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Women Writing the
Neo-Victorian Novel
Erotic “Victorians”
Kathleen Renk
Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel
Kathleen Renk
Women Writing
the Neo-Victorian
Novel
Erotic “Victorians”
Kathleen Renk
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-48286-2 ISBN 978-3-030-48287-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48287-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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To my daughter Sarah Elizabeth and my granddaughters Isabella
Ann, Carrigan Clare, Piper Elizabeth, and Maeve Dinah,
with the hope that they will achieve all of their dreams and that
a feminist utopia will be attained in their lifetimes
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Department of English at Northern Illinois University,

where I designed and taught a graduate seminar entitled “‘Erotic’
Victorians: Sex and Sexuality in Neo-Victorian Fiction” in the spring of
2013. The seminar piqued my interest in Neo-Victorian novels by women
and their approach to the erotic.
I would like to thank Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave
Macmillan as well as the anonymous readers of the original manuscript
whose insights and suggestions improved the manuscript.
In addition, I wish to thank and acknowledge the Tate Museum in
London for permission to use Anna Lea Merritt’s painting Love Locked
Out. I wish to specifically thank the Tate Museum’s David Thompson
who was a pleasure to work with. Finally, I’m grateful for the help and
permission that I received from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to
reproduce four of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs: “Annie,”
“Sappho,” “Spring,” and “Grace Thro’ Love.” I wish to acknowledge that
a section of the introduction is based on my article, “Erotic Possession,
the ‘Phantasm,’ and Platonic Love in Two Neo-Victorian Novels.”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 56 (2015): 576–585.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: “Erotic ‘Victorians’: Women, Neo-Victorian

Fiction, and Creative Eros” 1
The Novel “Reforming” Woman’s World 5
Eros, the “Phantasm,” and Platonic Love in Byatt’s Possession 6
Creative Eros 15
2 “The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in Neo-Victorian Fiction” 23

The Gaze 25
Victorian Photography 27
Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists and Julia Margaret Cameron 29
Afterimage: Re-imagining the Pre-Raphaelite Vision 35
“Breaking the Sequence; Breaking the Sentence”: Re-envisioning
Ophelia and Seizing Sappho 38
Visionary Luminescence in Sixty Lights 42
3 Eros and the Woman Writer: Conversing with the Spirits of

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and E. Nesbit 53
Aurora Leigh and the “Woman Question” 55
Marriage, Mothering, Writing, and Overcoming Male Influence 58
The Monstrous Feminine 72
Sexual Eros and Creativity 77
The Lesbian continuum 82
ix
x Contents
4 Female Rogues and Gender Outlaws in the Neo-Victorian

Novel 91
Slammerkin: Fashioning the Self 92
Alias Grace: Mary Whitney the Rogue 102
Fingersmith and Roguish Freedom 109
Gender Outlaws: Tipping the Velvet and Frog Music 115
5 “In Other Dark Rooms: Eros and the Woman Spiritualist”129

Affinity and Confinement 131
Two Versions of the Spiritualist Medium Florence Cook 136
Selene of the Spirits: Hearing Spirit Voices 137
Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen 142
“The Conjugial Angel” 145
6 “Voyages Out: Postcolonial Desires and the Female

Victorian Traveler/Adventurer”153
Voyaging Out: Women and Travel 154
Egyptian Sojourners: Lady Lucie Duff Gordon and the Victorian
Artist John Frederick Lewis 157
“Going Native” in The Mistress of Nothing 160
Sartorial Choices, Cross-Dressing, and Identity in
The Map of Love 163
A Female World of Habitation: The Harem 165
A New World of Habitation in The Mistress of Nothing 169
7 Conclusion: Drawing a New Map of Love177
Bibliography179
Index193
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Love Locked Out, 1890, Anna Lea Merritt (1844–1930), Tate
Gallery, London. (Photo ©Tate) 24
Fig. 2.2 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Julia Margaret
Cameron, “Annie,” 1864, Albumen Silver print, 21.1 × 16.2 cm 32
Cameron, “Sappho,” 1865, Albumen Silver print,
22.1 × 17.6 cm 33
Cameron, “Spring,” 1865 34
Cameron, “Grace Thro’ Love,” 1865, Albumen Silver print,
24.8 × 19.5 cm42
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “Erotic ‘Victorians’: Women,

Neo-Victorian Fiction, and Creative Eros”
In the conclusion of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith,

Maud, a young woman exploited by her uncle to transcribe Victorian por-
nography, announces to her love Sue her plan to write erotic fiction in her
own way, suggesting that a Victorian woman might recreate and redefine
the erotic. Intriguingly, in his The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality
and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England, Steven Marcus
suggests that, in contrast to Victorian male writers of pornography, women
who wrote erotic literature did so differently. Instead of writing about
male genital organs conquering supine females, these women writers
wrote about relationships, “emotions…, contemplation, [and] conscious
reverie” (281). While it seems unlikely that such a writerly act like Maud’s
would frequently occur in the Victorian era, I find that contemporary
women writers of the neo-Victorian novel, like these female Victorian
counterparts, do redefine the erotic but in a distinctive way.1 In their re-
envisioning of the Victorian novel, these women writers draw on various
conceptions of the erotic from classical to contemporary, but, in addition,
they gravitate toward the way Audre Lorde defines the erotic as “the life-
force of women, [it is] creative energy empowered” (Lorde 55).
Lorde argues that:
[t]he erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It
has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized
sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and
© The Author(s) 2020 1

K. Renk, Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48287-9_1
2 K. RENK
consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing

it with the pornographic. (55)
This definition, which distinguishes the erotic from pornography, speaks

not only to the exercise of sensuality but also to an attempt to empower
women to awaken their creative potential and to realize themselves as full
and complete human beings.
This interdisciplinary study focuses on the work of contemporary
British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers, such as A.S. Byatt,
Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood,
and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the
erotic in neo-Victorian fiction. As we will see, in the classical sense, eros is
defined as “destructive and acquisitive,” the desire and “will to possess”
the beautiful (Soble xiii, Plato 43). I argue that women writing neo-
Victorian fiction included in this study utilize classical concepts of eros but
also highlight Lorde’s notion of creative eros. These writers invent female
characters who demonstrate a “will to possess” themselves and thereby
embolden and energize themselves as artists, writers, rogues/gender out-
laws, spiritualists, and travelers/adventurers.2 As such, they defy what
A.S. Byatt terms the “willed oblivion” of women in fiction (Byatt 1994,
120). They possess sexual and creative subjectivity.3 These female charac-
ters also embody the efforts of early feminists, not those who organized
collectively, but those who individually defied social expectations, resisted
patriarchy, and “self-authorized” in order to create “authentic selves”
(Lerner 47). In doing so, these women writers pick up where Victorian
women writers left off, as they ask and reformulate answers to the Victorian
“Woman Question.”
Numerous scholarly studies have analyzed the phenomenon of neo-
Victorian fiction, including such works as Louisa Hadley’s Neo-Victorian
Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview
Mirror (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2007), Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana.
Histories, Fictions, Criticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007),
Kate Mitchell’s History and Cultural Memory in neo-Victorian Fiction:
Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
John Kucich and Dianne Sadoff’s edited collection, Victorian Afterlife:
Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: Univ.
Minnesota Press, 2000), and Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Neo-
Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (New
1 INTRODUCTION: “EROTIC ‘VICTORIANS’: WOMEN, NEO-VICTORIAN… 3
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). In general, these studies have focused

on narratology, the relationship between our era and the Victorian era,
theories in regard to why the Victorian era is of interest to contemporary
writers, and the ways in which the Victorian era is imagined.
Clearly, based on the high-level of scholarly interest, the neo-Victorian
novel has obviously fascinated readers and scholars ever since the first neo-
Victorian novels were written as either prequels to Victorian fiction, such
as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), or postmodern renditions of the
Victorian novel, such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969). Since the late 1960s and especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the
neo-Victorian novel proliferated as writers sought to re-create/reform and
or “replicate” the Victorian era.4 Various theories abound in regard to the
neo-Victorian phenomenon, including regressive theories based on
Margaret Thatcher’s ahistorical nostalgia for a supposed ideal Victorian
past (Hadley 2010, 10), but also progressive ideas based on the ways in
which the neo-Victorian novel often “challenges or critiques official histo-
riographies [of the Victorian era]” (Mitchell 2010, 6). Often, these cri-
tiques present the reader with “different” versions of the Victorian world
by “represent[ing] marginalized voices, new histories of sexuality, [and]
post-colonial viewpoints” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 165). As such, accord-
ing to Mark Llewellyn, the neo-Victorian novel contains a “democratizing
impulse” (167). Kate Mitchell agrees in noting that the neo-Victorian
novel “moved away from high culture and included features previously
invisible or excluded: women, the working and criminal classes and non-
Europeans” (2010, 165).5 Overall, neo-Victorian novels connect with the
Victorian era by “self-consciously engag[ing] with” the Victorian era
through a deliberate “act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)
vision” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 4).
This engagement with the Victorian as an act of re-vision often takes
the form of addressing the ways in which gender and sexuality are con-
structed in the Victorian era.6 And while Jeannette King in The Victorian
Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction asks “[w]hy, in the last
decades of the twentieth century, should so many women novelists have
looked back a hundred years for the subject of their fiction? What is the
interest of Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality for modern
feminists?” (1), no study of the neo-Victorian novel has specifically focused
on women writers nor on the ways in which the erotic is conceived in
women’s neo-Victorian fiction, and how this re-conception relates to the
interests of contemporary feminism.
4 K. RENK
As such, this book addresses the following questions: Why are women
writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about
the state of contemporary feminism? As readers, are we attracted to this
fiction merely because of our so-called prurient interests and our own era’s
pre-occupation with sexuality and sexual liberation? How do classical and
contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writ-
ers address and answer the Victorian “woman question”? How exactly is
the erotic used to underscore women’s creative potential? How and to
what extent do these women writers write back/“talk back”7 to their
Victorian counterparts, such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning? How do these women writers conceive “new
worlds of habitation” (a term used by Annis Pratt) for Victorian women
where the creative erotic can be expressed?
Before considering how neo-Victorian women writers approach the
novel and utilize classical and contemporary forms of eros, I’d like to clar-
ify the approach to feminism that I take in this study. I agree with Judith
Keegan Gardiner that feminism is best defined as “a utopian discourse of
an ideal future, never yet attained” (2002, 10) and that “Neo-Victorianism
and feminism … have always been related endeavors” (MacDonald and
Goggin 1), particularly for women writers who still seek this unattained
ideal. Yet in writing about women’s sexual and creative eros (what could
be called sexual and creative subjectivity) in the Victorian era, these writers
underscore the hidden histories of ordinary women, female “geniuses,”8
who sought to create themselves as artists, writers, rogues/gender out-
laws, spiritualists, and travelers/adventurers, as well as to realize them-
selves as sexual subjects, not sexual objects.
With that said, I take a broad, transhistorical postfeminist approach that
accounts for the multiple and varied debates about feminism since its
inception (not just since the second wave, as argued by Stéphanie Genz
and Benjamin Brabbon in Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories
(2009, 22)). Although postfeminism is a conflicted, somewhat contested
term,9 I use it in a distinctive way, similar to how postcolonialism is some-
times defined. Akin to one definition of postcolonialism that defines post-
colonialism as everything that comes after the moment of contact with the
colonizers (Ashcroft et al. 1), postfeminism, in my view, can be defined as
all feminist approaches and practices that came after the first feminist writ-
ings and actions; thus postfeminism encapsulates all feminist theories and
practices from the first-wave through current theories and practices.10
Viewed in this way, postfeminism suggests that feminism is still necessary
and also suggests that feminism, which contains many intellectual, social,
and political threads, has not yet fully achieved all of its ends; the ideal of
feminism, the utopian dream, has not yet been attained. In this way, in an
era that asked the “Victorian Woman Question” about woman’s place and
her rightful social and political roles, the struggles of Victorian women to
create themselves are still relevant to many women in our current world.
In a sense, the Victorians are still “us,” despite the social and political gains
that women have achieved. Many women around the world have not yet
attained those fundamental rights, nor the right to act as sexual subjects,
not objects, nor the right to fully realize their creativity. The neo-Victorian
novel in women’s hands sets out to reform the world through advancing
the utopian ideal where all women can attain and exercise sexual and cre-
ative subjectivity/eros.
The Novel “Reforming” Woman’s World

