For it is true, as William James and Conan Doyle and the rest allow, that a spirit can persist in the after-death. Persist by its own volition. But usually, the evil persistence of a thwarted will, returning for vengeance on life. Lemures, vampires.

(SCAL 80-81)

Lawrence wrote this in 1918, in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but it is only one of his lines on the life of the dead. “There's a long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear” says Birkin in Women in Love. “We live on long after our death, and progressively, aeons of progressive devolution” (WL 204). Later it is the living who find solace in the still-living dead: “I feel like the Sicilians” Lawrence wrote in 1923; “They always cry for help from their dead. We shall have to cry to ours.” This comes from a letter to John Middleton Murry written after Katherine Mansfield's death, in which Lawrence also mentions that he has sent Murry a copy of Fantasia of the Unconscious, although, as he rather enigmatically puts it, “I wanted Katherine to read it.” A gift to the living meant for the dead, a message to the dead via the living. The content: psychoanalysis and its discontents. But then he says, “She'll know, though” (know, presumably, about the Fantasia she did not live to see); “The dead don't die. They look on and help.”¹ Pondering the life of the returning or undead dead, Lawrence also wonders at the reception of his fiercest response to psychoanalysis.

Then in 1925 “Glad Ghosts” develops the “dead don't die” issue, literally, fantastically, and sexually. In it we have the dead who look on and help, as well as the dead who persist, Ligeia-like, through “a thwarted will.” The living dead are present too. The story was written in late 1925 for Lady Cynthia Asquith's supernatural collection of 1926, The Ghost-Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny.² It is a tale of burial and unearthing, of double transgression, moving across the lines of sexual taboo, and across the life-death divide. Its engagement with, and contradiction of, arguments from Lawrence's psychoanalysis essays—about the family as context for neurosis and the uncanny, about sleep and dreams, and about sexual healing—is important. This meeting of the psyche and the psychic is then a key moment for any investigation of how the psychoanalytic infuses Lawrence's work.

Quite unusually, the story is narrated in the first person, and is something of a comedy as well as a ghost story. Most of Lawrence's key binary obsessions are present—class, gender, nationality, sex, mental versus bodily knowledge and health. But “Glad Ghosts” is also a prime example of how these grand oppositional structures break down at a moment of crisis. In particular, three key divisions—life and death, body and spirit, and male and female—are quite dramatically undermined as the story proceeds. The first-person narrator, Mark Morier, tells the story of Carlotta, a woman he knew at art college, a debutante and artistic dilettante slumming it among the real, poorer, artists—just one of a long line of Lawrence's blue-blooded women to be found “playing bird of paradise among the pigeons” (WWRA [The Woman Who Rode Away, and Other Stories] 174; Carlotta is said to be a portrait both of Brett, who typed it, and Lady Asquith, who was its destination). The possibility of sex between them is raised (“an inkling, perhaps, of the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which we call life” [WWRA 184]), but instead Carlotta marries into the aristocracy. Morier is invited to Riddings, the country pile, where he is offered a haunted guest room to sleep in, and asked to act as bait for the local libidinous ghost whose rare appearances revive the family fortune. But even ghostliness here is infused with fleshliness: “she seems to be a very grateful presence … apparently quite persona grata to everyone she visited. Gratissima, apparently!” (WWRA 184). The lively Morier readily accepts what seems to be the offer of sex with the dead, then helps to save the house's occupants from the ghastly pallor and malaise into which they have fallen. The ghost comes, in more senses than one, and blessings are showered on all.

Lawrence's overt forays into the uncanny were rare, and always had far more to say about the living than the dead. Harry T. Moore called “Glad Ghosts” “Lawrence's finest story of the supernatural—that is, of the supernatural used symbolically”: “a Lawrence ghost story—if this really is a ghost story,” Moore continues, “is also a sex story” (253). “Also a sex story” might be my alternative title: the narrative which speaks one story while also betraying another, simultaneous, tale of sex, under the breath and between the lines, might be a crude definition of the psychoanalytic utterance. For Freud too, tales of the uncanny are also sex stories, stories of that which “has undergone repression and then returned from it” (368). “Glad Ghosts” addresses the supernatural and the sexual together. It is a story of memory and repression made flesh, of intercourse between the unhappily living and the grateful dead, as the past and passed-on return to revive or terrorize the alienated present. Although my title quotation, spoken by Lord Lathkill, Carlotta's husband, to his mother, suggests the early Freud of Oedipus and the pleasure principle—of mothers, flesh, and the flesh-and-blood of incest—the story itself also demands that we look at later Freudian discussions of the death drive, the uncanny, and the unconscious manifest in the demonic. The more recent work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on psychic phantoms, the crypt, and transgenerational haunting also illuminates this story particularly well, although I do not have space to explore this here. In the spirit of some of this work I will argue that this is a sex story which is “also a ghost story,” but that it might be its ghostliness, not its sexiness, which requires the input of psychoanalysis most urgently. Psychoanalysis has much to say about our apprehension of our own death, but what does it say about the dead's apprehension of us, or our response to the dead returning?

