Love Theme Analysis

Love is the central strand of Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” bringing comfort and happiness to everything from the undead to the titular haunted house itself. Far from being a typical ghost story, “A Haunted House” details a much gentler kind of haunting. In the story, two ghostly lovers glide through the house where they once lived, searching for a “treasure” that they had buried there before death. In the end, it seems that the so-called treasure is simply the love they shared in life, which is alive and well in the living couple to whom the house now belongs. In “A Haunted House,” Woolf ultimately suggests that love knows no bounds—it survives the test of time, it overcomes boundaries between people, and it even endures beyond the grave.

As the story unfolds, it’s clear that the ghostly couple’s love still lives on in the house and in the garden even though the ghosts haven’t lived there in several centuries, suggesting that love can survive the passage of time. The ghostly couple’s exchange at the beginning of the story—"Here we left it.” “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs.” “And in the garden”—grounds their treasure in the house. Though the living couple has “inherited” the treasure, it is the house, which has safeguarded it for many years, that makes that possible. The representation of the house as a living creature also indicates that the house itself embodies the couple’s love and lives on. Throughout the story, Woolf repeats the refrain, “‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat.” The house protects the “treasure” in it, suggesting that the love will be passed on to the next couple to live in the house. The use of “pulse” and, at another point, “heart,” to describe the life of the house also connects it with the organ traditionally associated with love, and suggests that even as time goes by, the couple's love will continue to “beat” in the house. Similarly, the garden functions as a symbolic connection between the living couple and the dead couple. The first location the dead couple gives for the treasure is “in the garden,” and the narrator (half of the living couple) makes mention of reading in the garden, which is “still as ever”—suggesting that for many years the garden has remained as it is now, as when the woman of the dead couple remembers being “in the garden reading.” Also, though the narrator is not able to see the ghosts, they see “reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves […] green in the glass” where the ghosts should be, so that the ghosts are in a sense reflected back to her in the form of the garden, the repository of the love that connects the two couples.

Not only does love transcend the boundaries of time and death, it also transcends the boundaries between individuals. This is clear through the way that the ghostly couple is described as a unit, like two strands woven into a single cord. The ghostly couple is unified throughout the story, acting and speaking in concert. They drift through the house “hand in hand” like two puzzle pieces snapped into one. They complete each other’s sentences and are referred to with the pronoun “they,” as though talking in exact unison. Later in the story, they interrupt one another rhythmically, almost like a song in harmony: “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—.” Love makes it possible for them to have an intrinsic understanding of one another’s minds and to act like a unit.

Most radically of all, the story suggests that love endures even after death. Although the ghostly couple is searching for the love they shared as living people, it’s clear that they are devoted to each other beyond the grave. The story introduces them going “hand in hand” through the house, and they complete each other’s sentences and speak as a unit, as in, “‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’” Once again, the pronouns “they” and “we” emphasize that the two lovers are truly a pair and speak with one voice. They may have been dead for hundreds of years, but they are the model of a loving couple. Later, the narrator describes how “death [came] to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house […] He left it, left her […] sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs.” When death divided the couple, the man left his house behind, the symbolic home of his love. However, the story then transitions into the refrain of “‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly. ‘The Treasure yours,’” suggesting that even in light of his wife’s death and his own absence, the love he shared with his wife is still pulsing through the home.

At the end of the story, the ghostly couple’s love supersedes death in a new way: by inhabiting the young couple who live in their home. As the ghostly couple leans over the sleeping lovers, the woman sighs, “Here, [...] sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” The living lovers mimic these activities, sleeping in the bedroom and reading in the garden. When the narrator wakes, they say, “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart”; Woolf’s italics suggest both that the narrator has realized what the treasure is—love itself—and, furthermore, that the treasure was previously the ghostly couple’s, positioning the living couple as inheritors of the dead couple’s life and love. In “A Haunted House,” love is able to overpower any barrier it faces, from separation to death to the ravages of time. Even the individual self is not impervious to the force of love, which seems at times to combine two people into one.