In A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Randolph Ash argues that while poets “write for
the life of the language,” novelists “write for the betterment of the world”
(147). This “betterment” or reformation of the world seems to be an
impetus for neo-Victorian women writers who answer the Victorian
“Woman Question” differently than Victorian women writers did. Whereas
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre cannot express sexual desire and chafes at
her circumscribed role, desiring a broad sphere of activity, A.S. Byatt’s
Olive Wellwood openly rebels against women’s limited roles and engages
with the idea that the erotic is a “source of [sexual and creative] power.”
Overall, neo-Victorian women writers further interrogate the issue of
women’s supposed place in Victorian society, a place deemed to be the
private sphere. In doing so, neo-Victorian women writers represented in
this study endeavor to make Victorian women’s creative lives visible and
thus attempt to reform woman’s world. They address the fact that andro-
centric history, which is “gender-skewed,” renders ordinary women invis-
ible, with the exception of women deemed great or powerful, such as
queens and militants, who are known for supposedly “heroic” deeds.11
Ordinary women or women attempting to enter the arts and the profes-
sions or who enter the public realm (not the political public) are not
included in such histories (Gallagher, Lubelska, and Ryan 2). In many
ways, these women writers act as feminist historians who “take on the task
of salvaging, critiquing and rewriting stories of past women’s lives and
experiences” (Gallagher et al. 2).
6 K. RENK
Heilmann and Llewellyn also speak to this issue of women writers

rewriting history to include commonplace women’s lives and experiences.
They view women writers of historical fiction as women who “redress the
past—a female past either outside of or silent within the male tradition”
(2004, 142). In addition, they note that Byatt believes that women write
about history because they have been forbidden to “think about it” (137).
Diana Wallace in her The Women’s Historical Novel: 1900–2000 (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005) agrees with this notion that women writing the histori-
cal novel use “the historical setting … as a way of writing about subjects
which would otherwise be taboo” (2). The sense of the forbidden or
taboo works in two ways though in terms of neo-Victorian works by
women writers. First, since women were generally excluded from andro-
centric history, we have been forbidden to “enter” history and thus con-
temporary women writers do transgress the forbidden and enter history.
Second, neo-Victorian works in general address other “forbidden histo-
ries,” including the history of sexuality and eros, topics that in general
appear taboo at least on the surface in Victorian discourse because of its
sense of what could be named in terms of sex and sexuality.12 It is this
combination of the forbidden, women’s forbidden history, and the forbid-
den history of sexuality and eros that these women writers appear to
redress. They address the linkages between women’s history, women’s
lives, and the exercise of sexuality and creative eros. While underscoring
relationships and emotions, as did Victorian women writers of the erotic,
they also, unlike some male writers of the genre, do not depict graphic
sexual scenes. They do not write to titillate the reader, but rather use the
erotic to further contemplate gender roles, sexual behaviors, and identi-
ties. And, in some cases, as Byatt does in Possession, they acknowledge the
dangers of eros, in the classical sense.
Before I outline the major theses in regard to the use of creative eros, I
consider the ways in which Byatt’s Possession withholds explicit sexual
scenes, a strategy that the other works in this study generally employ.
Eros, the “Phantasm,” and Platonic Love in Byatt’s

Possession
In Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, Cora Kaplan implies that we
are fascinated, in part, by the neo-Victorian novel because neo-Victorian
fiction, at times, offers what is not present in Victorian fiction; in our
sexually liberated era; this fiction elicits and satisfies our “prurient” desires
(86). This suggests that the neo-Victorian novel offers readers a “peep”
show into the erotic lives of the Victorians. The novel becomes a lens
through which we observe what was not graphically represented in
Victorian fiction. While it is true that erotic sexuality is sometimes more
graphically described in neo-Victorian fiction by some writers, for example
in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, than it is in Victorian
fiction,13 Byatt’s Possession, despite the fact that it is written in a Post-
Freudian, Post-Kinsey era, is more philosophical in its approach to repre-
senting the erotic and draws more heavily on Victorian mores that would
prohibit the blatant depiction of sexual acts, therefore it leaves more to the
reader’s imagination. Here, I use the Greek concept of eros, as well as
Medieval and Renaissance notions of sexual possession by the “phantasm,”
to consider the ways in which the erotic is represented in Possession. I argue
that Byatt grounds the erotic in mythic material and suggests that erotic
love may be perilous because it is “egotistical and acquisitive” and can lead
to madness in the lover. In addition, Byatt also portrays the original idea
of Platonic love, which philosopher Gregory Vlastos defines as a “mix of
sensuality, sentiment, and intellect, a companionship [shared by a same-
sex couple] bound by erotic attraction no less than by intellectual give and
take”(125),14 as a possible cure for this destructive love.15
In “Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the
Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction,” Marie-Luise Kohlke
repines that in Possession “[there is] a long drawn out build-up of attrac-
tion and seduction. When the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and
Christabel LaMotte finally consummate their secret love affair, their
orgasms disappear into a line break in the text; the reader’s curiosity
remains unsatisfied” (63). The logic is odd here in that Kohlke wants the
reader to “vicariously experience” (63) Victorian sexual fulfillment and
concurrently she scolds contemporary writers for their projection of our
sexual license onto the Victorian era. Overall, she decries the use of the
erotic in neo-Victorian fiction, claiming that such writing, which often
seeks to replicate the Victorian novel, ends up “orientalising” the nine-
teenth century, making it the location and timeframe onto which we proj-
ect our own sexual desires. At the same time, she criticizes Byatt for not
going “all the way” and giving the reader detailed descriptions of sexual
scenes. Kohlke critiques Byatt’s diction in these sex scenes, arguing that
the language “withholds more than it discloses” (63).16 Kohlke, as a
reader, feels frustrated, because of the “highly romanticized” [not sexually
8 K. RENK
explicit] diction. Oddly, while Kohlke’s assertion about the ways in which
we project our own sexual desires onto neo-Victorian fiction is partially
correct in that we, as readers, likely think that Victorians were sexual prigs,
while we, in our era, are generally not,17 she overlooks one of the objec-
tives of some neo-Victorian fiction, in particular novels written by women.
In mimicking the style and substance of Victorian fiction, Byatt and other
women writers of neo-Victorian fiction will not wholly break with Victorian
conventions in regard to what can be penned about sexual acts. Instead,
Byatt “withhold[s] explicit language” and leaves much to the reader’s
imagination as she ponders philosophical aspects of eros.
In order to address how Byatt represents sexual eros, it is important to
consider Greek definitions of the term as well as conceptions of the god.
According to Bruce Thornton, the god Eros, (in the Roman pantheon,
Cupid), is drastically different from our contemporary notion of love; he
is the antithesis of the “hallmark” Cupid who benignly shoots his arrows
and unites us in love to one another. Instead, Eros is “much more sinis-
ter … [he] is a force of nature, a window into the irrational where swarm
myriad other desires whose excess leads to our destruction” (14).18 The
concept of eros for the Greeks, like the god himself, connotes damage and
chaos, which can “overthrow … the mind and orders of civilization” (12).
Plato complicates this concept and the god through the tale that Socrates
conveys in The Symposium that he heard from his “instructress in the art of
love,” Diotima of Mantinea who relates that:
Following the birth of Aphrodite, the other gods were having a feast, includ-
ing Resource [sometimes translated Plenty], the son of Invention. When
they’d had dinner, Poverty came to beg, as people do at feasts, and so she
was by the gate. Resource was drunk with nectar (this was before wine was
discovered), went into the garden of Zeus, and fell into a drunken sleep.
Poverty formed the plan of relieving her lack of resources by having a child
by Resource; she slept with him and became pregnant with Love [or Eros].
(Plato 39)
This offspring of the oppositions, Resource and Poverty, is “always

poor … [has no] shoes or home. … [H]e always lives in a state of need …
he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things” (Plato 39). Socrates
also asserts that “far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly
supposed, he’s tough, with hardened skin … [he is] impetuous and
intense” and a “lifelong lover of wisdom” (Plato 40). Even though this
apotheosis of love is a penniless enchanter, the product of poverty com-

bined with plenty, who assails the good through his erratic, malignant
nature, Plato, through Socrates’s tale, views Eros as one rung on the lad-
der of love that leads to higher forms of love. Even so, according to phi-
losopher Alan Soble, the Greek concept of eros, in general, is an
“acquisitive, egocentric or even selfish” love that is “unconstant [and]
wavering” (1989, xxiii), essentially a form of love that seeks to possess
forever the beautiful, equated with the good (Plato 43).19
It is essential to consider how the erotic is treated in Victorian fiction
before we look at its representation in Byatt’s novel. David Trotter main-
tains that the erotic could not be directly represented in Victorian fiction,
particularly in domestic realism. Although he does not speak about the
entire body of Victorian fiction, which varies in its attention to representa-
tions of sexual behavior,20 he persuasively argues his point in relation to
the classic realist novel, Middlemarch, which can be viewed as a model for
other domestic fictions, including some neo-Victorian ones. He asserts
that George Eliot did not include erotic suggestions or scenes in
Middlemarch because of her “moral consciousness.” This moral con-
sciousness was not based on sexual prudery, however, but rather the fact
that Eliot believed “there [must be] a complete submergence of egoistic
[read erotic] desire and an habitual outrush of emotional force in sympa-
thetic channels” (44).21 For Eliot, the erotic is only represented “in mem-
ory and speculation, in half-told stories, such as that of Will’s grandmother,
Julia, and in evocation of other literary texts, such as Shakespeare’s son-
nets” (Siegel qtd. in Trotter 43). According to Carol Siegel, “[t]here is an
awareness of the erotic in [the Victorian novel], but it comes from the
places where the erotic inheres … in memory” (Siegel qtd. in Trotter 43).
It is this suppression of egoistic love that is highlighted in Byatt’s novel.
In Possession, Ellen Ash’s observations about Christabel LaMotte’s
“The Fairy Melusine” Proem reflect generalized Victorian attitudes about
the erotic in literature. When pondering the scene in the poem where “the
husband … bores his peephole and observes his Siren-spouse at play in her
vat of waters,” an act that Melusina forbids, Ellen relates that this “scene
was best left to the imagination.”22 And, in the text, this is precisely what
Byatt does. Although Ellen considers the scene too “strong for some stom-
achs, especially maidenly English ones” (135), Byatt does not explicitly
depict this erotic and transgressive scene where the knight Raimondin
peeps at his wife and discerns her true nature as a serpent woman who
possesses a strong, lashing, phallic tail, a scene conveyed in the medieval
10 K. RENK
legends about the White Lady, Melusina. Instead of tempting the reader
with an explicit description of this somewhat sexualized scene whereby
Melusina is rendered, in part, masculine and perhaps “self-contained” in
her mythic world, as Laura Van Dyke argues, Byatt entices the reader by
suggesting the erotic through implicit language in the manner of Victorian
writers. She uses the mythic archetype of Melusina and the other Dames
Blanches, who are destined to be “fantastic” soulless creatures until and
unless they marry a human male (189). Byatt presents the force of the
myth through Ellen Ash’s words as she describes Melusina’s “terrible and
tragic” tail. A “monster” tail, in LaMotte’s version of the Melusina myth,
that “[b]eat[s] the lambent bath to diamond-fine/Refracting lines of
spray, a dancing veil/Of heavier water on the breathless air” (135).
Melusina is not eroticized as a centerfold pin-up but rather as a powerful,
alluring, and dangerous mythic force, much like the Greek version of eros,
that, according to Thornton, was sometimes represented as a “coiling”
snake (16) or flying serpent as in the myth of Eros and Psyche, which
Byatt alludes to in her novella, “Morpho Eugenia.”23 Here the erotic is
conceived as a “source of power,” as Lorde forcefully argues.
Further, in the erotic scene that satisfies Christabel and Ash’s desire,
Byatt uses mythic material to accentuate the protean nature of the sexual-
ized female, who becomes a sexual subject, not a sexual object. When Ash
assumes that Christabel is a sexual innocent, Byatt makes Christabel the
character who asks Ash, “Are you afraid?” to which he responds, “Not in
the least, now … My selkie, my white lady, Christabel” (308). And during
the following nights when Ash and Christabel make love, Ash thinks, “It
was like holding Proteus … as though she was liquid moving through his
grasping fingers, as though she was waves of the sea rising all around him”
(308). Such mythic material is suggestive but not graphic and is more in
keeping with Victorian conventions about the depiction of sexual activity
in the novel.24
Beyond this effort to leave more to the reader’s imagination, Byatt also
underscores the dangers of erotic, acquisitive love, a type of love that over-
takes the lover and makes her or him nearly mad because of the longing to
possess forever the beautiful beloved. In warning of these dangers, Byatt
suggests Medieval and Renaissance notions of the “phantasm.” In the
twelfth century, Andreas Capellanus described erotic love in this way:
When a man sees a woman deserving of erotic attentions, he at once begins