One way forward would be to develop work on Lawrence's more general response to psychoanalytic knowledge as a form of cerebral vampirism. Critics are fond of reading Lawrence's writing as a kind of amateur therapy: Leavis praises him for his “diagnostic insight” (9), while Normal Mailer writes in The Prisoner of Sex that “Lawrence was not only trying to sell dictatorial theorems, he was also trying to rid himself of them” (139). For David J. Gordon in D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic, “He read literature mainly as a diagnosis of our psychic illness” (5). “Glad Ghosts” is a story that deals first in diagnosis, then in cure, but it does so in a way which is both vulgarly blatant and deviously disguised. If reading “Glad Ghosts” as a straightforward (or even straight) ghost story is to engage in one kind of stupidity (so patently is it about sex), reading it to discern a sexual subtext as the Freudian figure in the carpet is equally absurd, so surface-textual is its sexuality. What, then, is psychoanalysis to do with a story which might already be engaging in its own vulgar Freudian reading of itself, telling us quite clearly “all stories are really sex stories”? What can psychoanalysis do with a story which mocks its own self-analysis?

“Glad Ghosts” seems to be begging for a reading that combines Freud's Uncanny and Kristeva's Abject, as I will briefly demonstrate below. But psychoanalytic literary criticism in the last fifteen years or so has also been keen to show the limitations of this “apply theory to text” approach, and Shoshana Felman's famous manifesto-Introduction to the Yale French Studies Literature and Psychoanalysis collection, and her essay on Poe in that collection, lay out the possibilities for rethinking the master-slave relationship between the two forms, which sets analysis over literature as the dominant, “knowing” party.³ Among other things, Lawrence was deeply suspicious of conventional forms of knowledge, and a critique of a knowledge-system which willfully sets itself as the consciously dominant party is at the heart of his distrust of (his reading of) a classic Freudianism, which—in the terms of Fantasia at least—takes a model of the known and maps it onto the unknown, and which reads disparate human phenomena with a controlling certainty. “We want effectual human beings, not conscious ones” he writes in Fantasia (FU 68): “The final aim is not to know, but to be … To know is to lose … To know is to die” (FU 68, 72). However, writers since Felman have wanted to show that Freudianism is as suspicious of itself, as self-critiquing, as Lawrence ever could be of it. If “vulgar Freudianism” had, for Felman, reached an impasse because of its dominating insistence on its own primacy and its own “truth,” its will to know, then Lawrence, who challenges this epistemology and undermines the primacy of conscious knowing, might be writing in the spirit of Felman's version of Freudianism suggested in “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”—always open, never sure, testing the conditions of its knowledge, the tool through which the known is questioned being determined by its object: “A ‘Freudian reading’ is thus not a reading guaranteed by, grounded in, Freud's knowledge, but first and foremost a reading of Freud's ‘knowledge,’ which as such can never a priori be assured of knowing anything, but must take its chances as a reading, necessarily and constitutively threatened by error” (116). Suspicion of traditional epistemologies might be one way in which Lawrence is already working as a Freudian reader. That “Glad Ghosts” is a story which finally slips into obscurity might be exactly what makes it prime psychoanalytic material.

THE VAMPIRE, THE CORPSE, AND THE HOLY GHOST

The occult haunts Lawrence's work as it haunts psychoanalysis. It is a sign not of the presence of the dead returning but of normalized forms of death-in-life: repression; thwarted, unclaimed, or excessive desire; secrets and lies. For Freud at least (who, though he initiated some of our most important discussions on the psychology of death and its aftermath, was ever a rationalist), figures from the occult—vampires, revenants, spirits, and ghosts—are symptoms, figurative beings who take shape in the world of the living to tell us something, externally signaling messages of malaise. And we do not need to read Lawrence's few ghost stories to find the undead or the returning, misplaced spirit, for here ghosts are everywhere.

As Judith Wilt has argued in Ghosts of the Gothic, her book on Austen, Eliot and Lawrence, the vampiric is insistently threaded through even the relatively realist, or—as she puts it—the “daylight” Lawrence: Anton Skrebensky in The Rainbow “sought [Ursula's] mouth with his mouth … like putting his face into some awful death,” but Ursula responds by “seiz[ing] upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight … seething with his destruction” (R 299).⁴ Hermione Roddice in Women in Love is a vampire cut to the measure of Poe's Ligeia and her narrator-lover, of whom Lawrence writes in his essay on Poe, “the desirous consciousness, the SPIRIT, is a vampire … to try to know any living being is to try to suck the life out of that being” (WL 75-76). Driven by a will to know which eats up everything including herself, Hermoine is “pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse, that has no presence, no connection” (WL 89). The desire to know thus consigns one to an experience in which the distinction between predator and prey, and between living and dead, becomes blurred. I have said that Lawrence was deeply suspicious of controlling knowledge-systems, hence his designation of Hermione's condition as modernism's disease. On the one hand too-sure, on the other entirely lacking, Hermione is a figure suspended between identities, utterly dependent yet also overpoweringly dominant, not alive enough but not quite dead either. Her need to consume also consumes her—she becomes “rather terrible, ghastly … uncanny and oppressive,” a figure “full of sepulchral darkness” (WL 90, 89), mutating into a kind of non-self rendered through the language of the corpse.

