Gothic architecture was highly popular in the eighteenth century which contributed to the dark, haunting settings for much of the Gothic genre. It was through the “somewhat fantasized version of the past” (Smith 2) that had culminated in the genre’s conception. This explains the Gothic characteristics of ancient almost primeval horror aesthetic found in most novels. In terms of literature, Gothic refers to a style that is characterized by horror, the fear of the unknown, “images of insanity” (Craig 4) and sometimes romance.
The history of the genre had “began in the mid-eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which is widely considered to be the first true work of Gothic fiction” (Craig 1). At the publication of the novel, it was during the movement of the Enlightenment that had given rise to the Gothic literature. As explained by Andrew Smith, when the Enlightenment movement had arrived in the eighteenth century, it primarily focused on the rational and intellectual aspect of understanding the world (2). Both the Romanticism movement and the Gothic literature had reacted to the rationale of the Enlightenment movement by challenging its ideas. The Romantics had “argued that the complexity of the human experience inner worlds of the emotions and the imagination far outweighed the claims of, for example, natural philosophy” (Smith 2). The Romanticism movement had primarily focused on the imagination and emotions to interpreting human nature and the natural world. From this idea, the Gothic genre had grown, although it had concerned itself more primarily on the “representation of ‘evil'” (Smith 3) within the world whether it was of nature or human beings. Where Romanticism ideas had elicited pleasure in the beauty of nature, the Gothic literature subverts this idea by creating both feelings of awe and fear in the horror.
Despite its appearance in the eighteenth century, the Gothic literature was not fully defined until the mid-nineteenth century which was at the height of the Victorian era. It was through this period in time that the Gothic literature was incorporating the culture of Victorian’s fascinations with the “Spiritualism [movement] and psychoanalysis” (Craig 2). At the height of the Victorian era, there was a spark of interest in the exploration of the unknown that many had begun to practice “séances” (Craig 1) to contact the dead that led to the spread of ghost stories amongst Victorian society. It was also at this time that the emergence of psychological theories with works published “such as Eduard von Hartmann’s The Philosophy of the Unconscious” (Craig 1) that had laid much of the foundation in the psychology field. This had inevitably led to the development of the major elements found in the Gothic literature: the supernatural and the insanity. There always seem to be a spectrum within Gothic literature where stories such as The Turn of the Screw and “The Yellow Wallpaper” appear on either side of the supernatural or insanity. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James deals with the supernatural horror of the Gothic while “The Yellow Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman focuses heavily on the psychological aspect (Craig 35). For novels such as Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Morrison’s Beloved feature a balance between the supernatural and madness elements.
The Victorian era has also been credited for creating the “unique style of horror found in Gothic literature” (Craig 6). As stated by Stephanie F. Craig, “themes that occur [in most genres] are almost always a direct result of the society in which the author is immersed” (1). This explains part of the reason that the Gothic literature has been characterized by elements of the unknown and insanity. It is also important to keep in mind that the genre was also founded on realist ideas. For most authors who had written within the genre had attempted “to take the unreal and make it real” (Craig 6). It is meant to make readers feel that the irrational that is displayed within Gothic horror could actually appear in the reader’s reality. The Gothic is the merger of the unknown and the natural within the world which within the Victorian era had tried to achieve. Moreover, it was through the Victorian era that the Gothic literature had begun to explore the social issues by representing them through the supernatural lens which will be discussed more in depth in relation to the works of Kingston and Morrison.
As mentioned beforehand, the Gothic creates feelings of awe and terror in the horror. This use of the horror is called the sublime which is an aesthetic theory first explored by the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke who wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke argued that “the sublime was associated with grand feelings stimulated by obscurity and highly dramatic encounters with the world in which a sense of awe was paradoxically inspired by a feeling of incomprehension” (Smith 11). In short, the sublime was an overwhelming reaction to something otherworldly and the natural grandeur within the world. While compared to the beauty, it was a sense of pleasure in smaller, delicate objects. Although Burke’s interpretation of the word ‘sublime’ is occasionally seen as a misogynistic idea where he believed that the sublime is associated with masculine attributes and beauty with feminine attributes (Smith 11). Regardless, Burke’s interpretation is a valuable one that helps in understanding how the sublime functions within the Gothic literature. Furthermore, as Andrew Smith states “the sublime is a negative experience because it reinforces feelings of transience (our passing) and insignificance (our smallness)” (Smith 12). An example of the sublime is seen in Toni Morrison’s Beloved where sometime after the arrival of the strange character Beloved that overtime, Paul D becomes greatly overwhelmed by her otherworldly presence.
