A Haunted House

The story begins by designating the temporal setting as “[w]hatever hour,” already setting an undefined time to the story. This instantly offsets any expectation of linearity and aims to replicate the narrator’s sense of time rather than impose order onto these impressions. The instantly disorienting sense of time threads throughout the story as it changes from night to day to night abruptly, and the narrator wakes up from sleep but returns to bed.

The overall tone of the short story is not one of suspense, as would be conventional in ghost stories. There is a pervasive sadness that permeates the narrative: a longing for something that has been missing in the ghosts’ existence. Virginia Woolf communicates this aura of sadness by the short sentences the ghosts use to communicate with one another: “Here we left it” (3); “the room…” (4). The short sentences the ghosts tell each other and the constant murmurs they exchange, in addition to broken sentences, add to the climate of sadness and melancholy of the short story. This ambience is further deepened by the descriptions of the house and the garden. “The house all empty, the doors standing open” (3), “the garden still as ever” (3), “from the deepest wells of silence” (4) all stress the feeling of loneliness, hopelessness, and sadness, which are at the same time the feelings of the ghostly couple.

Woolf creates a sense of ambiguity, which is at the heart of the short story. As a ghostly figure is somewhat evasive to the eyes, the narrative is constructed in such a way that evades a more conventional form of narrative. This is mainly expressed in the different points of view the story presents. The story begins in direct address to the reader with the line, “Whatever hour you woke” (3). “You” consequently presupposes an “I” to the story. Indeed, the narrator is a first-person narrator, but they are not an overt presence in the text. In more than one instance—for example, in the passage “[b]ut it wasn’t that you woke us” (3)—the first-person singular changes to the first-person plural, and Woolf does not explain or make explicit the identities of these people. Further in the text, on two occasions, the narrator states, “My hands were empty” (3), returning the text to the first-person singular. Even the quotation marks that indicate dialogues are used for multiple characters. While at the beginning of the story the quotation marks clearly indicate a conversation between the ghosts, in the last line of the story the narrator quotes themselves saying, “Oh, is this your buried treasure?” and reporting their speech instead of simply narrating their thoughts. This erases a clear definition of who is actually speaking, adding another layer of ambiguity to the text. The narrator is hence as “ghostly” as the couple, suggesting that subjective experience cannot be pinned down into a binary of real or unreal.

The ghostly couple seeks to find something that has been left behind for a long time. The ambience of the house heightens their feelings of loneliness, as it was abandoned for a long time. The narrator, when describing the walls and the glasses on the walls, describes what is there in an intangible way, reinforcing this sense of loss or longing. The glass filters the images coming from the outside: “The window panes reflected apples; reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass” (3). The glass also obscures vivid images of the ghosts’ life. At one point, the narrator equates the glass with Death. Death here becomes a character that hovers above the scene, and it is personified, as the use of the uppercase letter depicts. These details suggest The Difficulty of Moving on from Loss.

The house itself is an allegory for the human psyche, something that works alongside the theme of the loss. The narrator indicates that the rooms of the house once flourished with life, so much so that after the woman died centuries ago, the man ran away from the place that reminded him of an important and vital loss. His sense of emptiness is reflected by the empty house. His return to the house and his meeting with the female ghost does not appease his sense of loss. The house then becomes almost a place of worship of the most important thing the couple misses: the love they once had and experienced fully. The search through the house as they search for meaning within their minds and attempt to come to terms with the psychological pain of loss. Some philosophers or psychoanalysts contemporary to Woolf used the house as a way to think about the human mind, including Gaston Bachelard, who used the many rooms of the house to illuminate aspects of the psyche in his works, such as The Poetics of Space. The rooms in this house in part reflect the minds of the ghosts and the narrator, who grapple with love and loss.

The narrator, despite knowing the trajectory of the ghosts through the house, is sleeping, and it is unclear whether they enact or dream of the scene being told in the story. The narrator knows the steps and the movements of the ghostly couple and envisions them approaching both characters sleeping. When the ghosts come near to the light of love, the narrator wakes up and cries out, suddenly understanding that the treasure the ghosts were seeking was a touch of the old love they once shared. The comparison of this sleeping couple with the “ghostly couple” highlights the significance of love in this story and suggests that the beating pulse of the house is created by the love that thrives within it. This conveys the story’s idea of Love as the Reason for Life.

Virginia Woolf’s ghost story finishes with the sudden realization that although love can be a cure for loneliness, and sadness, it never fully heals old wounds. The final paragraph of the story indicates that, by seeing the living couple sleeping, the ghosts remember that the love they share is the treasure they have lost in time. However, the ambiguity of the tale is further deepened in this very same passage. It is not possible to know for certain whether the couple sleeping is an image of the ghosts or another couple entirely. This is the final subversion of the ghost story genre: There is no resolution to the plot, be it the confirmation of the existence of ghosts or the discovery of a type of device that explains the sounds and movement in the house. Woolf deconstructs the genre and brings it up to date with the breaking of paradigms that is a central feature of modernist writing.