22 pages • 44 minutes read
A Haunted House
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Themes
Love as the Reason for Life
At the end of the short story, there is the discovery of what the ghosts look for. After searching the house and the gardens for something for which the story provides no name (only “it”) and then a “treasure” that is hidden somewhere, the ghosts arrive in a room and find a couple sleeping there. One of the members of the sleeping couple is the narrator and the other is an unnamed person. There, bending over the sleeping couple, the ghostly couple has a conversation that reveals the nature of the “treasure” they were looking for. Sighing in a nostalgic tone, the male ghost says, “Long years—” to the female ghost and adds, “Again you found me” (5). The discovery of the love of a couple, which may be themselves at another time, is precisely what ghosts seem to be unable to feel after dying. They seem only capable of remembering what they went through centuries before, when they lived and loved each other. The narrator wakes up and cries out that they understand what the treasure was: the light of love. In a world of darkness, the light of a living love is what gives life to a ghostly existence.
Love is a recurrent theme in Gothic fiction because of its potential to cause conflict and even violence, such as in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), which both address the topic of obsessive love between classes of people that could not mix. Love is also present in Dracula, transfigured in the motif of the femme fatale, in which an irresistible love drives male characters to madness and other types of violence. In Virginia Woolf’s story, however, this is not the case. Love gives the ghostly couple a reason to want to live even after death. The memory of a past love is what drives the ghostly couple in its search for a lost treasure. This treasure is found in the lips of the sleeping couple: “‘Look,’ he breathes. ‘Sound asleep. Love upon their lips’” (4). The search for a love that has been lost in time lightens the anima of the ghostly couple, and the ending suggests that finding love at last may give them peace.
The Difficulty of Moving on From Loss
The general tone of the story is one of melancholy that stems from the loss of life, in general, and the loss of a love in particular. While this detail is ambiguous, the narrator suggests that the female ghost died, leaving her male lover alone for years, travelling without her, until he died, too. The presence of the ghosts suggests that people cannot pass peacefully through the experience of loss but find it difficult to move on. The idea of haunting itself denotes returning to or manifesting oneself somewhere without moving on; this is reinforced by the fact that the ghosts spend the story searching for something that they have lost. The ghosts’ inability to move on from loss makes them want to return to each other and their house, even after hundreds of years.
The house and the gardens are a physical embodiment of the loss of their love. The house is described as “all empty” (3), and the furniture is still untouched in all the years that have passed since the death of the two ghostly characters. The garden is “still as ever” (3), denoting an immobility that traverses time, as if everything died when the couple that gave life to the environment died. Woolf’s descriptions of an empty house lead to the narrator’s statement that “death is among us” (4), both pointing to the presence of the ghosts and the general state of decay of the environment surrounding the narrator. This underscores the story’s idea that it is difficult to move on from loss; even though there is no suggestion in the story that anyone has died recently, it looms in the setting and in the narrator’s emotions.
The natural setting itself enhances this feeling of melancholic loss because it is not a friendly setting: “The wind roars,” “trees stoop and bend,” and “moonbeams splash and spill wildly” (4). These are examples of a confrontational nature in contrast to a probable pacific nature that existed when the couple was alive. This suggests that the house and gardens themselves absorb the sense of the loss of the people who live in it, reinforcing the story’s sense that loss is an inescapable part of existence.
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By Virginia Woolf
