Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19188-3 - Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajic Excerpt More information Introduction Mrs. Ferguson is a vampire. There should be no doubt about this: two reliable eyewitnesses have observed her, on separate occasions, sucking blood from the neck of her infant son. “On one occasion … this child had been left by its nurse for a few minutes. A loud cry from the baby, as of pain, called the nurse back. As she ran into the room she saw her employer, the lady, leaning over the baby and apparently biting his neck.” Apparently? Surely more than that: “There was a small wound in the neck from which a stream of blood had escaped.”1 The mother bribes the nurse to keep quiet about what she has seen, a gesture difficult to interpret otherwise than as an admission of guilt. From then on the nurse closely watches the mother, the mother closely watches the nurse, and both closely watch the baby. “Day and night the nurse covered the child, and day and night the silent, watchful mother seemed to be lying in wait as a wolf waits for a lamb” (“SV,” p. 537). Or as a vampire waits for her prey. Fearing for the child’s life, the nurse confesses everything to Mr. Ferguson. Convinced that his wife is as devoted a mother as she is a loving spouse, and outraged by the nurse’s scandalous accusation, he scornfully tells her “that she was dreaming, that her suspicions were those of a luna- tic, and that such libels upon her mistress were not to be tolerated” (“SV,” p. 537). Moments later, however, the evidence of his own eyes leaves him no choice but to believe the nurse’s wild story. “While they were talking a sudden cry of pain was heard. Nurse and master rushed together to the nursery. Imagine his feelings, Mr. Holmes,” says Mr. Ferguson (speaking of himself in the third person), “as he saw his wife rise from a kneeling position beside the cot and saw blood upon the child’s exposed neck and upon the sheet. With a cry of horror, he turned his wife’s face to the light and saw blood all round her lips. It was she – she beyond all question – who had drunk the poor baby’s blood” (“SV,” pp. 537–8). Seeing is believing. Mrs. Ferguson is a vampire. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19188-3 - Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajic Excerpt More information 2 Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists But we know that this cannot be the case, that what the nurse and the husband saw, all appearance to the contrary, must have been something that only looks like vampirism. We know this not because we have read the ending first, as some of us (myself included) are tempted to do with mysteries, but because we are reading a Sherlock Holmes story – and in Holmes’s world there are no such things as vampires. “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish!” Holmes exclaims in one of the rare moments when he loses his temper. “What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” Watson does not disagree. He proposes, however, that “the vampire [is] not necessarily a dead man,” and that “[a] living person might have the habit.” He recalls having read somewhere of the legend “of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth.” Although Watson does not expressly say so, the legend provides a template for understanding how behaviors regarded as socially deviant may be perceived as unnatural – how the unusual is discursively transfigured into the unnatural or supernatural, and how transformations of this kind are always contingent upon who has power and authority to judge behaviors as normal or abnor- mal, and upon when and where this power is exercised. To ascribe this level of sociological insight to Watson is perhaps to give him too much credit. Holmes, in any case, is not interested in theories of othering or cultural criticism. To him the story of the aged drinking the blood of the young smacks of the kind of gory sensationalism and superstition-ridden hearsay where the odd gives way to the occult and the supernatural is per- mitted to sneak in through the back door. He insists that “[t]his agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (“SV,” p. 535). Indeed, vampires, ghosts, and similar agencies cannot, must not apply in detective fiction. For if Holmes were seriously to consider that Mrs. Ferguson may be a vampire, and consequently that what he had always regarded as “rubbish” and “pure lunacy” may have some truth to it after all, then what we are reading – regardless of whether or not the mystery turns out to have a rational (i.e. non-supernatural) solution – is not the sort of detective story we are used to. In fact, it may not be a detective story at all but something that only resembles one: a mischievous simu- lacrum of a detective story, maybe, that preserves the superficial features of the genre while stretching its epistemological and ontological coordi- nates out of shape, expanding the range of plausible theories, legitimate inferences, and lawful deductions, so that what ought to be rejected with- out a second thought (vampires, ghosts, and similar “rubbish”) turns out © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19188-3 - Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajic Excerpt More information Introduction 3 to be very much applicable. And if applicable in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” one of Doyle’s later stories, in what previous adventures as well? Might the favored rational solution always have been a reactionary oversimplification of a larger cosmic riddle (to be deliberately vague about it) whose troublesome loose ends are in detective fiction tucked out of sight, systematically censored because they challenge the detective’s “flat- footed” understanding of the world? Holmes’s sarcastic “dry chuckle” at a case that he suspects will be “a mixture of the modern and the mediaeval, of the practical and of the wildly fanciful” (“SV,” p. 534) is haunted by anxiety about the consequences of this unlawful mixing, whereby what is denied entrance into the genre manages to insinuate itself into it. The mere mention of the supernatural, even if it is immediately dismissed as inapplicable, is enough to make the detective feel displaced, not just histor- ically (has he been teleported into the Middle Ages?) but also genre-wise: “[B]ut really we seem to have been switched on to a Grimms’ fairy tale” (“SV,” p. 535), he peevishly complains to Watson. Holmes’s complaint reflects a persistent metatextual concern in detective fiction: the anxiety that generic purity is unattainable; that the supposedly rational genre in which the supposedly rational Holmes feels at home is everywhere con- taminated by the supernatural, occult, or irrational; that the epistemological principles and investigative procedures that define detective fiction’s characteristic modality are deeply implicated in what the genre insists on condescendingly treating as “rubbish” and “pure lunacy.” “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” foreshadows how this book will end: with a look at the “switch,” to use Holmes’s word, between ghost and detective fiction – or their hybridization, as I want to represent it. While literary genres are always impure, this particular hybridization occurs prominently toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth century, and Doyle’s vampire/detective story, published in 1924, is a convenient bookend to the historical itinerary I will chart out. More importantly, Doyle’s story, with its foregrounded tension between faith in and skepticism about the evidence of one’s eyes, its conflicted endorsement and dismissal of the notion that seeing is believing, corrob- orates Kate Flint’s remark that “though the visual was … of paramount importance to the Victorians, it was a heavily problematized category.”2 My contribution to our understanding of this problematic category will be to examine the ways in which ghost and detective fiction are structured by and in conversation with contemporary philosophical and scientific work on visual perception – what these genres have to tell us about Victorian theories of vision, and how these theories are represented in literature and © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19188-3 - Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajic Excerpt More information 4 Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists help shape its form and content. At times I contend that there are direct lines of influence to be traced between science and literature, as in the case of physiological optics and ghost fiction. In other places I make no such claims, and instead position philosophico-scientific and literary texts side by side to examine how different forms of discourse address the same issue, as in the shared concern of Victorian epistemologists and detective fiction writers with problems of inference and interpretation. I contend throughout that ghost and detective fiction either implicitly or explicitly articulate the notion that vision, bluntly put, is a messy affair – that “[t]he facts of vision,” as William James remarked, “form a jungle of intricacy.”3 Indeed, what exactly the facts are is precisely the issue.

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