In the beginning, Paul D is initially repelled by Beloved’s presence which he describes as “shining” (Morrison 76) that stuns his senses. When he is near Beloved he is unable to speak until Paul D finds the courage to say something when her attention turns to Sethe. Although over time, Beloved’s shinning begins to elicit “confusion” (Morrison 135) within Paul D who feels an unnatural yet enthralling sensation from her. It is through her otherworldly presence that slowly pushes Paul D out of the 124 home into the storeroom where she eventually opens “his little tobacco tin” (Morrison 137). This tobacco tin had been referred to as a symbolic representation of Paul D’s heart earlier in the text. Beloved’s presences overpowers Paul D who subsequently, against his will, has sexual intercourse with her, making him “call my name, [Beloved]” (Morrison 137). The act humiliates and horrifies Paul D yet he allows Beloved to continue on with their affair for some time. It is here that the sublime is present, where the harmony had been disrupted by something otherworldly. Paul D’s harmony had been disrupted by Beloved’s presence that had elicited an overload of feelings in both fascination and repulsion. With the sexual intercourse between ‘living’ characters Sethe and Paul D, it is disappointing yet ordinarily part of the natural world. It is in stark contrast to the act between Beloved, a ghost, and Paul D, the living, where it is an overwhelming and unnatural experience which drives Paul D to repeat “red heart. Red heart. Red heart” (Morrison 138) in a trance. The ghostly intercourse also effectively takes away Paul D’s status as the man of the house of 124. The act that Paul D experiences show what Andrew Smith had brought up about the sublime where it, in the face of the otherworldly, creates feelings of insignificance. The character of Paul D feels a lack of power in the presence of Beloved that eventually drives him out of 124 home.
The sublime is not the only aesthetic theory applied in Gothic literature. Often, the sublime is paired with another aesthetic theory known as the uncanny which is more so utilized in understanding the themes in the Gothic literature. Another intellectual contribution made to understanding the themes within Gothic literature had been the publication of the essay “The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud (Smith 10). While the sublime had dealt primarily with the overwhelming feelings of the otherworldly, the uncanny arouses a sense of unease in the familiar. In Freud’s essay, he had explained that the “uncanny events have the power to provoke a sense of dread precisely because they are once strange and familiar” (Tatar 169). How Freud had arrived at this idea of the ‘uncanny’ began with his discussion of the etymology of the word heimlich within his essay. The word heimlich is an ambiguous meaning that on one hand heimlich “is familiar and congenial, on the other [unheimliche] that which is concealed or kept from sight, and hence sinister” (Tatar 169). Freud had come to the idea that the home or a house could be “familiar and congenial, but at the same time, it screens what is familiar and congenial from view, making a mystery” (Tatar 169). In other words, the familiar could be a pleasant past memory but can also bring a sense of anxiety or unease when it appears in an individual’s present. In the English translation, there was no word that could capture the meaning of heimlich. It was Freud’s English translator who had found a word that was similar to its German counterpart, the ‘uncanny’ which shared similar key attributes such as “strange or unfamiliar” (Tatar 171). The uncanny had become an important aesthetic theory in the Gothic literature which attempted to understand the psychological characteristics found in the genre.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts explores the uncanny in a scene between the narrator and a silent young girl who she attends school with. The narrator is unnerved and upset by the similarities between the silent young girl and herself in the beginning. Both she and the silent young girl are daughters of Chinese immigrants who have trouble in speaking. The two are also similar in their lack of ability in sports from the way they held their bats “on [their] shoulders until [they] walked to first base” (Kingston 172) and how they were both chosen last for their teams. The narrator had disliked the silent young girl “for her China doll hair cut…[and]…hated her at music time for the wheezes that came out of her plastic flute” (Kingston 171). The silent young girl unnerved the narrator due to their similarities but the narrator was more so distressed by the young girl’s strange quietness that she only spoke during class readings. When the narrator and her younger sister stayed after school to play in the schoolyard, she comes across the silent young girl. What transpires next is the narrator’s harassment of the girl by squeezing her cheek which “seemed to stretch” (Kingston 176) that horrifies the narrator. No matter how the narrator violently bullies the silent young girl by pulling her hair or grabbing her skin to force her to talk, the girl remains silent. The scene in The Woman Warrior ends with both girls crying and returning home with their sisters which creates a mirror image of the two girls.
