Read or listen to the story here.
A number of different approaches present themselves when we analyze a ghost story. Are the ghosts literal or a projection of the mind? If the ghosts are literal, is their meaning literal? This is not the same question but rather asks if the meaning of the story pertains to persistence of the soul. Either way, the ghosts can also have a metaphorical meaning, as is very much the case here, and while most ghost stories focus on negative emotions, loss and longing, hatred and envy, Virginia Woolf’s ghost story is all about love.
Note: you can read or listen to the story here.
I don’t approach my analysis of A Haunted House assuming a literal meaning for the ghosts. It can be and has been done, with arguments made for the eternal love of the ghostly couple over the centuries, but I feel the focus is the living narrator and the ghosts are a vehicle for her journey.
Perhaps similar questions have to be asked of the house in a haunted house story. Within the context of the story is the house literally cursed, or blessed, as in this case. If so, what does that mean for the house’s pulse sounding, safe, safe, safe? A compelling argument could be made for the importance of the house, but my analysis will suggest the opposite.
A Haunted House is Virginia Woolf’s response to Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). That’s a grandiose claim that should be stated with far more uncertainty, but that’s not how they teach us to write. I see strong and persistent parallels, and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, we have this as the third in a line of obsessive tales.
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth.
Just as Lady Macbeth reflects on urging her husband to murder while she’s unable to cleanse herself of the blood, so Poe’s narrator has come to kill an old man. In a moment important to our current analysis, he cracks opens his lantern and the light falls upon the hideous eye.
It was open — wide, wide open — and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness — all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
One damned spot to another.
Louder! louder! louder! beat the heart of the dead man beneath the floorboards, “much such a sound a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” But, our haunted house’s heart beats gladly and speaks not of a buried horror ready to be discovered but of a treasure ready to be found.
Virginia Woolf’s narrator is reading a book, while around the house, windows open in the wind and curtains move, a ghostly couple in search of buried treasure. She continues reading until she’s certain the ghosts must have found the quarry. She rises and looks for herself, but all is as it should be.
“What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
She’s believes they’re in the drawing room, and sees the apple’s yellow side as her proof of their passing. She feels they’ve found what they’re looking for.
Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty.
Our narrator feels the presence of the ghostly couple. This buried treasure they pursue, they have found; it’s here. But what is it? She looks from floor to wall to ceiling and finds nothing. Her hands are empty.
A wood pigeon sounds, and with it, the pulse of the house beats softly. “Safe, safe, safe.”
The light fades from the room, and she supposes they’ve moved their search to the garden.
But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass.
A shadow fell beneath a ray of light, the light she always sought and which burned beyond the glass. “Death was the glass,” she writes, the separation between light and dark. Death came between her and the ghostly couple, and it divided the couple, too, taking the wife first.
…hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”
All this insight from the play of shadows upon the glass.
Wind and rain comes during the night. Windows open, but it’s not the wind. Doors shut. Lovers whisper through halls, looking.
The narrator and her husband sleep as the storm dies down, and the ghosts come spying, like Poe’s narrator at the door of the old man’s room. The end of Woolf’s story echoes both Poe’s point before the murder and the confession to the officers.
His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”
Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.
“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”
Poe’s madness is here transformed to joy and love. Woolf’s narrator awakens, having witnessed the ghosts in a dream, perhaps, and she understands the treasure. It was found before by those who loved one another in times past, and its hers now to hold onto while life lingers.
It’s not the house. The ghosts have searched the house, and but for the memory of a live loving one another, they find the treasure present and immediate, only, in these two, together. The heart of the house speaks of safety because of the love of those within its walls.
Remember: you can read or listen to the story here.
My Digging Deeper analysis of A Haunted House.
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