to desire her with his whole heart. Then the more he thinks of it, the more
he feels himself imbued with love until he reconstructs her in her entirety in
phantasy. Then he begins to think of her figure, he perceives her limbs,
imagines tham (sic) in action and explores [rimari, lit: splits] the private
parts of her body. (Couliano 19)
According to Cappelanus, the male lover seeks to possess the beloved

female through his phantasy. Yet Ioan Couliano, the twentieth-century
scholar who drew connections between eros and magic, relates that “the
feminine phantasm can then take entire possession of … the lover, produc-
ing … a pathological Eros … [a] variety of melancholia (amor heroes)”
(Couliano 19). Couliano states that the Renaissance pathological Eros was
thought to be a “phantasmic” infection that entered the eyes of the man.
According to Couliano, the “very image of the woman has entered the
[man’s] spirit through the eyes and, through the optic nerve, has been
transmitted to the sensory spirit … [and then] [t]ransformed into a phan-
tasm…. Inducing a disordered state of reasoning (virtus estimative) … a
spiritual sickness” (21). The victim, instead of trying to overcome the ill-
ness, “delights [in] the sickness that consumes it” (22). This pathological
eros is parallel to that type of eros that Thorton tells us creates madness.
“For the Greeks, … [e]xcessive passion is fundamentally a form of insanity,
a destruction of the rational mind’s control over the body” (17). Such
passion seems best exemplified in Sappho’s poetry where the speaker
states, “[w]henever I see you, sound fails, my tongue falters, thin fire steals
through my limbs, an inner roar, and darkness shrouds my ears and eyes.”
(Fragment 31, translated by Catullus). This dangerous, debilitating, and
pathological Eros is clearly represented in Byatt’s novel.
Christabel and Ash suffer from a type of pathological eros that begins
in an innocent way through their exchanges of poetry. Eventually, Ash
contemplates the nature of sexual love in a short poem where the persona
asks, “And is love then more/Than the kick galvanic/Or the thundering
roar/Of Ash volcanic/Belched from some crater/Of earth-fire within?/
Are we automata/or Angel-kin?” (297). This poem alludes to Sappho’s
idea that our senses are overcome whenever Eros strikes; we are no longer
in control of our beings and emotions but are possessed. Yet the persona
also suggests that perhaps there is some physiological determinism behind
this “kick galvanic,” adding a biological layer to the madness which over-
takes us.25
Christabel has struggled with Ash’s “possession” of her both in a liter-
ary and physical way. She initially withstands his intrusion in her life and
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her work, knowing that his artistry may influence her own, remarking to
Ash in a letter, “I cannot let you burn me up” (213). She favors remaining
locked in her tower, like “The Lady of Shallott,” weaving her own solitary,
feminine vision of the world. Yet she gives into his incursions and invites
him to take tea with her, relating “I am out of my Tower and my Wits”
(215), further noting that this fledgling erotic attachment has probable
writerly consequences. Rather than love producing abundant art, this love
makes her Muse leave and Christabel can no longer write (216).
Pathological eros seems to have severe consequences for the woman writer
tainted by acquisitive love. In fact, Christabel only produces her magnum
opus, “The Fairy Melusina” poem, after the erotic attachment is over and
she flees to France.26 The poem itself though conveys a moment of beguil-
ing love in which the knight Raimondin meets the Fairy Melusina and
requests to drink from her fountain, whereby “All dazed with glamour was
he, in her gaze./She ministered unto his extreme need/And his face took
the brightness of her glance/As dusty heather takes the tumbling rays/Of
the sun’s countenance and shines them back./Now was he hers, if she
should ask of him/Body or soul, he would have offered all./And seeing
this, at last, the Fairy smiled” (322–323). The fairy’s glance possesses the
knight and likened to the Fairy Melusina herself, Christabel becomes
aware of love’s enchantment and the ways in which love possesses body
and soul.
Ash’s art, on the other hand, is not diminished by this erotic love. If
anything, he becomes more productive since he writes his “Swammerdam”
poem while he is becoming emotionally attached to his “true wife”
Christabel (499). Overall though, he aims “to possess” “the whiteness” of
Christabel, “which was part of her extreme magnetism” (301) and yet he
cannot contain her, because, as the narrator notes, she was “like Proteus …
liquid moving through his grasping fingers” (308). However, once the
love illness abates, Ash confesses to his wife Ellen, “For the last year per-
haps I have been in love with another woman. I could say it was a sort of
madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding” (492), noting
once again the ways in which erotic love overtakes the lover, causing infir-
mity in the lover who becomes controlled by eros. Ash even notes that
“Eros is a bad and fickle godhead” (179).
In addition to highlighting the dangers of erotic love, Byatt also por-
trays another type of love, Platonic love, perhaps as a cure for acquisitive
possession. This Platonic love is represented in the love that Christabel
and Blanche share. Even though we ordinarily think of Platonic love as
asexual, if we recall the original concept of this love, we see that it is love
shared by a same-sex couple, albeit male in the original. We also under-
stand that it is a “mix of sensuality, sentiment, and intellect, a companion-
ship bound by erotic attraction no less than by intellectual give and take”
(Vlastos 125), making it a superior form of love on the Platonic ladder of
love. It is a love that reaches toward knowledge and truth of the divine.
Even though the love attachment between Blanche and Christabel
becomes anguished and, at times, approaches jealous attachment on
Blanche’s part, their initial love, based on erotic attraction, mutual regard,
shared artistry, and “shared solitude” (202), lifts their love above the mad
love that bedevils Christabel’s and Ash’s relationship.
Samantha J. Carroll claims in “Lesbian disPossession: The
Appartionalization and Sensationalization of Female Homosexuality in
A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance” that Byatt “generat[es a] same-sex
union [between Christabel and Blanche] whose authenticity is repeatedly
called into question” (360)27 because it is “erased” (358). Likewise, Jackie
Buxton argues that Possession’s plot lacks subversion because it ultimately
forsakes the lesbian relationship and returns to a heterosexual paradigm.
However, I find that in acknowledging that same-sex unions existed in
Victorian England,28 Byatt underscores their validity and even the ways in
which they suggested a more authentic intellectual, sexual, and emotional
intimacy than the union between Christabel and Ash. In some ways, Byatt
spins Platonic thinking on its head by creating her same-sex female couple
that initially thrives as a loving artistic pair that seeks beauty together.
Christabel relates to Ash that “We were two who wished to live the Life of
the Mind” (225) and Blanche recalls in her diary “Our days weave together
the simple pleasures of daily life … and the higher pleasures of art and
thought which we may now taste as we please” (51). 01
In Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, Annis Pratt asserts that
“[w]hen novels depict women loving women or seeking Eros or rebirth in
solitude, women authors must create new spaces and new worlds of habi-
tation” (94). Byatt engenders this world in envisioning Bethany Cottage,
where Christabel and Blanche live apart from the world in their own artis-
tic haven, drawing on each other’s work and trying to create their art in
solitude. In some ways their mutual artistry, one that focuses on visual art
(Blanche’s) and one that focuses on poetic and narrative art (Christabel’s)
re-works some of the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a type of
Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood,29 which combined visual and poetic art as dif-
ferent ways to represent the same object. Similar to Christina Rossetti’s
14 K. RENK
“Goblin Market” for example, Blanche illustrates some of Christabel’s fai-

rytales and children’s stories, and she also commences an advanced study
of “Vivien and Merlin,” a study which resonates with the medieval mate-
rial that influences Christabel’s Melusina material and her own take on
“The Lady of Shallott.” In contrast to the ways in which Ash’s intrusion
thwarts Christabel’s artistry,30 Christabel’s union with Blanche fortifies her
art and makes her more productive. For example, one must assume that
Christabel composes her “City of Is” and all of her fairytales and stories
for children while she and Blanche live together at Bethany Cottage.
Platonic love, which has an erotic element, but is not overcome by acquisi-
tive eros, strengthens art and makes it a shared experience. In their private
world, their Bethany Cottage, Christabel and Blanche embolden women’s
art through mutual regard forged through their Platonic love. Their
“shared solitude” in Bethany Cottage is a utopian space separate from the
patriarchal world of art and letters. It is Lady Shallott’s Tower, as Christien
Franken argues (101), but it is a castle the Lady shares with Guinevere.
Byatt, in keeping with Victorian conventions to leave more to the read-
er’s imagination, conveys Christabel’s and Blanche’s Platonic love through
subtlety. Christabel merely states that she and Blanche “were quiet
together,” suggesting physical intimacy without describing in full their
love-making. Yet the reader comprehends that being “quiet together”
means much more, when Ash is surprised that Christabel displayed “such
delicate skills, such informed desire” (309), implying that he understands
that her exquisite love-making was learned somehow, even though he
believes her to be a virgin.
Rather than giving the reader a salacious “peep” show into the erotic
lives of the Victorians, Byatt mitigates her representation of erotic love by
drawing on philosophical concepts of eros even as she warns of the dan-
gers of acquisitive erotic love. Eros’s enchantment can engender debility
in which the lover loses control and is possessed. Beyond this, Byatt also
foregrounds a higher version of love that combines eros and artistic enter-
prise and elevates the lovers beyond selfish attachment. These lovers,
according to Plato, “shall walk together in shining happiness, and when
the time comes, they shall grow wings together because of their love”
(qtd. in Vlastos 125). Although Christabel and Blanche do grow apart and
do not “grow wings,” like Swedenborg’s “conjugial angels,” for a brief
moment, they ascend the “ladder of love,” reveling in the promise of
Platonic love.
Creative Eros
Byatt’s novel and the other works in this study do not arouse the reader
with graphic sexual imagery. Instead they mimic Victorian conventions in
regard to the explicit display of sexual activity and behavior and the dan-
gers of destructive and possessive sexual eros, while they also depict female
characters who endeavor to become sexual subjects, not sexual objects, as
they exercise creative eros. Their characters attempt to defy the designated
private sphere of activity and enter the public realm as artists, writers,
rogues/gender outlaws, spiritualists/religious leaders, and travelers.
Chapter 2 focuses on the work of Victorian female artists and their neo-
Victorian fictional counterparts, who challenge the “traditional” and axi-
omatic ideas of the artistic gaze as acquisitive and male, even as they exert
themselves as valid and valuable artists who have a genuine aesthetic sen-
sibility. More explicitly, these female artists seize the gaze and question its
assumptions about who possesses it and to what purpose, while they also
seek to redefine the visual erotic. Rather than posing the erotic as a female
object to be consumed by the male spectator, the female artistic figure is
relished by a female spectator and the female becomes a sexual subject, not
object. In addition, the erotic is more fully realized as the right to exercise
the female gaze and develop artistic acumen, while further contesting tra-
ditional female roles. Helen Humphreys’s Afterimage, a novel loosely
based on the work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron,
and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights, a novel that focuses on a “visionary” Victorian
female photographer, serve as the center of my discussion; however, I also
examine the larger realm of Victorian art, including Victorian photogra-
phy’s aims in relation to “realism” and its erotic impulse as well as the
influence of the Pre-Raphaelite women artists on female photographers.
In Chap. 3, I study neo-Victorian works that seemingly converse with
and talk back to the spirits of Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and the
lesser-known fairytale writer E. Nesbit. In this chapter, I consider the chal-
lenges Victorian women writers confront as they create their art. Neo-
Victorian women writers focus on the additional obstacles and impediments
suggested by but glossed over in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh that
Victorian women writers experienced because of the narrow gender roles
assigned to them. Such obstacles and impediments include the extent to
which a woman can be a writer and a dutiful woman, the ways in which
women writers had to acknowledge, address, and overcome male influ-
ence and dominance while endeavoring to discover a “country” [literary
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realm] of their own as J.S. Mill suggests, as well as the ways they needed
to confront the perception of the woman writer as a unfeminine “mon-
ster,” an aberration and perversion of the ideal feminine. Although Polly
Teale’s drama Brontë,31 Michèle Roberts’s novel The Mistressclass, and
A.S. Byatt’s novels Possession and The Children’s Book all portray successful
women writers, all of the women’s lives represented are fraught with these
contentious issues; women writers in the Victorian era were plagued by
prejudice against them and neo-Victorian works expose the extent to
which gender roles circumscribed women’s literary creativity. All of these
works, to greater or lesser extents, suggest that Victorian women writers
were deemed monsters for either succeeding at their craft while avoiding
motherhood or were freaks of nature for neglecting their womanly duties
as wives and mothers. Whereas neo-Victorian works endeavor to show the
erotic as the flowering of women’s creative and sexual gifts, they neverthe-
less present the reality of women writers’ lives; unlike Barrett Browning’s
Victorian poem and the Victorian novel in general, there is no fairytale
ending in any of these works that ensures women writers’ happiness but
rather these works expose, even more profoundly than does Aurora Leigh,
the various ways women writers struggled to exercise their creative and
sexual eros, which were cast as miscreations.
At the same time, some neo-Victorian works by women exceed the
limitations of the Victorian by inextricably connecting creative and sexual
eros and by presenting the real possibility hinted at in Aurora Leigh of
what Adrienne Rich calls the lesbian continuum, which she defines as
“woman-identified experience [throughout a woman’s life]; … the shar-
ing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and
receiving of practical and political support” (Rich 26). These relationships
between and among women, are not physical, but are also spiritual and
emotional, thus akin to the philia that Aristotle describes in Nichomachean
Ethics (Soble 1989, xxiii); this philia is more than the homosocial sisterly
bond, thus breaking away from conventional sex and gender roles.
Chapter 4 considers another type of public figure—that of the female
rogue or gender outlaw. Contemporary versions of these female figures
are found in Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin32 and Frog Music, Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Tipping the
Velvet, all of which write back to earlier versions of the female rogue and
the gender outlaw. Contemporary versions of rogues and gender outlaws
attempt to defy their “fates” in fiction—they defy “willed oblivion” and
seek to be their own mistresses, often using their creative and sexual eros
to attempt to fashion themselves, both literally and figuratively, as they

