Review: Weinstock, Scare Tactics (2008)

Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, with a New Preface by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Specifically in the subtitle he means American women between 1850 and 1930, when apparently there was this enormous output of ghost stories by American female authors. One of the OTHER things I learned in reading this book is how many American female authors of this period there were that I had never even heard of. These are women who were prolific and who enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success during their own lifetimes but who somehow just...got erased. I had heard, of course, of Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Harriet Prescott Spofford, Anna M. Hoyt, Madeline Yale Wynne, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Helen Hull, and Gertrude Atherton? (And those are only the women whose stories Weinstock discusses.) It's a truism, often trotted out---or at least it was when I was getting my degrees, lo these mumblecough years ago---that 90% of Victorian fiction was unremarkable: popular disposable fiction. But I wonder to what degree that "unremarkable" meant either "fiction by women" or "supernatural fiction"---both of which were sneered at by the academy for most of the twentieth century---or both.

I am not original in wondering this, I know. But wow.

This is a book of academic criticism, so it's a little dry. It is, however, readable rather than suffocated beneath the weight of its own critical jargon, and I found the subject fascinating. (Possibly, full disclaimer, because I am also a female writer of ghost stories.) Weinstock argues that American women writers between 1850 and 1930 used supernatural fiction as a vehicle/stalking horse for discussions and/or critiques of the ideology of women's roles in Victorian and Edwardian society, particularly motherhood; the failings of capitalism; lesbian desire; and the Gothic written by men. I particularly liked his reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Giant Wisteria" as a critique of The Scarlet Letter.



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