ABSTRACT
The enchanted vision of the ghost-seer and the sceptical gaze of the disbeliever prove to be mutually dependent. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ghost story installs the notion of spectral vision as a response to a traumatic experience which is displaced onto a choice between various love objects, one of which sustains the phantasmagoria defied by the other. If, as in Vertigo, a dead male figure hovers over the love story onto which the haunting is displaced, Hoffmann also includes a feminine figure that staunchly refuses to believe in ghosts. The epistemological uncertainty of the stories the readers tell about ghosts also speaks to the spectral power of literary and cinematic representation, particularly when, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a duplicitous act of ghost-making is both performed and debunked. The ghostly aspect of the oscillation between animation and de-animation, and with it the spectral aspect of cinema, comes into play most prominently during the wedding night.