The unease in the familiarity yet strangeness with the silent young girl causes the narrator to lash out violently against her. It is an uncanny feeling that disrupts the narrator’s world and senses. In a way, the narrator is more so upset by the silent young girl’s inability to speak up for herself properly much like herself and is more at anger with herself than the girl. What is interesting about this scene is that it is part of the known ‘reality’ in the novel. There are many elements of the Gothic supernatural in The Woman Warrior but in this particular moment between the narrator and the silent young girl is meant to convey the narrator’s frustration in herself and in her identity. The silent young girl is a reflection of the narrator’s oppression as a girl in her culture. When the narrator violently harasses the other girl it is meant to signal the narrator’s own struggle within the structure of her world. In the narrator’s world, the boys in her family are more so valued than the girls. This is shown clearly by the Great Uncle when invited the children to go out shopping but had exclaimed “no girls” (Kingston 47) and had only taken the boys out for candy and toys instead of the girls. Other comments such as that “there’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls” (Kingston 46) only create a sense of disparity in the narrator’s life as a girl, which brings back the idea from earlier that the Gothic literature represents the social issues through supernatural elements of ghostly apparitions and haunted spaces of homes.
In the Victorian era, the supernatural in the Gothic genre was to “present social criticism” (Craig 3) commentaries concerning the social issues during the eighteenth century. These issues at the time were centered on the status of women’s rights, classism and wealth in society. They were symbolically represented in the form of ghost stories. For example, most of the ghost stories that appeared in the Victorian era were “to examine the limitations of Victorian women, especially within the confines of marriage” (Craig 3). Furthermore, ghost stories were also centered on the “concerns about class and wealth” (Smith 91) such as the story A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens set in the early eighteenth century. The story features a series of ghostly visits that each represents a fragment of the social inequality about class and the concerns regarding the rise of capitalism (Smith 91). Over the years since the conception of the genre, the texts in the Gothic literature had evolved from commenting on the issues of sexism, classism and wealth to more nuanced discussions about race and national identities. The social issues of race and national identity are seen in the novels of Morrison and Kingston which are presented in the supernatural element of the Gothic.
Both in The Woman Warrior and Beloved, the supernatural element is embedded deeply within the texts. There are Gothic characteristics of ghostly apparitions, haunted spaces and even an unexplained manifestation of the unknown. What sets the novels, however, is the portrayal of ghosts in the texts. For The Woman Warrior, the ghosts can be divided into two sets between those of Chinese folklore and the American culture. In the Chinese folklore, there is the unnamed aunt, the Sitting Ghost and other ghosts such as the Photo Ghost who “with arms hanging at its sides… [stands] beside the wall in the background” (Kingston 65). Then there the American ghosts, “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghost…what frightened [the narrator] most was the Newsboy Ghost” (Kingston 97). To the family, they believe they had “entered the land of ghosts” (Kingston 153) where everyday American is as invisible and mysterious as the ghosts in the Chinese folklore. Each set of ghosts had been encountered by the narrator and her mother, Brave Orchard.
The mother, Brave Orchard, contends with the first set of ghosts from Chinese folklore by standing her ground against the Sitting Ghost who sat on her body, sapping her energy. She speaks to the Sitting Ghost, “There is no pain you can inflict that I cannot endure. You’re wrong if you think I’m afraid of you…You have no power over a strong woman. You are no more dangerous than a nesting cat” (Kingston 70). Brave Orchard knows that a woman should be strong to win the battle with ghosts which lay the foundation of courage for her own daughter, the narrator. With the narrator, she battles every day with her own ghosts in America and those of Chinese where “once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, [the narrator] could hardly breathe…could hardly walk” (Kingston 97). Both of these instances show how a ghost could repress an individual by making them feel entrapped in their presence. These ghosts the women encounter may suggest that the ghosts are symbolically, a projection of women’s oppression in their culture. It is through the courage of the narrator who had to “leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing…to think that mysteries are for explanation” (204). When the narrator does just that she leaves behind the ghosts and the oppression that had hung over the heads of her female family members such as the unnamed aunt. The narrator becomes the woman Fa Mu Lan as she always wanted with the courage to speak freely as a strong woman.