According to Tony Pinkney, in his fine 1990 analysis of Gothic elements in Lawrence's wider cultural mise en scène, Miriam in Sons and Lovers is also a vampire, having “difficulties with mirrors” (here very much unlike Hermione): “Even Mrs Morel … inclines to see Miriam as vampire, as “one of those who will want to suck a man's soul out” (35). Katharine in the 1924 story “The Border Line” also avoids “the sight of her own face in the mirror,” but this is for fear of dispelling the influence of her dead husband, who has come “from the halls of death, to her, for her relief,” rescuing her from an “ashy nervous horror” (86). That mirrors pose a threat implies that the vampiric also haunts this story; the dead Alan now inhabits a realm beyond the visual.⁵ Katharine, whose own name, Todtnau, is haunted by death, experiences an exchange of the powers of the living and the dead which foreshadows “Glad Ghosts,” written the following year.

Lawrence's Poe essay also confronts the vampire, and maps out a topography of the psyche split across attics and catacombs. Poe, “was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul” (SCAL 87-88). The essay is set out within a loosely psychoanalytic agenda, addressing incest as desire and taboo, love as disease or as the cause of “the neuroticism of the day” (SCAL 73), and the self as crypt, the self as multiple. Furthermore, Poe's story of a malignant line, of a haunted house, and of an unclear (and unclean) division between house and inhabitants—“The Fall of the House of Usher”—illuminates Lawrence's own “Rise of the House of Lathkill.”

But all ghosts are not the same. The vampire must be quite clearly distinguished from that prime Lawrentian entity, the Holy Ghost, also discussed in the Poe essay. Ghosts are not rare ephemera who exceptionally haunt the margins of his work, only to breathe fully in a couple of tales of the supernatural, nor are they simply the figurative beings. The Holy Ghost (“who is inside us, and who is many gods”) is the central force explicitly celebrated in each of his tales of the natural: “Many gods come and go, some say one thing and some say another, and we have to obey the God of the innermost hour. It is the multiplicity of gods within us make up the Holy Ghost” (SCAL 87). Ghosts can be glad, and they can be Holy; they can signal supreme health or abject disease. The vampire can only signal malaise, a body out-of-kilter, a self which gets too close. But perhaps what all of these disparate spirits have in common is that they belong nowhere except—in the title of that story—on the borderline. For Wilt, the vampiric in Lawrence is anything which blurs a distinction which ought to remain distinct, any soul who tries to cross too far into, and to “have,” any other soul:

Vampire resurrections, “ghastly” visitations, occur for Lawrence when the personal will to love (or to hate) pushes one's being over its body's borders, even past the borders of the kingdom of death, towards the world, or another, in the striving to merge, unify, dominate, subsume otherness with oneself, or oneself with otherness.

(241)

This is Hermione's condition: an inability to maintain or police one's boundaries, whether in the sadistic desire to “have” or the dissolving inability to be singular. The grasp to know and to have is thus a desperate attempt to shore up that which is hers. Yet dissolution continues to beckon, and the spectacle of Hermione's unraveling is perhaps Women in Love's central horror. If Hermione is a living corpse, she takes us into the terrain of the abject—she is “sick, like a revenant” (WL 90). It is almost as if she has died already; like Kristeva's corpse read as “the most sickening of wastes,” Hermione embodies and transgresses the boundary between this side and the other, unable to maintain the difference. For how often is she exposed through the repulsed reaction of those around her? “Ursula felt herself recoiling from Hermione,” later in Women in Love: “It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion” (WL 142). Death has come back into life to get us—and she is its sign. Undead before death rather than after (like the true vampire), Hermione presents the abject, and must be rejected. Like vampirism read as a disease of the blood, Hermione's condition, to judge from the disgust and distancing of her companions, must be highly contagious.

Defining the unclean, and a “healthy” repulsion of it, Kristeva writes:

[R]efuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. … The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part.

(3-4)

There are lots of dead bodies in Lawrence—Gerald Crich's, Bates the miner in “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow—all of which undergo exquisitely extended laying-out rituals. Tom's corpse, stripped naked by his daughter, lies in “transit from life to death”: “Neither the living nor the dead could claim him, he was both the one and the other” (R 233). When Lawrence hears that World War One has broken out, he feels his soul to be “not dead, but with the flat stone over it, a corpse … Yet I was not dead—only passed over—trespassé.”⁶ Hermione occupies a number of positions on death-in-life. Vampiric, she is also abject, corpse, dissolved, and a non-being who somehow continues to be: the animated dead. The “matter of life and death” with which Women in Love is concerned is partly this: reject the abject or become it yourself. As abject, Hermione must be thrust aside by those achieving “clean” individuation. She is the sign of the dissolving border.

