The Return of the Victorian Occult in Contemporary Fiction

The Return of the Victorian Occult 1 in Contemporary Fiction Rosario Arias The 1990s have witnessed the flourishing of a language suffused with ghosts, revenants and spectral forms. In fact, Roger Luck- hurst2 suggests that the relevance of spectrality in a wide variety of literary contexts involves, what he calls, a “spectral turn”.3 In this paper I undertake the examination of this idea of spectrality or haunting as the persistent presence of the Victorian occult, and, more specifically, spiritualism, in contemporary narratives like A. S. Byatt’s “The Conjugial Angel” (1992)4, Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999)5 and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2005),6 among others. While the neo-Victorian novel has recently become the subject of many critical studies, a literary type of the neo-Victorian novel that revisits the Victorian past through its involvement with the occult has received relatively little exploration. Accordingly, the return of the Victorian occult in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction will be analysed against the backdrop of notions of spectrality, haunting and ghostly returns, which are now being privileged in critical and literary discourses, as well as in the light of recent scholarship about the Victorian occult. Lastly, I would like to demonstrate that the spectral visitation of the Victorian occult in 1 The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology: BFF2003-05143 / FEDER. This article is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Conference “The Twentieth Century and the Victorians”, held at Trinity and All Saints College (University of Leeds) in July 2005. 2 Roger LUCKHURST, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn’”, Textual Practice, 16.3 (2002), 527–46. 3 Luckhurst, “Contemporary London Gothic”, 527. 4 A. S. BYATT, “The Conjugial Angel”, Angels and Insects, London: Vintage, 1992 [=1993] [=B1]. 5 Sarah WATERS, Affinity, London: Virago, 1999. 6 Julian BARNES, Arthur & George, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Variations 14 (2006) 88 Rosario Arias these (and many other) novels can be taken as a metaphor for the return of Victorian themes, settings and historical personages in contemporary fiction. From the 1990s onwards critical and literary discourses have privileged notions of the uncanny, spectrality, haunting and doub- ling to such an extent that Martin Jay has affirmed that the last decade of the twentieth century could be known as “the uncanny 1990s”.7 Any discussion of the uncanny, unheimlich or the return of the repressed, should give the credit to Freud for his pioneering 1919 essay “The Uncanny”8, where he maintains that the uncanny is constituted by the return of something familiar that has been repressed and feared. Moreover, after the psychoanalytic interpre- tation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sand-man”, Freud con- cedes that “[t]o many people the acme of the uncanny is repre- sented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts”9, key elements in the novels under consideration. Although Freud’s text has proved to be fundamental in later readings of the uncanny—as the discussion of Sarah Waters’s Affinity in this paper will prove—Allan Lloyd Smith10 has noted that Freud fails “to articulate adequately the social and political aspects of the uncanny”.11 This critic takes note of the weak- nesses of Freud’s model as far as historical repression is concerned: by taking Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theories of “cryptonymy” and the phantom as starting points for discussion, this critic examines how the haunting of gaps, silences and secrets of others from the past that have been repressed end up determining 7 Martin JAY, Cultural Semantics. Keywords of Our Time, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, 163. 8 Sigmund FREUD, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, with an Introduction by Hugh Haughton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. 9 FREUD, Uncanny, 148. 10 Allan LLOYD SMITH, “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca. The Uncanny Reencountered through Abraham and Torok’s ‘Cryptonymy’”, Poetics Today, 13.2 (Summer 1992), 285–308. 11 Lloyd Smith, “Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca”, 288. The Return of the Victorian Occult 89 one’s psychic development.12 In other words, the uncanny could be aptly utilised to unveil the “silenced historical ‘secrets’ of the culture”.13 In this sense, a watershed year was 1994 with the publica- tion of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx.14 Although this text has been aptly utilised by Marxist scholars from a political stance, critical theorists have found it particularly useful. Based on a plenary lecture, Derrida’s Specters of Marx addresses the question of the haunting spirit of Marxist theory in contemporary thought and culture. He thus refers to the logic of haunting as “hauntology”15 and further argues that “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept”.16 In short, Jacques Derrida arti- culates the idea that history is haunted since narratives that have not been successful, such as the eruption of communism, leave a trace and will resuscitate. It remains clear that the relevance of the trope of spectrality and the figure of the ghost in contemporary critical theory owes much to deconstruction, as Peter Buse and Andrew Stott sustain.17 However, this master trope of spectrality is gaining currency in literary contexts. For example, Julian Wolfreys, in Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002)18, a Derridean-inspired study, elaborates on these notions of haunting, the spectral and the revenant in order to “consider the spectraliza- tion of the gothic, to understand how that which haunts the gothic as genre returns […] as a number of apparitional traces and frag- 12 Lloyd Smith, “Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca”, 306. 13 Lloyd Smith, “Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca”, 306. 14 Jacques DERRIDA, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 15 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10. 16 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 161. 17 Peter BUSE and Andrew STOTT, “Introduction. A Future for Haunting”, in: Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts. Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Basingstoke: Palgrave- Macmillan, 1999, 1–20. 18 Julian WOLFREYS, Victorian Hauntings. Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 90 Rosario Arias ments in discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”.19 In a similar vein, a recent book on the Victorian supernatural claims that it is possible to forge associations between Victorian concepts and the uses of the supernatural in twentieth-century thought, and that the “metaphor of haunting, of revenants from another place or time” is one such connection.20 Another instance can be found in an article published in the latest number of PMLA, in which Brian McCuskey21 carries out a lucid analysis of the figure of the servant in Victorian ghost stories in relation to the uncanny and the nineteenth-century séance. In it he supports the view that “spiritualists converted the uncanny into a sign of social and intellectual distinction”22 by aligning materialists with servants. He goes on to suggest that the uncanny carries the signifier of “intellectual sophi- stication” in twentieth-century criticism.23 This is only a recent example of the connections between nineteenth- and twentieth- century discourses of the uncanny, haunting and spectrality. In what follows I will explore the ways in which a number of contemporary novels or “fictions of the uncanny” (using Lloyd Smith’s terminology) favour the representation of the spectral, whether in the form of ghostly returns, supernatural events or spectral presences from the Victorian past and the occult. The spectral return of Victorian spiritualism in neo-Victorian novels is first and foremost linked to the idea that spiritualism of- fered communication with the dead through a medium. Therefore, some background information about recent scholarship and critical work on the Victorian occult is required. Feminist cultural histori- ans like Alex Owen, Janet Oppenheim and Alison Winter have 19 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, 7. 20 Nicola BOWN, Carolyn BURDETT and Pamela THURSCHWELL, “Introduction”, in: Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004, 9. 21 Brian MCCUSKEY, “Not at Home. Servants, Scholars, and the Uncanny”, PMLA, 121.2 (March 2006), 421–36. 22 McCuskey, “Home”, 430. 23 McCuskey, “Home”, 434. The Return of the Victorian Occult 91 drawn their attention to Victorian deep-rooted anxieties and fears in relation to the supernatural in mid- and late-Victorian England. In focusing on pseudo-sciences like spiritualism or mesmerism, they seek to unearth the hidden stories of women, who had been underrepresented or marginalised from the official accounts of history, thereby unveiling those secrets and silences of culture, following Lloyd Smith. Generally regarded as a reaction to the materialist skepticism due to the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of faith, the Victorian occult was much more complex than that — it encroached on every single aspect of the Victorian life, insofar as it blurred the boundaries between the spiritual and the material, as well as collapsed all distinctions between social classes, sex and gender in the spiritualist circle or séance.24 Spiritualism took part in the cultural position held by women in mid- and late-Victorian England. It has become commonplace to argue that many spiritualist women participated actively in the movement as notorious mediums who communicated with the dead, thus giving spiritual relief to grief-stricken people. Among others was Florence Cook, the most famous female medium in the 1870s, whose life has provided the inspiration for the plot of several neo-Victorian novels, as seen later.

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