For Beloved, the ghosts within the text only have one mention of a ghost who is the murdered baby of the character Sethe. The presence of the ghost causes the home of 124 to be “spiteful. Full of baby’s venom” (Morrison 3). The ghost has haunted both Sethe and her daughter Denver for eighteen years which may symbolize the guilt Sethe had been carrying for murdering her child. It had chased off both of her sons, Buglar and Howard and had caused Baby Suggs to withdraw from the world and her few remaining family members. When Paul D arrives, he asks her why she has not left 124 which she replied with “No moving. No Leaving. It’s all right the way it is” (Morrison 17). Sethe’s reluctance to move away from the haunting house suggests her inability to move on from the past of her committing infanticide and as a former slave. The character does not see the house evil as other characters but for Sethe, the house is “just sad” (Morrison 10). For Beloved, the social issues of slavery and trauma are manifested in the forms of the haunting of 124 and the ghostly apparition of the murdered baby, Beloved.
The book touches on the effects slavery has had on the characters in the book. But it deals more so on the effect slavery had on Sethe’s body, mind and soul, from before Sethe was born when there was trauma beginning with her unnamed mother. Told by her grandmother Nan, Sethe knew that her own mother had thrown all her children “without names” (Morrison 74) away but Sethe and her mother were hung over for unknown reasons. In her adult life, Sethe was assaulted by the Schoolteacher’s sons who came for her “milk” (Morrison 19). They later retaliated her when Sethe had informed Mrs. Garner by punishing her with a “cowhide” (Morrison 20). Although the punishment had left physical scars on her back, it was the psychological scars of losing her milk that created a deeper effect. When she finally escaped and found her way to Baby Sugg’s new home, she felt peace until the Schoolteacher and the boys had found her. When they came for Sethe and her children, Sethe made a drastic decision to kill the baby in order to keep her children not to “live under [the] schoolteacher” (Morrison 192). The act of killing her daughter Beloved breaks Sethe psychologically that perhaps it is the reason for her to stay in 124. With the arrival of Paul D who represents the reality and Beloved representing the unknown, she is forced to face her past trauma. In the end, she chooses to live in “some kind of tomorrow” (Morrison 322) with Paul D when Beloved leaves who is essentially taking the past trauma of slavery and guilt with her. However, Sethe will always be reminded of the past by the scars it had left on her back.
Gothic literature is an interesting blend of reality and the unknown. Many authors over the last two centuries had attempted to make the unreal real. This suggests why the genre had survived for so many years since its inception in the eighteenth century. The Gothic literature has changed so much over the years yet it has been for the better. If not for the historical and cultural influences, the genre would possibly not have been characterized by its themes of the supernatural and madness. Furthermore, with contributions such as the aesthetic theories from Burke’s interpretation of the ‘sublime’ and Freud’s ‘uncanny’ had been important in analyzing the elements and their functions with Gothic texts. The aesthetic theories have been especially important in understating texts such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Each text questions the readers if the supernatural is a figment of the character’s imagination or if the madness of the character’s psyche is creating the supernatural element. In either way, the stories of Kingston and Morrison are complex readings that not only they speak on the Gothic elements, the two authors also it use the supernatural in order to present the social issues such as past trauma of slavery and women’s oppression. In Beloved, the haunting and the ghostly apparitions are the manifestations of Sethe’s psychological trauma from her past history as a slave. Whereas The Woman Warrior, its presentation of ghosts in the women’s lives is symbolically represented as women’s oppression in the narrator’s culture as well as the unfamiliar culture in the new country. It is with the existence of the Gothic literature that creates complex ideas within the texts of Morrison and Kingston.
Works Cited
Craig, Stephanie F. “Ghosts of the Mind: The Supernatural and Madness in Victorian Gothic Literature.” Honor Theses,
Nov. 2012, pp. 1–71. Retrieved from https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=honors_theses.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Vintage International, 1989.
Maria M. Tatar, author. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature, no. 2,
1981, p. 167. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/1770438.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International, 2004.
Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature. Vol. Second edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2013. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=575548&site=eds-live&scope=site.
About the Author: Taylor Flett is a young Cree woman from Split Lake, Manitoba. This is her forth year at the University College of the North and would be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Degree. Taylor has goals of becoming an elementary teacher and hopefully a published author one day. She is an avid reader of sci-fi and fantasy novels who also enjoys fishing with her family and binge-watching Netflix.
Instructor’s Remark: Taylor Flett has just completed a 6-credit course, Post-1900 American Literature. She is fascinated by the Gothic Novels. She does a close reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved within the Gothic genre that blur the lines between the natural world and the supernatural. She has proved that both novels shared the Gothic features of supernatural elements – Dr. Ying Kong