But Lawrence does not just lay out dead corpses, he explains the condition of the living ones too. Hermione's consuming epistemophilia is vampirism, but it is also as a kind of incest with the self. Again we must return to the Poe essay to understand this. Here Lawrence explores incest as sex with self, sex with known, and sex without resistance:

it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem. In psychoanalysis almost every trouble in the psyche is traced to an incest-desire. … In the family, the natural vibration is the most nearly in unison. With a stranger, there is greater resistance. Incest is the getting of gratification and the avoiding of resistance.

(SCAL 82)

Wanting to be too close, to close the gap, to “have” without resistance, to drink in and absorb, is then the root of the vampiric. Lacking boundaries, Hermione “subsume[s] otherness with [her]self, or [her]self with otherness.”

“GLAD GHOSTS” AND THE MATTER OF THE PAST

“my desire to go onwards takes me back a little”

(WWRA 188)

Ghosts are everywhere in Lawrence; his few ghost stories are not peculiar, playful or uncharacteristic aberrations, but are part of a continual discourse with and about the presence of death in life. “Glad Ghosts” deals with a number of the issues raised above, being both ripe for a psychoanalytic framing and already actively self-analytic. As it proceeds it almost seems to be “ticking off” motifs from Freud's essay on “The Uncanny,” published in German in 1919 and in English in the same year that “Glad Ghosts” was written. Indeed, Lawrence insists on the story's uncanniness, repeating the word itself many times.

Like the narrator of Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” Morier arrives at the dismal Riddings and inspects its occupants. It is a childless place, but more important than the lack of children is the lack of fathers. As with any classic haunted house story, architecture and psyche mirror each other, windows become eyes and eyes windows, and living inhabitants are all but metonyms for their surroundings. The Lathkills exist in a curious space between the living and the dead, with inhabitants of both sides of the great divide clinging to each other in a way which both affirms and breaks down that boundary. Yet the life of the dead, alive in the house, is the least of the family's problems. A deadly separation of matter from spirit has taken place, leaving a pervasive dead smell. The matter is worse than the spirits: “There was a curious, unpleasant sense of the fixity of the materials of the house, the obscene triumph of dead matter” (WWRA 182). Celebrations of the body in Lawrence notwithstanding, here matter, the flesh, is not enough. Despite the ripe, poised potential of Luke (Lord Lathkill and Carlotta's husband), Mark is initially quick to diagnose: “[Luke] was so sure of circumstances, and not by any means sure of the man in the middle of the circumstances. Himself! Himself! That was already a ghost” (WWRA 177). Ghostliness thus emerges not as the state of those who have passed on, the absent dead who somehow still remain, but of the still-living who have failed to be fully present. The haunted house in “Glad Ghosts” is the uncanny-abject: matter and spirit have come adrift, and matter is left bereft. The key Lawrentian principle of “Life” is an attempt to articulate the need to reintegrate what have become separate elements, yet paradoxically Lawrence can only address this through the language of opposition. He must first identify the separability of elements before he can show the need for their reintegration. At the moment of reintegration another central Lawrentian ghost enters the scene, the Holy Ghost. But first a struggle must take place.

Worse than death, then, is the death-in-life endurance of those still alive. The greatest offender is Carlotta's mother-in-law, Luke's mother: a creepy Madame Blavatsky figure and prime exhibit in the Lawrence bestiary, bloodless, abstracted and cold. The dowager Lady Lathkill “has her leanings towards the uncanny—spiritualism, and that kind of thing,” but it is her bodily details which tell her story. She is bleached, aristocratically anemic, infecting all she touches with the odor of death. Her body's fragments speak for her: she has “icily white hair” and “pin-point blue eyes … a real, modern witch-face” (WWRA 185). At the dinner table over which she presides the conversation struggles over how best to remember the dead, but “They all let their words die in their throats, as if the larynx were the coffin of sound.” Coldness, decay, and whiteness are the keynotes: Lady Lathkill is “like an ermine in the snow, feeding on his prey” (“she” can become “he” when the body turns uncanny); the whole party is remote “like the snows on Everest” (WWRA 186). Crucially, she does not eat meat, nor does she drink, as “alcohol, if it has an effect on your psyche, takes you back to old states of consciousness, and old reactions.” I am reminded of Freud's “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not”(354) which occurs in connection with anxiety about dolls. The dowager is an animate object who behaves more like the inanimate. Although she inhabits only the edges of each scene, her control is central.

“A STILL-WINCING NERVE”

