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Seeing Edith Wharton's Ghosts: The Alternative Gaze on Page and Screen

The most electrifying moments in Edith Wharton’s supernatural fiction are preoccupied with vision and visuality.1 In “The Pomegranate Seed” (1931), for instance, a woman anxiously struggles to read a faint, illegible letter with a magnifying glass before realizing that it was written from beyond the grave. In “The Eyes” (1910), a man lives at the mercy of two haunting eyes that doggedly follow him throughout his adult life. In yet another tale, “Kerfol” (1916), a prospective homeowner visits an isolated estate in Brittany and finds himself the object of the gaze of a pack of silent, ghostly dogs. Indeed, from her first published ghost story, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (1902), to her last, “All Souls’” (1937), the narratives offer complex meditations on both visual media and the physical practice of vision, with exchanges of glances, privileged sight, voyeurism, and representational objects like paintings and photographs motivating the plots in fundamental ways. In this respect, Wharton’s stories draw from the tradition of late-eighteenthand nineteenth-century Gothic novels, including early classics like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and later ones like her friend Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Wharton is also a distinctly modern writer, however, using her stories as a space to explore the changing relationship of the ghost narrative to vision and visual media in the twentieth century. Wharton pointedly declared in the 1937 preface to her Ghost Stories collection that “the faculty required”