“perform gender.” That’s not to say that they are necessarily likable char-
acters, but they certainly force us to reconsider the female rogues in
Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century fiction, as the contemporary writers
underscore the limitations placed on women’s social, economic, and pub-
lic roles, while demonstrating how women’s lives have been circumscribed
by these imposed limitations. Like the artists and writers envisioned by
female neo-Victorian writers, the female rogues and gender outlaws exer-
cise creative and sometimes sexual eros as they defy their fates in fiction.
Chapter 5 considers the creative and sexual eros of Victorian women
spiritualists as represented in women’s neo-Victorian fiction. Unlike
Victorian novels and poetry, such as Henry James’s The Bostonians and
Robert Browning’s “Mr. Sludge, The Medium,” that mock and malign
the spiritualist medium, Sarah Waters’s Affinity, Melissa Pritchard’s Selene
of the Spirits, Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen, and A.S. Byatt’s
novella “The Conjugial Angel” generally portray a nuanced approach to
female spiritualists. To greater or lesser extents, neo-Victorian women
writers emphasize the ways in which these women sought new social roles
that liberated them from confinement, while also attempting to acquire
power through this new “religion,” as well as achieving socio-economic
independence. In addition, these women spiritualists sought social “inter-
course” with the dead and performed in ways that exercised their sexuality
and verged on theatricality, as they create “fictions.” However, these
women writers, on occasion, demonstrate that mediums would sometimes
act in fraudulent ways, which only underscores their need for power and
liberation from Victorian female confinement. In this way, they share some
motives with the female rogues also portrayed in women’s neo-Victorian
fiction.
In the final chapter (Chap. 6), “Voyages Out: Postcolonial Desires and
the Female Victorian Traveler/Adventurer,” I consider the ways in which
neo-Victorian women writers transform the Victorian woman traveler.
Neo-Victorian female travelers/adventurers seek to value an educational
growth experience as they become cosmopolitan travelers who re-evaluate
their own cultures as they learn from and assess other cultures. Whereas
Isabella Bird and other Victorian women travelers are often critical of the
worlds they encounter in their Odysseys, neo-Victorian women writers,
such as Ahdaf Soueif, in The Map of Love and Kate Pullinger in The Mistress
of Nothing choose to have their protagonists value the new worlds that
they encounter; in doing so they transform themselves from socially
18 K. RENK
restricted British women to what they perceive to be freer “Middle

Eastern” individuals, often cross-dressing or adapting themselves by wear-
ing local garb and thus embracing entirely new gender and social identi-
ties. In addition, both novels posit the possibility of a utopian female
community in the “harem” but also the possibility of breaking away from
strict gender and sexual roles even if that break is merely an illusion of
freedom.
The women writers included in this study re-map women’s fated lives
in fiction; they draw a link between sexual and creative eros; they create
characters who “fashion” and own themselves, as the writers note the
numerous and various ways in which women in the Victorian era perform
gender. Writing in a Post-Freudian, Post-Kinsey era, these women writers
seek to show Victorian women as sexual subjects, not objects of male fas-
cination. Overall, the writers underscore creative eros or the unfolding of
creative gifts in their female characters to further address the limitations
imposed by the seemingly unanswered, unresolved, and ubiquitous
“Woman Question,” a question that unfortunately continues to plague us
even in the twenty-first century. In doing so, these writers allow the reader
attracted to this fiction not just new ways to approach the erotic but new
ways of looking at gender, sexuality, and social class, as well as women’s
private and public roles.
Notes
1. Although Nadine Muller argues that “Fingersmith suggests a female appro-
priation, rather than, an obliteration of pornography” (120), the text itself
does not replicate Victorian male writers’ approach to pornography. Rather
it speaks to Maud’s love of Sue, which more closely resembles the ways in
which Victorian women pornography writers approached the subject of
pornography.
2. I have not included Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage in this
study for several reasons. First, I agree with Caterina Novák that this novel
seems parodic of the genre and that “Dora regards her work as an eco-
nomic necessity rather than as a source of self-expression” (115, 117).
Thus, Dora does not resemble the female characters noted in this study
who seek to create themselves through their chosen artistry.
Of course, women artists, writers, rogues, spiritualists, and travelers
existed in the Victorian era. Neo-Victorian women writers acknowledge
this but underscore the obstacles that women had to overcome in order to
enter the public sphere, while also highlighting the lives of ordinary and
lesser-known women who have been rendered invisible in androcentric

history.
3. Sexual subjectivity is a term that Rosalind Gill uses, when she describes
women “presented as active, desiring sexual subjects” (258).
4. Simon Joyce argues that replication of an era or holding a “mirror” up to
the past naturally involves “distortion” of the past (4). Thus, any attempt
to replicate an era depends upon the current culture’s desires. See Helen
Davies’s Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian
Freak Show (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) for more concerning the ways in
which Neo-Victorianism may distort the Victorian era.
5. I disagree that the Victorian novel excluded women and the working or
criminal classes. Obviously, writers, such as George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë,
Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens wrote about “minority”
populations.
6. Two recent studies by Helen Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian
and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
and Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak
Show consider gender and sexuality, first as it applies to voice and represen-
tation, and the second in relation to the ways in which “disabled” bodies
exhibited in “freak” shows were represented in the Victorian fiction and
neo-Victorian fiction. Often their bodies were sexualized or hyper-
sexualized in the Victorian era.
7. In Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction:
Passionate Puppets, Davies discusses the metaphor of ventriloquism and the
ways in which it is often attributed to Neo-Victorian authors. But she also
speaks to one of the implications of “talking back” to authority, in this case
the Victorians, and how this back talk is associated with rebellion.
8. Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn note that “genius” was always
inscribed as male (25). I also use genius in the way that Emma Donoghue
notes, since some of the female characters physically desire other females.
Donoghue reveals that one of the terms used in the past to describe women
who loved other women erotically was “genius,” her own “favorite”
(2007, 17).
9. Sometimes the term is hyphenated to denote an era after “feminism,” sug-
gesting that feminism is no longer relevant or needed (O’Callaghan 66).
Others criticize the term aligning it with “free market feminism” harnessed
to consumerism (Whelehan 2000, 100). Despite these contesting views of
the term, other critics, such as O’Callaghan, who uses the term without the
hyphen, find the term useful in addressing the feminist concerns located in
neo-Victorian novels by women.
10. Clearly, the novels that I study do not underscore one particular feminist
stance; some gravitate toward a liberal nineteenth-century feminist indi-
20 K. RENK
vidualist approach, some toward a Marxist feminist approach, other novels

toward a non-heteronormative lesbian approach, and others still toward a
postcolonial feminist approach.
11. Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History
attempts to broaden the scope of heroism by designating Mohammed and
Shakespeare, among others as heroes. However, Carlyle ignores the female
sex and does not include any women in his pantheon of heroes.
12. Michel Foucault refutes the underlying assumption that Victorians were
“repressed.” While it’s true, according to Foucault, that there was a “polic-
ing of statements” about sex, it’s also true that “[a]t the level of dis-
course … there was a steady proliferation of discourses concerning
sex” (18).
13. I agree with Kaplan that Faber’s novel verges on the type of fiction that
Steven Marcus describes, at times mimicking what Marcus calls “pornto-
pia” (268). However, Faber goes farther than Fowles. In The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles includes two sex scenes, one where Charles
and Sarah make frantic 90-second love, a moment that Fowles mocks
because of Charles’s premature orgasm, and the other when Charles visits
a brothel and is sexually aroused but “relieves” himself rather than have sex
with a prostitute who resembles Sarah. In addition, Charles’s fiancé
Ernestina views herself nude and has “sinful” “sexual thoughts” that she
tries to repress (28–29).
14. Vlastos reminds us that, even though current usage describes Platonic love
as “purely spiritual love for one of the opposite sex,” Platonic love, during
Plato’s time, was not asexual nor was it directed at the opposite sex
(124–125). Women in Ancient Greece were ranked only slightly above
slaves in their husband’s households; they were not citizens and they gen-
erally were undereducated and therefore were considered “servile and
uninteresting” (Agonito 23). Free males were citizens and were considered
superior; therefore, the highest love would be attained through same-sex
relationships between citizens, which ultimately combined erotic desire
with intellectual interest and often ideally paired an older male with a
young man whom the older man mentored (Gill, Christopher. xv).
15. Byatt acknowledges that she deliberately set out in Possession to revise
Fowles’s approach to the Victorians. In her essay, “Ancestors,” she states:
“My own intentions, as I recollect them, were more to do with rescuing
the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies like
those of Fowles” (79).
16. Kohlke states that in Possession “not a breast, buttock, clitoris, vagina or
penis [are] in sight” (2008, 63). However, as Foucault suggests, Victorians
“coded” sexual language and thus neo-Victorian works by women gener-
ally maintain coded rather than explicit sexual language.
17. I disagree with the idea of applying orientalism to these texts, since the
original concept of orientalism suggests that Europeans orientalized the
other by seeing themselves as asexual and chaste. Our era does not make
this claim; if anything, we see ourselves as sexually liberated.
18. The provenance of the god Eros is ambiguous and contradictory. Hesiod
“places the birth of Eros … early in the story of creation,” essentially arriv-
ing with Tartarus and Earth “out of Chaos” (Thornton 13). In The
Symposium, Phaedrus concurs, calling him one of “our most ancient gods”
(10), while Agathon conceives of him as one of the youngest gods, since
“the gods would not have castrated or imprisoned each other or done
those many other acts of violence if Love had been among them” (29).
Plato relates a different version of Eros’s birth.
19. The various participants in The Symposium attempt to eulogize Eros. After
the participants speak, Socrates commences a dialogue with Agathon,
which refutes much of what the previous speakers have argued.
In Erôs in Ancient Greece, Ed Sanders claims that eros the “[sexual]
emotion” and Eros “the god” “cannot be simplistically isolated one
another” and that “from Plato onward, erôs poses a philosophical prob-
lem” (3).
20. One could argue that the sexualized erotic is portrayed in varying degrees
in Victorian fiction, particularly in the Sensation Novels of the 1860s and
certainly in Thomas Hardy’s late-Victorian novels, which Fowles fre-
quently alludes to in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Even so, no Victorian
novel graphically displays sexual activities in the way that some neo-Victo-
rian novels, mostly by males, do.
21. Eliot added this passage to George Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind,
which she prepared for publication after his demise (Trotter 44).
22. It’s important to recognize that Ellen Ash’s view of sexuality is skewed
since she is depicted as lacking sexual experience. She thwarts Ash’s carnal
embrace out of fear and the couple never sexually consummates their mar-
riage. In some ways, she is similar to the female counterpart to John Ruskin
who did not sexually consummate his marriage to Effie Grey (Rose 91).
23. “Morpho Eugenia” exemplifies the destructive power of eros in focusing
on brother-sister incest.
24. Kaplan relates that neo-Victorian fiction, “with the exception of Faber,”
contains a “hint of nostalgia for a less sexually knowing and brazenly
expressive society” (95).
25. In The Symposium, Socrates relates that Diotima indicates that this erotic
desire to possess the beloved and thus to perhaps reproduce biologically is
one way that humans try to attain immortality (43).
26. Van Dyke mistakenly claims that while LaMotte is involved with Ash she
writes her best poetry (156) and that she “ceases writing” after the birth of
22 K. RENK
the child. Christabel tells us though that her “Muse has forsaken” her
while writing to Ash and Sabine states that Christabel told her that “she
wants to write a Fairy epic” (404). Clearly, Christabel does not write the
fairy epic until after she gives birth to Maia.
27. Carroll employs Terry Castle’s notion of the “apparitionalized” lesbian to
Possession, in particular to Blanche Glover. Castle asserts that the lesbian
figure is often “rendered spectral or ghostly” (Carroll 359) in Western
discourse and, therefore, lacks, according to Castle “sensual or moral
authority” (Castle 6).
28. Carroll relates that Byatt was teaching Henry James’s The Bostonians and
decided to base Christabel and Blanche’s relationship on Bostonian mar-
riages between women (360).
29. I include a description of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood in Chap. 1, as
described by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn.
30. In alluding to Tennyson’s “The Princess” with Blanche’s moniker for
Christabel as the “Princess,” Byatt seems to be deliberately highlighting
how Ash is like the Prince in Tennyson’s poem who intrudes on Princess
Ida’s all-female utopian world.
31. Although Teale’s work is a drama, I include it because its narrative is based
on the Brontë family’s writerly lives and it serves as a counterpoint to
Roberts’s novel.
32. Jennifer Green-Lewis acknowledges a broader definition of the Victorian
era beyond Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837–1901, which operates cul-
turally. She states,
[w]hat we popularly define as Victorian is frequently coterminous nei-
ther with the life of its monarch, nor even with the beginning or end of
her century; it designates an aesthetic, rather than a precisely historical
concept. Contemporary cultural allusion to the Victorians sweep gener-
ously if inaccurately from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
tury (Romantics and Jane Austen included), right up to the outbreak of
the Great War (the death of Victoria herself thereby ignored). (2000, 30)
So, “Victorian” as an aesthetic is culturally broadened to sometimes
include the Georgian or even the Modern eras. If one of the defining
Victorian “aesthetics” or mores is sexual continence or prudery, we must
acknowledge that these mores existed, according to Michael Mason, prior
to the Victorian era; sexual prudery or moralism was present even during
the eighteenth century (5).
In addition, much of the material on which Donoghue bases her repre-
sentation of prostitution is found in contemporary histories about Victorian
prostitution, such as Judith Walkowitz’s work. Since neo-Victorian novels
often revolve around somewhat more suggestive sexual encounters set in
previous centuries, it seems appropriate to classify Slammerkin in this way.
CHAPTER 2
“The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in

