Gina Barreca, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, and a blogger with the Chronicle's Brainstorm blog, has a fun post about gender differences between ghosts. She comments both on what seems like an interminable list of "reality TV" shows about ghosts to which we now seem to be treated, and on the ghost stories she's been reading (call it research). Among her observations:
Unlike the ghost of Jacob Marley, “dead as a doornail,” who appears to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, the ghosts of women tend not to walk the earth for penance. They don’t come around, for example “wearing the chains they forged in life,” as is the case with Scrooge’s former partner. Instead, female spirits seem to sense that something has escaped them during their lifetimes. They come back, not to frighten those they left behind, but to console them.
Girl ghosts can be found in kitchens, laundry rooms, flee markets, and hospitals (where they appear as pretty young nurses still trying to care for their long-lost patients, or sad specters of those long-lost patients who rang for a nurse, but whose bell was never heard — I’ve heard a lot of ghost stories from people who work in hospitals).
Girl ghosts return to those places they inhabited in life, not so much the creatures of midnight walks or foggy moors, but as less vibrant versions of the same women who occupy those places today. It’s as if the wall between the living and dead has thinned and become permeable. It seems boy ghosts come back to avenge what happened to them while alive; girl ghosts return because, having been denied the chance to fully participate in life, they’re damned if they’re not going to get their money’s worth after they die.
Now, I'm not certain I agree completely. I think I've seen some accounts that attribute vindictiveness to some "female entities" (think of the Bell Witch), and some accounts that allege that male ghosts hang around the places where they have passed. But on the whole, Dr. Barreca may be on to something. It may make a kind of weird sense that (assuming that ghosts exist, and in my humble opinion that's a BIG assumption), female ghosts, overwhelmingly represented in the helping professions, would continue in those professions. However, would they carry on helping? I suppose there's no Social Security or pension after death. Or would they pick up on the feminist revolution, and decide to join in? Maybe that's the reason for the banging and levitations. Do ghosts have rights? I think I smell a conference (or at least a panel) on Gender Differences, Rights, and Sentience in Paranormal Entities. Anyone up for applying for a grant?
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