Through Fiction’s Mirror Abjects in Neo-Victorian Fiction Dissertation zur Erlangung des philosophischen Doktorgrades im Studiengang Englische Philologie (Anglistik) an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen vorgelegt von Jan-Erik Ella aus Kiel Göttingen, 2016 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Brigitte Glaser Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Barbara Schaff Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 28.06.2016 Revidierte Fassung August 2018 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Defining a Genre ....................................................................................... 6 1.2 A Short History of the Victorian Revival and the Neo-Victorian Genre ............................................................................................ 14 1.3 Retro- vs. Neo-Victorian: Outlining two Contrary Trends .................... 18 2 Exploring the Collective Victorian Unconscious ..................................................... 24 2.1 Psychoanalysis, Post-Structuralism and Literature ............................. 24 2.2 Freud’s Uncanny and the ‘Domestic Gothic’ ...................................... 27 2.3 Abjection and the Abject ........................................................................ 28 2.4 Individual Self and Collective Cultural Identity .................................. 33 2.5 Confronting the Shadow/Purifying the Abject .................................. 34 2.6 Revisioning Victorian Sexuality ............................................................. 36 3 Lost Girls: Make Love, Not War .................................................................................. 38 3.1 Creating a Different Kind of Pornography ......................................... 38 3.2 Therapeutic Re-Telling ........................................................................... 45 4 Through Fiction’s Mirror 3.3 The World beyond Fiction’s Mirror ..................................................... 53 3.4 Daunting Shadows: Fencing the Middle-class in ................................ 62 3.4 Relating the Past to the Present: Lost Girls as a Neo-Victorian Text ...................................................................................................... 71 4 Two Sides of the Same Coin: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White ...... 74 4.1 Abject Monogamy: A Scathing Look at Traditional Relationship Models ......................................................................................... 81 4.2 Following the Prostitute: A Journey into Abjection .......................... 95 5 Sexual Deviation: Beyond Heteronormativity ......................................................... 105 5.1 Afterimage: The Tyranny of the Norm ................................................ 111 5.2 Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders: The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name ......................................................................... 121 5.3 The Master: A Life of Denial ................................................................ 126 6 Madness and Subversion: Victorian Spiritualism and Occultism ......................... 131 6.1 “The Conjugial Angel”: The Medium as Gifted............................... 137 6.2 Affinity: The Medium as Fraud ............................................................ 144 6.3 In the Red Kitchen: Mediumship as Repressed Trauma ...................... 147 6.4 Penny Dreadful: Mediumship as Aberrancy ......................................... 153 7 Conclusion: Abject Mirrors ........................................................................................ 162 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 175 1 Introduction Queen Victoria is everywhere. Despite her diminutive size, the erstwhile widow of Windsor continues to cast a long shadow. Not only as a monarch who came to be a symbol of British colonialism and of the vicissitudes of a society transformed by industrialization, but also as the embodiment of her era’s morality and culture. From modernism to the contemporary era, Victoria has loomed large in the collective cultural imagination. Even a cursory look at contemporary British popular culture reveals how strongly the Victorian era’s presence persists to this day. It manifests in the shape of numerous film adaptations of famous Victorian novels; it is reflected by the neo-Victorian aesthetic that can be found in certain works of architecture and design; and last but not least, it takes the form of a vast plethora of literary publications set during Queen Victoria’s reign, which have been amassing exponen- tially since the 1980s. These ‘neo-Victorian’ texts are not merely a nostalgic imitation of well-known predecessors, but tend to focus on the era’s repressed aspects: sexu- ality seems to be of particular interest to contemporary authors. Instead of portray- ing the Victorian era as nothing more than an exotic ‘other’, the taboos of the past reconnect it to contemporary cultural discourses and areas of conflict. Themes that could not be fully explored by 19th century authors without risk of censorship or even legal repercussions are now projected back into the past, highlighting the roots of present societal changes. Before any further analysis, however, it shall be prudent to establish some core terminology, starting with ‘neo-Victorianism’ itself. 6 Through Fiction’s Mirror 1.1 Defining a Genre Critical research has only recently started to explore the characteristics and generic boundaries of this particular phenomenon, as evidenced by the fact that the first issue of the Journal for Neo-Victorian Studies (henceforth abbreviated as NVS) only appeared in autumn 2008, and John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff still postulate a “critical gap” (xi) in regard to this topic as recently as the year 2000. The very term neo-Victorianism is still slightly under-defined and contested, even though it has “gained both popular and critical currency” (Hadley, 3) within the last decade. In its opening issue, the NVS published two essays that addressed this lack of specificity with regards to its principal critical term, yet neither of these could hope to resolve the issue conclusively. Instead, Marie-Luise Kohlke points out: What this introduction will not, indeed cannot pretend to do, then, is provide the (still) missing definitions or delineate possible generic, chronological, and aesthetic boundaries – objectives which more properly belong to the project ahead. The same refusal of pre-emption also underlies the editorial board’s decision to adopt the widest possible interpretation of ‘neo-Victorian’, so as to include the whole of the nineteenth century, its cultural discourses and products, and their abiding legacies, not just within British and British colo- nial contexts and not necessarily coinciding with Queen Victoria’s realm; that is, to interpret neo-Victorianism outside of the limiting nationalistic and tem- poral identifications that ‘Victorian’, in itself or in conjunction with ‘neo-’, conjures up for some critics. (2) Kohlke’s decision to settle on a deliberately open interpretation of both Neo-Vic- torianism and the historical era it alludes to is a prudent one, as the subject clearly merits some further research. In and of itself, such a loose definition need not be a stumbling block to further critical pursuits. Quite the contrary, by keeping the definition as open as possible, scholarly research can more easily focus on elements that might be overlooked if the genre’s established boundaries are too closely drawn. Furthermore, even firmly established literary genres are often quite difficult to pin down: for example, “[t]he term ‘science fiction’ resists easy definition. This is a strange thing, because most people have a clear sense of what science fiction is” (A. Roberts, 1). Roberts’s ob- servation reveals a problem at the heart of every categorization: genre-boundaries are ultimately arbitrary, a convenience of communication, providing a short cut. If they are too closely examined, post-structuralist deconstruction becomes virtually inevitable. Definitions that are too broad are insufficiently distinct from other cat- egorizations, while narrower terms will exclude texts that need to be considered part of the genre that is to be described. Nonetheless, it is debatable whether every con- temporary fictional text that is set in the nineteenth century qualifies as neo-Victo- rian by default, and it will be necessary to outline distinctive generic qualities of neo- Introduction 7 Victorianism in order to distinguish it sufficiently from other genres set within the same historical epoch. In the same issue of the NVS, Andrea Kirchknopf attempts to establish such a distinction in her essay “(Re-)Workings of Nineteenth-Century Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts”, which contrasts and evaluates the most com- monly used terms that had been suggested for this genre up to that point. Surpris- ingly, she concludes that the term post-Victorian should take precedence over the more commonly used neo-Victorian, arguing that the latter lacks “an emphasis on the postmodernist influence in these texts” (Kirchknopf, 66). Her suggestion has re- mained largely unheeded, however, as suggested by the fact that the term post-Vic- torian has been widely ignored by subsequent critical research – and this study is no exception to that trend, for reasons that will