22 pages • 44 minutes read
A Haunted House
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Character Analysis
A Ghostly Couple
Virginia Woolf does not offer any physical description of any character in the short story. The narrator states that the woman and the man who form the ghostly couple died at different times after having lived in the house for a long time. Their main characteristics are given by actions performed, mainly searching through the house. The ghostly couple is therefore only a shadow of a story that has vanished through time, and that is precisely what they set about to find. The couple comes back to the house in which they once lived to find traces of a long lost love they shared. Beyond being characters in a story, the ghost are symbols of unrest, of something that has not met a closure during a lifetime. Woolf’s ghosts are not meant to be scary, as in conventional ghost stories; they are effectively two people seeking closure about a situation that death caused; that is, the eternal separation of lovers.
Woolf refuses to give shape and form to the main characters since they are also part of a narrative structure that is ambiguous in its entirety. The male ghost even doubts the identity of the narrator. In his last words in the story, after finding the sleeping couple, the male ghost says, “Long years—” (5), melancholically pointing to a period in time when the ghostly couple lived together undisturbed by the overwhelming presence of death in the house. The phrase, “Again you found me” (5), suggests that the sleeping couple could be the ghostly couple at a young age; due to the narrative’s ambiguity, however, one cannot state for sure whom the ghosts are observing at this point of the narrative. Therefore, the clear identity of the ghostly couple is blurred, following Woolf’s depiction of the entire scene as a blurry liminal space between wakefulness and dream.
The Narrator
The narrator is polyvalent in the sense that it is more than one character. The narrative does not state a precise number of roles that the narrator plays in the story. At the beginning of the story, the narrator talks to the reader using the pronoun “you,” as opposed to “I.” However, the narrative assumes a plural form with “us” in the third paragraph. Woolf never defines who the second person of this “us” is, except for an indication by the ghosts that there is a couple sleeping in a room inside the house. Soon after, in the same paragraph, the narrator assumes again the first-person singular with the use of “I” and “my,” reinstating the deictic as before. This interchange of narrative point of view is in line with the story’s creation of a multiplicity of meanings, deepening the ambiguity that pervades the story and unsettling the notion of objective truth. In the last line, the narrator even uses quotation marks for their own speech, a device that was previously reserved for the dialogue between the ghosts. The narrator itself is a figure of multiplicity, for there is no indication in the story that it is a woman or a man narrating the events. The polyvalence refutes any character study and instead allows the narrative to paint a picture of sensory impressions and feelings.
A Secondary Character: The House
A secondary character in Woolf’s short story is the house itself. Although it does not change the course of the story, the house is an important factor for the narrator’s psyche. Passively, the description of the house adds to the overall tone of melancholy of the short story. It has long been abandoned by the ghostly couple, who supposedly lived there centuries ago. Through the words of the narrator, the house is empty and abandoned; its windows are closed shut. However, the house seems alive because of the opening and closing of doors, which imitates the pulse of a heartbeat. It is not possible to state for certain whether the ghosts are doing this or the house itself is “alive” and moving its doors. It is certain that the house seems to speak three times during the story, repeating the phrase “safe, safe, safe” three times, once beating gladly, beating proudly, and beating wildly. The words the house seems to whisper reflect the emotions the ghosts feel, increasing in intensity as the story draws to a close. Thus, the house is an important character in creating the ghostly aura of the text, and it responds to changes in the environment and to the people who live within it.
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By Virginia Woolf
