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Virginia Woolf's most famous essays are those polemical ones in which she advocates a Modernist aesthetics by criticizing her immediate predecessors whom she labels the materialists. While those essays such as “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” have been taken up by many critics as the crucial statements that assert Woolf's own modern aesthetic position, many of her relatively obscure essays have been given little critical attention, which is surprising considering that Woolf was primarily an essayist and reviewer for the first two decades of her professional life as a writer. This paper aims to examine three essays on Gothic literature, “The Supernatural in Fiction,” “Gothic Romance,” and “Henry James's Ghost Stories,” to explore the ways in which Woolf engages herself in the English literary tradition, the Gothic tradition in particular, and evolves her own modern aesthetic position out of it. In those essays Woolf notes the resilience of supernatural elements in English literature since the 18th century. While she warns the modern writer of supernatural fiction of the risk of employing obsolete methods and conventions of Gothic romance, Woolf discerns the longing for terror and wonder in human nature and vindicates Henry James's ghost stories that testify the sense of ghost in human mind and chart the state of mind both mysterious and terrifying. Woolf's interest in Gothic and the supernatural is crucial in understanding her aesthetics that emphasizes the sense of wonder and the mind's capacity to penetrate into the realm of the unseen. Woolf's ghost story, “A Haunted House,” presents her own gothic aesthetics that appeals to the sense of wonder and quickens the perception of the relations between the present and the past, the dead and the living. One of her major novel, To the Lighthouse, can also be read as extending the gothic motifs of “A Haunted House” in presenting the haunted house, the ghost/phantom, death, loss, and unfinished businesses to the effect of shock and terror and appealing to a sense of the vastness and the mystery of life.
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Virginia Woolf, essays, the supernatural, Gothic aesthetics, ghost stories, “A Haunted House,” To the Lighthouse
