What does ‘haunting the narrative’ mean?
‘Haunting the narrative’ is a trope that refers to a character’s profound impact on the events of a story, while remaining physically absent from them. Despite the ghostly implication of the term, a character who ‘haunts the narrative’ is not necessarily dead, and could also be missing or simply absent.
Notably, the trope seems to have been dominated by female characters, particularly teenage girls. Young women have ‘haunted the narrative’ in popular media across genres and decades, with perhaps the most famous example being Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. But she can be found everywhere: the five Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, Alison DiLaurentis in Pretty Little Liars, Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Lyanna Stark in Game of Thrones, and Jackie Taylor in Yellowjackets.
Less frequently, she can be found in the form of ‘older’ characters (who are still, needless to say, young women). Examples include Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, Grace Wicks in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and Rebecca De Winter in Rebecca.
Although a character who haunts the narrative is primarily defined by her absence from the story’s physical action, it’s the lingering sense of her presence that creates an internal tension – a feeling that she’s not quite gone.
So why is it that some of the most iconic on-screen characters ‘haunt the narrative’? Why do we love to watch stories about girls who are missing or dead? And let me be clear, I’m guilty of this as well. I have enjoyed all of the media listed above, and I can hardly wait for the final season of Yellowjackets coming this November.
A blank canvas
After they’re gone, the audience primarily sees these girls through the colour-tinted haze of flashbacks, dream sequences, and visions, or the dialogue between the characters they’ve left behind. The closest most of these girls get to breaking the fourth wall and appealing directly to the audience is through their haunting smiles frozen permanently on missing posters or funeral portraits.
The truth is, in being so removed from the physical narrative of the story these girls lose much of their agency. They become blank canvasses for male characters to project their fantasies on to, as seen in The Virgin Suicides, or for the audience to impose their own ideas on. We see this in everyday life too, when the personalities and histories of the dead can be moulded into something different to suit an agenda or to satisfy our own needs as we deal with the complexities of grief. The character ceases to be a person and is reduced to an idea or even an object.
However, I don’t think that the trope has arisen entirely from a place of malice or objectification. In many cases, I can recognise a desire to immortalise these fictional women and girls who have suffered, usually at the hands of men, in the same way that so many women and girls suffer at the hands of men in real life.
The true crime link
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many characters who haunt the narrative are women, and that this trope seems to appear most often in media that has predominantly female audiences. Instead, I think this links to the public fascination with true crime, and particularly women’s consumption of the genre – women are almost twice as likely as men to regularly listen to true crime podcasts. It makes sense, then, that the women who are inclined to consume true crime would naturally gravitate towards fictional narratives featuring missing women or girls too.
However, the trope of ‘haunting the narrative’ in its current form does not represent the reality of violence against women and girls, and this limited representation highlights a serious ethical issue for the audience to consider. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, the overwhelming majority of female characters who ‘haunt the narrative’ in popular media are white. It raises the question, if the concept of ‘haunting the narrative’ is associated with innocent young girls and women, why is the default depiction of this a light skin tone? Is a dead girl less tragic if she has dark skin? Is a missing girl only worth searching for if her hair is blonde? Who gets to haunt the narrative? Who gets to impact the story, and leave their mark on characters and audiences alike? Who is seen as worth mourning?
This pattern is noticeable in real life, too. Consider the level of media attention afforded to missing or murdered women and children. There are names you’re probably familiar with: Madeleine McCann, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenét Ramsey, Elizabeth Short (also known as the Black Dahlia), Sharon Tate, Gabby Petito, Sarah Everard. It is not to say that these women and girls do not deserve the media coverage their cases have received, of course they do (in most of these cases, there were additional reasons for the scale of the media coverage). But it points to ingrained societal racism that these women are household names while the majority of people, myself included, would struggle to name a similarly well-known case of a woman or girl who is not white.
American news anchor Gwen Ifill coined the term ‘missing white woman syndrome’ to describe the disproportionate media coverage afforded to missing white women as opposed to women of colour. Despite the fact that African American women are 2.4 times as likely as white women to be victims of homicide, the mainstream media never seems to pick up on their cases with the same fervour or outrage. This needs to change. Popular media acts as a reflection of our society, and representation within fiction can serve as an indication of our values.
One example of increased representation within the trope came in the 2023 film adaptation of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, when Latina actress Rachel Zegler played the character of Lucy Gray Baird, who is revealed to have had a significant impact on the events of the entire Hunger Games franchise and perfectly exemplifies a character ‘haunting the narrative’.
But this is just a small step in the right direction. It might seem strange to be asking for more diversity in roles that at first glance seem to be negative, involving a characters’ suffering and victimisation. However, the trope of ‘haunting the narrative’ presents its characters as being uniquely captivating or ‘worth’ missing, with the majority becoming beloved figures within their respected fanbases. When these figures are valued so highly within popular media, the inclusion of more women of colour amongst them would help to set a precedent that we expect to see these women and their stories represented in our media coverage too.