Wharton inhabited grand houses throughout her life, from Land’s End in Newport to Pavillon Colombe in France. But the world of her youth, among the cloistered New York families for whom a Newport summer home was wholly unremarkable, was transformed by the breakneck growth of the Gilded Age, the world-historical fortunes of tycoons like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, and increasingly violent struggles between capital and labor at the turn of the century. By the time Wharton was born, her family was several generations past its income-earning phase and her circle prided itself on wasteful leisure. While they coasted on inherited wealth, the new robber barons made huge profits that they strove to make even huger by exerting downward pressure on their workers’ wages and lifestyles. (Wharton memorably depicted this shift in The Age of Innocence, whose old-money protagonist, Newland Archer, twiddles his thumbs at an undemanding law firm while the arriviste, scandal-shrouded financier Julius Beaufort makes vast sums that are utterly incomprehensible to families like the Archers.) Furthermore, the once-farm-based American economy rapidly industrialized; agricultural jobs shrank from 64 percent of the workforce in 1850 to 30 percent in 1920. The newly proletarianized working class had many occasions to rebel, and they certainly did not escape the notice of Wharton, who conducted firsthand research into subjects like factory towns, cotton mills, and the lives of poor New Englanders.
That may be why the specter of underclass rebellion animates so many of Ghosts’ stories—what the scholar Karen J. Jacobsen has called their “economic hauntings.” In “All Souls,” Agnes, the “dour old Scottish maid whom Sara had inherited from her mother-in-law,” leaves her infirm mistress with a tray of sandwiches while she and the other servants deliberately clear out for their secretive group activity. We never actually find out what they get up to on that night, but the point is that they are empowered to do so by banding together. Agnes begins the story as inherited human property but ends it with a triumphal performance. She puts on a “masterly” display of surprise the day after getting away with her scheme—essentially gaslighting her prideful mistress. And why not? Sara knows, even after her terrifying solo ordeal, that “she was dependent on [the servants] and felt at home with them.” But then the same thing happens the following year, so Sara simply flees the house and its supposedly “efficient, devoted, respectful and respectable” servants. Agnes might see it as a successful collective action.