A Haunted House

There is a close connection between the description of the environments in the short story and the general disposition of the characters, especially the ghostly couple. The sense of abandonment and loss is one of the main characteristics of the house that makes it haunted. The description of the drawing-room, a place where people receive family and friends, as an empty and abandoned place mirrors the ghostly couple’s feelings of losing a previous loving life. The return of the couple to seek a “treasure,” that is, love that has been lost somewhere in the house, intensifies the sensation of desertion that accompanies both “he” and “she,” the two ghostly characters. Finally, the peace the ghostly couple finds in the faces of the sleeping couple mirrors, in an inversed vector, their own anguish of knowing that such a peace cannot be found after death.

One of the striking characteristics of Virginia Woolf’s short story is the use of ambiguous points of view to deliberately confuse the narrative and thus subvert a classic type of storytelling. The ambiguity arising from the existence of ghosts (or not) is mirrored in the multiple points of view.