Subversion in Ambiguity: The Female Revenant in three Fantastic Short Stories by Claude Vignon, Edith Nesbit, and Emilia Pardo Bazán (1856–1908)

Abstract

Female ghosts and ghost stories have formed the focus of several seminal feminist critical studies. Due to the strong tradition of the nineteenth-century British fantastic short story and genre as a whole, as well as the extensive body of work by female authors in the English language, women writers from other European countries and their forays into the genre have often been overlooked. This article seeks to elucidate the evolution of the female ghost / revenant archetype in the work of three authors from France, Britain, and Spain by re-examining them from a comparative perspective. Focusing on three short pieces – “Isobel la ressuscitée” (Noémi Cadiot, also known as Claude Vignon – 1856), “From the Dead” (Edith Nesbit – 1893), and “La resucitada” (Emilia Pardo Bazán – 1908), and drawing on the theories on horror and the abject of French feminist author Julia Kristeva, the article positions the female revenant as “otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject”. Exploding the period’s reliance on the comfortable dichotomies of life and death, male and female, lover and mother, angel and whore, the liminal space occupied by the revenant becomes a site for the re-evaluation of existent societal concerns in the work of three female authors who were engaged in the feminist discourse of the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century.