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Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Stories
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Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Stories
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Journal Article
Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Stories
2013
Overview
Vernon Lee's supernatural fiction provides an interesting test case for speculations about the function of spectrality for women writers on the cusp of the modern era. This article argues that spectrality, in line with Julian Wolfreys' theories about the 'hauntological disturbance' in Victorian Gothic (2002), is both disruptive and desirable, informing the narratives we construct of modernity. It traces the links between the 'unspeakable' spectral encounter and contemporary attitudes to gender and sexuality in stories in Vernon Lee's collection Hauntings (1890), as well as her Yellow Book story 'Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady' (1897). The ghostly encounter is erotic and welcomed as well as fearful, used to comment on the shortcomings of heterosexual marriage and bourgeois life, though this often results in the troubling spectacle of the ravished, mutilated or bloody female corpse. Lee's negotiation of unspeakability and the desire for the ghostly is compared to the more graphic depictions of the dead female in stories from E. Nesbit's Grim Tales (1893). Representations of the female revenant are considered in relation to the psychoanalytic readings of the otherness of the female corpse put forward by Elisabeth Bronfen (1992).