Neo-Victorian Fiction”
Pre-Raphaelite painter Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out, painted after
her husband’s untimely death shortly after their marriage, ostensibly is
concerned with loss and grief as the loved one hungers for and waits to be
reunited with her beloved (Gorokhoff 115) (Fig. 2.1).1 Yet the image also
suggests an approach to creative and sexual eros that can be discerned in
the work of nineteenth-century female artists who attempted to exercise
their own, not a male, gaze. If “Love” in this painting represents eros as
the erotic gaze,2 we see that vision blocked, that sight barred from view;
the door closed to a full erotic experience. A female eros should not be
imagined, since good Victorian women should not possess an erotic imag-
ination. The painting itself demonstrates this prohibition, since women
artists were not allowed to study fully nude models and seemingly were
discouraged from painting the nude (Mavor 16);3 hence this nude can
only be painted in a less sexually erotic way, not as a frontal nude, which
would have been unseemly for a woman artist in this era.
This chapter focuses on the work of Victorian female artists and their
neo-Victorian fictional counterparts, who challenge the “traditional” and
axiomatic ideas of the artistic gaze as acquisitive and male, even as they
exert themselves as valid and valuable artists who have a “genuine aes-
thetic sensibility,” effectively arguing against philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer’s derisive claim in his essay “On Women” that women lack
any aesthetic sensibility (Lee, footnote 1, 97). More explicitly, these female
artists seize the gaze and question its assumptions about who possesses it
© The Author(s) 2020 23

K. Renk, Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48287-9_2
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Fig. 2.1 Love Locked

Out, 1890, Anna Lea
Merritt (1844–1930),
Tate Gallery, London.
(Photo ©Tate)
and to what purpose, while they also seek to re-define the visual erotic.
Rather than posing the erotic as a female object to be consumed by the
male spectator, the female artistic figure is relished by a female spectator.
And the female artistic figure in one instance becomes a sexual subject
who possesses sexual desire. In addition, the erotic overall is more fully
realized as the right to exercise the female gaze and develop artistic acu-
men, while further contesting traditional female roles. Helen Humphreys’s
Afterimage, a novel loosely based on the work of Victorian photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron, and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights, a novel that focuses
on a “visionary” Victorian female photographer, serve as the center of my
discussion; however, I also examine the larger realm of Victorian art,
including Victorian photography’s aims in relation to “realism” and its
erotic impulse as well as the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite women artists
on female photographers. In addition, I comment on the use of the erotic
artistic gaze in neo-Victorian novels by some male writers, such as Joseph
2 “THE FEMALE ARTIST’S EROTIC GAZE IN NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION” 25
O’Connor, as well as the way the female artist is portrayed in John Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Whereas Kate Mitchell argues that both Afterimage and Sixty Lights
represent “photography as memorial” (2010, 149), whereby photography
is “linked to death” and loss, in particular the death of the mother,4 I view
these novels as demonstrating Victorian women’s efforts to live as cre-
ative, visionary artists who attempt to re-map women’s lives, both the life
of the Victorian gentlewoman and the life of the “ordinary” working-class
girl, thus redressing and exposing women’s commonplace lives. The
female visual artists in Afterimage and Sixty Lights exercise Audre Lorde’s
notion of eros as “empowered creative energy,” even as they utilize classi-
cal notions of Eros, particularly the first and last rungs of Plato’s Ladder
of Love, love of a [singular] body and love of Beauty itself, while not
relenting to destructive, acquisitive eros. They re-envision the erotic, not
as “pornographic or plasticized sensation,” as Lorde claims some males
do, but as a way to re-imagine the world, particularly the ability of women
to exercise the gaze as artists, even as they attempt to redefine social and
sexually erotic relationships among women of differing social classes. Both
novels resist and re-envision women’s “plotted lives,” a term used by
A.S. Byatt in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” to describe the ways
women’s lives were generally fated in pre-twentieth-century fiction.
The Gaze
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s theories about the male
gaze must be considered before we think about whether and to what
extent women in general and women in Victorian Britain could exercise
the artistic and erotic gaze. We know, for example, that from the time a
female becomes aware of herself as an object of male desire, she knows
that she is actively watched. She even begins to view herself as an “object”
that is being observed, while the male “watcher” becomes the “active”
member of the pair. According to Berger,
one might simply say that men act and women appear. [Heterosexual] men
look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines
not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of
women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the sur-
veyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object. (47)
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Ironically, when the female reflects on and surveys herself as a sexually

desirable object [if she is a heterosexual], she does so, according to Berger,
from a male standpoint. In this way, when she is aware of herself as this
object of male desire, she begins to “continually watch herself. She is
almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” (46).
When considering Western Art and woman as the object of this art,
Berger notes that the female object, whether nude or not, is often placed
in a supine position turned toward the perceived male spectator, the artist
or the audience, in such a way as to suggest that she is a willing participant,
an object to be consumed and even “submissive” to the patron for whom
the work is painted (52).5
This is radically different from non-Western Art, where females are
not turned toward a male spectator but are often depicted with their
male counterparts, both participating in sexual congress (Berger 53). In
terms of Art in general, the presumed male spectator, whom Berger calls
the “principal protagonist”6 (54), experiences pleasure in seeing or
scopophilia.
Mulvey applies scopophilia to the cinema and to the gaze in general.
She asserts that Freud “isolated scopophilia as one of the components of
sexuality” and that he “associated scopophilia with taking other people as
objects, subjecting them to a controlling or curious gaze” (16).7 When we
sit in a dark cinema, we all experience, both female and male, scopophilia
and yet do not necessarily experience it in its extreme. Mulvey continues
by noting that this pleasure in seeing can be “fixated into a perversion,
producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satis-
faction can come from watching, in an active, controlling sense, an objec-
tified other” (17). Freud himself elaborates by asserting that scopophilia
“becomes a perversion, if, instead of being preparatory to the normal
sexual aim, it supplants it” (“Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”
251).8 An example of exaggerated scopophilia is found in Joseph
O’Connor’s neo-Victorian Star of the Sea, when David Merredith, Lord
Kingscourt, fixates on his former and forbidden love, Mary Duane, a
working-class girl, and watches and draws her as she undresses. He rarely
touches her and only with her permission (46); his sexual satisfaction lies
in his voyeurism, his pleasure comes merely from watching.
Whether extreme or not, according to Mulvey, “pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive/female. … Woman displayed
as sexual object is a leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pinups to strip-
tease … she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (19).9
What happens when we begin to think about the female artist casting
an erotic gaze in the nineteenth century? If women are the objects of the
male gaze, how can they seize the gaze and become the spectator and/or
operator, Roland Barthes’s term for the artist/photographer (9) and not
the one on whom the gaze rests? In other words, how and to what extent
can the female during this time period, during which the “angel in the
house” was supposed to be devoid of sexual longing, become the active
looker rather than the passive recipient or object of the gaze? And how
and when can the female artistic figure demonstrate sexual desire and
become a sexual subject? If Victorian women, in general, were thought to
be asexual or, at least, sexually ignorant, how could they reverse assump-
tions made about woman’s supposed nature and take pleasure in looking
and in creating art? These questions have no facile answers but we can first
begin to answer them by considering the ways in which Victorian photog-
raphy and Pre-Raphaelite female painters challenged traditional art forms.
Victorian Photography
Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photo-
graphs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record.
[W]e are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting the sight
from an infinity of other possible sights. (Berger 10)
In the imagistic era in which we live, we rarely think about how photogra-
phy is a recent phenomenon that straddles both art and science. As
Kimberly Rhodes notes, “[p]hotography [as] a fresh technology … [was]
received with suspicion, superstition, and awe” (127), because it seemed
both a miraculous science and an aesthetic form that seemingly replicated
and fixed the original. And Jennifer Green-Lewis adds that photography
suggests a “fantasy of perfect re-presentation … a photograph, in theory,
can more than replicate appearance. It can duplicate it” (1996, 25). While
the idea and experience of the camera obscura in which an artist could
trace an inverted image created by light projected through a pinhole10 had
been around since Leonardo da Vinci’s time (Hirsch 4), capturing an
image via a camera did not occur until the 1820s. In 1823, the French
inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph, “The Dinner
Table,” a shadowy, spectral, grainy off-center image of a place setting on a
table (Barthes 1984, 31). Another French inventor, Louis Daguerre, who
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collaborated with Niépce, developed the daguerreotype process of pho-

tography in 1834, seeking to improve the process by which images could
be produced mechanically, exclaiming to a friend, “I have found a way of
fixing images of the camera! I have seized the fleeting light and impris-
oned it! I have forced the sun to paint pictures for me!” (Hirsch vii), an
exclamation that seemingly boasts control over the natural world itself
because it stops time and fixes the ephemeral.
Due to these inventions, which continued to improve over the course
of the nineteenth century, ordinary people in the Victorian era were the
first non-aristocrats to have available to them a means by which their “like-
ness” was reproduced; prior to this only the wealthy could afford a formal
painted portrait. Now, the middle and even working-class person might
avail themselves of having a “likeness” made in which they could represent
themselves as they chose, often having a “carte de visite” made of them-
selves.11 In this way, the early photographs not only begin to replace the
formal and expensive painted portrait but they also inaugurate the era in
which art is democratized (Groth 2) and made available to the com-
mon person.
Working or middle-class people were not the only ones to indulge
themselves with images of themselves. Such image producing became
“chic” (Hirsch 79), even for the “upper crust” elites. Royalty, including
Queen Victoria, actors, and politicians all sat for carte de visite portraits
that could be exchanged with friends or even sold. Robert Hirsch reveals
that allegorical subjects were popular in the 1850s (81) and Rhodes adds
that actresses dressed as characters from plays, such as Ophelia from
Hamlet (128), were photographed, thus acknowledging the ways in which
photography was associated with role playing and theatrics, a point that
Barthes makes, which I’ll further discuss.
As artifacts of the first century that could be “recorded” in images,
Green-Lewis speaks to the idea that those who view the photographic
images take them as “conveyors of identity and authenticity” (2000, 29).
However, if we take into account Berger’s idea that photographs surpass
portraiture’s ability to select from an infinity of possible images, we begin
to understand that photography does not necessarily convey reality, but
rather the photographic image is selected from a plethora of choices as the
photographer’s or “operator’s” eye peers through the camera lens. The
photographer could slightly move the camera and lens or even sweep it
180 degrees or even just a few degrees and thus produce an entirely differ-
ent image. With that said, we also begin to understand that early
photography also drew on portraiture and even theater as Barthes claims.

