ABSTRACT
At the most basic level, the middle class was concerned with marking its space to reinforce class boundaries. An observer should have been able to identify the social position of any individual by the space that individual occupied. However, the middle-class concern that outward appearances refl ect something true about the people within gave greater urgency to an overriding concern with “normality.” As Foucault points out in Discipline and Punish, “normalization [became] one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age” (184), and throughout the nineteenth century, “normality,” as defi ned by middle-class values, was the mark of social identifi cation. Homogeneity was key; difference was redefi ned as illness and domesticated in various institutions, from prison to workhouse to hospital. As part of this process of normalizing middle-class behaviors, Nancy Armstrong argues that Victorian fi ction in general “helped to formulate the ordered space we now recognize as the household . . . and used it as the context for representing normal behavior” (23). According to her, domestic fi ction took on the task of taming “new domains of aberrance” which were beyond or above the law (163). Another kind of fi ction, the suburban ghost story on which this chapter focuses, contributes to this cultural movement by giving the middle-class male hero of its narrative the opportunity to order the space inside the house, which has been disrupted by the ghost, and to “normalize” those connected with it.
