True Love as Possession: Ashputtle (Carter, 1987), Lady Oracle (Atwood, 1976), The Greatcoat (Dunmore, 2012), The Glass Bottle Trick (Hopkinson, 2000)

This chapter looks at possession, at Cinderella and Bluebeard influences. Possession lies at the heart of the ghost’s role in an economy of romance and domesticity which values, seduces, deludes, constrains, and sometimes destroys women. Women become possessed by compelling but ultimately destructive narratives—Cinderella marrying the prince (‘Ashputtle’; Lady Oracle). which turns into a Bluebeard story of lies and destruction (The Greatcoat, ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’), leaving them as only possessions, only possessed, or utterly dispossessed victims. Women are haunted by, written through by their predecessors and by the controlling narratives of romance, true love, performance, beauty, maternity, domesticity. In the texts considered here, versions of these narratives are perpetuated by friends and family members, such as great aunts who ghost-write through their female relatives, mothers, some of whom are themselves ghosts, and by popular media, romance novels, by film.