Barthes argues that “[p]hotography has been, and is still, tormented by
the ghost of Painting” (30) and yet he ultimately argues that photography
“touches art” not by its association with Painting but through its associa-
tion with Theater (31). Barthes reveals that Daguerre himself was first
involved in creating dioramas, light shows that used sound effects (31); he
produced what seemed like three-dimensional objects on flat surfaces and
audiences were enthralled (Hirsch 10). Thus, we see that early photogra-
phy challenged traditional art by photography’s association with theater,
role playing, and performance (Mavor 4), a point that will be particularly
true of Cameron’s work.
In addition to being more aligned with Theater than Painting, early
photography, particularly in the Victorian era, was “grandiose” and “mor-
alizing,” “full of sentimental anachronisms,” according to Green-Lewis,
even while the images supposedly represented the recent past and pulled it
out of the “mess that is history” (2000, 41).12 While we tend to see the
early photograph as a truthful artifact, we start to see that photographers,
some of whom, like the painters and poets of the Victorian era, attempted
to convey an earlier British era, particularly when they “staged” photo-
graphs that depicted scenes from British history and myth. Like the other
artists, both visual and poetic, some photographers, including Cameron,
expressed a regressive nostalgia that commented on the Victorians’ fears
of impending modernity.
Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists and Julia

Margaret Cameron
The original Pre-Raphaelite13 artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William
Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais are well-known for their radical
departure from conventional Victorian painting. With art critic John
Ruskin as their advocate, they exhibited their work at the Royal Academy
in 1849–1850.14 “An avant garde movement aiming to regenerate fine
art” (Marsh and Nunn 8), these artists sought “pictorial truth, beauty, and
moral meaning” and were “determined to bring social concerns into con-
temporary art” (Marsh and Nunn 9). Their now well-known paintings,
particularly of Ophelia and the Lady of Shallott, were initially criticized for
their attention to nature and their inherent sensuality (Rhodes 89). While
the male artists of this group are well-known, the artistic world has paid
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little, if any attention, to women artists who, according to Jan Marsh and
Pamela Gerrish Nunn, can be called the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. One
of these artists was Dante Rossetti’s model and pupil, Elizabeth Siddal.15
Others include Anna Lea Merritt, Evelyn De Morgan, Anna Mary Howitt,
Barbara Leigh Smith, and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
(Marsh and Nunn 8), Virginia Woolf’s great aunt. The art world has only
recently acknowledged these women as Pre-Raphaelite artists with an ini-
tial exhibition of their work at the Manchester City Galleries in 1997–199816
and more recently at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2019
entitled “Pre-Raphaelite Sisters.” One of the reasons women artists were
not taken seriously is the fact that women were not allowed to fully develop
their talents. De Morgan’s sister noted that women were discouraged
from painting; she recalled that “When a girl, my sister was forbidden to
paint, it was considered a grievous waste of time and unladylike” (Marsh
and Nunn 9).
In addition to families discouraging or forbidding females from paint-
ing, women in general did not receive the same artistic education as their
male counterparts. Males attended private art schools and received “free
tuition at the Royal Academy Schools” and they were allowed to travel to
the Continent to study in Florence; whereas women, if they had any for-
mal training, were sequestered in government-funded art schools, such as
the Female School of Art in London (Marsh and Nunn 11). And as Jan
Marsh notes, “women seldom had the freedom to travel [to study] as men
did” and “lone women sketching were liable to be harassed or openly
insulted” (Marsh and Nunn 20).
Interestingly, Anna Lea Merritt acknowledges that a woman’s “chief
obstacle to success is that they could never have a wife” (Marsh and Nunn
39). She wrote to a friend, “Just think what a wife does for an artist.” She
“darns his stockings, keeps his house; writes his letters; [pays] visits for his
benefit; wards off intruders; is personally suggestive of beautiful pictures
[and] is always an encouraging and partial critic” (39).
Despite all of these obstacles, women did enter the artistic realm and
worked to overcome outright prejudice toward them, including defying
John Ruskin’s notion that “no woman could paint” (Marsh and Nunn
25).17 They overcame misogynistic attitudes toward them and seized the
gaze; they were no longer merely the objects of the gaze. As Marsh notes
the women artists “entered a world where their own images served as sig-
nifiers of beauty, holiness, pathos or domestic virtue” (Marsh 19).
As the lone photographer among these women artists, Julia Margaret

Cameron, nevertheless drew on their sense of mysticism and realism and
their approach to portraiture that was linked to the theatrical. She was
perhaps also part of the movement in nineteenth-century photography to
“rewor[k] Pre-Raphaelite models of storytelling” (Green-Lewis 1996, 4).
Her work plays with notions of performance, in particular gender perfor-
mance, which will be further underscored in Helen Humphreys’s novel
that is inspired by Cameron’s life.
According to biographer Victoria Olsen, Cameron verged on being
similar to Woolf’s Orlando, “she transformed herself. She lived the first
half of her life as a stereotypical [upper-class] daughter, wife, and mother
[who grew up in India and knew William Makepeace Thackeray and Emily
Eden].18 She gave parties, collected money for charities, and raised six
children. Then … in 1864, she re-invented herself as a photographer” (3)
and taught herself the art and science of early photography (Hill 16).19
In Lord Tennyson and Friends, Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote this about
Cameron’s greenhouse/studio on the Isle of Wight:
The scent of sweet briar, the odd acrid flavour of collodian, the door that
was never shut, … the echo of the mistress’s voice calling to her maids, that
of the master’s voice reciting Homer…, and then at the same time rise
visionary glimpses of figures strangely robed…, issuing from the glass house.
(Qtd. in Groth 148)
As Thackeray Ritchie notes, Cameron’s early photography projects staged

theatrical tableaux vivant portraits that paid homage to British legends
which required that models wear ancient garb. Like the female photogra-
pher in Humphreys’s novel, Cameron “dragooned” (Hill 106) her staff
into posing for her photos, frequently making them “allegorical subjects,”
such as women who represented Humility or Virtue.20 Hirsch argues that
Cameron’s “goal was to make allegorical portraits capable of expressing
the ideals of the PRB who saw evil in industrialization” (128) and he also
identifies Cameron as the “first photographer to stress the power and sig-
nificance of women’s roles” (129) and Helen Groth notes that Cameron’s
photographs “reached an audience far beyond the privileged urban …
milieus” (149).
In teaching herself photography, Cameron used the “wet-collodion
process on albumen paper” (Hirsch 67). It took some time to produce a
successful image. Cameron’s first successful photograph was of nine-year-
old Annie (Fig. 2.2).
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Fig. 2.2 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Julia Margaret Cameron,
“Annie,” 1864, Albumen Silver print, 21.1 × 16.2 cm
Cameron said this in regard to the portrait: “My dear, you are an angel
from above! I do believe this one took—after all those blotched efforts.
You will be immortalized in Art, child! She has quite made my picture! My
first success!” (Olsen 10).
Using a close-up and soft focus method that actually influenced the
composition of Dante Rossetti’s portraits,21 Cameron sought to show the
“inner greatness” and beauty of ordinary people. Hirsch notes that
“Cameron brought her camera close to her subjects, fashioning a close-up

portrait that brought to the forefront the subject’s distinctive intellectual,
psychological, and spiritual qualities” (128).22 Cameron stated that she
desired to “arrest all beauty that came before [her]” (Olsen 29), to pre-
serve it and to break with stereotypes of the ordinary. Her portrait of
Sappho accomplishes this when, according to Hirsch, she cast a “heavy
featured, middle aged woman” for the poet (129) (Fig. 2.3).
Cameron also broke with convention by posing ordinary women, par-
ticularly her maid, Mary Hillier, as the Madonna, and girl children as the
Jesus figure,23 thus subverting gendered expectations about the supposed
sacred and deified realm (Fig. 2.4).
Carol Mavor argues about the Madonna photographs that Cameron
“Sappho,” 1865, Albumen Silver print, 22.1 × 17.6 cm
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“Spring,” 1865
us[es] Christian typology, the pictures properly contain women’s sexuality

within a space of holy motherhood. Yet upon closer investigation, the pic-
tures manage to bleed through the … confinement that encircled … the
angel in the house. The images which are [purposely] blurred, … smear the
lines between sexual and non-sexual, male and female, earthly and heavenly.
They move like an apparition. (156)
She further notes that Cameron’s Madonnas, which are “more real than
mythical,” “embodied death and sexuality,” and “verged on sacri-
lege” (47).
Cameron’s iconoclastic work thus begins to deconstruct traditional
ideas of gender and women’s confinement as the angel and asexualized
Madonna all with the aim of, according to Cameron herself, “to ennoble
Photography and secure for it the character and uses of High Art by com-
bining the real and the Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all
possible means of Poetry and Beauty” (Rhodes 134).
Cameron’s high aspirations were rewarded when her work was “pre-
sented at annual exhibitions of the Photographic Society of London; …
[and her work was] seen in Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, and Berlin” (126).
She was also honored by being asked to illustrate Tennyson’s Idylls of the
King (Groth 151)24 and went on to photograph Tennyson, Longfellow,
Robert Browning, Darwin, Trollope, and Julia Duckworth, Woolf’s
mother (Hill 130).25
Afterimage: Re-imagining the Pre-Raphaelite Vision

