The specter has long been a figure of study within Victorian literary criticism. Haunting dark stairwells and appearing in the reflection of windows, the Victorian specter is known for bringing madness to those who perceive it. While many have discussed the Victorian specter and its connection to madness, there remains a gap in the scholarship surrounding female spectrality and the role the specter plays in representing female mental illness. While the early nineteenth century was known for classic ghost stories, there was also an emerging body of literature “[that] aimed to provide ‘rational’ and scientific explanations for widely believed supernatural events” (Mangham 283). This shift largely has to do with an increased interest in psychological study and what the Victorians called the sciences of the mind. As Suzy Anger notes, the Victorians “read and wrote widely on subjects connected to the mental sciences” with conversations about the mind appearing in popular periodicals, magazines, and newspapers (Anger 276). These conversations in turn had an influence on popular fiction of the time. Through an examination of spectrality and madness in The Woman in White by Willkie Collins and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, I will demonstrate how madness is used as a social label to subjugate women to an undead existence and how Collins and Brontë offer their texts as depictions of as well as interventions against this subjugation. This reading will be supported by an analysis of the material in the periodical press Collins and Bronte would have been reading at the time, drawn from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Household Words, to demonstrate how this critical work was beginning in these periodicals, largely, through their braiding together of conversations related to madness, spectrality, and the mental sciences.
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