The foremost focus of this control is the potentially rather carnivalesque character Colonel Hale, trapped by an hysterical post-mortem fixation on the dead wife he failed to satisfy in life, who has now come back. “She forgot to be flesh and blood while she was alive, and now she can't forgive herself, nor the Colonel,” says Luke (WWRA 200). According to Freud, one of our most primitive feelings about death and the dead is this: “the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him.” (365) So the Colonel wanders the house obsessively symptomatizing, possessed by a malign unfulfilled femininity which will not let him go. Hale seems to require a diagnosis, like the kind offered by the Hitchcockian shrink, wheeled on to explain that he is “suffering from acute melancholia with a guilt complex” (as is said of the bereaved, fixated hero of Vertigo). Because of this one is tempted to read the Colonel's confessional self-narrative as psychoanalytically parodic: marrying an older woman who “mothered me,” he is first, sexually, a son. Failing fully to embrace her when alive he then continues to confront her as the repressed returning, since he cannot shake her off when she is dead. He then moves on to become the sexual father, marrying a friend of his daughter—a much younger woman—on the insistence of his dead wife. Meanwhile the messages from the beyond become even “more insistent,” as Lawrence puts it, “waking me three or four times in the night” (It is hard to avoid the thought that here Lawrence is playing some kind of sexual joke on us, confronting us with that psychoanalytic “dirty little secret” to see what we will make of it). The terror of the second marriage to the daughter-figure makes Hale “almost unconscious,” so he returns instead to Lucy—his returned dead mother-wife—who now perversely prevents him from going near his new daughter-wife. The confessional ends with Hale looking at Morier, “with fear, and shame, and shameful secrecy, and a sort of gloating” (all quotations WWRA 190-91). Freud writes that incest is “transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety” resulting in “the frightening element” understood as “something repressed which recurs. … this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (363-64).

Tony Pinkney might read the whole Gothic mise en scène of “Glad Ghosts” as originating in this transgressive incestuous confusion. As he writes of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's clearest articulation of the workings and breakdowns of Oedipus,

Paul's mother is his lover, as a host of details and similes stresses throughout the book. But this means that the incest-taboo, keystone of the whole order of culture and of its classicist and realist literary modes, has broken down. And as culture travels back, Tardis-like, to and beyond its primordial origins in this prohibition, so do more archaic forms—Miriam's Gothic—which are not bound by its edict begin to emerge.

(35-36)

Incest, then, might be the rent, the rupture, through which figures from the uncanny leak out. Or rather, as Freud puts it, the uncanny is the gap through which incestuous desire is shown, worried over, feared.

I have said that the story diagnoses sickness, then describes its cure. First the Colonel's symptoms are meticulously noted by the narrator: his “expression of anxiety, fear, and misery,” his insomnia, the “half glazed, obsessed” eyes, the face which “seemed as if the flesh were breaking under the skin, decomposing”: “My head feels as if there was a cold vacuum in it, and my heart beats, and something screws up inside me” (WWRA 202). A pseudo therapy is recommended: “The only thing is to stop it, as one does hysteria” says Mark (WWRA 197), and when the initial advice of just saying No to the dead does not work (“Why don't you turn round and quarrel with the spirit of your first wife, finally and fatally, and get rid of her?” [WWRA 192]), acceptance and avowal follow (“Why don't you take her to your warm heart … Why don't you be kind to her poor ghost, bodily?” [WWRA 204]). Luke's diagnosis of the Colonel's hysteria seems at first to be simply a vulgar-pop-psychological explanation of mental illness resulting from not enough sex—apparently in direct contradiction to the moment in Fantasia when Lawrence pleads, “don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too much of it under the table, and really, for my part, I prefer to keep mine there” (FU 20). In life, Luke says, “You ignored and disliked her body, and she was only a living ghost. Now she wails in the afterworld, like a still-wincing nerve” (WWRA 203). Lawrence's purgatory is thus dependent upon the quality of bodily existence; both the living and the dead in “Glad Ghosts” inhabit an in-between world of mutual unfulfillment. However, these are not the vampiric undead of a Bram Stoker or a Sheridan Le Fanu, whose blood-dependent afterlife is often figured as an intensification of the flesh, an acute indulgence of desire and appetite, or “haemosexuality.” Undeath here is a state of sexual anemia. It seems that Hale has, in the words of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “put her living into the tomb,” but it is his body which is Lucy's crypt. The widowed Colonel, possessed, thus becomes the living sign of his wife's unfulfillment. She inhabits him. The unfulfilled body thus engenders profound metaphysical confusion, breaking down the distinction between this side and the next, between matter and spirit, and between man and woman.

Earlier I wrote that reactions to Hermione in Women in Love are partly explicable through the Kristevan discussion of the abject as border-country. “Glad Ghosts” is also pitched across the border line, but its problems and solutions are quite specific, and signal a crude psycho-sexual topography at work: desire and consciousness split in a way that prevents neither being fully realized, with disease as the result. Reunite them and health will prevail. This is partly articulated through a possession anxiety. “It's as if her spirit wanted to live in my body,” says Colonel Hale. The man as the crypt of a woman might then be one way of expressing the problem; Hale as a man experiencing the specter of the unconscious figured as a woman behaving badly might be another. Clearly this supports the reading that Hale's first wife is a “still-wincing nerve” disguised as a ghost. More generally it shows Hale as a character spread and fractured across a boundary, existing beyond the limit of what he believes himself to be, beyond conscious control conceived as masculine.