Before I explicate my reading of Afterimage, it would be helpful to con-
sider the way in which a female artist is depicted in another neo-Victorian
novel, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. As a postmodern
Victorian novel that plays with form, Fowles’s work rehearses multiple
endings, the majority of which subvert the traditional Victorian novel’s
expectations of a happy ending. Instead of a Brontësque “Reader, I mar-
ried him” ending, Fowles’s multiple endings generally inscribe no sexual
or emotional satisfaction for the male protagonist Charles. In the first end-
ing, after searching for Sarah Woodruff, with whom Charles is besotted,
Charles finds that she is living in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s home somewhat
in the position of Elizabeth Siddal. Sarah is seemingly Rossetti’s student,
but she is also his model and Charles notes this when he sees a nude paint-
ing of her in the studio. Clearly, she is sexually objectified in this painting.
Although Sarah is studying to be an artist, she denies that she has any tal-
ent. She tells Charles that she is Mr. Rossetti’s aide and that she herself
“has no genius,” but rather has “no more than the capacity to aid genius
in very small and humble ways” (451), statements that generally reflect
36 K. RENK
Ruskin’s initial attitudes toward women artists, as well as the way that
Merritt denotes how women, through their daily ministering to male
needs, assist men to become artistic geniuses. In this case, even if Sarah
attempts to seize the gaze from the male artist and become the one who
exercises it, she feels herself unworthy, inferior, and second-rate because
she lives in the shadow of the male artist. As Marsh notes, genius had been
inscribed as masculine (Marsh and Nunn 25) and Fowles’s cursory nod to
the female artist clearly upholds this point of view.
Humphreys’s Afterimage widely contests this point of view by present-
ing the reader with two female artists, one based somewhat on Julia
Margaret Cameron and one based on one of her servant/models. In pre-
senting two female artists, one an upper-class eccentric, Isabelle Dashell,
who breaks down the social hierarchy by befriending her Irish maid, and
the other Annie Phelan the Irish maid, Humphreys radically questions
both the idea that males own the gaze but also the notion that, if women
usurp the gaze, only an upper-class female can exercise it. Initially Isabelle
controls the gaze, but over the course of time, Annie Phelan also seizes the
light and gaze, (unlike Joseph O’Connor’s working-class girl who is the
object of the gaze), and teaches Isabelle ways to subvert the ways in which
fiction “plots” women’s lives. In creating new scenarios via the tableaux
and portraits that the two envision, Annie and Isabelle invent new ways of
being for women’s lives; as visual artists, they share the agency of the
female gaze. And Isabelle becomes a desiring sexual subject when Annie
photographs her.
One character with whom the female artists must contend is the painter
Robert Hill whose work resembles the archetypal work of the PRB and
whose rhetoric resembles that of Ruskin and other male artists who dis-
avow and interfere with female artistry and creativity. Hill discounts pho-
tography as an art and disparages Isabelle’s “theatrical” photographs that
depict allegorical figures, such as “Abundance” (6), preferring that, if she
must take photographs, they should be of still life, because apples sitting
on a table are more “domestic” and are “worthier of” Isabelle. Hill’s pref-
erence implies that any attempt at art by a woman ought to confine itself
to depicting the domestic sphere alone, women’s designated sphere of
activity, even allegorical portraits and the tableaux vivant verge on the
public sphere, since they involve the telling of stories and legends through
the photograph.26 Overall though, the narrator reveals that “Hill does not
believe [Isabelle] to be an artist. She is a woman. She is a photographer.
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going out of the gate. Makes me fairly crazy to wait,
fearful I am missing it in not going. This lottery way of
living is painful on the nerves. There are all kinds of
rumors. Even have the story afloat that now the raid
is over that drove us away from Andersonville, we
are going back there to stay during the war. That
would be a joke. However, I stick to my resolution
that the rebels don’t really know themselves where
we are going. They move us because we are not
safe here. They are bewildered. Believing this am in
a comparatively easy state of mind. Still I worry.
Haven’t said a word in a week about my health. Well,
I am convalescing all the time. Still lame, and always
expect to be; can walk very well though, and feeling
lively for an old man.
Nov. 18.—None being taken away to-day, I believe
on account of not getting transportation. Notice that
rebel troops are passing through on the railroad and
immense activity among them. Am now well satisfied
of the correctness of my views as regards this
movement. Have decided now to stay here until the
last. Am getting ready for action however. Believe we
are going to have a warm time of it in the next few
months. Thank fortune I am as well as I am. Can
stand considerable now. Food given us in smaller
quantities, and hurriedly so too. All appears to be in a
hurry. Cloudy, and rather wet weather, and getting
decidedly cooler. My noble old coverlid is kept rolled
up and ready to accompany me on my travels at any
moment. Have my lame and stiff leg in training. Walk
all over the prison until tired out so as to strengthen
myself. Recruiting officers among us trying to induce
prisoners to enter their army. Say it is no exchange
for during the war, and half a dozen desert and go
with them. Even if we are not exchanged during the
war, don’t think we will remain prisoners long.
Nov. 19.—A car load went at about noon, and are
pretty well thinned out. Over half gone—no one
believes to our lines now; all hands afraid of going to
Charleston. Believe I shall try and escape on the
journey, although in no condition to rough it. Am
going to engineer this thing to suit myself and have a
little fun. Would like to be out from under rebel guard
once more. When I can look around and not see a
prison wall and a gun ready to shoot me, I shall
rejoice. Have edged up to another comrade and we
bunk together. Said comrade is Corporal Smith,
belonging to an Indiana regiment. While he is no
great guns, seems quite a sensible chap and a
decided improvement on many here to mess with.
The nights are cool, and a covering of great benefit.
My being the owner of a good blanket makes me a
very desirable comrade to mess with. Two or three
together can keep much warmer than one alone. It is
said that a number of outsiders have escaped and
taken to the woods. Another load goes to-night or
early in the morning. My turn will come pretty soon.
Nothing new in our situation or the prospects ahead.
Food scarce, but of good quality. More go and I go
to-morrow.
Nov. 20.—None as yet gone to-day and it is
already most night. My turn would not come until to-
morrow, and if none go at all to-day I will probably not
get away until about day after to-morrow. Shan’t flank
out, but await my turn and go where fate decrees.
Had a falling out with my companion Smith, and am
again alone walking about the prison with my coverlid
on my shoulders. Am determined that this covering
protects none but thoroughly good and square
fellows. Later.—Going to be a decidedly cold night,
and have “made up” with two fellows to sleep
together. The going away is the all absorbing topic of
conversation. Received for rations this day a very
good allowance of hard-tack and bacon. This is the
first hard-tack received since the trip to
Andersonville, and is quite a luxury. It is so hard that I
have to tack around and soak mine up before I am
able to eat it. There is a joke to this. Will again go to
bed as I have done the last week, thinking every
night would be the last at Camp Lawton.
Nov. 21.—Got up bright and early, went to the
creek and had a good wash, came back, after a good
walk over the prison, and ate my two large crackers
and small piece of bacon left over from yesterday,
and again ready for whatever may turn up. Lost my
diminutive cake of soap in the water and must again
take to sand to scrub with, until fortune again favors
me. Men are very restless and reckless, uncertainty
making them so. Try my very best not to have any
words or trouble with them, but occasionally get
drawn into it, as I did this morning. Came out solid
however. Is pretty well understood that I can take
care of myself. Noon.—Five hundred getting ready
to go; my turn comes to-morrow, and then we will see
what we will see. Decided rumors that Sherman has
taken Atlanta and is marching toward Savannah, the
heart of the Confederacy. All in good spirits for the
first time in a week.
ESCAPE BUT NOT ESCAPE.
MOVED FROM CAMP LAWTON AFTER A SOJOURN OF TWENTY

DAYS—DESTINATION BLACKSHEAR, GA.—JUMP OFF THE
CARS AND OUT FROM REBEL GUARD FOR SIX DAYS—A
HUNGRY TIME BUT A GOOD ONE—CAPTURED AND MAKE THE
ACQUAINTANCE OF TWO OTHER RUNAWAYS WITH WHOM I
CAST MY FORTUNES, ETC., ETC.
Nov. 22.—And now my turn has come, and I get off

with the next load going to-day. My trunk is packed
and baggage duly checked; shall try and get a “lay
over” ticket, and rusticate on the road. Will see the
conductor about it. A nice cool day with sun shining
brightly—a fit one for an adventure and I am just the
boy to have one. Coverlid folded up and thrown
across my shoulder, lower end tied as only a soldier
knows how. My three large books of written matter on
the inside of my thick rebel jacket, and fastened in.
Have a small book which I keep at hand to write in
now. My old hat has been exchanged for a red
zouave cap, and I look like a red headed
woodpecker. Leg behaving beautifully. My latest
comrades are James Ready and Bill Somebody. We
have decided to go and keep together on the cars.
One of them has an apology for a blanket, and the
two acting in conjunction keep all three warm nights.
Later.—On the cars, in vicinity of Savannah en-
route for Blackshear, which is pretty well south and
not far from the Florida line. Are very crowded in a
close box car and fearfully warm. Try to get away to-
night.
In the Woods near Doctortown Station, No.
5, Ga., Nov. 23.—A change has come over the spirit
of my dreams. During the night the cars ran very
slow, and sometimes stopped for hours on side
tracks. A very long, tedious night, and all suffered a
great deal with just about standing room only.
Impossible to get any sleep. Two guards at each side
door, which were open about a foot. Guards were
passably decent, although strict. Managed to get
near the door, and during the night talked
considerable with the two guards on the south side of
the car. At about three o’clock this a. m., and after
going over a long bridge which spanned the
Altamaha River and in sight of Doctortown, I went
through the open door like a flash and rolled down a
high embankment. Almost broke my neck, but not
quite. Guard fired a shot at me, but as the cars were
going, though not very fast, did not hit me. Expected
the cars to stop but they did not, and I had the
inexpressible joy of seeing them move off out of
sight. Then crossed the railroad track going north,
went through a large open field and gained the
woods, and am now sitting on the ground leaning up
against a big pine tree and out from under rebel
guard! The sun is beginning to show itself in the east
and it promises to be a fine day. Hardly know what to
do with myself. If those on the train notified
Doctortown people of my escape they will be after
me. Think it was at so early an hour that they might
have gone right through without telling any one of the
jump off. Am happy and hungry and considerably
bruised and scratched up from the escape. The
happiness of being here, however, overbalances
everything else. If I had George Hendryx with me
now would have a jolly time, and mean to have as it
is. Sun is now up and it is warmer; birds chippering
around, and chipmunks looking at me with curiosity.
Can hear hallooing off a mile or so, which sounds like
farmers calling cattle or hogs or something. All nature
smiles—why should not I?—and I do. Keep my eyes
peeled, however, and look all ways for Sunday. Must
work farther back toward what I take to be a swamp
a mile or so away. Am in a rather low country
although apparently a pretty thickly settled one; most
too thickly populated for me, judging from the signs
of the times. It’s now about dinner time, and I have
traveled two or three miles from the railroad track,
should judge and am in the edge of a swampy forest,
although the piece of ground on which I have made
my bed is dry and nice. Something to eat wouldn’t be
a bad thing. Not over sixty rods from where I lay is a
path evidently travelled more or less by negroes
going from one plantation to another. My hope of
food lays by that road. Am watching for passers by.
Later.—A negro boy too young to trust has gone by
singing and whistling, and carrying a bundle and a tin
pail evidently filled with somebody’s dinner. In as
much as I want to enjoy this out-door Gypsy life, I will
not catch and take the dinner away from him. That
would be the height of foolishness. Will lay for the
next one traveling this way. The next one is a dog
and he comes up and looks at me, gives a bark and
scuds off. Can’t eat a dog. Don’t know how it will be
to-morrow though. Might be well enough for him to
come around later. Well, it is most dark and will get
ready to try and sleep. Have broken off spruce
boughs and made a soft bed. Have heard my father
tell of sleeping on a bed of spruce, and it is healthy.
Will try it. Not a crust to eat since yesterday
forenoon. Am educated to this way of living though,
and have been hungryer. Hope the pesky alligators
will let me alone. If they only knew it, I would make a
poor meal for them. Thus closes my first day of
freedom and it is grand. Only hope they may be
many, although I can hardly hope to escape to our
lines, not being in a condition to travel.
Nov. 24.—Another beautiful morning, a repetition
of yesterday, opens up to me. It is particularly
necessary that I procure sustenance wherewith life is
prolonged, and will change my head-quarters to a
little nearer civilization. Can hear some one chopping
not a mile away. Here goes. Later.—Found an old
negro fixing up a dilapidated post and rail fence.
Approached him and enquired the time of day. (My
own watch having run down.) He didn’t happen to
have his gold watch with him, but reckoned it was
nigh time for the horn. Seemed scared at the
apparition that appeared to him, and no wonder.
Forgave him on the spot. Thought it policy to tell him
all about who and what I was, and did so. Was very
timid and afraid, but finally said he would divide his
dinner as soon as it should be sent to him, and for an
hour I lay off a distance of twenty rods or so, waiting
for that dinner. It finally came, brought by the same
boy I saw go along yesterday. Boy sat down the pail
and the old darkey told him to scamper off home—
which he did. Then we had dinner of rice, cold yams
and fried bacon. It was a glorious repast, and I
succeeded in getting quite well acquainted with him.
We are on the Bowden plantation and he belongs to
a family of that name. Is very fearful of helping me as
his master is a strong Secesh., and he says would
whip him within an inch of his life if it was known.
Promise him not to be seen by any one and he has
promised to get me something more to eat after it
gets dark. Later.—After my noonday meal went
back toward the low ground and waited for my
supper, which came half an hour ago and it is not yet
dark. Had a good supper of boiled seasoned turnips,
corn bread and sour milk, the first milk I have had in
about a year. Begs me to go off in the morning, which
I have promised to do. Says for me to go two or three
miles on to another plantation owned by LeCleye,
where there are good negroes who will feed me.
Thanked the old fellow for his kindness. Says the war
is about over and the Yanks expected to free them all
soon. It’s getting pretty dark now, and I go to bed
filled to overflowing; in fact, most too much so.
Nov. 25.—This morning got up cold and stiff; not
enough covering. Pushed off in the direction pointed
out by the darkey of yesterday. Have come in the
vicinity of negro shanties and laying in wait for some
good benevolent colored brother. Most too many
dogs yelping around to suit a runaway Yankee. Little
nigs and the canines run together. If I can only attract
their attention without scaring them to death, shall be
all right. However, there is plenty of time, and won’t
rush things. Time is not valuable with me. Will go
sure and careful. Don’t appear to be any men folks
around; more or less women of all shades of color.
This is evidently a large plantation; has thirty or forty
negro huts in three or four rows. They are all neat
and clean to outward appearances. In the far
distance and toward what I take to be the main road
is the master’s residence. Can just see a part of it.
Has a cupola on top and is an ancient structure.
Evidently a nice plantation. Lots of cactus grows wild
all over, and is bad to tramp through. There is also
worlds of palm leaves, such as five cent fans are
made of. Hold on there, two or three negro men are
coming from the direction of the big house to the
huts. Don’t look very inviting to trust your welfare
with. Will still wait, McCawber like, for something to
turn up. If they only knew the designs I have on
them, they would turn pale. Shall be ravenous by
night and go for them. I am near a spring of water,
and lay down flat and drink. The “Astor House Mess”
is moving around for a change; hope I won’t make a
mess of it. Lot of goats looking at me now,
wondering, I suppose, what it is. Wonder if they butt?
Shoo! Going to rain, and if so I must sleep in one of
those shanties. Negroes all washing up and getting
ready to eat, with doors open. No, thank you; dined
yesterday. Am reminded of the song: “What shall we
do, when the war breaks the country up, and scatters
us poor darkys all around.” This getting away
business is about the best investment I ever made.
Just the friendliest fellow ever was. More than like a
colored man, and will stick closer than a brother if
they will only let me. Laugh when I think of the old
darky of yesterday’s experience, who liked me first
rate only wanted me to go away. Have an eye on an
isolated hut that looks friendly. Shall approach it at
dark. People at the hut are a woman and two or three
children, and a jolly looking and acting negro man.
Being obliged to lay low in the shade feel the cold, as
it is rather damp and moist. Later.—Am in the hut
and have eaten a good supper. Shall sleep here to-
night. The negro man goes early in the morning,
together with all the male darky population, to work
on fortifications at Fort McAllister. Says the whole
country is wild at the news of approaching Yankee
army. Negro man named “Sam” and woman “Sady.”
Two or three negroes living here in these huts are not
trustworthy, and I must keep very quiet and not be
seen. Children perfectly awe struck at the sight of a
Yankee. Negroes very kind but afraid. Criminal to
assist me. Am five miles from Doctortown. Plenty of
“gubers” and yams. Tell them all about my
imprisonment. Regard the Yankees as their friends.
Half a dozen neighbors come in by invitation, shake
hands with me, scrape the floor with their feet, and
rejoice most to death at the good times coming.
“Bress de Lord,” has been repeated hundreds of
times in the two or three hours I have been here.
Surely I have fallen among friends. All the visitors
donate of their eatables, and although enough is
before me to feed a dozen men, I give it a tussle.
Thus ends the second day of my freedom, and it is
glorious.
Nov. 26.—An hour before daylight “Sam” awoke
me and said I must go with him off a ways to stay
through the day. Got up, and we started. Came about
a mile to a safe hiding place, and here I am. Have
plenty to eat and near good water. Sam will tell
another trusty negro of my whereabouts, who will
look after me, as he has to go away to work. The
negroes are very kind, and I evidently am in good
hands. Many of those who will not fight in the
Confederate army are hid in these woods and
swamps, and there are many small squads looking
them up with dogs and guns to force them into the
rebel ranks. All able-bodied men are conscripted into
the army in the South. It is possible I may be
captured by some of these hunting parties. It is again
most night and have eaten the last of my food. Can
hear the baying of hounds and am skeery. Shall take
in all the food that comes this way in the meantime.
Sam gave me an old jack knife and I shall make a
good bed to sleep on, and I also have an additional
part of a blanket to keep me warm. In fine spirits and
have hopes for the future. Expect an ambassador
from my colored friends a little later. Later.—The
ambassador has come and gone in the shape of a
woman. Brought food; a man told her to tell me to go
off a distance of two miles or so, to the locality
pointed out, before daylight, and wait there until
called upon to-morrow. Rebel guards occupy the
main roads, and very unsafe.
Nov. 27.—Before daylight came where I now am.
Saw alligators—small ones. This out in the woods life
is doing me good. Main road three miles away, but
there are paths running everywhere. Saw a white
man an hour ago. Think he was a skulker hiding to
keep out of the army, but afraid to hail him. Many of
these stay in the woods day-times, and at night go to
their homes, getting food. Am now away quite a
distance from any habitation, and am afraid those
who will look for me cannot find me. Occasionally
hear shots fired; this is a dangerous locality. Have
now been out four days and fared splendidly. Have
hurt one of my ankles getting through the brush; sort
of sprain, and difficult to travel at all. No water near
by and must move as soon as possible. Wild hogs
roam around through the woods, and can run like a
deer. Palm leaves grow in great abundance, and are
handsome to look at. Some of them very large.
Occasionally see lizards and other reptiles, and am
afraid of them. If I was a good traveler I could get
along through the country and possibly to our lines.
Must wander around and do the best I can however.
Am armed with my good stout cane and the knife
given me by the negro; have also some matches, but
dare not make a fire lest it attract attention. Nights
have to get up occasionally and stamp around to get
warm. Clear, cool nights and pleasant. Most too light,
however, for me to travel. The remnants of
yesterday’s food, have just eaten. Will now go off in
an easterly direction in hopes of seeing the
messenger.
Nov. 28.—No one has come to me since day
before yesterday. Watched and moved until most
night of yesterday but could see or hear no one.
Afraid I have lost communication. In the distance can
see a habitation and will mog along that way. Most
noon. Later.—As I was poking along through some
light timber, almost ran into four Confederates with
guns. Lay down close to the ground and they passed
by me not more than twenty rods away. Think they
have heard of my being in the vicinity and looking me
up. This probably accounts for not receiving any
visitor from the negroes. Getting very hungry, and no
water fit to drink. Must get out of this community as
fast as I can. Wish to gracious I had two good legs.
Later.—It is now nearly dark and I have worked my
way as near direct north as I know how. Am at least
four miles from where I lay last night. Have seen
negroes, and white men, but did not approach them.
Am completely tired out and hungry, but on the edge
of a nice little stream of water. The closing of the fifth
day of my escape. Must speak to somebody to-
morrow, or starve to death. Good deal of yelling in
the woods. Am now in the rear of a hovel which is
evidently a negro hut, but off quite a ways from it.
Cleared ground all around the house so I can’t
approach it without being too much in sight. Small
negro boy playing around the house. Too dark to
write more.
Nov. 29.—The sixth day of freedom, and a hungry
one. Still where I wrote last night, and watching the
house. A woman goes out and in but cannot tell
much about her from this distance. No men folks
around. Two or three negro boys playing about. Must
approach the house, but hate to. Noon.—Still right
here. Hold my position. More than hungry. Three
days since I have eaten anything, with the exception
of a small potatoe and piece of bread eaten two days
ago and left from the day before. That length of time
would have been nothing in Andersonville, but now
being in better health demand eatables, and it takes
right hold of this wandering sinner. Shall go to the
house towards night. A solitary woman lives there
with some children. My ankle from the sprain and
yesterday’s walking is swollen and painful. Bathe it in
water, which does it good. Chickens running around.
Have serious meditations of getting hold of one or
two of them after they go to roost, then go farther
back into the wilderness, build a fire with my matches
and cook them. That would be a royal feast. But if
caught at it, it would go harder with me than if caught
legitimately. Presume this is the habitation of some of
the skulkers who return and stay home nights.
Believe that chickens squawk when being taken from
the roost. Will give that up and walk boldly up to the
house.
RE-CAPTURED.
HOME GUARDS GOBBLE ME UP—WELL TREATED AND WELL

