Subversive Ghosts: Epistemic Injustice, Invisibility, and Silencing in American Women's Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation examines how American women writers from the mid-nineteenth century until today use the literary trope of the ghost to criticise epistemic violence and epistemic injustice against women and People of Color. More precisely, the project puts nineteenth-century ghost stories by white, middle-class women into dialogue with contemporary ghost novels written by women of Color. Amongst others, the dissertation examines stories such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's "The Day of My Death" (1868), Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House" (1872), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), or Edith Wharton's "Kerfol" (1916) as well as novels such as Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (1997), Toni Morrison's Love (2003), Louise Erdrich's The Sentence (2021), or Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (2022). The dissertation argues that nineteenth-century ghost stories criticise the invisibility of the female experience and the silencing of women's voices in patriarchal society. It further argues that while contemporary ghost novels by women of Color are still very much concerned with issues of silencing and invisibility, they increasingly focus on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and racial injustice. More specifically, contemporary ghost novels criticise epistemic violence against People of Color in white, patriarchal society, the silencing of women of Color, white ignorance as well as white historiography.