3 - In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London

Summary

There is no peace in death to those who die in the terrible deadlock of frustration. And if there is no peace for them, there is none for us. They return home to us. They are the angry, unappeased shades that come darkly home to us, thronging home to us from over the seas, entering our souls and filling us with madness, ever more and more madness, unless we, by our active living, shall give them the life that they demand.

—D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

The early twentieth century saw many Gothic narratives and ghost stories focusing upon the landscapes of rural England, investigating the possible energies, spirits, and images that had apparently lain dormant in this realm while the urban Gothic of the fin de siècle grew with monstrous rapidity. These stories, as we have seen, often explore a renewed supernatural energy that runs counter to the dominant scientific and rationalist currents of modernity. With the outbreak of the First World War, Europe was engulfed by a catastrophe that seemed, for authors such as T.S. Eliot, to stem from an excessive focus upon those currents, from a failure to attend to the spiritual realm. As I will argue in this chapter, postwar modernism was thus motivated, in part, by the need to critique this failure: authors such as Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence all imbued their literary experimentation with a sensitivity to the spiritual and the spectral, in terms of both form and content. Yet for these authors, if new forms of the Gothic were to be developed after the war, the appropriate site was often London, rather than the rural world: it was the nation's capital that now seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of the millions killed in the war, and these narratives often focus upon that legacy of recent trauma and loss, rather than the sense of ancient or mythical forces that tend to dominate the texts discussed in Chapter Two. The fact that violence and slaughter had been unleashed upon the European world on an unprecedented scale seemed to undermine the potency and relevance of traditional Gothic and supernatural themes, but at the same time it meant that writers were unusually preoccupied with death and spirituality;