Now You See Her: a Quick Interlude on Gay Ghosts
Ghosts in movies and movie-ghosts in movies–and what I hate to say I loved about Bly Manor
"When it comes to lesbians ... many people have trouble seeing what's in front of them."
~Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian
The darkest nights of the year have arrived, and I love them. I love the cold, hedonistically, because it allows me to read books and watch movies, and I love the shortening of days culminating in the solstice. With the city sitting expectantly in the dark and certain rats shrieking in our empty streets, it’s this time more than any other –with its brink of lengthening days just around the corner–that seems suitable for ghost stories (apart from the obvious Dickens, a Victorian ghost story comes to mind, probably by Edith Wharton, that started with the telling of ghost stories round the fireplace on Christmas Eve–which seems like an upgrade of the holiday, one where only the best carols are stupefyingly melancholy and maybe even creepy). So before I continue on to the second installment of my previous chapter, I would like to address what already made an appearance in the previous chapter: lesbians and ghosts.
In the inherently gothic Spencer, Kristen Stewart’s Diana roams her childhood home in the moonlight, stumbling more than once upon the ghost of Anne Boleyn. She is also visited by someone she believes to be her confidante Maggie (Sally Hawkins), her dresser and personal assistant, who professes to Diana that she loves her. We do not know if Maggie is real, and were Spencer not based on the real Diana, we might very likely consider Maggie’s existence a psychological indictment of Diana’s closeted homosexuality. Sandringham Castle and the psychological drama Diana goes through inside have that same intrepid quality of the Bluebeard/Jane Eyre trope, about many-roomed buildings and the threatened women locked up inside them. Delicious in their prompt (“What use is a castle if you know all the rooms?”), sprawling, mysterious spaces in books and films do tend to entrap a woman in a situation that slowly robs them of their sanity. See The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and its 1963 movie adaptation, Gaslight (1944), Notorious (1946), The Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and of course Rebecca (1940).
Not only does the topic of ghosts frequently surface in Lesbian stories, or stories I would label as explicitly Lesbian–with the ghost either appearing as a psychological preoccupation of the heroine in lieu of her expressed sexuality, a disassociation; or ghosts symbolizing this sexuality (the ghost as the lover, the missed opportunity); or the house as this lover, the house as the mother; or as a preoccupation of the viewer/reader with seeing her own Lesbian sexuality manifested – but ghostliness, or reference, the doubled state of being and not-quite being, seems to personify the state of Lesbians in how they configure their cultural items: in counting and likening and emotionally inferring. Queer internet fandom really drove Terry Castle’s ideas all the way home, but with a twist: over the years, unable to see Lesbians in front of them, sources were taken and recombined, movies counted and turned into lists, plots twisted (this certainly started far before Lesbian culture) to make up movies that never were, an exquisite corpse of synthetically combined story options. For those of us who came of age in the 00s, a foot stands in both worlds: one in which movies starring A-List actresses in major Lesbian love stories were hard to fathom, and one in the here and now, where most major actresses have portrayed a Lesbian onscreen. At seventeen I remember finding a monthly calendar for lesbian movies–all twelve lesbian movies I knew of at the time. To compensate, there was the fan-fiction writing (making serialized stories about emotional content you can’t let go of), the constant seeking of validation in labeling something lesbian, or even everything I owe this late tumblr, where every morsel and crumb was counted.
Maybe because I do not have to try so much anymore, or maybe because I am older, I no longer have to search far for lesbian content. On the one hand “Lesbian Content” is a term I now view far more expansively than I used to (for contemporary me, movies like Rebecca and Spencer are canonic Lesbian movies; my 16-year-old-self would probably have disagreed; for her, even something as obvious as The Children’s Hour only just made the cut), on the other, I am lucky to live in a day and age where every year is announced is the definitive golden year of Lesbian Representation.
Recently I was in a spooky mood and decided to watch the Netflix TV-show The Haunting of Bly Manor, despite having disliked its predecessor, which I am still extremely excited to forget. Overblown and humorless, with whole episodes I would rather have done without, I still enjoyed Bly Manor. Sprinkled throughout the movie were scary effects that got under my skin, like figures showing up in the periphery of the image and disappearing again, seeming too intentional for a continuity error. I liked most of its cast, I thought again fondly of the uncomfortable, deeply queasy creepiness of the Henry James story and the great movie starring Deborah Kerr (there is so much more to be said about The Turn of the Screw here, and Benjamin Britten, and maybe will be said later).
But most of all I fell for the very simple lesbian love story. That always shakes me up a bit. The actresses are conventionally attractive (Victoria Pedretti of the Haunting of Hill House and relatively unknown Amelia Eve), the story, set in the 1980s, seems anachronistic to a degree it seems almost laughable, a fantasy. Pedretti plays the updated version of Henry James’ Governess. She resembles a blonde frightened straight girl, the kind of babysitter you would have wanted in the 1980s. In some ways Pedretti reminds me of Joan Fontaine, who is likable but brittle, a character you feel is understood by no-one but yourself. The Governess is haunted by her guilt over the death of her fiance, which in itself is steeped in her conflicted feelings about her homosexuality. Eve plays Jamie, the cooky, tomboy gardener at Bly Manor who walked out of an Urban Outfitters catalogue with a ridiculous British accent and an insufferable backstory (something about precious moonflowers). There is not much more to Jamie and The Governess than this: one woman is out and the other is coming out, the story is simply that both are supportive of each other and protective to the degree of self-annihilation (there is a sad but wistful ending to this ordeal. The final line of the show flourishes something about how love stories are ghost stories, not unlike something Barthes would have said!). It’s enough to make you swoon: the frisson of the closet, from which, expelled, the governess continues to no more than the domestic lesbian nest. One that is literally nurturing, because like most Lesbians, Jamie is great with plants. And yet, reader, I was truly moved! For the simple reason that this stupid little TV trope knew its own ghosts.
In moments like those, where I suddenly fall in love with a TV couple like a teenager, I can’t help wonder what I would have turned out as if I were straight. Homosexuality pervades me to the brinks of my gender. I know I appear feminine and have no desire to change that, but at heart I feel deeply masculine, not in an essentialist way but in how I look at women, which I code as something I have only commonly seen men do, or which a deep, regressed part of me still thinks of something forbidden. When I notice other women do it, look that way, on film and in real life, I feel almost struck down with joy. Would I as a straight woman have become entrapped in a similar way, I wonder, is this how some straight women sometimes just fall into their favorite romance novel?
I do not yearn for the times I watched I Can’t Think Straight (2008) on a loop, in a time when that movie was the highest production quality version of what I wanted to get my hands on. But I do appreciate seeing those specific kinds of movies–movies we all agreed were bad, but which we somehow, not unlike the L-Word, could not leave alone–manifested in a reference. So I was delighted when in the final episode of Bly Manor, a florist shop appeared, cut right out of the mid-00 romcom, Imagine Me & You (2005) the first romantic comedy I had ever heard of in which two women fell in love.
Now You See Her: a Quick Interlude on Gay Ghosts
Can I ask which book exactly you are referring to with this?: "a Victorian ghost story comes to mind, probably by Edith Wharton, that started with the telling of ghost stories round the fireplace on Christmas Eve". Because it sounds amazing and I'd like to read it.