“A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe”

In an irony she might well have appreciated, the publication of Edith Wharton’s sole collection dedicated especially to ghost stories saw the author herself presiding over the assembled tales as a ghostly presence. Wharton theorizes ghosts and ghost stories neatly in the succinct preface to Ghosts. Of ghosts, she asserts that “the good ones bring with them the internal proof of their ghostliness; and no other evidence is needed”. Wharton is a conservative thinker: for her, democracy, feminism, technology, social mobility, and the decline of Anglo-Saxon dominance tend to merge together as one unwelcome blur of distasteful and destructive modernity. But modernity denies the ghost these things: “the ghost may after all succumb first to the impossibility of finding standing room in a roaring and discontinuous universe”. “Roaring” is what she associates with violent mobs; and discontinuity offends her not simply because it prevents hauntings, but because, socially, politically, and aesthetically, she favours continuity and abhors sudden, radical change.