But the abject is present here too, in the body of the dowager, the corpse on legs, and in the half-lives of the living. “Glad Ghosts” is a tale of two bodies or, as Morier puts it, “the quick body which I imagined within the dead” (WWRA 174). Matter comes adrift from spirit, and the body which is left is the ultimate abject—Kristeva's “body without soul” (109), the corpse. Early in the story Luke's “brown eyes had a hollow look, like gaps with nothing in them except a haggard, hollow fear” (WWRA 182) The Colonel beside-himself expressed as an unfulfilled woman might be another form of this, as might be the extraordinary food anxiety of this story. For a writer who is elsewhere able to detail venison pies and sides of ham with such relish, this is quite a turn. Whiteness becomes the register of disgust. “I suddenly thought at dinner-time, what corpses we all were, sitting eating our dinners!” says Luke: “I thought it when I saw you look at those little Jerusalem artichoke things in a white sauce” (WWRA 200). The dowager mixes herself “some night-cap brew over a spirit lamp: something milky and excessively harmless” (WWRA 199). This is a domain in which appetite is only anxiously negotiated.⁷ We have, then, a story populated both by bodies with no lives (the dowager) and bodies with one too many lives (Hale-Lucy).

But to explain this entirely in terms of a mind-body split is to minimize the specific influence of the family and to ignore the position from which Luke as a physician attempts to heal Hale as analysand. First we must question things further. Where, for instance, is the patriarch in this house? Where has the father gone? There is a gap here, an absence which is not that of femininity. We have a mother (the dowager), a son (Luke), a daughter-in-law (Carlotta), but no “head.” Luke is certainly not (yet) it. I have said that the Colonel's phantom is not only a dead lover but also a dead mother. All of these uncanny happenings take place in a house which is fatherless, dominated by the passive-aggressive control of the dowager. Luke's own father is never mentioned,⁸ and he himself has ceased to be a father long before Mark arrives, all three of his children having died. His prime relations are thus with his wife and mother, making a crucified unholy family which Mark describes in an astonishing aside:

[I]t occurred to me that in this Crucifixion business, the crucified does not put himself alone on the cross. The woman is nailed even more inexorably up, and crucified in the body even more cruelly.

It is a monstrous thought. But the deed is even more monstrous. Oh Jesus! didn't you know that you couldn't be crucified alone? That the two thieves crucified along with you were the two women, your wife and your mother? You called them two thieves! But what would they call you, who had put their women's bodies on the cross?

(WWRA 201)

Posited here is an argument for the son as source of Oedipal desire and strife, and its consequences for his lover. A curious twist, to say the least, on Paul Morel's fate: in the spirit of this we might say that it is Paul who actively implicates Mrs. Morel and Miriam in his twisted fate, not the women whose perverse desires (for the son as husband on the one hand, and for the lover as spirit on the other), are his unwitting undoing. It is then Paul's desire to be martyred on an Oedipal cross, not the women's individual failures, that instigates the tragedy. The speech above also bears comparison with the image of the mother in Fantasia as “diseased with self-consciousness and sex in the head”:

the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to her child. … Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which she is craving. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and strength of her husband and is poison to the boy. … And the fatal round of introversion and ‘complex’ starts once more.

(FU 125)

Who, then, is doing what to whom? Is it the mother who weaves the son's desire into her own? Is it the man who makes mother and lover share his crucified fate? Who is the active party in Lawrence's seduction theory? Is Oedipal desire here the projected fantasy of the child, or (as for Jeffrey Masson), a real victimization of child by adult which psychoanalysis has chosen to conceal? Is seduction (as in Jean Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier) something which passes across and between adult and child, blurring a clear-cut distinction between active and passive parties? Or is the Oedipal narrative (as for Abraham and Torok, and in Esther Rashkin's words) “construed as a strategic lie offered by the male child to the mother … during the process of separation” in order to “reassure the mother of the child's love”? (35) If “Glad Ghosts,” published so soon after Fantasia, does not resolve these questions, it does present the burden of the motherson nexus rather differently.

In his crucifixion discourse, Mark is thinking of Luke while looking at Carlotta, one of Luke's co-crucified. The other is of course Luke's mother. The crucifixion narrative is followed by a moment of crisis between Luke and the women. His wife is given away (to Mark), and his mother is dispelled with a curious speech of corpulent affirmation, in which Luke thanks the dowager as the mother of his sexuality, the mother of “my shoulders and my hips … of my thighs”:

Oh Mother dear, a man has to be in love in his thighs, the way you ride a horse. Why don't we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness? Oh mother of my body, thank you for my body, you strange woman with white hair! I don't know much about you, but my body came from you.

(WWRA 207)

The effect of this is that the son gives birth to the mother, confronts her with her corporeal connection to him, and cures her of her uncanniness. By the story's close she has been thoroughly normalized. The Oedipal narrative at this point clearly comes from the son, and is something of a shock to the dowager. Here then the adult child becomes the conscious seducer of the parent in order to depose her. The dowager's discomfort—she trembles, glances nervously, says “Don't you forget yourself, my boy?”—signals a realization of a sexual connection not with husband but with son. The result of this unearthing, however, is not neurosis but cure, not repression but gratification, and the reassertion of the patriarchal balance of power which ushers back the family's fortunes. A reverse, then, of the “The Rocking-Horse Winner” scenario, which sees the wife left alone, with neither son nor lover, bereft of all but the “filthy lucre.” Indeed, we could read “Glad Ghosts” in terms very similar to those used by W. S. Marks in his 1965 reading of “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a story which “is intended to make us feel emotional as well as intellectual revulsion from the inorganic death-in-life of the middle class menage and, accordingly, a greater respect for the traditional view of a family unified under the vital authority of the father” (391).