FED—TAKEN TO DOCTORTOWN AND FROM THENCE TO
BLACKSHEAR—THE TWO BUCK BOYS AS RUNAWAYS—RIDE
ON A PASSENGER TRAIN—PROSPECTS AHEAD, ETC.
Doctortown Station, No. 5, Nov. 30.—Ha! Ha!

My boy, you are a prisoner of war again. Once more
with a blasted rebel standing guard over me, and it
all happened in this wise: Just before dark I went up
to that house I spoke of in my writings yesterday.
Walked boldly up and rapped at the door; and what
was my complete astonishment when a white woman
answered my rapping. Asked me what I wanted, and
I told her something to eat. Told me to come in and
set down. She was a dark looking woman and could
easily be mistaken from my hiding place of the day
for a negro. Began asking me questions. Told her I
was a rebel soldier, had been in the hospital sick and
was trying to reach home in the adjoining county.
Was very talkative; told how her husband had been
killed at Atlanta, &c. She would go out and in from a
shanty kitchen in her preparation of my supper. I
looked out through a window and saw a little darky
riding away from the house, a few minutes after I
went inside. Thought I had walked into a trap, and
was very uneasy. Still the woman talked and worked,
and I talked, telling as smoothe lies as I knew how.
For a full hour and a half sat there, and she all the
time getting supper. Made up my mind that I was the
same as captured, and so put on a bold face and
made the best of it. Was very well satisfied with my
escapade anyway, if I could only get a whack at that
supper before the circus commenced. Well, after a
while heard some hounds coming through the woods
and towards the house. Looked at the woman and
her face pleaded guilty, just as if she had done
something very mean. The back door of the house
was open and pretty soon half a dozen large blood
hounds bounded into the room and began snuffing
me over; about this time the woman began to cry.
Told her I understood the whole thing and she need
not make a scene over it. Said she knew I was a
yankee and had sent for some men at Doctortown.
Then five horsemen surrounded the house,
dismounted and four of them came in with guns
cocked prepared for a desperate encounter. I said:
“good evening, gentlemen.” “Good evening,” said the
foremost, “we are looking for a runaway yankee
prowling around here.” “Well,” says I, “you needn’t
look any farther, you have found him.” “Yes, I see,”
was the answer. They all sat down, and just then the
woman said “supper is ready and to draw nigh.”
Drawed as nigh as I could to that supper and
proceeded to take vengeance on the woman. The
fellows proved to be home guards stationed here at
Doctortown. The woman had mounted the negro boy
on a horse just as soon as I made my appearance at
the house and sent for them. They proved to be good
fellows. Talked there at the house a full hour on the
fortunes of war, &c. Told them of my long
imprisonment and escape and all about myself. After
a while we got ready to start for this place. One rebel
rode in front, one on each side and two in the rear of
me. Was informed that if I tried to run they would
shoot me. Told them no danger of my running, as I
could hardly walk. They soon saw that such was the
case after going a little way, and sent back one of the
men to borrow the woman’s horse. Was put on the
animal’s back and we reached Doctortown not far
from midnight. As we were leaving the house the
woman gave me a bundle; said in it was a shirt and
stockings. Told her she had injured me enough and I
would take them. No false delicy will prevent my
taking a shirt. And so my adventure has ended and
have enjoyed it hugely. Had plenty to eat with the
exception of the two days, and at the last had a

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Women Writing the Neo-Victorian

Novel: Erotic "Victorians" 1st ed.

ISBN 978-3-030-48286-2 ISBN 978-3-030-48287-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

I am grateful to the Department of English at Northern Illinois University,

1 Introduction: “Erotic ‘Victorians’: Women, Neo-Victorian

2 “The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in Neo-­Victorian Fiction” 23

3 Eros and the Woman Writer: Conversing with the Spirits of

4 Female Rogues and Gender Outlaws in the Neo-Victorian

5 “In Other Dark Rooms: Eros and the Woman Spiritualist”129

6 “Voyages Out: Postcolonial Desires and the Female

7 Conclusion: Drawing a New Map of Love177

Introduction: “Erotic ‘Victorians’: Women,

In the conclusion of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing

This definition, which distinguishes the erotic from pornography, speaks

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). In general, these studies have focused

The Novel “Reforming” Woman’s World

Heilmann and Llewellyn also speak to this issue of women writers

Eros, the “Phantasm,” and Platonic Love in Byatt’s

This offspring of the oppositions, Resource and Poverty, is “always

apotheosis of love is a penniless enchanter, the product of poverty com-

When a man sees a woman deserving of erotic attentions, he at once begins

According to Cappelanus, the male lover seeks to possess the beloved

“Goblin Market” for example, Blanche illustrates some of Christabel’s fai-

to attempt to fashion themselves, both literally and figuratively, as they

restricted British women to what they perceive to be freer “Middle

lesser-­known women who have been rendered invisible in androcentric

vidualist approach, some toward a Marxist feminist approach, other novels

“The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in

© The Author(s) 2020 23

Fig. 2.1 Love Locked

Ironically, when the female reflects on and surveys herself as a sexually

collaborated with Niépce, developed the daguerreotype process of pho-

photography also drew on portraiture and even theater as Barthes claims.

Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists and Julia

As the lone photographer among these women artists, Julia Margaret

As Thackeray Ritchie notes, Cameron’s early photography projects staged

“Cameron brought her camera close to her subjects, fashioning a close-up

us[es] Christian typology, the pictures properly contain women’s sexuality

Afterimage: Re-imagining the Pre-Raphaelite Vision

MOVED FROM CAMP LAWTON AFTER A SOJOURN OF TWENTY

Nov. 22.—And now my turn has come, and I get off

HOME GUARDS GOBBLE ME UP—WELL TREATED AND WELL

Doctortown Station, No. 5, Nov. 30.—Ha! Ha!

You might also like

1 Introduction: “Erotic ‘Victorians’: Women, Neo-Victorian

2 “The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in Neo-Victorian Fiction” 23

3 Eros and the Woman Writer: Conversing with the Spirits of

4 Female Rogues and Gender Outlaws in the Neo-Victorian

5 “In Other Dark Rooms: Eros and the Woman Spiritualist”129

6 “Voyages Out: Postcolonial Desires and the Female

7 Conclusion: Drawing a New Map of Love177

lesser-known women who have been rendered invisible in androcentric