“A Haunted House” is a short story highlighting the experiences of a couple who bought a house only to experience the voices of ghosts, earlier owners of the house. Virginia Woolf carefully interplays an unconventional love story with a ghost story as they are murmuring, “Here we left it” (Woolf, 2013, p.3). The ghosts’ conversation reveals a couple looking for their treasure, love, and the author creatively lets the reader intermittently shift between conscious and subconscious moments to the very end of the story.
At times, the story does not sound like a ghostly narrative, but in some other instances, it does. Indeed, from a different viewpoint, “A Haunted House” is a visual illusion, which hugely demonstrates what it means to feel something beyond mere immediate comprehension – love. Although it does not have a clear beginning, middle, and end, the story’s plot takes the reader through subconscious dreaming and absolute consciousness. It is during the subconscious states that the narrators closely feel attuned to the imaginary ghosts. Woolf’s net of brilliance captures the slippery concepts, and the reader feels the ghosts are real, which makes the reader feel the imaginary murmurs.
Although “A Haunted House” is a short story, it has a prose-poem language, which gives it a rhythmical touch. For example, the narrator repeatedly says, “safe, safe, safe” (Woolf, 2013, p.4). The ghostly couple is so much in love, illustrated by how they move together, in the curtains, near the walls, and upstairs, holding hands, looking for their treasure. At times the coupe speaks in unison, and Woolf’s aim is to show the couple’s affection for one another. Additionally, they are looking for something they left here before, although the house has new, living occupants, indicating that they were here before.
In conclusion, a close analysis of the story rules out the possibility of it being either an unconventional love story or a conventional ghost story. Woolf creatively maintains the genre in between these two categories. Early on in the story, the reader feels the story would be explicitly scary. However, with time and the author’s poetic devices and experimental narrative style, the reader forgets about the expectation. Instead, the focus shifts to discerning what treasure they really are looking for. Thus, in “A Haunted House”, Virginia Woolf uses the ghost story pretext to write how important love is.
Reference
Woolf, V. (2013). A haunted house and other short stories (The original unabridged posthumous edition of 18 short stories). e-artnow.