At its conclusion, “Glad Ghosts” reinscribes patriarchy in a dramatic and literal manner. First it banishes the dowager to her rightful place. Then it prescribes for the man something astonishingly like that which Freud prescribes for the woman—cure and health in the shape of a baby: “Carlotta has a son … and I an heir,” writes Luke to Mark. The Colonel's wife also has a child, and though its father maybe Luke, and Carlotta's child's father maybe Mark, what is important is that Luke and Hale are repositioned through the appearance of progeny. The matriarchy of the dowager has been overturned, ironically by the appearance of the silent female ghost who granted these conceptions—and the rise of the house of Lathkill is assured. The man, it seems, can be one of three things for the Lawrence of this tale: father, son, or wanderer (I will say more about this last figure shortly). Unless he absents himself from the family altogether, it is in terms of the family that he is identified. Fatherhood is the only sure way of cutting the ties to the mother: having a baby frees Luke from the dowager, and Hale from Lucy. Crucifixion is averted. Each moves from the position of son in a matriarchy to that of father in a patriarchy; each comes to form his own Holy Family.⁹

THE MASCULINE UNCANNY

The issue here is so far quite clear: face up to your illness, recognize, speak it, and you and your line shall be cured. Haunting as neurosis is spelled-out, catharsis and confrontation are prescribed. It is not then the appearance of the ghost that cures the house, but the analytic act which precedes her coming. The spectacle of the moment of cure, when Hale embraces Lucy, is curious to say the least. What follows is a bizarre scene in which dead femininity enters the living Colonel Hale's heart, and it is this fact of femininity affirmed by the flesh of a man which allows him fully to live as a man again. The Colonel opens his pajama jacket and exposes his breast, “white and very pure,” while everyone watches. Then the dowager comes in (this is before Luke's eulogy to the body detailed above), and Luke launches momentarily into a strange discourse of uncanny homoeroticism, addressed to the mother: “Our ghost is walking, to bring Lucy home. … The Colonel's breast is white and extraordinarily beautiful, Mother, I don't wonder poor Lucy yearned for it, to go home into it at last. It's like going into an orchard of plum-blossom, for a ghost” (WWRA 206). There is, then, another story at work here, which celebrates white masculinity as an object of an anxious homoeroticism, a homoeroticism which the mother must witness. Lawrence's fascination with the bodies of white men, as well as dark men, is evident across his work. Hale's is a body figured as somewhere in-between, but it is miraculous rather than abject. Incorporating not just the dead, but the dead woman, is the crucial stage in Hale's “cure,” and briefly he is seen lying somewhere between the dead and the living, masculine and feminine, sexual and spiritual, earth and heaven.

There is much more that I would like to be able to explore in this, particularly about the detail of Hale's whiteness (Lawrence has a powerful sense of color: “The pink Colonel [has] yellow creases under his blue eyes” [WWRA 185]). Why focus on whiteness? Because Lawrence is both insistent and particular in his naming and placing of the color in certain contexts. White things in this story can be both pure and disgusting, authentic and anemic, insubstantial and grossly material. Whiteness in Lawrence is a sign both of consummate realized flesh and the debased body in the process of decay or death. A wider question would ask why ghosts are white at all? In a chilling letter to Ottoline Morrell Lawrence predicts a revolution of white ghosts—trench corpses it seems—coming back over the sea to change things: “It is the whiteness of the ghost legions that is so awful.” But Hale's whiteness, ghost-infused though it is, is not awful. The Colonel's chest represents a number of contradictions: both male and female, home and absent, and, in its whiteness—the color of abjection and blessing—both repellent and desirous. Finally, we hear, Hale becomes hearty too, embracing a life which incorporates (takes in bodily) all of these oppositions, rather than lying uneasily between them—a fulfilled Lawrentian life, the apotheosis of which is (Lawrence's joke) to breed pigs with a passion (“raising swine ad maiorem gloriam Dei”[WWRA 210]).

I want to conclude, however, by thinking briefly about modernist masculinity and the uncanny. I said that there is a third possibility for masculinity in this text and in Lawrence's work, which is neither father nor son but wanderer, the man as homeless specter. Indeed, “Glad Ghosts” reinflects the uncanny from the female to the male. Freud located the uncanny as or at the woman's/mother's genitals: the most unheimlich place of all—the most haunted of houses—is,

the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, … the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that “Love is home-sickness”; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: “this place is familiar to me, I've been here before,” we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body.

