Spectres are the lifeblood of the Gothic. Ghosts, phantoms, apparitions and revenants return to the Gothic scene again and again, giving expression to its preoccupation with the fragile thresholds of mind and body and the phantasmatic aspects of language. Owing to its cultural associations with the territories of irrationality, otherness and corporeal excess, femininity has been particularly and peculiarly susceptible to ‘spectralisation’. From the ‘spectral presence’ of the ‘dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing’ (Kahane 1985: 336) that haunts the Radcliffean Gothic heroine and the feminist critical imagination alike, to the female revenants and ghoulish women conjured in the macabre writings of those such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, the Gothic brings into view the troubling movements of wraithlike women.

Etymologically related as much to the sphere of vision as to the realm of phantoms, the ‘spectre’ (from the Latin specere, meaning ‘to look, see’) signifies both that which is looked at and the act of looking. It is owing to this connection between the spectacle and the specular, suggest María de Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, that the spectre is especially suitable ‘for exploring and illuminating phenomena other than the putative return of the dead’ (2013: 2). In Specters of Marx (1993), a text that insistently ghosts discussions of spectrality, Jacques Derrida offers ‘hauntology’, with its evocation and radical unsettling of ‘ontology’, as a new way of thinking about being (with ghosts). According to Derrida, learning to live with ghosts would be to live ‘otherwise’ and, crucially, ‘more justly’; for ‘being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance and generations’ (Derrida 1994: xviii). A way of living ‘between all of the “two's” one likes’ (1994: xvii), Derrida's hauntology attributes to the ghost a paradoxical status as neither being nor non-being that brings into view the spectrality of identity. Most particularly for this discussion, Derrida's account of the spectre emphasises its uncertain status as ‘a furtive and ungraspable visibility, or an invisibility of a visible X … the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone or someone other’ (1994: 6).