(368)

But this is not true for the story in question—here it is male flesh not female that articulates the uncanny. Hale's body is Lucy's uneasy crypt, and then her peaceful resting-place. And the concluding text not only undermines the homeliness of Riddings, it splits and doubles the narrative voice itself, from which the story has been spun. “Glad Ghosts” ends with Mark, its narrator, adrift, abroad, addressing the adoptive home he has left, and speaking with the voice of another man (Luke), in the words of a letter written from Luke to Mark. The last few lines are then narrated by Mark, but they are Luke's words. Spoken from both home and abroad, this double-voice evokes home to the man who is missing from it. The story ends with Mark ventriloquizing Luke:

“I am in love with this house … I cannot understand why you wander in uneasy and distant parts of the earth. For me, when I am at home, I am there. … I feel the house of Lathkill will survive, built upon our ghost. So come back, and you'll find we shall not have gone away …”

(WWRA 210)

The homeliness of Riddings and the strength of the family line are founded on a ghost. But more than this, the story itself is concluded by an absentee. Mark Morier, home and not-home, is left at the end in no-place, narrating someone else's words from a space which is defined only by its distance from the haunted house, possessed by the voice of another man.

Lawrence's most uncanny space is, then, that which ought to be most rooted: the male line is finally built on the supernatural, the male narrative voice is consigned to wandering. In its very articulation the story itself is somehow both there and not-there. I started by discussing Lawrence's female vampires—Hermione, Miriam, and Ursula as Skrebensky's predator. Lawrence's male ghosts are perhaps even more pervasive—the final letter in “Glad Ghosts” renders both Luke and Mark the ghostly absence of each other. Lacking women's vampiric capacity, the male ghost can dwell in mirrors: Siegmund in The Trespasser “saw himself like a ghost cross the mirror” (T 51) as he leaves his wife and children. He has returned home to find that he has already left; his presence only signals his absence, his foreignness. The departing or absent father in Lawrence—Siegmund, Aaron Sisson, Walter Morel—might be read as a key sign not just of alienation and exclusion but of the simultaneous guarantee and breakdown of the Law, a key figure of present-absence. Home is not-home. The man, titular head of the family but so often in Lawrence absent and alienated from it, has become the sign of uncanniness: the one who gives home its name is also the one whose claim upon it is weakest. “Glad Ghosts” articulates Lawrence's masculine uncanny in all its exquisite ambivalence: the Colonel's chest offers the only image of arrival the story can spirit up.

Notes

1. The letter of 2 February 1923 runs, “I wrote to you to Adelphi Terrace the day after I got your letter, and asked Seltzer to send you Fantasia of the Unconscious. I wanted Katherine to read it.” L iv. 375.

2. It was not accepted for The Ghost Book, however, and “The Rocking Horse Winner” was written and used in its place. “Glad Ghosts” was subsequently published in two parts in Dial magazine.

3. See both “To Open the Question” and “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” by Felman in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Felman is, of course, also dealing with a psychoanalytically knowing ghost story in her complex reading of Henry James' “The Turn of the Screw.”

4. This is discussed by Judith Wilt in Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot & Lawrence, 235-36.

5. In a similar uncanny sensory deprivation, the Lathkill's ghost is a spirit of silence who must not be verbally addressed—“Glad Ghosts” was to be titled “The Ghost of Silence.” If the ghost does bring some sort of pseudo psychoanalytic cure, it is only the humans who make it a talking one.

6. Lawrence writing to Cynthia Asquith, 31 January 1915, from L ii. 268-69.

7. “[A] spirit from the other side is more important than mere pleasure,” says Hale (WWRA 192).

8. If we continue to read Carlotta as Lady Cynthia Asquith, the absent patriarch/father-in-law could then be read as her father-in-law, Herbert Asquith, the prime minister!

9. “The Holy Family” is, of course, the title of one of Lawrence's best known, and most psychoanalytically parodic paintings. W. S. Marks also reads “The Rocking Horse Winner” as a story suggesting the consequences of matriarchal living: “A typical Lawrentian protagonist,” he writes, “young Paul, like Paul Morel and Gerald Crich, is kept from maturity by an Oedipal attachment to the mother. Through her baleful influence Paul forsakes the phallic gods of the patriarchal household, cleaving to the obscene idols of the matriarch” (385). In a sense “Glad Ghosts” charts the reverse of this, moving from a matriarchy (in which the dowager prepares Colonel Hale “for my next incarnation, when I am going to serve Woman” [WWRA 192]) back (or forwards) to a patriarchy.

Works Cited

Felman, Shoshana. Ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” in Art and Literature. Pelican Freud, 14. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Gordon, David J. D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1966.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967.

Lawrence, D. H. “The Border Line.” The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge UP, 1995. 77-98.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume II: June 1913-October 1916. Ed. George J. Zyaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume IV: June 1921-March 1924. Ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton, and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

———. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

———. “Glad Ghosts.” The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 174-210.

———. The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

———. Studies in Classic American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

———. The Trespasser. Ed. Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

———. Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Mailer, Norman. The Prisoner of Sex. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

Marks W. S., III. “The Psychology of The Uncanny in Lawrence's ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’,” Modern Fiction Studies. 11. Winter, 1965-6.

Moore, Harry T. The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951.

Pinkney, Tony. D. H. Lawrence. Harvester: Hemel Hempstead, 1990.

Rashkin, Esther. “Tools for a new psychoanalytic literary criticism: The work of Abraham and Torok,” Diacritics. Winter 1988. Vol 18, 4.